The Traveler Read online

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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 mat
erial 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.

  “Good, with securing the special package perhaps you can now realize how close this project is to my heart. To directly challenge the Führer’s edict, one that was of my own design, would be considered by some as”—he smiled but only briefly—“treasonous? But the need to have complete cooperation from the test subjects cancels all that out, yes?”

  Thomsen knew he had better answer right or he would be buried deep inside this bunker when it was razed to the ground after Himmler got what it was he desired out of him. He would show the man his resolve in the finalizing of the design and its test subjects.

  “How could the advancement of science ever be construed as treasonous, Herr Reichsführer? As you will see our test subject is now cooperative and very much intelligent enough to see the final test through. The Traveler has accomplished this feat more than once. With the assurances now in place with the transfer of her brother, yes, the Traveler will complete the final test and we can begin to transfer equipment to Berlin at the first opportune moment.”

  Himmler raised his brow and then nodded. He turned and stepped from the large lift. “I am pleased to hear your reputation for humanitarian causes has its limits.” Heinrich Himmler looked back at the much taller scientist as he wanted to see his expression when he realized that the scientist’s small meetings he held with his staff over the use of slave labor as test subjects had not gone unnoticed. Thomsen remained silent as Himmler smiled again, this time even more brief than the first, and then nodded for his security detail to move ahead. Thomsen and the other three observers moved quickly to catch up.

  The men were led to a large enclosed area that overlooked an even larger room filled with men, women, and equipment, the likes of which none of the SS men or industrialists had ever seen before. Standing in the middle of the laboratory space was what looked like a large door frame constructed of a material that was not immediately recognizable. This frame had large conductors that coiled out of the top and sides of the machine. The entire flooring was covered in a rubberized material that protected the workers inside from static electricity. The men and women all wore coats of either white or blue—it was explained to Himmler that the technicians had been broken into two teams. The white team handled the power output and consumption, which would be massive in scope, while the blue team was in charge of radar tracking, signal acquisition, and would perform the actual conducting of the test. There were sixteen rows of stations with a technician at each console and over 170 power cables running from the monitoring stations to the Doorway, as the Reichsfürher had come to call it. He was adamant about using the doorway’s code name because of its British connotations in using its full moniker, the Wellsian Doorway, in honor of the man who wrote about this very subject many years before.

  Thomsen turned and bowed his head at Himmler as the Reichsführer remained standing at the large, thick window that gave visitors a view of the entire floor below.

  “With your permission,” the German scientist asked.

  The small man nodded just once.

  “As you know, gentlemen, this project began in earnest in 1941. It is meant as a ‘fail-safe,’ if you will, against the Americans entering the war against Germany, a scenario our farsighted Reichsführer saw as a precursor to the Fatherland losing the war with so much of that world pitted against us. This fail-safe, gentlemen, is now ready and may I say with pride, fully functioning. This will be the final non-German personnel test in the schedule. The next test will be conducted by a representative of the Reichsfüher’s staff and myself when our equipment has been properly placed inside our Berlin complex.”

  Himmler knew that they had lost at least sixty reassigned non-German personnel in the doorway’s testing. Some of the lost were recovered right back inside the facility, mangled and in grisly pieces at the doorway’s opening, or were lost in the void of time and space.

  “As you already know the first gate was commissioned in May of 1942 and was completed that same month. Our scheduling of tests has been nonstop since that historic day. The first success came three days ago.” Thomsen handed Himmler a folded newspaper. As he was unfolding it he saw the headline in bold print as described by the London Times over one year ago: “American Fortress of Corregidor Falls to Japs.” And then next to the headline was the scrawled signature of none other than himself. Himmler nodded as he refolded the newspaper. “May I assume that is your signature next to the headline, Herr Reichsführer, and no others?”

  The miniscule man nodded his head and handed the newspaper over to the next man who examined it and passed it on.

  “As you know, the very first Wellsian Doorway was built right here in this room you see below. It was dismantled exactly six months ago as we built the secondary door—the one you are now seeing below. The first doorway has ceased to exist for exactly one year, gentlemen, as it was dismantled in the past—only the doorway and its signal remain. No personnel, no power other than what it would take to run the testing. This newspaper and several others like it were placed next to the first doorway over a year ago. To see these newspapers again is proof positive that the Wellsi
an Doorway”—here he paused for dramatic effect—“works beyond all expectations.”

  Himmler looked pleased but only he knew just how pleased.

  “The third doorway was completed this month, only this one was constructed in Berlin at a secret location known only to the assembly team and the Reichsführer. This doorway will be utilized if the worst-case scenario happens and the war is lost. The new location is far more viable an option of escape for … you gentlemen than out here in Dortmund.”

  “So, we are convinced this is the only way in which Einstein’s hypothesis can be achieved?” asked the man who represented Krupp Steel.

  “Yes, Herr Einstein has theorized that the balance of inner-dimensional travel can only be achieved through conducting poles of influence. In other words, one doorway has to be connected to another doorway or the travel is unachievable if the direct transfer of material, or in this case, a human, can get to the coordinating doorway in the past. If there is no corresponding doorway the Traveler will be lost and deposited in a time frame, air, water, or land coordinates not of his choosing. Maybe even lost three or four kilometers above the Earth, there would be no rhyme or reason to the Traveler’s exit point from the originating Wellsian Doorway without a corresponding doorway, or signal for the first doorway to lock on to.”

  “So, in essence, what you are saying is the Traveler would not only be sent to a time in the past not of his choosing, but may also materialize deep within the oceans or miles into the sky?”

  “Correct, it was never hypothesized by Einstein that this was a safe science to use.”

  “We know it takes an inordinate amount of power to create the rip in time, but how is that action achieved? The thoughts and schemes of men such as yourself and Herr Einstein fly far above our barbaric ways of thinking,” the immaculately dressed gentleman from Klienmann Electronics inquired.