The Traveler

 

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For my mother and her girls,

Valisa, JoAnne, Katie Anne, Tram, and, of course, Klera

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the dark personalities at DARPA, NASA, and Jet Propulsion Labs. A very special thanks to Albert Einstein for his insight into what is possible and impossible. Luckily the latter very rarely entered into his train of thought … the impossible to possible is only a hard think away!

 

PROLOGUE

DAYS OF FUTURE'S PAST

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.…

—Albert Einstein

 

ANTARCTICA, 227,000
B.C.E.

The tremendous gravitational forces pulling at the man sent his conscious thoughts spinning into obscurity. Through the reinforced windscreen he saw the sky tumbling over and over until the view became a strobelike effect that made his stomach heave. He tried desperately to breathe but found his bodily functions had ceased to work. As he tried to focus on the instrumentation panel in front of him his eyes dimmed and his view became one of tunnel-vision extreme. The instrument panel shorted out and smoke and the acrid smell of ozone filled the small cabin. The man knew he had a task to perform, but as he struggled to keep conscious he could not fathom what that chore was. A jarringly sharp slam of air moved the craft to the left and the man heard but did not understand a sonic boom. Trapped inside the quickly falling capsule, the man broke the sound barrier in its speedy downward descent.

Through the pain and his blurry vision the man heard a series of warning beeps and tones coming from somewhere he could not see. The man tore at the clear visor covering his face, trying desperately to unlock the slide that would allow the protective helmet to be removed. He finally found the slide lock and shoved the glass visor up, and then his bodily reactions took over as he fought for oxygen. The scream of air outside the thick glass had become unbearable. The noise threatened to burst the large man's eardrums as he and the machine plummeted. He tried desperately to focus on the sound of the warning lights and the computer's continued hail of “
pull up, pull up.
” He eventually forced his eyes open and he saw the swirling view of sky, then a deep greenness, then white, and then sky again.

“
Wake up!
” came an unbidden voice from his quickly evaporating memories of human speech.

The man tried again as the frantic inner voice faded to nothing. His eyes fluttered and then he concentrated. He was confused because this was not expected. A decision, a thought, a prayer, and underlying all of this the idea that he knew his life was over. He once again focused and he saw the large red light blinking frantically in front of him. Now what was he supposed to do about it? His mind tried to take him back into the safety of his memory to protect him from the struggle of deduction. He desperately wanted the beeping to stop. He slammed his thickly gloved palm through his anger and frustration into the flashing red light.

The man immediately heard a loud pop that jolted his body painfully against the seat back. He felt the deceleration, and that restrictive motion again made his stomach want to relieve itself of anything he may have eaten in the past few hours. He felt his body jerk and the pain of deceleration strained something in his back. Soon the tumbling stopped and an eerie silence filled the cabin.

As he started to close his eyes against the pain in his back the man felt the craft he was in slam into a yielding force from below. Before he knew what was happening the vehicle rolled completely over and he found himself upside down in his restrictive and limited world. Finally, as he bobbed upon some unknown surface, the man lost consciousness. The last words he spoke he failed to understand as they flowed out of his mouth unbidden.

“Not this time, Jack, not this time…”

The man's world went black.

*   *   *

His eyes opened. He felt as if he was in an almost weightless condition. The man turned his head and vomited onto the now dark instrument panel. The man dry-heaved until there was a belching satisfaction from his stomach. He didn't vomit but felt the relief nonetheless. He then felt the coolness of water as it struck his face, and he realized that there was water coming into the enclosed space that had become his confined world. He tried to look out of the windscreen but saw a revolving scene of sunlight, then the darkness of water, and then sunlight once more.

He reached over and felt the tug of restraint and then he realized he had a three-point harness on. He snapped off the restraint and freed himself as the world started to flood into the capsule. He remembered a safety brief he had had and popped the canopy as the water flooded in. He remembered something else and reached over and hit the flashing blue rescue beacon and then slammed his gloved hand down on the lifeboat release. As he did he failed to notice that the wristwatch he was wearing on his gloved and protected wrist was torn free and settled to the bottom of the flooded cockpit.

As the man tore loose from the fast-sinking capsule, he heard the rubber raft and all of his supplies explode as bottled air filled the large boat. He rolled free of the capsule just as the glass windows went under. He splashed and fought his unyielding suit as he struggled to gain the lifeboat. Just as he made it into the life-saving boat he looked up and saw a large head as it rose from the water in front of him. He flinched away as the reptilian features submerged. The creature must have been curious as to all of the noise on the surface, and then it vanished. Before it did the man realized that the animal he had just seen was not normal. The head was that of a crocodile and the body of a fish. He shook his head and collapsed into the confines of the bright yellow raft.

Admiral (temporary grade) Carl Everett realized at that last moment that he was definently not in Kansas anymore.

DORTMUND, GERMANY
MAY 16, 1943

The bunker was designed for maximum bomb protection. The men and equipment buried deep inside the underground facility were as safe from RAF bombs as any cowering official in the extensive Berlin bunker complexes. The two enormous elevator systems lowered the heavy equipment needed for this final test. These large platform elevators traveled along the same conduit tunnel needed for the heavy electric cable system that traveled the twenty-five miles from the Möhne dam. The rubber-encased cables were capable of supplying enough electricity to not only Berlin but Munich and Cologne as well. No power coupling that size had ever been supplied to one facility in the history of electrical engineering.

The bunker itself was not that remarkable in design: five levels of heavily reinforced concrete surrounded by sound-dampening sand lining the outer walls. The entire complex was built on large steel springs to keep vibration to the outside world to a bare minimum. This facet was the outstanding design feature of the system. The city of Dortmund never suspected the bunker system was there at all. The comings and goings of the many technicians needed for the project was tightly controlled through a tunnel access portal fifteen miles outside of the city. Trucks would drop off the needed men and material and then would continue on to Dortmund, never allowing prying eyes to view their comings and goings. The heavier equipment was brought in by truck and aircraft that many area residents supposed were meant for the enormous dam twenty miles distant. For the locals it was not well known that anyone caught within the perimeter of the hidden bunker was never heard from again. Summary execution was the order of the day for any would-be hiker.

Three hundred feet of downward travel was completed in eerie silence by the five men inside the smaller of the two transit elevators. The smallest of the five stood with his leather-gloved hands clasped in front of him. It had been this miniscule gentleman who had commenced full-scale start-up of the experiments that he personally dubbed Operation Traveler. Once the covert order was received and the funds swindled from the military for the massive project, the strange equipment was quick to start arriving on December 15, 1941. Two years of hard work and the expenditure of stolen wealth the Third Reich would never miss and the “Wellsian Doorway” was finally complete.

The small man reached up to his greatcoat's thick collar and closed it more firmly around his chilled neck.

“Apologies, Reichsführer, the temperature on the main concourse and laboratories has to be maintained at a constant fifty-four degrees. It is imperative that we never vary as our computing apparatus is extremely temperamental.”

Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS, the head of the most powerful organization outside of the German Wehrmacht, stood silently, not bothering to acknowledge the man in the white lab coat nor temper a comment of his explanation. He finally spared the man a glance. In the dull lighting Professor Lars Thomsen could only see his own reflection in the small wire-rimmed glasses of the former chicken farmer turned mass murderer.

“I am just pleased to note, Professor, that the many millions of Reichsmarks I have funneled to this project were not wasted on creature comforts. I can bare the chill.”

“As you will see, Herr Reichsführer, your money”—he quickly noticed the frown as the pencil-thin mustache wrinkled at the corners of the small man's mouth—“with respects, the Reich's money, has been well spent.”

The elevator started slowing as it reached the fifth of five levels three hundred feet below the forest floor.

“I assume your special cargo arrived intact from the east?” Himmler asked as two SS guards dressed in long black field coats slid the large elevator doors aside and then immediately went to attention as Himmler waited for his answer inside.

“Yes,” Thomsen answered as his eyes flicked to the other three men accompanying them. These black-coated officers raised a brow his way. He knew the semi-disguised men were private industrialists that had assisted the leader of the SS in funding and in the material supply needed, and then coordinated the most technical project in the history of mankind. Himmler finally turned and faced the scientist full on.