Friday, July 14, 2006
Deja View
Andy weaved through the traffic like Terry LaBonte on the NASCAR circuit. There was traffic slowing ahead of him, but he punched the gas and slid into the oncoming lane of traffic to get around the turning car. As the traffic signal turned red ahead of him, he eased the car to a stop and took a look in the rear-view mirror.
He was a ruggedly handsome man. His hand ran through his short, light brown hair absently. As his eyes shone like cuts of jade catching the rays of a bright sunbeam, he smiled. The curve of his lips accentuated the two-inch long scar on his left cheek; the pinkish gash was in stark contrast to his dark complexion. It was usually the first thing people noticed about him.
The light turned green and he punched the gas once more. Normally, this trip to Dr. Weidel’s lab took him a good twenty minutes without traffic, but today, he was in sight of the converted warehouse and only ten minutes had ticked off the clock. He roared into the parking lot and screeched to a halt mere inches from the concrete wall. Laughing, he popped the trunk and grabbed his gear. As he walked up to the door, he was already shaking from the adrenaline. The door swung open with a click and he walked inside.
The lab was a cross between a machine shop and a physics professor’s office. There were engines and oil all over, but the walls reflected intelligence beyond that of a mechanic. There were countless sticky notes with undecipherable notations on them stuck to more sticky notes stuck to dry-erase boards with more notations and of course there was the obligatory poster of Albert Einstein with his tongue sticking out. It was located on the outside of the bathroom door. Physics humor.
“Ahh, Mr. Jensen. So good of you to be early for once.”
Dr. Heinrich Weidel wheeled himself into the room. He stood about five feet, eight inches… if he stood. Dr. Weidel had been confined to a wheelchair since he was emancipated from
“Andrew. You seem a little… tense. Are you going to be alright with this experiment?” he said calmly, yet his eyes shone through the giddiness of a young child. In truth, he was probably more excited than Andy.
“Cocked, locked, and ready to rock doc! I have been looking forward to today since you fist told me what was going on here. Just let me get changed and we are ready to go!”
Without waiting for a reply, Andy raced into the back and started to get changed. Off came his jeans and T-shirt. On went the sleek black wetsuit / stealth gear. He emerged from the room holding a watertight case about 3 feet long by 6 inches wide by 6 inches deep. He inhaled deeply and walked to the large metal and glass pool in the middle of the room.
Dr. Weidel called this monstrosity “the hydro-temporal displacement chamber” or HTDC for short. Andy, after finding out what those words meant, simply called it the time tub. He had been merely working his way through college when he spotted a help wanted sign on the Cherry Pit (the hangout for he and his friends). It promised experience in the field of physics, a personable manager, and, most importantly, nine dollars an hour. He came to find that he learned a lot of physics from his personable manager, Dr. Weidel. He learned to like him almost as a father figure. All he had done to earn his keep was cleaning and reaching for the infirm doctor.
It was about six months ago, Dr. Weidel decided to tell Andy what he was working on. He had dreamed since he was a child that he would discover the vehicle that would take him back to before the Nazi SS came and took him and his family to the death camps simply because of the choice of their religion. He dreamed about leaping back in time to stop Hitler before he came to power. He fantasized about stopping the face of madness before it could infect others. It was now time to show his dreams to another. He trusted Andy because his own grandmother had been whisked off to another camp to die like millions of others. Her ticket had come because she was too vocal about not wanting her children to be raised in a Nazi regime. Dr. Weidel found that same hatred for the Worker’s Party in this young man and felt a kinship with him. When he finally discovered the secret to jumping in the temporal sense, he shared his findings with Andy, hoping that he wouldn’t think the old man crazy.
Far from it! Andy seized the chance to right the global wrong that Hitler and his armies had perpetrated on the planet. This is where they stood now… poised on the brink of the past while staring into the future, praying that things will be different when he returns. Andy looked at the pool, now beginning to swirl counter-clockwise slowly. Bolts of blue electricity began to form, drawn to the center of the rapidly swirling funnel. Vaguely a light began to shine through the center of the pool. Andy looked back at the professor and waved. He jumped into the electric blue water.
He landed hard on the slate roof and managed to roll to the flat portion before falling into the street below. He smiled and looked up. There, among the wash that a housefrau had hung out was a small swirling opening, hidden by the flapping sheets. According to Dr. Weidel, he had 30 minutes before that portal closed. He didn’t wait to find out if it was accurate.
Andy had traced this route many times in his mind. This portion of the city had not changed in the almost sixty years since this time originally existed. He ran and leapt and ducked and rolled through wash and over gaps in buildings. Around chimneys and climbing railings until he finally reached his destination. He overlooked the square where, it appeared, millions of Germans were standing amidst the red, black, and white symbol of hatred and intolerance. Everywhere Andy turned, another flag emblazoned with the swastika hung. He scanned the crowd for the main platform where his target would be standing. He found it 1000 yards away.
Most of the crowd were holding the Nazi flag and chanting along with their neighbor in support of der Fuhrer. Andy watched as old men and women, young boys and girls, and men and women his own age were swept up in the speech. He was amazed at how one speaker, no matter how passionate, could persuade a country to embrace a policy of hate and of intolerance. He listened to the rambling German and could not pick up many words. He heard “Jews,” “inferior,” “master race,” and “
Andy knelt down and opened the case he brought with him. He began pulling out dark pieces of metal and as he assembled the pieces, it began to take the shape of a sniper’s rifle. He caressed it with almost a sexual touch. He lay down on his stomach and looked through the sight: Hitler was impassioned and gesticulating wildly. He barely stopped talking. Andy took a breath…
“Rot in hell”
…and pulled the trigger. The madman’s head imploded with the entrance of the lone bullet and then exploded in a cloud of red haze. There would be no more camps and no more death. Hitler had been laid to rest in the year before World War II would start. It was 1938.
The crowd started to react in waves. Those being the closest to the stage and its main attraction caught wind of the murder before the back of the crowd. However, the news spread in a heavy current and before long the entire crowd was worked into a frenzy running and screaming and looking for the man with the rifle. None thought to look at a rooftop almost a mile away, if they had, they would have seen Andy, proudly looking at what he had done and placing his weapon back into its case.
He picked up the rifle case and began the walk back to the entranceway to his time. He retraced his steps and reached the swirling electric-blue hole in time. He threw his case in first and watched it shimmer and disappear.
“Pretty damn cool doc!”
He backed up about five feet and ran into the portal. He disappeared from 1938.
He heard a click and when he opened his eyes he was staring at two men in black uniforms. Their armbands had the swastika emblazoned in their arm, but the fields were reversed. Instead of a dark symbol of hatred, the bastardized symbol was a deep blood red on a field of black.
“Achtung!”
Andy instinctively put his hands up and said, “Don’t shoot!”
The two men stood there with their Luger pistols aimed at his head, daring him to breathe. The taller of the two men was the prototypical Aryan soldier. He was muscular and his chin was chiseled to a point. His closely cropped blonde hair was partially hidden under the officer’s cap he wore. His piercing blue eyes bored a hole into Andy’s head as he switched his gaze to the other man. His blonde hair was sticking out from underneath his cap, but it was darker and unkempt. His eyes were a much darker blue, almost blackish and when he spoke, his accent was not a German one.
“You must be the man who broke into Dr. Weidinriech’s lab and attempted to sabotage der Furher’s laboratory. Stand up slowly and we won’t shoot you yet.”
The man spoke in clipped tones, much like a native New Yorker. And…
“Dr. Who?” Andy asked. He looked around and discovered this was not the lab he had left from. The sticky notes had been replaced with whiteboards with defined handwriting, legible to anyone who could read. The picture of Albert Einstein now showed Adolf Hitler saluting the crowd with the caption: Mien Furher: Martyred for his people. The reversed flag of the Nazi regime hung on the sidewall.
“Dr. Weidinriech,” the taller guard said, “but you already knew that didn’t you traitor?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about! Who are you and where is Dr. Weidel?” Andy was grasping at the last straws of sanity when a man walked into the room behind him. He turned and gaped in shock at the man he knew as Dr. Weidel, but obviously was not.
The man was five feet, eight inches tall and was skinny and had a hawkish nose. The glasses, which his Dr. Weidel wore, were perched at the tip of his nose. The beard he had grown so accustomed to was gone. The clean-shaven scientist was wearing a black lab coat with a red swastika over his right breast.
“Who is that man? And what are all of you doing in my laboratory? I have the personal assurances of our leader himself that I will have no interruptions of my work! It was a lucky coincidence that you caught him, but what were you doing here in the first place Heinrich?”
The shorter, Americanized Nazi answered, “My apologies Heir Doctor. We were passing by and saw a strange light. Franz and I were hoping that there were no problems and we came to make sure that things were all right. We saw this man step out of the shadows and thought he looked out of place so we grabbed him to prevent him from doing any damages to your machines. That is all.”
The doctor seemed to ponder this and said, “From now on, I will thank you to investigate only when screaming is involved. You could have walked in on a ‘strange light’ that would have burned your entire body in a flash of a second. These machines are not just contraptions gentlemen…”
“Uh… hello? What the hell is going on here?” Andy broke into the conversation. “Where am I, because this definitely isn’t where I am supposed to be.”
Franz tightened his grip on Andy and shook him once to get his attention. Heinrich moved in front of him and spoke.
“You, my treacherous friend are in
“The What World Reich? How did that happen? Hitler’s dead! You lost World War II… right?”
Heinrich slapped him across the face with his glove. “Acting like you are mad will not save you. Our beloved Furher was murdered, but his memory lives on. World War II, as you call it, was a great victory for the Reich under General Wilhelm Von Fasbrau. He became prime leader after the Nazi army crushed the Allied troops in 1942.” Heinrich seemed to be reciting a well-enacted scene in a play. The words were there, but spit out mechanically, as if implanted there. “In 1944, the German people propagated the globe taking over the world economy and pioneering the scientific advancements that make society today. Our honored leader led the charge that crushed the American people in 1944 and now the entire world is under his glorious leadership.”
Andy shook his head and remembered a saying from his father The evil that you know is sometimes better than the evil that you don’t son. When you charge into things blindly, you will hurt things more often than help them. How very true. His eyes were focused on the floor when he noticed his rifle case lying five feet away. The guards must not have seen it when they grabbed him. He lifted his head and surveyed the situation. Franz was still holding him, but Andy hadn’t struggled so the grip was loose. Heinrich was discussing things with the doctor and seemed to be intent on that.
Oh God, let me remember those moves I saw on Saturday morning wrestling!
Andy drove his elbow into Franz’s stomach and wheeled him around as a human shield. He grabbed the gun and pointed it at Heinrich’s head.
“Throw your gun down. NOW!”
Heinrich did as he was told. He looked amused.
“You realize that you will never escape don’t you? We have 10 men outside waiting for us.”
“Well dude that’s where I got ya. I don’t plan on going outside. I plan on going through there,” he nodded towards the HTDC. “Now Doc, be a good boy and set the controls to spin this thing to August 1, 1938. Believe me when I tell you I know how it works, so one wrong turn, I kill you all and set it myself. This way you can live until I set things right. So do it.”
Dr. Weidenrich spun knobs and flipped switches and Andy heard the crackle of electricity. He smiled and pushed Franz towards the other two men. He stopped to grab his case and leapt up onto the tub’s wall.
“For what it’s worth Doc… I am sorry we didn’t leave things the way they were.”
He jumped.
The familiar sensation hit and he rolled to his stomach. He was back in
“Sorry grandma…”
He took aim and fired. As he witnessed the blood spraying from his own head he collapsed. The crowd heard nothing as Hitler kept speaking about the Third Reich and how it would last for a long time. Andy lay dying on the rooftop watching the other him, the previous him, twitch its final spasm. He closed his eyes and though about the future, his present, and how it was all behind him.
