The Black Gate (10 page)

“Yes, sir, I’m sorry,” Peter managed. “You move as quietly as the dead, sir.”

Baumann threw back his head and laughed, the sound echoing across the chamber. The technicians who were now taking their places at the operations consoles paused in their work to look up, expressions of unease on their faces, before resuming their preparations for the evening’s test.
 

“It looks like the back of a cargo truck, only larger,” Mina observed. Peter had heard her heels clicking on the floor, but had been careful not to turn and look. Even as inexperienced as he was at field craft, he knew that her coming to his room that morning had been a potential point of exposure that could not be repeated.
 

“Why yes, it does,
Fräulein
, now that you mention it,” Peter admitted, greeting her with a polite nod of his head. “Perhaps we should drape a flag with a swastika over the top so the
Luftwaffe
doesn’t accidentally bomb it?”

The joke fell into a well of silence.
 

“It’s time.” Von Falkenstein turned on his heel and headed toward the command platform. “Come along, Peter. This is something you will not soon forget!”

Peter fell into line behind the professor and Baumann, with Mina bringing up the rear. In the short time it took them to reach the control platform, every console was manned and the technicians were abuzz with their pre-mission checklists. The consoles were aglow with red, yellow, and green lights. Needles on meters danced, and numbers flickered on gauges. Every operator was tense with excitement, and Hoth waddled among the stations like a nervous hen, double checking everything.

“What are they doing, sir?” Peter pointed to a pair of technicians in the cage that was suspended over the ring.
 

“They’re preparing the guide cable,” von Falkenstein answered. “We won’t be sending anyone through this time, but we learned early on that without that simple expedient, the travelers tended to get lost, shall we say. We discovered that by attaching the cable to a harness worn by the traveler, they can always find their way home. As I’m sure you have already deduced, we drop the traveler from the upper cage and recover them in the lower one. This ensures that they enter the gate as close as possible to the center, and exit the same way at the bottom.”

“Why didn’t you put the gate in a vertical orientation so a traveler could walk straight through?”

Von Falkenstein shook his head. “We tried that in the initial experiments, but found that recovering the traveler on the far side was very problematic. Our technology, particularly the computing machine, is not yet so far advanced that we can hold the boundary perfectly stable, and the test subjects sent through the vertical gate often intersected the boundary on the exit side.”
 

“What happened to them?”

The
Herr Professor
shrugged. “They died.”

As Peter watched, the pair of men in the upper cage lowered a thin cable through the center of the great ring to another pair of men in the lower cage, which was easily big enough to contain three or four elephants and had steel bars that looked to be as thick as Peter’s forearm. Some of them, it appeared, had been bent out of true and crudely hammered back into line.

Once the men rigging the cable had finished, they cleared the catwalks.

“We are ready,
Herr Professor
,” Hoth announced.
 

“Excellent!” Von Falkenstein rubbed his hands together.
 

“Here, Peter.” Baumann handed him a set of dark goggles. “You’ll need these.”

Peter nodded his head in thanks as he took them.

Turning back to the ring, Peter caught Mina’s gaze. She gave a slight nod, her lips compressed into a thin line.

“Hoth,” von Falkenstein ordered, “begin the sequence.”

“
Jawohl!
”
 

Hoth began issuing instructions to his controllers. A low hum rose from the sub audible range to fill the chamber. “Power at fifteen percent,” Hoth reported. “Twenty-five…thirty…”

The hair on the back of Peter’s neck stood on end and a chill ran down his spine, but it was more than an emotional reaction. He could sense the enormous electrical potential building in the cavern as the hum grew louder.
 

“Forty percent…Fifty!” Hoth checked with several of the controllers. “Power holding steady at fifty percent!”

Von Falkenstein nodded. “Initiate stage two!”

“Goggles!” Hoth ordered. “Now!”

Everyone pulled the goggles down over their eyes. They were like welding goggles, far darker than sunglasses. Even with the brilliant lighting in the cavern, Peter could barely see a thing.
 

The hum grew into a low roar that penetrated his bones, the low frequency vibrations setting his teeth on edge.
 

Hoth continued his count as the controllers fed more power to the ring. “Sixty percent…seventy-five…eighty-five…”

The natural golden hue of the ring began to grow brighter, as if the metal was being heated from within, but the temperature in the cavern remained cool.

“Ninety-five…one-hundred percent!” Hoth had to shout to be heard over the roar. “Power holding steady!”

“Phase three!” Von Falkenstein bellowed.

By this time the ring was blazing so bright that it was painful to look at. Even waring the goggles, Peter had to squint.

“Stand by,” Hoth warned. “
Now!
”

Peter jumped back in surprise as thousands of electric bolts exploded from the inner edge of the ring, the deafening shockwaves rebounding through the cavern. The entire interior diameter of the ring was filled with a raging sea of cyan lightning.

“Phase four!” Von Falkenstein cried, signaling to Hoth with a slashing chop of his hand.

Hoth nodded, then bent to his own console and pressed an unimpressive looking button.

With a tremendous
boom
, the bolts stopped dancing in random patterns around the ring. Instead, they were drawn to the exact center, pinned there as if against their will by some unimaginable force. The point where they intersected was so bright that Peter’s eyes were tearing up. He raised his hands to his face and peered through the tiny gap he made with his fingers.

The convergence of the ring’s energy became a tiny star that began to grow, expanding faster and faster.

In the final instant before it reached the edge of the ring, Peter felt as if gravity had suddenly surged, making him feel far heavier than he normally did, drawing him toward the glowing ball at the center of the ring. Gripped by a sense of panic every bit as real as this strange gravitational surge, he latched on to the railing around the platform to keep from being drawn into the maelstrom.
 

With another even louder explosion, the artificial sun vanished, as did the gravitational anomaly. All Peter could see through the goggles was the ring, glowing a steady white. The storm of sound had passed, leaving behind only a deep hum that throbbed in a slow rhythm.

“The gate is stable,” Hoth said in a rasping voice. “You may remove your goggles.”

Peter warily pushed the goggles up to his forehead, and his jaw dropped open at what he saw below him.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Von Falkenstein said quietly beside him.

Inside the superconducting ring Peter could see…nothing. Absolutely nothing. In contrast to the steady white glow of the ring itself, the circle the ring defined was now blacker than black, a darkness deeper and more impenetrable than a dark sky bereft of the moon and with all the stars extinguished. As Peter stared, he saw not the faintest shimmer or ripple. “The ring defines a Schwartzchild radius,” he whispered.
 

His voice must have been loud enough for von Falkenstein to hear. “Exactly so. In theory, the radius would typically apply to a spherically symmetric body and would be shaped as such, but the ring allows us to collapse it into what we perceive as two dimensions. It appears black, of course, because any light that would normally reflect from the surface cannot escape once it has intersected the Schwartzchild radius.”

The guide cable, Peter saw, remained taut where it passed through the precise center of the black disk.
 

“While you cannot see it from here,” von Falkenstein observed, “the cable remains fixed and taut where it is anchored to the receiving cage.”

“Incredible,” Peter breathed. A sudden shiver ran through him, but it was not born of fear. He was gripped with an inescapable sense of wonder that he hadn’t felt since he was a young boy, his imagination captivated by one of his father’s many impossible stories.
Here you stand
, Peter thought,
at the doorway to a portal through space and time
. This was no dream, no elaborate parlor trick. What Einstein and Rosen had only theorized, von Falkenstein had made real. Peter stood there, awestruck, witness to the greatest technical achievement in mankind’s history, far eclipsing every accomplishment since primitive humans had learned the secret of making fire.

“Hoth,” von Falkenstein demanded, interrupting Peter’s reverie, “how long?”

“Fifty-six seconds,” Hoth reported. “Holding steady.”

“In the tests conducted since our problems with
sabotage
,” von Falkenstein said with an irritated glance at Baumann, who was staring at the gate, “we’ve only been able to hold the aperture open for a maximum of seventy-two seconds before the computer fails and the gate collapses.”

Peter watched the large timer at Hoth’s console. The hand counting the seconds swept past the twelve o’clock position and the minute hand moved to one. He could sense von Falkenstein’s tension mounting as the second hand moved past two, then three.

At the two minute mark, Hoth said, “Two minutes, and the gate remains steady.” He favored Peter with the trace of a smile and a nod.

Von Falkenstein clapped Peter on the back. “Very good, Peter! Very good!”

“How long do you plan to hold it open?” Peter asked. “Now that I think of it, how long does it need to be open for a traveler to make the journey?”

“The time a traveler takes is always exactly one-hundred twenty-three point seven eight seconds, regardless of the coordinates programmed into the gate. We have never measured a variance of more than a thousandth of a second.” He looked down at the main mission timer. “Once the gate has reached one hundred and eighty seconds, Hoth will shut it down. That aspect of its operation is far less interesting. The Schwartzchild radius simply disappears with a bang.”

Gazing into the abyss, Peter asked, “If I were to follow the cable, to travel through the gate right now, where would I find myself?”

Von Falkenstein chuckled. “Why, deep in the bowels of Hell, of course.”

“And that’s just where you’re about to go,” Baumann said with a malicious twist of his lips. “I’m taking you down to Level Three.”

LEVEL THREE

Peter felt his pulse quicken as the elevator smoothly dropped with vertigo inducing speed from Level Two, descending even deeper into the earth.
 

Beside him, Baumann asked, “Have you ever read
Alice im Wunderland?
”

Alice in Wonderland
, Peter thought. “Yes, sir, although it was a long time ago.”

“It’s a wonderful story, don’t you think?” He grinned, his white teeth flashing in the dim light of the elevator. “Think of yourself as Alice, and this,” he gestured with his hands, indicating the elevator shaft, “is the rabbit hole. You probably thought the Black Gate was the bottom of the hole, that nothing more fantastical was possible. If so, you were quite wrong.”

As the elevator slowed to a stop, Peter guessed that they had traveled at least another hundred meters from the bottom of the Level Two cavern. Even before the doors opened he heard something, faint traces of cries and grunts, bestial squeals. The sounds made his skin crawl.

The enlisted man who operated the elevator opened the door and stood aside as Baumann led Peter out. Peter couldn’t miss the sideways look the man sent through the door, and saw the tremor that gripped his hands.

They stepped into a corridor of rough-hewn rock. The entrance was guarded by an entire squad of SS soldiers. Unlike the others Peter had seen in the facility, who were required to wear their black uniforms, these men were in full combat dress, wearing camouflage uniforms, ammunition bandoliers for the assault rifles they carried, and long-handled “potato masher” grenades stuck in the tops of their boots. In a rack on one wall hung a trio of flamethrowers, while a rack on the opposite side held half a dozen
Panzerfaust
anti-tank rockets. In the center of the corridor, which had been widened near the elevator to form a sort of vestibule, was a sandbagged and armor plated pillbox with an MG-42 machine-gun pointed down the length of the corridor.

“Are we expecting the Russians to tunnel through from Moscow?” Peter asked.

A few of the guards looked over at him, but clearly none thought the quip humorous. Most guards Peter had encountered during the war had been bored at their duty, attentive but never truly expecting anything to happen on their watch. These men, by contrast, were tense, their attention focused on the corridor, and something told him it wasn’t merely to put on a show for himself and Baumann.
 

Baumann asked the squad leader, “All is quiet, I trust?”

“Yes, sir,” the man, a senior sergeant who wore the Iron Cross, said. Then, in a lower voice he added, “As quiet as it ever gets down here.”

“Very good.” To Peter, Baumann said, “Come along,
Hauptsturmführer
. Let me show you what all the fuss is about.”

The animal sounds grew louder as Peter limped down the corridor beside Baumann. But something in Peter’s brain told him they weren’t exactly animal sounds. They were bestial in nature, but not quite like any he had ever heard before. The closest to being recognizable was a low grunting that sounded much like a gorilla, but was still different enough to his ear to discomfit him.
 

The corridor ended at a T junction, where Baumann turned right.