Chapter 10
Claire too had seen the Shift, had seen Vega, then Deneb and Altair drop down to the southern horizon, only she made a quick estimate of the change in right ascension and declination then worked through the math – in her head. Judging from the positional change in just these three stars, the earth's relative position in the galaxy had either moved ahead forty thousand years or retreated more than seventy thousand years. That meant, she deducted, that the sphere was a "cloud" created from one electron, but then what? By varying the charge rate the sphere could be made smaller or larger? But how could anyone do that? And what if, as many were beginning to more fully understand, there were particles smaller than electrons, protons, and neutrons. How would that change the calculus of the phenomenon?
'There's still so much we don't know,' she whispered, her inner voice tinged with frustration, then she thought about Oppenheimer's warning, his 'paradox of time.' If time was a river, a constantly flowing river, and if the flow was disrupted by a traveler venturing into the past, and if the course was thereby altered, then everything that had happened after the alteration would be altered, too. The future would be altered...
"So if," Oppenheimer continued, "one was to go back far enough and teach cavemen to make fire millennia before the original event, presumably mankind would be that much further along the curve."
But then she had said something to the effect that: "But what if one went back and prevented man from learning how to make fire, or how to make a wheel? Couldn't an unscrupulous agent move through time to completely undermine human progress?"
"But why," Oppenheimer sighed condescendingly, "would anyone do something like that?"
"Why is it, Robert," Albert Einstein said to the assembled group, "that you assume human actions will always be rational, or even benevolent, when all human history is full of direct contradictions of that notion?"
"Because destruction is creative, Albert. It always has been."
"Yet what if, and one day soon, we take our destructive impulses too far? What then, Robert? What will we have created?"
"Renewal, I should think, Albert."
"Renewal?" Einstein sighed. "Whose renewal, Robert? Perhaps those Hindu gods of yours? Chamunda, I dare say?"
And what had Benjamin said? We have to stop, now, or else. What did 'or else' mean, though? He was implying direct consequences, wasn't he? So 'or else' meant there was someone, somewhere, who would take great offense at the Los Alamos groups tinkering with the fabric of time...
And she thought, just then, that 'someone...somewhere' was exactly the wrong way of looking at the problem. The real issue would most likely turn around the idea of someone, sometime. The idea that the river of time might be diverted in such a way that people in the future would be somehow negated, and so, perhaps, simply cease to be, had never occurred to her.
So what if Trevor and Benjamin had truly come from New London, Connecticut; if that was true, could Trevor indeed be her father? The idea washed over her for a while: Yes – but only if her father had been a time traveler. If he still was a time traveler. Yet they were trying to stop the Los Alamos group from studying the phenomenon. Why?
The only plausible explanation would be to keep their present intact, and to do that they couldn't overtly intervene. To repair that kind of damage would require that they move backwards in time again and erase the damage done...but how could they – if their present could be, potentially, negated?
Then it hit her. Trevor had said he'd been born in the nineteenth century, and what if that was the truth?
But what about his eyes. And Benjamin's, too. She'd never seen anything quite like them before, and they were identical. And both their heads were a little "off," weren't they. Not shaped quite right.
She shook her head, refused to think through the consequences of these little observations, the cause and effect of their presence, any further. She didn't like where this path was leading.
Oh no, not at all.
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Levy stood on the bridge, looked out over the stormy seas, at the scudding clouds whipped along by the storm. The Iowa plowed through these towering waves, throwing great white walls of blue water over the foredeck, but the escorting destroyers weren't having so easy a time. He watched as one of them, one of the newer Buckley class DEs, struggled up and over a forty foot wave, the little ship's helmsman obviously fighting to keep the hull from turning sideways to the wind and the waves – and broaching – in effect, being rolled over. The Iowa could take these seas head-on, and for days if necessary, but these five little "tin cans" could be seriously damaged, or lost, in a storm like this one.
But that wasn't all Levy was thinking about.
No, and that was because, in the accounts he'd read about the Iowa's role in the Tehran mission, she had never once diverted towards Portland, Maine. Roosevelt's convoy had traveled, unmolested, directly to Norfolk, Virginia...so why had he decided to divert north? An extra measure of caution, perhaps? A sense that something wasn't quite right?
He had known about the German Condors flying out of northern Spain, the Wolf-packs operating in the south- and mid-Atlantic, as well as the raiders patrolling south of Bermuda, but what didn't they know about? The weather, for one, but then there were all the other ships and submarines, ships whose activities had never been recorded by history. Each was suddenly a great unknown, and now he wondered if, by altering the Iowa's course two days before, he had begun to alter the flow of time. If that was true, the assumed outcome of this trip – Roosevelt's safe return to Washington, D.C., was now in jeopardy.
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Großadmiral Karl Dönitz read through the latest dispatches then looked over the assembled nautical charts; most showed the approaches to the Straits of Gibraltar, while two represented waters around the Azores. Next, he looked at the assumed track of the convoy on a chart that encompassed the entire North Atlantic, then he plotted last nights report that a Condor flying out of Spain had developed a positive track on the Iowa. The convoy had deployed some kind of new electro-magnetic weapon, and the ships had simply disappeared; when news of this development landed on Hitler's desk that morning, an invective storm of terrifying proportion had enveloped the entire command hierarchy in Berlin. "One of our maritime patrol aircraft had Roosevelt in it's sights, then the ship simply disappeared?! Find this convoy! Find Roosevelt, and kill him!"
Dönitz looked over the dispatch one more time, and once again he plotted the coordinates on the relevant charts, then he looked over his fleet readiness report. The Iowa was headed to New England, not Virginia, and his eye went to Norway.
Unencumbered by escorting destroyers, Scharnhorst could, conceivably, make a dash into the North Atlantic and intercept the convoy at the Georges Banks. The weather would be treacherous, but that might work to their benefit, too. The Condor's pilot had remarked that the convoy was only making 15-16 knots, a fuel conserving rate, meaning the Iowa's escorts wouldn't need to refuel at Bermuda. So, the convoy would be approaching Halifax in bad weather, but in a perilously low fuel state. And air cover would be unavailable in such a storm, wouldn't it...?
He picked up the phone on his desk. "I need to speak with Konteradmiral Eric Bey immediately."
Three hours later, the Scharnhorst left Narvik and slipped quietly through the Vestfjorden – bound for the not-so-calm waters of the Georges Bank.
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20 December 1943
"I don't think I've ever seen it this bad out here," the X-O said, and just as the Iowa's bow disappeared inside yet another forty foot wave. The windshield wipers were working overtime now, having been set at maximum power for more than thirty hours, but this storm wasn't abating – not in the least.
Captain McCrea looked at the Indiana, now about a quarter mile off their port quarter, through the ever-present binoculars that hung from his neck, and he held his breath as he watched the ship disappear briefly under a fresh sixty-foot wave. He resumed breathing only when he saw her forward guns break free of all that blue water.
"Signal Indiana to reduce speed to ten knots," the McCrea said as he eyed a train of sixty footers bearing down on his ship. "Come left to two-six-zero; let's take these waves head-on for a while, stop the rolling as best we can, and would someone see if Mr. Levy can make it back up to the bridge now."
He heard men moving and instantly regretted the order. Most everyone below was strapped into bunks, though out of sheer desperation some tried to use a head from time to time. Only the truly insane aboard made their way to one of the ship's dining rooms, but no matter what was eaten, the half-digested muck soon came right back up. Sending someone to fetch Levy meant a seaman would have to navigate three passageways and two stairways; almost a suicide mission under these conditions. He hoped Levy had his sea legs now...
"Indiana acknowledges ten knots and two-six-zero, Captain."
"Very well," McCrea said, glad he'd sent the lighter DEs south to Bermuda; they'd have had a truly evil time in these seas. Now, with less than five hundred miles to go he wanted to breathe easy. He wanted to believe the worst was over, but he knew, just knew, that wasn't the case.
Because something was bothering him. Something important. But what was he missing?
"X-O, let's fire up the radar, see if we have any company."
"Aye, sir."
The latest radar arrays were enclosed in small domes, small, stout structures perhaps 15 feet in diameter. The first convoys to make the Murmansk run lost radar when freezing spray and snow rendered radomes inoperable; now almost all naval vessels were operating with enclosed sets, yet, even so, the latest arrays were hardly any better when operating in a sea-state like this. Waves and rain conspired to make all but the largest targets hard to acquire, and the ship's violent motion didn't much help matters, too.
"Bridge, radar, I have a large target bearing zero-seven-two degrees, two-zero miles. Standby for a speed."
McCrea and the X-O looked at one another. There was no allied shipped this far north, not in this storm, so it could only be one thing.
"The Brits got Tirpitz, right?" McCrea asked.
"Yessir, but the Scharnhorst is operational, and last I heard the Prinz Eugen was in the Baltic but ready for duty again."
"Bridge, radar. Confirmed vessel track, speed two-five knots, positive radar emissions."
McCrea shook his head. "Signal Indiana, let 'em know the situation and tell them to come right to two-eight-zero, increase speed to flank. Helm, steady on two-six-zero, increase speed, all ahead full."
"She has eleven-inch guns, right, sir?"
"Yup, but they're not radar-controlled. In these seas she'd need all the luck in the world to even get close. Tell Indiana to run parallel when she's five miles off our beam. If Scharnhorst manages to close we'll converge and give her a broadside at ten thousand yards."
