Machine Sense, page 20
‘Why?’ said Zak, starting to prep the C4.
‘I can’t believe we missed it.’
‘Missed what?’ echoed the others.
‘Anyone… anyone?’
‘Manny.’
‘OK. Look. As soon as we killed him, chilling assassination by the way, Allie, he was dead.’
‘Of course he was dead.’ said Zak.
‘Yeah, but the timeline changed as soon as we killed him. There’s no World War Three as of one minute ago. No-one ever needed to come back and kill him.’
‘Jesus, it was us who stopped World War Three,’ said Zak. ‘Kammler probably never even thought of Beria.’
A few moments passed as another opportunity started circling to go down the plughole.
‘What now?’ said Izzi.
‘Well the plus side is World War Three won’t happen,’ said Zak. ‘At least we couldn’t mess that up. But we still have no idea where Kammler or the machine is.’
‘How about if we come back to just before we did just now but not kill him?’ said Allie.
‘We’d just see ourselves arrive and kill him anyway,’ said Manny.
‘Couldn’t we stop ourselves?’ said Zak.
‘We’ve already decided not to,’ said Manny.
‘Why?’
‘When we got here just now, were there the four of us waiting for us?’
‘We can’t come into contact with ourselves,’ said Izzi. ‘Eight of us in this tiny cell and all.’
‘Shit,’ said Zak.
‘One thing I do know,’ said Allie. ‘If we hang around any more, this cell will be full of Soviet soldiers and World War Three will be back on the agenda nine years earlier than planned.’
‘Home?’ said Zak.
‘Home,’ said Izzi.
Thoughts transferred to Zak and Izzi’s place, the coffee and tortilla chips and that flower by the couch, flicking soft boy’s idiot card into space. The four of them joined hands and started to chant. But instead of feeling the pipe take them home, Manny broke the circle.
‘Woah, hang on,’ he said. ‘We can’t got back to ‘45 or ‘65 so where can we go where we know exactly where the asshole is at a specific point in time?’
The room didn’t. And then Allie did.
‘1967, the mountains,’ she said. ‘Mom’s lunch with Freddie, the macaroons.’
‘Ping,’ said Manny.
‘Of course, June 15th 1967.’
‘Manny you’re a genius,’ said Zak.
‘What, still?’ said Manny.
‘Arrogant much?’ said Izzi.
‘We know Kammler’s there but we don’t know the bell’s there,’ said Allie.
‘It’s there,’ said Zak, staring straight ahead. ‘Katherina didn’t mention any door to that basement in ‘67.’
‘That’s right,’ said Allie.
‘But there was a door a few days ago. The space has always been there, so why was it hidden in ‘67 but accessible in 2017?’
‘It had something to hide,’ said Manny.
‘It has to be there,’ said Zak.
‘So it’s back to Mom’s plan in ‘67,’ said Allie.
They turned to look at Beria one last time and joined hands. Their new formula for their navigational chant set them fair for the morning after Katherina’s lunch with the Kammler family.
‘Where are we aiming?’ said Zak.
‘The treeline beyond the morning terrace,’ said Allie. ‘Mom said she saw something that morning in the trees. It was us.’
‘Wait for Katherina and Freddie to leave and see if Kammler goes down to the basement.’
‘Check,’ said Manny.
Suddenly, there was a noise in what they assumed was the hallway outside Beria’s cell. At least two men and keys jangling right outside the door. When they entered the cell, there was just the mess of a murdered President.
Nobody in that Soviet jail, least of all the very deceased former president Lavrentiy Beria, heard the chants and the sweet tune of the dream pipe as once more they were projected across time and space to the mountains in Southern California on the morning of June 16th 1967.
A strong smell of sausage and a gentle rustle of early morning leaves brought them into their new space. They appeared as planned, behind the treeline on the far side of the terrace behind Freddie as he served up a fine fare of sausage to all and sundry not least the two happy alsatians.
Allie smiled as she saw the relief her mom felt when Pete showed up. From 1953 to 1967 everything seemed as it was meant to be, as it always was. There’d been no changes to the continuum, nothing untoward trickling down the timeline and they were where they wanted to be.
Katherina pulled away from her luxurious fluffing of Pete and stared right through the trees and straight into Allie’s eyes. She scoped around the rest of this far side of the terrace and then returned to the mutt and his pathological desire for sausage.
There was Kammler. It was like seeing a movie star in a restaurant, more like seeing Charles Manson in a restaurant. There he sat, ready for sausage and the day, large as life and at ease with himself.
Everything Katherina said was true. Here was a man born in 1901, a man who should have been sixty-six years old as he sat on this sunny terrace yet here sat a man who looked the twenty years younger he was. Twenty-two years ago to everyone else and two years ago to Hans, this Nazi had been suffering under the very real threat of being murdered for his knowledge of the machine.
This was another irony the Nazis loved to fulfill on each other. They would invite a select group of highly expendable people to a celebration, a party to commemorate their great work for the glorious Reich. Food and wine and cake would be all around them.
Gradually and slowly those of a certain office would ooze out of the room until only their targets remained and then the doors were locked and those who remained started to wonder where everyone else went. When they saw the guns drawn and ready, they could only close their eyes, all their hard work, all their loyalty served only their own destruction, for the future of the glorious reich of course. They’d be martyrs, guarantees that it all stayed in house and the idiot Americans or stinking Russians never got hold of it. They would pay this price of spoof immortality with their lives.
Allie wondered how lovely it would be for Kammler to somehow feel the paranoia that today would be his last day alive. They were joining Katherina’s mission no sooner than she’d failed in it and how lovely as well if she knew they would be finishing it for her. Allie couldn’t help feeling that perhaps she did.
In another segment of time, unknown to the Hans having breakfast here, the Hans and Freddie of 2017 had something to celebrate.
‘Remember, they won’t look like the people around them,’ said Freddie. ‘They’ll be gods to these people. The blonde woman will definitely be hard to miss.’
‘Maria fucking Orsic,’ chipped in Hans very much looking forward to this moment of epiphany. Hans had known this Maria Orsic in Nazi Germany. She was one of the Vril scum behind that eternally closed door.
‘Seven thousand years, that spawning breed. Seven thousand fucking years will be gone starting with her and the other fucking gods. This first spawning breed will be no more and every slip-eyed freak that followed will be no more. You’ve been discovered and you’ve been marked.’
Freddie had finally made sense of it, this time in ancient Sumeria, extracted everything he could from scrolls, caves and carvings. There were more and more signs pointing to this woman ‘not of their kind’ and those she came with, Gods, come to improve us, teach us. And then there was this stone tablet, dug up in Iraq three weeks ago and the first mention of a beautiful queen’s eyes changing color, a queen with powers beyond the imagination of anyone else. She’d appeared to the people of the age soon after the great chariots from the sky had shown themselves and come among them.
Hans and Freddie were headed for Babylon 5445BC.
They would blend in from a distance, find their way to this woman and her kind long before she became Maria Orsic. They weren’t far off making what they hoped was their final journey. Hans couldn’t help wonder if he’d feel the vanishing of her kind, a release, the opening of a door. After all, if a door never opens, what do you do? You burn it down. Would he enjoy the truth they never existed. Would he hear screams? Probably not. Pity. Would he see the terror of oblivion on their faces and feel his victory as he drove his knife into them? Definitely.
Breakfast on this 1967 terrace was a quiet affair but seemed to take an age to finish. Katherina held her own after the chaos that had invaded her and this house in the mountains last night. She even managed a smile or two at Hans. Allie was rooted to this scene and her Mom’s playing of it.
Soon, Freddie announced it was that sort of time and he and Katherina went inside to pack Hans and Klara had a brief chat about spiders. Klara knew when to let it go and sat back and smiled. It would be a matter of a car kicking up gravel in the driveway before she brought out bottle number one of the day and good luck to her.
Katherina and Freddie left and by this time, Manny’s attention to sausages was primordial.
They didn’t understand the German that confirmed to a surprised Klara it was also time for them to go and do whatever they needed to do. The terrace became quickly empty and the plates of sausages put down for Wolfgang and Pete. Manny left it almost a minute before he broke cover, slipping the attempted restraint of Zak and Allie and introduced himself to Wolfgang and Pete.
Wolfgang and Pete’s attention moved from sausage for the sake of sausage to this new friend. Manny gave them both a solid fluffing and returned to the trees with every morsel of food left on the terrace. As breakfast was being shared in the woods, Klara returned and congratulated Wolfgang and Pete with another fluffing for their obvious appetite. Klara was dressed smartly. It looked like she and Hans might be off somewhere themselves.
Before the last of their breakfast had been chewed, the front door closed behind the last residents of this house, who got into their car and headed off down the drive.
They were alone and free to do their mischief. It mattered not that Hans had left. They knew it was temporary, there was stuff to clean up and doors to lock, which luckily they hadn’t bothered to do. The trust alive and well in this remote fiefdom was welcome. They probably didn’t have much time but now was their chance to sniff about and discover the secret door that must exist to the basement.
The three of them spread out to various areas, tapping walls, looking under rugs and finally Zak found it. There was a bookcase built into the dead space under the stairs. Zak had noticed a copy of The Black Obelisk by Erich Maria Remarque, not due to his familiarity with the author, but because it wasn’t flush with the rest of the books in the row. He reached to pull the book out only to find it wasn’t to be pulled out, existing only as a catch release. The whole bookcase shifted slightly towards him, revealing a staircase to a lower realm.
Zak went first and drew his pistol. They weren’t to know if there was a team of scientists or security personnel lurking down there. But there were no sounds coming from below as they rounded the oak spiral and soon they were in the basement area they’d accessed from the corridor a few days ago.
This wasn’t the dark, dusty basement they found the other night back in 2017. There were still some boxes stacked up over by the wall on the left side but here and now, this was a large clean space dominated by a vast panoramic window out onto the mountains. It was bigger than the entire floor above, maybe there was a Tardis-like force at work.
The beautiful stone walls persisted down here and the only things interrupting the complete openness of the space were the boxes, a small oak desk and two armchairs facing the window. It looked like a place of modest activity soaking up its view.
Zak noticed in the far corner of the room to the left of the panorama, there was a door, the only sign that this space had company. Zak signaled Izzi and Allie to stay back and he and Manny headed over to the door. Their nerves were tingling like pins and needles. The door was locked. Zak ran his fingers over the top part of the frame but there was no key. He turned to ask Manny to look in the desk drawers but found the lad already there, carrying a big smile and holding up a key. The key was the key they needed. The door creaked open slowly and soon it became clear this small circular room, about the size of a squash court, was what they’d been searching for all this time.
All around the wall of this room was a concrete structure that looked like a small version of Stonehenge and in the middle sat the machine, quiet and aloof, hovering about two feet above the ground with no visible means of doing it. They approached it slowly like approaching the cage of a lion at the zoo. This unmistakable bell shaped machine was levitating effortlessly absolutely still in front of them. It was bigger than Zak had imagined and he could easily see at least three of them fitting into it although a way in wasn’t obvious.
‘Can you feel that?’ said Izzi. ‘like a really quiet buzzing noise.’
‘I can,’ said Manny. ‘Makes me want to itch my ear.’
‘You guys stand a bit further back from it,’ said Zak.
Zak applied a very light pressure to the machine’s surface, which was warm, brass type material, pushing it slightly, mindful of it toppling off any invisible moorings but it didn’t move. He gave it a heavier nudge but still nothing. Finally, he ran a shoulder into it. It was like it was cemented to something but it was totally free, suspended in the air.
Allie crouched down on the floor and ran her arm underneath it and there was still no physical device to explain how it was levitating.
‘Its hollow inside,’ she said. ‘As far as my arms can reach.’
‘Good. we can place the charges in and out,’ said Zak.
She ran her fingers over the markings engraved into the metal, the symbols Larry had revealed to them in San Diego, symbols created countless millennia ago on another world that only made sense to Zak and Izzi.
They stood back in awe of where they were. Zak had to think to himself, as time machines go, this bell was clinical, industrial even. You really want a beautiful brass and steel, mechanical and leather-bound comfort time machine like HG Wells, a big observation window to see what time looks like being travelled, like a first class cabin on the Orient Express. Levers need to push and pull and you need to hear the ratchet noises as you speed up and slow down. There were no clues to how to use the machine. Maybe its designers weren’t that bothered about how they got somewhere, just get there. Now where’s the fun in that?
Zak couldn’t help feeling a twinge of shame as their plan of destruction returned to him. He had plenty enough C4 to split this bell into a peeled banana, possibly a million pieces with just a few symbols remaining to baffle anyone approaching the aftermath, maybe take Kammler’s whole private fourth reich with it down into the valley.
Zak suggested the others leave the room while he lays the charges and they agreed ten minutes was enough on the timers for them to get well clear.
As he placed the charges in their ideal positions for maximum damage, he pulled back. The machine started to vibrate. Then it started to hum. Maybe this is what Izzi and Manny heard. It wasn’t consciously audible, just enough to shake his atoms, not enough for him to feel it but just enough for him to know it.
Perhaps this machine was aware of their attack on it, perhaps it possessed the same fear animate beings possess when they know the time of their ending is inevitable. Perhaps this was its machine sense.
Then a noise was heard back where they came down the stairs. It was the unmistakable noise of the false bookshelf door creaking open quickly followed by the sound of two men talking in German and footsteps descending a staircase. Allie ran in to warn Zak.
‘Zak, someone’s coming,’ she said, whispering but urgent. She turned to exit the room but noticed Zak wasn’t moving. ‘Zak,’ she said again, now giving it more volume, but still he was just standing there with his hands on the machine. He’d laid the charges but looked like he was bidding the thing farewell. She ran over to him and punched him high on the arm, releasing him from his trance.
‘Boxes,’ he said. They ran over behind the boxes, their only available cover down here, but Zak noticed a desk drawer left open following Manny’s discovery of the key. Despite Allie and Izzi’s attempt at restraint, Zak ran over to the desk to close the very obvious drawer but had just turned to head back for cover when one of the men appeared at the foot of the stairwell. He and Zak froze.
The others remained undetected behind the boxes but the lack of footsteps back over here to the boxes, told them Zak had been seriously detected. The man holding Zak where he stood was Hans Kammler. He drew a pistol and pointed it at Zak to ensure there was no attempt by this intruder to unfreeze. The man who followed him down the stairs was an equally surprised Freddie.
‘Move,’ said Hans. ‘Over in front of the window.’
Zak half raised his arms and did as he was told. He thought to himself how close they’d been. They would have had to wait for Hans to return to kill him anyway but he’d hoped to have the element of surprise. This was whole different kettle of fish.
Allie did well not to lend audio to the cold shiver that crawled up her spine. They were barely breathing behind these boxes and could only rely on sound to make out the goings on in the room. She knew there were two men who came down the stairs and she could tell the distance of the one taking but the other one might be inches from them, about to peer round and that was them done.
‘Take out your pistol very slowly,’ continued Hans. Zak did. ‘Now throw it on the floor.’ Zak complied again, making sure it was thrown away from the boxes. Freddie moved to pick it up and held it at Zak.
‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ said Hans flicking his pistol upwards to imply Zak’s arms were becoming lower than he was comfortable with. Zak adjusted his arms to mirror the gesture.
Zak had many possible answers running around his head, none of which seemed to make sense. Was he lost? Was he a common thief? If so what was he after? Nothing had the impact he felt he had to make here apart from the truth.
