Eric Flint's Blog, page 322

The Forever Engine – Snippet 19

The Forever Engine – Snippet 19

 

TWELVE

October 3, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

“Do you understand, lass, how awkward this is?” Thomson asked.

“Of course,” she replied. “The times they are awkward for us all. But we carry on, non?”

“Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t arrest you right now,” Gordon said.

“I have broken no laws, and you have no authority in Bavaria.”

That was actually two good reasons, but pointing that out would have seemed rude. Besides, she left out the best reason — she was a special friend of the Prince of Wales.

“Just tell us what we need to know and we’ll take care of the rest of this business,” Gordon snapped.

“Non. I must accompany you, for to be certain the interests of France they are served.” She shrugged again, as if to say there was nothing more to discuss.

“Look, you guys may not like the idea,” I said to Thomson and Gordon, “but this trip is likely to be long, stupid, and end up with us dead, facedown in the mud, unless we get some real intelligence, and quickly. Let’s add up what we know: he’s called the Old Man of the Mountain and he’s a really bad guy. That’s not a lot to go on, and according to . . . Baron Renfrew, the Bavarians can’t help much. Where are we even going to start looking?”

Gordon answered. “If he is not somewhere near the site in southern Bavaria –”

“He is not,” Gabrielle put in.

“If he is not,” Gordon continued, “then obviously Syria. I would imagine either the Lebanon or Ante-Lebanon mountain ranges, where his original predecessor lurked.”

“Non,” Gabrielle said. “He is not in the Syrian mountains.”

“He’s the Old Man of the Mountain,” Gordon shouted back. “What do you mean he’s not in the bloody mountains?”

“Oui, the mountains, but not those mountains.”

Gordon sank down in a chair against the wall, and Thomson shook his head.

“He’s in Serbia, isn’t he?” I asked.

“Don’t be an ass, Fargo,” Gordon said, but Gabrielle looked at me, and her eyes widened slightly in surprise.

“How did you know this?”

“I didn’t for sure, not until your reaction. It was just a hunch — a speculation.”

Thomson laughed for the first time since we got the Aldis lamp message. He sat in an overstuffed armchair and pulled his pipe out of the pocket of his jacket.

I expected Gabrielle to react with irritation, but instead she nodded thoughtfully. “Upon what was this speculation based?”

“I didn’t see it until we were in the chart room of the Intrepid and I looked at their large globe. Because of the projections used, large-scale flat maps distort straight-line distances, but on a globe you can see them more clearly. We know there was an energy source at one end of this effect — the Wessex collider in my time. What if there was one at the other end as well?”

“But the other incident was here in Bavaria,” Thomson said.

“The other reported incident was in Bavaria, but what if the real effects were at two power sources with an echo effect in the center? The Allgäu Alps are on a straight line and exactly centered between Wessex and Serbia.”

Gordon snorted in derision. “You expect us to believe you reasoned all that through based only on two explosions?”

“No, but it was enough to make a guess. My first pick was southern Bavaria and my second was Syria, like yours. But if Syria and the Alps were out, Serbia was worth a shot.”

“That was very logical,” Gabrielle said.

“Do you mind, my dear?” Thomson held his pipe up for Gabrielle to see. She shook her head and drew on her cheroot. Thomson began packing tobacco into his pipe, and behind me Gordon lit one of his own cheroots. I supposed this sharing of smoke was a step toward a sharing of information, and perhaps even international peace and harmony, which were all good things, but it was getting hard on my lungs.

So we were back to the question of whether Gabrielle Courbiere would accompany us. The problem, in the end, was one of trust. How could we trust Gabrielle’s information to be sufficient to warrant her inclusion unless she shared it with us? But once she did, how could she trust us to take her along? It was the sort of problem best solved by repeated and generous infusions of distilled alcohol, but all we had was one bottle of dry sherry, and Gordon put about half of that down just to take the edge off his hangover. At least after that he stopped shouting so much, which made the negotiations go easier.

“Okay, here’s what I suggest,” I said. “Mademoiselle Courbiere, tell us what you know about the Old Man except how to find him. If the information’s good enough to convince Dr. Thomson to bring you along, you’re in. If you don’t trust us to deliver on that promise, tell us what we need, as we need it, to find him. What do you say?”

“Oui,” she said without hesitation. “If this is acceptable with the doctor, for me it is good.”

Thomson drew on his pipe and looked intently at her.

“Forgive me asking, Mademoiselle, but . . . are you really a spy?”

“Oui, Doctor. For three years now I have been the agent of Le Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux, the DCRG.”

“But . . . how?”

“Oh, it is simple. I am quite intelligent, and men find me attractive. They will often tell me almost anything for the possibility to mate with me, even if later that possibility it is not realized.”

Thomson and I must both have stared at her for a moment, he in shock and me in puzzled admiration.

“Lass,” Thomson finally said, “for a spy you’re disarmingly honest. The truth is, the more I think on this mission, the less prepared I feel to accomplish anything. We do need help. If what you tell us now is useful, I’ll take you with us and accept any additional assistance you can provide.”

She nodded firmly.

“Bon. We have a considerable dossier on this man who calls himself le Vieil Homme de Montagne. He takes this name to cause fear, oui? He has assassinated over thirty men that we know of. His agents use the hashish, like the Hashassiene in the Holy Lands during the Crusades, but he is an ethnic Serb born in Austrian Croatia.”

“Born when?” I asked.

She pursed her lips and looked up. “On 10 July, 1856.”

She had a pretty good memory for numbers.

“So he is what? In his early thirties? Younger than I would have thought,” I said.

“Young, oui. Perhaps le Jeune Homme de Montagne, n’est-cepas?” She looked at us and smiled, then added, “I made the joke.”

We smiled back at her, but it wasn’t exactly a knee-slapper.

“We know little about his early life,” she continued, “but he studied the electrical engineering at the Polytechnique Autrichien in Graz. We first began collecting information on him six years ago when he moved to France.”

“He lived in France?” Gordon shouted from his chair by the window. “Why in God’s name didn’t you arrest him when you had the chance?”

“We did not know his identity as le Vieil Homme de Montagne until recently. He had broken no laws when he lived in France, mon Capitaine. We do not arrest people simply for being disagreeable. You, for example, would be quite safe there.”

I chuckled at that, and Thomson suppressed a smile of his own.

“While in Paris he worked for La Compagnie d’Edison, then in 1884 he traveled to your country, Professor Fargo, but a year later there was a dispute with Monsieur Edison and he returned to Europe. It was not long after his return that the first attacks by le Vieil Homme de Montagne took place.”

I shot Thomson a look and saw him bite through his pipe stem in surprise, then spit out the end.

“Good God, you can’t mean Nikola Tesla!” he exclaimed.

“Ah, you have heard of him.”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 18

The Forever Engine – Snippet 18

 

ELEVEN

October 3, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

Baron Renfrew summoned us to a private home in Ludvigsvorstadt, a suburb between the landing ground — the Fliegerplatz, they called it — and the city center. We climbed aboard a carriage and set out to meet him.

Large balloons still floated aloft in the early evening, and a small cigar-shaped one passed overhead no more than fifty feet up. Instead of a basket, the gas bag supported a contraption like a tandem bicycle without the wheels, the chain drive turning a whirring propeller in back. A young couple pedaled vigorously, and the woman waved to us as they passed over. I waved back. That looked like fun.

At first our carriage made good progress down the broad, tree-lined Landsberger Strasse, with a sprawling rail marshalling yard to our left and a mix of small parks and suburban townhouses with steeply peaked gabled roofs and brightly painted wood shutters and flower boxes framing the windows. After ten minutes we came to a stretch filled with people, and the carriage slowed to a crawl.

The good news was the crowd was in a festive mood. I had grown used to the somber clothing of London and the surrounding countryside. Bright colors dominated the crowd here, with a lot of men in lederhosen and jaunty alpine hats and women in elaborately embroidered aprons over flaring skirts worn just short enough to show the layers of ruffled petticoats underneath. Wealthy women in expensive gowns wore their hair up in elaborate twisting towers, and even their austerely dressed consorts sported green sashes around their ample middles and green scarves wound about their tall silk top hats. What I found particularly interesting, though, was the extent to which the wealthy and common seemed all mixed up together, and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

The sun touched the horizon behind us and promised a beautiful, warm autumn evening. I heard distant music from ahead of us and to the right, a dozen oompah bands battling for supremacy and cheered on by well-lubricated vocal sections a thousand or more strong.

“Somebody’s having a hell of a party,” I observed unnecessarily. “Was ist das?” I asked the driver.

“Der Wies’n,” he answered with a broad grin.

Wies’n? My German was rusty, and Bavarian was slangy, but that sounded like The Meadow.

“What’s The Meadow? A festival?” I asked in German.

“Ja. The October festival.”

Of course: Oktoberfest. That explained the music and crowds of amiable drunks dressed in colorful local costumes.

“People come from all over for the fest?”

“Ja. Most from the south and Austria, but some from farther. Not many Prussians,” he said and laughed. “Carnivals, too, come from all over, but more from the east. Damned gypsies steal everything.”

“What’s he saying?” Gordon asked. I remembered he didn’t speak German but Thomson did and provided him a translation. Gordon looked bored and annoyed while Thomson remained distracted, preoccupied with our impending meeting. I couldn’t blame him for being nervous.

So far I liked Munich better than London. Folks at least had a sense of fun. Maybe Bavaria was an international backwater, but there might be some advantages to that. Now we’d see what Baron Renfrew could do to screw things up.

***

We met in the parlor of a small but tastefully decorated private home, nothing like Dorset House. The furniture was lighter in design and color, the walls papered with pastel stripes and adorned with a few inviting landscapes — apparently the Bavarian countryside we’d just overflown. Large windows would have let in sunlight during the day, but it was early evening by the time we arrived and the curtains were drawn for privacy. Renfrew waited for us seated on a loveseat beside a strikingly attractive woman.

Portraits of important people are idealized representations. Even though I’d seen dozens of portraits and photographs of Renfrew, I was prepared for something less impressive. Actually, the portraits didn’t do him justice. He stood taller than I did, which put him over six feet, and he had a good fifty pounds on me, maybe more. Some of that was fat, but not all of it. I thought of Thomson as bearlike, but Renfrew physically dominated the room.

He rose to meet us, which is more than Lord Chillingham had done in our brief meeting. Renfrew wore his dark hair cut close to his head and his beard trimmed in the tight pointed style so familiar in all the paintings and photographs. The pictures failed to capture the animation in his face, or the intelligence and humor in his eyes. He looked deadly serious in all the pictures and sort of distracted, looking up and away as if his mind was somewhere else. Today his mind was right here.

Thomson made the introductions and “Baron Renfrew” shook our hands, shook mine particularly vigorously.

“I’ve heard a good deal about you, Professor Fargo. You have had an adventurous few weeks since appearing so explosively in our midst. I assume Dr. Thomson has told you who I am.”

“It wasn’t necessary, Your Highness,” Thomson put in. “He already knew.”

“Really? How is that?”

“I’m from Illinois, Your Highness. I have relatives from a little town southwest of Chicago called Dwight.”

He face broke into a wider smile, and he nodded.

“Yes, I remember that village quite well. I hunted there — oh, it must have been twenty years ago now. Stayed with a local gentleman named Spencer. Quite good shooting. Lovely countryside. They don’t still talk about my visit in your day, though, surely. It was just a hunting trip.”

“No, Your Highness, they don’t talk about it, but your stay made such an impression in the town, they named the local park after you.”

“What? Albert Edward Park?”

“No, sir. Renfrew Park.”

“Renfrew Park?” He laughed. “Oh, that’s quite good! Yes, very gratifying. Thank you for telling me.”

Baron Renfrew was the title Prince Albert Edward, son of Queen Victoria, Prince of Wales and heir apparent to the British throne, and who at least in my timeline would later become King Edward VII, used when he wished to travel informally and without a lot of fuss. It was the most modest of his many titles, and its use told everyone involved he was not visiting officially or on state business; he was there purely for pleasure.

I again glanced at his female companion, still seated on the loveseat, and tried not to stare. She wore her shining blond hair swept up in what I thought of as Gibson Girl style, with a few soft curling strands framing a heart-shaped face, clear skin, and broad, inquisitive blue eyes. Her riding habit, jet black except for white ruffles at her throat and wrists, flattered her figure. I saw no rings on her fingers, no ear rings, brooches, or any other jewelry except for a small silver locket suspended from a chain around her neck. Smoke curled from the slender cheroot she held in her hand.

The Prince of Wales followed my glance.

“Allow me to introduce my friend, Mademoiselle Gabrielle Courbiere. Gabrielle, this is Dr. Thomson, Captain Gordon, and Professor Fargo.”

I followed their example and bowed. Thomson murmured enchanté, but Gordon remained tight-lipped.

Prince Albert Edward — affectionately called “Bertie” — gained fame for his love of the good life, particularly his liaisons with some of the most beautiful women in Europe. The basis for his attraction to Mademoiselle Courbiere was obvious, but why the British crown prince was playing footsy with a French woman when Britain and France seemed ready to start shooting at each other any minute, and why he had brought her to this meeting, were, well — interesting questions.

“Have you been riding, Mademoiselle?” Thomson inquired politely.

“Non, I prefer the riding habite. It is how I wear the trousers without scandalizing the small minds.” To illustrate her point, she flipped back the slit skirt to show the tightly fitted black trousers underneath, tucked into gleaming riding boots. She crossed her legs and drew on her cheroot, then blew a smoke ring. Thomson colored, and Gordon turned away with a disapproving scowl.

What was interesting, at least to me, was how devoid her gestures seemed of artifice. Her words and the uncovering of her legs could easily have been an act either of provocative challenge or playful flirtation, but instead they were surprisingly matter-of-fact. If she was a steamy seductress, she wasn’t working it very hard — at least not for us.

The prince took a large cigar from his inner coat pocket and trimmed the tip off with a pocket knife, talking as he did so.

“Professor Thomson, I understand that you are in authority over this expedition.”

“Yes, Your Highness, I am.”

“Splendid. I wonder, then, if you would do me a little favor. A personal favor, you understand — entirely unofficial.”

Thomson shifted uncomfortably.

“Well — of course, your Highness, if it is within my power and does not jeopardize our expedition.”

“Be so good, then, to take Mademoiselle Courbiere along, would you?”

Gordon snorted in derision, and the prince’s face immediately lost its easy charm and casual humor, as if a massive thundercloud had blotted out the sun, and I was again aware of how physically imposing he was. Gordon’s face reddened, and Thomson seemed nearly beside himself, shifting from one foot to the other as if he had to go to the bathroom.

“But Your Highness, a lady . . . do you know where we’re going?” he asked.

The prince struck a match and then carefully lit his cigar, the silence stretching out as he puffed, puffed again, turned the cigar, examined the coal, and then blew out the match.

“Do you?” he finally asked.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

“Well. . . in a general sense. That is, there are . . . some specifics still to work out. We were hoping the Bavarians –”

“The Bavarians know a little,” the prince cut in. “Mademoiselle Courbiere, on the other hand, knows a great deal. So were I you, I would add her to your party. Now, if you will all excuse me, I have an appointment with a baccarat table.”

He kissed Gabrielle’s hand, and he was gone.

“Highly irregular,” Gordon said once the prince’s footsteps faded.

“Oh shut up,” I said.

He turned and glared at me, opened his mouth as if to speak, but then scowled and turned away.

“He has a point, Fargo,” Thomson said. “This is a highly sensitive mission, and the young lady is . . . well –”

“What?” I demanded. “A French spy? Is that what you think? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well . . .”

I turned to Gabrielle.

“Mademoiselle Courbiere, are you a spy for the French Commune? Are you an agent of the dreaded Garde Rouge?”

She shrugged.

“Oui.”

I stared at her, and she returned my gaze without blinking. She was absolutely serious.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 17

The Forever Engine – Snippet 17

 

Conroy exchanged a look with the other officers and Thomson cleared his throat before he spoke.

“I imagine Captain Gordon is still abed. He had quite an evening.”

The three of us had eaten in the small officers’ mess, but I’d left right after dinner and turned in early. In the week we’d spent in England getting ready to leave, I’d gotten back in the habit of rising before dawn and running. This morning I’d taken my run on Intrepid‘s deck, round and round the superstructure. Two miles before breakfast had done wonders for my attitude. But by the time I’d left the officers’ mess the night before Gordon had been tipsy, and was still going strong.

“Well he’s got ten hours to sleep it off before we land in Munich and find out what the Bavarians know,” Harding said. “Do you suppose the young gentleman can be persuaded to rise before sunset?”

Damn. Munich in ten hours? The stately progress of the flyer had lulled me into a false sense of complacency. There would be things I would have to do, things I never thought I’d do again, things I dreaded doing, but would have to do. I needed to get my head squared away about that, and time was running out.

I had a mental checklist I’d been making. Gordon wasn’t on it. If Gordon couldn’t make the world safe for Bonseller and Lord Chillingham’s England, it was no skin off my ass. If I managed to do what needed doing, that England wasn’t going to be around much longer anyway.

It wasn’t my world. It would sure as hell take more than one pretty sunset to make it so.

***

Nine hours later we dropped down through the scattered clouds to find the Bavarian countryside below us, afternoon sunlight sparkling off the rivers and making the wooded hills and fields spreading out to either side seem to glow with life. The snow-peaked Alps rose to our right above nearly invisible clouds on the horizon and, like Intrepid, seemed to float impossibly in the air. The ground was higher and wilder looking to the south, and the rivers, a series of them perpendicular to our path like successive finish lines, flowed north to feed the Danube for its long journey east.

Thomson and I stood on the open flying bridge beside the wheelhouse. He pointed out three moving shapes far below us and handed me a pair of binoculars. The objects were some sort of powered land vehicles, with caterpillar tracks as near as I could tell, and enclosed. Big, too, about the size of locomotives, but they moved across open ground, not on railroad tracks. They each sported a few gun mounts.

“What the hell?”

“Imperial German land ships,” Thomson answered, “moving south. Quite formidable. Odd to see them on Bavarian soil — although Bavaria is part of the empire, of course, especially since the old king was deposed.”

“The Kaiser?”

“Good heavens, no! The Kaiser is secure, but Bavaria — its place in the German empire is ambiguous. It is a kingdom within the empire, more than a province but not exactly sovereign. Its foreign policy is directed from Prussia, but its heart, I think, is still with Austria. The old king, Ludwig, was mad and his brother Otto, the new one, is worse, but this Luitpold fellow, the prince regent, actually runs things now. He seems levelheaded enough. I don’t envy him his job.”

“So we’re getting help from whom? Germans? Prussians? Bavarians?”

“Yes,” Thomson answered and laughed. “General Buller’s contacts were through the German General Staff in Berlin, but the Bavarian Stadtpolizei have jurisdiction over the incident site. They’ll assist us, under instruction from Berlin.”

“How happy are they going to be about that?”

“We’ll see soon enough,” he answered.

Maybe the maneuvering Prussian land ships were meant as a reminder to the locals of who was in charge. Maybe not. I gestured down toward them, now well astern.

“Reinforcements?” I asked. Thomson’s eyebrows went up in surprise at that but then settled back as he thought it over. He was a scientist and viewed this as a fact-finding mission. I don’t think it had occurred to him until then that we might have to fight for information, or that the Germans might have anticipated something like that and were getting ready to back us up. Intrepid might be useful to us for something other than its speed.

Ahead of us I saw the dark mass of a city — Munich. While smoke rose from countless chimneys, it was nothing like the oppressive industrial smog of London. Dozens of multicolored balloons, some spherical, some sausage-shaped, floated above and near the city. As the clouds drifted and the sun setting behind us touched the distant city, a thousand windows reflected the light and sparkled like diamonds.

“I hear it has come back to life since the old king was deposed,” Thomson said from beside me. “Like a fairy city, isn’t it?”

It was. In the distance I saw a light on the outskirts of the city flickering with particular brilliance and regularity. When it paused, I heard a loud clacking from above us, on the catwalk above the flyer’s bridge. A crewman manned a large searchlight with louvered metal shutters, and as he worked the lever controls the shutters opened and closed, flashing light back to the city.

“Aldis lamp,” Thomson explained. After several more exchanges, the signalman slid down the ladder and disappeared into the bridge. Ten minutes later Captain Harding joined us and handed Thomson a message form.

“It came in my personal code,” Harding said.

Thomson read the note, and his eyebrows went up a bit.

“I didn’t know he was in Bavaria,” he said.

“He was supposed to be in Italy, last I heard,” Harding replied.

“Who?” I asked.

Thomson folded the message and put it in his coat pocket before answering me.

“We will see the Bavarian police tomorrow, but tonight we are to meet with Baron Renfrew in Munich. Baron Renfrew is –”

“Yeah,” I interrupted. “I know who Baron Renfrew is.”

“You do?” Thomson said. “Extraordinary.”

“I’m just full of surprises.”

Baron Renfrew! Now, this was an interesting development, but not a very cheery one. I’d never even heard of Lord Chillingham, and my brief meeting with him had left a bad taste in my mouth. Renfrew . . .

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 16

The Forever Engine – Snippet 16

 

TEN

October 3, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft Over the Franco-Belgian Border

“We cruise at twenty knots,” Captain Harding, Intrepid’s skipper, told me the next morning. We stood together in the wheelhouse and shaded our eyes from the glare of the sun rising almost directly ahead of us. Twenty knots, at two thousand yards to the nautical mile, put our speed at about twenty-two or twenty-three miles an hour. It felt as if we were hardly moving at all.

“We can keep this speed up day in, day out, for a week,” Harding went on. “There is very little vibration from her machinery. My first aerial command was Uxbridge, a Macefield-class gunboat based out of Alexandria. She’d do thirty-three knots, if you coaxed her and had the engineer sit on her safety valve, but she’d vibrate and shake to beat the devil. Bucked like a whore.”

The petty officer helmsman beside us grinned at that.

“It’s true,” Harding insisted. “Ride her too hard and she’d start leaking steam everywhere. Not the whore, mind you.”

“Smoke off the starboard quarter,” one of the lookouts called from the masthead above us. “Twenty degrees high.”

Harding raised his binoculars and scanned the sky.

“Mr. Conroy, what do you make of her?”

Ensign Conroy, the young officer of the watch, raised his own glasses.

“Converging course, sir, making . . . I’d say fifteen knots. Three stacks, turrets fore, aft, and ventral — I make her Invincible, sir.”

He pronounced it as a French name, however, not English. On-ven-SEEB-luh.

“Close,” Harding agreed, “But Invincible’s been shifted to the Pacific. That’s her sister, Gloire, as sure as there’s a hole in your backside. We’ll pass close enough to exchange honors. I believe we’ll go to action stations, Mr. Conroy.”

“Action stations, sir,” Conroy repeated. He pressed a red-painted lever near the engine telegraph and five bells sounded in rapid succession, followed by several seconds of silence, then five bells again.

Crew members boiled from hatches and scrambled to man the open gun mounts. The twenty red-coated marines formed in two ranks on the superstructure, and another officer climbed the steps to the wheelhouse. After a few minutes, Thomson joined us as well.

“Well, this is exciting!” he said, still puffing from the climb up the companionway to the bridge. “Another flyer, I see. We aren’t expecting trouble, are we?”

“No trouble,” Captain Harding answered. “Just a French cruiser, and we’ll pass close enough to smell the garlic. Trimsman.”

“Aye, sir?” a petty officer at the rear of the wheelhouse answered.

“Let’s bring her up even with the Frog. Ten percent positive buoyancy.”

“Ten percent positive buoyancy, aye, aye, Captain.” The petty officer stood before a double bank of tall levers, about twenty of them in each row. He released the hand brakes on two of the levers and pulled them back slightly, then locked them, waited, and adjusted two more. I felt the deck tilt very slightly up toward the bow then level again and for a moment I felt slightly heavier.

“Holding at ten percent positive buoyancy, sir,” he reported after a few seconds.

“What’s the glass read, Mr. Conroy?” Harding asked.

“Four-twenty, Captain.”

“Very well. We’ll come up to five hundred fathoms and level there,” Harding said.

“Aye, sir. Level at five hundred fathoms.”

At six feet to the fathom, that would put us at three thousand feet, about a kilometer — not very high for a jumbo jet, but plenty high for a thousand-ton ironclad.

I could pick out more detail on the French flyer now, even without binoculars. It had a different look from Intrepid. Its turrets sat higher in front, and it didn’t seem to have much deck forward. With an under-slung gun turret aft, like a bomber’s belly turret, its profile looked a little more like an aircraft than a flying ship, but only a little. I never saw an airplane with three smokestacks.

“Coming up on five hundred fathoms, Captain,” Ensign Conroy reported.

“Very well. Trimsman, neutral buoyancy.”

The petty officer made more adjustments to the forest of levers, studied his spirit levels and plum line, and then adjusted one more.

“Ship neutral, Captain.”

We had drawn closer to the French ship, and it slowly changed course to parallel ours. As we were moving faster, we would overtake the other aerial cruiser and pass it in a few minutes. I could make out her flags; a large tricolor flew from the mainmast amidships, and a blood-red ensign fluttered from the stern.

“She’ll follow us for a while, but we’re coming up on Saarbrüchen in a quarter hour. She’ll turn back for home rather than go deep into German air space,” Harding declared.

“Is that red flag some sort of naval ensign?” I asked.

Harding snorted.

“Not by a long shot. She’s flown by La Garde Rouge, the Commune’s pet bully boys.”

“The Commune?” I repeated.

“Mr. Fargo is not conversant with recent European political history,” Thomson explained. “He’s from . . . the west.” He turned to me. “The Commune took control of the French government in 1871, during the war with Germany.”

“You’re a cowboy, Mr. Fargo?” Harding asked. “You must be a cowboy who lives in a bloody cave if you’ve never heard of the Commune.”

Right, the Paris Commune. But in my world it had lasted — what? — a couple weeks?

La Garde Rouge — the Red Guard. I wondered how “red” those French really were. Wasn’t Karl Marx still wandering around somewhere?

“No shooting today, though, right?” I asked.

Harding turned and looked at me for a moment before answering.

“No, Mr. Fargo, not since ’85. The politicians will yammer a while longer before we start shooting at them again. Soon enough, though, I’ll wager.”

He turned back ahead, and in a couple minutes we passed abeam of the French cruiser, close enough that I could see the expressions on the French officers as they returned the salutes of our officers — proper but unsmiling. There was as much recognition over there as there was here that the next time they saw each other it might be through powder smoke and across a bloodstained deck.

That might explain why we were getting so much help from the Germans — nothing like a common enemy to make the children play well together.

I looked around the wheelhouse.

“Where’s Gordon?”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 15

The Forever Engine – Snippet 15

 

NINE

October 2, 1888, Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft Over the English Channel

“Lift-wood?” I asked. “You mean to tell me this thing is held up by wood?”

“I assure you, laddie, I was as surprised your time does not have it as you are that ours does,” Thomson answered.

We stood inside the massive lower hull of the flyer, looking down at row upon row of broad, thin wooden slats, arranged like louvers in a door.

“Go ahead and touch them,” he told me. “They’re real enough. Only touch the top surfaces, though, unless you want the skin stripped off your fingers.”

I knelt on the catwalk, reached out, and ran my fingers lightly along an upper edge.

“Are they always so hot?”

“No. As we ascend, their temperature increases. We don’t know why the temperature rises when they climb and drops as they descend, but my theory is it has to do with potential energy. A good trimsman keeps the climb shallow enough to avoid thermal distortion. The angle of the plane of the wood with respect to the center of mass of the world determines the amplitude of lift.”

I sat on the catwalk, leaned my back against one of the steel ribs of the hull, and looked at the rows of louvers, their positions controlled by an elaborate array of brass and steel gears and thin control cables running up to and through the overhead. As I watched, the louvers adjusted slightly, two here, five over there, keeping the flyer in trim.

Thomson and the others had figured out I was from a different future right away, but they’d done a good job of keeping it to themselves. It had been obvious to them once I talked about our “amazing” space-exploration program, which had finally put an unmanned rover on Mars in the twenty-first century. That’s why he hadn’t wanted me to tell Tesla about our space program — it would have let him in on the secret as well. Men from this world had been visiting Mars since 1870!

And they had liftwood. It grew on Mars.

“Back at the hospital I felt a downdraft when one of these things went over. I thought maybe it had big fans inside or something. Instead it’s got these wood slats, but when we took off I noticed a lot of wind underneath. So how do these things work?”

“There is some controversy over that. The panels clearly do not block the effects of gravity. Since there are lifting panels between us and the ground, we would not feel the gravitational pull of the Earth below us, or would feel it with reduced effect. Nevertheless, we clearly do feel it.

“The accepted explanation is that the louvers exert a repulsive force on whatever they come in contact with, but only do so parallel to the axis of strongest proximate gravitational attraction. The mechanism of this repulsion, and the source of the energy which produces it, remains a mystery, but it is one to which I believe you may have provided the answer.”

“Me?” I said. “What does time travel have to do with it?”

“Not time travel,” he answered, “but rather your explanation of matter in terms of small particles, particularly those — what are they called? Bosons? Those bosons which carry force and are exchanged.

“The difficulty with the standard explanation of liftwood’s function is that it seems to allow for violation of conservation of matter, energy, and momentum. If you float something heavy and then drop it, you generate a good deal of kinetic energy at the impact point, and appear to do so for free.”

“Nothing’s free,” I said.

“Quite right, and there is some historical evidence from Mars’s past that in fact the entire momentum of the system is preserved. I now believe that liftwood does not actually repel matter which comes in contact with it, but rather exchanges momentum with it.”

“What momentum? The air isn’t moving.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “It is spinning around the Earth’s axis and hurtling through space as the Earth revolves around the sun. Each particle of air has enormous momentum. What remains a puzzle is why, or how, liftwood is able to selectively borrow the momentum parallel to the pull of gravity, but organic constructs are extraordinarily sophisticated. We cannot even begin to explain how a chameleon’s skin can so quickly react to its surroundings and duplicate them as a form of visual camouflage. Your time has extraordinarily advanced computing machines. Do you have one as quick, sophisticated, and compact as the brain of a seagull?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

“No, and mind you a seagull is not a particularly intelligent bird.”

I looked back at the rows of louvers. They vibrated softly, in tension between gravity and the restraints of the gears holding them in position.

No, not gravity — momentum?

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “This place gives me the willies.”

We made our way through the doorway, back out into the rhythmic clatter and bustle of the engine room, and I felt better right away. I was tired of complicated men and impossible science. I paused and took a good long look, breathed in the steamy smell of oil and hot metal. Here were men dirty and sweaty from work, real work — lubricating the big reciprocating engines, fine-tuning a dozen different-sized valves on the steam lines, shoveling coal into the hungry boilers, shouting to be heard over the pounding beat of the flyer’s heart. They worked with confidence and economy of motion — a well-practiced team. I was nearly overcome by a desire to be part of that team, to take off my shirt and just start shoveling coal.

“Do you mind, lad? I’m starting to melt,” Thomson said.

***

Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid was damned impressive. I’d been on the old cruiser Olympia, Dewey’s flagship at the Battle of Manila Bay, and Intrepid reminded me of her. She had a broad, shallow hull. A narrow superstructure, topped by the wheelhouse, ran most of the way along the upper surface, all dark iron, steel, and polished brass, along with bleached white wooden decks and rich varnished interior woodwork. The flyer bristled with guns. One large steel turret dominated the main deck forward and another crowned the stern superstructure. More guns were mounted to fire broadside from the superstructure, and a sort of sideways turret on each side of the deck mounted another gun each. They called those sponsons. They could fire up and down as well as to the sides.

A small housing below the hull held the ship’s compass. It had to be below the hull because the liftwood interfered with it. It didn’t stop it from working, it just made it slow to change, like a gyroscope. Later, as we leaned on the brass railing and watched the distant clouds drift by, I asked Thomson how that squared with his new theory of how liftwood worked.

“I’m not certain,” Thomson said, “and if I know anything, I should know that. I designed that compass, the one in use in every Royal Navy vessel. It is not simply a navigational aid, it is also a precision scientific instrument. The navy has ships all over the world and they’ve been mapping the magnetosphere since — well, the 1830s, as I recall. Still are. This cruiser’s taking magnetic readings all along its course.”

“Since the 1830s? And you’re not done yet?”

“The magnetosphere is not absolutely stable, you know, laddie. The north and south magnetic poles drift over time, and there are other anomalies worth mapping. For the last year we’ve noticed a very slight weakening in the electromagnetic field. That’s the main reason the Royal Navy adopted my compass; it’s the most accurate and sensitive navigational instrument the service has ever had.”

“If you do say so yourself,” I said.

He smiled but I saw sadness there as well.

“Yes, you’re right. It is a very good compass, but still — just a compass. As I grow older, most of my work seems little more than tinkering: the transatlantic cable, the adjustable compass — simply toys by your day, I imagine. I wonder if I’ve done anything which will be remembered once I’m gone. Tell the truth — you’ve never heard my name, have you?”

“Nineteenth century science isn’t my field,” I said.

“Yet you knew of Edison.”

“He’s American — hometown boy makes good.”

“And Hertz?”

“They named radio waves after him. A car rental company, too.”

But the truth was, I knew a half-dozen or more scientists from about this time: Edison, Hertz, Faraday, Marconi, Kelvin, Babbage, Darwin, Planck, Tesla, of course — but not Thomson.

“Now Tyndall — there’s a scientist who’s left his mark on the world,” Thomson said.

I’d never heard of Tyndall, either, but I didn’t think that would make Thomson feel any better about his life. Besides, I had problems of my own.

I’d found out how the South won its independence: Lincoln had died in 1862 from typhoid fever. It made my heart ache again just standing there thinking about it. Everyone thinks strategy is all about generals, but it’s more about the men who stand behind them. Hamlin, his vice president, apparently just didn’t have what it took to get the job done, so the war effort faltered. McClellan won the election in ’64 and made peace. That’s how the South won — not anything they’d done, just some microscopic organism.

Typhoid fever. Son of a bitch.

In the midst of the post-war malaise which gripped the North, a young inventor named Edison heard a lecture on the luminiferous aether and decided America needed a new challenge, a new frontier to re-spark its spirit of purpose and adventure. A year of obsessive-compulsive experimentation later and he had a working aether propeller. So far so good. The problem was, when he got to Mars, there was a breathable atmosphere and life.

“Yes, there’s a troubling difference,” Thomson had said when he told me all this other stuff. “Mars has very small polar caps, but they are slowly growing, have been for several centuries as near as we can tell. I actually believe that is at the root of the collapse of the great civilizations there, the gradual cooling and drying of the world. It’s not just its seas which have disappeared. It’s also losing its cloud cover. I suspect that kept the world warm, rather like a greenhouse.”

That was about the first scientific thing I’d heard here which made much sense. I knew a little about our own Mars expedition plans. They included some long-term terraforming involving melting the polar caps, which were mostly CO2, to release the greenhouse gases, get the planet warming, and cook an atmosphere from Mars’s own frozen gases and the moisture locked in the soil. I wondered what it would have taken to do that naturally a couple billion years earlier, long enough for life to have evolved. A really big meteor strike at the pole? Sure, that would probably do it.

The problem was, now I was not looking at “fixing” a change in history as recent as the Roman emperor Galba. Now I had to figure out how to rearrange the solar system. Well, somebody apparently did it, so somebody could undo it. Maybe I was that somebody.

Yeah, maybe.

The sky stretched before us seemingly to infinity, dusted with a handful of clouds ahead and above us, and a wispy, uneven floor below. Through breaks in the clouds I could still see the blue-gray water of the English Channel and the approaching green outline of the Belgian coast. By then the sun was low in the sky behind us, the deck dark in the shadow of the hull, the clouds below us turned from white to pale orange, with dark, well-defined shadows and pink highlights.

This was real. I could never dream this sunset, and I felt tears run down my face.

“What is it, lad?”

For a moment I couldn’t even find my voice. Thomson put his hand on my shoulder.

“My daughter doesn’t even exist here,” I whispered. “How can it be this beautiful?”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 14

The Forever Engine – Snippet 14

 

EIGHT

October 1, 1888, Essex, England

Less than week later I felt like a proper Londoner. I had my own respirator and goggles, even if they were tucked away in a leather shoulder bag. I also had a hat.

I was forced to agree to the practicality of a hat in this environment — that or comb dust and cinders out of my hair every time I came in from outdoors. I never liked wearing hats and I had avoided them altogether after leaving the army, but now I had a closet-full of the damned things.

That was only a slight exaggeration; I had a hat for everyday “walking out” wear, one for formal occasions, a sporting hat, a shooting hat, a hunting hat, and a riding hat. I had a hard time telling the everyday, formal, and riding hats apart, since all three were black silk top hats, but the tailor assured me they were all necessary and Thomson agreed. Since the British government was paying the bill, who was I to argue? After all, the British government got me into this mess. Maybe not this British government, but what the hell — this one was handy.

I wore my formal hat and formal evening wear today, wore it for the first time since it was delivered yesterday afternoon. I always thought I’d look good in white tie and tails, and I was right. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help remembering what Thoreau said on the subject: Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

“It looks tight across your midsection,” Thomson said. “You should have let the tailor cut it more generously.”

“I’m about to lose some weight,” I answered. “It would have ended up looking baggy.”

“If I had a shilling for every gentleman who’s told his tailor that, I’d be a rich man.”

“You are a rich man,” Buller put in, his first words since climbing into the horse-drawn carriage at the train station. He was resplendent in his own dress uniform, which looked unlike any British Army uniform I could remember seeing — all black with shining black silk tapes across the front and looping around the sleeves, and topped by a fur cap with a tall, slender black and red plume. The coat was heavy with decorations across the chest, including a couple of big multipointed silver stars.

The carriage lurched in the rutted road and turned into a long, shaded drive. As we rounded a bend I saw what I took to be our destination — Larchmont Hall, stately and serene, perched on a low hill and surrounded by painfully disciplined formal gardens.

Buller, Thomson, and I had taken the train from London out to a place called South Woodham Ferrers-on-Crouch. Its name was almost longer than the village main drag. The large and ornate four-horse carriage waited for us at the station and carried us to the hall where Lord Chillingham would receive us.

“So, let me make sure I’ve got this right. We are going on a critical mission but we couldn’t leave yet because first we had to meet this Lord Chillingham, and before we could do that I needed the right clothes. Is that about it?”

“Don’t be an ass about this, Fargo,” Buller growled. “Keep your mouth shut in there unless you’re spoken to directly. If asked for your view, either agree with his Lordship or say you don’t have an opinion.”

“And for heaven’s sake,” Thomson added, “don’t be sarcastic, much as I am sure that will pain you. This is no joking matter, laddie. Chillingham is an Iron Lord, makes a fortune from industry instead of agriculture, although God knows he has land enough for that as well. That makes him dangerous — he actually does things for his money, instead of just owning land and paying someone to collect the rents.”

“Their Lordships don’t usually take to money with the scent of sulfur on it,” Buller said. “I suppose if you’ve got enough of it, they make an exception.”

“That and the fact that Lord Chillingham is from one of the oldest noble families in the British Isles,” Thomson added. “Thomas St. John Curnoble, twenty-eighth earl of Chillingham and Adderstone. He was rich before he bought the Manchester Iron Works.”

“They’ve been rich ever since King Harold stopped a Norman arrow with his eyeball at Hastings,” Buller muttered.

It didn’t sound as if I was going to like this Chillingham guy much. On the other hand, if he was some new breed of noble, a “get your hands dirty” take-charge guy, maybe I could find some common ground.

The carriage stopped at a side entrance where a butler waited for us.

“Follow me,” he ordered and then turned and entered the house.

“Servants and tradesmen’s entrance,” Buller said quietly, almost to himself. “Been some time since I’ve had to go in one of those.”

He heaved his bulk up from the seat, squared his shoulders, and walked through the door with the quiet resignation of a man marching to the gallows. Thomson fidgeted with his gloves as we followed, but in we went.

Quiet. That’s what Larchmont Hall was like inside: quiet and bright. Light flooded in through windows and French doors while white lace sheers floated in the soft breeze that carried the scent of flowers in from the garden. I breathed in slowly. Rose. Gardenia. Jasmine. Hyacinth.

Quiet, bright, and clean-smelling: anyone fresh from the noise and gloom and stench of London would instantly recognize this as Heaven. There was both irony and symmetry in that: first render the cities hellish, then construct a refuge from your own handiwork.

The long halls and open rooms seemed to stretch on endlessly. Mirrors everywhere accentuated the effect. Here and there I caught sight of a servant moving silently and gracefully from room to room. The butler led us, his velvet-slippered feet silent on polished hardwood floors. Our own shoes clumped and banged incongruously, no matter how carefully we trod. The sound echoed in the halls of light, somehow seeming to defile this sacred oasis of calm.

Three grown men tried to tiptoe down the hall like schoolboys following a teacher to the principal’s office, trying to keep up but not draw attention to themselves, to their guilt and awkward inadequacy. Buller, a brave soldier — even if he was an overbearing asshole — walked gingerly on the balls of his feet, almost stumbled from the effort in his tall riding boots, and looked foolish doing it. That brave old soldier looked foolish, and I think that’s what finally got me.

I stopped walking lightly.

Clump, clump, clump.

After a half-dozen steps the butler turned and scowled at me.

“Bite me, pal,” I told him

“Fargo!” Buller hissed. “Mind your tongue.”

“Give it a rest, General. If Chillingham wanted it quiet, he’d either put in rugs or have us leave our boots at the door. This is just a head game.”

“Aye, that may be,” Thomson said softly at my side. “But in his castle, he chooses the game.”

Maybe so, but I noticed both Buller and Thomson walked more easily after that.

The butler took us to a sitting room with large glass doors facing the garden. It caught the early afternoon sun perfectly, and I had the feeling there must be different rooms in different parts of the hall used at different times of the day just for the way they caught the light. And of course the light changed at different times of the year. I always wondered what the deal was with all those rooms in old manor houses. I guess if you wanted to have rooms that always got the light just right, you probably needed a house this big.

Chillingham looked younger than I expected, early forties probably. His brown wavy hair grayed at the temples so perfectly I wondered if he dyed it. He had the physique of an active man but not too active — someone who rode but did not shovel out the barn afterwards. I saw no glint of humor in his eyes at all; that’s always a bad sign.

He sat in a large wingback chair with a small dog in his lap — a black Scottish terrier. The terrier was alert and interested in the three of us, but not inclined to bark. We did not alarm him, because he knew that nothing threatening ever entered this house. Lucky little dog.

“Lord Chillingham,” Buller and Thomson said together and bowed from the waist. I took Buller’s advice and kept my mouth shut. I nodded with enough energy I’m sure someone might have mistaken it for a bow. Chillingham didn’t seem inclined to take offense.

Instead, he sighed.

“Yes, very well, General. Let’s hear it.”

Buller launched into a detailed outline of the mission. I wasn’t sure our host was even listening. He was more interested in his little dog. But then the door opened, and the butler crossed to Chillingham’s side. Buller stopped speaking, but Chillingham motioned him to continue. He did so, but with less assurance as the butler leaned forward and whispered in the lord’s ear.

Chillingham frowned, and for the first time looked alert and mentally engaged. The butler straightened, and Chillingham’s gaze wandered to the French doors, swept the garden, and then lost focus in the afternoon clouds as his mind grappled with the new problem. Buller stopped speaking again, and this time Chillingham did not notice. For several seconds the only sound was the caress of the sheer drapes against the doorframe in the light breeze.

Chillingham’s mouth hardened, his attention returned to the room, and I knew he had made a decision.

“Very well then,” he said to the butler. “We’ll follow the fish course with a claret. It’s too early in the meal, but there’s nothing for it.”

The butler nodded and glided from the room. Chillingham’s eyes wandered back to us, he seemed to remember we were there, and the look of intent concentration flickered away, replaced by bored irritation. He waved for Buller to continue.

“We — ah — where was I?”

“Somewhere in Bavaria,” I volunteered.

Chillingham glanced at me, and one eyebrow went up slightly before he looked back at Buller.

Buller resumed his narration of our plan, such as it was. From this point on it was all wishes and dreams as far as I was concerned. We had no clue what we were getting into and would be making things up as we went. Operations like this work when you know exactly what’s going to happen at every step and rehearse it a couple times. This sort of “Go in there and see what you chaps can accomplish” approach almost always ends in disaster, but it was my only ticket to the Old Man.

While Buller droned on, I had time to think about Chillingham. He wasn’t at all what I had expected. Any thoughts I’d had of winning him over were long gone; he wasn’t interested enough in this mission, or me, to even listen to my pitch. His mind was more on tonight’s dinner than this operation, and, despite the contempt that initially made me feel, the more I thought about it, the less certainty I had on the subject. I didn’t know who was coming to this dinner or what would be decided there, but Chillingham did not strike me as a stupid man. For him the dinner was more important. Maybe he knew something I didn’t.

And maybe he had about as much faith in this “mission” producing positive results as I did.

Buller finished, and Chillingham turned to look me over, noticed me studying him, but showed no reaction to that one way or another.

“And why are you helping us in this enterprise, Mr. Fargo?”

“To get back to my time,” I lied.

“I see. I read enough of that long report of Captain Gordon’s to make me wonder why you would want to. Considering the enthusiasm with which your society embraces its lowest, least-cultured elements, it’s small wonder your world is in such a frightful state.”

“As opposed to how peachy things are here,” I said.

He looked at me through eyes incapable of registering either respect or contempt. He looked at me through the eyes of a farmer inspecting his livestock, but his eyes narrowed as he did, and I saw measurement and calculation and an inhuman coldness unlike any I’d ever experienced.

“Precisely,” he said.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 13

The Forever Engine – Snippet 13

 

SEVEN

September 25, 1888, London, England

When Thomson told me we’d meet Tesla at Burlington House off Piccadilly, I imagined an anonymous brownstone like Dorset House. Boy, was I wrong. At first it looked like a massive gray stone three-story building, with columns and balconies and stuff all over it but regularly enough placed that they had a sort of grace in their repetition. Our carriage took us through an arched gateway in the center, and it turned out Burlington “House” was actually four massive buildings enclosing a sprawling rectangular courtyard.

“This is somebody’s house?” I asked.

“Not for over a century, and it wasn’t always this grand. They added the east and west wings about fifteen years ago. I think they did a splendid job matching the original architecture, don’t you? The Royal Society has the east wing.”

“Yeah? So where are the Illuminati?”

He chuckled. “Nothing so sinister or romantic as that, I’m afraid. The other wings house the Royal Academy, the Chemical Society, the Linnean Society, and the Geological Society. There may be a few other small organizations housed here and there in odd corners.”

A crowd of dark-suited men flowed slowly out of the main entrance to the east wing, breaking into animated conversational knots here and there.

“Tesla’s talk must be finished,” I said. “Looks like he gave them something to chew on.”

“I’m not surprised. He’s lecturing on his theory of a force-bearing aether.”

“The luminiferous aether?” I asked. As I recalled, these Victorian scientists had been big on that until the theory got shot full of holes.

“No, not the light-bearing aether, but a force-bearing one, which he claims is entirely different. The luminiferous aether is a propagating medium for thermal, radiant, and electromagnetic energy, but he speculates about a deeper, rigid propagating medium for force — gravity primarily, but also more fundamental forces which bind matter itself together. I understand he believes this force-bearing aether is also the source of mass itself, that without it mass would have no meaning or means of exerting effect on other objects.”

I wasn’t a physicist, but I’d watched enough episodes of Nova to know that this force-bearing aether thing Thomson was talking about sounded a lot like the Higgs field, the omnipresent field which gave all particles in the universe mass — or at least those which actually had mass. Maybe these guys were smarter than I gave them credit for.

“Ah . . . General Buller has cautioned me not to mention anything we know about the Old Man of the Mountain,” Thomson added as the carriage pulled up. “If you would accept a word of advice, I would not make any mention of your space exploration program, either. It may complicate things.”

Probably good advice. Things were already plenty complicated as they stood.

We left the carriage and made our way up the steps to the door. With the lecture attendees still leaving, this was like swimming down the Columbia River when the salmon were coming up. A doorman took our overcoats and tried not to stare at my ill-fitting and unmatched clothing — my own new duds wouldn’t be ready for a few days. As I handed my coat over, I saw my hand tremble and felt sweat break out on my forehead. Why?

I was scared, that’s why. This meeting might very well determine my fate, even the fate of my world. Until I actually did the meeting, there was still the possibility, the hope, Tesla could whip up a miracle. But once it was over, and if no miracle emerged, I’d have exhausted one more of my very limited options.

***

“You say 2018?” Tesla asked in a fairly pronounced eastern-European accent. He leaned forward, his curiosity aroused. “So you are from future, not past. Most interesting.”

The way he said interesting didn’t make it sound like a good thing.

“You didn’t seem to have a problem with me being from a different time, so why not the future?” I asked. Thomson and I had already told him as much background as I was willing to let go of, and he had reacted with interest rather than incredulity. The date of the Wessex accident was different, though. That brought him up short.

“Unsettling,” he answered. “It is one thing to accept relics dredged up from past, animated museum exhibits. But a fully formed man from the future — that suggests a level of determinism in the affairs of men I find troubling. What if you were to tell me what I am known to have done in future and I do something different? Or better still, what if I were to find ancestor of yours and kill him before he produced necessary offspring? Would you disappear?”

“Beats me,” I answered, not entirely truthfully. He studied me, his brow creased by a slight frown — partly from concentration and partly irritation. I looked him over again — tall and slender, black hair cut short and parted in the middle, neatly trimmed black moustache, high forehead, dark deep-set eyes, thin straight nose. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but there was something remote, almost incomplete about him, as if he existed simultaneously in two worlds and all you saw was the part that happened to be in this one.

What did I know about Tesla from my own time? Not much. He was smart, and he was crazy — probably more smart than crazy. He’d come up with wireless communication and alternating current, both of which transformed the world. Some argued those two innovations created the modern world. He also had a lot of screwy ideas that never panned out.

“It is a pity you are professor of ancient history rather than physics,” he said. “I am certain you could answer many questions both I and Dr. Thomson have.”

“I know a little about physics. There were programs on TV — well, think of them as lecture series by prominent scientists. My daughter, Sarah, got interested in physics and we watched a lot together.”

“Ah, your hobby?” Tesla asked.

“Well, it’s one of my interests. I’d rank it below football but way above synchronized swimming.” That clearly meant nothing to him, so I forged on ahead. “I don’t understand the math, but I know a little of the basics from a layman’s point of view. Take your idea of a force-bearing aether. It’s very similar to what scientists in my time call the Higgs field.”

I explained the Higgs field the same way I had to Thomson, then had to get into the Higgs boson, got tangled up in what a boson was, and started losing them. I’d been a teacher for the better part of ten years. I thought I was a pretty good one, but I was making a hash of this. I took a breath and paused a moment to gather my thoughts.

“Okay, all matter is made up of particles, and there are two types of fundamental particles: fermions and bosons. In a nutshell, fermions are particles with mass which combine to form atoms, which in turn form molecules and then all other matter. Have you heard of atoms and molecules?”

“We’ve heard of them, but let us say the atomic and molecular theory of matter is not generally accepted in the physics community,” Thomson said.

“Most members of the so-called physics community are fools,” Tesla replied. “Existence of atoms and molecules has long been recognized in chemistry. Please continue.”

“Okay, fermions are particles with mass, the building blocks of the material universe. Bosons are force-carrying particles with no mass. So if a fermion, a particle with mass, bumps into another one, it imparts some of its momentum to that particle by giving up and transferring a momentum-carrying boson.

“A Higgs boson is the manifestation of interactions between fermions and the Higgs field, but it’s more than that. It’s what actually gives a fermion mass. The more powerfully a fermion interacts with the Higgs field, the more Higgs bosons it has, and so the more massive it is. Think of the Higgs field as a rain shower and a fermion as a person who walks through it. The more absorbent the person’s clothing, the more water it absorbs from the rain and so the more wet it becomes. But once the clothing becomes saturated, the rest of the water just runs off. It can only get so wet.”

Thomson said nothing but chewed on his pipe, frowning in thought, eyes distant and unfocused.

“Interesting theoretical explanation of the property of mass,” Tesla said after a moment.

“Not a theory,” I answered. “Scientists in my time had isolated and observed Higgs bosons in high-energy particle accelerators. It’s the real thing.”

“Tell me of this — what did you call it? — high-energy particle accelerator,” Tesla said.

I did, and he listened thoughtfully, occasionally nodding in understanding. When I explained the Wessex particle accelerator as a weapon which had instead produced this time-shift effect, he smiled and almost laughed, but I couldn’t tell exactly why. He was definitely an odd fellow.

Thomson came back into the conversation then. “The use of a rotating electromagnetic field to produce this effect naturally made me think of you, Mr. Tesla. I know of no one more knowledgeable about the subject, with the possible exception of Mr. Edison.”

That must have been the wrong thing to say, as Tesla’s face immediately clouded with anger.

“Edison knows nothing. He makes his discoveries without a priori hypotheses. He simply tries a thousand different mechanical combinations — or has his hired lackeys do so — until something works. He has no idea how or why it does so. He is not a scientist. He is a tinker, and a thief to boot!”

I remembered something about the disputes between Tesla and Edison from my own time. Edison had clung to direct current and Tesla had promoted alternating current, eventually winning what people called The Current War. Maybe I could use that to settle him down.

“If it’s any consolation,” I said, “before he died, Edison said his greatest regret in life was not listening to you on the controversy over alternating versus direct current.”

Tesla looked at me, his eyebrows rising in surprise.

“That is interesting,” he answered, “since he stole my plans and ideas for alternating-current generators and is manufacturing them even now. That is why I returned to Europe. There is nothing left for me in America.”

Shit! No Current War here, apparently.

“Listened to you about compensation,” I added quickly, making it up as I went. “If he had paid you fairly, and you had stayed and worked with him, who knows what you might have come up with together?”

Tesla studied me for several seconds, eyes calculating. Then he looked away.

“Edison is a man of appalling personal habits, a filthy man, and with no interests beyond accumulation of wealth. I could not have worked long with him.”

“I have never met the man,” Thomson said, “but I confess I have heard similar judgments from others. We are doubly fortunate you were available. Surely this must excite your scientific curiosity. Will you help us understand this phenomenon?”

Tesla looked at him and I could see something about the question amused him, some private joke.

“I do not know if I can shed light on this matter. It is too soon to say for certain.” That wasn’t what I was hoping to hear, especially after he’d seemed so engaged in the physics discussion. “There is much to absorb,” he went on, “much to think about. But I have previous engagements on the continent which I must attend to.”

“We are bound for the continent ourselves,” Thomson said. “Would you consider joining our party and traveling with us?”

Tesla looked from Thomson to me and considered the possibility, but then shook his head.

“No, I am afraid that is not possible. I will think more on this matter, though, that I can promise you. If something comes to me, how can I find you?”

“You can contact us through the British consulate in Munich,” Thomson said.

“You travel to Bavaria then.”

“Well . . .” Thomson shifted in his chair, perhaps thinking he may have said too much. “Only in passing, but we will keep them informed. I would ask you not to share that information with anyone else.”

“Of course,” Tesla answered and then turned to me. “Your situation here must be very difficult, Dr, Fargo. I wish I could have been more help.”

***

“So, did you buy all that?” I asked Thomson once we we’d flagged down a horse-drawn cab.

“Buy? I’m not sure I . . .”

“Did you believe him?”

Thomson’s confusion showed clearly in his face. Scientists are easy to fool because they are trained to accept the world at face value.

“He knows more than he’s letting on,” I said. “What’s he doing here in England?”

“I told you, this talk. Well, now that you mention it, he contacted the society and offered to give the speech, as he was already in the country. Why? Do you think that’s significant?”

Everything is significant.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 12

The Forever Engine – Snippet 12

 

“The what?” Thomson sputtered.

“No, I didn’t think so,” Buller said with a nod. “There were cases of sabotage, such as the Vickers workshop, which I think are also linked to this spy, whoever he is. You weren’t positioned to assist in those. No, I had already ruled you out. Damn you, Gordon. Why couldn’t you have been the bloody spy?”

“Sorry, sir,” Gordon answered with a hint of sarcasm and Buller glanced up sharply at him.

Buller played the blustering, gobbling British general, but there was clearly more to him than met the eye. Rossbank’s body was hardly cold, Buller had been head of Military Intelligence for probably twelve hours at the outside, and he was already up to speed on the leak and the most likely suspects. I wasn’t crazy about the guy, but that was impressive.

“Carstairs, Burroughs, you are both dismissed,” he said.

The two other officers barked “Sir!” in unison and stamped out of the office. Once the door closed behind them, Buller looked at us.

“Well, that’s it, then. You three are the only ones in this whole business I can trust. Trust is perhaps too strong a word in your case, Fargo. Let’s just say I am certain you are not a spy for the Old Man. The same is true for you, Captain Gordon.”

Buller moved the folder to the side and opened the one under it.

“You are with the Northumberland Fusiliers, I see,” he said after a moment.

“Sir.”

“The First Battalion fought in Afghanistan eight years ago. You were a subaltern then, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good opportunity for a young chap to show what he’s made of. But you stayed in England, exchanged places with a subaltern from the Second Battalion, lad named Collingwood.”

Gordon shifted his weight from one leg to the other and frowned.

“Yes, sir.”

“He was killed in action, I see. Where was that?”

I saw the color come to Gordon’s face. His ears burned cherry red. When he didn’t reply, Buller looked up at him. Gordon licked his lips before answering.

“Kandahar, sir.”

“Yes, that’s right. I missed that show. Down in Zululand, you know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then last year your second battalion rotated with the first, got overseas service at last. It’s seeing some lively action out on the Northwest Frontier. You exchanged out again, I see, with a captain named Winthrop. Is he still alive?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lucky chap,” Buller said.

Gordon dropped his hands to his side and came to attention.

“Will that be all, sir?”

“No, damn you, it will not. I know the army is full of worthless young gentlemen who think soldiering is nothing more than hunting foxes in Yorkshire and gambling away their father’s money in London. They exchange out with poorer officers whenever their battalion ships overseas. The poor ones can’t afford the mess dues back in England and so go on campaign, seduced by the prospect of prize money. They end up doing all the bleeding and damn the army for still allowing it. But you, Gordon! You had your chance to prove yourself yesterday, and you ran.”

“I went for help!” Gordon protested.

“Went for help? You ran into the others outside the door and so had to turn around and come back. Otherwise like as not you’d have kept running all the way to Horse Guards.”

“If you believe that –”

“Shut up, damn you!” Buller roared, his searing rage no longer a pretense. Sweat broke out on Gordon’s forehead and he seemed to wilt in the furnace of the general’s contempt.

“I won’t say what I believe,” Buller resumed after a moment. “If I did, I might have no choice but to give you a revolver and some privacy. I can’t afford that. Much as I loathe the idea, you are the only officer in this entire department whom I can trust. Whatever else you are, Gordon, Fargo has convinced me you are not the spy.”

Gordon glanced at me, but there was no gratitude in his eyes.

“You fancy yourself an intelligence officer,” Buller continued. “I will tell you this much: an intelligence officer isn’t worth a box full of backsides unless he’s out in the field. So that is where you are going, all three of you.

“Professor Thomson, I cannot order you, but the Crown would be extremely grateful –”

“Of course I’ll go,” Thomson said. “I owe poor Tyndall that much. We should never have let a scientific disagreement divide us so bitterly all those years.”

“Splendid. Lest there be any misunderstandings, you are in charge of the expedition.”

“Where would you have us go, and to what purpose?” Thomson asked.

Buller looked at each of us in turn.

“Investigate the Somerton site. The police already have done so, and we have their report, but there’s nothing in it. This talk about a ‘hole in time’ is worth looking into, though. The incident at Somerton was not a unique occurrence. We received a cable from our embassy in Berlin which reports another similar detonation in southern Germany — Bavaria, actually — at precisely the same time.

“After you’ve learned what you can from the Somerton site, go to Bavaria. I’ll have a Royal Navy flier ready to take you — quickest way and no embarrassing questions from fellow passengers. Contact the Bavarian State Police. They have already agreed to cooperate. You will jointly investigate the reports of the explosion near Kempten, Bavaria, in the Allgäu Alps. Find out what happened and what role this Old Man had in the business. Follow wherever it leads, Thomson, and sort this business out.”

***

Out in the hallway the three of us paused for a moment, but Gordon stared straight ahead, as if Thomson and I weren’t there. He straightened his tunic and then walked away without a word.

“That lad’s carrying too many rocks in his pockets,” Thomson observed. “Tyndall was his uncle, you know. They were quite close.”

“Well, he better get his shit together or he’ll get us all killed.”

“His shit together?” Thomson chuckled. “Aye, that’s one way to put it. Now, where are you staying?”

“Here I guess.”

“Nonsense. Come along to my club. We’ll have a wee bit of lunch and then see about providing you with some proper clothing.”

“That sounds okay. Some jeans, running shoes, and a couple sweat shirts and I’ll be good to go,” I said with a smile.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t sound like proper attire to me. My tailor will kit you out, though, no fear. You’ll have to look your best when we meet Lord Chillingham.”

We started down the broad stairs, and I saw the butler at the bottom holding our coats, calm and emotionless as a robot. I’d only been here a few days, but one of the things which already struck me was how people were so careful about not showing their humanity to anyone of a higher social station. I bet this butler loosened his collar and roared with laughter with his pals, tossing back a pint or two in the pub, but you would never know it to see him here, standing like a statue.

“Who’s Chillingham?” I asked Thomson. “Is he the man you said might help me?”

“Lord Chillingham, and best not forget it, laddie. He won’t find you as amusing as I do. He doesn’t find anything amusing, so far as I can see. No, he’s not the man I mentioned earlier. Lord Chillingham. All the soot and smoke in the air over London — and Manchester and Birmingham are worse — is mostly from Chillingham’s foundries and mills. Ever since he bought up the patents to Henry Bessemer’s process, he’s had a stranglehold on heavy industry. He’s also the Lord Minister Overseas, the real power behind the foreign ministry, colonial affairs, and particularly military intelligence. I imagine that’s the reason the general’s so upset. Buller was Quartermaster General until yesterday, safe and sound on the Army Board. Now he’s at Chillingham’s mercy. Well, we all are now, I suppose.”

I knew at least something about British government, but I’d never heard of a Lord Minister Overseas.

“Aren’t ministers from the House of Commons? What’s with this Lord Minister thing?”

“The Common Cabinet comes from the lower house, but cabinets come and go as Parliament changes. The Lords are — more permanent. Their two ministers — Home and Overseas — well, they’re the ones to worry about.”

“In my time the House of Lords is pretty powerless,” I said.

Thomson slipped into the coat the butler held open for him and looked at me a moment before answering.

“Now, that’s a revolutionary idea,” he said. “Were it mine, I’d keep it to myself.”

“Okay. So who’s the guy who may be able to help?” I asked.

“We’re fortunate he’s even in the country, it’s only a temporary visit. He’s speaking at the Royal Society tomorrow. I’ll send my card and ask him to meet with us afterwards. A remarkable man, especially considering he’s a foreigner of quite humble origins.”

“Yeah, you have to be careful of those foreigners of humble origin,” I said.

He glanced at me to make sure he understood what I meant and then squinted as he smiled. “Aye,” he answered, “present company included. This fellow’s eccentric, of course, perhaps even a bit mad, but only a madman would take your story seriously. His theories are certainly excuse enough for a suite at Bedlam. I suspect it will take some very unconventional thinking to sort out a way to duplicate the event which brought you here.”

That, I thought, was probably an understatement. And simply reversing the event wasn’t enough. I had to figure out a way to go farther back in time, find out what had changed the course of history, undo it without making any other changes, and then get back home. Of course, I couldn’t tell anyone here that was my plan, because it involved undoing this history to restore my own, and they probably wouldn’t like that idea.

So whoever this guy was, he had better be really smart.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Nikola Tesla, although I doubt you’ve heard of him. He’s certainly a very creative thinker, but he doesn’t have the sort of organized, methodical approach likely to leave a lasting mark on the world.”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 11

The Forever Engine – Snippet 11

 

SIX

September 24, 1888, London, England

The next morning an older maid woke me up with tea — hot for a change — some crisp toast held upright in a silver toast rack, and the news that I was wanted downstairs as soon as I could dress. I’m not sure why, but a hot cup of tea, and the thought of someone — even assholes — waiting for me, restored my confidence.

“Outrageous! Do you hear me? It is bloody outrageous, and I will not bloody have it. I will not!!”

I paused in the doorway, glanced around the office, and saw three red-faced junior officers at rigid attention — with Gordon the reddest of them all — in front of the ranting older officer. I recognized the two others with Gordon as the men I had taken for detectives the day before. Thomson sat in a chair in the corner, puffing on his pipe and lost in thought. He noticed me at the door and took the pipe from his mouth to wave me in.

The tall, stout officer turned his ferocious glare on me. His eyes narrowed and his gray moustache bristled like the whiskers on a walrus.

“So, the mysterious Mr. Fargo joins us. Because of you they said my ‘talents’ were needed here, in the Intelligence Department. They’re bringing that doddering old fool Baker back from India to give him my seat on the Army Board. That was Wood’s handiwork, I’ll wager. Well damn Wood, damn the Board, damn Rossbank for getting himself killed, and damn all of these fools for not dying in place of him!”

“Don’t forget to damn me,” I said.

“Damn you, sir!”

“Fargo, allow me to introduce the new director of military intelligence,” Thomson said from his chair. “Major General Sir Redvers Buller, VC. General, as you correctly deduced, this is Professor James Fargo of the University of Chicago.”

VC after his name meant Buller had the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for heroism, the equivalent of our Medal of Honor.

“University of Chicago?” Buller said. “Never heard of it.”

“Be patient,” I answered. “It wasn’t founded until 1890, but we managed to make a name for ourselves fairly quickly. Redvers. Do your friends call you ‘Red’?”

“Damn you, sir, they do not. Americans must prize a particularly thick sort of professor. Just what did you intend by taking on two armed assailants?”

“I intended not to go with them.”

“Damned foolish, if you ask me,” he said.

“Well, you guys have been so nice to me, I couldn’t bear to leave.”

“‘Better the enemy you know’ was more likely your motive,” Buller muttered.

There was more than a little truth to that.

“I think this ‘Old Man’ may be the only one who can get me back to my time,” I said. “I want to have a nice long talk with him about that, but not as his prisoner. So I’m going to need some help.”

Buller stood there for a moment and stared at me.

“Indeed,” he said finally. “And you expect us to provide that help?”

“Yup. You want him, and I appear to be the key to getting him, or at least bringing him out into the open. His henchman said as much. So you need me for bait, and I need you for muscle. It’s a match made in heaven.”

Buller snorted and looked to Thomson, who simply raised his eyebrows in reply.

“And I suppose I’m to trust you because you turned on your captors,” Buller said. “But you did not raise a finger until after Tyndall and Rossbank were dead. How do I know the entire episode wasn’t staged just to put you in our good graces?”

“You’re director of military intelligence. In my time I’d know what that means. Here, not so much. Is this just another assignment, or have you actually done this stuff before?”

“‘Done this stuff before?’ Listen to this fellow, Thomson. You actually believe he is a professor of anything? He talks like a guttersnipe.”

“Well, he is American,” Thomson answered.

“Hummph. I was chief of intelligence in the Ashanti campaign and again in the Sudan in ’82, so, yes, I have ‘done this stuff’ before. What of it?”

“You’d give a lot to have a source inside the highest level of your enemy’s counsels, right? Sure you would,” I said. “But once you had it, would you risk it just to get a second one?”

“What are you insinuating, Fargo?” Gordon demanded.

Buller turned on him.

“Found your voice, have you, Captain? He is insinuating nothing; he is stating the obvious. We already have a viper in our midst. How else could they have found out about both Fargo and the artifact? As I’d say you were the principal suspect, your outburst is hardly surprising.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you,” Buller answered. “I must say, Gordon, for a serving officer that was a remarkably unconvincing display of marksmanship. You put pistol bullets all over the place, missed almost everything you aimed at, but your very first shot hit the henchman square in the back. Or should I say square in the body armor?”

The color drained from Gordon’s face, and he shook his head.

“No, sir. It wasn’t like that!”

“No, perhaps not,” Buller continued. “Perhaps that shot was as wild as all the rest. Were you really aiming for Fargo, but couldn’t hit him any better than anything else?”

“No, sir. I swear it, upon my honor!”

“If, as I suspect, you are a damned spy, you have no honor, sir, so your oath is hardly reassuring.”

Enjoyable as it was to watch Gordon getting roasted over a fire — and it really was — I knew I had to step in before this careened out of control.

“No, it can’t be Gordon,” I said.

General Buller’s eyebrows went up a little in surprise, and for the first time he looked at me with genuine interest. I learned something about him right then. Everything he’d done up until then had been a deliberate performance, and everything he’d seen and heard had been exactly what he expected, until I came to Gordon’s defense.

“Go on,” he ordered.

“You can fake voluntary reactions, but not involuntary ones. He soiled himself. It’s a common but completely involuntary response to sudden danger. He was as surprised as the rest of us.”

“You didn’t soil yourself,” Buller observed.

“I knew I was in for a long and stressful day, maybe even torture, so I took a tactical dump on the train right before we got to London.”

“And what, pray tell, is a tactical dump?” he demanded.

I told him.

Thomson laughed, and one of the young officers snickered, which made Buller frown all the more fiercely.

“You never filled your trousers in combat, General?” I asked.

His scowl grew even darker and his face reddened.

“Different matter altogether,” he snapped. “Water’s always bad on campaign; a soldier learns to live with dysentery. Not the same thing at all.”

“No, of course not,” I said.

“Damn you, Fargo. How do you explain his convenient marksmanship? Hasn’t it occurred to you he may have been trying to kill you?”

“Yeah, but I decided against it. Use your head, General. If he works for a guy who wants to ‘collect’ me, whatever the hell that means, why would he want to kill me? No, his shooting makes perfect sense. You’ve been in tough combat before or you wouldn’t have a Victoria Cross, so think about it.

“His stress level was through the ceiling, so his hands shook, and he’d lost fine-detail resolution in his vision. He couldn’t see the sight on the end of his pistol. His first shot was pure muscle memory; he raised his hand, and it automatically pointed where his eyes were looking. After that he started thinking about it, trying to aim, and so he put bullets all over the place.”

Buller studied me carefully for a few seconds, and I could almost see the gears turning in his head as he thought it over. He’d probably never heard it explained that way before, but if he really had seen a lot of combat, it would make sense.

“Loss of fine-vision resolution, involuntary responses, muscle memory — how do you know all this?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you some day. But right now you’ve got a more pressing problem, don’t you?”

“Yes, the spy. Well, that’s thin soup, Fargo, but it’s the only soup we have, I’m afraid. Damned if I’m certain why, but I think you’re right. Blast you, Gordon! My life would be a deal easier if you were guilty.”

Buller waved the three rigid officers to ease and sat down behind the large wooden desk. I found a chair.

“I’m a fair suspect myself, I suppose,” Thomson said. “I knew all the details concerning Fargo’s story, and I was on bad terms with Tyndall and the other X Club members.”

The same thing had already occurred to me. I liked Thomson, but that didn’t change the facts.

Buller opened a folder on his desk and studied its contents, frowning in thought.

“Your argument with the X Club was public, Professor, but I hardly consider it a motive for these killings. Your position is rather sensible, if you ask me. All this Origins of Species nonsense the X Club members spouted — I knew my grandfather, by God, and he was no monkey.”

Across the desk I saw Gordon’s face tighten, but he said nothing. Buller turned to me.

“Professor Thomson disproved all that rubbish, you know, but the X Club johnnies still stuck with it. Rather thick of them, if you ask me. Not to speak ill of the dead, of course.”

“Disproved it?” I asked.

Thomson shifted uncomfortably in his chair and cast a guilty look at Gordon.

“I . . . ah . . . calculated the age of the Earth based on its internal temperature and the rate of cooling of its component elements. It is not old enough for the processes Mr. Darwin outlines to have played out . . . at least not in the fashion he describes.”

He looked down and away when he was finished. Maybe he felt uncomfortable bringing up a disagreement with the late lamented Tyndall.

“Right, but that’s hardly a motive for you to go around killing them,” Buller went on. “Rather the other way, I should think. Between Sir Edward’s staff and this department, a dozen men knew or could have known of Fargo and his story. Thomson, did Sir Edward ask you to consult on the Vickers lightning-cannon project?”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 10

The Forever Engine – Snippet 10

 

I looked the guy over. Scars on his face and knuckles told the story of a violent life. Hard eyes told it better. Red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes, broken veins on his nose to match — a life of alcohol as well as violence. But he looked strong now, in a lean, ratlike way, and clearheaded. There was life in his eyes — not exactly hope, but defiance and self-respect. This wasn’t a hired tough; this was a man with beliefs.

His pupils were dilated. All mixed up in the smells of sweat and soot, the smells of the man and his world, there was something else, something herbal and smoky. Marijuana? Maybe so.

“What’s your name?” I asked. He hesitated. “What do you want me to call you?”

“Grover’ll do.”

“Would you like a smoke, Grover?” I asked. The question caught him by surprise, but then he shrugged.

“Could do.”

“Captain Gordon, give him one of your cheroots.”

“I’m damned if I will! These bastards killed Tyndall.”

“Just do it, man,” Thomson ordered softly.

Gordon threw the small cigar onto the couch. The prisoner snatched it, put it in his mouth, and grinned.

I took a match from Gordon, struck it, and the prisoner puffed the cheroot to life. The room filled with its aromatic smoke, and he leaned back in relaxed pleasure, his pain and fear momentarily forgotten.

“Captain Gordon has told you that, no matter what, you’ll hang. Well, that’s not much of a surprise, is it? Two constables, a colonel, and one of the most respected scientists in England all dead — hard to imagine they’ll let you off with a warning. My guess is, the time you spend here, smoking that cigar, is probably going to be the best time you have left in your life, so savor it. From here on out it will either be just so-so, or truly horrendous. You understand that, right?”

His smile faded a bit, and his eyes grew thoughtful. After a moment he nodded.

“Okay, good. You probably aren’t going to betray anything important to us, so instead let’s see if you can satisfy our curiosity about some smaller things. Professor Thomson figures he knows who you work for. Who’s that again, Prof?”

“The Old Man,” Thomson said.

I watched the thug’s face. If Thomson was wrong, I’d have seen disdain or triumph. Instead I saw nothing, a wall.

The Old Man. The Old Man of the Mountain? That would explain the smell of cannabis. The timing was about eight hundred years off, though.

“Well, whoever. Here’s what I’m curious about. I get that he’s killing some group of guys, and Tyndall was next on the list. But why did he want me? And why the coin?”

The prisoner took the cheroot from his mouth and studied the ash for a moment, considering his answer.

“Well, ‘e’s a collector, see? Go’ to collect all the li’l shiny bits what come frew the ‘ole.”

“The hole?”

“The ‘ole in time. ‘E’s already got lots o’ shiny bits. Don’t think you’re the first, do ya?”

The hole in time! I sat up straight and leaned forward.

“I need to find him.”

Grover’s expression clouded over as if he realized he’d said too much. “‘E’ll find you, soon enough.”

“Yeah, well, he’s got his schedule and I’ve got mine. Where is he?”

I figured I knew the answer — Syria. That’s where The Old Man of the Mountain — Shaykh al-Jabal in Arabic — had been based along with his cult of hashshashins — fearless killers, from whom the word assassin derived. The story was they took hashish before a mission to fortify their courage and dull the pain of any wound or injury they might suffer. That had always sounded pretty far-fetched to me, and London was a long way from the cult’s recruiting area, but it wouldn’t be the screwiest thing about this place. Not even close.

Grover’s face tightened, and his eyes narrowed to slits. Everything up until then was bragging — this approached betrayal, and I had the feeling he would never voluntarily betray The Old Man.

“Look,” I said, “if he’s as good as you think he is, you’ll be doing him a favor. I’ll go charging in there, he’ll grab me, and then he’ll have what he wants. Besides, he’ll know we’re coming, right? If he knew about me and the coin, he knows everything going on here.”

We stared at each other, me daring him to talk, him calculating the angles. As I watched, I realized I was seeing the workings of an intelligent and sophisticated, if unschooled, mind. Now he was trying to figure out which play made the most sense, but not for him, for his boss.

“Stuff it,” he finally said.

Here was someone with brains, guts, and loyalty, even honor in his way, and this society had just discarded him. Then along came someone who recognized gemstones, even damaged ones lying in the gutter, and had swept him up. This wasn’t my world, and I was glad it wasn’t, because it was in bad trouble.

***

I gathered the plan had been to throw me in prison after the interview. Things having turned out as they had, they decided against prison, but that left my domestic arrangements up in the air. It turns out there were bedrooms on the third floor of the house for unexpected guests like me. I also found out the house had a name — Dorset House.

A maid — she couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve — showed me to my room and brought some cold cheese sandwiches and a pot of lukewarm tea. She also pointed out, with much blushing, the commode down the hall, where I was pleasantly surprised to find a functioning flush toilet.

I turned in early but had trouble getting to sleep. I wasn’t used to sleeping in odd places. A hospital, a bed-and-breakfast, that’s different. Those are places with labels, so you know how you’re supposed to feel about them. Dorset House — what kind of place was that? Also, I wasn’t sure when I was going to get a clean change of clothes, so I slept in the raw. The bed was cold and the sheets stiff and scratchy. I could have used a change of bandages on my burned back as well, but that would have to wait.

My thoughts didn’t help me doze off. Sitting in the interview room with Grover, the Cockney hashshashin, for just a moment I’d felt closer to an answer, closer to the way home. But since I’d come to this thoroughly screwed-up place, all I’d seen were hostile faces, violent death, and a London right out of a bad acid trip. I’d played this game of looking for allies, planning my next move — for what? Even if I found some “hole in time,” what then? How much closer would I be to finding what had altered my past and then undoing it? Not one inch. Lying there alone in that cold bed, I felt impossibly far away from anyone and anything I had ever cared about. And in that cold darkness, I couldn’t believe there was a way back to the warmth and light. I just couldn’t.