reality played with in Hut 4. Yet Turing was a man of great intellect, and equal imagination, well ahead of his day in the many fields he chose to interest himself in. He gave the matter more than passing thought, realizing that the entire logic of his assumption rested on the sole premise that the ship now found to be in the Pacific was indeed the same one that vanished at St. Helena. Yet as one photo after another came in, and reports from coastwatchers out of Milne Bay also fleshed out the information they had on this latest incident, it appeared that the Japanese now had the pleasure, or the horror, of tangling with Geronimo.
Turing had a contact at FRUMEL HQ down in Melbourne, a man named Osborne who fed him everything they had on the incident. It all painted the same picture—the photography, the naval rockets, and now the blackened and wrecked hulls of Japanese destroyers, cruisers and battleships for a change. Appearing right in the middle of a major Japanese offensive, ‘the ship’ had unhinged the whole operation just as the Americans launched a devastating counterpunch at Guadalcanal that also sent three Japanese fleet carriers and most of their planes and pilots to the bottom of the sea. The one-two punch had set the Japanese back on their heels, and changed the whole balance of power in the Pacific. It would be the beginning of an American and Allied offensive there that would not stop until it reached the home waters of Japan, though Turing did not know that just yet.
For now the news was good for a change. It seemed that Geronimo was no respecter of persons when it put to sea. It was ready, willing and quite able to take on all comers, and punish any naval force that tried to impede it. And then, just as it had done twice before, the ship simply vanished again!
Admiral Tovey had been making regular visits to Hut 4 ever since. Like Turing, he also found the notion that the ship had moved in time a bit of a stretch, but if a man of Turing’s credentials could seriously entertain the prospect, then Tovey thought it best to at least consider it as well. Now the Admiral was visiting yet again, with an arm full of new material for the secret files, and an equal number of other questions in mind. He alone had gotten a firsthand look at the men from this ship. He spoke directly with the ship’s Admiral, astounded to learn that they were not monsters or supermen after all, only a ship of men—but they were Russians!
Turing had suspected that himself once, given the place the ship was first spotted by Wake-Walker’s carriers over a year ago. It was well north in the Norwegian Sea; north of Jan Mayan. To learn now that the Admiral of this ship and crew spoke Russian was quite telling. Yet Turing was convinced that the ship, its weapons, and perhaps even its crew could not possibly have come from the Soviet Union he knew in 1942. In fact, Tovey told him that the ship’s Admiral made a point of denying any association or affiliation with Stalin’s Russia. All that did was further reinforce the impossible conclusion Turing had come to in his own mind.
This ship had come from some future time. It’s weapons were decades beyond anything that any nation on this earth could produce. Its Admiral had stated that they had the ability to convert sea water to steam and therefore had no fuel problem, yet they would need something to kindle the heat required to make steam for turbines powerful enough to drive a ship of that size at the speeds reported. They clearly were not burning coal or oil to do so. Only some new propulsion system from a future time seemed to solve that riddle. This Russian Admiral even hinted that he looked upon the events of this war as history. In fact, the only way that the presence of this ship in the Atlantic, the Med and finally the Pacific made any sense at all was to consider it as having come from another era, another future time, perhaps when the theoretical discussions about the possibility of time travel had become a practical reality.
Why was the ship here? Why had it come? Admiral Tovey had made a strong point when he noted that it was indeed a warship that was sent back, not