about something that had supposedly happened back in the midsixties. Then Senator Barry Goldwater, who’d been the Republican nominee for president in 1964, had had a long-standing fascination for UFOs. A major general in the USAF, a senator from Arizona, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’d repeatedly tried to gain access to the Blue Room.
In 1994, Goldwater appeared on Larry King Live to talk about UFOs. According to him, he’d asked no less a personage than the chief of staff for the US Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, for help in getting into the Blue Room. According to Goldwater, LeMay had gone ballistic. Furiously angry, madder than Goldwater had ever seen him, he’d cussed the senator out, then told him, “Don’t you ever ask me that question again!”
Someone—quite probably someone not in the regular chain of command—took secrecy about UFOs very seriously indeed. It seemed that not even the President was told everything … and often he was told nothing.
They touched down at Wright-Patterson and were driven to a nondescript office building somewhere in the middle of a forest of hangars, offices, and storage sheds. They were met in the lobby, just inside an initial security checkpoint, by an Air Force major named Frank Benedict, who took a clipboard from Gilroy, signed something on it, and handed it back. It was, Hunter thought, very much like the chain-of-custody receipt required when prisoners were transferred from one keeper to another.
Were they prisoners? It was distinctly possible. Hunter did not imagine for a moment that he could tell Benedict “so long!” then turn on his heel and walk away.
Benedict took his time looking through a sheaf of orders that had been transmitted to his command. “Lieutenant Commander Mark Hunter?” he asked, looking up.
“Yes, sir.”
“Master Chief Arnold Minkowski.”
“Present, sir!”
“Chief Roger Brunelli.”
“Here, sir.”
“EN1 Thomas Taylor.”
“Yes, sir.”
“RM1 Ralph Colby.”
“Yes, sir.”
“… and TM1 Frank Nielson.”
“Yessir.”
“Okay. You men have received USAP clearance levels, and I have been directed to show you what is popularly known as ‘the Blue Room.’ I will remind you that all of you have signed security paperwork in which you’ve promised not to divulge anything that you see here … right?”
A chorus of “yessirs” sounded from the Navy personnel.
“You breathe a word about any of this and you’ll be out on your ears so fast your heads will spin. You’ll lose your pensions, your reputations, and even your identities, so no one will believe a thing you say. And then you’ll spend a minimum of twenty years in Portsmouth for violating the Secrets Act. You all hear me?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Just so that’s clear.”
Benedict then ushered them down a series of halls, through various twists and turns, with stops at each of an additional five security checkpoints. During the journey, the six men were scanned for metal, photographed, fingerprinted, had their retinas examined, and gave voice prints. Finally, they took an elevator down; Hunter couldn’t begin to guess how far down, but it was quite a way. The descent took almost a full minute.
The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and Hunter and the other SEALs stepped into another passageway with another checkpoint. Here they had their palms scanned and their retinas checked again, before a massive steel door hissed open …
… and Hunter wondered just how far down the rabbit hole they’d gone.
“TIME TRAVEL,” Dr. Lawrence Brody said with an air of utter dismissal, “is bunk.”
“Physics says that, does it?” Navy captain Frederick Groton said.
“Exactly. Where would causality be if we could zip back in time and kill our own grandfathers?”
Brody and Groton were in the mess hall of a facility so secret that the government had only recently even admitted that the place existed—despite ample evidence from satellite photos and the unwinking gaze of Google Earth. Area 51 was very, very real. And actively being used.
“My understanding,” Groton said slowly, “is that if we changed history somehow, we would simply move over to an alternate time line, one where we had never been born. No paradox. The universe—the multiverse, I should say—would never allow that.”
“An entire universe—hundreds of billions of galaxies, quintillions of stars, worlds and civilizations without number, all of it identical to this one, down to the smallest detail except for my existence—created in an instant just because I shot dear old Gramps before my father was conceived? The universe is wasteful, Captain, but not that wasteful. It certainly doesn’t create an entire universe around the absence of one man.”
“That, as I understand it, is the basic theory behind the many-universe concept.”
“Captain … do you have a degree in astrophysics? In cosmology? In quantum dynamics?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I do—all three! And I’m telling you that quantum theory does not support so absurd a statement about the nature of the cosmos. How do you summon an entire universe out of nothing? Where does all that matter come from in the blink of an eye? Where is the energy, man?”
“I believe the idea,” Groton said, “is that this other universe already exists. That, in fact, every universe that could possibly exist does exist—including one where your grandfather was regrettably killed as a young man. Not an infinite number, certainly, but a very, very, very large number of them. Rather than creating a new universe, a better way to say it might be that you simply step from one reality to another.”
“Yes, Captain, I know. You needn’t lecture me on cosmology.”
“That was not my intent, Doctor. But I am telling you that time travel is possible. We know it to be true because we’ve done it.”
“Bullshit! Where’s your proof?”
Groton melodramatically patted his white uniform jacket. “Damn. I must have left it in my other coat.”
“Very funny.”
A woman approached the table, holding a tray of food. “Hello, Captain,” she said. “May I join you?”
“Of course!” He rose, gesturing to a chair, and Brody managed to get to his feet a moment later. The woman was, simply put, impossibly gorgeous. There was no other word for it. Brody was fifty-five years old, but his hormones were kicking in with all the force and red-faced stammer of a sixteen-year-old adolescent boy. The woman was tall and slender with large and startlingly blue eyes; long silver hair, though her face looked like she was only in her twenties; and a silver jumper or suit of some sort that Brody was prepared to swear was spray painted onto her body.
“Please sit, gentlemen,” this vision told them.
“Elanna,” Groton said, “this is Dr. Brody, our professor of astrophysics on the Big-H. Dr. Brody? Elanna.”
“A pleasure, Doctor.” She extended one slender hand.
Somehow, Brody managed to take the hand, and felt her give it a squeeze.
“We were just discussing time travel, Elanna,” Groton said. “Dr. Brody was explaining to me why time travel is impossible.”
She laughed. “Really? Do tell me!”
Brody’s