Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

They were all enthralled by Kapitänleutnant Sohler’s handwritten account by now and waited eagerly for Durand to read and translate each page at a painfully slow pace. Sam had even stopped wolfing down the boats rations as he listened raptly to the story as it unfolded.

“It’s not clear how he knows this, but Sohler claims the device, The Bell, was designed as a propulsion system to be used on aircraft to deliver speed and maneuverability beyond anything possible with the jet engines of the day.” Durand paused and looked around the room, “How does a propulsion system become weaponized? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe we’ll all find out if you get back to the log entries,” Sam suggested.

Durand’s finger traced each word in German across the page and his lips moved as he read to himself in a whisper, like a preschooler. Other than that, the room was silent. Even Captain Jameson remained silent, his mind preoccupied with the crazy events of the past 24 hours.

Finally Durand’s finger stopped tracing the lines on the page and his face paled noticeably.

“If this is true, then God help us.” The hands of the man who made a career of patrolling the depths in a steel tube with a nuclear reactor trembled as he lowered the wartime log.

“What is it, XO?” Jameson asked. He hadn’t known the man long enough to have the measure of him, but you didn’t get to be the XO of an attack submarine by being a pussy. Jameson wanted to know what had his officer so spooked.

“I don’t understand some of the jargon, but he’s suggesting that Kammler revealed to him how the thing works…”

“And?” Jameson prompted.

“Well, it sounds like it works by bending space and time, somehow, so it can move from one place to another, well… in an instant. He talks about Jew physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity and about…”

His words caught in his throat.

“For God’s sake, man, out with it,” Jameson commanded impatiently.

“Time travel, sir. He says that the device had been re-engineered to move through time.”

Jack noticed that for the last minute or so, Juan and Dave had been looking directly at Leah. Not in that way, either. There was something they knew that the others didn’t. But Leah remained tight lipped and avoided eye contact with her two prodigies.

The room fell silent, yet again.

Juan’s excited outburst punctuated the stunned silence. “He’s talking about Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hitler debunked it because Einstein was a Jew, I think that’s why Sohler mentions ‘Jew Physics’. Leah? Want to help me out here?”

Shaking her head, Leah waved her hand for Juan to continue his physics tutorial.

“Okay, so a few years before the Second World War, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, also a Jew, published a paper detailing what they called their general theory of relativity. In it, they hypothesized the existence of wormholes and suggested that these ‘bridges’ or wormholes connected different points in space and time.

These wormholes or bridges were naturally occurring but short-lived and highly unstable, so they were of no practical value. It was purely conjecture that they could be used to travel vast distances in a short space of time, yet that’s exactly what Star Trek and Dr. Who have built their franchises on — travelling through the galaxy or through time using wormholes.”

“So where does this ‘Bell’ come into it?” Jameson asked.

Durand had composed himself and resumed his explanation, “It seems this Kammler fellow had tried to develop a propulsion system using this bridge theory so that aircraft could move from one place to another in an instant using a bridge or wormhole created artificially by the Bell.”

“Which is how we speculate that UFO’s are able to maneuver in three dimensional space as fast as witnesses report they do. Way faster and more agile than any jet fighter,” Juan added.

“Yeah, during The Second World War pilots reported seeing spherical ‘bogies’ darting around the sky. They couldn’t explain what they were or how they moved like lightning, so they just called them Foo Fighters.”

“I’m still not seeing how this propulsion system is a weapon. If the Nazi’s had this technology earlier, then maybe they could have won the war, but even though a lot of their tech was superior to what the Allies had, it was developed too late in the war and in not in enough volume to make much of a difference,” suggested Dave Sutton.

Jack Coulson’s analytical mind had been churning and processing the data that he’d been absorbing since the mission began. A picture was beginning to emerge from the murky collection of facts and speculation that he’d gathered.

Jack decided to take the floor and share what had been going through his mind. “I’m no scientist I’m a black ops soldier, for those who hadn’t figured that out already.” He paused and looked them all in the eye. Juan and Dave looked almost impressed, but the others gave nothing away in their expressions.

“The hostile force we encountered on the ice was extremely well armed, highly motivated and extremely well trained. Men like that aren’t easy to find. The fact that they seemed hell bent on capturing that U-Boat,” he gestured to the where the German boat lay alongside the Barracuda, “suggests that there’s something on board that is of extremely high value to whoever is overseeing the hostiles.

Now, given what you’ve been saying about this device, is it possible that this base was built for a single purpose — to hide and safeguard the U-Boat and the weapon or wormhole machine or whatever it is?”

Durand and Jameson both nodded.

“It certainly explains the location and the rudimentary facilities,” Jameson added.

“I know this sounds way out there,” Coulson continued hesitantly, “but is it possible that the U-Boat looks like it’s fresh out of dry dock because… well, it is? Like it was transported from 1945 to now using whatever that Bell thing does to make that happen?”

Juan looked enquiringly at Leah. For a former quantum physicist she wasn’t participating as much in the discussion as he would have expected.

“Anything’s possible, I guess. But time travel? Really? That’s quite a leap,” said Leah.

“You haven’t seen inside that boat,” Jack replied, “it’s uncanny. Everything works. The batteries are charged. The electric engines got us in here, didn’t they? If anyone else can tell me how a 1945 U-Boat can do that, I’m all ears.”

Nobody offered an explanation.

“How did it end up in the ice shelf, above sea level?” Sam asked the question before Jack had time to ask it himself.

Leah nodded her head slightly and raised her hand to quiet the debate while she thought through what Sam had just said. “Sam might be on to something,” she said.

Sam grinned like he’d just made a scientific breakthrough himself.

“Time, speed and space,” Leah proffered. She’d tried not to buy into the argument, but like the genie the former quantum physicist in her wouldn’t be put back in the bottle.

“I didn’t even make it through college. You’re going to have to fill in some blanks,” Sam admitted.

“Did you ever see the original Planet of the Apes movie? Charlton Heston comes back to earth from a space mission and the planet is being run by apes, right? Well that is a Hollywood take on the Einstein’s theory. Time passes slower the faster you travel toward the speed of light. So for an astronaut travelling in space at the speed of light time will pass slower than it will on earth. When he returns to Earth it could, in theory be years or even hundreds of years in the future in earth time, depending how long he’s travelled at the speed of light.”