by Trevor Judd

© 2013 used with author’s permission

Professor Kelvin nervously tugged at the collar of his shirt. He had been waiting in the hallway for the last half-hour, his anxiety steadily building like steam in a pressure cooker. Kelvin had taken to pacing to release some of his energy, straightening and re-straightening his tie, pulling at his shirt cuffs and picking lint off his tweed jacket. He couldn’t decide whether or not to wear his glasses going into the briefing and so kept removing and replacing them every minute. Jason “Jazz” West relaxed in a chair, the epitome of calm with his hands clasped behind his head. It was like he briefed heads of state all the time. “Somebody had a little too much coffee this morning,” he said. “Huh? Oh.” Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Kelvin sat down across from West but kept drumming his fingers on his knee. “I just want to get this over with.” The two men were as different physically as they were in temperament and yet had forged a bond stronger than brotherhood. West was scrawny with a lean face and frizzy light brown hair. Kelvin, on the other hand, was tall and broad with a rosy, youthful face and ash blonde hair. West was employed in the Science and Technology Directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Kelvin was a professor of physics at a small university in Tennessee. They had recently survived a great ordeal together and were now about to regale the most powerful man in the country with their adventure. Calvin Bryce, an elderly but surprisingly sneaky government agent, materialized beside Kelvin. “Where did you come from?” asked West. “Secret passageway,” Bryce said with a dismissive gesture. “Place is full of them.” “You are one sneaky old man,” West said. “Get used to it, Jazz,” said Kelvin. “Are you the one holding up the show?” “The President decides when he wants to be briefed, Henry,” Bryce said. The door at the end of the hall opened and an aide ushered them inside the Oval Office. As they crossed the threshold Bryce whispered something to Kelvin: “But every once in a while I can move things along.” The President rose from behind his desk to greet Bryce who, in turn, introduced West and Kelvin. “I’ve heard a lot about you two,” the President said with a politician’s smile. “Especially you, professor.” Kelvin faltered, unsure of how to reply. “Really?” he blurted. “Any time someone asks the government for money, their name gets dropped,” he said, “and you’re proposing a whole new civilian agency to police this Phenomenon.” The President sat down in a plush leather chair near the middle of the room. Bryce took a chair next to him while Kelvin and West shared a sofa across from them. “Don’t misunderstand,” the President continued, “I agree with you. The Phenomenon is dangerous and it needs to be contained. I just need a way to sell it to Congress.” “Just tell them that at any moment Los Angeles could be replaced with a chunk of Martian desert,” West said. “Something like that may have to happen first,” the President said morosely. “What I don’t understand is why: why is this happening? Why now?” “I can tell you why, sir,” Kelvin said, “but you won’t like it.” “I’m accustomed to hearing things I don’t like,” the President said. “Comes with the job.” Kelvin cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter. “Well, sir, the simple answer is that the universe is…um, dying.” The President frowned as if he were confused. “Dying,” he repeated. “Yes, sir. We’re living inside a decomposing body, a cosmic corpse.” The President leaned forward in his chair and fixed Kelvin with a cold stare. “Are you serious?” “I’m always serious, Mr. President.” The President leaned back and loosened his tie. No doubt Kelvin had just added a number of white hairs to his graying temples. “Explain, professor. And keep in mind that I’m not a physicist.” “Yes, sir,” said Kelvin. “Our universe is expanding, and this expansion has been accelerating since the moment of the Big Bang. The driving force behind the acceleration is called dark energy. We don’t know what it is or where it comes from, but we know there’s enough of it to keep the universe expanding indefinitely. This will eventually lead to a phase called the Big Rip where time, space and matter will literally rip themselves apart. We are living in the Big Rip, Mr. President. Entropic zones are the result of reality being stretched too thin, and it’s only going to get worse.” “But the island eventually disappeared,” said the President. “Are you saying these events could become permanent?” “Eventually,” Kelvin said. “Entropic zones are bubbles in quantum foam that have inflated like a baby universe. Now, scientists have theorized that our own world could have emerged from quantum foam in the same way, but no one has been able to explain why we don’t see universes born all the time.” “I’ve often wondered about that myself,” the President said. West and Bryce both grinned at the Commander-in-Chief’s wisecrack, but Kelvin seemed oblivious as he carried on unabated. “The answer may lie in string theory, which reimagines particles as tiny threads of energy. Some strings may act like a balm, or sealant, that keeps quantum fluctuations from blowing up out of proportion. But now that the universe is expanding out of control, those safeguards will start to fail.” “By your own admission, Dr. Kelvin, there’s nothing we can do about entropic zones,” said the President. Hell, the universe is ending. What good will a government agency do?” “The threat to public safety is imminent, Mr. President,” said Calvin Bryce. “Entropic zones and the singularities they create can appear at any time, anywhere. And any person or thing trapped inside a zone is vulnerable to its environment.” “What does that mean?” the President asked. “The laws of physics are different inside each zone,” Kelvin clarified. “A person could be flattened like a pancake because gravity is suddenly a thousand times stronger, or a thief could rip open a bank vault with his bare hands because steel is as strong as paper.” “Just think about that, sir,” said West. “Our world is a safe, boring place because the laws of nature prevent impossible things from happening. Now, impossible things can happen all the time. People need to know their government is trying to protect them.” The President sat forward, clasping his hands together under his chin. “How far ahead of this thing are we? Can we predict where and when a zone will appear?” “Not yet,” Bryce said, “but Dr. Kelvin is confident he can build a system that will forecast their formation. ” The President looked to Kelvin for confirmation. “Entropic zones emit a unique type of particle radiation that disrupts the Earth’s electromagnetic field. We can detect these disturbances and use them to pinpoint where a zone will emerge.” “When can you get this system up and running?” asked the President. There was a knock on the door and an aide stepped in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. President, but Dr. Kelvin and Mr. West are needed.” “For what?” West asked. “There’s another singularity.

West and Kelvin were flown to Naval Station Norfolk via private jet thirty minutes later. From above, the Sewell’s Point peninsula looked like a dense metropolis spread across four miles of waterfront and seven miles of quays and piers. It was the largest naval base in the world, providing support for over 75 ships and hundreds of aircraft. It was the densest concentration of U.S. Naval forces at any given time. They stepped off the Gulfstream and were met on the tarmac by an ensign dressed in crisp Service Khakis. They climbed into a government SUV and were driven to a waiting MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter. A member of the aircrew jumped out, gave them both a headset and pointed to their seats. As he buckled in, Kelvin felt the frame of the aircraft vibrate as the rotor fired up. In the air he could hear the race of the twin turboshaft engine through the muted insulation of his headset, broken occasionally by the voice of the pilot in his headphones. West spoke into his mouthpiece. “How far out are we going?” “Not far, sir,” the co-pilot replied. “Just the Elizabeth River. Practically downtown Norfolk.” “What’s the situation?” asked Kelvin. “Witnesses claim they saw a bright white flash then a ship appeared in the river,” said the co-pilot. “What kind of ship?” asked Kelvin. “Some say it’s a navy destroyer, but it’s too small,” the pilot replied. “They’ve closed regular traffic through the harbor until everything’s resolved.” The chopper flew south, following the shore of the Elizabeth River until they came to the wide fork between Norfolk and Portsmouth. Kelvin saw a destroyer holding position in the area between the U.S.S. Wisconsin museum and Craford Bay. There was also a smaller ship about three hundred yards off its bow that appeared to be their destination. “What’s that vessel we’re landing on?” Kelvin asked. “It’s the USS Cole,” replied the pilot. “She’s been docked for refit and was on her way out to sea when the…uh—” “Singularity,” Kelvin said. “Yea, sure,” the pilot said, “when the ‘singularity’ appeared. So she’s the acting base of operations.” “Sir,” asked the co-pilot, “what’s a singularity?” “It’s something that should be impossible but happens anyway,” West said. “Do either of you know what’s going on?” he asked. West looked at Kelvin and smiled a wide grin. “We’re the one’s who’re going to find out.” The USS Cole (DDG-67) was an Arleigh-Burke class guided missile destroyer. She was over 500 ft. long and had an average displacement of about 8,000 tones. In the year 2000, Al-Qaeda suicide bombers blew a 40-foot hole in her side and killed 17 of her crew while she was docked in Yemen. The ship survived and eventually returned to active service after extensive repairs. The Knighthawk gently touched down on the helicopter pad, and the pilot cut power. Kelvin and West jumped out after a flight deck crew secured the chopper. Kelvin inhaled the sea air tainted with the smell of diesel. The sky was overcast, and the air was cool and humid. From their position on the river, Kelvin could clearly see Dominion Tower in the distance. They were taken below deck. The Cole must have been operating on a skeleton crew because it seemed like there was hardly anyone onboard. A crewman showed them into a briefing room. There was a large dry erase board on the wall and desk chairs bolted to the floor in neat rows. The space could seat less than twenty, and West could imagine how crowded and warm it got when it was full. An officer wearing the dark blue Navy Working Uniform entered the briefing room. “Gentlemen, I’m Commander Richardson. Navy Intelligence.” He shook both their hands. Richardson was the classical military type: strong, formal and neat with a commanding tone of voice that was somehow reassuring and sinister at the same time. Kelvin estimated Richardson to be in his mid-forties with graying temples, laugh lines and crow’s feet. Kelvin and West each introduced themselves. “I’ve heard of you two,” Richardson said. “You did the Entropy Island reconnaissance mission. Yea, you’re both kinda famous in my circle.” “Who named it Entropy Island?” West asked. “A member of my staff thought it sounded appropriate.” My five-year-old niece could come up with a better name, Kelvin thought. “So what’s the emergency this time, Commander?” he asked. “There’s a ship currently off our bow,” Richardson said. “According to eyewitness accounts it suddenly appeared in the river about an hour ago. People reported hearing a loud clap like an explosion and a bright flash of light. Then there it was.” “What is ‘it’ exactly?” asked West. “It is a Cannon-class destroyer-escort, positively identified as the USS Eldridge, DE-173.” Something about that name struck a chord in Kelvin’s mind. “Why does that sound so familiar?” “The Eldridge is part of an urban legend. Conspiracy nuts think she was involved in something called the Philadelphia experiment.” “Sounds like the name of a sci-fi B movie,” West said humorously. “That’s because it was,” said Richardson. “The story goes it was an attempt to make ships invisible at sea. The Eldridge was equipped with a cloaking device and disappeared out of the Philadelphia shipyards then reappeared ten seconds later. The crew supposedly suffered horrible side effects like being badly burned; fused to bulkheads; driven insane. The there are several variations of the story. One has the Eldridge being teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk. Others say it traveled through time and visited a parallel universe.” “But the Philadelphia experiment is just an urban legend,” Kelvin said. “It didn’t really happen.” “We know,” Richardson said. “The Navy has detailed records of the Eldridge’s service history and what happened to her after World War II.” He flipped open a manila folder and began reading: “She was commissioned 27 August 1943 and served in the Mediterranean between January 1944 and May 1945. In May of ’45 Eldridge was transferred to the Pacific Theater where she performed escort and patrol duties until November. She was inactivated 17 June 1946 and held in reserve until she was given to Greece as part of the Mutual Assistance Defense program in 1951 and was renamed the Leon. She was finally decommissioned in 1992 and sold for scrap in 1999.” “So there’s no way that ship out there is really the Eldridge,” West said. “Identification was made by an inspection of her markings and hull,” Richardson explained. “It’s the Eldridge, we just don’t know how she got here.” “Has anyone been to the ship?” asked Kelvin. “We were told no one goes aboard until you two scout it out first,” Richardson said. “Figures,” West said sarcastically. “We’re going to need our equipment,” said Kelvin. “Got that covered.” Calvin Bryce entered the briefing room followed by a sailor carrying two black Pelican cases. “I think you’ll find all your tools in here.” “How the hell do you get around like that?” West asked. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Bryce replied cryptically. “There’s a dinghy prepared to ferry you to the singularity. Maintain radio communication at all times. I’ll be monitoring your progress from here.” They were each given a pair of safety glasses with a camera set into the bridge, a radio and a flashlight. The glasses plugged into the radios and used a digital signal to transmit video. Kelvin’s radiation detector was also in one of the cases. It was a gun-like sensor that looked like the handle off a vacuum cleaner with a three-inch metal cylinder sticking out of it. He hooked up the display unit and looped the strap around his neck. “The Eldridge appears abandoned,” Commander Richardson said. “We’ve spotted no movement on her deck, and nobody’s answering our hails. The temperature of the hull is a uniform 100 degrees, so thermal imaging is all but useless. It’s also throwing off a lot of broadband radio-frequency interference. Sonar confirms the engines are off, but there’s something else running on the ship, possibly an electrical generator of some kind. We think it’s acting as a heat source.” “I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Kelvin said.

The dinghy came alongside the ship’s port bow. Using a pole and hook, a seaman tied a flexible rope ladder to the deck and held the boat steady while Kelvin and West climbed aboard. The second he touched the deck, Kelvin grabbed his detector and began taking readings. West gave the dinghy pilot a thumbs-up and the boat sped back to the Cole. “Lots of monopoles,” Kelvin said, “but nowhere near the levels we saw on Entropy Island.” “So we’re dealing with a smaller zone,” West said. “Much smaller. In fact I’d say it’s local to the ship.” West pressed the talk button on his radio. “Commander Richardson, this is Jason West. We’re on deck and headed inside the ship.” The response was almost immediate. “Copy that. Switch on your camera feeds.” In the Cole’s Combat Information Center, Bryce and Commander Richardson saw video feeds appear on two separate monitors. The CIC was dark, lit only by the glow of computer screens and electronics equipment. It was the information-processing hub of the ship where real-time data was analyzed and distributed to the battle staff. Bryce and Richardson stood behind a small workstation in the center of the room wearing headsets while a crewman worked the equipment. “You should split up,” said Bryce. “One of you find the bridge while the other goes below and looks for the generator. Keep an eye out for the crew.” “I’ll take the bridge,” West said as he walked away. “Keep in touch.” “Look to your left, Dr. Kelvin,” said Richardson. “There should be a circular hatch nearby. That’ll lead you down to the next deck.” Kelvin spotted the dome-shaped lid and lifted it open. A set of narrow metal stairs led down into a dark pit. Even the beam of his flashlight failed to illuminate the space beyond. He could just make out a watertight hatch at the bottom of the steps that must have led even further into the Eldridge. Armed with his trusty scanner, he took his first steps into oblivion.

West couldn’t help but draw comparisons between the Eldridge and the Cole, even though it wasn’t a fair contest. The Eldridge was a relic. She resembled a long sled with a bunch of misshapen boxes piled haphazardly on her top deck. Everything looked exposed, vulnerable. On the other hand, the Cole was a modern warship. It’s design incorporated geometric characteristics that reduced its radar signature, making it look more futuristic than the Eldridge. Yet, the Eldridge looked newer. The paint was fresh—he could smell the fumes in a few places—and the deck hardly had any wear. There were smokestacks nearby where exhaust from the ship’s diesel plants was expelled. They should have been stained black with soot, but they weren’t. It was like she had been put to sea just yesterday. West mounted stairs that led up the superstructure, a tower of metal balconies stacked one atop another just off center of the ship. The navigating bridge was a small U-shaped room that contained the pilot house and the Combat Information Center. Inside the enclosed pilot house was the steering station and compass. Small portholes lined the front wall at eye level. To his left was a chart table, laid out with open notebooks, papers and maps. “Look at this place,” West said. “It’s brand new, like it rolled out of dry dock last week. Everything’s spick and span. The brass isn’t even tarnished.” “We see,” said Bryce. He picked up a logbook labeled U.S.S. Eldridge in stamped silver letters. “This ship definitely belongs in 1943.” “Jason, try to get Dr. Kelvin on your radio,” Bryce said. “Doc, can you hear me? Doc, what’s your position?” There was nothing. “What’s going on?” “We lost Kelvin’s feed the instant he went below deck,” Bryce said. “It must be the radio interference from the zone. It’s jamming his transmissions.” “I’ll go look for him,” West said. For the first time, West looked out the windows. Where he should have seen Portsmouth, he saw only open seas and blue skies. “What the hell?” he said aloud. “Tell me I’m seeing things.” West rushed outside and saw Norfolk and Portsmouth to the right with the Cole standing silent watch in the river. Above, the sky was still blanketed in gray. He reentered the bridge and gazed out the windows. He again saw the broad expanse of open ocean where he should have been looking at Portsmouth and the Elizabeth River. Instead of misty, gray clouds he saw the sun reflecting off the water without a cloud in sight in the sky above. “Ok,” West said to reassure himself. “This is new.

Kelvin unlocked the hatch and entered a narrow corridor. On either side of him were metal bulkheads, and above his head ran a complex system of piping and electrical cables. It was like a tomb down here: dark, silent and still. Only the beam of his flashlight and the glow of the scanner’s digital screen provided any illumination. There was something about the darkness. Kelvin’s rational mind tried to downplay the eeriness, but his primitive instincts were in high gear. The dark was thick, like milky water. His flashlight hardly penetrated it, like it was a palpable entity trying to enclose him. Kelvin remembered when he’d taken scuba lessons as a young twenty-something during a summer break from college. He had gone so far down that he couldn’t see the surface. The water absorbed the beam from his flashlight and gave him the impression of infinite depth. Like being in outer space, he couldn’t tell which way was up or down. That’s what this place felt like, and he had panicked then, too. Kelvin took a reading with his scanner. Down here, he was picking up a new kind of particle radiation in addition to the monopoles. At first he didn’t believe the scanner’s readings, but there was definitely a gluon source somewhere within the ship. Gluons regulated the strong nuclear force within atomic nuclei and were only ever detected as shrapnel in high-energy particle collisions, never “in the wild.” Even stranger, these gluons were moving in pairs, one “real” gluon and its virtual twin, behavior that was purely theoretical. The diversion calmed Kelvin by reminding him he was still firmly in the world of science. Weird science, he thought humorously. He followed the narrow corridor, headed aft. The scanner would lead him to the largest concentration of gluons on the ship, probably near the generator he was looking for. Kelvin took in the derelict nature of his surroundings. The walls, pipes and floor were covered in rust. The paint had faded and flaked away decades ago. He saw a lifesaver lying on the floor and knelt down to examine it. The black lettering was faded but he could just make out the name of the ship by aiming his flashlight at the right angle: U.S.S. Eldridge. DE-173. This was all wrong. The Philadelphia experiment was a myth. This couldn’t be the Eldridge. A sound caught his attention. It came from an adjoining hallway up ahead. Kelvin waited until he heard it again, a rattling sound like shifting silverware. As he drew near, the stale air became tinted with the strong smell of fresh coffee. Around a corner he saw light coming from one of the rooms, electric light. He entered cautiously, surprised to find the ship’s galley in pristine condition. The counters and cabinets were spotless stainless steel. A coffee pot was sitting on a gas-fed stove, steam rising out of its spout. Beside the stove stood a man with his back turned. “Who are you?” Kelvin asked the stranger. The figure turned, and Kelvin felt a wave of disorientation sweep over him when he saw his face. It was like looking at a living reflection. The man in front of the stove was himself. The other Kelvin held out a cup of coffee. “Here, have some. It’ll make you feel better.

West couldn’t believe his eyes. The discontinuity between what he saw on deck and what he saw from inside the pilot’s house was more than illusion. The camera on his safety glasses was relaying everything to the CIC on the Cole where Bryce and Richardson were communicating with him. “It’s not an illusion,” Richardson said. “We see it on our monitors, too.” “What the hell is going on?” West asked aloud, more to himself than to Bryce and Richardson. “Dr. Kelvin might know,” Richardson said. “He’s the expert.” “I’m going to look for him,” West said. “Just be careful,” Bryce said, “chances are good we’ll lose your signal once you go below decks.” “I’ll keep that in mind,” Jason said. A door behind the steering station led out of the pilot house and into the Combat Information Center. All electronic information was processed in here by radar technicians, radio operators and sonar specialists. The CIC was bathed in red light and all the equipment was in operation. That meant the battery room was intact and providing power. Interesting, thought West. He sat down at one of the radar consoles. It must have been malfunctioning because the scope was clear; it wasn’t picking up the Cole at all. A radio next to him blared static, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He gave his heart a moment to calm down before flipping a toggle under the speaker. The static ceased, and the room became silent again. That’s when West heard a wheezing sound coming from a passage on the other side of the room. He pointed his flashlight down a flight of stairs, and gagged on a horrid odor that was drifting up from below. He heard the wheezing again. It sounded like the labored breathing of an asthmatic, and it was coming from the bottom of the stairs. Steeling himself, West descended the stairs. As he got closer to the bottom, he could make out a shape ahead of him. The stench of burnt hair and flesh became stronger the nearer he got. West froze in horror when the figure finally became clear in the beam of his flashlight. It was the body of a man or at least half a body. It was cut in half by the bulkhead. No! It was fused in between the bulkhead. The head and chest were visible, the right forearm, part of the right knee and the left foot. The flesh was scorched with third degree burns, and most of the hair had been burned off the scalp. Jason felt ice water run down his back when the sailor worked his mouth in the beam of the flashlight, trying to speak. It made wet sucking noises like water running through a drain before he heard anything intelligible. “H-help…me.

Kelvin stood there dumbly. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for anything like meeting himself. He took the coffee. The cup was stainless steel and piping hot, and the coffee already had milk and sugar mixed in. He took a cautious sip, but his eyes remained locked with those of his doppelganger. “If it’s any consolation, I know how you feel right now,” the other Kelvin said. “You can’t remember a time when you felt this uncomfortable.” Kelvin hesitated to respond. “You seem to be handling it pretty well,” he said after a moment. The other Kelvin shrugged. “I’ve been through this once already,” he replied. “When I was you.” “When you were me?” “Sure. I’m only a few minutes ahead of you. See?” The other Kelvin held out his watch for Kelvin to inspect. It was the same one Kelvin was wearing now—his father’s watch. Kelvin looked at the time on his own. There was ten minutes difference between the identical timepieces. “Understand now?” “I’m walking along a closed timelike curve,” Kelvin said. Future Kelvin nodded. “Pretty awesome, don’t you think? You’re at the beginning of the loop. I’m at the end. After you finish your coffee you’re going to walk back out of this room, turn a corner and end up right back here ten minutes earlier.” “And knowing what’s going to happen,” Kelvin said, “I’ll make coffee and offer a cup to my younger self when I walk in.” “Like I said: awesome.” Kelvin shook his head despondently. “No, not really.” “Just wait,” future Kelvin said. “You’ll get a kick out of this, trust me.” Kelvin took another sip of coffee. There was something obliquely normal about the act itself that made him feel better, like he could have been conversing with a friend in his kitchen at home. “Where did the coffee come from?” Kelvin asked. “Why does this room look so new while the rest of the ship is falling apart?” “I don’t know,” future Kelvin said. “I’m only ten minutes ahead of you. I haven’t seen any more of the ship than you have. But the kitchen’s fully stocked. Even the freezer.” “If that’s true, there must be a crew around here somewhere. I guess you’ll find out for sure after I leave.” He finished his coffee and turned to leave the galley. “Well, uh…so long, I guess.” He got to the door and turned around. “Which way am I supposed to go?” “Straight on,” said future Kelvin. “What if I go back the way I came? What if I choose to do something different?” “Death by paradox, I guess,” future Kelvin replied with a shrug. “But you won’t do anything differently.” “Why not?” Kelvin asked. “I have free will. I can do whatever I want.” “Within reason, maybe. Let’s be honest with each other, Henry. All causality and fatalism aside, you’re just too scared to try.” “Wiseass,” Kelvin said. “Takes one to know one,” future Kelvin said indignantly. Kelvin left the galley reentered the hallway. Using his scanner to find the gluon radiation again, he followed the passage until it turned right and he found himself right back at the entrance to the galley. The passage was twisted around like a Möbius strip. He wondered if the whole ship was distorted like this, where space and time were folded into loops. Kelvin entered the galley, finding it empty and darkened. He flipped on the lights and began examining the kitchen. Like his future self had said, it was fully stocked with provisions, mostly canned foods. The freezer was also stocked with meat and other products. Kelvin tried the gas stove and got a flame going with some matches he found in a drawer. The propane came from a tank under the stove, but where was the electricity for the lights coming from? He looked through the cabinets and found a coffee tin, filters and a pot. There was water in the tap (another mystery). He let the coffee percolate on the stove and looked around for some cream and sugar. For some reason he felt excited, like he was about to play a prank on an unsuspecting friend. He sensed movement behind him as he poured the coffee into a stainless cup and added powdered cream and sugar. “Who are you?” a voice behind him asked. Kelvin turned and felt the same disorienting feeling of looking at a perfect reflection of himself, only ten minutes younger. His younger self just stood there staring at him with a deer-in-the-headlights expression. He held out the cup of coffee, knowing how this was about to go. “Here, have some. It’ll make you feel better.

The sailor seemed to expire, his plea for help a death rattle on his lips. Jason checked his pulse at the jugular vein. He was gone. West spared no time and moved on through an open hatchway, and saw the rest of the sailor’s body sticking out the other side of the wall. “Richardson, are you seeing this?” asked West. There was no response on the radio. “Richardson? Bryce? Come in.” West knew this would probably happen. He wasn’t alone—Kelvin was definitely down here somewhere. They needed to meet up and get off this ghost ship before one of them was split in half by a deck plate. West’s flashlight fell on a door behind the sailor’s legs. It led to the captain’s quarters. He debated with himself. He really, really, really wanted to get off this ship. He had to keep forcing himself not to throw up every second the image of that dead sailor popped into his mind. On the other hand this was a reconnaissance mission, and he had a job to do. The captain’s cabin was smaller than Jason had expected, but then again it was a small ship, only 300 ft. long. Space was a commodity. There was a bunk, a locker and a bathroom the same size you would find on a commercial airliner. A foldout table served as a desk. An official envelope laid torn open, its papers spread over the table. They were official orders, signed by Secretary of the Navy James Baker and dated March 1944. According to the documents, the Eldridge was ordered to field test the cloaking device in enemy waters and perform reconnaissance of the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean. “I’ll be damned,” he whispered. So the Philadelphia experiment wasn’t a myth after all. It had really happened, and the Navy was successful! The implications were staggering, but it still didn’t answer the big question: What was the Eldridge doing in Virginia? Then West realized what he was holding. These papers weren’t the sorts of things a captain would just leave out in the open. There was a small safe in the wall above the bunk, locked tight. It was becoming apparent that a disaster had befallen the Eldridge and her crew, something so bad and so quick that the captain didn’t have time to lock up sensitive documents. He folded the papers up and stuffed them in his pocket. He needed to get back upstairs and report this to Bryce and Richardson. They were going to want to hear this. Stepping outside, Jason found a set of stairs in the next section that led back up to the main deck. After three solid minutes of climbing, West stopped to catch his breath. He had reached a point on the staircase where he was neither getting closer to the top nor further from the bottom. It was as if the stairs were moving beneath his feet like an escalator as he walked. He tried sprinting up the stairs. That didn’t work either. What the hell is going on? West asked himself. He gave up and returned to the bottom of the stairwell. West tried his radio. “This is Jason West, can anyone read me?” Silence. Not even static. He continued to another compartment tried turning left into an adjoining corridor. Ahead, he saw another person come around a corner. “Hey, stop right there,” West called. The person ahead of him kept his back turned. He was male and held a flashlight ahead of him. “Doc, is that you?” West tried to approach the man, but he started moving forward. “Hey, I said stop!” The man kept walking in tandem with Jason, maintaining the exact same distance between them. Something strange was happening here, West knew. When he stopped, so did the man. West took one step backwards. The person in front of him took one step backwards. West held up his left hand and wiggled his fingers. The man ahead of him copied the action exactly. Every movement West made, the person in front of him did the exact same—the exact same. Jason turned his head to look behind him and saw a semblance of himself peering over his shoulder. It was like standing between two parallel mirrors, only the images weren’t reflections. To test his theory, Jason threw his flashlight at the figure ahead of him. He watched it spin end over end until he felt the flashlight hit the back of his own head sharply. He bent down and picked it up. This wasn’t an illusion. Somehow space was twisted around here, and he was looking at the back of his own head. Feeling panic sweep over him, West doubled back to the adjoining hallway. Leaning against the bulkhead, he tried to regain his senses, but his body wouldn’t stop shaking. What kind of catastrophe could have thrown the ship into such chaos? If the whole ship was like this, what hope did he have of escape?

Kelvin watched his younger self walk to the door. He was in a hurry to get out of this freak show, and Kelvin the elder couldn’t blame him. “Which way am I supposed to go?” the younger Kelvin asked. “Straight on.” “What if I go back the way I came?” the younger Kelvin asked. “What if I choose to do something different?” Now that he had been through the motions, Kelvin realized the idea was absurd. “Death by paradox, I guess. But you won’t do anything differently.” His younger self eyed him resentfully, like a kid who hated being told what to do. “And why not? I have free will. I can do whatever I want.” Kelvin smiled cryptically. Amazing how much can change in ten minutes, he thought. “Within reason, maybe. Let’s be honest with each other, Henry. All causality and fatalism aside, you’re just too scared to try.” “Wiseass.” He remembered the wiseass comment, yet for some reason it really struck a nerve. “Takes one to know one,” he shot back. Kelvin watched his younger self leave the galley and disappear around the corner. “Thank God that’s over,” he said aloud. Instead of leaving the galley through the corridor, Kelvin descended a small set of stairs down to the mess hall below. This place also had electricity, but it was in shambles. Plates of food were left on the tables; cups were overturned; napkins and silverware littered the floor. It was like a crowd had suddenly vacated the mess in a frenzy. Perhaps a call to battle stations, Kelvin mused. Like the galley upstairs, this room was functional but it had seen more use, yet it wasn’t as derelict as the hallway he first entered. The food was cold, but it was recently cooked. If there was a crew onboard, where were they? Had they all jumped overboard? Why were certain sections of the ship newer than others? Kelvin noticed a folded-up newspaper and opened it up. The creases were well worn, like it had been opened and leafed through dozens of times. It was a Sunday edition of the New York Banner dated May 1950. Kelvin was fairly certain the newspaper was fictional. Stranger still, it contained an article describing Kim Il-sung’s failure to secure military support from the Soviet Union and China for a proposed invasion of South Korea. Intervention by United Nations peacekeepers had forced the Communist leader back to the negotiation table, and a new non-aggression treaty between North and South Korea was almost ready to be ratified. Kelvin folded the paper up and stuffed it in his back pocket. He was finally beginning to form a theory about what was happening. To prove it, he needed to find the source of the gluon radiation. That was the key. Taking a reading with his scanner, he picked up the gluon source again and followed its trail. He kept making his way aft and passed through two sections of crew quarters before coming to another stairwell. The gluon radiation got stronger the further down the stairs he went. Halfway down, Kelvin’s radio crackled. He tapped the push-to-talk button on his radio. “This is Kelvin, come in.” The next transmission was static-heavy, but he made out a voice. “—Doc?” “Jason? Jason, do you read?” Kelvin chided himself for not maintaining communication. As often happened, his curiosity and one-track mind had caused him to ignore protocol. “—you there, Doc?” “I’m here, Jason. What’s your location.” “Some—ere near — captain’s quarters,” he said. “Copy. Captain’s quarters.” “—is place is weird, Doc,” West said. “I’ve –een all –inds of crazy –uff.” “Meet me in the engine room and we’ll compare notes,” Kelvin said. “I’ll –ry. This ship – twisted –round. – might get –ost.” “I understand. If you can’t make it, double back and we’ll meet on the main deck.” “—ain deck. Copy.” Even through the interference, Kelvin could tell West sounded tired and frightened. Apparently he had experienced the warped dimensionality of the ship as well and wasn’t the better for it. Kelvin only hoped they kept it together long enough to complete their mission and leave.

Jason picked himself up. He tried to think objectively about this situation. He had a destination now, he just needed to get there. He climbed down a ladder to a lower deck. Looking up, he saw a network of water pipes and electrical cables, each labeled with a different color stripe. He picked one color and followed the pipe. As he passed through different sections of the ship, he kept noticing a bizarre trend in his surroundings. Different bulkheads meshed together the wrong way, walls jutted out awkwardly where they should have terminated, and the age of the construction materials varied greatly, ranging from almost new to ancient. In several places he saw where the pipes had been cut as if by a precision laser and shifted along with the deck plates. It was as if someone had cut up the ship and put it back together haphazardly. As he feared, West ended up in another space warp. This time he kept returning to the same spot, like he was going in circles, even though he walked in a straight line. Luckily, it only affected a certain corridor going in one direction. He found the adjacent passage and was able to reorient himself. Eventually, through some trial and error, he made it to the engine compartment. Before him was another crewman, not quite as badly burned as the first one he’d encountered but just as obscenely mutilated by a freak in the ship’s internal geometry. The sailor was sticking out of the floor from the torso up; his legs, meanwhile, were hanging from the ceiling, the tips of his shoes dangling directly above his head. Further on, another crewman was similarly disfigured. This one was bisected almost right down his middle, except the right and left halves of the crewman’s body were sticking out of opposite walls. It was like someone had cut the sailors in two and stuck each half against opposing sides of the corridor. Jason couldn’t take it anymore. Bracing himself against a wall he wretched and vomited the contents of his stomach. It provided almost no relief. This ship, this charnel house, had given his subconscious enough ammunition to torment him with nightmares for a lifetime. Nightmares will be the least of my problems, West thought, if I don’t get out of here. Walking slowly, he entered the engine compartment. On either side were the long piston rods that drove the propellers. Further ahead were the diesel engines beyond which was an eerie purple light coming from an adjoining compartment.

At last, Kelvin reached the source of the mysterious gluon radiation. It was a room adjacent to one of the ship’s turbo-diesel engines. He passed through the first doorway into an anteroom with electronic control stations on either side. It looked like two operators were meant to sit and man these stations during normal operations. The panels were complex, outfitted with myriad buttons, switches, glowing gages and dials. The room beyond was circular and bathed in an eerie blue-violet glow. Above was a parabolic dish that made a domed ceiling over the compartment. Kelvin couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might be made of palladium. The light seemed to ripple off the walls like waves in an ocean. Its source was a device in the center of the room that had been hooked directly to a generator. It was shaped like an upside-down bell, nine feet wide and fifteen feet high, with two large glass rods spinning around each other in the center. The glass rods were filled with different colored liquids and sparked between each other like they were electrically charged. There was an open book on a nearby instrument panel. It was an old-fashioned cardboard binder containing technical orders for operating the device. The manual wasn’t very thick, less than a hundred pages. It described the machine as an “electrogravitic invisibility screen generator.” Two transuranic isotopes, identified in the book as Torrium-452 and Torrium-600, were used to create a gravonic field—Whatever the hell that is, Kelvin thought—which rendered the ship invisible in certain wavelengths of the EM spectrum. When an electric current passed through the isotopes, they developed a net magnetic charge, creating a region of negative vacuum energy between the oppositely charged samples. This energy field was focused by the bell-shaped shell, which was made of thorium-beryllium alloy, while the palladium dish above increased the field’s radius to encompass the entire ship. Kelvin’s radio crackled then he heard West’s voice loud and clear. “Doc, I’m in a room adjacent to the engine compartment. You’re not going to believe what I’ve found. You should get here quick.” “I’m already there,” Kelvin replied. “ Are you looking at a glowing, bell-shaped machine?” “Yea, that’s right. Where are you, Doc? I can’t see you anywhere.” “That doesn’t surprise me,” Kelvin replied. “We’re in the same room, but were not on the same Eldridge.” “What do you mean?” asked West. “This may sound farfetched, but I think what we’re seeing are several versions of the same ship from different parallel universes within the same phase space.” “What are you talking about, Doc?” “Phase space is a mathematical description of a system in which all possible states of that system are expressed as points in a multidimensional space. The Eldridge’s phase space is being warped by this machine and all the universes that it exists in are actually touching each other.” “Are you saying this ship is from a parallel universe?” asked West. “Exactly. The Philadelphia experiment is just an urban legend in our reality, but it did take place in several alternate realities. This ship is the Eldridge, it’s just not the Eldridge from our universe.” “And it’s overlapping universes?” “I think it’s more accurate to say that there are many universes overlapping the Eldridge. The point is that right now we’re no longer in the same space-time continuum. The only reason we can communicate is because we’re both at the focal point of the Eldridge effect.” “The Eldridge effect?” Jason asked. “Did you just make that up?” “It sounds better than Entropy Island, don’t you think?” West gave a frustrated sigh. “So you’re saying this entropic zone isn’t natural?” “Yes. It’s a pocket of normal space that’s been warped by an energy field from this machine.” “Well, here’s a thought: let’s turn it off.” “It can’t be turned off,” Kelvin explained. “The idiots who built this thing didn’t realize the energy field could bleed into other universes. That’s probably what caused the phase space to collapse.” “So we have to retrace our steps all the way back to the main deck and hope we come out in the same universe we left.” “I think that’s our best plan,” Kelvin said. “We’ll probably lose radio contact again once we leave this room. Try and follow the exact same path you took to get down here.” “That’s easier said than done, Doc,” said West. “The inside of this ship is all twisted around. Even if I move in a straight line, I’m just as likely to end up back where I started.” “Tell me about it,” Kelvin said. “Hey, if you meet yourself offer him a cup of coffee. It’ll make you feel better.

Bryce watched from the deck of the Cole as the Eldridge was towed out of the Elizabeth River by tug. It had been a long day, and the old man was weary. He rubbed his thigh absentmindedly, soothing a dull ache that promised more pain. “You should sink it,” Kelvin said. The scientist leaned against the railing next to Bryce. He looked contemplative but kept his back turned to the Eldridge. It was like he was willing himself not to look at it. “Is that your personal or professional opinion?” asked Bryce. “Both.” “I’m surprised,” Bryce said. “You’d rather sink the ship than study it. That doesn’t sound like an inquiring mind.” “Appealing to my intellectual vanity won’t work,” said Kelvin. “That thing is more dangerous than an atom bomb. Sink it.” “Are you speaking for yourself or for Jason?” Kelvin frowned angrily. He and West had made it off the Eldridge alive, but the experience had taken a psychological toll on Jason. He was in the Cole’s sickbay, passed out courtesy of a tranquilizer from the ship’s surgeon. “The Eldridge could help us understand the nature of entropic zones,” Bryce continued. “You know things are only going to get worse. We need an edge, and this is it.” Kelvin remained silent, stoically refusing to acknowledge that Bryce had a point. “There are so many things we don’t know,” he continued. “What happened to the crew? Why did the Eldridge come here? Don’t you want to find out?” Kelvin folded his arms across his chest. “What happens next?” he finally asked. “The Eldridge will be carried out to sea where she’ll stay until you have a chance to brief the President,” Bryce said. “You’ll have the chance to give him your recommendation on how to proceed.” “I can’t imagine my word will carry much weight,” Kelvin said. “After this, Henry, your word will carry the most weight,” Bryce said. “Even more than mine.” He retreated back into the ship, limping noticeably. Kelvin turned and watched the Eldridge disappear over the horizon. He caught himself hoping it had vanished forever.