CHAPTER 2 – REMEMBERING BERLIN
19:37 (Washington Time)
Sunday, April 21, 1985 ‘C’
Pan Am ticket counter
Washington International Airport
Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
The female Pan Am employee smiled on seeing the little girl carried in the arms of a young woman who had just stepped in front of her section of ticketing counter.
‘’Oooh, she is so cute! How old is she, miss?’’
‘’She is two and a half years old, miss.’’ replied Ingrid before presenting two passports to the employee. ‘’I have reserved two seats on this evening flight to Hamburg and prepaid them via credit card. Here are our passports. Would it be possible to get seats in the kindergarten section of the aircraft?’’
‘’One moment, please… Yes, you are in luck, miss. Let me register you in, then I will weigh your luggage.’’
The employee started typing Ingrid’s personal information written in her passport into the Pan Am’s computer databank but soon hesitated and looked up at Ingrid.
‘’Uh, there must be a mistake in your passport, miss: it says that you were born in 1925.’’
‘’It is not a mistake, miss: I was born in 1925. I am retired General Ingrid Dows and you must have heard many stories about me.’’
The Pan Am clerk, not being a news addict, took a few seconds to remember some of those stories she had watched on television and to realize who was facing her. With a smile returning to her face, she finished entering Ingrid’s data into her computer, assigning her a seat in the kindergarten section of the Boeing 717-300 which was due to fly to Hamburg in two hours. She however hesitated again when she opened the passport of the little girl and saw her official place of birth.
‘’The U.S.S. PROMETHEUS… Your daughter was born on a ship, miss?’’
‘’On a spaceship, miss.’’ corrected Ingrid, making the employee look closely at Nancy. Only then did she notice the three embroidered round patches sewn on her coat, all of them connected to the epic voyage to Jupiter and Saturn by the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS.
‘’My! She is already quite an accomplished traveler, miss. You will have seats 33A and B. Here are your tickets. If you could now put your suitcases one by one on this luggage scale.’’
Ingrid executed herself, lifting with one hand and without apparent effort each of her two large suitcases and putting them in succession on the scale, while keeping with her one travel bag. She had no purses, contrary to most other women in the airport, as she was wearing one of the adjusted female suits with slightly flared trouser bottoms which she favored, suits which included a number of pockets that precluded the need for a purse. For a young woman like her to be routinely wearing a suit rather than a dress still disturbed or even irked many old-fashioned people around the United States, something that she in turn studiously ignored. In truth, Ingrid thought that the American society was still quite conservative and prudish, not to say hypocritical, on top of still harboring racism in many regions. While she had fought for decades to protect her country of adoption, she was the first to recognize that it was not perfect, by a long shot. Now, she was going to visit her country of birth, Germany, and, with luck, was going to be able to visit what remained of her old family house in Berlin.
With her two suitcases now tagged and on their way to her assigned aircraft, Ingrid walked away from the Pan Am counter, heading towards the departure gates while still carrying Nancy in her arms. Little Nancy was more than capable of walking that distance, but Ingrid liked to feel her daughter close to her and to thus communicate her love for her, something that Nancy returned in spades. Passing first the security checks at the entrance of the departures section, Ingrid then carried Nancy to the boarding lounge assigned to the departure gate of her aircraft. That aircraft, a Pan American Airlines Boeing 717-300, was already parked in front of the gate, so Ingrid went to a seat near the large windows of the lounge and put down Nancy before examining the airliner. The Boeing 717-300 was actually an improved, slightly larger and more powerful variant of the basic Boeing 717, itself a civilian variant of the C-200 military troop transport, whose design she had directed some 35 years ago. In fact, she had either directed or inspired the designs of nearly all the main aircraft types presently in service in the United States and could brag justifiably that she had revolutionized air transport in the United States and around the World and had brought it firmly into the jet age. Even compared to the modern jet airliners Nancy Laplante had known in her own timeline, the Boeing 717 had a decided futuristic, unusual look to it. Ingrid had made its basic design with the help of the technical data files her adoptive mother had with her when she had been involuntarily transported through time from the year 2012 back to 1940. Those data files had in turn allowed Ingrid to avoid wasting a lot of time and resources exploring many dead-end technologies and to learn about phenomenons and concepts without the need for years of experimentations, trials and errors, like how to pass more quickly and safely through the sound barrier. While today’s electronics, particularly concerning computer technology, were still crude compared to what Nancy Laplante had known, in terms of aerodynamics and aircraft design context the Boeing 717-300 Ingrid was now looking at would have impressed the people of the year 2012 ‘A’. A large, wide-bodied airliner with four large turbofan jet engines installed in pairs attached near the tail of its fuselage, the Boeing 717 featured two pairs of wings with their tips attached to large external fuel tanks, thus forming a closed-box-like, diamond-shaped wing, a design feature of many of her aircraft projects. Such diamond wings, with the forward pair swept back and the aft pair swept forward, brought many advantages to their aircraft: a more compact design; more rigid and solid construction; lighter overall weight and high resistance to both aerodynamic spinning and stalling. Ingrid had further added to that concept by inventing what was now known and patented worldwide as the ‘Adaptive Wing Profile’ concept, or AWP in short. Ingrid had developed that concept in 1948, while studying at the Boston’s M.I.T. to obtain her degree in aeronautical engineering. That concept, inspired by limited studies done in Nancy Laplante’s time, studies which had not been pushed to full fruition, replaced the classic leading-edge slats and trailing edge flaps used as hyper sustentation devices on planes, which were in essence a number of separate surfaces extended out from the main wing structure. That, while greatly increasing the area and aerodynamic lift of the wing, also created a lot of aerodynamic drag, which cost extra in both fuel and speed. Ingrid’s AWP concept used instead thin, metallic flexible surfaces sliding in and out of the main wing structure, using a system of internal rails and electrical jacks to form a smooth, curved and continuous surface along both leading and trailing edges. Apart from resulting in much enhanced extra lift while cutting down drastically on drag, the AWP concept also allowed the pilot to vary the wing profile nearly at will in order to adapt it continuously to various flight speeds and conditions. The U.S. Air Force had benefited from that concept at very little cost as Ingrid, as the patent holder, had charged one symbolic dollar for the right of the Air Force to use her patent. Things were however different when it came to commercial aircraft using either or both of her patented diamond wing and AWP concepts. While she could have made a fortune personally by charging what would have been a more typical patent royalty to the civilian aircraft builders using her proprietary concepts, Ingrid had only charged an amount considered by many as ridiculously low for every commercial aircraft built using her patents, including the commercial variants of the military aircraft designed by her. That small amount had however been multiplied tens of thousands of time as the American commercial aircraft industry had basically become dominant around the World. While very few people were aware of this, Ingrid was in reality a millionaire and had been so for over a decade. However, that had not been reflected in any ways by her lifestyle, as she was by nature a truly frugal person. She instead often contributed anonymously to many charities, while of course keeping the receipts of those donations for tax purposes. Now that she was officially retired from the military and thus free to fully take care of Nancy, maybe her spending habits would change, but definitely not to live in luxury and enjoy excesses.
Nancy’s little voice then returned Ingrid to the reality of the boarding lounge.
‘’Mommy, why didn’t Sarah come with us on this trip?’’
Ingrid smiled down to her little daughter while gently taking hold of one of her tiny hands.
‘’Sarah went to take care of other things while we are traveling, Nancy. Sarah is actually quite busy all the time and is helping many other people on top of us.’’
‘’Did she have to travel away, Mommy?’’
‘’In a way, my little treasure.’’ said Ingrid, not wanting to go into details on that subject. In truth, Sarah, or Natai as per her primordial name, was now probably in the Jerusalem of Timeline ‘B’, where she had replaced the defunct Nancy Laplante ‘A’ as Queen of Jerusalem and Overseer of Palestine, using Nancy Laplante’s physical form to continue her reign there. Nancy then surprised her by asking her another question.
‘’Sarah is a queen, Mommy?’’
Throwing a bemused look down at her daughter, Ingrid then understood that Nancy had just read her thoughts, something she had believed would be possible in only a few more years. She then reminded herself that Nancy was of half celestial essence, thanks to having been fathered by Archangel Michael. Who could know how much that could influence her speed of mental growth? She thus answered her via telepathy, as there were over 200 other persons crowding the lounge around them.
‘She is a queen in another parallel world separate from our own world, Nancy. How much of my thoughts can you read?’
‘All of them, Mommy!’ replied proudly Nancy via telepathy, alarming a bit Ingrid.
‘Nancy, you will have to control your ability to read the thoughts around you, both to hide your special talent and to stay safe. It is impolite to read the thoughts of others without their permission. Also, some people could try to find out how you can read minds and could also try to exploit your talent to their profit by forcing you to work for them. I am very serious about this, Nancy. Hide your talent and do not let it appear that you can read minds. The same goes for your talent to make objects fly.’’
‘Would they torture me, like they tortured poor Andrée?’
‘Who?’ asked mentally Ingrid, both shocked and horrified. Nancy’s young face became sober as she answered her mother.
‘Andrée Raymonde Borrel, Mommy. She was once me. She died 41 years ago.’
Ingrid could only fix her daughter with unmitigated surprise for long seconds, speechless. She had been planning to open Nancy’s mind to the souvenirs of her past incarnations with the help of Sarah, but only when Nancy would have been more mature and past the age of at least ten or eleven. Also, at two and a half years of age, Nancy was not supposed to know already how to count, yet alone up to the number 41.
‘How many of your past lives do you remember, Nancy?’
‘Just one, Mommy. However, I feel that more souvenirs are going to come to me soon.’
‘Please tell me about this Andrée Raymonde Borrel, Nancy.’
The way Nancy then answered her told Ingrid that the old Borrel, or at least its souvenirs, truly resided inside her daughter.
‘I was born on November 18, 1919, in Bécon-les-Bruyères, near Paris. When the Germans invaded France, I joined the French Résistance to fight them. Then, I joined the British S.O.E.{1}, who sent me back to France as a clandestine agent in 1942. The Germans captured me in 1943, tortured me and then sent me to the concentration camp of Natzweller-Struthof, in Alsace. I was killed there on July 6 of 1944.’
‘And how much of Andrée’s life do you remember, Nancy?’
‘Everything, Mommy!’ answered mentally Nancy, sadness showing on her face. ‘The Germans were very cruel with me.’
That left Ingrid both alarmed and deeply worried: the implications of this could have profound repercussions on how Nancy would grow and also how fast she would grow. Even the souvenirs from a single past life would be enough to put her completely apart from the other children of the same age. What would happen once Nancy started remembering more past incarnations? She thus decided to test her on a limited but potentially crucial subject.
Did Andrée do things with boys, things that you remember?’
The way Nancy broke into a smile confirmed at once Ingrid’s fears.
‘Yes, I slept with a number of men, if it’s what you meant, Mommy.’
Ingrid hid her face with one hand, suddenly feeling discouraged: the task of raising Nancy, which she had expected to be a pure joy, now could turn into a nightmare full of anxiety and fears, not for what could happen between the two of them but rather because of how others around Nancy could react to her. Some could think of Nancy as a sort of young witch, while older boys and men could be tempted to abuse her because of her past souvenirs about sex.
‘Nancy, listen to me carefully: this is extremely important. You cannot let others, either children or adults, realize that you have special powers and past souvenirs. If they do, they could then either attack and harm you, or try to abuse you and use your body for their own selfish goals. Do you understand me, Nancy?’
‘I do, Mommy! Andrée knew how to keep secrets and I will do the same.’
Ingrid, only half-reassured, then patted gently the head of her little daughter, who had just proved in essence to basically be an adult mind inside a child’s body. One thing then came to her mind and she quickly got out a pen and a small notepad from the pockets of her suit’s jacket, presenting them to Nancy.
‘Here, Nancy! Please write your name on this notepad, plus Andrée’s name if you can.’
Nancy took at once the pen and notepad and, without any apparent difficulty, quickly wrote both names on the pad before giving it back to Ingrid, along with the pen.
‘Here you go, Mommy!’
Ingrid heart jumped when she looked at the two names, which had been written clearly and without a single mistake: her job as a mother and educator for Nancy had just become a lot more complicated and trickier. In contrast to that, Ingrid had remembered her own past incarnations only after she had been fifteen and had already experienced a lot about life, including sex and war.
‘And what language can you speak now, Nancy?’’
‘English, French and German.’ was the immediate mental answer. Ingrid felt more discouragement then: how did you explain to others that a two and a half years-old girl could speak three languages, could write and also could count?
Ingrid was still mentally analyzing her new problem when a Pan Am stewardess announced the start of the passenger boarding for her flight, starting with the handicapped passengers and the parents with babies or small children. Apparently able to sense her disarray, Nancy, being carried in her arms as they went down the jetway’s narrow corridor, touched Ingrid’s face while speaking softly to her.
‘’Don’t worry, Mommy: I promise you that I will behave.’’
That brought tears to Ingrid’s eyes, and she kissed her little daughter on the cheek in response.
‘’Thank you, my sweet Nancy: you can’t know how I appreciate that.’’
‘Yes, I do, Mommy!’ replied mentally her daughter. Ingrid kept it at that and presented her two boarding passes to the Pan Am stewardess waiting at the door of the Boeing 717-300. The young woman looked briefly at them before pointing the entrance to the main passenger cabin.
‘’The kindergarten cabin is situated on the lower deck, at the rear, miss. Cross the length of the main cabin, then go down via the aft spiral staircase. Another stewardess will be there to guide you to your seat.’’
‘’Thank you, miss!’’
As Ingrid and Nancy walked down the main cabin, the pilot of the airliner, who had been standing with his copilot behind the stewardess in order to also greet his passengers, whispered excitedly to his copilot.
‘’Hey, isn’t that the famous General Dows, the commander of the Space Corps who just retired?’’
‘’Uh, I was not daring to think so, in truth, Mack: she looked impossibly young for a full general.’’
‘’That’s the point, John! She is supposed to be close to sixty! I will make a point to talk briefly with her when she will deplane in Hamburg.’’
After going down the long main passenger cabin, with its two aisles and rows of eight-abreast economy-class seats, Ingrid arrived at the aft lobby, which lodged a kitchenette and stewardesses’ station, five toilet stalls, two side exit doors and a spiral staircase going down towards the lower deck of the aircraft. In the C-200, the original military troop transport variant of the B-717, that spiral staircase led down to an armory room where the traveling soldiers could secure their individual weapons in locked weapons racks during the trip, in order to avoid possible accidental discharges. In the civilian B-717 airliner, that armory room had been converted into what had been designated the ‘Kindergarten Room’. That space in the lower tail section of the aircraft was reserved for parents with infants or young toddlers and offered seats facing a playroom where young children could feel less boxed-in, plus a special, extra-large toilet stall where one could comfortably change a baby’s diaper. That kindergarten room was also a strictly non-smoking compartment, another reason for Ingrid to like it, as she was a non-smoker and hated tobacco smoke. Yes, a section of the main passenger cabin was also designated as a non-smoking area, but that notion was more an illusion than a reality, as the majority of Americans still smoked, with no indications that they were about to stop that disastrous habit.
A young stewardess checked again Ingrid’s boarding passes and then pointed the spiral staircase to her.
‘’The seats 33A and B are to the right side of the last row, right next to the playground, miss. I will ask you to keep your little daughter strapped into her seat until we will have taken off and climbed to our cruising altitude.’’
‘’I will, miss.’’
Climbing down the steps of the spiral staircase, Ingrid soon stepped into a compartment that measured a good sixteen meters in length, with a floor width of four meters. Due to being on the lower deck of the round fuselage section, the width at the ceiling was of six meters, making the compartment look even more spacious. First passing by two toilet stalls and a locker for strollers, Ingrid walked through a section reserved for parents with babies and infants, which counted a total of fifteen seats split by a central aisle. Those seats were in turn flanked by padded baby parks with mesh barriers, where babies could be laid during the flight. The next section was separated from the infants’ section by a noise-cutting curtain and counted twenty adult-sized seats in four rows, again split by a central aisle, plus a total of ten smaller, toddler-size seats in elevated positions along the sides. Beyond the last row of seats was a playing area with a length of six meters and a width at the floor of four meters. That playing area contained a full-sized cubic module inside which children could crawl and climb, a long and high slide forming a curve and a large and deep, four meters by two meters colored plastic balls bath with protective rope mesh cage. When Boeing engineers had approached Ingrid in 1953 to ask for her counsels about turning the C-200 military troop transport into a civilian airliner, Ingrid had strongly enjoined them to think of the future passengers as human beings rather than as paying cattle heads and to plan the interior layout of the future B-717 accordingly. One of her recommendations had been to reserve a separate space reserved solely to parents with very young children and babies and to make that space a non-smoking area. Ingrid had been motivated to make her recommendations by her own experience at traveling with her then young daughter Hien in civilian airliners where there were no restrictions against smoking and where the other passengers tended to be irked by the wails of babies and the excess of energy of young children. A few years later, as the B-717 was entering service in a growing number of commercial airlines, the executives of many of those airlines had decided to ignore her counsels and had configured their new aircraft for maximum capacity, keeping seat width and pitch to a minimum in order to pack as many paying passenger as they could inside their B-717s and thus make bigger profits. One company that had followed Ingrid’s counsels and still did was Pan American, whose then boss Juan Trippe had been a good friend of Ingrid. While other airlines mocked what they called the ‘uneconomical policies of Pan Am’, Pan Am had replied that its customers, pleased by the comfort of its planes and the good service offered to them, traveled by preference aboard Pan Am aircraft. One of those loyal customers was Ingrid. As for little Nancy, she got excited at the sight of the play modules and slide and tried to wiggle out of Ingrid’s arms, earning a chiding from her mother.
‘’You heard what the nice stewardess said, Nancy: you will have to wait until we have taken off and climbed to our cruising altitude before you could play.’’
Putting the disappointed Nancy down into her seat, a toddler-sized one with a width of forty centimeters instead of the sixty centimeters of standard Pan Am adult seats, Ingrid then buckled her daughter’s safety belt before taking place herself in the adult seat next to Nancy’s seat. She was far from alone in using the Kindergarten Room of the Boeing 717-300, as it nearly filled quickly with parents, toddlers and babies. One young couple and their toddler son sat in the same row as Ingrid. From listening to them, it quickly became evident to Ingrid that they were German citizens returning home after a visit to Washington. The little boy, who was maybe five years old, attracted the attention of Nancy, who playfully waved hello at him and spoke to him in German.
‘’Hello! I’m Nancy!’’
‘’I’m Karl!’’ replied the boy, also in German, while returning her salute. The father, a tall and handsome man in his late twenties, then smiled to Ingrid and spoke to her in German.
‘’You are German, miss?’’
‘’I was born in Germany, mister, but I am an American citizen. My name is Ingrid, Ingrid Dows.’’
Not realizing who she was, the man presented his hand for a shake, which she pressed.
‘’And I am Frederick Schenk. This is my wife Anna and my son Karl and we just visited relatives who live in the Washington area. And you? Are you going to Hamburg as a tourist?’’
‘’I have old friends in Northern Germany, but the main goal of my trip is to go visit Berlin.’’
Both surprise and confusion showed then on the man’s face.
‘’Berlin? But the city was destroyed by a British nuclear bomb in 1944 and is still in ruins. I believe that its region is still out of bounds to the public because of lingering radiations.’’
‘’You are mostly correct, mister, but the radiations have greatly subsided in the last four decades and the German government has started to slowly clear the debris in prevision of a long-term rehabilitation plan.’’
‘’Uh, why then do you want to visit it, miss? The place is still nothing but rubble. Besides, the police will not let you enter the Berlin Zone.’’
‘’I have obtained a written permission from your minister of interior to visit the zone. As for why I want to visit it, the reason is simple: my old family home was in Berlin.’’
Her explanation seemed to only confuse further the man.
‘’Your family home, in Berlin? But Berlin was destroyed 41 years ago.’’
‘’I know, mister: I was nineteen at the time. I am now 59 years-old. I should have presented myself properly: General Ingrid Dows, recently retired from the United States Space Corps.’’
From confusion, the German man went to excitement and enthusiasm.
‘’THE General Dows? Wow! It is a true honor to be able to meet you, General.’’
Anna Schenk, while also excited at realizing who Ingrid was, then looked at her and Nancy.
‘’Your little daughter, wasn’t she born in Space, as you were travelling to Jupiter and Saturn?’’
‘’She was born halfway between Jupiter and Saturn, Misses Schenk, and lived all her life on a spaceship, except for the last month.’’
‘’Mein Gott! Such a fantastic experience for such a small girl! Did she like it?’’
‘’She adored it! She particularly enjoyed playing around and floating in the zero gravity sections of the ship and she also took part in a mass spacewalk outside the ship while we were flying back to Earth. Before that, I took her and other kids on a surface rover trip on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.’’
Anna Schenk sucked air in on hearing that.
‘’Oh, the lucky girl! I envy her!’’
Ingrid grinned at the woman’s reaction.
‘’I do agree that the PROMETHEUS’ mission to Jupiter and Saturn was the experience of a lifetime, even for an old Space hand like me. Hopefully, there will be more trips to the outer planets in the years to come.’’
‘’And what about Mars? I understand that an American ship is presently heading for Mars, on the third mission to that planet.’’
‘’You are correct, Misses Schenk: the U.S.S. CONSTITUTION should arrive at Mars in about fifty days, where it will conduct a year-long scientific study mission.’’
‘’That was an incredible life you lived through, General.’’ said softly Frederick Schenk, attracting a smile on Ingrid’s lips.
‘’Yes, and it was also a most adventurous one. I hope that my little Nancy will have as exciting a life as I did, but with less dangers. She is so precious to me.’’
‘’All the children in the World are precious.’’ pronounced Anna Schenk, to which Ingrid nodded her head.
Some 25 minutes later, the pilot announced on the cabin’s speakers that the boarding was now completed and that the plane was about to roll away from the gate. Nancy, who had never experienced a commercial airliner flight, watched and listened on as the plane’s engines started to whine, with the Boeing 717 starting to be pushed away from the gate a moment later. Looking through the nearest window, she followed the whole process of rolling down a taxiway and then pivoting and stopping at one end of a runway. The takeoff itself excited her and she clapped her hands together as the airliner climbed steeply towards its cruising altitude. The moment that the sign for the seats’ safety belts went off, she started wiggling in her chair.
‘’Mommy, can I go play now?’’
‘’Yes, you can, my little treasure!’’ replied verbally Ingrid before continuing with a mental message to Nancy. ‘Remember: do not use your special powers and communicate only verbally. That’s very important.’
‘I know, Mommy!’
The moment that her belt was undone and Ingrid had lifted her down from her chair, she ran into the playground, triggering a mad rush by the other nine toddlers in the compartment, including little Karl Schenk. Entering the play cube module by a round mesh entrance, Nancy started crawling and climbing inside it while screaming with joy, pursued by other children. Once she had gone through the whole module and had exited it on an elevated platform, she promptly slid down the curved plastic slide of the room, landing on a thick padded mattress. She followed that by diving into the pool of plastic balls, little Karl behind her. Ingrid and the Schenks happily watched on before resuming their conversation together. At first, the subjects covered were banal ones, until Frederick Schenk raised a new subject.
‘’So, what are you going to do during your retirement, General? With such a young body like yours, you are liable to live for many more decades, no?’’
‘’You are correct about me having many decades left to me, but I am not really fully retired. While I left the military service, I am still a presidential special advisor and the National Director of the United States Space Programs. I will thus continue to work as a civilian for many more years, until the President decides that he doesn’t need my services anymore.’’