Read Ship of the Damned Online
Authors: James F. David
Ship of the Damned (19 page)
J
ett shook Walter Kellum’s hand. He had to lean across the table to do so; the man made no move to come around to his side, and sailors with machetes guarded both ends of the table. Sailors and civilians with a variety of homemade weapons were crowded in behind him and Ralph. They guarded Kellum like a king.
ett shook Walter Kellum’s hand. He had to lean across the table to do so; the man made no move to come around to his side, and sailors with machetes guarded both ends of the table. Sailors and civilians with a variety of homemade weapons were crowded in behind him and Ralph. They guarded Kellum like a king.
“Welcome, Mr. Jett. So, you’ve come to kill us.”
“I’m here to locate the Nimitz, nothing more,” Jett lied. “You say it’s here, but we’ve been on deck many times and not seen it.”
“Just what were you planning to do once you find the Nimitz?” Kellum asked, carefully keeping information from Jett.
“We’re a scouting party. We are to locate and report.”
As he spoke, Jett realized that their second signal laser had been destroyed when Thompson was burned. Now the only way to inform Rainbow about the Nimitz was to return through the barrier.
“And when you make your report, what will the government do? Send in troops to retake their aircraft carrier? And if they can recapture the Nimitz, then how will they get it back to the world?”
Using marines was exactly what Jett expected, but somehow they
needed to find a way to get the Nimitz home. Kellum might be the key to making that happen.
needed to find a way to get the Nimitz home. Kellum might be the key to making that happen.
“If you help get the Nimitz back, I’m sure you and the others here would be welcomed back, too,” Jett said, trying to sound sincere. “It would be a show of good faith.”
“You can all come to my house if you want,” Ralph offered.
“Either you’re lying or you’ve been duped,” Kellum said. “They’ve kept us trapped in here for more than fifty years, and now you expect us to believe they would welcome us home?”
“Times have changed,” Jett said.
Kellum circled the model ship with his hand.
“There are two resonant magnetic fields surrounding the Norfolk. The inner field flows from the synchronized magnetic pulse generators I created. We call the inner field the amniotic field since it contains us just like the amniotic membrane contains a fetus in its mother’s womb. The outer field—the chorionic field—is generated by an outside source. I assume you know by whom, since they got you inside. They could drop that field any time they wanted.”
“The outer field is purely defensive,” Jett said. “Those that have gotten out have harmed innocent people.”
“My people were killed because they were different, not dangerous. Besides, not all of us have developed unusual abilities.”
Jett knew that those who escaped were all considered to have psi abilities and were killed as soon and as efficiently as possible. The policy was based on experience. The first Specials who emerged from Pot of Gold had killed many. Impressed, the military had tried to control them, to use them as weapons, but the Specials proved uncontrollable. The early escapees were insane, and Jett knew a powerful telekinetic had killed most of the scientists assigned to the early project. It was that early experience, and fear of living in a world where a select few have psi powers, that had sealed the fate of the men on the ship and brought the Office of Special Projects into existence.
“The Specials who got out were dangerous,” Jett said, regretting using the word “Special.”
“Then why would we be welcome on the outside now?” Kellum said.
The men and women packed into the machine shop murmured, then quickly grew still, waiting to hear Jett’s reply.
“For one thing, you seem to have found the key to extending the life-span. You haven’t aged a bit,” Jett said.
Dr. Kellum paused, knowing that Jett was stalling, but then straightened his glasses, pushed the wisps of hair higher on his forehead, and said, “The words ‘day,’ ‘night,’ ‘week,’ or ‘year’ have no meaning here. If outsiders didn’t occasionally stumble across an opening to the Norfolk, we wouldn’t have any sense that time has passed at all.”
“People get in?” Jett probed.
“That’s where the women and children came from, and some of the men too. Their stories are all the same; out walking or playing and the next thing they know they’re on the Norfolk.” Motioning to the woman in the waitress uniform, Dr. Kellum said, “Tell him how you got here, Peggy.”
Peggy was a teenager, pimples dotting the chin of her pretty face. As a child her hair must have been blonde, but it was darker now, with blonde highlights; slivers of her childhood.
“My boyfriend picked me up from work,” Peggy said with a deep Texas accent.
Jett saw that she still wore a Denny’s name tag that said, “My name is Peggy.”
“We were fighting—he didn’t like the way I was with the customers. He thought I was coming on to them, but I only did it for the tips. Blondes get bigger tips, and if you’re friendly you can make a lot. He started yelling, and I yelled back, and he yelled some more. Then I just told him to stop that truck of his and let me out.”
Now Peggy looked far away as if it was happening to her again.
“I started walking down the road, and he followed me, hollering at me to get back in the truck. He wouldn’t leave me alone, so I crossed the highway and started cutting across a field. It wasn’t nothing special, just sage. He got out and came after me and grabbed my arm. I got loose and started off again. He kept coming after me, cutting me off, herding me this way and that like I was some yearling calf. Finally, I had enough and took off running. He chased me, and I started zig-zagging to get away, and then suddenly I was here.”
“Tell him when it happened,” Dr. Kellum said.
“It was June 6, 1984,” Peggy said. “I guess Zach is a married man now with kids as old as me,” she added sadly.
Jett didn’t say it, but he thought it possible that Zach was doing time for the murder of his girlfriend. They had left a restaurant together fighting, and she had disappeared without a trace. A jealous boyfriend would be a prime suspect, and Texans liked their crimes solved.
“See Bobby back there, hiding behind Wilma?” Dr. Kellum said, indicating the oldest boy standing behind the woman with the seamed nylons.
“He was chasing a butterfly around his backyard and ended up in the engine room on level thirty-two. He was there a long time before we found that level. A man named Kennedy was president when Bobby showed up, and he says he remembers seeing a debate between President Kennedy and a man named Nixon on television. I worked on the development of television and I knew then it would become a great civics tool.”
“He was chasing a butterfly around his backyard and ended up in the engine room on level thirty-two. He was there a long time before we found that level. A man named Kennedy was president when Bobby showed up, and he says he remembers seeing a debate between President Kennedy and a man named Nixon on television. I worked on the development of television and I knew then it would become a great civics tool.”
Then Dr. Kellum smiled in a sad way.
“I’d love to see television. Peggy said it’s in color now.”
He acted as if he wanted Jett to describe the state of modern broadcasting, but Jett had no desire to regale him with the marvels of high-definition reception or digital satellite broadcasting. He had a mission to complete, and needed to find a way to get on with it.
“The amniotic field convoluted time and space, which created the different levels of time on the ship,” Dr. Kellum continued. “The field is porous, however, and there are holes. Your chorionic field seals most of those holes, but there are routes in and out. Peggy, Marge, Sarah, Bobby, and the others all stumbled across an entrance.”
Jett knew that the technicians at Rainbow actively worked at keeping the Specials inside Pot of Gold. Impending escapes were preceded by power fluctuations that slowly built, indicating the general geographic area where the escape would take place—all within a few thousand miles of Philadelphia. Jett hadn’t known about people finding their way into Pot of Gold, but of course that wouldn’t concern Woolman.
“Occasionally, some of our people disappear,” Dr. Kellum said. “We know they found a way out, but they never come back. But there is order to the universe, so the twists and turns of time and space inside the Norfolk can be understood. There must be a pattern!” he insisted, indicating the ship model in front of him. “That’s what this is for.”
“That’s neat, Walter,” Ralph said with a mouth full of gum. “Did you make it yourself?”
Dr. Kellum’s thick glasses magnified his eyes, giving him an owlish appearance.
“We built it, Ralph,” Dr. Kellum said, sweeping his hand to include the men and women gathered in the room. “We’ve all worked on it. You see, it isn’t really a model; it’s actually a three-dimensional map.”
Ralph’s eyes glazed over as he looked at the ship. Even his jaws stopped in mid chew.
Jett looked at the multicolored wiring that made up the guts of the ship and traced a yellow wire that went up and down and all around through the ship. If it was a map he would never be able to follow it.
Dr. Kellum pointed at a silver disk soldered to the end of a red wire on the deck near the stern.
“That’s level twelve, where you entered,” Dr. Kellum said, “but we can’t get out that way because your people have it sealed, and even if we did get out we would be killed.”
“So we must be here,” Jett said, pointing at a white wire that wound deep into the ship.
Dr. Kellum ignored him, his owl eyes focussed on the ship. “We know of two other unsealed exits,” he said, pointing to other disks soldered to the ends of wire, “but they don’t go anywhere, or go somewhere we don’t want to go. There are other exits out there, I’m sure of it.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Jett asked.
“Why? Because you’re one of us now. There’s no way out for you or Ralph, or any of the others. They sent you on a suicide mission, Nathan Jett.”
Dr. Kellum waited for Jett to respond, but he didn’t. Jett did have a way out, but he wouldn’t share it. Instead, he played along to gain Kellum’s confidence.
“Did they tell you how we got here?” Dr. Kellum asked.
“I know some of the story,” Jett said.
“I’m not sure anyone on the outside knows the whole story. I’m not sure I fully understand it, and I created this place.”
Dr. Kellum waved his hand over his head as he talked. He was an animated man, using his hands as well as his voice to communicate.
“We didn’t understand what we were creating when we began. We hoped that by creating an intense magnetic field we could bend light around a ship, making it invisible—a decided military advantage. Our first experiment was with a destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge. We fit her with Navy degaussers specially designed to pulse. Pulsing the degaussers in tandem created resonance, exponentially increasing the power of the combined magnetic field. The first experiment took place in Philadelphia, and I watched from the dock as the ship was slowly surrounded by a green glow. As the generators came up to power, the light got brighter and our hair stood on end. Then the Eldridge shimmered and disappeared right before our eyes. A few seconds later it was back.
“Later we heard reports that the ship was sighted off the coast of Virginia at the same time it had disappeared in Philadelphia, but we laughed them off. We shouldn’t have. Given that first success, the Office of Naval Research made our project high priority, just below the Manhattan Project. We received funding for a full-scale test and were given another ship.
The cruiser Norfolk was turned over to us for a few weeks of experimentation. She was fresh out of the Philadelphia Shipyard and ready for sea trials. Dr. Einstein and I had worked out the original pulse rates and frequencies, and now we refined these to increase the intensity of the field.
The cruiser Norfolk was turned over to us for a few weeks of experimentation. She was fresh out of the Philadelphia Shipyard and ready for sea trials. Dr. Einstein and I had worked out the original pulse rates and frequencies, and now we refined these to increase the intensity of the field.
“The second-generation magnetic field generators had ten times the power of those used on the Eldridge. We took the Norfolk thirty miles offshore and then slowly brought the generators up to full power. It happened just like with the Eldridge—the green glow, the slow build-up of static electricity—but this time I was on the ship and felt the full force of the charge. The static build-up was so intense, I almost stopped the experiment, but suddenly the static was gone. Then it happened. The ship shuddered, and then the outside world faded away and was replaced by the opaque field you see all around the ship. We found ourselves in a desert—here—and a hundred yards in all directions there was nothing. Only then did we begin to understand what we had created.
“You see, the magnetic field we created was modified by the steel of the ship—thirteen thousand tons of it. If only we hadn’t used a ship,” Dr. Kellum said, shaking his head. “The field was distorted, flowing up and down the corridors, twisting time and space. There are two poles now—one astern, the other forward of the bow. This distortion created the different levels of time you have experienced. You see, as you travel through the ship you are really travelling through different moments in time. That’s why you seem to have multiple ships. Think of it this way: right now you exist in this second, and then this one, and then this one. If you could travel back a second, you would see yourself as you were a second ago.”
“Time travel,” Jett said.
“Of a limited sort,” Dr. Kellum said. “Different moments in time are fixed for the ship and exist in parallel rather than in series, which is how we normally experience time. Since these moments are parallel, we can move between them. Right now we are in this machine shop at this moment. Walk through the ship until you are on another time level, and it’s a different moment in the same machine shop. It’s the same all over the ship, with different moments of time frozen and parallel. The only exception is the boiler room where we installed the generators. Those generators are the nexus for the field and they exist at only one moment in time.”
Other books
Wish by Alexandra Bullen
Blood's Shadow: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 3 by Cecilia Dominic
Redemption by Denise Grover Swank
Sweet Peril by Wendy Higgins
Lady Jasmine by Victoria Christopher Murray
Stolen by John Wilson
Late in the Day by Le Guin, Ursula K.
Carson Mach 1: The Atlantis Ship by A. C. Hadfield
Némesis by Louise Cooper
Big Beautiful Witches: I Married A Warlock by Georgette St. Clair
