The Forever Engine - eARC

by Frank Chadwick

  I remembered something from back in London, maybe from Buller’s office, something about disproving Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The details were fuzzy.

  “Gotta stick by your guns,” I said, but just to make him feel better.

  “Magnetism is an interest of mine, you know that. But temperature is my true passion. Heating, cooling, that’s the history of the cosmos, laddie. Everything else is . . . side effects. No one knows heating and cooling as I do. Not half a dozen men can even understand the equations I’ve derived to model the cooling of the Earth.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said, but he shook his head.

  “You don’t understand. Temperature—it’s all I’ve got. It’s my legacy, and . . . I made an error.”

  “An error?”

  “Aye, an error in computation. The Earth is older than my calculations, old enough . . . perhaps . . . I don’t know. But no one’s noticed the mistake yet, even though it’s been published for over a decade. Who would think to double-check Billie Thomson’s sums on something that important, on something about temperature? No one but me.”

  He stared down at his beer stein. No wonder he felt haunted by Tyndall’s ghost.

  “Well, your secret’s safe with me, pal,” I said, and patted his back.

  He turned and looked at me, eyes empty and hopeless.

  SEVENTEEN

  October 6, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

  I rose early, my head throbbing from too much beer the night before and too much bizarre science. I left the hotel in my improvised running clothes and began jogging under a pale pinkie-gray sky that promised another glorious autumn day. Only a few clouds drifted overhead, and the heavy dew would vanish like magic as soon as the sun showed itself.

  I had the streets almost to myself. Down the block a solitary milk wagon made its way, four young boys running back and forth from the open sides to front steps, delivering tin jugs of milk and boxes of butter, panting to keep up as the wagon made steady progress down the street. Another block away I saw a carnival wagon, maybe an early departure from the fair. Other than that, everyone was sleeping it off.

  I ran it off instead. I had things to do, a body that wasn’t ready to do them, and not enough time, so I ran even though I would rather have rolled over and drifted back into my erotic dream of Gabrielle Courbiere. I might have done so anyway if I hadn’t had to pee.

  Besides, the dream had become disturbing. She had undressed, and under the black riding habit she was a robot—a shapely robot, like out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but a robot nonetheless—and it hadn’t bothered dream-me. In fact, dream-me was part robot, too. What the hell did that mean?

  So I ran. I ran to purge my body of toxins, to harden it for the coming trials, and to scourge it for my sins. I ran to forget unbidden dreams, and I ran to think, to make sense of the inexplicable—trips to Mars on gossamer wings!

  Our hotel was a couple blocks south of the Fliegerplatz. Despite the cool morning I’d worked up a good sweat by the time I rounded the corner onto Landsberger Strasse and the Fliegerplatz came into view. I jogged east now, toward the red pre-dawn, with the Fliegerplatz to my left. Not much stirred except for a smallish dirigible ahead of me, descending for a landing from the east. I watched it glide almost silently across the Landsberger Strasse, nearly brushing the uplifted branches of the chestnuts and oaks and I felt the adrenaline surge as I saw its unmarked black sides. I watched helplessly as it passed directly over the bulk of Intrepid, dark and silent on its tie-down pad, and as it passed over I saw a shower of small objects cascade from the dirigible onto the British cruiser. The explosions were small, but there were many of them, crackling like fireworks, all mixed up with the shouts of alarm from the sailors on early watch and the chiming of action stations, all of the sounds soft and distant, not at all like genuine danger.

  The dirigible did not land; its engines increased in volume as it climbed and turned to port, toward me, and it began making smoke—thick, oily black smoke, escaping in almost solid coils from the back of its enclosed cabin. I knew instantly it wasn’t turning toward me; it was turning toward the hotel.

  I sprinted back south across the broad boulevard and into an alleyway. The hotel was three blocks south and four west. My lungs burned for air by the time I reached the end of the alley, but I didn’t let up. As I raced across the street, I glanced left. The dirigible cleared the roofs, coming diagonally toward me, no more than a hundred meters away. They’d see me, but from up there I’d just look like some local yokel running in panic.

  That wasn’t far wrong. I upped the speed, put everything I had into it, legs pounding like pistons, my heart feeling as if it were about to explode, and with no idea what I’d do when I got there. Warn them! my brain screamed.

  The dirigible was going to get there before me. A warning was going to be too late, unless the dirigible had to mess around for a while trying to land. Think!

  The hotel was on another broad east-west boulevard, Agnes-Bernauer Strasse. They’d have plenty of room to land the dirigible there, but they’d also see me coming from a long way if I went there and turned right.

  At the next corner, a block short of Agnes-Bernauer, I turned right. My breath came in ragged gasps, the shadow of the dirigible passed over me, I felt a tingle in my scalp and up my spine, and then suddenly I had my second wind. Adrenaline is a marvelous thing. Behind me I heard the report of a large naval gun. Somebody on Intrepid had found a better way to sound the alarm than ringing a bell.

  By the time I’d run the four short blocks west and turned into the alleyway, the dirigible had disappeared below the roof line ahead of me and its engines softened to idle. Smoke smelling of fuel oil settled into the streets and alleyways around me. Through the drifting smoke I saw the zeppelin now, or at least a very short segment of it between the buildings at the end of the alley, hovering twenty or more feet above the pavement. A rusty one-meter length of inch-and-a-half iron pipe lay against a trash can, and I picked it up as I jogged down the alley.

  I paused at the end to catch my breath and get my heart rate under control. As I did so, I felt the familiar darkness tease at the edges of my vision. I did not fight it this time. I surrendered to it.

  I looked cautiously around the corner, across and slightly down the street toward the hotel. Half a dozen ropes hung down from the dirigible, and several men on the ground held on to them, holding the airship in place against a soft breeze from the west, my right. None of them looked armed, and their attention was directed upward. The engine noise was louder out in the street. The carnival wagon I’d seen earlier was parked in front of the hotel, and as I watched, four men hustled Thomson, still in his nightshirt, down the front steps.

  I took four or five long, fast strides out into the street and swung the pipe with both hands. The first man holding the rope never saw or heard me coming, and when the pipe cracked the back of his skull he went down like two hundred pounds of dead weight. The man beside him holding the same line started to turn toward me, his face distorted in horror, and the pipe crushed his left elbow, then his ribs, then his hip in three quick blows, and he was down.

  The pipe felt good in my hands, balanced and lethal, as I ran toward the second group of linemen.

  One of them saw the scuffle and alerted his partner. They let the rope go, and the first one drew a sheath knife from his belt. He held it up, as if to guard against me. I swung the pipe, and he made to duck it, stepping sideways. He ran into the other lineman, stumbled, and the pipe hit, driving the two of them to the pavement in a shower of the first one’s blood and teeth.

  The buoyancy of the dirigible changed and tugged the remaining linemen up, pulling their feet off the ground for a moment before they came back down. They literally had their hands full, so I ignored them and ran toward the men holding Thomson. The linemen were in dark uniforms, but these four were dressed in bright colors. Of course—the circus wagon—a pretty good cover for guys moving around early in the morning.


  I heard a gunshot from above and behind me, felt a momentary burning sensation in my left shoulder, but the pain went as quickly as it had come. I was running fast, and the dirigible was bobbing. I’d have to be damned unlucky to get hit by another aimed shot before I got to the kidnappers.

  Thomson’s face lit up when he saw me. One man held the old Scotsman’s arms behind his back, and the other three stepped forward to meet me, knives drawn. Fortunately none of them were packing pistols or this might have been a short fight. I shifted my grip on the pipe, held it like a short quarterstaff.

  The first man lunged for me. I broke his wrist with a downward chop of the left end of the pipe and then took him down with a sharp right cross to the head. The other two went wide to either side of me. The quarterstaff grip was a mistake, wouldn’t let me keep these two at a distance, and now I needed to fight for time. Police, the army, somebody had to be on their way to find out what the ruckus was all about.

  I let the pipe slide back into a kendo grip. I launched an overhead swing at one attacker, followed him and swung again as he gave ground. Then I spun and swung from the shoulder at the other attacker, who I sensed, who I knew, was closing in on me from behind. He raised his arm to block the blow, and it made a sound like a stick of celery snapping when the pipe hit it. The man, face distorted in pain and broken left arm dangling limp at his side, started to back up, but not quickly enough. I swung again and he went down forever.

  I turned back to the remaining thug, but he backed quickly down the sidewalk away from me. I looked to Thomson, but more men now crowded out of the hotel, some in the dark dirigible uniforms, some dressed like carnies—too many of them, and a couple had revolvers.

  “Kein Schiessen!” I yelled at them. “Ich bin Fargo. Der Alte Mann wunscht mich lebendig.”

  Don’t shoot. I’m Fargo. The Old Man wants me alive.

  They hesitated; the barrels of the pistols dropped.

  I raised the pipe above my head and charged.

  EIGHTEEN

  October 6, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

  “Well, you’ve got guts, Yank, I’ll give you that,” O’Mara, the Royal Marine corporal from Intrepid, said, shaking his head and looking around. A half dozen of the men from his section along with two Bavarian policemen examined the bodies in the street while several more Marines checked out the hotel behind us room by room. A crowd of over a hundred curious locals clustered around, looking at the visible evidence of violence with the same mix of horror and fascination as motorists driving past a bad wreck.

  “Thanks. You want to hold this for me?”

  I was trying to bandage my left arm and it was hard to manage it with one trembling hand, especially since both of my arms felt as if they were filled with sand—really hot sand. Every muscle in my body seemed on fire.

  He tied the bandage for me as Jenkins, a naval lieutenant from Intrepid, came out of the hotel and looked around.

  “You did this by yourself? Unarmed?”

  “I had a pipe.”

  “Remarkable,” he said, shaking his head. “The Marines shot four of them when they opened fire, but you killed three men yourself. Injured more than that, I daresay, but they got them away.”

  “They got away with Thomson, too,” I said. “That’s what matters. Son of a bitch.”

  I’d gotten tangled up with the mob from the hotel, and the dirigible had dropped a sling and hoisted Thomson up. It dropped a whole bunch of lines with slings at the end. The thugs had overcome me by the time the Marines showed up, were dragging me toward the slings, but they got sloppy in their haste. They had sheathed their knives to use both hands, and I got hold of a nice heavy-bladed one, pulled it out of its sheath, and cut up two of the thugs pretty badly before they dropped me. With a dozen Marines pounding up the street and firing rifle shots, there wasn’t enough time to deal with me again, so they grabbed the slings and called it a day. The dirigible had let loose a cascade of ballast water and shot up into the sky, gone just like that.

  The water had washed most of the blood off the street.

  Now what the hell was I going to do? Thomson was the closest thing I had to a friend here, my guide, the honcho of the expedition. Gordon was probably dead, or Tesla’s men would have hauled him out as well.

  “Better let our surgeon have a look at that later,” Jenkins said, nodding to my arm. “Right now he’s busy with casualties from the diversionary attack. Some sort of metal globes that unfolded into mechanical spiders after they landed. Devilish machines, and quite deadly.”

  “Yeah, I saw some in London. Not that hard to avoid once you get over the surprise, but pretty scary the first time.”

  He looked at me and frowned, clearly unsure what to make of me, a history professor who ran the decks of his ship every morning and who had done . . . this.

  “You may have a broken bone or two as well. You do look frightful, I must say.”

  “I’m still a little groggy so I think I’ll just sit here on the grass for a while, if that’s okay.”

  I probably had a cracked rib or two and probably a mild concussion. Once I went down, they were pissed enough that, orders or no, they might have kicked and beaten me to death if the Marines hadn’t shown up. My vision was blurry, and I was sure my nose was broken, but I still had all my teeth. That was good; the thought of having to visit whatever passed for a dentist here was pretty high up on my creepy nightmare list.

  Gordon came out of the hotel with the last couple Marines. I experienced a flash of an unfamiliar emotion—pleasure at seeing him. He saw me and walked over, clearly still excited from his narrow escape.

  “You’re alive! Good Lord, what happened to you?”

  “There was a fight. They captured Thomson and got him away. Where were you?”

  “Thomson? Gone? I . . . I woke up and had to visit the water closet. I saw them on my way back, and when they tried to overpower me I broke away and made it to my room.”

  “Barricaded in right proper, ’e was,” one of the Marines volunteered.

  “You barricaded yourself in?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” he answered and looked around at the others. O’Mara stood and walked toward his men in the street, suddenly interested in what they were up to, and Jenkins and the other Marine followed him.

  “I’m just one man,” Gordon said. “What the devil did you expect me to do against that mob?”

  “Your revolver was in your room. Shoot the first six of them and then beat the rest of them to death with your empty pistol. Or die trying.”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but no words came, perhaps because there was no anger or accusation in my voice. I simply said what I honestly expected of him. It’s what everyone had expected of him, and, as he stood there, I think he knew it was what he ought to have expected of himself.

  He looked away and frowned.

  “Go to blazes, Fargo. I don’t answer to you.”

  “No, you answer to Lord Chillingham. If we go back empty-handed, General Buller might be willing to give you a revolver and some privacy, but Chillingham won’t. Have you met him? I have.”

  He looked back at me, anger and resentment mixed up with desperation and the hint of panic.

  “Of course I’ve met him. He’s my department head. It doesn’t matter what you think,” he said in a low voice. “Hate me if you like. You’re nothing here.”

  I didn’t hate him. I wasn’t all that crazy about myself right then.

  Not because I’d failed. Success and failure are often beyond our control. But I had killed three men, probably crippled as many more, and after all these years, it had been so fucking easy! Every day here took me further from the life I had built for myself, took me further from my daughter, Sarah, until even if I returned she might not recognize me.

  Sarah found an old picture of me once, a picture I’d forgotten. For a while she kept it in a frame on the desk in her room. I never spoke to her about it, but after a while she put it in a drawer. She noticed I
stopped coming into her room when it was out. She was always very sensitive that way.

  The picture was taken in Afghanistan, at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul. There’s an MH-60L Black Hawk helicopter from the 160th Aviation in the background on the tarmac, with me and the other eleven guys in my chalk in the foreground, six kneeling and six standing. I’m standing second from the left. We’re not combat-loaded; we’re just in desert camo pants and tee-shirts. I remember it was a hot day, but we don’t look uncomfortable. We look as if all our lives up until that day had prepared us for that place, that moment, and nothing else. That’s not true, but that’s how we look.

  I’m grinning, squinting in the sun, mouth wide and showing bared teeth, white against the brown of my tanned face. I look like a cheerful Doberman, well-adjusted and happy and dangerous. I look like Reggie Llewellyn, but I’m not. I’m not like Reggie Llewellyn.

  Gordon stood there for a while, his anger running out of fire, and then he looked out into the street at the line of bodies.

  “The Marines said you . . . who are you, Fargo?”

  That was a pretty good question.

  “I’m exactly what I told you. I’m a history professor from the University of Chicago. I specialize in the ancient world. When I was younger, I was a soldier, like you.”

  “Not like me,” he said.

  “Okay, not exactly like you. I was a warrant officer, not a commissioned officer. I was a translator, Middle-Eastern languages—Arabic, Pashto, Turkmen, and Daric Farsi. I’m not sure how useful that’s going to be.”

  “We usually hire a local Johnny to do the translating.”

  “Yeah, how’d that work out for you in Afghanistan?”

  His face clouded with anger again, and I could have kicked myself. He hadn’t been to Afghanistan, he was ashamed of it, and I’d just rubbed his nose in it. If he froze up, either with anger or shame, this was the end of the road. Thomson was gone. Without Gordon there was no expedition, and then how would I save my world? How would I save Sarah from oblivion?