The Forever Engine (2 page)

It was a terrifying prospect, or at least would have been if I believed any of it. Wave effects taking time to move through time, theories spun on top of other theories, none of it was real. But across the desk Reggie absentmindedly tapped the plastic coin case.

That damned coin was real. I felt sweat on my forehead.
What if . . . ?

The lights dimmed for a moment and came back up. I heard a soft chime from somewhere deeper in the facility.

“Ah,” Reggie said. “Firing up the accelerator for tonight’s test shot. They’re sending something really large back this time, so we’ll see what we get in return. The white lab coats think there’s some sort of conservation of matter and energy thingie at work—we send something back and automatically displace an equivalent mass here to keep things in balance.”

“How long have we got if this wave-effect theory is real?” I asked.

“We don’t know, but they’re playing with different settings, power and that sort of thing, trying to find as many artifacts from different times as possible and see if they match our expectations, or if . . . well, they are somehow
different
.”

“And you want me to look at whatever shows up here.”

“Precisely. We need you to look for historical discrepancies like this coin. We have a few other historians I’ll introduce you to shortly, but to my mind you’re the key, Jack. You see, you always had an eye for detail, for little things not quite right, and a preternatural ability to see relationships no one else could. That’s why we really need you here: first to find out how much time we have, and then to help formulate a plan. If someone has altered our past, we need to change it back, and I suspect we will have only one opportunity to do so.”

I sat back and thought about that, and I didn’t much like it.
This
was their plan? Poke around, see what turned up, and hope
I
could pull a quantum rabbit out of the hat?
Jesus Christ!

He drew a polished metal flask from his pocket, took a drink, and handed it to me. I noticed his hand trembled as he did so. I’d never seen Reggie’s hand shake. I took a long pull. Irish—Reggie always preferred Irish to Scotch.

“If I’m going to do this,” I said, “I need to talk to someone from the physics side, someone who can explain things in English instead of foot-long equations on a blackboard. I’ll need to see the existing artifacts as well. Presumably you have a database started?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I need to know the plan, the logic of their search for artifacts, and see if we can tweak that to get better results. Well, that’s a start.”

“Right. I’ll go find the others, introduce you to the team—
your
team. I knew you were the right man for this.” He rose and turned to leave.

“One more thing, Reggie. I want to call Sarah. My phone’s not going to screw anything up, is it?”

“No, certainly not, but you may have trouble getting a signal once the accelerator starts, so I’d call now.” He left through a door opposite the side we’d entered, and I took out my phone.

“Call Sarah.” I heard the line ring at the other end three times, and then she answered, voice foggy with sleep.

“Mmm . . . hello?”

“Hey, kiddo, it’s just me. Sorry I woke you.”

“Mmm . . . Dad?”

“Yeah. Go back to sleep. I just called to let you know I’m safe and sound and . . . to tell you I love you.”

The sleepiness vanished from her voice. “Dad, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine. I’m—”

The lights dimmed again, more this time, and flickered. The phone crackled, the connection starting to breaking up.
“. . . ad . . . oo . . . and . . .”

“I can’t hear you, honey. The connection—”

My phone sounded the three quick beeps of a dropped call. The lights came back up, brighter than before, and an alarm chimed from deep within the facility. I started to redial, but the phone just displayed the
searching for service
message. Reggie burst back through the door looking confused and alarmed.

“Something’s gone wrong,” he said. “I’m not sure what, but you’d better go back to the front entrance for now.”

I slipped the phone in my pocket and started to stand.

The world turned white, unbearably hot. The thundering roar of dying atoms and molecules tore through every nerve in my body and drowned out my scream of agony, and all I could think was,
the event wave!

TWO

Somewhere in England

I lay in a bed, my eyes bandaged. Those bandages on my eyes frightened me more than anything else, more than the waves of pain that washed over me and made me cry out and try to sit up. Someone spoke, someone pricked my arm, the pain left, and for a while I floated in a narcotic fever dream.

In the dream Sarah needed a bigger bed. I got one of those kits from Ikea, and Tommy Nash, my platoon sergeant, came over to help. We had the parts spread all over the floor, trying to figure out which peg G went into which socket M, while Sarah stood in the doorway watching. She was small, though, only about six years old, with short brown hair like mouse fur. How could she go to college when she was so tiny?

After ten minutes, she asked, “How many hillbillies does it take to put together a bed?”

I laughed and grabbed for her, but she ran away giggling.

I turned back to Tommy, but he was dead, his legs blown off by an RPG round. He lay on the riverbank and his blood stained the water of the Darya-ye Helmond pink, but only for about ten meters downstream. Then it turned back to the same muddy brown as always, and you’d never even know he’d been there.

Then I was back in the bed of pain. People spoke to me. I answered, but don’t remember what I said or if it made any sense. Probably not.

Eventually my senses sharpened and I asked whoever was there not to give me any more of the pain medication. Hard to do. I liked the meds, had started looking forward to my shots.

The more my thinking cleared, the less everything around me made sense. Where was I? What had happened to me? I couldn’t see because of the bandages, but what did my other senses tell me?

I was still in England. The nurses’ rural accents were barely intelligible and the food was terrible. The fare that morning, stewed kidney paste on toast, smelled like urine. Who but the Brits would eat that stuff?

The scent of alcohol, soap, and another strong chemical I couldn’t place hung in the air, but I didn’t hear any of the normal background noises—PA systems, monitor beeps. The breeze brushing my face and the smell of flowers meant an open window instead of central air. That was odd. And just as odd, they actually injected the pain medication with hypodermics. Why not just add it to my IV drip?

No IV drip.

Maybe I was in better shape than I thought.

A doctor—older fellow from his voice—talked with me about my burns. My back and upper arms would scar, but not my face. My hair was already growing back. They expected my eyesight to recover, though they wouldn’t know for certain until the bandages came off. I asked about Reggie and the others. He declined to discuss any other cases, but only after enough of a hesitation to make me fear the worst.

Had my daughter been notified? The doctor didn’t know but promised he’d look into it.

A police inspector interviewed me. Beyond the large explosion, he had no idea what had happened. I couldn’t fill him in, not without going to prison for violation of the Official Secrets Act, but I told him I’d talk to someone from military intelligence out of London. I repeated my request twice before he got it. Apparently the British police did not reserve their most intellectually promising officers for service in rural Wessex.

The doctor removed the bandages from my eyes the next day. Even through blurry eyes, my surroundings looked wrong. No monitors. The bed wasn’t adjustable, just a brass poster with no railings to restrain restless patients. The nurses wore long sleeves, long dresses, and long hair tucked up under little round white caps.
Maybe a private Mennonite hospital?

Yeah, maybe. But that damned coin suggested an alternative. I tried to avoid dwelling on the implications but couldn’t. Had there really been an event-wave passage? Was I in an altered world, and if so,
how
altered? But if the world had really changed, why did I remember the way it had been? Why weren’t
my
memories changed? No, none of that made sense.

The military intelligence guy showed up the following day: a slender, dark-haired captain in his late twenties named Gordon, in his own words “sent out from Horse Guards.”

My vision had improved to about eighty percent or so. He wore a red uniform tunic and dark blue trousers, like the foot guards in front of Buckingham Palace. Why send someone from the Guards? Why wear the ceremonial uniform? And besides, the Horse Guards wore blue, not red.

I had learned enough British history to remember the Horse Guards barracks once housed the headquarters of the British Army. “Horse Guards” had been shorthand for Army Headquarters—but not for the last hundred years. So maybe that had changed—or not changed, I guess.

Gordon started. “You understand, Mr. Fargo, that this whole affair is quite a serious matter. The village of Somerton was all but destroyed, between the blast and fires. Over a hundred people died, and Copley Wood is still burning. Now what’s all this nonsense about some secret law?”

He took out a pocket humidor, stuck a cheroot in his mouth, and lit the cigar from a big, sulfurous match. In a hospital!

A nurse came in with a pitcher of water, and when she didn’t bat an eye at the cigar, my pulse increased and sweat broke out on my forehead. I remembered Reggie’s words:
it’s something of a time machine.
My breathing became labored, as if my ribs had fused and would not expand to inflate my lungs.
A hundred years? No, too crazy. But that damned coin . . .

“Are you unwell, Mr. Fargo?” Gordon’s tone told me the question was
pro forma
; he didn’t really give a damn.

“What year is it?”

“You don’t remember?”

“What year is it, goddammit?”

“No need to be a bore.” Disdain saturated his voice. “It is 14 September, the year of our Lord 1888.”

Sarah!
Somehow I had to get back to my daughter. Crazy. She wouldn’t be born for another century, or might not be born ever, but I couldn’t believe that. As hopeless as it might sound, one thought came to me and stuck: wherever I was,
whenever
I was,
if there was a way here, there had to be a way back.

Gordon was talking again, and I knew I had to pay attention. I needed an ally, and Gordon was my best candidate.

“I’m sorry, Captain, what were you saying?”

“I wonder if you could identify this item.”

Careful to keep the object out of my reach, he held up a flat sliver of aluminum and plastic. He needn’t have bothered—there wasn’t anyone in this century to call, even if the plastic buttons and screen weren’t melted and fused into the frame. A bandage covered a still-healing burn on my right hip about where the phone had rested in my pocket.

“It’s my . . . oh boy. It’s called an allphone. It’s a communication device and . . . um, a web-access tool.”

“I see.” Gordon made no attempt to hide his disbelief. “And this ring found beside you. Can you identify it?” He handed Reggie’s ring to me. Soot still blackened the crevices. My throat tightened,

“It’s a class ring of a friend. You say it was beside me. My friend . . . ?”

“Deceased. All we found was the one arm and part of a skull, both badly charred. What does the inscription signify?”

Reggie dead? Reggie was . . . indestructible.

I looked up from the ring. What an odd question from a British officer.

“RMA Sandhurst? It means the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.”

He frowned. “Interesting. And the number 2006?”

“His year of graduation.” I watched his face for reaction. Mounting anger replaced his disbelief.

“Two thousand and six you say?
AD?
What do you take me for?”

What did I have to lose? Nothing. So I told him everything—who I was, when I’d been born, why Reggie had called me in, what the Wessex project was attempting, and the little I knew about what went wrong. I left out the part about trying to change the past back to what it had been, not knowing whether this time was part of the reality I wanted to save or the one I would have to extinguish to do so.

All that took a while. By the time I was done he was on his second cheroot and his anger had given way to contempt. He sat and smoked his cigar for a while, saying nothing. It’s a good interrogation technique—people like to fill the silence with sound. I filled it with my own silence. After a few minutes he gave in.

“You expect me to believe all this rubbish?”

“Not really.”

“Then why waste my time with it?”

“It’s all I’ve got, Captain Gordon. The truth. Who could make something like that up?”

“Some arrogant American scoundrel could. You think foreigners will believe any silly twaddle you invent. An attack on an English village gone wrong, an attempt to shift the blame to the British military—you could at least have done some research. The Royal Military Academy is at Woolwich, not Sandhurst.”

Anti-American bias on top of everything else. So much for my potential ally. Time to change direction.

“Maybe you better put me in touch with the American embassy.”

“That will be difficult, as I am sure you already know. Your ambassador was sent packing a month past. I shall be greatly surprised if we are not at war with the United States within the fortnight.”

My startled expression pleased him.

“You are under arrest for espionage, Fargo, if that really is your name. I don’t know what happened at Somerton village or why all those people had to die. We’ll get to the bottom of it, though, I assure you. And I will see you swing for it.”

THREE

September 20, 1888, Wessex, England

A constable appeared outside my door after Gordon left. I needed some time alone anyway. Either I really was one hundred and thirty years back in time or I was in the hands of intelligence operatives who had gone to a lot of trouble to fool me. As unlikely as that second option seemed, it was at least physically possible. But time travel? Absolutely unbelievable . . . except for the coin.

The coin.
Reggie’s ring had made it through with me, and my allphone sort of had. What about the coin? Gordon hadn’t mentioned it, or anything else that might have come through.

I picked at my dinner, which was a small meat pie—some sort of bird, I assumed, since the top of the pie was garnished with its little amputated feet. Nice touch. It was okay, but there were too many things on my mind for me to have much appetite. Was it time travel, or was I enmeshed in the gears of the most complicated and improbable intelligence scheme I’d ever heard of? Never in my life had I so wished to be in the clutches of ruthless and diabolical villains; the alternative
really
sucked.

If I was in the past,
which
past was I in, mine or that coin’s? There was the business with the Royal Military Academy being at Woolwich instead of Sandhurst, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that proved anything. I didn’t know where it had been a hundred and thirty years ago—why not Woolwich?

I’d been thinking about the war talk as well. We’d never gone to war with Britain since the War of 1812, but we’d had some diplomatic bumps. I just wasn’t sure if any of them were this serious—or if this one was as serious as Gordon had portrayed it. He hadn’t said there was a war, only that he expected one. Maybe that was just his wishful thinking. This might still be the unaltered past.

But if the event wave hadn’t hit my present, how had I gotten here? Possibly the malfunction at WHECOL was simply that, a massive accident which I’d managed to survive. If so, this was my unaltered past and I was, as Reggie’s SAS troopers in Afghanistan used to say,
proper
fucked
.
No one in my unaltered past would have the means of building a high-energy particle accelerator, even if I had any idea how to go about doing it. My only hope was the event wave had already passed and altered this past enough to give me something—
anything
—to work with.

But if it had, why did I still have my memories? Why did I even exist? Was the event wave still someplace between 1888 and 2018? If so, how long did I have before it caught up to my childhood, my life? When it did, would it wipe me out? Or would those early memories fade first, one at a time, until it got to the Wessex event itself and then erased whatever was left of me.

When the nurse took away my dinner dishes, I asked for paper and pencil. I thought that if I could write down the critical information, then I could read it and keep acting, even if my memory of those events started to go. Or if it was going to snuff me out, I should write about that world I’d lived in, leave some concrete record of it having existed. The paper and the graphite in the pencil were from this time; the event wave wouldn’t erase them. It wasn’t a living, intelligent being, just a force of nature, like an avalanche.

For a long time I stared at the blank paper. Where should I even start? What was there to say about the entire history of a world that stood in danger of extinction? What was it about that world which made it so important I had to preserve it? Finally I picked up the pencil and began to write.

Dear Sarah,

I can’t imagine you will ever read this, but just writing it makes me feel closer to you, across the unimaginable gulf which separates us. There are things about me I need to tell you, should have told you before I left for England, but I put them off out of fear and shame. But as I sit here and think of you, of the young woman you have become, I know you are strong enough to hear them. . . .

* * *

Two days later Gordon returned with a suit of civilian clothes. I was already up and in my robe, but he tossed the clothes on the bed.

“Put those on. We’re taking the express to London.”

I’d grown impatient, was anxious to start on whatever journey lay before me, but despite that my heart sank a bit. There had still been the faint possibility I was in my own world and had simply been fooled into thinking otherwise. Now that possibility was gone. Someone could have dummied up a hospital room to look like a century ago and hired a dozen actors to play their parts—London was a different proposition. So I was in the past. Now the question was,
which
past?

“Hurry up, damn you,” Gordon snapped. “We haven’t got all day.”

“A little touchy today are we, Captain?” I asked as I started to dress. “Have the boys upstairs overruled your plans for a hanging?”

“Never fear, you’ll have your trial and then we’ll hang you. It will be closed door, of course; we have some experience dealing with spies. But first there are some gentlemen who would like to ask you a few more questions.”

“I’ll be happy to talk to your people in London,” I told Gordon, “but I’ve already told you everything I know. I don’t have much more to give.”

He didn’t answer me; he just smiled. Actually it was a nasty little smirk, which wasn’t a good sign. I’d read enough
Flashman
novels to know what that meant. Those old-time Brits had a code of honor and standards of behavior, unless they didn’t think
you
were a gentleman. In that case they didn’t feel much need to act like gentlemen themselves, so this could get pretty ugly. Making a run for it started sounding good.

My only real hope was things had actually changed here, and done so in a way that left me some sort of return route. I knew next to nothing about physics, and when you know that little, anything is possible, right? So my first priority was figuring out if this really was my own past or that coin’s. I specialized in ancient Rome and the Near East, not nineteenth century Europe, but I knew more than the average Joe on the street. Reggie had picked me in part because I had an instinct for little things not quite right. I’d need to focus that, look for subtle differences, something the average person might miss.

Gordon included a long overcoat with the clothes, but it seemed like a nice day and so I carried it over my arm. Gordon and I, with two big constables in tow, walked out the front door of the hospital. I felt a breeze, heard the drone of machinery; a shadow fell across the broad stone steps ahead of us. I looked up.

Three hundred meters above us was . . . an ironclad? It was big, really big. It had too many surface features to be a balloon, things that looked like gun mounts and observation platforms, with shining brass railings and evenly spaced rows of massive rivets, the kind that hold steel girder bridges together. The drone grew louder as it passed overhead. Black smoke escaped from a stack in the rear, dispersed into a dirty gray wake by three large propellers that apparently drove the ship forward. I had no idea what held the damned thing up. An intense downdraft enfolded us, and piles of dried leaves on the lawn exploded into a swirling red-brown blizzard.

“Okay,” I said to no one in particular, “so much for subtle differences.”

I don’t remember much about the carriage ride. I suppose I was still dazed, but I started paying attention again once we got to the train station—a little place out in the countryside called Creech St. Michael Halt. The locomotive hissed and throbbed nervously, reeked of hot rusty iron and sulfurous coal, and looked longer and more powerful than I remembered Victorian steam engines looking in Sherlock Holmes films.

Sherlock Holmes films?
Flashman novels?
And I called myself an historian? This was getting pathetic. Why couldn’t this event-wave thingamajig have dropped me in fourth-century BCE Achaemenid Persia? At least I knew my way around there.

Gordon led the way with the Bobbies to either side of me. The one on my right slipped his hand around my elbow—not making a show of manhandling me, just letting me know he was there. Gordon looked through the open doors until he found an empty compartment and motioned us to follow him in.

The compartment was pretty much what I expected: dark wood paneling and brass fittings, a gaslight overhead, and a well-thumbed copy of
The Times
left on the overstuffed seat. Gordon sat facing me while the constables sat opposite each other by the windows.

“Where in London are we going?” I asked.

“You will see in good time,” Gordon answered.

“Who are these gentlemen I’ll be talking to?”

“All in good time.”

“Look, if you could just—”

“Do be quiet, Fargo. There’s a good spy.”

Be quiet. Sure. I was on a train about to take me to an interview with people Gordon had broadly hinted were going to torture me—if necessary—to find out what I knew. Since I didn’t know anything they were interested in, it was hard to see how this was going to end happily for anyone, but especially for me.

I picked up
The Times
and looked it over. Doing a quick scan was hard—these guys still had a lot to learn about newspaper layout, things like headlines and organizing from most to least important.

A penny had been removed from the pendulum counterbalance of Big Ben, which would slow the clock by four-tenths of a second per day. Seems it had been running slightly fast. No one knew why, but a panel of study was being formed. Swell. There was a report on the Royal Horticultural Society’s flower show, another grisly murder in Whitechapel—when was Jack the Ripper running around?—and a letter from an unnamed correspondent about a Fenian Army massing in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. It also alleged several acts of sabotage against the Canadian Pacific Railroad near Vancouver.

Fenians—Irish separatists. I remembered there had been a border incident after the Civil War when a bunch of Irish veterans got together and tried to invade Canada, hold it hostage for an independent Ireland. Not much came of it, although it had been a big deal at the time. It seemed to me it had been earlier than the 1880s, though; weren’t Civil War veterans getting long in the tooth by now?

Then another article caught my eye. The Foreign Office announced its acceptance of the credentials of General William Ransom Johnson Pegram as the new ambassador to the Court of St. James from the Confederate States of America. General Pegram had expressed his government’s sympathy with Great Britain’s current difficulties
vis-a-vis
the United States of America.

“Son of a bitch! Those assholes actually
won?
”

Gordon and the Bobbies eyed me with disapproval, and I tossed the paper aside.

The train started up, gathering speed quickly.

I couldn’t believe it.
The South won?
I wasn’t just in an altered history, I was in some stupid “Lost Cause” wet dream. If this place had taken a pass on emancipation, what other horrors had it decided it just couldn’t part with?

This
place? As if there were somewhere else? No, this was all there was now. This was it. I had already spent too much time in a hospital bed. Whatever trick I was going to perform to fix all this, I had better get going on, and right away.

Son of a bitch.