The Forever Engine (29 page)

“I suppose there are many parallel universes—what we called timelines before—but in each of them time advances like a wave, and the only substantial reality in each of them is that universe’s ‘present,’ the location of time’s wave front at that instant. The present just happens to be at a different time point in each of them.

“To answer my own original question, I have been in your universe for about a month. When you return me to my universe, you will return me to it a month after I left. You will return me to that time because that is the only time there is.”

I looked at Gabrielle, and she looked from me to Tesla, looking both relieved and intrigued.

“So, do you know why the base-time wave front is different in each of these universes?” I asked.

Tesla looked at me for a moment, his expression unchanging.

“I do not.”

I felt a slight adrenaline rush. As certain as I was that my conclusion was correct, there was always the possibility I had overlooked something and gotten it wrong. Tesla, by his expression and demeanor, had confirmed it. The three of us knew something no one else, on this world or my world, knew, something fundamental to how the universe was ordered. I found that pretty exciting, no matter what else happened next.

“So here’s my next question: How can you be sure you can get me back to my own universe? Have you accessed it before? For that matter, how can you get me to a precise location in that universe?” I thought again about the seeming impossibility of finding the needle that was the exact location on a world when there was a difference of billions of miles between where it was here and where it was in that universe.

He sat there for a moment not speaking. I got the impression he had figured out how this conversation would unfold, and it had gone completely off the rails. Now he took some time deciding out how to regain control.

“No, I have not accessed your plane of existence before. I have been unable to access any plane with a more advanced time than our own, but that is in part an energy issue. My calculations suggest the energy cost to open a portal to a more advanced plane is substantially higher than to the less advanced one. I suspect there are inertial issues involved in this. But I have accumulated enough energy to do so, and now that I have you physically present, I have the means to target your plane directly. As I explained, the vibrational properties of items from your world can be measured and used to calibrate the instrument.

“As to precise places within that plane of existence—I will only say that location may not be as significant in the universe as I once thought. It is at any rate not a tremendous barrier to surmount, provided the vibrational properties of the associated local material in this plane of existence are known. Once this business with the Turks is finished, I shall be happy to demonstrate.”

That was great news, right? I was going home, and I wasn’t going to have to be a mass murderer, a destroyer of worlds, to do so. So why did I feel like I was waiting for another shoe to drop?

THIRTY-NINE

October 14, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

After lunch, Tesla took me on a walking tour of his compound. Gabrielle remained behind, claiming her leg still bothered her, so it was just Tesla, me, and two big guards. One guard walked between Tesla and me, and the other, with revolver in hand, walked behind us. This
pistolero
had a bandaged head, probably a souvenir of our fun together at
Oktoberfest
. Apparently Tesla had decided to take no chances, even after my agreement to help him.

First he took me back up the stairs. We passed what appeared to be storage rooms and servants quarters on the fifth floor and then, past them, climbed a narrow stairway to the attic and then up a ladder to the roof.

An observation platform, supported by iron girders, topped the peaked slate roof. We climbed a steel spiral staircase to get up there, and even on the way up I could see enough to appreciate the view. A dozen outbuildings and smaller structures huddled around the house, and the two or three dozen homes and shops of the village of Kokin Brod sat securely under its view a quarter mile down the gentle slope, halfway to the lake.

We had a crisp, cool, bright autumn afternoon for our inspection. The sun sparkled off the lake which stretched east of the compound for several miles, filling what had clearly once been a river valley. A well-worn road snaked down to the shore of the lake, ending at a cluster of two large, new buildings, and a third, smaller one nestled close by the shore, all inside a wire fence. One of the larger buildings was taller and very long, with a semicylindrical curved roof: zeppelin hanger, wide enough for three of them side by side. I couldn’t tell anything about the other structures, but I remembered Durson saying he had mapped the position of new “machinery buildings” along the lake.

I turned and looked west, up the valley toward the main peaks of the mountains. The day was clear enough that I could have seen all the way to Brezna, and the ridge Gabrielle and I had fled down, except the valley twisted and a tall spur blocked my view.

I looked back at the east and counted nine gun positions grouped in three clusters of three each. One cluster sat on high ground to the north of the lake and another sat on a low hill a quarter mile south of Tesla’s compound. Both had excellent fields of fire up the valley in addition to covering a slice of the northern and southern approaches. The third cluster was farther east, on the south side of the lake, and covered that direction. Each trio of guns was laid out in a triangle, so two guns could always fire at any one target and no angle of approach was left uncovered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is this your command post?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bad actors,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

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

“Exactly so,” he said.

Jesus!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Down for maintenance?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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