The Forever Engine (28 page)

The bedroom had a single door, which was locked, and a single window, covered on the outside by substantial-looking iron bars. For furniture the room boasted a single bed with a covered chamber pot underneath, a desk and straight-backed chair, another straight-backed armchair in the corner, a dresser with china water pitcher and bowl, and a wardrobe with a clean shirt and clean pair of trousers hanging within. The desk drawers were empty while the dresser held two pairs of long underwear and two pairs of woolen socks.

I put on a pair of the socks and settled into the armchair to wait. Within a quarter hour I heard the door unlocked. Tesla entered, a leather portfolio under his arm and two big guards in tow. He moved quickly, but not nervously—a man with a lot of things to do and a purposeful approach to getting them done.

“Have you considered my proposal?” he asked without preamble.

“A bit, but I have some questions. Assuming you can get me back to my own time—”

“I can,” Tesla said with confidence.

“Yeah, okay. Assuming you can, how do you know you can hit my time exactly? What if I come out fifty years in the future? Or fifty years in the past? Fifty years is nothing compared to some of the time differences you’re playing around with.

“For that matter, what if I come out, say, ten years in my past and meet myself? Does the time-space fabric rupture or something? Or is that possible?”

Tesla’s eyebrows went up slightly.

“Interesting questions, which I expected you to ask. There are vibrational properties unique to the objects from each point in time, properties which manifest themselves in a particular type of spectroscopic analysis I have perfected. Using this, I can calibrate my device to access that precise time.”

I touched the bandage on my left arm, hidden by my shirt.

“Is that why you carved on my arm with a knife yesterday? To get a sample of me for spectroscopic analysis?”

“Yes, of course. And that is why there was no need to take such a sample from Gabrielle.”

“Is that how you brought back all those
azhdaja
?”

He smiled

“Exactly so. I sent several large oxen through with iron filings implanted in their flesh. Then several hours later I recalibrated and exchanged a large number of rocks for a surprising number of these avian predators. I had hoped to capture a single large predator. Usually small animals do not hunt large ones, you know, unless they do so in concert. Unfortunately, this animal engages in collective hunting. Most of them escaped and seem to be thriving in the hills.”

“Where they are killing people. Your people. They almost killed Gabrielle twice.”

“And you twice saved her life, I understand, for which I am grateful. But as to the larger picture, the food chain will adapt to them.”

“Yeah. Like Asian carp in the Mississippi River.”

He nodded. Of course, he didn’t know that in my time Asian carp had all but ruined the Mississippi ecosystem.

“That Roman coin I brought with me—you were anxious to recover it as well.”

“Yes, and my agent managed to pass it to the man who escaped from Dorset House. It arrived here shortly before you did. But its spectroscopic properties were confused.”

“Now that I have answered your questions, I hope you will be sensible and cooperate,” Tesla said. “Dinner at 7:30 PM,” he said over his shoulder as he left, and the guards closed and bolted the door behind them.

I sat there and thought about the coin for a while. What had Tesla called its time signature?
Vibrational properties.
Why would they be confused? Maybe because the melted plastic from my time got mixed up with the silver of the coin from the past.

Yeah. That had to be it.

THIRTY-SEVEN

October 13, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

Two guards came to collect me for dinner—one a beefy fellow in peasant smock, the other in the black uniform of Tesla’s zeppelin crews, with his left arm in a cast and sling and his right hand resting on the grip of a revolver thrust into his belt. The peasant gestured down the hall and walked at my side. The
pistolero
followed at a distance.

I turned and looked at him, and his eyes burned with hatred.

“Do we know each other?” I asked in German. He said nothing, and his expression remained frozen.

Oo-kay.

The house looked new and was more modest than I had imagined when I was blindfolded—plain, but spotlessly clean. The hardwood floors were varnished but not stained. The plaster walls lacked decorative wainscoting or crown molding. The coarse brown carpeting on the stairs clearly was intended only to muffle noise.

We descended a broad staircase to the main floor, ended up facing a large front door, but turned right into the dining room. I started composing a mental map of the place, now that I could see.

Tesla and Gabrielle, already seated, waited for me. Tesla sat at the head of the table, Gabrielle to his right. The circles under her eyes bore testimony to our arduous journey here, but she looked rested, even fresh otherwise. She smiled when I entered, and I saw a light in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. She had found her family, a goal to which she had devoted herself with single-minded determination for quite some time, and I wasn’t entirely blind to what that might mean for her. It wasn’t my place to judge her about other responsibilities and loyalties. Realistically, I had to be near the bottom of that list in any case. Because of all we had gone through together, and all I’d shared about my own life with her, it seemed like longer, but the truth was we had only known each other for nine days. I had no claim on her, and no right to judge her betrayal. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to smile back.

“You are well, Jack?” she asked.

“Better, anyway. Amazing what a bath and a nap can do sometimes. A meal won’t hurt, either. You okay?”

“Yes,” she said, and she smiled at Tesla. “I am quite well. I have already learned a great deal more about my family, things which simple newspaper reports and gossip could not tell me.”

Tesla returned her smile and gestured to the seat to his left, across from Gabrielle.

I sat and the peasant guard left, although the black-clad
pistolero
remained, standing discreetly in the corner behind me. I turned and glanced at him.

“I understand that you are a dangerous man, Dr. Fargo,” Tesla said. “Dangerous in many ways, perhaps, but also in a personal, physical sense. I do not wish to have to shackle you, but I need to take precautions with my own safety and that of Gabrielle.”

“I wouldn’t harm Gabrielle.”

“But you do not deny that you might harm me. That is understandable, given your circumstances. I hope to persuade you otherwise, but in the meantime I prefer to have a guard present, one who understands the necessity of vigilance. Dragomir is one of the men you attacked in Munich. The local doctor says he will probably lose the use of his left arm. He is unlikely to underestimate the danger you pose, and will certainly not hesitate to shoot you should you attempt violence. Only his loyalty to me keeps him from doing so now.”

I looked at the guy again.

“Dragomir. Ich entschuldige mich für das Schädigen Ihres Armes,”
I said.
I apologize for the injury to your arm.

His expression didn’t change, and I didn’t know if he even understood German, but I made the effort anyway.

All violence has victims. I lived in a time—two times now—where sometimes there were no obvious alternatives to violence, but that didn’t mean I had to tell myself fairy tales about how everyone I hurt deserved everything they got. That was one lie I’d given up a long time ago.

A servant brought steaming bowls of vegetable soup and a platter of thick-sliced bread which smelled freshly baked. My mouth watered, but I made myself eat slowly, partly because I didn’t want to get sick, partly because I didn’t want to show weakness to Tesla.

“Have you considered my offer?” Tesla asked as the soup bowls were cleared away. “Surely you understand there is no other way to return to your daughter. That, I understand, is your principal motivation.”

I looked at Gabrielle. She wore a confident, happy expression, and Tesla seemed at ease as well. Suddenly I saw my edge, if I could figure out how to leverage it. Both of them had very limited, simplified views of human motivation and behavior. Gabrielle understood me only in terms of my love for my daughter, and had communicated that to Tesla. For the moment, the most important thing was to play to that belief. It gave me the most options down the road. I made up my mind.

“Okay, I’m in.”

For the rest of dinner Tesla began his “conversation” with me about my world, which amounted to an interrogation, but that’s what I figured. He was uninterested in our space program and had surprisingly little interest in weapons technology, given his ongoing fight here. I would have thought he’d want some more goodies like the gun turret his men had scavenged from the Puma back in Bavaria, but that wasn’t the case. Instead he was much more interested in the data infrastructure of my world: the Internet, wireless communication, satellite GPS systems, the data cloud. Those things fired his imagination, would leave him lost in thought for several minutes after a round of answers, and then suddenly full of an entirely new line of questions.

This went on long after dinner was done and the dishes cleared away. His other interest, not surprisingly, was magnetic fields, and he sucked whatever information I had on the subject as a man might suck the marrow from a bone after stripping every shred of meat from it. Magnetism and planetary magnetic fields led to the solar magnetic field, or rather series of changing magnetic fields, and how the current thinking in my time was that changes and collapses in local solar magnetic fields led to solar flares.

The largest known solar flare had happened in 1859, when Tesla was just a little boy. He didn’t remember it but had heard stories of the electrocution of telegraph operators and the brilliant night auroras. A flare of that intensity would have fried most of the communications and computer systems in my world.

After an hour or so, Tesla finally pushed back from the table.

“Fascinating conversation, but it grows late and I still have work to do before I retire. I now have a good deal to think over, and for that I am most appreciative, Professor Fargo. Tomorrow perhaps we can discuss what you know of particle accelerators. The guards will see you back to your room.”

He rose and bowed to Gabrielle before leaving. Once he was gone I got to my feet as well, but Gabrielle spoke for the first time since the dinner dishes had been cleared away.

“Jack, I know you must think ill of me, and I cannot blame you. I feel no guilt over what I did, but I feel something. Regret, I suppose. I am uncertain I can accurately characterize it.”

“It’s okay. You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“No, I do not think so, either. But I wish you to be comfortable and even happy, if that is possible. I found this book in the library.” She leaned over and picked up a heavy volume from the floor and placed it on the table. “It is about the subject dear to you, I think. Perhaps it will remind you of your home.”

I walked around the table and picked up the book: the first volume of Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Despite myself, I smiled.

“Thanks. Nothing helps me sleep like Gibbon.”

She smiled in reply, oblivious to the irony in my words, but then grew pensive.

“Why do you think it so wrong to believe in the possibility of a perfect world?” she asked.

I looked down at the book for a moment, tempted to let the question slide, to tell her maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. What did it matter to me anyway, one harmless lie more or less? But I’d let enough lies stand for the last ten years.

“Because only that belief can make otherwise-sane and good-hearted people commit unspeakable evil.”

We said our polite good-nights, and the guards followed me back up to my room and saw me securely locked in. I undressed, but as soon as I slipped under the cold sheets I thought better of it, rose, and put on a pair of long underwear from the dresser. Then it was just me, Edward Gibbon, and a gas light. The Gibbon volume had been about as thoughtful and tender a gesture from Gabrielle as I figured she was capable of, and reading Gibbon’s carefully measured prose probably would bring back pleasant memories of graduate school at the University of Illinois.

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 timeline, 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?