by Ian Andrew
He looked round at her, “Well whatever the Ringroom is I’m guessing from looking at you that it isn’t good?”
“It’s where the ring laser gyro actually is.”
“You mean the room on the other side of the glass from the control room?” he asked not seeing the real problem.
“Yes,” she said distractedly.
“So what’s so bad about that?”
She raised her head out of her hands and looked directly at him. “You remember I told you about Kristen Zielang?”
He frowned. “I vaguely recognise the name but I can’t place it, sorry.”
“She was the young lady who stood up into the middle of the Observation Window in Toronto. The one that caused the accident?”
He nodded and waited.
“Before her we had all the normal security clearance protocols. I know you know all about the classified compartments and how clearances and all that works.”
He nodded again.
“But most of our physical security was established because of what she did and as we’ve seen, that side of things is just not in your purview is it.”
This time he shook his head but still said nothing.
“When we moved here it was decided to put in a multilevel approach that increases physical protection the closer you get to the equipment. The last barrier is the door to the actual ring laser.”
“And I’m not going to like what you’re going to tell me, am I?”
She shook her head slowly. “The door’s a Reich Security Grade-6.”
He closed his eyes and simply said, “Oh!” After a moment he asked, “Are you sure we need to get in there?”
“Absolutely. I’ve tried everything else. Something in there is broken and I need to get into it. I need to run real-time diagnostics with power on to the system. That’s the reason it’s a Grade-6. Theoretically, if you were inclined to, you could do what Kristen did. So they made it a designated no-lone-zone, dual approved entry.” She drew a breath and stood up to walk in circles as she thought.
“Well that’s that then.” He sat heavily onto a stool at the bench, “Not even a security detail card’s going to bypass a Grade-6.” He watched Leigh continue pacing in circles. “You’re sure it’s a true Grade-6?”
She continued to pace but said, “Oh yes. Have you seen one before?”
“Yes, in the Berlin Archives,” he said sadly.
“Well then you know. Two separate swipe cards, two separate biometric scans and two separate coded entry sequences. Miss any one of them and the door isn’t opening.”
“I suppose given his future prospects we could’ve asked Konrad but he’s wiped from the system. We’re stuffed.”
Leigh stopped pacing and turned to him, “What did you say?”
“That there’s no use in thinking about Konrad. He’s wiped from the system.”
“You’re right,” she said with a tinge of excitement.
“What? What did I say that’s just made you all sparky again?”
“We can’t get in and we’re stuffed and so is Konrad.”
“Yeah,” he said it slowly, “and?”
“We need to call Franci and get her in here.”
“We can’t! She’ll hand us over as quick as look at us when we tell her what we’re doing.”
“No she won’t. Oh no she won’t!” she said it deliberately. “She won’t care what we’re doing but she’ll care why we’re doing it if she thinks it gives Konrad a chance.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so, Heinrich. It’s a win-win. In fact it’s better than that because Franci’s a much better physical engineer than I am so we should fix it quicker. She gets to help Konrad and we get to go back and talk to Him again.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes!”
Leigh punched the speed dial on her ForeFone. “Franci?”
“Hi Leigh,” she sounded dejected.
“What you up to?”
“You don’t want to know, it’s sad and lonely.”
“C’mon Franci, tell me.”
“I’m in my pyjamas, on my couch, eating ice cream.”
Leigh imagined her in her neat apartment in Bethnal Green and felt such a wave of empathy for her friend. “I need your help.”
“Really?” Franci said very unenthusiastically.
“Yes really. On something that could help a mutual friend.” Leigh could almost sense Francine’s physical reaction at the other end of the line. She waited. After a few seconds with no response, Leigh was going to repeat herself when Francine finally spoke.
“Are you in work?” she asked and the full weight of the question wasn’t lost on either of them.
Leigh drew a deep breath and said, “Yes.”
There was a longer pause.
Leigh knew Francine would be thinking she meant to use the Time Window to warn off Konrad. That was unfortunate but advantageous in the circumstances. If she chose to help then they would have to deal with the truth of the matter face-to-face. For now all Leigh could do was hope that her friend actually loved Konrad as much as she had always said. She waited and wondered if she should try to prompt her but decided to give her time.
After a few more moments, a much more focussed Francine said, “Give me half an hour.”
Chapter 49
There was nothing for them to do but wait. He reached out for her and they sat nestled together on the bench. Her head resting against his chest and his arms wrapped around her.
“I wish we’d had longer together,” he said.
“Me too, but I don’t think we were meant to.”
They stayed like that, breathing in and out in a resonant rhythm with Heinrich planting gentle kisses on her hair.
After a quarter of an hour Leigh swivelled about and kissed him.
“I’m loving this and I don’t really want to move, but she’s going to be here soon. Who knows what happens after that, so I really need to go and have a smoke. Or two. You coming?” she hopped up and he followed.
Lighting her second cigarette she exhaled the smoke into the fresh breeze and bright sun of a beautiful May day in London.
“Would you mind if I spoke to her alone, it’s just...” she hesitated to say it and he filled in for her.
“That to her I’m still the SS-Standartenführer who was responsible for Konrad’s arrest?”
“Yes.”
“No problem. You take her back down and ring me. I’ll loiter up top in the cafeteria.”
She remembered back to Sunday night when they had sat in the cafeteria, “I’m going to have to tell her I’m a Turner.” Heinrich merely nodded. “You know it’s typical. Tell no one my whole life then tell you on Sunday and now Franci on Friday.”
“Wouldn’t be too concerned,” he said laconically, “if this doesn’t work we’ll be outed to the whole world on Saturday.” Although they both knew he meant it as a joke the correctness of it hit home. They stood quietly with their own thoughts. Leigh remembered her mother and father at her graduation in Cambridge. Heinrich saw his grandmother and mother, each holding a hand and swinging him as they walked up a hill towards the woods that lay just south of his village.
The sound of a car pulling across the gravel and into the staff car park distracted them. Leigh looked quizzically at the cigarette in her hand. “If we get it all working again this could well be my last cigarette.”
He smirked at her. “For a strategy to give up smoking it’s a bit extreme.”
She took a last draw of the smoke and stubbed it out in the ashtray.
Heinrich was surprised it took so little time. He had loitered outside until Leigh and Francine were safely inside and then wandered up to the cafeteria. The smell of the lunchtime servery had reminded him he was hungry so he grabbed a handful of takeaway sandwiches. His Fone buzzed just as he was paying for them and three bottles of water.
“Leigh?”
“Come down.”
“It’s only b
een what, fifteen minutes? Is it all okay?”
“It’s fine. Come down.”
Both women were sitting at the bench next to the array of wiring diagrams when he walked in. Francine jumped up and met him halfway. She flung her arms around him, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Thank you.”
Heinrich was almost speechless. “Um, you’re welcome. What’d I do?”
“You surprised me Herr Steinmann. That doesn’t happen often. And you’ve given me hope. In the world I live in that doesn’t happen much at all.”
The three of them sat and shared the food and water.
“So you’re okay with everything Franci?” he asked.
“Okay? No. Thrilled, excited and a little stunned? Yes.”
Heinrich couldn’t help but feel good when he saw the breadth of the smile on her face.
“My best friend is a member of a banned religion, her new fella,” she winked at him and he felt his face blush, “is also a member of it and he’s in the upper echelons of the SS. We’re all going to run a Time Projection back to change the world and save the man whom I have loved for years, yet he can’t love me back the way I want and we’ll probably wipe ourselves out of existence in the process. Less than an hour ago I was eating ice cream and feeling sorry for myself. So yep, not okay, bit shocked but definitely up for it.”
Leigh and Heinrich looked at one another and Leigh could see the confusion on his face.
“Ask her why Heinrich.”
“You don’t need to ask,” Francine said, “I’ll ask you something. What do you see when you look at me Heinrich?”
He hesitated in answering, not too sure if he was missing something or if he was meant to respond in a certain way.
“It’s okay Heinrich, just tell her the truth,” Leigh encouraged him.
“I see Doctor Francine Xu, senior scientist with the Reich’s Technical Directorate. I don’t know what your specialisation is but you must be good to be on this team.”
“Aww, he really is a keeper Leigh,” she teased and then turned back. “That’s nice but let’s get down to brass tacks, what do you see?” she stressed the last word, “And be honest.”
“I see a woman of about,” now he paused again not having a clue how old she was but he decided to take her at her word and was as honest as he could be, “thirty-eight...”
She interrupted, “Oh, I do like him more and more, go on.”
“About one-sixty tall, slim, obviously healthy, fit and,” he blushed again and gave Leigh an awkward look. She just nodded her encouragement for him to go on. “And very beautiful.”
He looked at the two women sitting opposite. Leigh was smiling broadly at him and Francine was looking contemplative and he could see a sadness in her eyes. Albeit that he had only known her for a short time and all of it at a superficial level within the project, this was the first sign of fragility that he had ever seen in her.
“Did I say something wrong?”
She sniffed and said, “No, not a thing. Leigh said you were a good person and now I’m inclined to believe her.”
“Because I said you were beautiful?” he asked a little perplexed.
“No, because you said nothing about me being a half-cast, yellow-chink, slant-eyed, daughter of a whore.” Heinrich went to object but she held up a hand and continued, “A product of a mixed-marriage that should never have been allowed. Some reject from the Aryan master race that slipped through the cracks.” She sniffed again and wiped her eyes, “You know I only survived because they needed my parents and then it turned out the Reich needed me too. That’s my world Heinrich. Apart from my closest colleagues the world, this world, our world as it is, sees me like that. When I walk down a street I get looked at. When I walk into places I get asked to leave. When I walk into worse places I get asked to stay and perform tricks. I’ve been verbally abused, spat at and on one notable occasion, punched. The last time someone tried to hurt me I defended myself using stuff my dad taught me and was thrown into a cell for four days. The only reason I got out at all was that Konrad came looking for me. Even then the guy who’d started it got nothing done to him.”
“I see,” Heinrich said.
Francine reached out for her bottle of water and took a drink. “I can get equally passionate about being a woman in a man’s world as well.” She gave him a mock toast with the bottle.
“Oh yeah, she really can,” Leigh added.
“So that’s why I’m up for this and that’s why I’m excited. I’ve had enough of what we have and I’d like something new please.”
“We’re going a long way back,” he said trying not to ask the obvious.
“I know. I thought at first that Leigh was thinking of going back to warn Konrad directly but that only saves Konrad. It doesn’t do much for my situation or the hundreds of thousands like me who haven’t even had the chance to live.”
“Do you believe it will work?”
“Well I did wonder how on earth we were going to communicate with anyone from back then but Leigh has tried to convince me that you’ve apparently been blessed. I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said with a good trace of cynicism in her voice.
“And what about the actual plan of changing things. Do you think that will work?”
“I don’t believe in the Godliness of Jesus but I know my history so yes, why not? My dad had some banned texts from the Far-East. He kept them as a curiosity but I thought they made interesting reading. There was one that was about a guy called Siddhārtha something or other. It was only a scrap really but it said that all things that come to be have an end. I always remembered that. I used to wish that one day people being bastards to me would come to an end. Perhaps today’s the day.”
“Well, if today’s the day we better make a start,” Leigh said and got up.
They took the diagrams with them and headed back into the Thule Room. Leigh and Francine scanned, swiped and punched in the necessary data before pushing the Grade-6 door to the Ringroom open. As soon as they entered they could smell a pungent, almost acrid odour. The two scientists said at the same instant, “The transformer’s gone.”
“Is it fixable?” asked Heinrich not having the least clue if a transformer that had obviously burnt out was just bad or catastrophic.
“Yes, probably,” said Francine, “we have a couple of spares but it’s going to take a good twenty minutes to replace it.”
“But we can get it back up and running?”
“There’s a very good chance,” Leigh said.
“Do you need me to do anything?” he asked as he watched them examine a large, square, black box that had a dozen or more silver coloured metal blades protruding from its sides and rear.
“Nah, we’re okay Heinrich,” Francine said. “We’ve got this. It’s just a simple case of a one for one swap but we have to disconnect it and wire the new one in.”
“I’ll leave you to it then. What’s the code to get out?”
“Five zeros,” Leigh said.
Heinrich laughed softly.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing. Just that I should write a memo to SS HQ and ask them to audit Grade-6 exit codes.”
Taking a seat at a console desk, he focussed his thoughts on what he would say when the Window reopened. He referred to the notes he had made in the Archives and tried to find a way to explain, in terms that would be understood by Yeshua, what befell the world when the Reich rose. Leigh and Francine came and went between Oscar and the Ringroom with various tools and bits of equipment. True to their promise, twenty minutes later they were back at the controls and ready to start again.
Once more they used Konrad’s key but this time Francine assisted Leigh. When stabilisation occurred Leigh entered the override code and all of the previous parameters save for the time. “What hours and minutes are we going for Heinrich?”
“After the Window crashed I reckoned we’d been observing about forty-five minutes. That puts it at 17:00 local Capernaum time. So if w
e aim to go back in to the Projection five minutes later, at 17:05 local, 15:05 GMT?”
“Sounds okay to me.” She punched the data in and instigated the Projection. The lights dimmed dramatically and then came back to an almost normal level.
“Whoa, that’s not good,” Francine said as she moved between consoles, but Heinrich wasn’t listening. Instead he was looking at the image on the wall.
He turned to look at Leigh, “It’s pitch black Leigh.”
“The crash wiped the last known coordinates. I had to go back to the jetty again.” She said.
“So much for the full moon, I can’t see anything.”
“Don’t fret, you said track 035 degrees last time and we only went about twenty metres. Then we followed them slightly north-west as they walked towards the small clearing. We’ll find them.” She watched her screens and used the tracking controls to move the numbers on her displays. “We should be about there?” she said and looked up but the image screen was still black. “Oh! That’s not exactly what I’d hoped for.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a brightness control?” Heinrich asked.
“Have patience. We’ll find it. Franci, knock the lights off in the room please and Heinrich, you watch the image. I’ll start spiralling out in concentric circles. Shout out when you see something.”
Francine put the room into darkness and Leigh adjusted the tracking controls. She moved in the smallest of increments and concentrated on being smooth. Heinrich watched the image and waited.
After what seemed like an age he saw the smallest flicker of light in the Projection. “There! Stop!”
Leigh froze the controls and looked up. They all stared into the near black. As their eyes adjusted it was Francine that said, “That’s a lamp in a window.” Leigh was about to agree when the moon finally broke through whatever cloud cover had been across it. The small house came into sharp focus and they could see the cordon of Disciples still gathered round it. Leigh punched in a lock command to capture the coordinates just in case something went wrong again.
