His neighbor, Greg, was a big guy. He had no trouble moving the large wooden desk but he wasn’t the most graceful man. As they were trying to get it through the front door he banged it against the door frame a few times and Campbell could hear something crack inside. But it seemed intact and they got it through.
Campbell’s house wasn’t large but it wasn’t small. The front door led into an entryway that opened up into the large living room with a couch and a bookstand with a TV. A little dining table sat at the back of the room next to the small kitchen. To the right there was a hallway that led to the two bedrooms and the bathroom. They pulled and pushed the desk into the living room.
The professor thanked his neighbor, showed him out and went into the kitchen for a beer. He lived alone. His teaching job and the occasional consultation on a dig paid him enough to afford the place by himself and live fairly comfortably. He hadn’t had a woman in his life since shortly after college. Though he was engaged to his last girlfriend, it ended badly and that was years ago.
He took a beer out of the fridge and went out to the garage to grab some sandpaper, if he had any.
The inside of the house may have looked respectable, but the garage looked like one of those junk booths at the swap meet. There were shelves lining the walls, but good luck getting to them. There were a few dozen large cardboard boxes stacked in the middle of the garage and more piled up along the edges. The whole room looked like a Tetris game, more stuff than you’d think would fit was stuffed and squeezed and stacked to make room like a puzzle where not all the pieces fit just right.
He turned on the light and stared at the piles for a moment, as he would do every time came into this room, thinking he ought to do something about all this junk. He walked over to one of the boxes marked tools and opened it. It was full of Christmas ornaments. He tried another box, also marked tools, it was full of fine china.
This went on for a few hours until he found a box marked kitchen. That one contained a bunch of wrenches and screwdrivers and sockets, all dumped into the box with no semblance of organization. There was also a stack of small scraps of sandpaper and a bottle of varnish.
He took the ‘kitchen’ box to the living room where he searched for five minutes for the remote control. When he found it, where it always was, he turned on the TV and flipped it to the history channel. They were playing a special on the history of doomsday prophesies, again. At least it’s not that ancient alien crap, he thought.
Two beers and an hour later and he had the top of the desk sanded smooth. He went into the spare bedroom, which he had set up as an office but never really used, and grabbed his briefcase. He pulled out a bunch papers and spread them on the desk and started to go over them.
They were homework assignments he should have graded Friday night, but he had procrastinated. He usually procrastinated. He read the first few lines of one paper and he could tell it was going to be a long night. He dropped the paper and went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.
He had a couple of students who actually enjoyed the work and took it seriously, but most kids who take an archaeology class at a community college are either just trying to make up credits or think they’re going to become Indiana Jones. A few days into the class and they realize the real world of archaeology involves spending most of your time in libraries and writing papers and end up dropping the class, or just show up and spend half their time glued to their cell phones or nodding off.
He sat back down on the couch, took a sip of his beer and picked the paper back up. It was supposed to be about the significance of agriculture in the growth of civilization. This student wrote, ‘farming is good because it helps people, like, eat and stuff and that helps them build things.’ And it went on like that for five pages. Campbell opened another beer.
He stayed up until three in the morning grading papers. There were two that actually presented good insight, which gave him a little hope for future generations, but most of them were agonizing to get through. When he was done he set his coffee pot to start brewing at five in the morning, he had to be on campus at six.
The next day dragged on until three o’clock. He went through three pots of coffee just to get through his first class and by the end of the day he nearly fell asleep at his desk. He cancelled his office hours that afternoon and took a nap. He dreamed about the ancient world.
Campbell always thought he should have been born in ancient Rome, or the Renaissance. At a time when things were simpler, better. Of course he avoided thinking about the short life spans or living under the rule of some tyrannical king, or constantly being surrounded by people who never bathed.
He got home around eight at night and almost immediately went back to working on the desk. He started pulling out the drawers and setting them to the side. A couple of them he had thought were stuck but now realized were locked. He examined all the connections on the desk and tried to figure out how to take the whole thing apart.
He picked up the desk and tried to gently tip it on its side. He wasn’t a small man, but this was too much weight for just him and it came crashing down, cracking part of his hardwood floor. The good news, though, was that it knocked loose the screw holding one of the locked drawers in place.
He bent down and tried wiggle it loose but there was still a screw holding it tight. He rummaged through the box of tools he had left out and found a screwdriver that was the right size and he fiddled with the screws until the drawer came loose. A pile of papers flew out.
Most of the papers were scraps ripped from bigger sheets with handwritten notes in a dozen languages. Campbell flipped through them, trying to read any of it but it was illegible, chicken scratch. Not too different from his own handwriting. He pulled the drawer the rest of the way out and dumped its contents on the floor.
There was a leather notebook that had to be at least fifty years old, probably older. He picked it up and took a close look. A leather string was wrapped around the book and held it closed. There were no markings on the outside.
He carefully undid the leather strap and opened the book. The pages were old and brittle and he very gently flipped through them. There were scribbled writings and little drawings filling up every bit of blank space, but he couldn’t figure out what any of it was trying to portray. Half the writing was in something that looked like Russian, or some other eastern European language.
He flipped through the whole book, skimming the pages to see if he could decipher any of it, but no luck. He set the book down and looked through the rest of what came out of the drawer. There were more papers, and a few photographs. Much of it was too old and faded to even recognize, but there was one piece of paper that was typed.
Upon closer examination he saw that it was a bill, from 1939. It was addressed to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, and when he read the rest of it he found that it was made out to a very familiar name. Nikola Tesla.
This was amazing. He sat there for a few moments just staring at it. How could this be? Is this really a water bill charged to Nikola Tjesla, the brilliant eccentric who came up with AC power and invented the first hydroelectric power plant? The guy who basically fathered all modern technology?
He started to stand up but he couldn’t take his eyes off the name on the bill and he tripped and fell into the couch behind him, which rolled, causing him to do a backwards somersault into the hallway.
“Ow,” he said to himself. He got up and walked into the office where he had a large file cabinet. He took a few large manila envelopes out of the top drawer and brought them into the living room.
He labeled all the envelopes ‘Tesla Desk’ and carefully put what pieces seemed, as far as he could tell, like they might have something in common together in the envelopes. The water bill and notebook each got their own, separately labeled.
The bottom two drawers of his file cabinet locked and he placed the envelopes in them, along with all the dreams he would never fulfill. Then he went back to examining the rest of the
desk.
He found twelve drawers in all in the desk. Some of them were large. Many of them were very small. Two drawers were hidden in the wide legs, one of which was locked.
He pulled his screw driver back out and undid all the screws. As he started to remove the drawer a small piece fell off.
“Well, I’m guessing that’s what Greg broke,” he said aloud to himself as he examined the little piece of wood.
He removed the drawer the rest of the way and something else fell out. It was small, about as big as the palm of his hand, and round like a miniature Frisbee. Campbell picked it up.
It was light weight and made of metal. He flipped it over in his hand and saw that one side contained a series of small dials lined up in two rows like the combination lock of a briefcase. There were small gaps between some of the dials so that at the moment it read 01 22 1537 on the top line, and 22 45 00 on the bottom.
As he turned the dials he could hear a clicking sound inside like gears moving into place. There was a seam around the edge of the disk and it looked as though it could twist apart very easily.
He checked the drawer for anything that might explain the little device but there was nothing there. He took the disk with him back to the office and searched through the notebook looking for any sketches that resembled it. There was nothing.
“Well,” he said aloud, looking closely at the disk, “what are you?”
He started fiddling with the little dials again. The top row seemed as though it might be meant to display a date, but then what would the bottom row be for?
“Are you a calendar?” he asked the tiny device, “maybe something that keeps dates automatically?”
Tesla was famous for his experiments with electricity, for his giant Tesla coils that created huge bolts of lightning, but he invented thousands of little things, many of which the public never got a chance to learn about. This little device, whatever it does, must be one of his inventions.
He set the disk in the file cabinet with the rest of the stuff from the desk. It was getting late and he had more homework to grade.
“Dr Campbell?”
He groaned.
“Dr Campbell,” the voice was louder this time. He jerked awake and looked up at the source of the voice. It was the dean.
He must have fallen asleep looking over papers after class. He didn’t sleep much again last night.
“Good afternoon Dean Jones,” he said a little groggily, “what can I do for you?”
“Good evening Dr Campbell,” the dean sounded a little annoyed, “it’s seven o’clock at night. Are you feeling Ok?”
Campbell looked out the window. It was dark outside. He must have slept for almost five hours.
“Actually I think I’m coming down with something.”
“Go home Dr Campbell,” the dean said and then walked out.
He gathered up his papers, stuffed them in his briefcase and headed for the door. He was still thinking about that disk. He decided to stop by the library before leaving campus.
The campus library had thirty-eight books on Nikola Tesla. He checked out five of them. When he got home he looked through all five and there was not a single mention of any device like the little disk. One of the books was all about projects he never finished or published and he looked over every page twice, but still he found nothing even similar.
He checked the internet but the he wasn’t very computer savvy. There were hundreds of websites on Tesla, but most of them were just speculation on his supposed doomsday device or conspiracy theories him creating earthquakes. He looked over a few of them anyway, but still found nothing.
Eventually he got fed up with all the dead ends. He sat back at the desk in his living room and pulled the little disk out of the drawer. He turned the TV on and leaned back on the couch, barely paying attention to the Discovery Channel’s search for Atlantis. He flipped the disk around in his hands, toying with it, scrutinizing it. He moved the dials around at random. His thumb followed the seam all the way around the outside and it seemed like he should be able to open it up.
He took the two halves and started to turn them in opposite directions, hoping they would pull apart, but there was some resistance at first. He got up to find the box full of tools, but he had only made it two steps when it came loose. He twisted and when the top piece had slid 180 degrees there was a loud click and noises that sounded like gears clicking against each other came from inside. He held it up to his ear and heard a series of rapid clicks. Then there was a blinding white flash as lightening started to crack all around him.
After a few seconds he was standing in the middle of a ball of rapidly flashing streaks of white light about three yards in diameter. With each flash of lightning there was a crack so loud he had to shield his ears, but the whole thing only lasted about ten seconds.
When the flashing stopped the two halves of the device moved themselves back into place with another series of rapid, ratchet-like clicks. Campbell looked up and saw that he was standing in a field. He was surrounded by tall, dry grass that came halfway up his thighs. The field stretched a hundred yards or so in all directions and beyond was a forest of thick, tall pine trees. He smelled ozone.
He stood there stunned for a few moments. He looked around and around in circles trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. He looked down at the device in his hand. The dials read 02 14 1531, 22 45 00.
It was night time. The watch on his wrist read 8:30pm. He looked around again. There was a full moon. He could see stars filling the night sky and they were brighter than he had ever seen.
He started to move towards the edge of the woods, pushing the reeds aside in front of him so that he could walk. But he only got a few steps before he saw movement in the woods ahead that made him stop.
There were two men in the bushes, hiding in plain sight. They had hair that stuck straight up in tall Mohawks, at least six inches above their heads. They were dressed in raw leather and thick furs, and all of a sudden Campbell realized that he was cold.
He folded his arms tight against his chest and stuck his hands in his arm pits and stared at these two odd looking men. He thought back in his head to his studies of Native American cultures and thought these guys looked an awful lot like Algonquin’s. But that’s impossible, the Algonquin tribe had died out a very long time ago.
He stood there staring at the strange men and they stood there staring at him for a few minutes. He took another step closer and one of the men lifted a bow with an arrow strung and aimed it straight at Campbell. He froze.
The man in the woods fired his arrow and it struck the ground barely a foot from Campbell’s toe. Before he had a chance to react the man had another arrow strung and was aiming again.
Campbell spun on his heel and ran into the field as fast as he could. After a few steps his foot caught on something in the grass and he fell on his face in the nearly frozen mud. The disk went flying out of his hand and landed a few feet in front of him.
He looked at the disk and looked back at the woods. The two men were running into the field towards him and they were coming fast. He scrambled over to the disk on his hands and knees. When he reached it he picked it up and put it into his pocket. Then he jumped to his feet and ran again as fast as he could, but the men were faster.
When they caught up one of the men jumped onto Campbell’s back and dragged him to the ground with enough force to make some of the thick, frozen mud fly into the air around him. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he struggled to take a breath.
The other man was standing over them with an arrow pointed at Campbell, who was still struggling to breathe as the weight of the man on top of him was pushed him down into the mud.
Then he heard shouting in some strange language. Campbell had a good grasp of few languages but this sound like anything he had ever heard. There were at least three voices and they were shouting from the woods. The man got off of Campbell’s back and stood up, giving Campbell a chance to tak
e a breath. He lifted his head and tried to see where the voices were coming from.
There were four men in the woods. They were dressed similar to Campbell’s captors but there was something different. Their hair wasn’t dressed quite the same and they wore a lot more fur.
The two men standing over Campbell started shouting back at the four in the woods. They were all armed and they didn’t seem happy with each other. The man with the bow raised his arrow towards the newcomers, two of whom produced bows and arrows as well. The rest had spears, long sticks with sharpened stones tied to the ends, but they all looked like they wanted to keep their distance.
They kept shouting back and forth for a few minutes and everyone was tense. Campbell knew there was about to be a fight. One of the men in the woods fired his bow and caught one of the men standing over Campbell in the leg. Then everyone with a bow fired and the spearmen ducked and Campbell thought now would be a good time to try and escape again.
He made it about a hundred yards, hauling ass and out of breath, before he looked back. He saw a couple men on the ground and the spearmen were stabbing at each other in a frenzy.
Campbell pulled the device out of his pocket and looked at it again.
“What the hell are you?” he whispered angrily. He thumbed the dials and flipped them around to another random set of numbers, keeping his eyes fixed on the fight. He twisted the disks again.
Again there was a click and the sound of gears turning rapidly. The white light and the noise started and the ball of lightning flashed around him.
A few seconds went by and everything died down suddenly, leaving his ears ringing. The device slowly twisted itself back into place and again there was another loud click. Again his surroundings had changed.
He seemed to be standing in the same spot, but this time there were a few buildings around him and a bunch of the forest was missing. It was still dark and the sky was still filled with bright stars.
Out of Time: A story of archaeology... sort of Page 2