The Forever Engine

by Frank Chadwick

  “What do you mean?”

  “I will send you back to your time.”

  This was where I’d figured I’d be arguing with Tesla, trying to find a way to persuade him to send me back, find something I could do to make it worth his while. Instead, he was offering me almost exactly what I wanted. So why wasn’t I jumping at the chance? Well, it wasn’t enough, was it? Going home wouldn’t save my time.

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  He looked at me and frowned, then paced the length of the narrow confines of the dungeon, across the cell and back.

  “Very well. Answer my questions about your world and I will give you access to my research findings on my experimental time soundings. I cannot guarantee the answer you seek—or believe you seek—is there, but it is all I have to offer you. When you believe you have an answer, I will send you wherever in time you desire, provided it is within the physical capacity of my apparatus.”

  “Somebody from the German Army vehicle from my time survived the transition to this time. That was obvious. Why don’t you ask him about my world?”

  “So stupid! The soldier survived the journey of over a hundred years and then died when the zeppelin crashed on the mountainside. That gave me another reason to kill Radojica, as if I did not have enough already.”

  I’d have liked to talk to that fellow myself. Speaking with someone from my own time would have made this all seem less surreal.

  Tesla paced back and forth again. Was he just upset over the soldier’s death, or was there something more? Why was he offering me everything on a platter? Why was he willing to risk annihilation of his time and world for answering questions about my world? Sure, there would be answers to some questions about lines of scientific progress which might help him out down the road, but was it worth the gamble? I couldn’t see that it was. That must mean either he needed to know something very important—vitally important—about my time or that he did not believe there was anything I could do to threaten his world. Maybe he just wouldn’t deliver on the promise when the time came.

  Still, what did I have to lose? I wasn’t getting anywhere in this dungeon. Even if his offer of a return to my time was a lie, access to his research notes might tell me something. After that I’d be on my own, but I’d been on my own all along.

  “How are you going to get me back to my time, or any other, without turning me to ash? Going through your hole in time seems like a game of Russian roulette.”

  Tesla smiled and relaxed. “Oh, that is elementary. I have been experimenting for over a year, and I derived the formulae for adjusting the electrical input based on mass transference and temporal deflection easily. It was only the coincidence of your laboratory people aiming their device here at the same time as mine was active which set off that violent and very distorted effect. They must have used an extravagant amount of power. But normally I have experienced no such ill effects. The birds the locals call azhdaja, for example, survived the transition from their time to ours.”

  He must have brought a whole flock of them back. There were a lot of azhdaja wandering around, and no one had seen them until the last couple of months, so there hadn’t been time for them to breed and populate, unless they grew really fast.

  “I will have a room for you upstairs this afternoon,” he said. “In the meantime, consider my offer.”

  He and the guards climbed the stone stairs and left me in the dark with my thoughts and my throbbing left arm.

  All I had to do was say yes. Study his notes, find a clue to what was happening, and if all else failed just go home, hope I got there in time to see Sarah one more time before the effect wave extinguished us. But then I’d never get to see her graduate, see her find someone to spend her life with, build a family, maybe even end up with a few grandkids of my own to spoil.

  Or maybe . . .

  Could Tesla return me even earlier? Ten years earlier? Early enough to save my wife and son? Why not? The idea came like a flash, left me sweating and dizzy. If I could figure a way to save the whole world, why couldn’t I also fix it to save Joanne and little Jack? If I was going to surrender my life, maybe my soul, to save my world, that didn’t seem like too much of a reward to demand.

  But a remembered voice nagged at me as well: Jovo Radojica’s last words spoken to me.

  Singe the Old Man’s whiskers, and that’s payment enough.

  Was that a debt I could ignore?

  Two guards came for me an hour later. Gabrielle and I had been blindfolded when they brought us here, and this time they covered my head with a canvas sack, I guess to keep me disoriented. They shackled my wrists together in front of me and led me up the stone stairs, down wooden hallways, up a carpeted set of stairs, more hallways, and then a warm, humid room. They pulled the hood off and I found myself in an austere but clean bedroom with a steaming tub of water in the middle of the floor. The guards waited till I stripped off the filthy rags of my clothing then gathered them up and left.

  I slipped cautiously into the tub, but the water wasn’t all that hot; it steamed more because the air in the bedroom was cool. I scrubbed myself until the water turned gray and I washed with particular care the patch on my left shoulder where they’d taken a chunk of my hide when I arrived. I resisted the temptation to soak; I didn’t know when Tesla would show up and didn’t want to be at a disadvantage, however slight, when he did. I dried off with coarse towels and found clean clothes folded on the bed—a little large but close enough once I pulled the belt tight. There was also gauze and tape, which I used to dress the wound on my shoulder.

  The bedroom had a single door, which was locked, and a single window, covered on the outside by substantial-looking iron bars. For furniture the room boasted a single bed with a covered chamber pot underneath, a desk and straight-backed chair, another straight-backed armchair in the corner, a dresser with china water pitcher and bowl, and a wardrobe with a clean shirt and clean pair of trousers hanging within. The desk drawers were empty while the dresser held two pairs of long underwear and two pairs of woolen socks.

  I put on a pair of the socks and settled into the armchair to wait. Within a quarter hour I heard the door unlocked. Tesla entered, a leather portfolio under his arm and two big guards in tow. He moved quickly, but not nervously—a man with a lot of things to do and a purposeful approach to getting them done.

  “Have you considered my proposal?” he asked without preamble.

  “A bit, but I have some questions. Assuming you can get me back to my own time—”

  “I can,” Tesla said with confidence.

  “Yeah, okay. Assuming you can, how do you know you can hit my time exactly? What if I come out fifty years in the future? Or fifty years in the past? Fifty years is nothing compared to some of the time differences you’re playing around with.

  “For that matter, what if I come out, say, ten years in my past and meet myself? Does the time-space fabric rupture or something? Or is that possible?”

  Tesla’s eyebrows went up slightly.

  “Interesting questions, which I expected you to ask. There are vibrational properties unique to the objects from each point in time, properties which manifest themselves in a particular type of spectroscopic analysis I have perfected. Using this, I can calibrate my device to access that precise time.”

  I touched the bandage on my left arm, hidden by my shirt.

  “Is that why you carved on my arm with a knife yesterday? To get a sample of me for spectroscopic analysis?”

  “Yes, of course. And that is why there was no need to take such a sample from Gabrielle.”

  “Is that how you brought back all those azhdaja?”

  He smiled

  “Exactly so. I sent several large oxen through with iron filings implanted in their flesh. Then several hours later I recalibrated and exchanged a large number of rocks for a surprising number of these avian predators. I had hoped to capture a single large predator. Usually small animals do not hunt large ones, you know, unless they do
so in concert. Unfortunately, this animal engages in collective hunting. Most of them escaped and seem to be thriving in the hills.”

  “Where they are killing people. Your people. They almost killed Gabrielle twice.”

  “And you twice saved her life, I understand, for which I am grateful. But as to the larger picture, the food chain will adapt to them.”

  “Yeah. Like Asian carp in the Mississippi River.”

  He nodded. Of course, he didn’t know that in my time Asian carp had all but ruined the Mississippi ecosystem.

  “That Roman coin I brought with me—you were anxious to recover it as well.”

  “Yes, and my agent managed to pass it to the man who escaped from Dorset House. It arrived here shortly before you did. But its spectroscopic properties were confused.”

  “Now that I have answered your questions, I hope you will be sensible and cooperate,” Tesla said. “Dinner at 7:30 PM,” he said over his shoulder as he left, and the guards closed and bolted the door behind them.

  I sat there and thought about the coin for a while. What had Tesla called its time signature? Vibrational properties. Why would they be confused? Maybe because the melted plastic from my time got mixed up with the silver of the coin from the past.

  Yeah. That had to be it.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  October 13, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

  Two guards came to collect me for dinner—one a beefy fellow in peasant smock, the other in the black uniform of Tesla’s zeppelin crews, with his left arm in a cast and sling and his right hand resting on the grip of a revolver thrust into his belt. The peasant gestured down the hall and walked at my side. The pistolero followed at a distance.

  I turned and looked at him, and his eyes burned with hatred.

  “Do we know each other?” I asked in German. He said nothing, and his expression remained frozen.

  Oo-kay.

  The house looked new and was more modest than I had imagined when I was blindfolded—plain, but spotlessly clean. The hardwood floors were varnished but not stained. The plaster walls lacked decorative wainscoting or crown molding. The coarse brown carpeting on the stairs clearly was intended only to muffle noise.

  We descended a broad staircase to the main floor, ended up facing a large front door, but turned right into the dining room. I started composing a mental map of the place, now that I could see.

  Tesla and Gabrielle, already seated, waited for me. Tesla sat at the head of the table, Gabrielle to his right. The circles under her eyes bore testimony to our arduous journey here, but she looked rested, even fresh otherwise. She smiled when I entered, and I saw a light in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. She had found her family, a goal to which she had devoted herself with single-minded determination for quite some time, and I wasn’t entirely blind to what that might mean for her. It wasn’t my place to judge her about other responsibilities and loyalties. Realistically, I had to be near the bottom of that list in any case. Because of all we had gone through together, and all I’d shared about my own life with her, it seemed like longer, but the truth was we had only known each other for nine days. I had no claim on her, and no right to judge her betrayal. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to smile back.

  “You are well, Jack?” she asked.

  “Better, anyway. Amazing what a bath and a nap can do sometimes. A meal won’t hurt, either. You okay?”

  “Yes,” she said, and she smiled at Tesla. “I am quite well. I have already learned a great deal more about my family, things which simple newspaper reports and gossip could not tell me.”

  Tesla returned her smile and gestured to the seat to his left, across from Gabrielle.

  I sat and the peasant guard left, although the black-clad pistolero remained, standing discreetly in the corner behind me. I turned and glanced at him.

  “I understand that you are a dangerous man, Dr. Fargo,” Tesla said. “Dangerous in many ways, perhaps, but also in a personal, physical sense. I do not wish to have to shackle you, but I need to take precautions with my own safety and that of Gabrielle.”

  “I wouldn’t harm Gabrielle.”

  “But you do not deny that you might harm me. That is understandable, given your circumstances. I hope to persuade you otherwise, but in the meantime I prefer to have a guard present, one who understands the necessity of vigilance. Dragomir is one of the men you attacked in Munich. The local doctor says he will probably lose the use of his left arm. He is unlikely to underestimate the danger you pose, and will certainly not hesitate to shoot you should you attempt violence. Only his loyalty to me keeps him from doing so now.”

  I looked at the guy again.

  “Dragomir. Ich entschuldige mich für das Schädigen Ihres Armes,” I said. I apologize for the injury to your arm.

  His expression didn’t change, and I didn’t know if he even understood German, but I made the effort anyway.

  All violence has victims. I lived in a time—two times now—where sometimes there were no obvious alternatives to violence, but that didn’t mean I had to tell myself fairy tales about how everyone I hurt deserved everything they got. That was one lie I’d given up a long time ago.

  A servant brought steaming bowls of vegetable soup and a platter of thick-sliced bread which smelled freshly baked. My mouth watered, but I made myself eat slowly, partly because I didn’t want to get sick, partly because I didn’t want to show weakness to Tesla.

  “Have you considered my offer?” Tesla asked as the soup bowls were cleared away. “Surely you understand there is no other way to return to your daughter. That, I understand, is your principal motivation.”

  I looked at Gabrielle. She wore a confident, happy expression, and Tesla seemed at ease as well. Suddenly I saw my edge, if I could figure out how to leverage it. Both of them had very limited, simplified views of human motivation and behavior. Gabrielle understood me only in terms of my love for my daughter, and had communicated that to Tesla. For the moment, the most important thing was to play to that belief. It gave me the most options down the road. I made up my mind.

  “Okay, I’m in.”

  For the rest of dinner Tesla began his “conversation” with me about my world, which amounted to an interrogation, but that’s what I figured. He was uninterested in our space program and had surprisingly little interest in weapons technology, given his ongoing fight here. I would have thought he’d want some more goodies like the gun turret his men had scavenged from the Puma back in Bavaria, but that wasn’t the case. Instead he was much more interested in the data infrastructure of my world: the Internet, wireless communication, satellite GPS systems, the data cloud. Those things fired his imagination, would leave him lost in thought for several minutes after a round of answers, and then suddenly full of an entirely new line of questions.

  This went on long after dinner was done and the dishes cleared away. His other interest, not surprisingly, was magnetic fields, and he sucked whatever information I had on the subject as a man might suck the marrow from a bone after stripping every shred of meat from it. Magnetism and planetary magnetic fields led to the solar magnetic field, or rather series of changing magnetic fields, and how the current thinking in my time was that changes and collapses in local solar magnetic fields led to solar flares.

  The largest known solar flare had happened in 1859, when Tesla was just a little boy. He didn’t remember it but had heard stories of the electrocution of telegraph operators and the brilliant night auroras. A flare of that intensity would have fried most of the communications and computer systems in my world.

  After an hour or so, Tesla finally pushed back from the table.

  “Fascinating conversation, but it grows late and I still have work to do before I retire. I now have a good deal to think over, and for that I am most appreciative, Professor Fargo. Tomorrow perhaps we can discuss what you know of particle accelerators. The guards will see you back to your room.”

  He rose and bowed to Gabrielle before leaving. Once he was gone I got to m
y feet as well, but Gabrielle spoke for the first time since the dinner dishes had been cleared away.

  “Jack, I know you must think ill of me, and I cannot blame you. I feel no guilt over what I did, but I feel something. Regret, I suppose. I am uncertain I can accurately characterize it.”

  “It’s okay. You don’t owe me an explanation.”

  “No, I do not think so, either. But I wish you to be comfortable and even happy, if that is possible. I found this book in the library.” She leaned over and picked up a heavy volume from the floor and placed it on the table. “It is about the subject dear to you, I think. Perhaps it will remind you of your home.”

  I walked around the table and picked up the book: the first volume of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Despite myself, I smiled.

  “Thanks. Nothing helps me sleep like Gibbon.”

  She smiled in reply, oblivious to the irony in my words, but then grew pensive.

  “Why do you think it so wrong to believe in the possibility of a perfect world?” she asked.

  I looked down at the book for a moment, tempted to let the question slide, to tell her maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. What did it matter to me anyway, one harmless lie more or less? But I’d let enough lies stand for the last ten years.

  “Because only that belief can make otherwise-sane and good-hearted people commit unspeakable evil.”

  We said our polite good-nights, and the guards followed me back up to my room and saw me securely locked in. I undressed, but as soon as I slipped under the cold sheets I thought better of it, rose, and put on a pair of long underwear from the dresser. Then it was just me, Edward Gibbon, and a gas light. The Gibbon volume had been about as thoughtful and tender a gesture from Gabrielle as I figured she was capable of, and reading Gibbon’s carefully measured prose probably would bring back pleasant memories of graduate school at the University of Illinois.