by Allen Steele
“I don’t understand.” Lea shook her head.
“Ariosophy, the hollow earth theory, using pendulums for decision-making, the world ice doctrine . . .” Murphy picked up a stick, prodded the bonfire’s embers. “It was all bullshit, of course, but a couple of best-sellers were published which claimed that the Nazis achieved scientific breakthroughs that were deliberately suppressed after the fall of the Hitler regime.”
“Makes sense.” Lea absently rubbed a forefinger across her lips. “Without a major European war or the Holocaust, the Nazis might not have been as stigmatized in the West as they were in our worldline. Some of the things they believed in might have been romanticized.”
“That’s what happened, exactly.” Murphy nodded. “Psuedoscience became popular, and it led people in the United States to demand that the government do more to investigate . . . y’know, that sort of thing.” His expression became grim. “So while NASA was being cannibalized and the National Academy of Sciences was begging for chump change, Congress founded OPS. I took a job with them because it was either that or flip burgers at McDonald’s.”
He shook his head at the memory. “The irony of all this was that, while Americans were going nuts over Nazi pseudoscience, the Germans themselves were racing ahead of us in terms of technological progress. So was England, France, Italy . . . first it started with basic research, then it went to product development, and finally it reached consumer goods. Got to the point that if you wanted a half-decent car, you had to buy European. Good ol’ Yankee know-how became knowing how to get the best deal from an Audi or BMW salesman . . . and then you guys crashed in ’98, and that changed the ball game.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand,” Franc said. “If the U.S. had fallen so far behind, how were you able to develop time travel?”
“Blue Plate was . . . well, it was done on the bootstrap principle.” Murphy picked up a branch, broke it over his knee, tossed the short end into the fire, and used the long end to poke at the embers. “You know the idea of someone trying to jump up by pulling at his bootstraps? No? Well, it’s sort of the same thing . . . if you can do it, you’ve taught yourself a new trick. The final objective of Blue Plate was figuring out time travel . . . because, y’know, if y’all were able to accomplish it, then that meant it must be possible . . . but the point was using this as a means of developing new technologies that would once again put the U.S. ahead of Europe. We needed a goal, and being the first country to accomplish time travel was it. Like the Manhattan Project all over again, only this time we didn’t have to worry about nuking anyone. War without casualties.”
“So Blue Plate was a crash program,” Vasili said.
“It started out that way, but it turned into a long-term effort. Theory is one thing. Putting it into actual practice is another.” Murphy tossed the stick into the flames. “Still, we didn’t do too badly. The underlying principles were well established, of course, and many physicists had already spent considerable effort refining Einstein’s work. It was mainly a matter of figuring out how to implement them, and then developing the hardware. We were ready for our first full-out test by . . .”
He suddenly stopped as if he had just heard something, then his face changed. “Oh, my God,” he whispered, his voice quiet with horror. “I didn’t know . . .”
“Know what?” Franc reached forward to grasp his arm. “What didn’t you know?”
“We were too early,” Murphy said. “We were much, much too early . . .”
Friday, February 16, 2024: 12:31 A.M.
Cold night lay across the Nevada desert. Pale moonlight glazed the distant slopes of the Papoosa Mountains, and an occasional errant breeze kicked up sand from the dry lake bed. A good night for secrets, for impossible things to become reality.
Standing at the edge of the long desert airstrip, Murphy sipped black coffee from a foam cup as he watched helicopters make a final low-level sweep across the foothills northeast of Groom Lake, their searchlights prowling the boulders and crevices of what had become unofficially named Freedom Ridge. UFO buffs had discovered the ridge about thirty years ago when it still lay in the no-man’s-land bordering the Nellis Test Range and used it as a vantage point for observing activity at this remote Air Force test site. After too many people began coming out here, the Air Force managed to persuade various congressional committees to expand the test range to include Freedom Ridge. The flying-saucer groupies retreated to Tikaboo Peak, yet that lay twenty-five miles from Groom Lake, too far for any meaningful observation, and even the most inquisitive of them no longer dared to hike into the restricted area. Nonetheless, the military always took the precaution of making sure that the adjacent hills were deserted before any test flights; there was no telling who might be camped out there, crouched beneath camouflage tarps with high-power telescopes and tripod-mounted cameras.
Murphy smiled at the thought. If so, he wished them luck. If there was anyone lurking on Freedom Ridge tonight, they were about to witness history being made, for not since the first prototype stealth aircraft had been developed had anything like this flown out of Area 51.
He turned to gaze upon the complex sprawled across the southeast side of the dry lake. Sodium-vapor lights illuminated a collection of low-built concrete office buildings, military barracks, machine shops, radar dishes, and fuel depots, all surrounding several aircraft hangars, the largest of them spacious enough to hold a C-5A Galaxy. As he watched, its doors were being slowly rolled open, revealing the massive black shape within.
“Time to rock,” he murmured.
Murphy took a last sip from his coffee, then tossed out its lukewarm remains and began sauntering back toward the hangar. The wind chose that moment to snatch at his baseball cap; he managed to grab it before it went dancing off across the desert, yet not before his hair, which he had allowed to grow out in the last few years, was blown from beneath its cover. Steven had given him the cap last summer when he had gone down to Brooklyn to visit him and his family. Murphy wasn’t much of a baseball fan, truth be told, but he had let Stevie take him to a Mets game if only to make up for all the times he had ducked Little League playoffs and day-trips to Boston to catch the Red Sox.
He scowled as he pulled the hood of his old Army parka over his head to keep the wind at bay. It was only slightly less cold than Donna’s voice the terrible night she demanded a divorce, barely more than fourteen months after they moved to Massachusetts. She took Steven with her when she moved back to upstate New York, and it was nearly two years before the court granted him full visitation rights; by then, his son had become alienated from his father, his ex-wife little more than a ghost seen through the living-room window of her second husband’s house in Syracuse. During the entire time, he had never been able to tell either one of them what he was really doing during all those eighteen-hour, seven-day work weeks he spent at ICR. No wonder she had left him; he couldn’t blame her for doing so. Yet losing Donna hadn’t been nearly as painful as the distance he had placed between him and Steven. Twenty-six years later, and the only tangible evidence he had that his son hadn’t utterly disowned him was a Mets cap . . .
God, he silently prayed, please don’t let tonight’s test be a washout. I’ve sacrificed far too much already.
Although a small crowd of military officials and civilian scientists had gathered outside the hangar, no one noticed Murphy until a soldier in desert camies spotted him strolling toward them. Murphy had partly unzipped his parka and was still groping for his ID badge when an Air Force general walked over to intervene.
“At ease, Sergeant,” he said. “He’s one of us.” The soldier cast Murphy a look of silent admonishment, then released his hand from his holstered sidearm, saluted the general, and walked away. The officer watched him go, then turned to Murphy. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your badge in plain sight at all times?”
“Sorry, Jake,” he murmured. “Just went out to see if I could spot any UFOs.” He gave him a wry grin. “Say, you don’t ha
ve any hidden around here, do you? I read this book once that said . . .”
“Cut it out.” The general wasn’t amused. “This is a high-security area. You can’t just wander off without letting anyone know where you’re going.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Murphy said. “My apologies. I’ll ask permission next time.”
As he closed his parka once more, he sourly reflected upon the fact that his relationship with Jake Leclede was nowhere near as informal as the one he had enjoyed with his predecessor. It had been almost three years since Baird Ogilvy had suffered a fatal stroke while playing golf in Florida, but Murphy still mourned his late friend as if he had only passed away last week. General Leclede had taken over as Blue Plate’s military director shortly thereafter; he had kept the project going, a remarkable feat considering that it had already cost the taxpayers nearly $60 billion and its original timetable had long since been thrown out the window, yet never once in those three years had he and Murphy ever gone out for beer and barbecue, as Murphy had frequently done with Baird. Indeed, it had taken two months before Murphy felt comfortable addressing the younger man by his first name.
“Please see that you do.” Then Leclede relented a little. “There’s your baby,” he said, nodding toward the aircraft being towed out of the hangar. “Ready for the big moment?”
Murphy didn’t answer immediately. It was difficult to find the right words, although “baby” wouldn’t have been one of them.
The SR-75 Penetrator was a sleek black condor, its titanium fuselage just over 160 feet in length, the span of its delta-shaped wings 97 feet from the sharp edges of its upward-canted winglets. Retractable canards folded outward from either side of its three-seater cockpit; the airscoops of its turbo-ramjets were large enough to swallow a man whole. Formerly code-named Aurora, the SR-75 had been a highly classified military secret, its test flights from Area 51 responsible for many of the UFO sightings from Freedom Ridge, until its existence had been reluctantly acknowledged shortly after the turn of the century when it flew reconnaissance missions during the Russian conflict. Even then, only one of the massive planes had ever been built; although capable of achieving hypersonic velocities in excess of Mach 3.5, its intense infrared signature and the noise it made at cruise speed made it easily detectable by ground forces.
Yet it wasn’t the SR-75 that attracted Murphy’s attention, but the smaller aircraft riding piggyback on a saddlelike pylon atop its upper fuselage. An unmanned lifting body 42 feet long, it vaguely resembled a silver manta ray, yet it lacked engines and, despite the oval porthole at its tapering prow, a cockpit capable of carrying a pilot. Nonetheless, it could have been any sort of experimental aircraft, save for the three small humps just aft of the cockpit.
The Pentagon had code-named the second craft Jade Lantern, yet Murphy and everyone else intimately associated with Blue Plate, with the sole exception of General Leclede, referred to their creation by a simpler name: Herbert. Herbert as in Herbert George Wells, the author of a novella that had given rise to the entire notion of time travel almost exactly a century before Blue Plate had been set into motion. Murphy had reread The Time Machine at least a dozen times during the last twenty-six years; more than once, lying awake at night, he had shared imaginary conversations with Mr. Wells. The military could call his creation Daffy Duck for all he cared; for him, Jade Lantern was Herbert, plain and simple.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m ready.”
They watched as a yellow tractor towed the SR-75 across the concrete apron to edge of the airstrip. The runway lights came on, a double row of red lamps receding for three miles in either direction, as the tractor released the plane from its yoke. There was a loud whine as the pilot powered up the turbines, then the Penetrator began to taxi toward the southern end of the airstrip. From his briefing, Murphy knew that the enormous plane would need every inch of the six-mile runway in order to achieve takeoff.
“Okay, time to head in.” Leclede prodded Murphy’s arm. “We can watch from inside.”
“Why can’t we stay out here?” Murphy looked around, saw that most of the onlookers were heading toward the nearby operations building. “Is this dangerous or something?”
“Only to your ears. See those guys?” He pointed to a handful of jumpsuited ground crew standing near a candy-striped rescue vehicle. They were fitting ear protectors over their caps. “When this thing takes off, it’s like standing next to a space shuttle during launch. If you don’t want to lip-read for the next few days . . .”
“Right.” At age 66, Murphy was proud of the fact that he hadn’t yet lost his sense of hearing.
He followed Leclede through the security door, then climbed the stairs to an observation room on the second floor. Everyone who had been on the apron was now gathered in front of a row of plate-glass windows. The inside lights had been turned off, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, but the airstrip was clearly visible by its runway lamps. The voices of the tower controller and the SR-75 pilot came through speakers in the ceiling:
“Runway check, Farm.”
“Runway clear, Janet Two.”
A pause, then: “All systems green-for-go, Farm. Request permission for takeoff.”
“You have permission, Janet Two. Happy trails.”
“Thank you, Farm. We’re rolling.”
For nearly half a minute, Murphy couldn’t see anything from the southern end of the runway. Then he began to hear a thin, high-pitched whine which quickly escalated into a howl as, all of a sudden, the SR-75 raced out of the darkness, its tricycle landing gear barely touching the ground as it hurtled past them. At that instant the whine dopplered into a thunderous roar that shook the window and made him instinctively cup his ears. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the flickering red torchlight of its afterburners, then the massive aircraft disappeared from sight.
“Wheels up, Farm.”
“Farm, we’ve started the clocks,” a new voice said. “Both are synched and running.”
“Copy that, Janet Two.”
Leclede unclasped his ears as he turned to him. “They’re away. All right, Zack, it’s your show now.”
“Thank you, sir,” Murphy muttered. He wondered how long that state of affairs would last. Not very much longer, if the test was a success . . .
They trotted back down the stairs, then crossed the operations building to an unmarked door guarded by an Air Force sergeant in camo gear. The general flashed his ID at the sentry; he saluted, then stood aside to let them pass. The room resembled a miniature version of Mission Control at Johnson Space Center; wide and dimly lit, the only light came from ostrich-neck lamps over the workstations arranged across the floor, its consoles winking with diodes, the CRTs casting a blue glow across the faces of the half dozen men and women seated at the carrels. The room was made more crowded by the military men gathered in the rear; Murphy had to push past a couple of Air Force officers just to get to his station.
“How’re we looking, Ev?” he murmured as he pulled off his parka and took his seat.
“So far, we’re golden.” Everett Backofen, the bearded young black man on his left, pointed with his pen toward a computer screen. It displayed a row of multicolored vertical bars, each pulsing slightly beneath a horizontal row of numbers that changed slightly with each passing moment. “We had a little spike about a minute ago, but I think that was just caused by g-force during takeoff. Otherwise, everything’s nominal. Herb’s staying within his parameters.”
“Good deal.” Murphy turned to the prim middle-aged woman sitting to his right. “Dorie, how’s telemetry?”
“We’re getting downlink now.” Doris Gofurther gently massaged her console’s trackball, and a tiny arrow leaped across her screen to a miniature pair of video images, both depicted in ghostly monochromatic shades of gray and black. She clicked once, and the one on the left expanded to show a vague form crossed by flickering lines of static. “There’s the rear-cockpit view,” she murmured. “I think I ca
n clean it up a bit.”
“Do that, please. This looks like its coming from Mars.” Murphy studied the TV image of Herbert as seen from the backward-facing third seat of the SR-75. Even aided by starlight enhancement, it was difficult to make out the drone. “Ev, keep an eye on Herbert and tell me if he spikes again.” He allowed himself a smile. “And whatever you do, agree on which direction you want to go.”
Everett scowled as Doris chuckled under her breath, but no one else overheard the private joke. Which was just as well. Murphy had worked with Everett and Doris on Blue Plate for several months before he recognized the puns inherent in their last names. It was ironic that two of the physicists involved in the first attempt to penetrate chronospace would be named Gofurther and Backofen, but Murphy had long since decided to accept it as a good omen.
Pulling on a headset, Murphy opened the spiral notebook in front of him and ran his finger down the checklist. He studied the plan for a couple of minutes, listening to the reports coming from the other controllers in the room, then he glanced up at the pair of digital chronometers positioned on the far wall of the room, just below the strategic display of the SR-75’s flight plan. The clock on the left showed elapsed mission time as recorded by the SR-75; at this instant, it read 00:10:47:02. The one on the right, which showed the elapsed mission time as independently recorded by Herbert’s onboard computer, gave an identical reading. Both clocks had been synchronized to a tenth of a second, and both were set to begin recording the moment they were triggered by the mission specialist in the rear-facing backseat of the SR-75. Redundant recording systems had been built into both the Penetrator and Herbert, yet this was the one he and his team would monitor during the course of the experiment.
