Our Hopes for Tomorrow Began Yesterday - 1. Incursions

Temporal Incursion 1939-10-14 Able 00:58

Scapa Flow, Scotland

HMS Royal Oak

Boy Seamen’s Berths

Ian McAlister was utterly knackered. Who would have guessed there would be so much work on an old battleship like Royal Oak riding at anchor? It was hard, dirty work that took more back than brains.

At sixteen, Ian was one of the older boy seamen aboard and eligible to enlist in the Royal Navy on his next birthday. The rest of the boys in his section were fourteen to sixteen. They had been busy scraping rust and painting the twenty-five-year-old Revenge class battleship as part of the preparations for making her ready to go to sea to face, as his father called them, the Bosch.

Ian had been asleep for several hours. He had a brilliant dream about a big-breasted red-haired lassie who served fish & chips in a pub favored by the boys.

A voice intruded into his dream, “Ian McAlister, torpedoes from a U-boat are on their way and will strike your berthing compartment in just a few moments. You and everyone in this compartment will be killed instantly. The ship’s magazines will go shortly after.”

Ian awoke, sat bolt upright, and noticed all the boys in the compartment were also awake and looking frightened.

The voice continued, “Your death here tonight would be meaningless. I am from the future. If you agree, we will take you from the moment into the future where you are needed and can have a life. All you must do is agree. Just don’t wait too long.”

Trey Callahan vanished in a flash of greenish-white light that illuminated the compartment. Suddenly the boys began disappearing in numbers. Harry Callahan, Barry Jenkins, Hal Holman, Jerry Nash…

Ian said, “Bloody right, I agree.”

He, too, vanished.

Seconds later, a German torpedo impacted the berthing compartment causing a pressure wave that would have pulverized human flesh to a fine mush, followed by the rushing of cold seawater of the Atlantic.

In rapid succession, the other two torpedoes knocked out the ship’s electrical power and started fires that were impossible to control without water pressure to the fire hoses.

Men and boys had little time to escape as the fires found a magazine, and a tremendous explosion gutted the old ship. Royal Oak took on an ever-increasing list and sank beneath the waves in just a few minutes.

Temporal Incursion 1940-08-02 tango 22:42

North Sea

U-25, Aft Engineering Spaces

Twenty-year-old Franz Muller knew he was in deep trouble. U-25 had been hit hard in the forward torpedo room, much of the boat was flooded, and all power was dead. The submarine was lying on the bottom of the North Sea.

The explosion had cracked the pressure hull, and the North Sea’s cold water was ankle-deep. To make matters worse, the sub had rolled over thirty degrees making it extremely difficult to move around the pitch-dark engineering spaces. He and his fellow engineers Karl Schmitt and Hans Beck were the only ones left for all he knew.

The cold was making him sleepy, and the air was getting thick. Their time was running short.

A voice came to him, “Franz, this sub will implode soon, and you and your mates will die. I offer you a way out. I am from the future where we have great need of your service. Your life in this time is done. If you agree to come into the future, you can have a life that will have meaning.”

There was a creek, a tearing sound, and a rivet popped with a gunshot.

Karl exclaimed, “Hol mich hier raus!” (Get me out of here!)

There were three greenish-white flashes as Franz, and his fellow surviving crewmen vanished seconds before the pressure of the North Seas waters crushed the stricken U-boat.

Temporal Incursion 1941-12-07 whiskey 08:05

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Battleship Row

USS Arizona

Whitey Forrest and his division mates, Kevin Greer and Matt Rush were in trouble. Their ship had been hit and they were trapped in their berthing compartment behind a warped hatch. The ship’s general quarters alarm was blaring, and the three teen-aged seamen were trapped.

Suddenly, despite all the noise and explosions, all three heard a voice directed to them individually.

“Whitey, in a few moments a Japanese dive bomber will put a thousand-pound bomb in the forward magazine. Arizona will be blown apart from frame ten to frame seventy. No one in this part of the ship will survive.”

Whitey could tell that his friends had heard that. They all turned pale.

“I am contacting you from centuries in the future where you are needed. If you agree, we can get you out of there and you can have a meaningful life. Chose quickly, time is short.”

All three of the young men decided and vanished. Seconds late a bomb pierced Arizona’s magazine and the forward part of the ship exploded in the largest loss of life to date for the United States Navy.