by Bob Blink
“Even if this isn’t what Kurt thought, it’s the only portable device we have seen that is powered. That alone should tell us a lot.” Naiya concluded.
Interesting observation, I thought momentarily. But it still wasn’t in our hands. I turned to John and asked what I needed to know. “Have you found anything that tells us where he put it?” I asked hopefully.
“Best for last,” he said with a chuckle, and handed across the last sheet he had been holding.
The three of us crowded around for a look. “Long Beach,” Carol noted.
“That’s consistent with the flight Kurt asked us to arrange,” added Naiya. “Long Beach is just down the freeway a few miles.”
I had been there a couple of times. Boeing had a plant in the area, and I had made a couple of presentations two years ago for Aero in my role as technical consultant. Finally I found what I was looking for. “Public Storage, and there’s the address. Good!” I said
“Why good?” asked Naiya.
“Because the public storage facilities typically have an indoor section, which is where I suspect we will find this storage bin number,” I said pointing to the reference. “But no one monitors your going into the bins. If you have the key, you can open it and no one knows whether you are the renter or not. Most have a gate that requires a code to open, but even if that isn’t here in Kurt’s instructions, it’s easy enough to get through by slipping in after another car.”
“I’m going along,” Carol insisted. In the end, four of us decided to go, Carol, Naiya, Dave, and myself. There was no reason not to. For now, the annoying surveillance of the past week was gone. All of us had waited too long. The charter was reactivated for the following morning, leaving just after 8:00.
Chapter 22
Wednesday, 31 May 2006
Southern California
The charter flight had left right on time with wheels up at 8:14, actually a minute before scheduled departure. Arriving together and being the only passengers the crew had been able to prepare for departure as soon as we were on-board. For once the airport was not experiencing delays, further accounting for our smooth departure. It had been a promising start. Minor turbulence rattled the small plane during the first half-hour of the flight, but as we made our way south the weather improved resulting in smooth flying the rest of the way. Rather than land at busy Los Angles International, the pilots had booked us into the Long Beach Airport next to the old McDonnell Douglas facility that Boeing had purchased a few years ago. This was not only convenient in terms of our alleged purpose for the trip, but was closer to our true destination as well. A mere five miles from the airport is where Kurt’s notes indicated he had stashed the device.
I claimed our rental car while the others waited in the lounge. Wearing business casual, we could have come to Los Angeles for sight seeing or a business meeting. Nothing made us stand out, although we had made certain that no lingering interest in our activities remained before boarding the flight. While a trip to Los Angles would be fully in character with our business activities, a trip there to visit a storage facility would have to appear odd to anyone keeping an eye on us.
The trip up Wardlow Boulevard to where it intersected Cherry Avenue took only a few minutes. The Public Storage facility was easily spotted, occupying the corner lot at the intersection of the two streets. We waited for the light, then continued north across Cherry arriving at the entrance just behind another car. The flight had taken two and a half hours, yielding an arrival time more than an hour after the facility opened. As I had predicted, slipping in behind another car was easily accomplished, and we pulled into one of the many parking slots inside the mechanical gate that rumbled closed behind us.
A pair of automatic sliding glass doors parted to allow us entrance into the main building. To the right was a second door which lead into the showroom and front desk where customers could pay rental fees, sign up for a storage space, or buy a variety of storage and packing goods. To the left were two sets of stainless steel elevator doors. We could go up the elevator to where Kurt’s storage area was located without having to pass by any of the facility staff.
Naiya pressed the call button. “Third floor, right?” she asked.
I nodded, and we all piled into the elevator when it arrived. Surprisingly narrow, but deep, there was plenty of room. Slowly the elevator lifted us to the upper floors and finally deposited us on the top floor of the facility allowing us to start our search. We soon found ourselves making our way down one of the narrow corridors past one wide steel door after another. Then, to our left, bin number 3224. Nothing to distinguish it from any other. It sported a pair of large master padlocks. I reached into my pocket for my wallet where I had placed the plastic key in the small key holder designed for a spare auto or house key. Holding my breath without realizing it, I prepared to slip the key into the first lock.
What if it doesn’t fit?
No surprises this time. The plastic key slid smoothly into the padlock, and as I turned the plastic stub, the lock snapped open smoothly. I repeated the procedure with the second lock, with the same result. Keyed the same. I looked at the doors of adjacent bins. All sported two locks. I wondered how many of them were also keyed identically. I didn’t quite follow the logic of the two locks, but what the hell. We were in.
An alarm sounded as I pulled the handle to raise the steel door. I froze. Naiya looked at me, eyes wide. Carol looked back towards the entrance. Dave came to our rescue. “I’ve been in one of these before,” he noted. “Anytime someone opens one of the doors, it triggers the horn. I guess they can look with video cameras and see if anything looks out of the norm. They will turn it. . . off,” his sentence ended as the predicted event occurred.
“So they might be making a video of our entry?” Carol asked.
“I honestly don’t know. But I can’t see how it matters. Unless someone reports a loss, or they discover damaged locks on their daily checks, any tapes they might make will probably be wiped when they are re-used. I’d bet they don’t even record. These places are pretty much store at your own risk with insurance covering any losses.”
With the steel door opened, we made our way inside. Lots of boxes, including a number of padded sample cases. According to his notes, many unusual artifacts of no real value he had found were stored here. They were mostly curiosities he didn’t want to throw away. In the back, behind a pile of boxes filled with books, was the safe. Here was the additional security that had made Kurt comfortable with the storage system. Fail to enter the combination properly, and the internal alarm would be triggered making enough noise to chase away any would be thief.
I carefully worked the dial entering the numbers supplied in Kurt’s directions. The handle turned smoothly, and the door opened without any sirens. Inside, I could see how he had done it. The bottom third of the safe was filled with lead blocks. It had to weight more than a thousand pounds. No one was going to cart it away. The safe itself was some form of modular construction. I could see the side, top, bottom and door had been brought in separately. Inside there were heavy, half-inch steel rods that slipped through inter-locking flanges to hold the pieces together. Disassembly from the inside would be straightforward, but from the outside as difficult to open as any normal safe. The back up battery sat on top of the lead blocks and an electrical cord came in from the back of the safe. It ran to an electronic package with the alarm in the middle section. Near the top, sitting on the only shelf were two more of the padded aluminum cases, one quite small, the other about the size of an attaché case, but about six inches thick.
“You do it,” Carol said, touching my shoulder for encouragement. I noted her voice was almost a whisper, although there was no need.
The large case came out smoothly, and I set it on the floor. Everyone gathered around as I knelt down and slipped the two heavy latches allowing me to open the case. There it was. Nestled in a cutout in the foam, obviously tailored to the shape of the device, was the blue-green object that
we had thus far only seen in the pictures Kurt had left for us in his files.
There had been speculation whether the device would continue to work after all this time. Had the power source finally failed? Would we locate it, only to find it inoperable? Maybe it was powered by sunlight, and being stored away for so many years might have drained the power source? If so, would exposure to sunlight reactivate the power source? If it did, would the device come back on or remain in the off state like so much of the alien equipment? Perhaps once off, it would require user action to turn it on again. Would it end up like the equipment in the storage room of the complex, apparently inert because we didn’t know the means of activation?
Gingerly I reached down and lifted it out of the case. “It’s powered,” I said presuming the lighted square really was an indication of power. The relief in my voice was obvious to everyone. “Look, the ‘power indicator’ still glows,” I said, holding up the device so they could see the faint purple square in the side.
“Try it,” Naiya urged.
Holding the device in both hands, I brought it near my face where I could see the gray screen, and uttered a number. “Six,” I said. An odd growl came from the device and a greenish symbol appeared in the center of the screen. It lasted about thirty seconds, then faded away. “Something at least,” I commented to the others. Chills ran up my spine.
“Seven eight, nine,” said Naiya, her face close to the device. More growls came from the device. If they were any different I couldn’t tell. Three new symbols appeared, scrolling across the screen, the last remaining until it too faded after a few seconds.
Grins all around. Gently I placed the object back into its case, closing and securing the latches.
“What else?” Carol asked, pointing to the remaining box.
I took it out and placed it next to the box containing the translator. Once opened, it revealed a half dozen pieces of the alien metal, unlike anything we had seen before. The largest was a flattened rectangle about four and a half inches at the widest point and three inches the other direction. It was somewhat over a half inch thick. None showed any indication of power. “No clue,” I said looking up at the others. Several heads shook as they gazed at the items.
“Maybe in Kurt’s notes there will be more,” Dave suggested. John was still decoding and building up a notebook of the information contained in the file. Our attention had been focused on the translator device, but more information on these other pieces would probably be there as well. I doubted he would have figured out the function. Unpowered, there was really nothing to work with.
I closed up the second box. We closed and locked the safe, followed by the steel door to the compartment, re-locking it with both locks. I suspected at some point we would come and get everything, just to see what else might be here. For now we had what we had come for. Now to get it back home and start the process of trying to build up a translation for the language.
For a change, something came off without a hitch. The trip back to Seattle that afternoon was jubilant. The alien device had been recovered, and it was still operational. A few experiments with spoken words had demonstrated that it operated as Kurt had explained, and as his painstakingly thorough notes detailed. A more careful examination of the device would have to wait until we were safely back at the office. There, in shielded security, we could consider how best to proceed. Did we try and find words appropriate to the function of the time complex, hoping to quickly tumble on the symbols written on the hardware within the complex, or a more systematic approach? Should the testing be conducted at the office, or should the device and team be moved to downtime base, well away from any potential interference? Questions to be answered later. At the moment, the translator lay packed in a heavy duty, foam padded carrying case on the floor next to my seat.
We celebrated with sparkling wine. Dave had talked to our flight attendant, indicating our trip had been a great success and we wished to celebrate while we returned home. Knowing our group from previous charters, she assumed we had landed another big contract during our morning stay in the Los Angeles area. It had happened before. Two fancy buckets appeared, filled with ice and bottles of imported wine, one of which we had nearly emptied now. The attendant was bringing us lunch, although no one was really interested in the food. Wine glasses made of genuine crystal, this was a chartered flight after all, clinked again in another high spirited toast. As I took yet another sip, my spirits were momentarily dampened. This should have been Kurt’s celebration. After more than half a century of searching, he had been cheated out of seeing how his efforts would ultimately unlock the secrets of the time complex. The recovery couldn’t have gone smoother if he had been with us. A jolt of turbulence brought my thoughts back to the present. The others were still brainstorming our approach.
Naiya noted my silence. “Jim?” she asked curious.
I shook my head. “Just thinking,” I said. I raised my glass. “To Kurt.” They each raised their glasses in response.
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Back at Epoch, but down in the lower basement secured area, everyone wanted to see the device in action. The frustrations of the past weeks were being dissipated by the euphoria associated with the major breakthrough the device potentially represented. Dave tried speaking in German. It took a couple of sentences before symbols and sounds appeared from the device. Another thing Kurt had noted. We needed to read everything he had documented so as not to waste time repeating experiments he had already completed.
John finally called a halt. “We need to be systematic about this,” he insisted. He wanted to set up recorders to capture every input and output. He had plans for audio recorders for the sounds, and video recorders to capture the symbols that appear. All the captured information was to be linked to a pair of the advanced computers that Carol had brought from uptime. Reluctantly, we surrendered the device, which John packed carefully away. We still hadn’t resolved if the device was to stay here or be moved downtime. The strongest argument for keeping it here was the potential need to bring in linguistics experts to help us with construction of the language. Having here would make it easier to pass the output to them without requiring multiple trips to the tunnel entrance, something to be minimized these days. We had people versed in multiple languages, but not any that were experts on language structure or resurrecting dead languages. We still hadn’t figured out a story or how to handle security.
“Hexadecimal.” A voice from the back of the room filled with satisfaction caught my attention. Al, our senior physicist, had been one of the people present for the initial demonstration of the device. After an initial look, he had retired back in one corner and began playing with some of the outputs we had recorded. Digital pictures had been taken of the symbols and labeled with the corresponding word input into the translator. He had a pile of these scattered around where he was sitting. The rest of us hadn’t noticed, being too wrapped up in the device itself. “It looks like they use a hexadecimal numbering system,” he repeated. He wandered over and laid a sheet of paper on the table for all of us to see.
Down the left side he had written the number zero to twenty. To the right of each number was a poor reconstruction of the corresponding alien symbol provided by the device. Up to the number fifteen, unique symbols were transcribed onto the paper. Starting with number sixteen, two symbols were required, and I could see now that the two symbols were a repeat of the ‘one’ and ‘zero’ symbols. “Hex ‘10’ is what we normally refer to as ‘16’” he said for the benefit of all. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it earlier. But once something is shown to you, it is often obvious where before it might have been confusing.
“Are we sure this carries forward?” I asked.
“We didn’t run enough numbers earlier, but I’m sure we will find that it is indeed what they are using as we continue to test the device. But here is something equally interesting.” He walked back where he had been sitting and picked up another sheet of paper. He walked over
where we were waiting and handed the paper to Carol, who held it so all of us could see.
“The outer ring of the alien ‘keyboard’ for lack of a better term,” he indicated. The ‘keys’, which we had only tried touching on the computers in the ‘lab’, were fixed, not moving in response to touch as in the case of a human computer keyboard. All had very faint markings, more symbols that we had photographed and made drawings of over the years. The meaning had remained a mystery along with all other writing we had found. Now, Al had found a correlation.
“There are eighteen keys in the outer ring,” he said unnecessarily. We all were aware of the layout. I couldn’t count how many discussions had centered around possible implications of the circular input device. Nothing conclusive had ever come from them. “Look, I’ve sketched the layout and indicated which symbols are on each of the keys.” He pointed, his finger working it’s way around the ring of squares.
“You remember the symbols for each of they keys?” I asked surprised.
“I could draw them in my sleep. I have an image of the keyboard as a screen saver on my computer. I kept hoping something would trigger in my subconscious.” His smile was a bit sheepish. “See, I’ve written the numbers that correspond to the symbols according to the translator.”
I could see now what he had discovered. The top key had an unidentified symbol. Then, starting to the left of that ‘key’ and moving counterclockwise were the symbols for zero, one, all the way through seven around the left side of the circle, coming to another unidentified symbol at the bottom of the circle. To the right of the bottom unidentified ‘key’ followed the numbers eight, nine, up through hex ‘F’ along the right side of the circle.
