The Forever Engine - eARC

by Frank Chadwick

  “Impressive setup. How’d you pay for all this? Royalties on your inventions that good?”

  “I receive very little from my past endeavors. Your Mr. Edison stole most of my discoveries. The Russian crown subsidizes my work now.”

  “The Romanovs? Seriously? Why on earth would they subsidize a guy who wants to pull down every edifice of inherited wealth and power? Don’t they not know how to spell ‘anarchist’?”

  “I have no love for the czar, nor he for me, but my attacks are directed primarily at Britain and Imperial Germany. The Russian foreign ministry operates under the foolish belief that its enemy’s enemy is its friend, or at least its useful tool. The czar’s agents have been quite useful, particularly in establishing my network of . . . sympathizers.”

  He was serious. He thought he was putting one over on the Russian secret police. Just because someone’s a scientific genius does not make him politically astute.

  I glanced around the observation platform. Heavy riveted iron or steel formed the raised palisade, certainly bulletproof. I saw short vertical metal pipes, a couple inches in diameter, welded to the back of the palisade. A couple metal footlockers were spaced along the base of the palisade. I started to open a lid but turned to Tesla to see if that was okay. He nodded.

  Gatling gun, and a dozen or more loaded magazines. The locker protected it from the weather, and it would take about ten seconds to pick it up and drop the post of the pivot mount into the steel pipe.

  The southwest corner of the platform was partially enclosed and roofed. Inside I saw what looked like a couple old-style telephone receivers on cradles and narrow observation slits on the walls. The ones on the west side had a good view up the valley.

  “Is this your command post?”

  “Only in the event of unwelcome intruders. From here I can direct the fire of all of the defensive batteries. I have never had to use it, nor do I look forward to doing so now. I do not enjoy violence, but I am left with little alternative.”

  Yeah. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, after watching the cream of the Union Army slaughtered in front of St. Mary’s Heights, Lee had said to Longstreet it was good war was so terrible, or men would grow to love it too much. Bullshit. Everyone who sent people off to kill said they hated violence, but just didn’t have an alternative. I think the truth is they all loved it, but were just embarrassed to admit it. Tesla was no different.

  We descended through the house and walked down the gravel-covered road to the lake.

  “So I get you want to bring down the old order, break the back of inherited wealth and power, all that stuff. But sending assassins hopped up on drugs to kill elderly scientists—how’s that fit in?”

  He looked at me, and his eyebrows drew together in an impatient scowl. “There is a war under way in this world, a silent war, so silent most people do not even recognize it. I will not accept the world order the Lord Chillinghams would impose. Were it within their power, the Iron Lords would turn the entire surface of this continent into a smog-choked industrial slum populated with destitute wage slaves, all simply to sustain their own luxury and idleness.

  “Science will transform the world. The question is: Into What? What would you have the future of the world be, Dr. Fargo? Shall science elevate the lives of people everywhere? Or shall it enslave them? It is really that simple.”

  It was never that simple, but there was some truth there. I’d met men whose sense of entitlement came close to Chillingham’s, but I’d never met one who seemed so capable of turning that lust for power into reality.

  “Okay, Chillingham is a bad guy,” I said. “But you lost me getting from there to murdering Professor Tyndall and those other men.”

  “The members of the X Club? They were Chillingham’s tools, even though they never met him. They were the most serious threat to my plans in the long run. They could also have been the most effective opposition to Chillingham and the men he represents, the forces of inherited power. But they chose to work with the system he sits at the center of, like a spider in his web. They paid the price of that choice.”

  “Bad actors,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “People who commit bad acts—that’s what some of my former bosses called them. Kill enough bad actors and pretty soon no more bad acts.”

  “Exactly so,” he said.

  Jesus!

  I thought about the elderly birdlike Tyndall, and a dozen other academics of advanced age, and the idea of them being the nerve center of a secret revolutionary resistance to Chillingham and the British Iron Lords was laughable. It showed how tenuous was Tesla’s grasp of political reality. Here was a guy fighting “inherited power” and financing his struggle with money from the Russian czar, probably the last absolute ruler in Europe.

  “Why not ally with the French instead of the Russians?” I said.

  “I admit to the logic of that, in the ideological sense,” he said. “Gabrielle has mentioned the same thing, and we discussed it yesterday at some length—en Francais, of course. You believe me naïve, but I know that one or two of my men may be agents of the Russians, reporting my activities to them, but none of them speak French. In this way I exercise care.

  “The short answer as to why—support from Russia was forthcoming when it was needed, while France seeks alliance with Austria and Turkey, two of the most absolutist powers in Europe and the principal architects of Serbia’s travails. While I have no more loyalty to the fiction of the Serbian state than Gabrielle does to the fiction of the French state, it currently provides me with a secure base of operations. Beyond that, France has no desire to overturn the European order. Perhaps once, but no longer. They have become comfortable with the status quo. In the long run, who I ally with is of less moment than what comes of it.”

  Our walk brought us to the wire enclosure by the lake. Tesla waved to a black-clothed guard, who pulled the gate open. Tesla paused to chat with him in Serbian for a moment. He called him by name, and the conversation was casual, the boss asking an employee how he was doing.

  I looked the defenses over as we went through—certainly not impregnable. A single row of barbed-wire fence formed the perimeter, better for keeping out wandering livestock than determined infantry. A handful of guard posts dotted the grounds ten or twenty yards in from the fence, but they looked to me as if they were for protection from the weather rather than small arms fire.

  One thing I did notice: the compound was not teeming with people. Tesla didn’t have an army here, or at least not a very large one. We passed two guards at the gate, and I saw two others making the rounds of the perimeter. The doors to the zeppelin hanger stood open, and I saw a half dozen more men there, working from scaffolds to repair the airship’s gas bag.

  In the real world the job of evil genius didn’t automatically come with a couple thousand loyal minions. Tesla had enough men to guard his compound, maintain his equipment, crew two airships—but not necessarily all at the same time. I’d banged up a few of his men, and Jovo had made an even deeper dent. His engineered crash must have killed or injured some of the remaining crew of the first airship—the Djordje Petrovic—and Tesla said three crewmen of the second ship were wounded in the fight I saw. I knew at least one man died in the night attack on Brezna, because I killed him myself.

  I glanced back at the bandaged pistolero accompanying us. Tesla said he used men who had reason to hate me as guards, and that made sense. But there was probably another reason to use walking wounded for this sort of grunt duty—he was short of manpower.

  Tesla led the way to the second building, about half the size of the zeppelin hanger, which still made it huge. As we walked, he gestured to a third building by the lakeshore.

  “That is our hydrogen-separation building. We divide water into oxygen and hydrogen by means of electrolysis, although it is not operating today.”

  “Down for maintenance?” I asked.

  “No. We simply have no immediate need for more hydrogen. We use it
only to fill the lifting cells of the zeppelins and in several small fuel cells carried by the flying ships. Given its combustible nature, it is better to separate it only when needed rather than storing quantities of it here and there.”

  He was right about that—hydrogen was volatile as hell. Who from my time and place didn’t remember the newsreel footage of the Hindenburg exploding and burning? Oh, the humanity! Small wonder Harding had looked forward to putting a couple incendiary rockets into Tesla’s zeppelin the next time he saw it.

  “Ever think about using helium instead?” I asked. “It doesn’t burn.”

  “It would be a superior lifting agent, if I could obtain it. The Americans control most of the world’s reserves, however, and are not generous with it.”

  We reached the second building, and Tesla paused, touching the handle of the door, thought for a moment, and turned to me.

  “You are extraordinarily fortunate, Dr. Fargo. What I am about to reveal to you, no more than twelve other people have seen.”

  He pushed open the double doors, and we entered. The first thing I noticed was the humid air. We walked down a corridor ten meters or so long and then out into the open floor of an enormous workshop, high-ceilinged and dark. Tall portable hissing gas lights illuminated a few work areas, scattered islands of yellow light in the ocean of gloom. I expected noise, but the building was nearly silent.

  The corridor ran down the broad open center of the building, flanked by rows of workbenches and assembly areas. Beyond them tall wooden shelves lined the walls, filled with dim, irregular shapes.

  I looked at the items on the workbenches and assembly areas. Most of them made no sense, but I recognized several partially assembled clockwork spiders, a primitive electric arc welder, a bicycle with training wheels and a metal shield covering the front, a lot of different-sized electrical motors (maybe some sort of electromagnetic field generators?), a Gatling gun mounted on a four-wheeled cart with a small steam engine, what looked like an oversized riveted metal diving suit on three steel girder stilts, a really big gyroscope, a circular sheet metal platform about a meter across with a brass railing around it and mounted on a dozen enormous steel springs.

  Ahead of us lights illuminated several large machines, eerie in their silent but continuous motion. As we got closer, I got a good long look at them, and, despite my natural inclinations, I felt a sense of awe.

  Three identical machines, each about three meters tall and wide, and twice as long, stood in line, attached to thick raised concrete slabs with bolts as thick as my forearm. Gleaming brass and steel made up most of the machines, but a large wheel, very much like a turbine blade, was the central component of each. The hub and rim of the wheels were metallic, the blades wood, and as the wheel turned I saw the blades change angle within the wheel, just as Thomson had predicted.

  Pipes ran overhead and sprinkler heads sprayed a fine mist of water on the wheels. I remembered the liftwood blades of Intrepid growing hot when they lifted. The water spray must be to cool the liftwood panels. This explained the humidity in the building. It was noticeably warmer near the machines.

  I only saw four workers in the building, clustered around the generators and an even larger machine farther back. All of them wore long white canvas coats, leather gauntlets, and dark-tinted goggles pushed up on their foreheads. A bald, wrinkled fellow, thin and stooped, greeted Tesla and gave him a report in Serbian. I couldn’t understand it, but I’d heard enough by then to know the distinctive sound of the language. Tesla smiled and patted his shoulder, then called out to the others, smiled and waved.

  The attitude of the workers here was the same as the guard at the gate and others I’d seen here—respectful without being servile. These were not soulless minions; they were dedicated people who shared some sort of common vision. They followed Tesla out of respect, even affection.

  “Good news?” I asked.

  “The generators still operate at 84 percent of their original capacity, which is somewhat higher than I projected. The liftwood loses potency over time, but I had very little good documentation on how quickly it would decline given this level of continuous use. Come. This next machine should particularly interest you. The Martians called their momentum generator a Forever Engine, but only because they did not understand its function. But this, by opening portals to other planes of existence, possibly infinite in their variety, slices of time reaching back to Creation and possibly forward to the extinction of the universe—this is a true Forever Engine.”

  The machine behind the three generators towered another three or four meters over them, and the building’s roof had been modified to accommodate it. As I thought about it, I figured the building had probably been built around it. Even in the quiet gloom of the workshop the machine seemed alive, enormously powerful, a tiger waiting patiently in the jungle shadows. Six enormous wire-wrapped armatures radiated from a central shaft, and three massive arms projected from the surrounding frame, ending in some sort of insulated housings, apparently a focusing device for whatever it was that came out.

  “So this is what an aether propeller looks like, huh?”

  “That was the core device, although this is heavily modified. The purpose is completely different, but both effects are produced by manipulation of electromagnetic fields.”

  “These big arms shape the field somehow?”

  “They are critical when using the device as a propeller, but some field shaping is also important to its current function,” Tesla said. “The fine manipulation is done with . . . well, it is done. That is what matters. My original modification to it envisioned its use as a directed-energy weapon, but the effect produced was quite different, as you know.”

  “So that’s why back in London you found it amusing that the Wessex accelerator was originally intended as a weapon. Small world—worlds. So, you got this one all lined up to send me back?”

  Tesla looked at me, and his expression changed—a mix of suspicion, amusement, and maybe grudging respect.

  “I thought it better to wait until I was prepared to initiate the operation myself. You have persuaded me that your ability to ‘connect the dots,’ as you say, is formidable. I cannot imagine how you would discern the operation of this machine, but I am prepared to accept that limitations of my imagination are not necessarily the same as those of reality.”

  The idea of figuring out how this thing worked had occurred to me. I didn’t think I could do it on my own, but I bet Thomson and I could have figured it out between us, if he’d lived to get this far. Figuring out the spectrographic vibration thing, or stumbling across the exact settings needed to get me home . . . those were different stories.

  “One thing I’ve been wondering about,” I said. “What were you trying to do when I came into this world? Obviously you were cranking your gizmo at the same time as I popped in or there wouldn’t have been that echo effect in Bavaria.”

  Tesla paused and thought for a moment before answering. “As I am returning you to your own world soon, I suppose it does not matter that you know. The modified focus arms are a recent adaptation I have made which allow me to aim the apparatus’s effect at a considerable distance from this laboratory, although at an increase in power requirement as well. My intent was to repeat my experiment with the azhdaja but instead of bringing them here, transport them to central London along with whatever other predators the process might sweep up. My intent was purely to cause terror and confusion, undermine the faith of the populace in their authoritarian government. Can you imagine the reaction to a score of azhdaja running through the halls of Westminster Palace, perhaps even in parliament?”

  “You have that sort of accuracy?” I asked. He shrugged.

  “I was still experimenting. I expected some drift, some errors in the calculations at first, but expected to be able to refine the process over time. Once I had done this in London, I would repeat it in the other major capitals of Europe. No palace, no fortress, no remote manor house, no matter how well
guarded, would be safe. However, instead of prehistoric animals emerging in London, a village in the countryside exploded and you appeared. Imagine my surprise.”

  “Imagine mine,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose so. This is purely speculation, but I believe the two energy discharges, which were coincidentally simultaneous, must have drawn each other together. As the power used by your Wessex facility was far in excess of my device, it displaced my target point all the way west to Somerton, while displacing your energy effect only a few kilometers to the east.”

  I wandered over to a tall metallic cabinet by the wall, its face made up of over a hundred small drawers, each one labeled. I looked at the labels: detailed latitude and longitude descriptions sometimes followed by a location. I found the one for London, pulled it open and looked inside. Dirt.

  “This must be your database of locations, right? Material from this world which you can use to calibrate your projector to link with the corresponding physical material at the other end?”

  “Very good, Dr. Fargo.”

  “And the echo effect you got in Bavaria?” I asked. Tesla shrugged again.

  “I am still considering that. I have no firm hypothesis yet, but we have barely begun experimenting in this field. It was an interesting and unexpected result, and fortunate for you. Had some of the energy not been drawn off for that transfer, the effect in Somerton would have been even more catastrophic. I cannot believe you would have survived the event.

  “But I am expecting visitors this afternoon. Come, we must return to the main house.”