Black Balloon

Chapter 10

I began recording the days with tally marks scratched onto the wall, something I'd seen done by Tom Hanks on a deserted island. I knew my first meeting with Gendelman had happened on the 5th, at least that's what he'd told me, and I had a rough idea that the comings and goings of various personnel aligned with a 24-hour cycle. The nurses visited every twelve hours, and just knowing this helped to maintain my natural sleep cycles, as natural as they could be in a room with no windows and with the ultimate jet-lag of being five decades in the past. A LAX to JFK redeye hasn't got shit on time travel.

According to my marks, it was the 21st of November when one of the guards told me I was being relocated.

"Grab your things," he barked.

This was easy because I had none, except my bucket which I left and hoped I'd no longer need. Pissing in a bucket is not so bad but when you've gotta...well, let's just say it's very embarrassing and leave it at that. Every time I went, I prayed Mildred wouldn't pop in and catch me in the act. I tried to time my dumps accordingly. Afterwards, I would ask the guards to empty the bucket immediately which sometimes they would do and sometimes they wouldn't. When a cute girl might visit you at any moment, the last thing you want is a bucket of your own shit sitting in the corner. It's just bad etiquette.

For the past few weeks, Mildred had visited me daily, performing the same physical diagnostic each time. Mrs. Weston, apparently the only other nurse in the building, would come alternately. Their visits were brief and each time I'd try to engage Mildred in conversation with mixed success, usually very little. Mrs. Weston...well she didn't have much to say to me nor I to her. She would chain smoke in my room for five minutes, leaving a thick tobacco stink lingering all over the place. The purpose of these visits I still did not really know, some type of test to see if my vitals were changing or if time travel had caused a lasting physiological effect, or so I assumed.

I followed the guard until we arrived at a part of the facility I'd never been to, the residential barracks.

"Here's your room," he declared, pointing to the door.

"Thanks."

This upgrade in accommodations had been entirely unexpected, but more than welcome. I let myself in, and was alone. My new digs were slightly bigger, ten by ten, but I now had an actual mattress. Two twin bunkbeds stood against opposite walls. I had them both to myself. I guess nobody wanted to be bunkmates with the weird future guy. There were four metal lockers in which to keep my things, if I'd had any. I was also now allowed the privilege of using the community bathrooms down the hall, (under the supervision of armed guard of course), but it meant I could shower regularly and shit in an actual toilet. I suspected Gendelman was to thank for the improvement in my living arrangement.

"You help me, I'll help you."

On the 23rd, Gendelman surprised me with a tour of the compound. He told me all about Station 12, a tuna-can shaped structure he said, a hundred feet high and six hundred feet in diameter, that had been painstakingly constructed deep beneath an already operational military base. An elaborate network of tunnels was slowly excavated over a period of ten years and replaced with a steel and concrete framework. Millions of tons of dirt were trucked away and dumped in the desert, one load at a time to avoid detection by Soviet aerial surveillance. He called it "an engineering feat to rival the Hoover Dam" except entirely unknown to the general public.

Station 12, first proposed during WW2, began as a laboratory to develop hydrogen weapons, but its purpose quickly changed when Gendelman proposed his theoretical anti-matter bomb. He had been instrumental in designing the "guts" of the building, the accelerator that would serve as proof-of-concept for the creation of the exotic material needed to make such a bomb. A much larger accelerator would have to eventually be constructed elsewhere to create the quantities of anti-matter required to actually develop a functioning weapon, but this was far in the distant future and its planning had not yet begun.