For a moment Borman thought Menzel might refuse, but the scientist held out the report. “By all means. I’ll need it back, but take all the time you need.”
A ship’s steward was dutifully standing guard outside the Mess. He directed them along a series of narrow corridors to their sleeping quarters. They were grander than Borman had expected. The suite of rooms began with a large conference space where a table for at least a dozen people occupied only about half the chamber. From a door at the rear of the conference room they entered a separate lounge, off which there were a series of bedrooms. Each of them would have a room to himself. There was even a private bathroom at the rear of the suite.
Captain Fifield joined them as they squared themselves away. “I think you’ll be comfortable here,” he said. “This suite was designed to accommodate an admiral and his aides.”
Borman smiled in appreciation. “After what we’ve been used to, this is a palace.”
“Get some sleep. We’ve organised a dinner in your honour for tonight. But that’s hours away. Until then, make yourselves at home.”
Once more, Fifield made a rapid exit, making sure to usher their steward out ahead of him lest the sailor started having other ideas.
“We’ve got to tell Menzel what we saw out there,” Lovell told Borman quietly.
“Do you really think it’ll make a blind bit of difference?” Anders asked.
Borman held up his hands in surrender. “I can’t do this right now. I’d really like to stop smelling like a sweaty boot someone threw up in. I need a shower and some rest. We all do.”
Captain Fifield found Dr Menzel waiting for him in the corridor just outside the astronauts’ suite.
“Something else I can do for you, doctor?”
“No, no, you’ve been most accommodating, Captain Fifield. I just wanted to inform you that I will be in my quarters for the next couple of hours and do not wish to be disturbed.”
Fifield paused before responding, apparently seeking to choose his words carefully. “Thank you for letting me know. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
Alone in the claustrophobic cell the Yorktown reserved for visiting officers — and confident he would not be interrupted — Dr Menzel began preparations for a quick side trip. He planned to be away from the ship and back again before the astronauts arose and before anyone else realised he had gone.
The Yorktown was cruising in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The nearest island was several hundred miles away, yet it was but one small step to Donald Menzel’s next destination. In taking that step, he would, in all likelihood, no longer be at sea. From his frame of reference, the journey would be unremarkable. Mundane. Like stepping through a doorway — for that was precisely what he would be doing.
He removed the small Hub device from his coat pocket and stared at it. The multi-dimensional transporter never ceased to amaze him. The power it placed at his disposal meant his single step became a very bold leap indeed. He twisted a small dial on the face of the unit to point directly at a small red light now flashing midway along its row of indicators. This activated the wormhole. A bubble of space-time now rippled around him like a sphere-shaped gateway. He took a single step to pierce the sphere and, in so doing, was transported across the vortex that connected him to his pre-determined destination. He was folding space, just as Einstein had postulated. Actually he was doing much more than that, but Menzel took a certain comfort in maintaining a stubborn finger hold on the fundamentals of relativity.
As surely as if he was walking through the exterior door of a building, the world around him changed immediately. The walls, ceiling and floor of the chamber in which he now stood were solid concrete. The large room was cool and, from the smell of the air, mechanically ventilated. He had no idea of his physical location, but figured it to be somewhere deep underground.
There was a very neat and precisely ordered lab set up in one corner of the chamber. Transistors, wires and diodes were stacked in colour-coded arrays and clearly designated work areas. In another corner, he noticed what appeared to be a small open-plan apartment: a couch and two single seater chairs faced one another across a plush and decorative Persian rug, the seating area lit by a standing lamp and the entire scene looking rather like a stage set. Behind this makeshift lounge room, against the wall of the chamber, was a kitchen bench and a refrigerator.
Positioned in his line of sight, right between the lab and the lounge, two men were waiting for him. Neither was shocked at his sudden materialisation. There was, after all, nothing miraculous about it when the science was laid bare.
He immediately recognised one of the men. Father Clarence Paulson walked forward and held out his hand. “Good to see you again, Donald.”
Menzel shook Paulson’s hand. “Father.”
A Catholic priest would never have been Menzel’s first choice for a role such as this. Admittedly, he didn’t rate priests as having any useful purpose, yet he had been forced to accept Paulson’s pivotal role in many of his most clandestine endeavours. He headed an unacknowledged research group known as the Verus Foundation. It was tasked with collating all of the world’s greatest secrets and recording them for the purposes of humanity’s betterment.
It was a noble task, one Menzel himself approved of — an official record of all human and non-human endeavour sensitive enough to be classed as Beyond Top Secret. Outside Verus, this knowledge was often held by no more than a handful of people. Without Verus, there was a risk that some or all of this knowledge might one day be forgotten or misplaced, thus becoming lost forever to humanity. Verus took this task seriously, knowing its records may likewise remain secret for decades, perhaps even hundreds of years, but that ultimately all of humanity would benefit.
Part of the reason the foundation was trusted for the task was that Clarence Paulson was a man who held himself beyond external influence. He didn’t even have to answer to the Pope. Paulson worshipped only at the Tree of Knowledge.
“I’d like you to meet David Donovan,” said Paulson. “He’s our man in Washington.”
“A pleasure, David.” Menzel held his hand out to the other man. “A war hero, I’m led to believe.”
“Navy Lieutenant Commander, retired. Highly decorated,” said Paulson.
“Like father, like son,” Menzel replied.
Wild Bill Donovan was the colourful founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. Some people called him the father of US intelligence. His son was not so much of a known quantity, although in the years before Wild Bill’s death in 1959, his mind slowly falling victim to the corrosion of dementia, he had insisted that David was the only person he trusted to replace him at the Verus Foundation.
“An honour to meet a member of the original MJ-12,” said Donovan, shaking Menzel’s hand vigorously with a vice-like grip.
Menzel smiled half-heartedly. It always made him nervous to hear mention of Operation MAJESTIC-12, the top secret research and development group originally answerable only to President Harry S. Truman, now so highly classified that no president since Eisenhower had even been informed of its existence.
“I don’t usually speak about such things,” Menzel told him quietly.
“You can relax,” Paulson assured him. “We’re 30 feet underground and there’s four feet of concrete above your head. Nobody can hear a word.”
“That’s comforting… I think.”
Unless the room itself was bugged, although Menzel knew this would be highly unlikely. Paulson had succeeded in keeping all Verus operations very much under the radar.
“Father told me a lot about you,” said Donovan. “I think he was jealous as hell Truman never included him in your dozen.”