The Test
By Robert B. Longley
Copyright 2019
Chapter 1 - Happy Birthday
Chapter 2 – It's Usually Best to Start at the Beginning
Chapter 3 – Stonehenge
Chapter 4 – Solstice
Chapter 5 - Send in the Marines
Chapter 6 – We Have Company
Chapter 7 - Meet Stephen Tyler
Chapter 8 - Soldier Number Two
Chapter 9 - Burns
Chapter 10 - Everyone Loves a Parade
Chapter 11 - Just Another Day at the Office
Chapter 12 - Sunglasses
Chapter 13 - Regarding Henry
Chapter 14 - Phone Home
Chapter 15 – Meet the Team
Chapter 16 - The Plan
Chapter 17 - Back to Work
Chapter 18 - Headed Uptown
Chapter 19 - The Ride Home
Chapter 20 - The Driving Test
Chapter 21 - More Sunglasses
Chapter 22 - Return to Princeton
Chapter 23 - Why Me?
Chapter 24 – Summer Fun
Chapter 25 - Back to Princeton
Chapter 26 - Run
Chapter 27 - U-Turn
Chapter 28 - The Final Act
Just for the record, The Test is a work of fiction. While there are many historical incidents and people referenced in the book, the overall story is fictitious. I've taken the story of the USS Eldridge in a new direction. I hope you enjoy the journey.
Rob
Chapter 1 - Happy Birthday
To me, it started like any other birthday. I was up at five before the kids, before my wife, and I headed downstairs for some ‘me’ time. On this day though, I was greeted by the dreaded banner, "Oh, nifty. Look who's 50.” I didn't have the heart to tell everybody that I was quite a bit older, but we'll get to that in a bit. I sat down at the breakfast table, pulled up my iPad, and checked the sports scores and my stock portfolio (if you can call it that).
Next to my iPad was my birthday gift. It was not wrapped because it's a little hard to wrap a baseball. It was a signed Carl Yastrzemski baseball. My son knew I've been a lifelong Red Sox fan. I told him about the ball that I had caught at Fenway Park as a child and got it signed by one of the players. I had always told him that the ball had long been lost when I was in foster care, so this was a nice reminder. I didn't have the heart to tell my son that I was 15 years old and I was watching Babe Ruth's last game as a Yankee at Fenway. The ball was signed by Red Sox pitcher Johnny Welch, and yes that was August 12, 1934. So if you do the math this is closer to my 100th birthday. Not bad for a guy with two kids still in high school. If you are wondering about the game, Babe didn't do much in either of the games. We split with the Yankees, but it's one of those moments you would like to share with your son. How many people can say they got to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play together?
I had completely missed the Carl Yastrzemski Red Sox years. I had to do more than a little reading to cover up that little discrepancy.
Next to the baseball was a small walker and a sign that said, "Be careful, old people!” If they only knew. There was also my first copy of AARP magazine and one of those DNA tests to discover your family history. I had told my family that I had been in foster care most of my childhood, and I didn't know too much about my parents because they were both dead and this was partially true.
You would think as a 50-year-old man in upstate New York with two kids that I had enough problems. My son Michael was a senior in high school. He was a classic geek with a mind for electronics like his dad. I suppose I am grateful that he wasn't into cars and partying. We had to pressure him to get his license as a senior. Even the classic Camaro in the driveway didn't interest him. He's the only kid I know that likes riding the bus because he can work on his homework. I'm not sure if it was the near-perfect SAT scores or the patent he came up with for part of a solar storage array, but he was headed to Princeton in the fall. They came through with a nice scholarship for him, but I was still looking into whether I could sell a kidney to pay for the rest.
My daughter Stephanie is a completely different story. She just turned 16 and is going on 30. She just got her driver's permit and wants to drive everywhere. Between the earbuds and her crazy music, it's a little unnerving. She also has a lead foot which doesn't help. I think she gets that from her mother. I'm pretty sure she isn't going to Princeton, the PSATs were not pretty. She's smart enough, but I don't think she likes school. She is artistic and writes well so who knows. Either way, I don't have to worry about that for another year.
For most people, this would be a normal 50th birthday. I knew later that night we would go out to dinner, have a few friends over this weekend, maybe open up a couple of bottles of wine from a local vineyard, and this birthday would fade into history. But unlike most birthdays for me, this birthday was going to change everything.
Chapter 2 – It's Usually Best to Start at the Beginning
I started my first life as Thomas Herman Wolfe. I was born just outside of Boston in the summer of 1919. The Herman was because it was Babe Ruth's middle name and I was born the year he left Boston. My dad loved baseball, but I think he loved Babe Ruth even more. I grew up around baseball, seeing the players at Fenway. From the time I was 3 to about 6, I was a regular at Red Sox games. I knew most of the players by sight and my father took me to games regularly.
My story didn't start in Boston though. It started half a world away. My grandfather first came from Turkey to Italy in the late 1880s as a sailor. (It didn't become relevant until my current birthday, but I figured I would fill you in now.) He met a local girl in 1891 and decided to stay. My father was born a few months later. My father grew up swimming in the Adriatic Sea in the Apulia region of Italy. It was not much of a childhood as his mother died in childbirth when he was 5. His father quickly drank himself to death a few years later. As an orphan in Italy, he was looking for any opportunity. There were advertisements for jobs in Eastern Pennsylvania and my father got on the first boat he could.
He ended up in Roseto, PA working in the slate quarries. It wasn't exactly a sailor's life, but it was a job. My father earned enough money to enter the New York Nautical School which is where he met my mother. She worked in the administration building. My father made more than a few excuses to show up there when he didn't need to. My mother got the hint. He eventually got the courage to ask her out and the rest, as they say, is history.
My mother's parents had a small farm just south of Albany. My parents were married there, in the yard in the gazebo. This became home for my parents while my father was at sea. My father helped out on the farm when he was on leave but he wasn't around much. He eventually moved my mother to Boston since that is where he was based. Getting to Albany was often a challenge. I don't think my mother ever got over leaving the farm, but she wanted to be with her husband.
My father was a merchant marine during the First World War and often told me stories of life at sea. He was disabled when a large pallet came free in a storm and broke his leg in several places. It never healed correctly, and he was forced to find a job on land. He was in finance during our time in Boston but got a job as a stockbroker in New York City in 1925. He commuted on the weekends by train but eventually moved my mother and me to Brooklyn in 1926.
We had a beautiful three-story brownstone with a maid. My mother was the queen of the house and regularly took afternoon tea with some of her lady friends. My dad took me to watch the Yankees play every chance he could. I was still a Red Sox fan, but I didn't advertise it too loudly. Everyone was there to see the Babe.
Then shortly after my 10th birthday, my dad fell out of a window and died. At least that's what I was told. A lot of other fathers fell out o
f windows that same day when the stock market collapsed. As it turned out, all our money was gone. My mother had been a housewife all her life and she didn't have many options, so we moved upstate to be with my grandparents.
The farm was a magical place. My grandparents had a pony named Buddy and I would ride him for hours. I was expected to help on the farm and kept busy with the cows. My mother took in sewing and starting cooking for a local family. It was a giant step downward, but she accepted it with dignity and never complained. She eventually opened a small restaurant and I helped there when I could.
In high school, I started studying electricity and wanted to be an electrician. There seemed to be good money in it. I had gotten shocked more than a few times, so I wasn't afraid of it. I started apprenticing with a local electrician when I graduated high school. Hitler was mixing things up in Europe, so I started thinking about joining the military. My grandfather talked me out of it, and I continued as an electrician apprentice for the next few years.
I eventually enlisted in the Navy right after New Year's in 1942, despite my grandfather's objections. We had just been bombed at Pearl Harbor and I said goodbye to my mother and grandparents. They understood, just like many other families did at the time.
I'd like to think I followed in my Father and Grandfather's footsteps when I joined the Navy. I thought I was going to see some action, but I was primarily assigned to sub patrol up and down the east coast. I was able to come home periodically, and believe it or not, did not see any combat. During my time in the navy, I was assigned as an electrician on a coastal patrol vessel. I got good at fixing things, but it wasn't exactly exciting work. It did get me promoted though and I got to move up in the world.
In 1943, I was assigned to a destroyer, the USS Eldridge (DE-173). It was brand new, and I was in New York for its commissioning. We took it out to sea after Rear Admiral Kelly gave us a proper send-off. It wasn't quite ready for the trip to Philadelphia so after the crowds departed, we headed back to New York harbor for a few weeks. We sailed with a skeleton crew to Bermuda for sea trials, and then to Philadelphia where the rest of the crew would join us over the next few weeks. There were 15 officers and 201 sailors on board.
Shortly after getting to Philadelphia, we were working on various radar projects and I was brought to Princeton University in September to help set up some new equipment there. I met Albert Einstein and a few other notable people. We became fairly good friends so to speak. I had regular private concerts with him and his violin. He would get bored, and he said it helped him think. I don't know if it helped the rest of us think, but he was pretty good. I did almost destroy his violin by accident one day. I was smoking and set part of the office on fire. We put out the fire quickly and had a pretty good laugh. Einstein said, "If you didn't like my playing all you had to do was say so.”
Again, not something I could tell my current family. The new radar project required large magnets and these giant coils. I was supposed to hook them all up and not get us all killed. I had worked with radar equipment before, so this seemed like a piece of cake.
In theory, it sounded pretty simple. You plug this thing in, you turn it on, and it made the boat look like it was made of wood. It wouldn't show on radar, and you could bump into a mine and not have to worry about it going off. It sounded like a pretty good idea to me. And so that's what we built. The initial tests in 1943 involved the USS Eldridge and the USS Liberty. They were conducted in port because we didn't know any better. There's an assortment of legends about what happened, but I was in the hospital with a burst appendix at the time. When I finally made it back to the boat in November, there were some new faces and it looked pretty much the same as I had left it. There did seem to be signs of some recent repairs, which seemed a little odd for a 4-month-old boat. I didn't question it at the time, but in retrospect, I probably should have said something.
We did a couple of escort missions to Africa and settled back into our homeport in Norfolk, VA just in time for New Year's. Over the next couple of years, the Eldridge did most of its sailing without me. I spent a lot of time in Princeton at the test site, and I would rotate on and off the boat to do "maintenance tasks" through most of 1944 and 1945.
When the war ended, I had moved up in rank several times. I wasn't an officer, but I enjoyed what I was doing, and I decided to stay with it for a while. I was still working on the project, which never got finished before the end of the war. It was 1946 and things were good. If you were a single sailor, you were pretty popular with the ladies, so I was enjoying my time. In Virginia, I was stationed at Norfolk naval base, and we had beautiful beaches nearby. I had a small bachelor apartment off base, so I was able to spend time at the beach whenever we were not deployed. Then came word that the Eldridge was going to be decommissioned in June.
Most of the crew had left the military. We had a small group of contractors that were removing armaments since many of these ships were going to become civilian vessels. The plan was we would take the ship to Green Cove Springs, just south of Jacksonville, FL., and then either take another ship home or take a train. Someone higher up had other ideas.
We ran into some weather off the Carolinas and decided to stop in Savannah on Jun 15, 1946. We were still on schedule for decommissioning on the 17th. As I was getting off the ship to check out the nearest bar, an officer approached me, “Petty Officer Wolfe, a word please.” I saluted and replied, “Yes sir.” He handed me a small envelope, the card read, "It works, here's the new settings- AE.”
I said, “What good does it do now, the boat is being decommissioned in 48 hours."
The officer replied, “And no one is going to miss it when it leaves for the storage area and keeps going.”
"Where exactly are we going, sir?"
"They said the best place to do the test was in the Bahamas."
I said, "We don't have supplies or fuel to make the trip.” "You will, by the time you leave in the morning.”
"Ok, I always wanted to know if this thing worked or not.” "I have some paperwork to take care of, but I'll meet you in Jacksonville."
Three trucks pulled up to the docks just as he said that.
"I guess I'm not getting any southern fried chicken tonight," I said.
"I'm sure there's some SOS in the mess" He smiled and walked away. Who was this smart ass?
I stopped and yelled, “Guys – change of plans. We've got 3 trucks to unload.” By the time I said it guys were already unloading. What did they know that I didn't?
I think we got to sleep around three. I don't even remember hearing the boat leave the dock. I passed on the officers suggested dining option and didn't even make it to breakfast. I grabbed some saltines and a coffee and made it out on deck just in time for us to pass the port entry in Jacksonville.
The decommissioning didn't have quite the fanfare as the commissioning. It was the equivalent of a naval junkyard. Our usual crew of 200+ was now a crew of 4 officers, 57 enlisted, and 22 contractors. As we arrived at our dock location, we were greeted by Lt. Commander Andrew Douglas, (who I had met the night before in Savannah), and the salvage operations officer. Commander Douglas explained to the other gentleman that the boat had not been properly cleared of the ordinance before decommissioning. He was authorized to take it to an exercise area off the Bahamas and expend the remaining ordinance. “Bring it back when you're done with it.” He didn't even question the order.
Except for a couple of men who needed to get back to Norfolk, everyone was up for a pleasure cruise to the Bahamas. Once we got underway Lt. Commander Douglas briefed the crew on the true nature of our trip. They thought they would get some good rum and maybe meet some island girls, but this was exciting too. The contractors had been briefed on the experiment before we left. It was suddenly unclear who they worked for.
It was a series of tests over five days. Generally, each test was with a subsequent higher power level. The first couple of days things didn't go particularly well. The test did not seem to do wh
at it was supposed to do. There was another boat nearby to test our radar signature, and we had fake mines in the water to see if they would attract. Nothing seemed to change when we turned the machine on. So, each day we increased the power level a little more. On the fourth day, we started getting coronal discharges around the boat. This seemed to be a good thing at the time, but in retrospect, it changed my life.
As far as I knew, things went completely wrong and the test ended on the fifth day, or at least it ended for me. All I remember was the sky turning blue and a whirling sound. There was an explosion and the next thing I knew, I'm flying through the air and land with my back against a large rock. My leg was broken, my clothes were largely burnt off me, and I had at least two ribs cracked. Then I noticed I'm no longer on the water but in the middle of England.
Chapter 3 – Stonehenge
I had seen pictures of it in books. One of my favorites was in National Geographic, but it looked somewhat different with a blue hue around it. Also, all of the stones were standing where they're supposed to be. The wooden structure around Stonehenge and the hand-hewn scaffolding didn't look familiar either. So, I figured I wasn't in Kansas anymore or even in my own time. I sat there and thought about my broken ribs, my broken leg, and what I was going to do next.
My first guess at the year was around 1000 BC. I didn't know when this thing was built; I just knew it was old. I later found out that I was somewhere between 2480 and 2450 BCE. I was there at the end of construction or caused the end of construction. I'm not sure, but either way, I made an unintended change to the historical record. Some would say I'm just part of what was supposed to happen. It's one of those questions that can keep you up at night, so I'm going to skip over the details for now.
The Test Page 1
