Jake moved to an unoccupied length of window. By putting his face next to the glass that leaned out from the top, he could see that three hundred feet below a grassy airfield waited. He strained to see what was to the right and left beyond the cabin: long stretches of silver-gray fabric, and above them a bulging gray fabric shelf that blocked part of the sky. No wings, he thought. We’re in a blimp.
Cars the size of matchboxes covered the ground on one side of a long wooden building. People ran beneath them. He hoped the glass wouldn’t mess up the recorder’s images.
The muttonchopped man said, “We’re tail heavy. If those folks don’t watch out below, they’ll get a good soaking.”
“How so, dear?” asked his wife. She smiled at him, a brief look, then she gazed out again.
“Water ballast.”
A nearly subsonic, mechanical thump bumped the room, then the people who’d been running scattered, their hands covering their heads as water streamed down from somewhere aft of the cabin. The muttonchopped man laughed.
Martin sidled up beside Jake. “Look at this,” Martin whispered, holding the menu he’d retrieved from the table.
Jake scanned the German text. “Nice wine list. Do you want the beef broth with marrow dumplings or the cold Rhine salmon with spiced sauce and potato salad?” He could barely keep from giggling. They had done it!
“No, not the food. Look at the name.” He stabbed a finger at the top of the page.
Trying to settle his heart, trying to keep the grin off his face, Jake read the heading.
“We’re going to Hindenburg? Is that where this airfield is?” Were the people he’d listened to American or English tourists on holiday in Germany?
Martin shook his head. “No, no. We’re on the Hindenburg. The zeppelin. The Hindenburg.”
Jake’s computer squeaked for attention with a bone-induction message only he could hear: The Hindenburg, first commercial flights in 1936. Final flight, May 6, 1937. Gas volume of 7,062,000 cubic feet. Gross lift of 242.2 tons. Originally designed for helium, the ship…” Jake flicked the voice off.
Ahead and to the left of the ship, a solid-looking tower of crossbeams and heavy struts awaited them. The zeppelin turned ponderously toward it.
The tower slid slowly toward the front of the ship. The grass below had given way to cement and tarmac, dark with long puddles of standing water. Fragments of the ship’s reflection shown back at them.
“When are we on the Hindenburg?” said Jake. A crew member opened one of the windows so the passengers could see better. A refreshing, rain-scented breeze filled the cabin.
Martin tapped his finger against the top of the menu impatiently. “What does it matter? We’re on the Hindenburg. The go-down-in-flames-oh-the-humanity Hindenburg.”
“It does matter. The Hindenburg flew for a year before it blew up. If it’s 1936, we’re in great shape. Can you imagine? 1936! Franklin Roosevelt is president. The Berlin Olympics. The Spanish Civil War. Picasso is alive, and so is Errol Flynn and Ginger Rogers. We can go to Hollywood! What are the odds of all the places and times in the world that we’d end up on the Hindenburg in 1937 when it goes down?”
“Why are we in an airship at all?” Martin looked out the window at the ground. “Brownson said temporal and physical destinations were random. No guessing where we’d end up, but this seems precise. If we’d arrived ten feet that way,” he waved beyond the cabin, “our visit here would have been short.”
Long cables dropped from the front of the ship. Men on the ground ran to catch them. The hum that pervaded the background shifted, and the cabin shuddered. Jake braced a hand against the slick metal window sill to compensate for the change in speed.
Martin shook his head. He stepped around Jake. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to the man with muttonchops. “My friend here is a little confused. Would you tell him what year it is?”
Before the man could answer, Jake heard a soft pop from outside the window, like a gas burner being turned on. The woman with the cane over her arm leaned out the open window, looking up. “What is that, dear?” She reached behind her without turning her head and grabbed the muttonchopped man’s wrist. “It’s like a sunrise.”
A pink and yellow glow brightened the zeppelin’s fabric toward the tail. Jake leaned out too to record the image, but the soft glimmer turned into flames racing toward them, furiously fast.
Jake pushed away from the window.
“It’s on fire!” someone screamed. The floor began to sink beneath their feet.
Martin faced Jake, his expression serious. “1937.”
They reached for their panic switches under their shirts at the same time. Before the world blinked away, the muttonchopped man and the woman with the cane threw themselves out the window. We’re still 300 feet above the ground, Jake thought before it all flickered and they were back in the laboratory.
Collapsed in a chair, Jake still breathed in interrupted hitches, his heart pounding in his throat. His hand fluttered as he reached for the coffee cup. Martin, though, bustled from his workbook full of figures, to the computer, and back again.
“Nothing in Brownson’s notes said we could end up in a zeppelin.”
Jake closed his hand on the cup. Gripped hard to stop the shaking. “Not any zeppelin. The Hindenburg.” He shut his eyes for a second, but he could see the mooring mast looming in front of him, beams and struts reflecting a hard, blazing light. In his vision, the woman, her cane still carefully tucked over her arm, tumbled out the window after her husband.
Martin ran his finger down a line of notes, turned the page, kept reading. “A hundred to four hundred years in the past, Brownson said. Location variable. But the math kept us on the ground I thought. Of course, the damn math never made any sense in the first place. Equations never balanced equally. Nothing reduced perfectly. Nothing was absolute.”
Jake shivered as he pushed away from the chair, glad for the coffee’s heat. From their lab’s single window, he could see the tar paper and gravel roof running to a low, brick border. Beyond that, a few clouds rested on the horizon. Their lab perched on the roof of the industrial park’s highest building. If he opened the door and walked to the edge, a handful of equally nondescript structures with equally bland roofs would lay out before him, like a bleak checkerboard. They were far from Brownson’s destroyed lab and whoever bombed it. He remembered the last time they’d seen Brownson, his only hand protectively over the top of the device, the place for the sleeve for his other arm sewn shut at the shoulder. No sleeve dangled. “Don’t want it catching in the equipment,” he’d said. Brownson, now, was gone, in explosion and fire, like the passengers on the Hindenburg.
“Those people are all dead.”
Martin looked up from the notebook. “You’re being sentimental. They’ve been dead for two hundred and fifty years. Their children are dead too, and their children. But if you’re talking about the people on the Hindenburg we saw, that’s not true. Only thirty-three died because of the crash. Sixty-two lived.”
The flames had come down so fast. “Only thirty-three?” Jake’s mouth was dry. Every swallow hurt.
After a moment, Martin, his voice distracted and preoccupied, said, “Yes, and two dogs. The rest got out when the ship was low enough. Didn’t your computer tell you all this?”
“I turned it off.”
Jake could still feel the radiant heat. The people screaming, all of them at once. The floor slipping away toward the ship’s tail. Glassware tumbling from the tables, and chairs falling toward the back wall. He had kept pressing the panic switch. How long would the device take to snatch them back? What if it wouldn’t?