January 3, 1941
Berlin
Berlin
Humboldt University was quiet.
It had been quiet for years. Founded in 1810, Humboldt was once home to Germany’s greatest thinkers, doctors, philosophers, and legal scholars. It had once been a sprawling campus filled with undergraduates eager to take classes in arts and the humanities.
There had been no classes for a while.
A huge segment of the university- students, scholars, and anti-Nazi activists- had been ejected in 1933, followed by hundreds of Jewish professors and employees. Enrollment had all but stopped. The professors who remained did not teach. Humboldt could no longer truly be called a university, but rather a research center.
Down in the basement floor of the Peithman Physics Laboratory, Klaus Foerster stood hunched over a mass of papers in his office, tugging absently at his hair as he scrawled equations down.
For Klaus, the absence of students came as something of a relief. He’d never loved lecturing to auditoriums full of undergraduates, wherein students invariably fell asleep while he tried desperately to make theoretical physics seem interesting. Nor was he overly fond of grading exams, holding office hours, or interacting with students, really.
No- he much preferred the quiet of his lab. The entire basement floor the Peithman building had been sectioned off for Klaus and his research team- something that would have met considerably more resistance if half the physics department hadn’t been fired in 1933. Even so, Humboldt’s greatly reduced physics department was still formidable, and it was here that groundbreaking research was being done to aid the war effort.
Klaus scribbled happily away for another twenty minutes, then sat up abruptly. “Mat!” he yelled.
Mathis Auttenberg, research assistant and lab engineer, poked his head into Klaus’s office.
“How’s Adel?”
Mat shrugged. “She’s great. Little temperamental today, but you can give her a poke.”
The pride and joy of the laboratory was the artificial reactor, against which Klaus’s team had been attempting to sustain a slow-neutron chain reaction with uranium and graphite. It was a monster of a machine, occupying a good third of the underground lab. The team had affectionately named it Adelheid.
They’d been hoping to achieve a chain reaction of nuclear fission. They’d been expecting a chain reaction.
On July 31, 1940, they gave it a trial run.
Adelheid displayed the result. The reactor was now a safeguard for a large glass canister, inside was hosted something that appeared like a floating black sphere. Closer examination showed that it was not a sphere at all but some sort of hole, as if a tear had been ripped in the fabric of the room itself. By itself, the black hole didn’t do much, but anything that made it past the glass barrier and came too close was immediately absorbed, disappearing into nothingness.
This they knew well. Mat had lost a finger in February.
They’d learned to be careful. They’d erected barriers, donned protective equipment, and approached the sphere with painstaking caution. For all their efforts, the hole had affected them all- was still affecting them all. Mat had taken to bursting into flames at random intervals. Aaron, who worked in the medical lab next door, had a terrifying tendency to turn transparent. Klaus was involuntarily making things float, which was why every chair and table had been nailed down into the floor. Just last night he’d woken up to find himself floating a good three feet above his bed.
None of them knew what was happening to them; no one had a clue how to explain it. Somehow, it had never occurred to any of them to be afraid. It was just so damn interesting. The entire team, despite their recent baffling transformations, was acting like children who’d been given a new toy. Ironically enough, they’d labeled it magic. The Zauber Project, they called it. It was an inside joke of sorts, an acknowledgement within a circle of men devoted to the scientific method that they’d stumbled upon something that simply could not be explained with science.
They didn’t know what to do with the sphere, so their plan was to try everything. Their latest approach was to introduce a stream of various noble gases into the canister and measure the output.
“Alright, darling,” Klaus muttered as he rolled up his sleeves. Several canisters of gas were lined up on the counter, ready to be opened. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
~
Noon came and went. At half past one, Klaus glanced at the clock, nearly dropped his clipboard in panic, and hastily began putting away his lab equipment. He stopped briefly by the medical laboratory before he left, where Aaron and Mat appeared to be having a heated discussion about safety gloves.
“I’m heading out,” he told them.
“Meeting Ros?” Mat queried.
Klaus nodded.
“Still don’t believe she’s real,” Mat singsonged.
A flask erupted near Mat’s head as Klaus pulled out his coat, eliciting curses from behind the door. Klaus grinned as he climbed up the basement stairs and left the laboratory.
He’d been seeing Ros Wolff from the linguistics department for several months now, and in Klaus’s opinion, their relationship was even more inexplicable than the black hole contained in the basement laboratory. Ros was charming, lovely, the pinnacle of Aryan perfection. They’d first gone out for drinks the day Klaus and his team discovered the black hole, and in Klaus’s mind, the two incidents were equal in sheer improbability.
She was waiting at the Czech diner they were so fond of, mostly for its cheapness and proximity to campus. Klaus slid into the booth, apologizing profusely for his tardiness.
“Caught up in something at the lab- we’re doing something with gases, those are tricky if you don’t measure them carefully- cibulacka, side of bread,” he told the waiter without looking at the menu.
Ros knew next to nothing about what Klaus was actually studying, which was already more than what she was supposed to know, but Klaus was finding it harder and harder to keep the Zauber Project a secret from her. So far he’d managed to discuss his work in vague, inscrutable terms like “energy” and “radiation”, and it helped that Ros didn’t have a degree in science, but the involuntary telekinesis posed a larger problem. Klaus fervently hoped they’d answer the mystery of the black hole before Ros saw him floating in the air.
Klaus leaned back in his chair, tapping his fingers against the table. “You’re looking wan,” he observed suddenly, noticing Ros’s demeanor. “Something the matter?”
