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A device - fuel-cell, battery, whatever - the size of a roll of 35mm
film that could punch a hole through three inches of steel in about
one-thousandth of a second... My mind was doing flip-flops and
cartwheels. Any further proof as to who The General was or where we were, to a certain point, was unnecessary. We were on to something big - just how big we had no way of knowing - and this was not just a dream and The General was not your everyday wacko. Still... The General cleared his throat and looked expectantly at me and then at Bill. A rather long and uncomfortable silence ensued. During this intermission The General never took his eyes off us, and every few seconds or so he would wink and grin and then cup his hand around one ear as if to aid poor hearing. It didn't take rocket science genius to figure out what he was waiting for. Suddenly Bill jabbed me in the side with an elbow in an attempt to pass the buck. I jabbed back - hard. Bill winced and toppled and hit the concrete floor with a thud. The General laughed and winked. With exaggerated care he re-positioned his cupped hand around the shell of his ear and leaned closer to me. Okay. Call me spineless. I caved. "So maybe you're not the Lovecraftian sicko we thought you were," I said slowly. "Maybe - just maybe - some portion of your story is legit." I was determined to give no more. Suddenly Bill was up on his feet again - groaning. He made a feeble attempt to gore me with the Elbow Of Death. I side-stepped. He missed. Momentum carried him along a graceful arc and onto the concrete once again. Thump! This time he made landfall flat on his back. The General was still cupping his ear. I had had enough. "I'm sorry," I said stiffly. "I'm sorry I doubted you." He nodded happily and then rotated his head so that his five-fingered hearing aid was directed at Bill, who, by the way, was now in a fetal position and gurgling like a baby. "He's very sorry," I hissed. We left the firing range moments later and headed back "up" Main Street. We walked slowly and in silence. Bill and I could both see that The General was lost in deep thought. Now that it was obvious to us what type of situation we were in, we both wondered if The General was really sure he wanted to confide in us. Who were we? Part-time desert rats from the smog-filled L.A. basin! A nasty thought kept bubbling up into my mind: what if he decided we could not be trusted? We were under his complete control. He (or Smith?) could snuff us and nobody would ever know. Yikes! Was The Truth worth it? "This complex," The General suddenly said, "and a few more like it scattered across the United States, is a result - either directly or indirectly - of alien technology. I'm not talking here about Martians or BEMs or starfolk. I'm talking about an alien race of Humans. A race of people, just like you or me or anybody else on planet Earth; a race of people that live and breathe and manufacture what appear to be impossible weapons." We had stopped at one of the Main Street doors we had passed earlier. "This is my rec room," he intoned and touched a button on the wall. Doors - if you can call foot-thick slabs of steel mere doors - slid upwards. We stepped inside. "My real living quarters, gentlemen," he announced. This is where we left Earth behind and stepped into science fiction.  "This room - and others like it - is a homage to another physical reality," he said. "A parallel universe co-existing side-by-side with our own. I like to think of that universe as being exactly like our own in an infinite number of ways - and unlike our own in an infinite number of ways." "Now...," he said. "Let's get our terminology straight - for reasons I have not yet explained, we have named the USA's doppelganger in the other universe the Radium League and the universe in which it resides Radium League Universe - or RLU for short. From now on let's use this convention: any reference to the other universe will be prefixed with RLU. Maybe we can talk about this thing without twisting our tongues into pretzels. Agreed?" We nodded torpidly.  He motioned us to sit down at a nearby table. We sat. The General pointed at four framed images on a nearby wall. "The American Bald Eagle," he said. "Haliaeetus Ieucocephalus... although we cannot prove it genetically, this bird exists here as well as in the RLU. Same physical characteristics, same name, same historical role in both universes. The only difference we have uncovered is that they were never an endangered species in the RLU." "The image next to it is an artifact from the other universe. The flag the soldier is facing is that of the nation that corresponds to our own United States of America. Now - a similar image was generated in our own world - a wartime propaganda poster referring to the Battle of the Bulge. The twist is - there was no Battle of the Bulge in the RLU. The image depicts an allied campaign against Field Marshal Rommel in the north of Spain" The General peered at us then. His eyes were shining. "Do you see what I mean?" he asked. "Rommel - Desert Fox - North Africa...it didn't happen that way in the RLU. In fact, in the RLU, Rommel went on to become Chancellor of Germany after Hitler got waxed in the Wolf's Lair in RLU 1944!" Bill and I were still nodding in a narcotized way. We were victims of physical fatigue as well as shellshock. For me, the room was spinning ever so slightly. I remember that, just prior to passing out, The General explained the other objects on the wall.    "You can imagine that, given my predicament, I have a number of hobbies to keep me busy," he said. "One hobby is the reconstruction of - items - that came from the RLU. These three frames hold such items. They are not to scale. I have built them based on RLU images, fragments, and description from whatever material I managed to dig up in this complex." He pointed at the first frame. "An RLU military chevron set," he said with pride. "Similar to chevron sets in our own world except for the atomic power symbol. The chevrons are in order from Private to Chief Master Sergeant." He moved to the second frame. "An RLU officer's insignia set - lieutenant through general. Notice that the lieutenant and captain's bars coincide exactly with American insignias of the present - but major, colonel, and general are completely different. I have a hunch that there are two more officer ranks, however, but no direct evidence and no clue as to appearance" The General glowed with pride when he confronted the items in the third frame. "These babies are really special to me," he murmured. "Fabric patches for various commands, affiliations, squadrons, and such. The '88' patch is the only actual artifact from the RLU - I recovered it, perfectly preserved, in some plane wreckage up above. The rest are reconstructions - again based on images and text descriptions. I made them out of sheets of colored plastic." He paused then and looked at us. I don't know if he caught us with our eyes closed and our heads lolling from side-to-side, but he obviously realized we were not paying the amount of attention due him. He cleared his throat loudly and clapped his hands together. "One last thing gentlemen," he announced. "Eighty-eight is the atomic number of the element we, and the RLU, call radium. You might want to sleep on that thought." Without further ado he escorted us out of his rec room, down a short length of Main Street, and into the bunk room. "Twenty beds in here fellows," he said. "Take your pick. I'll come around again in the morning to fetch you. All I ask is that, under no circumstances do you leave the room without me. There are active video cameras around the complex that send images to certain people in D.C. People whom you do not want to meet." I don't remember falling onto one of the beds.   My next awareness of conscious thought was that my head was throbbing painfully. Clenched in my right hand was a cold cup of coffee. In my other hand were two white pills. As I considered my misery a shadow fell over me. It was The General. "You asked for aspirin," he said. "Those are the pills in your hand. What you do with them is pop them in your mouth and swallow." I did as instructed. After about twenty seconds of gagging on the dry tablets I remembered the coffee. I took a gulp and gagged some more. With an effort I swiveled my head and peered through one eye at my tormenter. "Postum!" he confessed. My stomach roiled a bit, but my head began to clear. We were all gathered in one corner of the rec room looking at a wall-mounted photo of what appeared to be the type of tasteless sculpture one normally finds in the courtyard of City Hall. The object reminded me of a burnt and shattered taco shell laying atop wind-swept sand. "What you are looking at is wreckage of an RLU airplane called an RL-45 Interdicter," The General told us. "The photo was taken, by myself, twenty years ago." I guess the same thought occurred to Bill and I simultaneously. "You've been to the other universe?" we cried. The General laughed at that. But now it was the laugh of a man either thoroughly enjoying himself or, perhaps, the whooping of a man finally relieving himself of a long and burdensome weight. "No!", he said. "But they've been here - quite by accident. Let me explain..." The General then gave us the following information: On July 2, 1947, at 8:33 PM, an aircraft of the RLU, an RL45 hybrid dubbed Harmer's Horror, disappeared from the sky over the general area of RLU Roswell Air Corps Station, NM. Ground observers - including a score of aircraft engineers, three physicists, and an RLAC (Radium League Air Command) General - reported an intense blue-purple flash followed by a sonic boom that shattered windows as far away as 10 miles. The craft disappeared both visually and from radar tracking. Its last known compass heading was 281 degrees. Airspeed was 825 mph. Apparently no wreckage of the craft was ever found in the RLU.It was very quiet in the rec room for quite some time. Bill and I both had more questions than our brains could process, but there was one nagging question that burned within me. "Maybe I missed something," I said, "But, given that one single prototype aircraft burst into our own universe and left a trail of debris 349 miles long - chunks of which may be scattered over millions of years - how could you derive so much information about The Radium League from what has to be so few pieces. I mean - you said that this complex was built using RLU technology either directly or indirectly - how much can you learn from what has to be just a handful of fragments?" "You have good ears," The General said with a smile. "But think about it: the people in the RLU lost an experimental aircraft. It is reasonable to assume that they repeated the test - probably with unmanned craft. Maybe such aircraft came through to our universe, maybe not. It is further possible that the RLU never determined what happened and stopped testing altogether. Maybe - just maybe - Harmer's Horror ripped a permanent hole in RLU time and space that is undetectable by normal means. And once the hole was opened it stands to reason that other aircraft could have flown near it or into it. For example: a passenger airliner chock full of personal possessions such as books, photos, and technology. Perhaps the plane carried the equivalent of a personal computer or compact discs or an encyclopedia. What if there were specs on board for the assembly of a pocket atomic reactor?" We both saw his point. "And," he continued, "It would not be unreasonable to wonder if such a hole in time and space might be a two-way. Think about that! What government on earth would not kill to access such a treasure or to keep it from a competitor?" At this point both Bill and I began wondering if our hookup with The General was a big mistake - given that his story was true. |
| NEXT: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS |
