The sun had not yet set on the east coast of the United States. The Independence materialized over the shores of Long Island, unnoticed by the sparse population. Below them, a wood-frame tower rose nearly two hundred feet, a partially constructed dome squatting on top. Nearby, sat a brick factory building next to a railroad track.
“What's that?” Pierce asked.
Tesla had already popped open the panel at the base of the control console for the portal machine that bore his name and had scattered devices and tools around him.
“It is called Wardenclyffe,” he said. “It is a wireless transmitting station. You must evacuate the people inside. Now, let me work.”
Pierce's headache was returning. “Nikola, that isn't a wireless tower. And why would we evacuate anyone.”
“Yes it is, and they are in danger.”
“What makes you so certain it's a radio tower?” Liz asked.
Tesla slammed a spanner onto the deck and stabbed a finger into his temple. “Because it is in here! I know that it is! The visions, they are all around me. I see the past, the future, other worlds, other lives. You must trust what I say. Just go and let me get on with my work.”
Pierce took Liz by the arm. “Murunga and I will go down. Lower us by the ladder. We might as well do what Nikola says, and you can keep an eye on him.”
He wanted to humor Tesla until they could discover what had happened to them. Perhaps it had been caused by the energy wave created by the sphere on the alien world, or perhaps from a malfunction in the Tesla Portal. At any rate, the only one who could help them return to their own reality was the Serb who saw visions. Pierce was not comforted when he and Murunga trod across the grassy field, then up the dirt road to the brick building in the shadow of the strange tower.
He knocked on the door, received no answer, and pushed it open. Lights inside were burning.
“Hello? Is anyone here?”
Curiously, the factory floor was filled with all sorts of electrical gear so that he well believed it could be some sort of radio tower. The machinery appeared primitive, nothing like what Tesla or Elias Fletcher produced these days. How had Tesla known it was here let alone what its purpose was?
“Is someone there?” came a voice form behind a dynamo.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” Pierce said. “Would you mind kindly evacuating the building?”
He was certain that sounded more idiotic than he had thought it would. Why would anyone listen to him, a foreigner in the States with no authority.
The man stood up and placed a spanner on a table next to the dynamo, taking a cloth to wipe his hands. He was tall and thin, immaculately dressed in a smock, sporting a thin mustache.
“Nikola?” Pierce said, staring at the apparition.
Tesla's brow furrowed. “I'm sorry, sir, but we have never met, have we? I have a photographic memory, and I would have remembered you. British, am I correct? I am indeed Nikola Tesla. And you are?”
“Harrison Pierce, sir.”
“Ah, the explorer. I have heard of you. I must admit that I have not read any of your books. Forgive my frankness, but the subject does not interest me. I have heard you mentioned many times while dining at Delmonico's. What brings the eminent explorer and your imposing associate to my tower?”
“Oh, ah.” He had almost forgotten why he had come. “This is my friend Murunga. We were sent to evacuate your building. You are in danger.”
“I'm the only one here at present, and I am in the middle of something very critical. I couldn't possibly—”
“We must insist,” Murunga said, his voice deep and threatening.
Tesla took a moment to study the massive Maasai, with his dark brooding face and its ritual scars, contrasting with the richly tailored suit that Tesla could identify with. He apparently found the situation more serious, for he gave a curt nod and slipped out of his smock, donning his suit jacket and following the two strangers to the door.
Murunga held the door for the others and spoke in a more polite tone, since the Serb had acquiesced to their request. “Excuse me, Mr. Tesla, but what year is this?”
Tesla gave him a curious look. “Why, 1902, of course. What an unusual question. With all this electrical equipment around us, and you ask me the date?”
“It's pertinent,” Pierce said, with a glance to Murunga. “Now let's hurry.”
If they hadn't traveled in time, then what had happened to them? Pierce was no scientist. He was an explorer and knew his way around certain disciplines, such as cartography, geology, and biology. He had no knowledge of physics and was at a total loss to explain how there were two Nikola Teslas at the same time. He certainly couldn’t give reason why the one would be working on a wireless transmission station in the middle of Long Island, when he should be in his own laboratory facility in New York when he was not traveling to alien worlds in search of new technology.
Pierce glanced around and noticed the Independence in a new position on their left, drifting higher and near the tower.
“No,” Murunga said. “This way.”
Murunga indicated the opposite direction. Another Independence floated over the field where they had been dropped to the ground.
The new airship was not the Independence, but its shape and structure was so identical, they could be sister ships, right down to the array of copper Faraday coils covering the rigid craft's superstructure.
“Airships?” Tesla asked in awe. “Incredible. I have never seen one, and now there are two hovering over my plant.”
Before Pierce could even formulate a question in his confused brain, the sister ship to the Independence began to crackle with energy. Blue lightening surged along the coils over its hull. Suddenly, a bolt blasted through the air and dissolved the middle struts of the tower. The upper half and the partially constructed dome came crashed down.
Pierce shoved Tesla in the other direction, and the three ran across the field before the airship propellers turned it to face them. The air crackled, and blue lightning ripped into the brick building, vaporizing roof, walls, and anything between.
The Independence, still dangling the rope ladder, raised higher, its coils spitting electricity. A blue bolt of lightning shot out from the projector on its bow, flashing over the other airship. But its doppelgänger had already been on the move, rising higher. Its coils were active again, this time to produce a hole in the sky. It sailed through, swallowed up, vanishing to somewhere else.
Once back on board the Independence, Pierce stormed to the forward section of the gondola.
“Just what the bloody hell is going on!”
“Did you get everyone out safely?” Liz asked. “When that ship used its portal weapon on the factory, I was afraid . . .”
Her face was pale as she looked at him with a mixture of worry and relief.
“There was only one person there,” he said, his anger starting to dissipate. “Just who was that other ship? Did you receive any signal from it? Was it German?”
“No signal. And if it was German, then they're buying airships from our company. That was a Fletcher Industries design. Who was down there?”
The rescued Tesla followed Murunga forward, his eyes studying all aspects of the craft.
“Incredible. Magnificent. These devices, what do they do?”
Liz stared while on the deck, Tesla slammed home the access panel to the portal control console and stood up, dusting off his striped trousers. He looked at his duplicate with disapproval.
“Captain Pierce, you should not have brought him on board.”
“Well, my apologies, but you could have warned us what we were walking into.”
“I only suspected what was down there. I was not certain I . . . he . . . would be there, only that there was danger. I told you, I have visions. These are not memories, and they are fragmented.”
“You, too, have visions?” asked the newcomer.
“Of course. We are the same. Our universe has been disrupted and our history altered
. You are from the present line of time, I from another. We should not be together.”
“But how better to solve this problem than to double our brain power?” asked the second Tesla.
Pierce waved his hands. “Wait. I'm confused.”
“Of course you are, dear boy,” the first Tesla said. “But not to worry, for I have devised a way of setting the universe back on the correct track. I have gained insight from exposure to that alien sphere and was able to construct a device that has added to our portal generator the advantage to take us backward in time.”
“A time machine!” exclaimed the second Tesla. “Of course. It makes perfect sense. I have toyed with that idea for years, but I have been too busy with alternative forms of energy.”
“Energy is not the issue,” the first Tesla said. “I have borrowed machinery from our alien friends that transcend the technology of either of our timelines. Their thoughts bombard my brain, but if I concentrate, I can make sense out of it. Not only do I see and hear them, but also, you and dozens of others of us. All our possibilities, all our futures and pasts. They diverge, forming other possible strings of existence. We must find where ours diverge, then travel back to repair the fracture.”
“And I will go with you,” said the second Tesla.
“Impossible. This is back along your own timeline. In fact, we should not even be meeting. But if you would travel back in your own history, that would be paradoxical.”
“Indeed, it would.” He spoke in Slavic.
His doppelgänger replied in kind, and they had a lengthy discussion in their native tongue while Pierce and Liz stared on in confusion.
When the Tesla from the present timeline was returned to the ruins of his factory, the Independence raised high into the sky and sailed over the Atlantic.
“Destination?” Gridley asked from his station at the ship's wheel.
“We must go to France,” Tesla said.
“What is in France?” Pierce asked.
“I am,” Tesla said.
“We just left you in Long Island,” Liz said.
“Of course. But that is the present me. We must go back to the time before I left Europe. That is where the string can be repaired or severed.”
“Why then and there?” Pierce asked.
“Because, my good friend, that is a pivotal moment in my history. It stands out in my visions with clarity in all its possibilities. And in more than one of those probabilities, I die. I would hope to prevent that.”
At the Strasbourg railway station, a twenty-eight-year-old Nikola Tesla stood waiting for his train, with a suitcase at his side and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison in his pocket. He did not notice the two men approach until they were hurrying away with his luggage, which contained his train ticket and boarding pass for the ship that would start his journey to America.
Before he could give a shout to the thieves, the one carrying off the case with his possession tripped over the outstretched leg of a huge black man in an immaculate suit.
The big man kicked the thief in the head, sending him into unconsciousness. When the second thief turned to his rescue, an older man dressed in khaki clothes that resembled a uniform stepped up and struck him full in the face. The thief crumpled to the ground next to his compatriot.
The African man retrieved the satchel and approached Tesla. He was as well dressed as Tesla himself, if not better.
Murunga held out the bag. “Your property, sir.”
His eyes flashed to either side, aware that the danger had only begun.
Pierce saw the other two first. They hid behind newspapers, peeking over the tops. One, aware that they had been discovered, tossed the paper aside and drew a revolver.
Pierce pushed Tesla down before the shot rang out.
Murunga had lifted the suitcase as a shield, the bullet piercing its leather side and embedding itself in the clothing bundled inside. He dropped the case, slipped his knife from his sleeve, and ran in pursuit of the two assassins.
Liz was beside Pierce, helping young Tesla, her hands checking his torso for any wounds.
“He's okay,” she told Pierce. “You help Murunga and I'll see to Nikola.”
Pierce didn't like the idea of leaving her, but Murunga seemed to have chased after the danger. Besides, Liz was very handy with the revolver she kept in her purse.
When Pierce caught up to Murunga, one assassin lay dead in an alley near the train station and the second was bleeding out into a puddle.
“Who sent you?” Pierce demanded of the dying man.
The man spoke in French, and Murunga questioned him in the same language. When the man expired, Murunga cleaned the blade of his knife on the dead man's coat and replaced it up his sleeve.
“He didn't know who requested the assassination,” he said. “He was paid by an intermediary.”
They found Liz on their way back to the station. She was smiling, holding a letter in her hand.
“Young Mr. Tesla is on the train and safely on his way to America,” she said.
“What's that?” Pierce asked, pointing to the letter.
She handed it to him. “Nikola wanted me to snatch it from his younger self. He didn't explain why. I lifted it out of his pocket while I was checking him for injuries. He never even noticed. People touching him makes him nervous. Especially women.”
Pierce looked at the letter addressed to Edison. “Dear Mr. Edison . . .”
The Independence slipped through the portal created in front of it, transcending time as well as space. Below them, London fell into view.
Smoke curled up from the ruined buildings, fallen structures, and crumbled monuments. Rubble and destruction stretched on either side of the Themes as far as they could see. It was a scene from the fragmented vision Pierce had imagined after shutting down the alien sphere.
“Our timeline does not seem to have been repaired,” Murunga said.
Tesla grabbed either side of his head, his face twisting in agony.
“No! Stop! Stop screaming at me!”
He sank to his knees on the deck and groaned.
Pierce knew they were lost. Tesla had finally slipped his grip on sanity, and he was the only key they had to returning the world to the way they knew it. Perhaps if they went back to the planet with the sphere, Liz was brilliant, she might be able to interpret its purpose.
Tesla suddenly stood. He walked the deck, turning and looking at people or objects that did not exist. He mumbled in his mother language, asked questions of specters, and then nodded.
He wagged his finger in the air. “Of course.”
He set the portal device for a new destination, and when the batteries recharged, he sent the Independence through the portal. When they came through, they floated over an ocean, a steamship sailing the seas below them.
“Now where are we? Or when?” Pierce asked.
Tesla turned his sharp blue eyes on him. “We needed to return to 1884. How stupid of me. Our enemy is resourceful. He has put agents on board the City of Richmond. You must board that ship and prevent a mutiny.”
“We're at sea,” Pierce insisted. “They're at sea. They aren't going to let us just board them in the middle of the ocean.”
“It is too late to go back to the time before they sailed. I have tried that setting and failed. This is the closest we can achieve. We are where we need to be when we need to be. You must move quickly. You too are a resourceful man, Captain Pierce. You will find a way.”
“This is 1884,” Pierce said. “We are the only airship that exists. They won't know what to make of us.”
Tesla grinned. “Precisely.”
Pierce paced the deck, thinking. Then he stopped over the pilot.
“Mr. Gridley, take us ahead of the City of Richmond.”
“Aye, sir.”
“You have a plan?” Liz asked.
“Maybe,” he said. He lifted the microphone for the wireless and stared at its control panel. “How do you put this to the external speaker
s?”
Liz threw a switch.
When Gridley brought the airship ahead of the steamship, crew and passengers scrambled to the deck to gaze up at the sight. Somewhere below was the young Tesla they had saved at the train station. Now he was in danger again.
“Ahoy, the City of Richmond!” Pierce said through the microphone, his words echoing outside the airship. “This is Captain Harrison Pierce of Her Majesty's Ship Independence. You must come to a full stop and grant us permission to board immediately. We must confer with your captain.”
Liz frowned. “Her Majesty's Ship?”
He patted her shoulder and winked at her. “It sounds more imposing. Besides, you are the queen in my life, now.”
Her face reddened. “Ah. . .”
“They’re coming to a stop,” Gridley said. “They're drifting.”
“That worked?” Pierce said, surprised he didn’t need to resort to threats. “Okay, I'll take Murunga and Billings, but I need to change first.”
Gridley fought the helm to keep the Independence hovering over the rolling deck of the steamship while the crew lowered the ladder out the aft hatchway of the gondola. Pierce climbed down first, wearing his red uniform jacket and white leathers. Billings, similarly attired, followed, and Murunga came last, in his usual tailored suit. There was no uniform for the Maasai, and Pierce would not have offered him one. Impersonating an officer was not on his agenda, but he would not go down into potential danger without his friend, who would be just as imposing and fierce in his suit as he would be in a loincloth.
A crowd of crew and passengers had formed on the deck, and young Nikola Tesla stood out—a head taller than everyone else. He looked as though he was writing furiously in a small notebook, but he was too far away for Pierce to approach. Murunga had noticed him, also, and Pierce gave him a nod. The Maasai broke off, and the crowd parted before him. He would watch over the Serb while Pierce spoke to the captain.
Cogs in Time Volume Three (The Steamworks Series Book 3) Page 6