[ WP ] A physicist is tasked with cleaning out his grandfather 's house . He discovers some old war trophies , and among them are plans for Die Glocke , a secret weapon the Germans had been working on near the end of the war .

The guilt was tearing me up. That's probably why I volunteered to clean out grandpa's house after he passed. I know I should have visited more often, especially there at the end, but it was always work or family or just outright laziness that kept me away. My job as Los Alamos kept me busy and what little time I had left over was spent on the wife and kids. Hell, is taken to scheduling bathroom breaks just for some me time. 
 
 But now he was gone. The man who taught me how to fish and tie my shoes. The man who told my Dad that I should be in a better school because I was too smart for that little town. I still remember seeing him tear up as we drove away to our new life. I'd spend summers with him when I could. Of course, by the time I got to high school, I was too busy with summer jobs and girls to spend all summer there. But he still welcomed me with open arms every time I went. 
 
 I'd left the family in town for the day with the rental car. I wanted some alone time with Grandpa's memories. The attic was dusty and hot. I could see little notes dancing in the shafts of sunlight from the one window up there. I decided I should just start at one end and work my way to the other. I pulled up a box and started in. 
 
 Two hours later, I had only made it through three and a half boxes. Every single item I saw brought back a thousand memories or connected in with stories I only partly knew. I'd never get done at this rate but it seemed wrong to try to rush this job. I had plenty of vacation time saved up and was thinking about how I'd get the family home when I opened the next box. 
 
 The contents of the fourth box were different from the others. While the rest of the boxes contained memories and mementos, this one contained technical data and blueprints. The writing was in German. I have no idea what it said but the name appeared to be Der Glocke, as best I can tell. 
 
 Now I have seen some technical drawings of weapons and some highly classified information so I know what I'm talking about when I say this definitely should not have been in Grandpa's attic. The paper was brittle with age and some of the writing had faded in places, but there was enough there that I could piece together the rest. 
 
 Grandpa fought in WWII as a kid. He was barely old enough to join and made it to Europe only six months before V-E day. He'd told that story enough that I could just about recite it verbatim. I knew he had taken some trophies - like the Luger my cousin could n't wait to get his hands on and an SS knife he won in a poker game. But he never said anything about papers. What kind of eighteen year old kid takes blueprints as war trophies? 
 
 I brought the whole box downstairs to the kitchen where the light was better and spread out the drawings. Whatever this thing was, it was massive. It called for tons of copper, liters of heavy water, kilograms of various rare earths, and piles and piles of steel. I did some back of the envelope calculations and realized this thing would be about the size of a ten story building, give or take. 
 
 But what the hell did it do? I traced the circuits and sketched out the form. I started plugging values into equations. I only had my phone on me, so I was n't able to do a full simulation but what I saw was still enough to frighten me. This was a planned doomsday device. Nazi-engineered destruction on a massive scale. If anyone had built anything like this, they would have been damn near unstoppable. 
 
 I looked at those drawings far longer than I should have. By the time I came up for air, the sun was setting. My wife would be back shortly to pick me up. I gathered up the papers and started carefully putting them back in the box. As I did so, I saw a hand written note on the back of one of the pages. I could tell my Grandpa's neatly precise hand even the through decades and despite how faded it was. 
 
 The note said he did n't know the full extent of this device only that the Nazi's thought it would be their final revenge. Grandpa found the papers and smuggled them out of Europe. He said no one should have a weapon like that. There was an added note, dated almost ten years later saying he should destroy those drawings but could n't. He did n't say why but something stopped him. So, instead, he buried them in the piles of memories in the attic. 
 
 I looked at the box of old dry papers. One match would wipe this terror from the world. But something inside stopped me. It did n't seem right. Or maybe I was still too curious about it. Or maybe I just did n't want to let go of my Grandpa. I do n't know. Whatever the reason, I cleared a space in my basement behind the water heater. Some day I'll get around to destroying those papers.
