Beers were passed around, as they sat down on the floor, Shona turned to the alleged time traveller. "So tell me, Johnny. What was this project? And what were you doing on it?"

Johnny looked at her. "So you really want to know? Why?"

Shona shrugged, "Don't mind me, I'm just a very nosey research student.

Johnny thought for a moment. "What the hell! Looks like it's all ancient history now, anyway.'

'You're a physics major right? What do you know about about the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum mechanics?"

"Neils Bohr, right? A fish's not a fish till it's in the net. Or, to put it another way, an electron's state is indeterminable until you decide how to measure it."

"You write papers like that?" Johnny shook his head. "Yeah, depending on how you measure it an electron or a photon , or whatever, will display particle-like, or, wave-like properties. Reality breaks down on a subatomic level. That really used to annoy old Albert. I met him a few times, at Princeton."

"Einstein! You met Einstein?" Shona tried not to stare.

Johnny laughed. "What a crazy cat! He had this idea about about unifying electromagnetic and gravitic fields in a series of cool equations. He wouldn't use quantum mechanics, crazy guy.'

'I was really young and smart enough to see a possible solution and too dumb to know it was impossible."

"You... came up with a solution?" Shona looked sceptical. "We're hardly any nearer now, forty odd, years on."

"Yeah. Man! Neatest piece of non-euclidian, macro-atomic interpolation ever chalked on a blackboard. So good, it got restricted and I got enlisted. In the interests of National Security, of course." He paused. "You wouldn't have heard of, `Project Rainbow.' Before my time. It was way top-secret."

"The name rings a bell, funnily enough." Shona got up and started the computer, quickly connecting to the Net. "Project Rainbow? Nothing to do with evangelical, or disabled, self-help projects, I suppose? Here we are, also called, `The Philadelphia Experiment?'

'Yes, I've heard of that. 1943, A US Navy ship gets teleported from Philadelphia to the Norfolk Naval Base. A hoax. It says here."

"A hoax? It was a crazy business alright, but no scam. Albert had been the only cat available, or able, to finish the theoretical jazz after old Tesla died. Tesla was the cat with the crazy idea of folding enough electomagnetic field energy round a big, steel, boat to make it invisible. Just leaving a dip in the water." Johnny grinned, mirthlessly. "Old Albert knew that was impossible, but Uncle Sam had asked so nicely and there was a war on. `The Battle of The Atlantic' was at its height. Hundreds of ships were being lost to the U-Boat Wolfpacks."

"Anyway, Tesla left a trunk full of papers and sketched out ideas, some crackpot, some not. Basic idea was to create a sort of heat-haze mirage and to side-step the problem of the near infinite amounts of energy required by creating harmonic resonances within the field, nodal points of pressure.'

'Some crewcut with a slide rule, at the Pentagon, realized you'd have to co-ordinate the oscillations in the field using some kind of fast calculating machine. They had access to equipment from England. Some sort of number crunching engines used for codebreaking. They used a lot of vacuum tubes, with thyraton rings acting as counters. Used almost as much juice as the field coils wrapped round the boat. They needed two of these things to run the phase-shift programme and they weighed about half a ton each.'

'They managed to squeeze one of these machines on to the boat and they already had a second one running in the Norfolk Naval Base, decoding U-boat radio messages, about two hundred miles away. They weren't about to move it so they rigged up a land line to carry the output direct to the big, modified, Tesla coils on board. Somebody called them Vibratrons.'

'Tesla left some very neat equations, but they weren't complete. So, Albert used some work he'd been doing on his unified field theory to turn them into algorithms for input. They fed the instructions into the beasts using modified solenoid switches and player piano rolls. Trouble is, the finished set of equations were too good."

He shrugged. "They described the space/time context for the mass of the boat almost too the last rivet. The technology really let them down. Albert was never big on the physical side of things. Tubes and valves run hot, they spray electrons about like lawn sprinklers. That put everything out of phase, not enough to snafu the experiment, just enough to describe a larger mass of denser, more coherent, matter, a steel boat and fittings in this case, in a microscopically different continuum from less dense, more amorphous matter, like the crew. Some sailors suddenly found themselves fused into the hull.'

'The boat vanished, only to reappear, immediately, at the Norfolk base. Nobody knew what had happened. Albert reckoned that, maybe, additional computations, written into the programme to correct the land-line delay between the two computation machines had sought the most logical way to put the resonating field back in phase. The ship was simply in the wrong continuum and became translocated.'

'Immediately, the external power cables and the land-lines were sheared through. No power, no modulation corrections, the batterys of super-capacitors discharged and a lot of excess energy was suddenly dissipated as intense heat." He shook his head sadly. "Only a few of the guys survived, not all of them were driven crazy. A couple of guys were even translocated elsewhere. There were really weird side effects, a few of the survivors were still experiencing them years later."

"Albert had had enough. He'd already been having his doubts about the A-bomb. This was too much. Heck. He was a nice guy. Nobody else knew enough to work out what had actually happened and the whole project was put on ice, labelled Over-Top-Secret, and sat on for 10 years until they found an ex-Nazi, Professor Von Slaggerhamer who claimed he could handle it. He's the guy that got me dragooned into `Project Over'."

"Project Over? What kind of name is that?" Asked Shona.

"Over the Rainbow,' you dig? It was all kind of cool at first. Von Slagerhamer even seemed like an okay guy. Smart, on the beam. I was on the big team, top level priority, unlimited funding. If I wanted something and it could be built, it was there, or on the way."

"Yeah." He paused. "We were getting real close. Things were running real smooth and progressing fast. I kept a load of stuff inside my head. Real weird equations. Multi-dimensional, not just 3 or 4D. Man! I mean, 7, 9 and eleven dimensional vector equations, floating there, just waiting for me to figure them out on paper.'

'Von Slagerhamer got on my case. He wanted results yesterday at the latest. Just when I thought I was going to go into orbit, I got a phone call from an old girlfriend. She wanted to see me, urgently. I took the T-Bird and high tailed it for UCLA."

He smiled. "Yeah, Man! Paula is some crazy chick! She's English, really on the ball! She's a biology post-grad, specialising in alien lifeforms. You heard of `Exobiology?' Maybe you've heard of her old man, Professor Quatermass? Head of the British Experimental Rocket Group."

"Yeah? I met Paula in this cool little coffeeshop near Berkley. She hadn't mentioned it by name, just said, the usual place. we always used to hang out there. She was waiting for me, looking worried. I soon found out why. She asked me what I thought of Von Slagerhamer. She said that her old man had asked her about me. He was looking for a new assistant.'

'When he heard who I was working for, he nearly bugged out. Sent her a file, through a friend in the British Embassy." He shook his head. "She passed me the file under the table. I Stuffed it in my jacket. It was all secret spy, stuff.'

'I really like, liked that chick." He sighed. "I high tailed it back to Nevada. I was technically AWOL. But, I pulled up in the middle of the desert to read Von Slagerhamer's file. Yeah. What a nice guy. I'd heard rumours about the War and Nazi witch doctors. But, somehow, I couldn't see the good old Uncle Sam really employing any of the really crazies. Von Slagerhamer was way up there with Doc Mengeles. He looked really sharp in the photos, in his SS uniform. He'd been a real 'wunderkind.' When the Ratzi's had got wind of Project Rainbow, they pulled him out of his studies as a teen genius and gave him access to all the top secret stuff they had under wraps. They even had a pile of Albert's and Tesla's papers, stolen from garbage cans. They planned to transport troops and armor right into the heart of Britain and America using their version of Project Rainbow."

He snarled. "They experimented on live subjects, lots of live subjects. Slave labourers, POW's, but mostly on concentration camp victims. Yeah, he personally, had hundreds, thousands of people burned, irradiated, fried, turned inside out, fused into blocks of steel and killed in his experiments. And Uncle Sam knew all about it."

"When I got I back to camp I stowed the file under my mattress. I couldn't think straight. I got carpeted for leaving the compound without permission. Von Slagerhamer was wigging out! I had data to input into the electronic brains. He wanted the first full scale trials to take place the following day.'

'I inputed the data alright... and built in a reset that would set up an unstoppable chain reaction in the 'Vibratrons' as soon as they were discharged for the first time. I don't know what I was thinking of. That was the day before yesterday, my time.'

'When I got back to my hut I just crashed out. The next morning we had an early start. I started thinking clearly again. I decided to to take the file to the head of military operations and let him see it. He'd been in Europe from D Day on and hated Von S's guts. I looked under the mattress. The file was gone! I turned the place upside down. Not a sign." He shook his head. "I didn't have time to worry about it. I got a call, they were ready to fire up the system. and wanted me to make some final adjustments to the transponder at the center of the transportation device, `Ground Zero'. I went straight to the Transporter chamber. I climbed up the ladder and stood there, between the two giant Field Plates, with the vibratrons already charging. After that, it's all a blur!