One Thousand Years

by Randolph Beck

  A second SS man stood beside Mtubo. A white man with dark hair. McHenry had not seen him before. The black uniform had nearly similar oak leaf markings, a rank just one level below Mtubo's.

  “Herr McHenry, this is Standartenführer Stern,” said the Kommandant. “He is the project's research director.”

  Stern wasted no time. He gestured to the image on the dome. “Is this what you saw, with no prompting from anyone?”

  McHenry instinctively identified Stern as a no-nonsense worm of a man. His eyes could look straight through McHenry, as though studying him like a bug. “That's exactly how I remember it,” he replied.

  “We added no details whatsoever, Herr Standartenführer,” offered Vinson. “We have not even discussed the Grauen yet. We were ordered to keep things light for the first few days.”

  Mtubo muttered something in German that McHenry didn't understand.

  “Rechner, display for us a Grauschiff null neun,” ordered Stern. A new picture appeared in the air. It was an image similar to the one the machine had drawn, with exhaust vents beneath it. “Could this be what you saw?”

  “I only saw it for a second,” McHenry admitted. “But I don't remember those holes along the bottom.”

  Mtubo issued a command in German and the picture changed again. “And this?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  “A Geier,” Mtubo said. “Definitely the older model.”

  “So, they did not follow us here,” the Kommandant acknowledged. “Assuming we are correct about ship classes.”

  “No matter,” Stern concluded. “It is virtually certain that this one did not alter history as we know it.”

  “Why so?” the Kommandant asked.

  “It is the certainty of cause and effect,” said Stern. “An event like Herr McHenry's sighting of the Grauen would have affected the timing of his subsequent actions. Even if the timing difference was small, it still would have affected fractions of seconds spent shaving, eating breakfast, and countless other deviations in how he lived and worked in the twentieth-century. For most people, on most days, this might not make much of a difference. The small affect on the action of an ordinary soldier would be corrected once he concentrates on combat. But Herr McHenry is an aviator, flying a craft by hand. The cumulative effect would certainly have been enough to affect his flight path into the bird that disabled him.”

  McHenry had listened intently and understood at least part of it. “You mean, if I didn't see that ship last January, I wouldn't have been thinking of it yesterday, and so I might have taken an extra second or two, more or less, to get to altitude, and that would have been enough to miss the bird.”

  “Correct, Leutnant.”

  “But what's the point?” McHenry asked. “Wouldn't I have been better off if I hadn't seen that ship?”

  “Probably so,” Stern replied. “But the real issue is for us to know that our history has not been changed. Everything is progressing as it should be.”

  “Not quite,” Mtubo interrupted. “The sighting was not in our records. Why was this not reported?”

  “It was,” McHenry stated. “I was also debriefed by two British officers.”

  Stern had a faraway look. “We will have to look into that. This one discrepancy could be a boon to our research here.”

  “Thank you Herr McHenry,” the Kommandant said. “But we are still faced with the reality of the presence of Grauen in this time period. Should we alter the mission profile to Platt Zwei, Oberführer?”

  “Ja,” Mtubo concurred.

  The Kommandant turned to address Vinson. “Thank you gentlemen, you are dismissed.”

  “Jawohl!” said Vinson.

  The Kommandant turned to shout orders to the crew in Kontrolle.” The image of the Grauen ship disappeared, and they were surrounded by stars again, with the Earth below. She turned briefly to McHenry and Vinson, smiled and nodded, dismissing them.

  Mtubo stopped the two men at the stairs. “Good work,” he said. “You have been a tremendous help, Herr McHenry. We will summon you if we have more questions. Heil Renard!”

  “Heil Renard!” returned Vinson.

  McHenry wondered how soon he would be expected to say that, should he not manage to escape. The thought disturbed him. He looked down at the blue uniform he was wearing and questioned whether he should have kept his mouth shut about the ship. The words echoed through his mind, You have been a tremendous help.

  Vinson led the way through the doors to the elevator. “What's going on?” McHenry asked. He had wanted to learn something about the Grauen.

  “We will go to the hangar deck,” Vinson said as the elevator doors closed behind them. “Flugzeughalle,” he ordered. “I think you would like to see the Tigers, which is the class of work ships we use. They are very likely going to send one out now. We have satellites, or buoys if you will, in orbit around the Earth. They look down and record history for our analysts. They are nearly invisible, but some more so than others. We cannot allow the Grauen to find and capture the most detectable ones. Our procedures mandate that those be retrieved now. The Kommandant will likely be taking us to a higher orbit so that we can continue monitoring events in Europe directly.”

  “Why move higher?”

  The elevator doors opened. Vinson continued as they walked down the long hallway. “At that altitude, we orbit the Earth at the same rate that it turns. Then the ship can remain stationary directly over the same spot, focused on the European continent, without expending energy.”

  He took lengthy strides that made it awkward for McHenry to keep up. Vinson continued, “There is one disadvantage. It is a predictable orbit. We assume the enemy will scan there first. That is why this goes against Luftwaffe doctrine. But with a smaller pattern of satellites, the SS will want a constant view over Europe.”

  They reached an intersection with an open hatch in the corner. It went to a tube that ran vertically up to the hangar. Vinson jumped in and grabbed the ladder. Suddenly weightless, he held on effortlessly with one hand. “Has the doctor taken you here before?”

  “No,” McHenry answered, waiting in the doorway. He knew something was strange in the tube. Vinson was barely holding onto the ladder.

  “Just follow me. There is no gravity in here. It is quite normal, so do not be afraid.” Then he climbed up out of sight.

  Not knowing what to expect, McHenry jumped and tried to grab the ladder as casually as Vinson had done. He missed the intended rung and clumsily grabbed onto the next one. His coordination was unprepared for the drop in gravitation. He held tight. The experience felt like the whole ship was falling. Mindful that Vinson was watching, McHenry maintained his composure.

  “Are you all right down there?”

  McHenry looked up at Vinson floating in the tube several yards above him. “Just fine. It's only a bit of a surprise, that's all.” It really was worse than that but it felt better after he closed his eyes momentarily and could imagine he was really falling. The weightlessness in the tube confused his senses.

  “Dr. Evers had warned that you might not like it in here,” said Vinson. “We can go back and see the Tigers after you have fully acclimated yourself. I understand it must be hard if you have never been weightless before.”

  “No, I can handle it.” McHenry climbed one rung at a time, hugging the ladder with his legs. Actually, he had been weightless before. He just didn't want to tell Vinson it was while dive-bombing. It's different without an aircraft fuselage around him. He looked back down at the tube's entrance. “I don't understand the physics of the sudden drop off. That's not supposed to be possible.”

  “You have time to learn,” said Vinson, almost at the hatch.

  They didn't have far to go. The hatch above wasn't more than twenty yards away, and they moved swiftly. It opened when Vinson was nearby, and McHenry hurried his pace. They floated through to the hangar deck. The entire section had no gravity.

  “Now I know why nobody wears hats,” said McHenry.

>   The enormous hangar deck was a busy place. Men and women, all wearing Luftwaffe blue, worked on terminal stations or at one of the spacecraft parked at one of the three mooring latches. Each black ship was 100 feet long with no visible windows. A dark gray swastika, Luftwaffe emblem and serial number adorned the tail sections. One of the latches was vacant. McHenry guessed a ship was out on a mission.

  Each of the spacecraft moors rested flat against the curvature of the entire ship. There was no real sense of up and down. The entire area was weightless, and people worked at stations facing in all directions. Vinson and McHenry clung to one of the railings that stretched across the hangar, but McHenry noted that some of the linemen wore control belts and could fly about the hangar.

  “That looks like fun.”

  “Oh, it is. Every child gets to play like that. Even when you grow up, you never get bored of it. But it is dangerous to play in here when there is flight activity. There is a Tiger out retrieving satellites already. This other is being serviced, but they should not be long.” Vinson pointed to men working near the door. “When they are done, we will have a look inside.” They settled in to a spot along the railing where they could wait.

  “Now,” McHenry began, “what about the Grauen?”

  “Ah, the Grauen,” Vinson sighed. “We think the Grauen have been watching us since soon after Earth's first radio transmissions. No one is really sure. They are considerably more advanced than we are and have probably been traveling the stars for millions of years.”

  “Millions of years!” McHenry repeated, looking again at the ships on the dock. “I can't imagine what kind of society that must be.”

  “And that is the problem. Neither can we. They don't talk to us, and we can't find their home planet. A barrier was recently discovered in space that no one has ever returned from. We think they come from that direction.”

  “A barrier? Like, a wall in space?”

  “Yes,” Vinson said, nodding. “We call it the Far Wall. It was discovered five years ago, and it is vast. Every ship that went into it just disappeared. We even sent survey ships to the edge, but they disappeared, too.”

  “Is that even possible?” asked McHenry, more a statement than a question.

  “No, it is not possible in any way we understand. And we understand a lot.”

  “Who started the war?” McHenry asked after a pause. He liked Vinson but assumed the Reich was at fault.

  Yet Vinson was not playing along. “This is not much of a war. There had been many incidents over time, beginning with the first stories about sightings of their ships and abductions. It did not become a major concern until they destroyed a Luftwaffe ship on the ground in Djibouti. That was five hundred years ago, and we have been shooting at them ever since.”

  “Djibouti, Africa?”

  “Yes. It was the best place to launch rockets back in the late twentieth-century. Any failures fall safely into the Indian Ocean. And it took less fuel to reach orbit from central Africa because it is so much nearer the equator than Peenemünde. You see, they needed every advantage back in the early times. It is not important at all now but most of the large Luftwaffe spacecraft are still assembled there.”

  The linemen had turned toward the adjacent spacecraft and jetted off in that direction.

  “Let's go,” said Vinson. He sprang forward and floated along the handrail. McHenry followed, feeling that he was finally getting the hang of it.

  The hatch was a circular opening with no sign of an actual door. A ladder extended from inside, with some German lettering along the side in gray print. McHenry could not read what it said, but it reminded him of the “NO STEP” warnings stenciled on his own aircraft. He almost felt he was in familiar territory.

  They crawled through the open hatch and followed a narrow crawlspace to the cockpit, which was dimly bathed in a red light. Two seats faced forward, although it was large enough to accommodate four. They stared at a grid-squared wall in what appeared to be a distance larger than McHenry knew the Tiger could be. Once fully inside, McHenry turned behind and saw that the grid extended fully 360 degrees behind him as well. He reached back to feel the wall that he could not see. It was all an optical illusion of a sort. Even the way he came from was now part of the grid.

  “It's like magic,” McHenry said.

  “Yes,” Vinson said, smiling. “It is a little like magic to me, too, and I know how it works.”

  Each seat had two control sticks. Any other controls and gauges would be on a small panel before them, except for a panel on the side that retracted when Vinson pushed it. “The SS officer uses that for scanning and library functions.”

  McHenry nodded but kept looking at the indicators on the main panel before them, trying to guess what it could all mean.

  Vinson swung into one seat. A black strip came out from underneath and held onto his chest and waist. McHenry hesitated only a second and then took the other seat. The strip was soft, holding him firmly but comfortably in place.

  “Rechner, aufleuchten!” Vinson commanded. The grid disappeared, replaced by a view from inside the hangar.

  McHenry looked behind him. It was as though the rest of the Tiger had disappeared around them. But like the view in Kontrolle, there were reticles and grid marks and numbers around the view.”

  “Where did it all go? Are we invisible?”

  “It's still there,” Vinson explained. “This is a composite from the sensors. Or, I guess you might think of them as cameras.”

  “I don't know what you mean by ‘composite.’”

  “There is a sensor array all around this ship, with many different views. The rechner assembles this image from all those pictures to make it appear it is one view all around the ship.”

  McHenry focused on the reticles and grid marks overlaying the view. “So this is really something like a picture that the machine draws for us?”

  “Very much like that, but it is all based upon what is really out there.”

  “I see,” said McHenry, now willing to accept the view as it was. It didn't matter that he still wasn't sure whether it was real or fake. It was useful. He put his hand on the stick. “So how do I fly this thing?”

  “It is only a little bit like an airplane. We do not rely only on the stick control.” Vinson reached to the panel. “These are the vital engine functions. If we were about to leave on a mission, the rechner would show this as the engines were initializing, and then again whenever I needed to know more details than were displayed on the dome background.”

  McHenry stared at the panel, attempting to make sense of it. He began to see that the numbers, some of them changing as he watched, were like the needles on his gauges. The legends were mostly abbreviations, all of it in German.

  “How do you start the engine?” asked McHenry.

  “It is not one engine. A Tiger has over twenty-four thousand drivers, or what you might call engines.”

  “Is there no thrust from this engine?”

  “Exactly. It is a reactionless drive.”

  McHenry's eyes narrowed. That was an impossibility, he thought, but he had seen too many of them already. “Okay, how do these engines start up?”

  “They start in phases. We could bring out this display and start each phase ourselves, but the rechner does that better than a man ever could. The rechner usually knows the mission we are assigned. It will start the engines when we give the command and set up the navigation. It could take us all the way there and back if we want it to. The stick is for making quick flight adjustments, and for manual combat maneuvers.”

  “It seems to me that the machine does a lot of the work for you,” McHenry surmised. “I guess there is a lot for it to do.”

  “Well, it is not like it was in your day. A pilot has a different role than just flying the craft. You probably need to become more acquainted with the rechners.”

  “I guess so,” said McHenry, realizing that was going to be his next task.

  A sense of inadequacy ove
rwhelmed him. He had thought this could have been his best chance to escape. He was alone with only one other man on a spacecraft that could very likely be capable of taking him down to his base in Italy. Perhaps even straight to the United States. Or maybe directly to Berlin, he thought, where he could drop a powerful space weapon on Hitler's Nazi bunker... If only he could fly this thing now.

  Besides, he realized, Vinson was too kind a soul to bash his brains in, even if he hadn't been so much larger — and almost certainly much stronger.

  “Have you ever flown one of these in combat?” he asked.

  “Never,” replied Vinson. “Grauen sightings are rare. The Reich has had no other enemies for over five hundred years. There might be one reported every three or four months, but I haven't been so lucky.”

  “Really? Don't Barr and Bamberg have Iron Crosses? How did they get those?”

  “My friend, you have no experience of our times,” said Vinson. “They have been flying for a couple hundred years. That is long enough to have seen combat. Perhaps not as much as you have, but they have seen more than enough.”

  McHenry allowed that to stand. It was clearly true. The Tiger may have had a stick and something like a window, but it was not an airplane. He had a thousand years to catch up on.

  “See this,” said Vinson, fiddling with the panel. The background image disappeared completely, replaced by a field of stars with the Earth below.

  McHenry held back expressing his astonishment, but he did look behind to see if the Göring was anywhere nearby.

  “We are now in game or simulator mode,” Vinson explained. “We use this for training. I will be able to show you how we do things.”

  “You mean, we hadn't really moved, and we're still in the hangar,” said McHenry, unsteadily. The only comparison he could think of was Hollywood.

  They practiced flying through space while Vinson explained the simple basics. They spent ten minutes working this way, and McHenry slowly got a feel for the controls.

  “When you first learned to fly, did you make passes over the airfield?”

  “Yes, they're called touch-and-goes.”

  Vinson reconfigured the simulator again. This time McHenry could understand what Vinson was doing even if he couldn't quite follow along. They were now positioned at low orbit just at the edge of space, at a steep descent.