The Forever Engine

by Frank Chadwick

  Anger struggled with curiosity for control of his face. Curiosity won.

  “Tell me your theory,” he said.

  “Well, it’s been a while, but as I remember, an astrophysical body generates a magnetic field with kinetic energy from planetary rotation acting on an electrically conductive fluid, in our case molten iron in the Earth’s core. What you end up with is a gigantic electromagnetic dynamo. And you’re slowing it, aren’t you?”

  He paced slowly back and forth in the confines of the dungeon, frowning in thought and occasionally glancing at me, as if gauging my honesty.

  “Did Thomson fill you up with this story?”

  “No. I didn’t figure it all out myself until today. I had a lot of time to think about stuff down here. But Thomson may put it together himself. He’s a pretty smart cookie.”

  Tesla shrugged at that, dismissing it.

  “He was, until my men shot him down, along with that Captain Gordon and the others. Jovo Radojica, the voivoda, as well. Ah, I see that surprises you. Yes, all of them, gone, hunted down on the slopes of the mountain and shot like dogs. But what does it matter? Even alive, Thomson posed no real threat to me. Most of the men who might have are already dead.”

  Thomson dead? Gordon dead? Maybe Durson and the others as well, or at best scattered fugitives, hiding in the rocks and brush of the mountains. I never really thought Tesla would deliberately kill them. That came from being too many years away from the life of violence, from getting used to the idea that a unique personality could somehow protect you from the worst of life’s reversals. It came from the notion that if you had an interesting enough story to tell, you would get to finish telling it. But you don’t always.

  My stomach twisted, and suddenly I vomited. There wasn’t much to come up, other than stomach acid, but I brought it up and then gagged again. Gabrielle and I were alone, chained in a dungeon, with no one left to rely on but each other.

  I licked my lips and tasted bile. Now what?

  What had Jovo said at the end? Singe the Old Man’s beard. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had left.

  “Tesla, the problem really smart loners like you always have is they underestimate the power of collective thought. The British are assembling a committee to look into this and they’ll put the pieces together.”

  He scowled.

  “A committee! Look into what?”

  “Look into why Big Ben is running fast. I read about it in the Times. They’re trying to figure out why they had to slow the pendulum by four tenths of a second a day. I didn’t think anything of it when I read it, but now I understand. Big Ben isn’t running fast; the Earth’s running slow. Your Forever Engine gizmo is not slowing the Earth’s orbital speed, is it? You’re not repeating the Martian mistake. It’s slowing the rotation of the earth, bleeding off rotational momentum and turning it into electricity, a great big turbine. But it won’t take long for the British observatories to figure out the rotation has slowed slightly, because the night stars are going to rise and set at the wrong times. Put that together with the survey work of the Royal Navy—”

  “What survey work?” he demanded.

  “The magnetic mapping surveys they’ve been doing for decades. They’ve measured a slight decrease in the Earth’s magnetic field in the past year. They don’t know what it means—yet. But they’ll put it all together, because you didn’t count on the reduction in rotational speed reducing the magnetic field.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, then shook his head.

  “How can I believe you were able to reason this through with such limited information? You are not a scientist. You teach history.”

  “I’m smarter than I look,” I said.

  “I must think about this,” he said abruptly and turned to go.

  “Wait!” Gabrielle called out, the first words she had spoken in hours. “There is something I must show you.”

  “Ah, the French spy,” Tesla said, turning back to us. A guard shifted his lantern to illuminate her, and she squinted in the light. I noticed Gabrielle and I had both become monochromatic, and not simply from the harsh lighting. Now that we were dry, our hair, skin, and clothing had all turned the gray of the streambed.

  “I warn you,” he said, “I am immune to your charms, even if they were more . . . presentable, but especially now”

  “I would never attempt to seduce you. It would be highly inappropriate,” she answered.

  “An interesting choice of words. What is it you want?”

  Gabrielle’s blouse hung open almost to her waist, showing her upper undergarment. She reached in and drew out a locket.

  “To show you this.”

  I’d noticed she wore a locket but hadn’t thought anything of it. Now I realized it was the only jewelry she ever wore. I suppose I subconsciously put that down to proletarian austerity, the whole Garde Rouge thing. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

  Tesla stood motionless for a moment.

  “Is this a trick?” he said.

  “Non. Have one of your men open it if you like. It is simply a locket with an image inside.”

  “Why would I care about that?”

  “That is for you to say,” she said.

  He hesitated for perhaps half a minute, then reached forward and swept the locket from her hand, opened it with his eyes on her face, searching for a reaction in advance, then held the locket up close to a lantern and looked.

  He said nothing at first, did not react at all, until the seconds rolled on and his lack of movement itself became a reaction.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked without looking up, his voice strained.

  “It was my mother’s.”

  “Why did she have it?”

  “It was an image of her lover, the man who was my father but whom I never met.”

  “They put you up to this. They concocted this story for you. Admit it!”

  “Non. My mother traveled in the Balkans as a young woman, was seduced by a married man, returned to France carrying me, and died without ever telling me who was my father. All I have of hers is the locket. When I grew older, I came to work for Le Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux, the DCRG. I did many things, but last year my superiors assigned me to research you. I am the very meticulous researcher. I sought out everything about the subject. When I did, I found an image of your father—our father.

  “I told no one, but I made certain that when an expedition was sent to find you, to it I would be indispensable.”

  Tesla lowered the locket and took a step closer to Gabrielle, leaned forward to examine her more closely.

  “And France?” he asked. “Do you feel no loyalty to your country?”

  “I try,” she answered. “I try, but a country is not real. The people, the cities and towns, the rivers, these things are real. But the country itself lives only on maps, and in the imagination of people. It is hard to be loyal to an imaginary thing.”

  He nodded in understanding.

  “A person must be loyal to something,” he said, “a principle, an ideal, some great goal.”

  “Oui,” she agreed. “And I have searched for such a thing all my life. What is worthy of loyalty? This is what I found: people are loyal to the family. For soldiers, the regiment is the family. Many people imagine their family encompasses an occupation, a political movement, even an entire nation, but their loyalty to it is strong only so long as they believe it is still their family, n’est-cepas? Always it comes back to family.”

  Always it comes back to family.

  Of course it did. Gabrielle never stopped asking me questions about Sarah and Joanne, about my family, the things which happened to us, how we felt about each other and why. Had this whole trip really been engineered by Gabrielle just to meet her half-brother, her only surviving family?

  She said it would be “highly inappropriate” to seduce Tesla. Boy, talk about understatement! As I sat there and watched them in profile, her looking up, him looking down, any doubt I ha
d as to their common ancestry vanished—both brilliant, both eccentric, both socially . . . odd. Tesla probably had a leg up in the brains department, and Gabrielle was a lot more concerned with finding her heart in all this, but here were two branches from the same tree.

  When I had rattled off the famous and brilliant people who were likely Asperger’s candidates, I had left out Tesla, even though he was near the top of the list. I’d done so because I thought that revelation might horrify rather than comfort Gabrielle. Now I remembered something else about Asperger’s: it was usually transmitted through the male line.

  Tesla gave an order in Serbian to the guards. One of them unlocked Gabrielle’s fetters, and Tesla helped her to her feet.

  “I am not yet sure what to do about you,” he said to her. “But we have a great deal to talk about before either of us can make an intelligent decision.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I believe that is so.”

  She glanced at me, then turned back to Tesla.

  “Jack Fargo will not be hurt? He has been very good to me.”

  “I may have need of him. I will explain all that in due time. For now I have to leave him here. I think I will win him over, but I cannot afford to let him escape before I do so.”

  “Oui,” she agreed. “He is very dangerous.”

  They started to leave, Gabrielle limping and Tesla supporting her weight, but Gabrielle paused at the foot of the stairs and turned to me again. She looked at me intently, frowning in concentration the way she always did when trying to solve a puzzle.

  “I told you to leave me, Jack. I told you I would be all right.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  October 13, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

  Woe for the wooing of disaster-fraught women.

  At least that’s what Euripides figured, and he must have known a thing or two about the subject. Half-naked, bleeding, shivering with cold and smelling of vomit, I sat chained in Tesla’s dungeon alone—as alone as I had been the first day in this world. More so. I had nothing that first day. This day I’d had people I’d come to care about and then lost them all, either to death or betrayal. I tried to imagine Gordon, Thomson, and the others dead, tried to and failed. And Gabrielle . . .

  Gabrielle’s was the most bitter loss. The others had left my side through no choice of their own; Gabrielle had meant to all along. All along. Why?

  During World War II, the U.S. built airstrips on a lot of remote and primitive Pacific islands and flew in cargo to sustain air and naval bases built there. The local base troops passed on food and some hardware to the locals, partially to keep their good will and partially out of natural generosity. It didn’t amount to much for the U.S. armed forces, but it constituted unimaginable wealth for the islanders. When the war was finished, the U.S. troops left, and the cargo stopped coming.

  Religions sprang up on a lot of those islands, religions collectively called cargo cults. Their followers would build imitation air strips, use old scrap metal to build dummy airplanes, and light fires at night like runway landing lights, hoping to lure back the cargo. If they went through all the right motions, they figured, they would get the good stuff and be happy again.

  Gabrielle had started her own one-person cargo cult.

  She had latched on to family as her cargo, and figured if she found a blood relative and acted as if they were a family, everything else would happen magically. She had a powerful and orderly mind, but in some respects it was unsophisticated. The biological component of family was easy for her to understand, easy to define and confirm, so that’s what she had grabbed hold of with the desperation of a drowning woman clutching a life preserver. And she was drowning—just not in a way most people could see.

  Gabrielle had asked which man I was. Was I the man I had become by chance or the one I had later become by choice? As I thought about it, I wondered if her question had as much to do with her own choice as it did with mine.

  It seemed to me that choice reflected the true self, but Gabrielle had suggested my choice was not made for me, or even for Sarah, but rather for Joanne, my dead wife. She thought it was a form of suicide. Is choosing a life path which subordinates your own sense of person to someone else’s expectations a form of suicide?

  Maybe it is.

  Which man was I? It was a question with less meaning for me than I think it had for Gabrielle, but often the questions posed by folks with Asperger’s made little sense to others. The three Asperger’s doctoral candidates I mentored at UC had remarkably similar childhoods, which is why I could peg Gabrielle’s so closely, but they were distinctly different adults. All of them struggled with interpersonal issues. In some cases they had trouble with day-to-day maintenance of relationships; in other cases the whole concept eluded them.

  Ann Girrardella alone had not finished her degree, and she had been the least socially adept of the three. She never understood “that romance stuff,” as she used to say. She ended up a veterinarian, which was a good match for her. She liked animals, in a thoroughly unsentimental way.

  Gabrielle reminded me of Ann in some ways, in her honest bewilderment concerning intimate relations of the heart, although Gabrielle was more determined to crack the mystery, whatever it took.

  So here I was, chained in a lightless dungeon, all alone, and at Tesla’s mercy. I should have been thinking about options, escape, turning the tables. Instead, all I could think about was Gabrielle’s prospects and difficulties, after she had switched sides, betrayed me, left me here to rot.

  I felt weightless, unattached to anything, not simply alone in the world but alone in the universe, the cosmos. What right did I have to feel loss at the deaths of Thomson and Gordon when I was hell-bent on destroying their world to save my own? What right did I have to feel betrayed by Gabrielle when the betrayal I contemplated dwarfed hers?

  Would I find a way to save my own world, save Sarah and everyone else I had known from extinction? Hard to see how, but if I did, if I managed to extinguish this world and every soul in it to save my own, would I be able to face Sarah with that atrocity on my conscience? “Hi, Honey, Daddy’s home. Guess what I did to save your life?”

  A world, an existence, has a right to self-defense, a right to preserve itself, and it fell to me to be the instrument of that preservation. Tough luck for me. But would I do what needed doing when the time came? Yes, I would.

  Yes, I would.

  I just could not imagine surviving the act, could not imagine going about life afterwards. Perhaps it would have been different if I had not named the lobsters, but I didn’t think so.

  The door at the head of the stairs creaked open, light flooded down into the dungeon, and Tesla and two burly guards joined me. I steeled myself for a beating, but that wasn’t what this was about at all.

  “This business with the rotational momentum of the earth and its magnetic field,” Tesla began without preamble. “I still do not understand how you came to the conclusions you did based on such little information. How is this possible?”

  “It’s my specialty. It’s the reason I’m here, actually. The people who brought me into the Wessex project did so because I can make logical inferences with limited data—I can connect the dots when nobody else can. Also, I have a really good memory—for some things, anyway. That helps.”

  “It is hard to believe,” he said.

  “It’s my gimmick. Some people do card tricks. Now, those are hard to believe.”

  He stood there quietly for a while, thinking that over.

  “What does your good memory tell you will be the result of a reduced magnetic field?”

  “The big thing is solar wind and cosmic rays. The magnetic field deflects them. Reduce the field and more will start getting through, which will increase the cancer rate. The solar wind will start stripping some of the atmosphere, too. I don’t know what the threshold levels are for serious results. If you stop now, maybe the effects won’t even be noticeable.”

  “A large steam power plant will produce s
ufficient power,” he said, “but building one here two years ago would have been obvious and difficult. The Forever Engines I use were more practical for my immediate needs, and . . . the concept intrigued me. But I will stop soon.”

  “Sure, you can stop any time you want. Spoken like a true junkie.”

  “I do not know what that word means. I assume it is unflattering, but that is neither here nor there. What happens in this time will be of little concern to you.

  “I have penetrated the curtain between different times repeatedly and reliably. If you are as astute as you claim, you must have realized this already. I offer you a way back to your own time, back to your daughter. Gabrielle tells me this is what you desire above all other things. I tell you I think she has misunderstood your purpose here, has misunderstood exactly what has happened. I realized when you made that slip of the tongue in London and then tried to cover it up. You remember? Concerning alternating versus direct current?”

  I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t feel like throwing in my cards yet. He might be bluffing. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, such transparency! You are not from our future, Professor Fargo, but a different one. But you hide this fact while revealing the rest. Why?”

  “You tell me.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “Still you try to mislead and confuse when all is revealed. You do this to mask your intentions. What are they? You mean to do violence to our world, I think, in order to save your own. Is that not your purpose? Come now and tell me the truth. Nothing is gained by these pointless denials.”

  Maybe nothing was gained by them, but I’d be damned if I’d admit it to him. We traded stares for a while, and finally he shook his head again.

  “You are a fool, Fargo. You think you can extinguish this reality? How? I think there is as much danger of you erasing my world’s existence as there is of fairies being real, as there is of you becoming a rose bush by simply wishing it so.

  “No, the only real danger you pose lies in your capacity for extreme violence. I owe you a debt for keeping my sister safe on her odyssey here. Also, she seems to feel an attachment to you, which makes her anxious concerning your health in this dungeon. So this afternoon I will have a room ready for you upstairs in the house—one with suitable security. You will find it more comfortable than this. I would like to converse with you about your world. If you accommodate me, I will accommodate you.”