October 29, 1943 – 3:00 AM107Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqD4tVrCxJz
Sal woke to the sound of his front door opening.
This was unusual for three reasons. First, it was three in the morning. Second, he'd locked the door before going to bed because Rosa was paranoid about burglars and also because South Philadelphia had a raccoon problem that had reached epidemic proportions. Third, the person opening the door wasn't picking the lock or breaking it down—they were using a key.
Sal lay perfectly still, listening. Next to him, Rosa slept on, her breathing deep and even. She could sleep through air raids, which was good because they'd had a few drills and she'd snored through every one.
Footsteps in the hallway. Quiet. Careful. Familiar.
Then a voice: "Mr. Lombardi? You awake?"
Sal sat up. He knew that voice. It cracked on the second syllable.
"Kowalski?"
The young guard appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding his cap in his hands and looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. His face was pale, his eyes were wide, and his uniform was rumpled in a way that suggested he'd been wearing it for a very long time.
"Sorry to bother you, Mr. Lombardi. Really sorry. But they sent me. From the shipyard. They said to get you. Now."
Rosa stirred beside Sal. "Whassgoingon?"
"Nothing, honey. Go back to sleep." Sal swung his legs out of bed and reached for his pants. "What's wrong, Kowalski?"
The young man swallowed hard. "It's the Eldridge, sir. Something happened. Something... I don't know what. They won't tell us. But they need you. Dr. Franklin said to bring you. He said—" Kowalski paused, clearly trying to remember the exact words. "He said, 'Get the plumber. The one who listens to pipes.'"
Sal finished buttoning his pants and reached for his shirt. "How bad is it?"
Kowalski's face answered before his mouth could. "Bad, sir. Real bad."
The trolley wasn't running at three in the morning, so Kowalski had brought a Navy truck—a beat-up old thing that smelled like gasoline and the ghosts of a thousand past deliveries. They rattled through the empty streets of Philadelphia, past shuttered storefronts and dark houses, past the occasional night watchman walking his beat, past the all-night diner where Sal sometimes stopped for coffee after a late job.
Kowalski drove too fast, his knuckles white on the wheel. He didn't talk. Sal didn't ask.
The shipyard gates were open when they arrived, which they never were at this hour. More unusual: the guards weren't at their post. The little shack where Kowalski usually sat was empty, a half-empty coffee cup still steaming on the desk.
They drove through without stopping.
Pier 4 was lit up like a Christmas tree. Floodlights blazed from every direction, turning the night into artificial day. Men swarmed the area—sailors, officers, scientists, men in suits who looked like they'd never been near a ship in their lives. Ambulances waited near the gangplank, their engines running. So did a vehicle Sal didn't recognize—a black truck with no markings, the kind that meant trouble.
Kowalski parked and killed the engine. "This is where I stop, Mr. Lombardi. They said to bring you to the pier. They didn't say anything about me going farther."
Sal understood. "Wait here. If I'm not back in an hour, go get my wife and tell her I love her."
Kowalski nodded solemnly. "Yes, sir."
Sal got out and walked toward the chaos.
The Eldridge looked wrong.
That was the first thing Sal noticed. The ship was still there, still tied to the pier, still wrapped in those copper cables. But it looked... different. The colors were off. The grey of the hull seemed somehow deeper, darker, like it had absorbed all the light around it. The edges of the ship—the rails, the hatches, the gun mounts—seemed to shimmer slightly, as if Sal was seeing them through heat haze on a summer day.
But it wasn't summer. It was October. And there was no heat.
Dr. Franklin materialized at Sal's elbow. The older scientist looked terrible—worse than Hollister had looked the day before, and Hollister had set a high bar for terrible. His silver hair was disheveled. His spectacles were askew. His good suit was wrinkled and stained with something Sal didn't want to identify.
"Lombardi. Thank God you're here." Franklin grabbed Sal's arm with surprising strength. "We need you. Now."
"What happened?"
Franklin's face twisted. "The experiment. We ran it. At 0200 hours, when the field was theoretically most stable. We turned on the generators. We watched the instruments. And then—" He stopped, shook his head. "Come. You need to see."
He pulled Sal toward the gangplank.
The inside of the Eldridge was worse than the outside.
Men lay in the passageways. Not dead—Sal could see them breathing, see their chests rising and falling—but not right. Some stared at the ceiling with unblinking eyes. Some twitched and muttered. One sailor sat against a bulkhead, slowly turning his cap in his hands, over and over, like he'd forgotten how to stop.
Corpsmen moved among them, checking pulses, shining lights in eyes, murmuring to each other in voices that tried to be calm and failed.
"What happened to them?" Sal asked.
Franklin didn't answer. He just kept walking, pulling Sal deeper into the ship.
They passed the mess deck. The tables were overturned. Trays and cups littered the floor. Someone's breakfast—powdered eggs, cold and congealed—sat untouched on a plate, a fork still resting beside it.
They passed the crew head. The door was open. Sal glanced inside. The third toilet—the one he'd fixed yesterday—was full to overflowing, water spreading across the floor in a slow, relentless tide. Nobody was cleaning it up. Nobody seemed to notice.
Franklin led him to the engine room.
The space was huge, filled with machinery that Sal only half understood. Massive generators, different from the ones on the pier, dominated the center. Pipes ran everywhere—overhead, along the walls, across the floor—carrying steam and water and who knew what else.
And in the corner, near a bank of electrical panels, stood a group of men. Hollister was among them, his face even paler than usual. So were several other scientists, all wearing expressions of barely controlled panic.
They were gathered around something on the floor.
Franklin pushed through them, pulling Sal along. "Make way. Make way. I brought him."
The circle opened.
On the floor lay a sailor. Young—maybe twenty—with a face that would have been handsome if it hadn't been twisted in terror. His eyes were open, staring at something only he could see. His mouth moved, forming words that didn't come out.
And his left hand was embedded in the steel bulkhead.
Not stuck to it. Not pressed against it. In it. The steel had swallowed his hand up to the wrist, and there it sat, like his flesh had simply merged with the metal.
Sal stared. He'd seen a lot in twenty-five years. He'd seen pipes burst and sewers overflow and toilets expel things that should never have been flushed. He'd seen a man try to catch a falling wrench with his face. He'd seen a chief petty officer get his head stuck in a porthole and require three men and a jar of petroleum jelly to free him.
He'd never seen anything like this.
"His name is Miller," Hollister said quietly. "Seaman First Class Thomas Miller. He was standing here when the field collapsed. When we... when we came back."
"Came back from where?"
Hollister's eyes met Sal's. There was something in them that Sal had never seen before—fear. Real fear. The kind that came from seeing something that shouldn't exist.
"Mr. Lombardi," Hollister said, "the Eldridge vanished at 0203 hours. For seventeen minutes, it simply wasn't there. And then it was back. And some of the crew... some of them came back wrong."
Sal looked at Miller's hand, embedded in the steel. At the way the metal seemed to flow around his wrist, seamless, like it had always been there.
"You gotta be kidding me," he whispered.
"I wish I was."
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