The Eldridge Roster

by Stephen Ames Berry

  Leaning back in his desk chair, he sat with templed fingers, staring out the window, watching the steady parade of silver jets catching the late afternoon sun as they glided down the Potomac toward the airport.

  Put it together, Jimbo, he thought—you used to be good at this. Assume that someone wants George’s file. What made it important enough to kill for? Whatever the reason, they’d come very quickly to his door—something they couldn’t have done without help from inside the Bureau.

  Downstairs, he checked the front locks and the alarm panel. Finding no signs of tampering, he poured himself a tall ale and went into the backyard. A stiff wind greeted him with swirling leaves. It was cold and growing dark. Below him, beyond the white picket fence, where Jim’s yard sloped to join his, Bill Enders was still struggling with the huge cedar play set he’d bought his kids two months ago. He was squatting in the tower, screwing in the lateral slats that would enclose the sides. Against his house lay a yellow plastic wave slide, now half-covered by leaves. “Should have paid for assembly, Bill,” called Jim, sipping his ale. “A lousy two hundred bucks, you could be inside jollying the Frau.”

  “Fuck you, Jim,” Enders called good-naturedly. “Either shut up or help.” It’d become a ritual exchange, beginning soon after the lumber and clear thick plastic bags of metal parts had been delivered early in August. A solidly built black guy in his mid-forties, Bill was having trouble positioning the tiny brass wood screws with his large fingers.

  “You want a Bass?” called Jim, watching from the patio.

  “Nah,” said Enders, intent on his work. Jim turned to inspect the ground next to the house. It didn’t take long to spot, the two six-inch long rectangles, about a foot apart, just under the bedroom window.

  “Hey, Bill,” he called. “You see any guys with a ladder here today?”

  Bill stopped working and looked up, frowning. “Just the two bubbas cleaning your gutters, about three-thirty. Problem?”

  “Were you out here all the time?”

  “No. They were finishing up when I got home.” Intrigued, Bill set the screwdriver down and eased himself into the opening where the slide would go, legs dangling. “What’s up?”

  “I didn’t have the gutters cleaned. Think I had some second story visitors.”

  “Shit.” Disentangling himself, he dropped agilely to the ground and came over. “What’s missing?”

  “Nothing,” said Jim. “But someone tracked up my front hall.” He shrugged. “Probably no use calling the cops.”

  “For what it’s worth, Suspect A was a scrawny white guy, with scraggly blond hair and a baseball cap worn backwards. Suspect B was dark, short, kind of oriental looking, maybe Filipino. Both about mid-twenties. I never saw their truck or whatever they came in. I guess we both better put alarms on our second floor windows.”

  “You’re good at this,” said Jim.

  Enders shrugged. “Goes with the territory.” Bill Enders was ex-Green Beret and a Special Agent with the U.S. Customs Service.

  Bill rejected a second offer of a drink. They bullshitted for a few more minutes, then Bill’s daughter called in him for dinner.

  Jim went inside and took all his phones apart, finding a tiny black bug nestled in each. Flushing them down the toilet, he called Angie.

  “GQ, Commander. No shitter,” he said as soon as she picked up.

  “Jimbo? Are you drunk?”

  “Sadly, no. And that steely little osifer tone won’t work on me. Couple of lads burgled my house and bugged my phones.”

  “George’s diskette?”

  “Not to worry.”

  “Good,” she sighed. “I gather you debugged the phones?”

  “For sure.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “Is Erik back yet?” he asked, trying to sound casual. He’d almost forgotten about the blond beast.

  “Still in Baltimore, at the booze and testosterone fest,” she said. “Give me an hour.” She hung up.

  “Yes, sir,” said Jim.

  He glanced at the clock—he could make it to the bakery, get dessert and some bread and be back before Angie arrived from Alexandria.

  He set out on his errands, the melancholy that had gripped him all day gone.

  “More cheesecake?” Jim asked, picking up the silver cake knife.

  Angie shook her head. “I’m stuffed, thank you. That was great, Jim.” She looked at him, smiling suspiciously, and sipped the wine.

  He held up the wine bottle, now two-thirds empty. She shook her head. “I’ll get silly if I drink anymore. Won’t be able to drive.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Let’s continue the mission, shall we?” she said lightly. Angie was all autumn crispness and L.L. Bean tonight, with a blue cotton turtleneck, gray flannel pants and a perfectly cut tweed sportscoat, now carefully folded across the arm of the living room sofa.

  “I’ll get the coffee,” he said rising. “Come on upstairs, the PC’s...”

  “In the bedroom,” she laughed, rising. Jim watched as she went into the living room, setting the leather satchel she’d brought atop the big red ottoman. Taking a canvas case from inside the satchel, she unzipped it and removed a laptop computer. Carrying the PC into the dining room, she placed it on the cleared end of the table, raised the screen and powered up.

  “You’re such a nice Italian girl, Angie,” Jim said, noting the Bureau property control sticker on the side of the machine. “So why the PC inside the satchel?”

  “Those little laptop cases might as well have ‘Steal Me’ stamped on them in flaming lavender six inches high. DC and environs are not an Athenian agora. I don’t want the cost of a stolen laptop taken from my meager paycheck. Disk?” she asked, pulling up a dining chair.

  Jim handed it over.

  “How come your visitors missed this one?” she asked, sliding it into the drive.

  “I labeled it as a spreadsheet file and saved it in my checkbook directory,” he said, pleased with himself. “Now if they’d taken the PC with them...”

  “You’ve deleted it from hard drive?”

  “You bet.”

  “Well done. Coffee?”

  He went to the kitchen and brewed a pot.

  Outside the wind was picking up, rain tapping on the windows.

  “So, what have we got here?” Angie asked as they peered at the jumble of characters wrapping down the screen. “You’re right—it does look like a personnel data.”

  “If so, it’s very old data. And without names. George was pulling World War Two data the day he died. I think these are service numbers.” He tapped several sets of numbers, each preceded by either an O or an RN and followed by an undifferentiated stream of alphas and numerics until the next occurrence of an O or RN. “Social security numbers replaced service numbers when I was in the Army.”

  “Were you in the Bonus March, Jim?”

  “Oh, before then. We had bronze-tipped spears—real bitch keeping an edge on those puppies,” he said, glancing at her then back at the screen. “Now, assuming each service number identifies a record, each record, counting blanks reserved for missing data, totals 156 characters. This,” his pencil touched a three character sequence—ENS—“is obviously a rank. But whether the rest of this stuff is a code or a date, who can tell without a file layout?”

  “How many service numbers?”

  “Fifty-three. And the Navy hasn’t kept officer and enlisted records together in over thirty years.”

  “Hull number,” she said after a moment. “See there?” She pointed to a five character grouping with her pen. “This prefix? DE—Destroyer Escort.” It repeated about every two lines: DE173. “Yesterday, George was running SLIF queries against the 1943 personnel data,” she continued. “Could be this is the hull number of a World War Two destroyer. If so, it isn’t just any destroyer. Oh, my, this is a famous hull number,” she said softly, continuing to scroll down. “It enjoys quite a following.”

  Jim was about to ask what
was so famous about DE173 when Angie suddenly exclaimed, “Look at this!” She pointed to six digits that repeated after every service number: 070343. “Position’s consistent with an Onboard Report Date. Which confirms this as assignment data. Therefore...”

  “Therefore what?”

  Angie handed him his wine glass. Picking up her own, she divided the rest of the burgundy between them and raised her glass. “Toast, Jim,” she said. “To the long-lost crew roster of DE173, the USS Eldridge, a 1240 ton Cannon-class destroyer escort officially launched in July of 1943 in Newark, New Jersey, commissioned August 27, 1943.” She touched his glass with her own, smiling at his puzzlement. “Drink up, Jimbo. I’ll explain.”

  Jim’s philosophy had always been, a woman tells you to drink up, you drink up.

  “So?” he asked, following her into the living room, where a table lamp gave a faint light.

  Outside the wind had grown to a howling beast, gale force at least, driving the rain against the house.

  “So it’s the crew that never was, Jimbo,” said Angie as he triggered the gas fireplace. “It’s the Philadelphia Experiment crew.” She set her wine on the raised hearth, kicked off her shoes and pulled off her sweater. She wore a pleated white silk blouse with mother of pearl buttons and a filigree gold necklace.

  “The what?”

  Going to the sofa, she took two red-and-gold silk throw pillows and returned to the fireplace. The firelight gleamed off the gold set against her lustrous skin as she sank onto the big old bear skin rug in front of the fireplace. Turning on her side, she put her raised elbow on the cushion and propped her head on her hand. “Flop down, Jimbo, I’m not going to seduce you,” she said as he stood, shifting his weight uncertainly. If he’d had a vision of how an evening alone with Angie would go, this wasn’t it.

  “Get your wine glass,” she said. “This is going to take some time. And may I have another cup of coffee? I really do have to drive.” In Virginia, recent use of alcohol-based mouthwash could win you a DWI citation.

  Returning with her coffee, Jim slipped off his loafers and settled to the floor a discrete distance away.

  “You really never heard of the Philadelphia Experiment?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Been a couple of movies and books? No? Well, it’s an urban legend, and like many legends it has a rich fringe following. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  She drank her coffee and gazed into the fire for a moment. “The U.S., Germany, maybe Japan,” she began, “were experimenting with ship invisibility back in the 30’s.”

  “Invisible? You mean, like undetectable by radar?”

  “No. Invisible, like no-can-see.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “Really? So’s nuclear fusion. Works all too well, though, doesn’t it? Certainly made the world safer.”

  “But...”

  “Just listen for now, ok?”

  “Ok.”

  “As part of its ship invisibility project,” she continued, “the Navy cammed onto an early attempt by Einstein at a Unified Field Theory that he developed in the 1920’s.” Angie stopped. “Already your eyes are glazing, Jimbo.”

  “I’ve a bachelor’s in political science.” He set his half-empty wine glass down on the rug. “And no math. Did I ever tell you about my third grade teacher, Miss Gerrish, and the trauma of the multiplication table?”

  “No. Did you want me to continue?” She had that steely tone again.

  “Please.”

  “World War Two gave birth to R&D as we now know it. The Manhattan Project’s the most famous, of course, but also of great interest to the military and research physicists was ship invisibility.” Finishing her coffee, she reached for the wine bottle, then thought better of it.

  “Einstein steered clear of the Manhattan Project and defense research in general until ‘43. Apparently the lure of the ship invisibility project was too hard to resist.”

  “Einstein used to correspond with Bertrand Russell,” said Jim, admiring her graceful throat. “They were both pacifists. Well, most of the time.”

  “How’d you know that?” she asked, surprised.

  “Physics for Poets,” he said. “It was either that or chemistry.”

  “Physics for Poets?” She shook her head. “During the summer of 1943, Einstein was a consultant to the Navy’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. He wrote to someone—one of his old Swiss or German chums—that he was really enjoying his work with the Navy. Then in July of ‘43 he was appointed to an unnamed Navy scientific committee ‘... where his special skills would be most useful’, I believe is the way the record phrases it.”

  “In Philadelphia?”

  “Don’t know. To this day the Navy refuses to release any information about what Einstein did for them during that time. However, Eldridge was probably launched in June of 1943 and used for experiments in ship invisibility during July and most of August of that year—the brief period that Einstein worked for the Navy as an ‘intermittent’ scientific consultant. The generally accepted dates are different, but there are some solid reasons to go with the June-July dates. Anyway in August, something went terribly wrong with the experiment—something that affected the surviving crewmen long after the experiment ended.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, the unwanted ability to penetrate solid matter, invisibility, cycling in and out of this reality. Insanity, cancer.

  “Any reports of women carried off to bear alien babies?”

  “Scoff if you will,” she said. “But the possibility something’s true is often proportional to attempts to hush it up. And there’s been a lot of hush-up where the Eldridge is concerned.” Finishing her coffee, she set her cup on the hearth.

  Outside, rolling peals of thunder had joined the torrential rains. The lights flickered, dimmed, returned.

  “This wasn’t in the forecast,” said Jim as a close hit rocked the house.

  “So not much on physics?” Angie asked, ignoring the storm.

  “No.”

  “Okay. No math required.” She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Scientific observation separates the elemental forces of the universe into two categories: electromagnetism and gravity. Simple, right?”

  “So far,” said Jim. He had the same sense of unease he’d felt when his high school math teacher began his introduction to the elegance, beauty and simplicity of calculus.

  “Einstein wanted to show that gravitational attraction was interchangeable with electromagnetic field attraction, to build a bridge between them—a Unified Field Theory proving that these two diverse forces were in fact attributes of a single universal design. Any empirical evidence demonstrating the validity, or at least the possibility of that would’ve been of great interest to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he didn’t believe that the universe was divided into two parts—the large part that could be understood through general relativity, and the small part that could be understood through quantum mechanics. Albert believed in the elegance and ultimate simplicity of Creation. ‘God does not play dice,’ he said. He spent thirty years trying to derive an overarching theory that would encompass everything.”

  “He never got it, did he?”

  “No. He came up with a Unified Field Theory in the 1920’s but discarded it. Anyway, it’s possible that the Philadelphia Experiment combined elements of both electromagnetism and gravitational force and provided an early demonstration of the possibility of a Unified Field Theory.”

  “Assuming there ever was a Philadelphia Experiment.”

  “Oh, I think there was. In Special Relativity—our old friend from a million toilet stall walls, E=mc2—energy is equivalent to the mass of a body multiplied by the square of the speed of light. Matter converts into energy and back again depending on the velocity at which matter moves. Of course, you need a lot of energy to make a small bit of matter, but not much matter at all to create a lot of energy�
��something profoundly demonstrated at Hiroshima. In General Relativity, gravitation is a field exerting a geometrical force on the bodies within its influence. And light’s an electromagnetic force.”

  “I knew that,” he said.

  “When light enters a gravitational field, it bends, and the angle at which it bends is relative to the mass and velocity of the gravitating body. No one’s ever achieved complete unification of gravity and electromagnetism. No quantum theory successfully describes the conversion of gravitational energy into electromagnetic energy and back again.

  “However, assume for the hell of it that it might be possible to unify the forces of electromagnetism and gravity by establishing a gravitational field oscillating at an electromagnetic frequency. All matter within that field should then be oscillating at that frequency.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, if the amplitude—the degree—of oscillation of the gravitational field could be manipulated, bringing it near the speed of light,” her hands formed an imaginary, vibrating sphere, “then the contents of the field—the objects within it—might become invisible to an observer. Voila! Invisible ship, invisible crew.”

  “And that,” she said lightly, taking Jim’s wine from his hand, “might just have been the basis of the Philadelphia Experiment.”

  “Question,” he said as she finished his wine. “What’s to prevent everything inside this gravitational field from becoming pure energy? Or did I miss something?”

  “Ah, Jimbo,” she sighed. “That’s the problem they didn’t work out—or work out very well. Matter within the gravitational field, says the theory, can be restrained from total conversion into energy by the controlled application of a radiation field intense enough to contain those objects.”

  “Objects such as the crew?”

  “Such as the crew,” she nodded. “Do note the use of the phrase ‘total conversion’. Control during the experiment was apparently... sporadic. The ship briefly disappeared, then reappeared—some of the crew never did. Some faded in and out of existence—going zero, the survivors called it. Others came back, though a few were melded with the ship’s structure.” Angie stared past Jim, envisioning a searing corner of hell from a half century ago.