Paradox Hour (22 page)

A curious man, he had immediately applied a little forensic investigation to the key, regretting that he had twiddled with it in his pocket and largely extinguished any finger prints he might have found on it. Yet a little non-invasive scan revealed something very interesting, for this key was not what it seemed at all. There was something machined on the side, a series of numbers that could only be read under intense magnification. Beyond that, it was hollow! There was something inside it, and he would spend a good bit of time thinking about that before he went any further, or even whispered the fact to his closest associates.

There was something inside it! The metal end, machined to engage lock tumblers, had clearly been designed for some other purpose as well, and this turned the cylinders of his mind, opening a universe of possibilities. What was it, he wondered? Surely the contents would tell him where it had come from, and what its purpose was, he thought.

Now all he had to do was find out how to open the damn thing. Yet, being inventive and resourceful, he soon answered that challenge. He found that the head of the key could be turned with sufficient torque, and slowly unscrewed. He still remembered that moment of breathless opening, when everything he ever knew and believed turned at the head of that key, and its slow untwisting became the great unraveling of all that ever was. When he finally had it open, and tilted the shaft ever so gently to urge the hidden contents out onto a lab dish, he stared with amazement and perplexity at what he had found.

Days later, he knew the answer to many of his questions, and he also knew why there had been no answer from the distant future when others had called out to their successive generations. From that day forward his life, and his entire understanding of the world he lived in, was never the same. But who to tell?

He spent a long time thinking about that before he ever spoke a word of this key again. Yet it was something too big for him to carry alone. Like Frodo’s ring, it began to weigh upon him, seeming heavier and heavier with each day that passed. But unlike Frodo, there was no place he could take it and cast it away, and there was no way he could simply forget about it either… not this… not this…

Then one sunny afternoon at his cottage in Carmel, he was sitting with his good friend Kelly, down on a getaway visit while the other team members stood watch back in their Berkeley Lab facility, the Arch complex as they called it now. They had been walking on the coastline of Asilomar that day, and later dined at a favorite restaurant, the
Sardine Factory
in Monterey. Afterwards, they were drinking wine in the cottage, looking at some of Kelly’s photo albums, and listening to the music they loved and shared together, talking over things in a way only two very old friends could. The music played on in the background and Kelly came in with a good bottle of Pinot Noir from the wine rack.

The man who would be Wellings knew that he had to finally unburden himself concerning his discovery of that key. Yet he knew the moment he opened his mouth, he would pass this hidden knowledge on to his friend, germ like, and Kelly’s life, and his awareness of life itself, would change forever. He, too, would never be the same. He hesitated briefly, thinking to leave his friend in the relative innocence and simplicity of his life, to leave him unbothered, unburdened, unaware. But if this would eventually lead them all to renewed Time missions, the whole project team would have to be informed. He could bear it no longer. The sheer loneliness of carrying the key, and all he knew about it now, was like a great weight crushing down on his soul.

He reached into his shirt and slowly drew out the key on its chain, feeling like Gandalf visiting Frodo in the Shire, there to tell him what the quaint little magic ring was really all about.

For one last moment he waited. Then he spoke. “It’s about this key,” he said…

* * *

Later
that night, the Arch was still slowly spinning on low power mode back in the Berkeley Hills, just enough to keep the systems energized and ready for quick startup if needed. The project team was taking no chances. They wanted to be able to monitor the newly enforced cease fire closely. The Golem Module was to be in use 24/7, now strongly reinforced with the addition of many new data banks and much more processing power.

At around four A.M. that evening, the Golem Module suddenly came to life again. The threat warning filters had been jarred awake by a lone sentry, while the world slept, blissfully unaware of the impending danger. Normally it would take an assessment from at least three Golem Banks to trigger a warning like this, a call to arms as it were. This time, however, the system had been reconfigured to move into alert mode if just one Golem Bank reported sufficient evidence of a variation. They were taking no further chances. So the alarm went out again, the threat module responded and sent start signals to the main turbines, and the low thrum of the Arch immediately revved up from 20% to 40% power, just enough to open and sustain a small Nexus Point around the facility. Signals were sent out to each of the four project team members, and they were all bound to come to the facility as soon as possible. Within that Nexus, they would be immune to any changes resulting from a Heisenberg Wave that may have been generated by the variation.

One of the Golem banks had found something oddly incongruous while it performed its routine scans of data available on the Internet. It was out of alignment with at least fifteen data points in the RAM bank, and so the digital “stand to” had been sounded again by the vigilance of this single search cluster. It was Golem 7, the same dogged module that had first set them on the trail of German warships on the seas of WWII.

The alarm came in, and that was the night everything again took a most unexpected turn. The man who now called himself Wellings had another name, Paul Dorland, Chief Physicist in the time travel project in Berkeley, one of the four “Founding Fathers” that had first opened the continuum and discovered the Time War. Something had happened. The Golem module was returning red flags concerning an incident in the Norwegian Sea. A Russian battlecruiser had been involved, and then suddenly went missing… as did something else.

That night, as he reflexively reached for the key that had been hanging around his neck since that last harrowing mission, he found that, like Alan Turing’s watch, it was gone…

Part VII

Choices

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing."

―
Theodore Roosevelt

Chapter 19

Lieutenant
Commander Wellings’ advice on that new heading was very timely, because the Germans were coming. Kapitan Friedrich Karl Topp, a stalwart Prussian who had joined the Kriegsmarine in 1914, was leading Group North aboard the
Tirpitz
. He had served in the U-boat force during WWI as a first officer, and then assisted Raeder with the administration of the new ship building program he was now trying to save from oblivion. He had his eye on the
Tirpitz
for some time, and was elated when they gave him the ship. He sat on the bridge, feeling the surging power of the warship beneath him, all of 53,500 tons when fully loaded for battle, as it was now. In spite of that weight, the ship could run easily at 30 knots, and had even bettered that speed once in trials.

The ship was a marvel of refined engineering, raw power and sheer beauty in design. When launched, Frau von Hassel, the daughter of the famous Admiral the ship was named for, attended the ceremony, along with Adolf Hitler. Dubbed the King of the North, the ship had been based in Norway rather than the Baltic, and now it was the centerpiece of a strong battlegroup that had no difficulty breaking out into the Atlantic.

The British dilemma was obvious. Their fast warships had to be divided to cover every possible exit the Germans might use, and with both
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
along, not to mention
Graf Zeppelin
, the Germans again had a real fleet task force at sea, not a lone raider that could be easily harried and hunted down by cruisers.

There had been a brief air action in the Faeroes-Iceland Gap, where the
Stukas
off the
Graf Zeppelin
had succeeded in posing a considerable threat to the two British battleships that had tried to challenge the Germans.
King George V
and
Prince of Wales
had fought a sharp duel, where their lavish suite of anti-aircraft guns had proven to be life savers, until fighters off the
Ark Royal
and
Illustrious
had arrived on the scene. There were two near misses as the
Stukas
came in, and
King George V
bore a few scratches from the bomb shrapnel, but the thirty
Fulmars
of 806 and 807 Squadrons had been enough to drive the Germans off.

It looked as though the British battle squadron, under Captain Patterson aboard
King George V
, was going to intercept the Germans, but the enemy suddenly turned after sunset on the 6th of May. The last of the British fighters had picked up the maneuver, and radioed Patterson, who quickly ordered his ships, and the carriers supporting him, onto a parallel course. The maneuver had surprised him, for it had been the British belief that the
Tirpitz
group was intending to effect a rendezvous with the
Hindenburg
, now well out to sea after emerging from the Med.

Kapitan Topp was equally befuddled when he got the orders to turn from Wilhelmshaven. He was to assume a new course of 135 degrees southeast, and directed to seek and engage any British forces encountered, with specific orders to find and sink HMS
Rodney
, if at all possible. It was the same order that had so puzzled Lütjens. The reluctant Admiral had steered north, then northwest, then north again, jogging up to get into a perfect position to effect a rendezvous with
Tirpitz
, but now he finally turned to the east, still muttering under his breath when he gave the order, much to the delight of his Kapitan Adler. Soon every warship within a thousand miles was angled on a new heading, with their bows all pointing
Rodney’s
way.

“What do we have ahead of us,” Topp said to his staff aide, Muller.

“Everything that was once behind us,” said Muller, with a shrug. “Those two British battlecruisers will be out there now. Spotters off the
Graf Zeppelin
have them maneuvering to head off our approach to this British convoy we are supposed to find. It seems we have just had a little help. One of our U-boats found that ship we’re after, and put a torpedo into it!”

“The
Rodney?
Excellent. It was slow enough before, but now we should have no difficulty running it down. Has Lütjens been informed?”

“Most likely, sir.”

“This turn leaves that British battleship squadron in our wake now. They are also most likely pulling their ships down from the Denmark Strait, but they won’t catch us before we get to this wounded British battleship. I wonder why Wilhelmshaven is so obsessed with this single ship?”

“Who can say, sir? The signal indicated it was escorting a big troopship liner. Maybe that is our real quarry.”

“You read the signal as well as I did, Muller. It specifically instructs us to engage and sink the
Rodney
. Yet I can see no reason why. We had two perfectly good British battleships we could have sunk on our old heading. What’s so important about this one?”

“I did a little digging, sir,” said Muller. “It seems this ship was scheduled for a refit in Boston. In fact, our operatives in the UK reported she took on a considerable store of cargo, including many crated boiler tubes.”

“That old ship is a relic from the interwar period,” said Topp. “It has bad lungs and bad legs, and probably a nice little belly ache now that one of our U-Boats got that torpedo hit. Very well, we will sink it, and then we turn to deal with the rest.”

“There is one other squadron we might be wary of, sir.” Muller was looking at the plotting board now.”

“Show me.” Topp came over, eyeing the charts as his staffer pointed out a thinly drawn course plotting.

“Here sir,” said Muller. “This is that British squadron that had the audacity to run the Straits of Gibraltar. Neither the Italians nor the French lifted a finger to stop them, and now they are in the western approaches to Gibraltar.”

“Astounding,” said Topp. “What about the Luftwaffe? Didn’t we have planes at Gibraltar?”

“Six
Stukas
,” said Muller. “All shot down in the attack. And we lost two U-boats in the straits.”

“How big is this squadron? Were there destroyers along?”

“Three ships were spotted, the battleship
Invincible
, another battlecruiser, and a heavy cruiser—at least this is what was reported.”

“Another battlecruiser? You say that like the British have been growing ships on trees. The only three battlecruisers they have are out here looking for us. What do you mean?”

“That’s all the report indicated, sir. It was a large ship, the size of
Hood
, but not well armed. We are waiting for conformation on what it might be. The other ship was smaller, but it engaged our planes with rocketry.”

Topp shook his head slowly, his eyes registering some inner conclusion. That was exactly the way Hoffmann had described it to Lindemann. He recalled the meeting of fleet Kapitans they had nearly a year ago, when they had first encountered a strange ship in the Denmark Strait. They were all there, Hoffmann of
Scharnhorst
, Lindemann from
Bismarck
, Fein from
Gneisenau
…