In Times Like These Boxed Set

by Nathan Van Coops

  This request takes me aback, and I can see Viznir grow concerned too. I open my pack and stare at the contents, trying to determine what I might need and won’t want to leave behind. I settle for my pocketknife, Charlie’s compass, Dr. Quickly’s journal, and the little tin of chronometer tools and instructions from Abraham. The last two are less from need and more to keep anyone else from looking through them. Dr. Quickly has never explicitly told me not to show his diagrams and sketches to anyone, but I get the feeling that the Quicklys’ habit of secrecy ought to extend to their possessions. I slip my chosen belongings into my suit’s pockets and hope for the best.

  By the time Viznir and I are ready to give up our packs, Ariella and Dagmar are lined up in front of the arch. The light shimmers, and a moment later they’ve passed through and vanished.

  I set my pack in the crate and turn to our host. “Must be sending us somewhere fancy if we’re going in suits.”

  Vikash gives me a magnanimous smile. “Seems only fitting, as your destination is the height of affluence in its era.” He chortles at first and then breaks into big hearty laughs that leave him breathless.

  I give a polite smile, wondering if he’ll fill us in on the joke, but when he finally calms down and wipes the tear of laughter from his eye, he merely gestures toward the gate.

  “Bon voyage, gentlemen. Or perhaps I should say, Schoene Reise.” He erupts in laughter again, and Viznir and I can only wonder at his mirth as we step through the gate.

  Upon passing through the translucent archway, I find myself in a room so tiny that I could almost touch both walls with my arms extended should I choose. I am alone, which is fortunate as there is very little extra space to maneuver. To my immediate right is a metal-framed bunk bed that has been secured to the wall. On the opposite wall is a foldable sink, also metal and designed for efficient use in the narrow space. For a moment I fear I could be in some type of prison cell, since there are no windows, but the lack of a toilet and a distinct humming vibration in my body tells me I’m more likely aboard some type of ship. Pivoting where I stand, I can see that the time gate has somehow been rigged to exit me out of a solid door. The door’s proportions are small, but when I turn the handle it opens easily, doing away with my fear of sudden imprisonment.

  I peek my head out and see that my cabin is one of several along both sides of the brief hallway. One end of the hall is a dead end, but the other leads to a stairwell. Seeing no sign of Viznir, I shut my door again and examine my cabin. Searching the room doesn’t take long, and I discover my objective box secured under the top berth. I extract it and am about to open it when I hear voices outside my door. I recognize one as Jettison’s. I swing the door open and find him conversing with Genesis just outside. They both stop at my intrusion.

  “Hey, guys.”

  Jettison looks at the objective box in my hand. “You open yours yet?” Something about his voice tells me he doesn’t expect me to find good news.

  “What’s up? Where are we?”

  Genesis looks more anxious than I’ve ever seen her. Her voice is low as she speaks. “The rules of the game are changing on us. We’re not just after objectives this round.”

  I pop open my objective box. It contains blueprints to an airship. Along with the diagram, I’ve been given a list of people’s names and accompanying black and white photographs. I look at the description in the schematic’s title block and read the name: LZ-129 Hindenburg.

  “Ho lee shit. Are they serious?”

  “It’s May 6th, 1937. It’s the ship’s last flight.” Jettison holds up his list of people’s names. “We have to get the crew and passengers off.”

  “All of them? Don’t some people get out by themselves anyway?”

  “Some. But most suffer injuries or burns in the process. A lot of people die in the hospital from the burns. We’re supposed to get our group on the ground safely in order to pass the level. Who’d you get?”

  I consult my list. “Birger Brinck, Wilhelm Dimmler, and Walter Banholzer.”

  Genesis is checking a tablet for information. “Brinck is a passenger, the other two are crew. In most timestreams where the Hindenburg crashed, those men all died, either in the crash or in the hospital.”

  “What about this timestream?”

  “We’re in a new one. No data. I’m guessing us being here for the race changed the prior stream we were sent to. The way it pans out is up to us now.” Genesis lowers the tablet. “Anything can happen.”

  “Where are our guides?”

  “Not here. Cliff and Mayra never showed up.”

  I jab a thumb toward my cabin door. “No Viznir either. You think they are on the ground?”

  “Only one way to find out, I guess,” Jettison says. “Let’s go find our people.”

  We walk toward the stairway and turn right near a pile of stacked luggage, then emerge into an open dining area populated with more than a dozen people. Most are seated at tables inboard of a railing that divides the dining room from a walkway or leaning along a set of angled windows that give a view of a somewhat dim twilight sky. A tall, sandy-haired steward in a white coat is handing out sandwiches from a tray and pauses in the act as he catches sight of us. A few others notice our arrival as well and begin to chatter.

  A passenger seated at a table close to us addresses us in surprise. “Hello, where’d you chaps come from?” The thin man with a brown-and-gray mustache stands and walks toward us. “Have you been hiding in your cabins all flight?”

  A woman joins in his inquiry. Dark-haired and in her fifties, she leaves the company of another woman to investigate us. “There’s no way a body could stay in those cabins three days, George. What would they eat?” She looks Jettison and me up and down, then turns her attention to Genesis. “I would have known if this young lady was anywhere to be seen.” She extends Genesis her hands. “Margaret Mather, how do you do?”

  “Ma’am, it’s nice to meet you, but we have to get you to safety,” Genesis replies.

  I address the thin man. “George was it? We’re here because we need to evacuate this airship. We’ll need everyone’s assistance in making it happen. Can we count on your help?”

  “Evacuate?” George replies. “Is there something wrong?”

  Jettison responds. “Not at the moment, but there is going to be an incident. Gather everyone you can and get them close to the exit stairs or windows. No one should go back to their cabins. Mrs. Mather, you too. You all need to be ready to jump if necessary.”

  “We’re at least five hundred feet up!” A short, wiry man who has been listening in from behind Margaret pipes up. “There’s no jumping out.”

  “What we’re saying is that when we get this ship on the ground you’ll need to move fast,” I say. “Where do we find the captain?”

  “What’s going on here?” A mustached older man in a dark uniform and glasses breaks away from a conversation with a passenger and addresses us. “Where did you people come from?”

  Before I have time to respond, Tad Masterson comes bounding up the stairwell from the lower deck, followed closely by Preston Marquez. He brushes past a pair of curious passengers and shouts at the group of people gathered by the windows. “All right, which one of you guys is Dooner? I need a Herman Dooner.”

  A woman seated with two blonde boys and a teenage girl gets to her feet. “I am Mrs. Doehner. Hermann is my husband. What do you want with him?”

  “Where is he, lady? I’ve got to get him out.”

  “Calm down, Tad,” Genesis says. “We’re getting them all out.” She turns to the woman with the children, eyeing one of the photos from the dossier in her hand. “Mrs. Doehner, is this young lady your daughter, Irene?”

  Mrs. Doehner is about to speak when the mustached man interrupts. “No one is going anywhere until we get an explanation of who you are and where you came from. How did you get aboard?” He looks to the white-jacketed stewards still holding sandwich trays. “Deeg, Balla, where did these people come from?�
�

  The sandy-haired steward and his shorter compatriot look at each other and then reply in a string of German I can make nothing of. The result seems to be the older man dispatching the shorter steward downstairs on an errand. The man turns his attention back to us and his voice is scolding. “As chief steward of this ship, I am familiar with each of the passengers and crew members aboard. You are neither. Where have you come from and how did you get on this ship?”

  “This is a story we only have time to tell once,” Jettison says. “Can you get us to the captain?”

  “The captain is busy landing the ship. We’ve been delayed over six hours and have a tight schedule to keep.” The chief steward consults a pocket watch. I manage to note the time before he flips it shut and stuffs it into his jacket pocket. “The Hindenburg will be departing again as soon as it is provisioned. We don’t have time for any more delays.”

  “Your schedule’s about to go up in flames, buddy,” Tad says.

  More passengers have crowded around to better hear the conversation. I scan the faces for one who looks like the photos in my dossier, but none of the men in the dining room seem to match the balding passenger in my first photo. I tap Jettison on the shoulder. “It’s almost seven. Any idea how much time we’ve got?”

  Jettison walks us away from the curious passengers and discretely refers to his tablet. “The fire starts on landing around 7:25pm. We need to be ready by then. I’ve got a Captain Ernst Lehmann on my list. I’ll head for the control car and see what I can do to get this thing on the ground faster.”

  “Who are your other objectives? It would make sense if we work together on this, team up based on location. If we’ve all got a mix of crew and passengers, we could take it by zones.”

  Tad has followed us to hear our conversation and grunts in derision. “Forget that. I’m not doing your work for you.” He strides away to look for his man. Preston trails behind him.

  We watch him go, then Jettison turns to me. “We don’t need them anyway.” He consults his tablet, then gestures to the blueprint in my hand and I open it up. “When the explosion happens, the first people to be affected are up in the nose. The fire shoots along this upper axial walkway and comes out the front. First priority is to keep everybody away from that walkway.”

  I stare at the blueprint. “This ship is pretty huge. Lots of people to locate. Wouldn’t it be easier to just keep the fire from starting in the first place?”

  “Maybe, but nobody knows exactly what caused it,” Jettison says. “The best theories seemed to be static igniting leaking gas in the tail, but even that is conjecture. How do we stop it if we don’t know why it started?”

  Genesis chimes in. “If the race committee put us here, they’ll have a way to keep the action going. I don’t think we should count on them putting us on a version of the Hindenburg that isn’t going to burn.”

  I think about what I know of the committee’s methods so far and have to admit she’s right. They could have any number of ways to ensure its ignition. “Okay, so we get the thing on the ground ASAP and make sure the people get clear.”

  Jettison nods, then turns to his sister. “You okay staying here, Gen, and trying to get the passengers out?”

  Genesis has been consulting her information tablet and looks up. “Shouldn’t be too bad. In most timestreams people were able to jump out the portside windows. I’ll need to get the people from the starboard side over here, but after that it’s just a matter of getting low enough to jump. I think I can handle it. Give me the photos of your passengers.”

  I hand her the dossier of Birger Brinck, and she passes me one of a radio operator named Franz Eichelmann. She trades one with Jettison also, then turns around and walks over to the cluster of passengers gathered around the chief steward. Jettison heads for the stairwell, and I follow him to the lower deck.

  The “B Deck,” as it’s labeled on the diagram, is divided up into crew dining and kitchen areas and, aft of the stairs, the hallway continues to more passenger cabins. We turn left toward the crew areas and traverse the narrow hallway to the kitchen, passing what appears to be a bar. A dark-haired bartender is securing bottles behind the bar and pauses as we pass. His expression is curious but kind. Rounding the corner to the center hallway we are met by more stares and exclamations of surprise, but we aren’t the first visitors. We find Milo and the man named Titus who had been next to him at dinner. They are trying to convince the kitchen staff to bust out the cellophane windows. Titus apparently speaks German, because he is bickering back and forth with a dark-haired man about my age wearing a white chef hat. Two other white-coated chefs are in attendance, but the one in the hat seems to be doing all the talking. I peek my head around the corner into a dining area full of comfortable looking booths and find a few more off duty crew members seated at tables. Some are in mechanic’s jumpsuits, others appear to be serving staff. One pair are playing chess on a foldable wooden chessboard. I immediately recognize one young, wavy-haired player as a man from my list. I double-check the photo and then approach him. “Excuse me, are you Walter Banholzer?”

  Banholzer looks up from the board, surprised, and rises from the booth. I extend my hand to him. “I’m Benjamin Travers.”

  He shakes my hand and replies in accented English. “Pleased to meet you.” He looks behind me, perhaps wondering where I’ve come from. The other men in the dining area appraise me with curiosity and begin to take an interest in the conversation.

  I stare at Banholzer awkwardly, then try to breach the subject. “So I guess we’re going to change history together.” Banholzer seems unsure, as if he didn’t quite understand me. I turn to the other men. “You guys are going to want to get ready. We need to get you off this ship.”

  Jettison and I do our best to inform the crew of the impending disaster. A few of the men retrieve fire extinguishers and one of the mechanics dons his gloves but all seem hesitant to start busting windows or taking other precautions without orders from their superiors.

  I reconvene with Milo and Titus. “We need to get to the control car. We’ve warned these guys. At least they know what’s coming. If we can convince the captain, he can give them orders to evacuate that they’ll really obey.”

  According to the diagram, the control car is forward along a keel walkway that runs the length of the ship. We pass another dining area on the way that is occupied by an adolescent boy stacking dishes in a cupboard. His hair is cut short on the sides and slicked back with the exception of one stray cowlick. The hairstyle instantly reminds me of the character Alfalfa from Little Rascals episodes that my dad would laugh along to in his den. The boy gawks at us as we pass and I can’t help but wonder how someone so young is employed on a transatlantic airship.

  We are forced to walk single file through the narrow keel toward the control car. To either side of the walkway are large drums of water and, as I get out from under the passenger deck above, I can now look up into the interior of the airship. Having grudgingly ridden in a hot air balloon on an occasion prior, my only experience of a lighter-than-air craft has involved voluminous open space. I had always imagined the interior of an airship to be similar, but to the contrary, it seems that every direction is taken up with aluminum girders and tensioned cables zigzagging their way through the structure. The gas bags of the airship above me have a vaguely translucent quality to them. The sight only increases my unease as I consider their flammable contents.

  The path to the control car becomes suddenly blocked as two men exit a room off the side of the keel corridor. One is a crewmember but the other is an irritated Horacio Amadeus. He turns and shouts down a ladder into what I assume is the control gondola. “The others are coming. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  The crewmember who has been forced into the walkway by Horacio seems to be contemplating socking the Italian in the face, but as we approach from the other end of the corridor he unfortunately seems to reconsider.

  “What are you doing up here, Horaci
o? Anything useful?” I ask.

  Horacio flips me off and climbs down the ladder into the gondola. I give the crewman a nod, and he seems to understand that we don’t want trouble.

  “Sorry about that guy. He’s not really with us.” I slip past the man and peek into the room he exited. A number of desks loaded with radios line the walls. Their analog gauges and big knobs look simplistic compared to modern standards, and there is even a typewriter mounted to one table. A clock on the wall reads just past seven. Twenty minutes to go. There is a commotion in the control car, so I ease myself over to the ladder to hear what’s going on. I hear voices of men I don’t recognize and then one I do. Admiral McGovern strides into view, still wearing his silver cape and gesturing toward the back of the ship.

  “It’ll be in the back. You’ll have been losing lift already. You have, haven’t you?”

  A man with graying temples that seems to be in charge is a step behind him. Dressed in a dark jacket with four stripes on each sleeve to signify his rank and a flat-topped white hat, the man cuts a hand though the air to silence the admiral. “You are not in command of this vessel. We will land as planned and you will be prepared to explain your intrusion to the American customs agents when they come aboard. Get out of my control car!” The man’s expression is hard and his mannerisms exude frustration.

  “For God’s sake, Admiral, just show him the footage already.”

  I recognize Ariella’s voice coming from somewhere out of view. She must have pulled the video up on some type of device because the next moment I hear audio from the famous radio newscast. “Get this, Charlie; get this, Charlie! It’s fire . . . and it’s crashing! It’s crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It’s burning and bursting into flames and the . . . and it’s falling on the mooring mast—” The captain turns at the sound and his face darkens as he takes in what he’s seeing. “ . . . it’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It’s smoke, and it’s in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity!”