The Forever Engine

by Frank Chadwick

  I picked up the volume and had a sudden thought, one which should have occurred to me sooner except I’d had a lot on my mind. What had three years, as opposed to three months, of Galba as emperor done to the history of Rome? It didn’t make any difference to my mission, but as an historian I was curious. I opened Gibbon to find out.

  Huh!

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  October 14, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

  Breakfast next morning was hot porridge and coffee, normally not my favorite flavor combinations, but the coffee was strong and rich, sweetened slightly with whole cream. I needed the coffee; I hadn’t slept well much the previous night—way too much to think about. Gabrielle sat quietly through the meal, eyes down, her happiness of the previous day less in evidence. Was it our conversation of the previous evening?

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She looked up and studied me intently for a moment.

  “I am very concerned about you,” she said.

  “Me? I’m going home. You’re the one staying here, with the Turkish Army on the way and the British and German armies behind them. Why worry about me?”

  “She is concerned you surrendered too quickly yesterday,” Tesla said. He sipped his coffee but studied my reaction over the rim of his cup.

  I shrugged.

  “No need to worry. Best way I can keep Sarah safe is to stick with the program, right? Besides, there’s nothing keeping me here.”

  She looked back down at her porridge. I’d meant it to hurt and it, had, but instead of satisfaction I felt shame. Wasn’t I the guy who’d said I had no right to judge her?

  “Thanks for the book, Gabi. It made for interesting reading.”

  She looked up and smiled.

  “Book?” Tesla asked.

  “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Volume One. She loaned it to me from your library. I wanted to read about Emperor Galba, and I made a very interesting discovery. There never was an Emperor Galba in your history.”

  “Really?” He smiled an odd, knowing smile. “That is not my field of expertise.”

  “It did pique my curiosity. When can I have a look at your research notes?”

  “I have work in the equipment building this morning, so this would be a good time. They are in German. I trust that will not be a problem.”

  Once the breakfast dishes were cleared away, we took our leave of Gabrielle, and he and the guards accompanied me back up the stairs. My initial impression of the house as being small was not correct. It did not have the rambling splendor of Chillingham’s manor house, but it had as many or more stories. The first floor’s kitchen, dining room, study, library, and sitting rooms were topped by bedrooms on the second and third floors, then a large laboratory on the fourth floor. I lingered a moment by the door to the laboratory, looking in at the banks of electrical instruments, and rubbed the bandage on my left shoulder.

  “This where you did your spectrographic analysis of my skin?”

  “No, that equipment is elsewhere. I have already calculated the settings and required power levels for the aether-field manipulator. I will transfer the settings to the machine when we are ready to proceed.”

  “Still cranking the power gizmo, huh?”

  “Actually, I have enough accumulated power to make the transfer now. I do not want to completely drain my reservoir, however. If the Turks should actually manage to organize an attack, I need a reserve of electrical power.”

  “I don’t think the Turks are coming. Nobody left to send them the all-clear signal. Even if they did, what would you need power for?”

  He didn’t answer me but gestured for me to follow into the laboratory. He pointed to a chair by a clear desk, and I sat. In a little while he came back carrying a thin folder of papers and a small bound book. I had expected more, and Tesla probably saw that in my face. He again flashed that same odd smile.

  “I have decided to save you some time,” he said. “Your discovery of the nonexistence of the emperor on the coin tells both of us something, doesn’t it? I assumed it was from your timeline, and you assumed it was from mine, but we were both wrong.

  “You are free to examine all of my research files, which are along that far wall. The assistant I leave with you, who speaks German, will help you if you so desire. But I believe all the information you need is in these papers here, consisting of two artifacts from time, along with this book from my library. How did you describe your talent? An ability to connect the dots? Well here are two dots—or perhaps three, counting this book—which I look forward to seeing how you connect. I will rejoin you for lunch.”

  And then he left.

  I picked up the book first and looked at it. It was in German, with a publisher’s imprint of 1765, a memoir of the campaigns of 1758 and 1759 in Saxony during the Seven Years War by the Austrian field marshal Prinz von Pfalz-Zweibrücken. I put it aside for the moment and spread the folder’s contents—four pieces of paper—on the desk blotter. Two were clearly the artifacts Tesla had mentioned, and the other two were sheets of accompanying explanatory notes.

  Before reading them I took a moment and just looked at them. The notes were in German, written in a careful, extremely regular hand, looking almost machine-generated. It reminded me a little of Gabrielle’s writing. I remembered that Tesla’s technical education had been in Austria, so scientifically he probably thought in German.

  The two artifacts had been printed on letter presses in the curlicue-choked German typeface called Fraktur. I’d read a lot of nineteenth-century German journal articles on Achaemenid Persia in this typeface, enough to give me headaches trying to tell the capital F from J—and forget about capitals B, R, and V.

  One sheet was a piece of oversized newsprint folded in half, scorched along the bottom but mostly intact. The sheet was an interior page from a newspaper, Die Frankonische Neu Zeitung, dated January 7, 1759. The main story dealt with rumors of the defeat of a French army under Marshal Soubise by the forces of the King of Prussia commanded by his brother Prinz Heinrich near a Saxon town called Torgau.

  The accompanying notes described the newspaper page, gave details of the settings of the Aether Field Manipulator—which made no sense to me—and listed April 28, 1887, as the experiment’s date.

  The August page from a calendar from 1759 constituted the other artifact. The first twelve days of the month had been marked off. The back of the page, labeled “Kalkenhof im Thüringerwald,” was a lithograph of a manor house in a rustic setting. The explanatory notes were identical except for the date of the experiment, which was in early December of 1887.

  That was it.

  I read through the experimental notes again but found nothing new. I compared the machine settings. Even though they were gibberish to me, they were identical gibberish, every entry exactly the same.

  I read both sides of the newspaper page again, thinking maybe there was something important hidden in the articles, but found nothing. Besides, if there was, what could the calendar page mean? The back was a picture and the front unremarkable except for the days marked off.

  I leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling, trying to understand what Tesla had seen. After twenty minutes I started thinking it was just an elaborate head game designed to lock my brain up for a day or so, a riddle to which there was no answer.

  If anything, it confirmed my concerns. Tesla had used identical settings on his machine, and yet it had brought back items from different times.

  And then I sat bolt upright in the chair and felt the adrenaline surge through my body with a rush like cocaine. I got it.

  Son of a bitch!

  I grabbed the von Pfalz-Zweibrücken memoir and paged through it until I found an account of the winter fighting. That pretty much capped it—there was no battle at Torgau in January, at least not in this timeline.

  So I had a coin from 71 C.E. which clearly was not from my timeline, and was not from Tesla’s, either. I had two artifacts from 1759 C.E. which were not from Tesla’s timelin
e, and which were from different points in whatever that other timeline was, even though the machine settings were exactly the same—same settings, same timeline, but different times. How could there be three—no, at least three—timelines going, two or more temporal-event waves scrubbing one past and replacing it with another? I didn’t think there could be. I checked the dates again. And there it was!

  I broke out in a sweat, and my hands shook, but not from fear: from excitement. How often do you get to see how the universe really works? All those smart guys at the Wessex lab had been wrong—or at least the ones who came up with the temporal event wave theory. There was no event wave. There was no such thing as time travel, odd as that sounded sitting here in 1888. When Tesla returned me—assuming he kept his half of the bargain—I couldn’t pop back out ten years before the Wessex incident and save Joanne and Jack Junior. They were gone, lost to me forever, but Sarah was not.

  That knowing smile of Tesla’s—he had figured it out as well. He wasn’t afraid of me destroying his timeline, because that’s not how the universe worked. Now all I had to do was play along with Tesla, tell him whatever he wanted to know, and then go home. I didn’t have to destroy this world or any other, did not have to go back home with the blood of billions of people on my hands. I didn’t have to eliminate Gabrielle to save Sarah.

  I looked out the window which I had scarcely noticed when I came in, and I saw a cloudless blue sky framing the mountains, the slopes painted gold and orange by autumn leaves and sprinkled with pale purple from the wild lilacs which seemed to grow everywhere in riotous abandon. How had I not noticed before how beautiful the mountains were? I might actually miss them when I went home.

  Home.

  Tesla, lost in thought, said nothing for the first quarter hour over lunch. Finally he emerged from his reverie and looked at me.

  “You asked me a question earlier, Dr. Fargo, about the precision with which I could return you to your own time,” Tesla said after a moment. “Have you found your answer in my research notes?”

  He glanced at Gabrielle and smiled. The smile appeared condescending to me, and Gabrielle looked down at her soup, her own smile gone.

  Tesla must already have spoken to her about my question, told her he had left the folder with me, and now he expected me to admit the problem was beyond my ability to solve. This was a demonstration of the limits of my intellect for Gabrielle’s benefit, and for a moment it made me angry and defensive.

  Interesting—and stupid, like some kid trying to impress his girl. I wasn’t some kid. Gabrielle wasn’t my girl. Not now.

  Since I had figured out the problem, this was an opportunity to embarrass Tesla, but I couldn’t see an upside to that. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure that pandering to Tesla’s desire to humiliate me was going to help my cause, either. The unembellished truth was probably the best path in this case.

  “Can it be that the answer escapes you?” Tesla asked. “It seems so obvious to me.”

  “It took me the better part of an hour to figure it out, but I managed,” I answered.

  His eyebrows went up slightly, and then I saw a flicker of amusement. He thought I was bluffing.

  “Ah. I see. So tell me, how will I manage to deliver you to your correct time?”

  “I assume you have repeated the experiment and obtained the same results. These results are illustrative and typical, not unique.”

  Tesla shifted in his chair, less confident than he had been a moment before. “Obtaining verifiable dating of samples is difficult in most cases, but, if we are speaking of the same thing, then I can say that I have not a single experimental result which contradicts the factual evidence of these artifacts. They are simply the clearest illustration of the phenomenon.”

  I nodded and took a drink of water. I took a moment to think about how best to explain the artifacts, at least as I understood what they meant.

  “The mistake the scientists in my world made was thinking they had a time machine of any sort. Once they did enough experiments, they would have figured out the truth, but since they’re all dead and the Wessex facility is probably a big crater in the ground, I’m guessing it will be a while before anyone tries that again, at least in my time—I guess I mean in my world.

  “The old law of conservation of matter, energy, and momentum is the real clue which should have tipped them off—there’s only so much stuff in the universe, and if it simultaneously exists throughout time, then it is not finite, is it? It is infinite.

  “I’m not sure I’m expressing that very well, but there are just a lot of issues with the universe completely re-creating itself every instant, or nanosecond, or whatever the universe’s quantum of time is. There are even more issues with the universe existing as separate complete products at every instant throughout time, products which can be independently accessed.

  “Here’s the bottom line: the only reality is now. The future is a possibility and the past is just a memory; the past is not a bunch of stuff still down there in the basement you can go back and rummage around in. It’s funny, but Omar Khayyam, the twelfth century Persian mathematician and astronomer, in one line of poetry, captured the essence of reality which escaped the understanding of all the scientists in the Wessex project:

  “‘The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.’

  “Time travel, as the Wessex scientists understood the concept, is impossible because there is no other time to travel to.”

  “And yet here you are,” Tesla said with a smile.

  “Yeah, here I am. Your experiment—that was the nail in the coffin. You brought back a newspaper page from 1759. I have no idea how many times you had to repeat the experiment until you found something else you could establish a date for, but two hundred and seventeen days after the first experiment, you succeeded; you brought back a calendar page also from exactly two hundred and seventeen days later in that timeline. Two hundred and seventeen days elapsed time in both timelines—that was no coincidence.

  “The answer is not time travel—it is multiple parallel universes, which is another theory which was gaining some traction in my time. Maybe some of the scientists at Wessex thought that was the answer, but I wasn’t there long enough to find out. Maybe they went with the temporal-event-wave theory because it was the most dangerous explanation and so they couldn’t afford to ignore it, just in case. Maybe they had other guys working on the multiple-universe angle. I’ll probably never know for sure, but it doesn’t matter now, does it?

  “I suppose there are many parallel universes—what we called timelines before—but in each of them time advances like a wave, and the only substantial reality in each of them is that universe’s ‘present,’ the location of time’s wave front at that instant. The present just happens to be at a different time point in each of them.

  “To answer my own original question, I have been in your universe for about a month. When you return me to my universe, you will return me to it a month after I left. You will return me to that time because that is the only time there is.”

  I looked at Gabrielle, and she looked from me to Tesla, looking both relieved and intrigued.

  “So, do you know why the base-time wave front is different in each of these universes?” I asked.

  Tesla looked at me for a moment, his expression unchanging.

  “I do not.”

  I felt a slight adrenaline rush. As certain as I was that my conclusion was correct, there was always the possibility I had overlooked something and gotten it wrong. Tesla, by his expression and demeanor, had confirmed it. The three of us knew something no one else, on this world or my world, knew, something fundamental to how the universe was ordered. I found that pretty exciting, no matter what else happened next.

  “So here’s my next question: How can you be sure you can get me back to my own universe? Have you accessed it before? For that matter, how can you get me to a precise location in that universe?” I thought again about the seeming impossibility of finding
the needle that was the exact location on a world when there was a difference of billions of miles between where it was here and where it was in that universe.

  He sat there for a moment not speaking. I got the impression he had figured out how this conversation would unfold, and it had gone completely off the rails. Now he took some time deciding out how to regain control.

  “No, I have not accessed your plane of existence before. I have been unable to access any plane with a more advanced time than our own, but that is in part an energy issue. My calculations suggest the energy cost to open a portal to a more advanced plane is substantially higher than to the less advanced one. I suspect there are inertial issues involved in this. But I have accumulated enough energy to do so, and now that I have you physically present, I have the means to target your plane directly. As I explained, the vibrational properties of items from your world can be measured and used to calibrate the instrument.

  “As to precise places within that plane of existence—I will only say that location may not be as significant in the universe as I once thought. It is at any rate not a tremendous barrier to surmount, provided the vibrational properties of the associated local material in this plane of existence are known. Once this business with the Turks is finished, I shall be happy to demonstrate.”

  That was great news, right? I was going home, and I wasn’t going to have to be a mass murderer, a destroyer of worlds, to do so. So why did I feel like I was waiting for another shoe to drop?

  THIRTY-NINE

  October 14, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia