The Forever Engine Read online

  “Now, let’s get to it, shall we?”

  They grilled me for over an hour. Bonseller asked most of the questions, with Tyndall chiming in on technical matters at first, but then becoming more involved as the questions turned from my “story” to a detailed description of the future from which I came. All of them reacted with surprise when I told them the outline of our space program, having put men on the moon and an unmanned rover on Mars. That interrupted the session while they had a huddled and heated consultation in the far corner of the room. When they started again, they asked more about powered flight, and when I told them the broad outline of some of the newest aircraft, they were impressed but confused. I could see why.

  Colonel Rossbank had a few questions about the armed forces of my time, but the capabilities I described were so unbelievable he quickly lost interest and lit a cigar. Gordon followed his lead with a cheroot of his own. Meredith sat at a writing desk and took notes, and Thomson, the heavy-set Scottish physicist, remained quiet and paced the room, chewing on the stem of an unlit pipe, his face always in silent motion, alternating between concentration, surprise, disbelief, and then understanding.

  The birdlike Tyndall finally shook his head in exasperation.

  “The story is remarkable for its detail and consistency. Genuinely remarkable. But it is simply beyond belief.”

  “Nonsense,” Thomson said, his first spoken word since my interrogation began. “There is not a thing in the world he describes which is not explainable by direct extrapolation from our own existing scientific principles.”

  Right then I decided the big Scot was my guy. I could have kissed him.

  “Oh, rubbish!” Tyndall snapped back. “This inter-web thing is extrapolation? Of what?”

  “His high capacity computing machines are simply an improvement on our analytic engines, but with mechanical calculation and memory replaced with electric functions. That accounts for both the miniaturization and the higher calculation speed. Electric storage of data is clearly possible, something like that American laddie Smith argued for, recording sounds with permanent magnetic impressions on wire.”

  “Smith? Smith who? What are you talking about?” Tyndall demanded.

  “Oberon Smith, I think he’s called. It was in Electrical World last year, Tyndall. You really should keep up on your professional reading. As to electrical as opposed to mechanical functioning, it’s nothing more than development of a Crookes tube into something more than a curiosity. The American mathematician Charles Pierce has already proposed a means by which logic operations can be carried out by electric switching circuits.”

  Tyndall sniffed and turned away, looking all the more like an offended owl.

  “I’d call that a mighty leap,” he said

  “Aye,” Thomson agreed. “But thus do we advance, by mighty leaps.”

  “And the ability to access these machines from anywhere, without wires?” Bonseller asked, but Tyndall instead of Thomson answered.

  “Obviously some sort of electromagnetic communicator propagated through the aether. I suppose it could utilize Hertz’s waves.” He turned to Thomson. “As was reported in Annalen der Physik, last year.”

  Thomson smiled and bowed slightly to him.

  “That’s right,” I put in, because it was time to insinuate myself into the group. “Hertz was one of the early pioneers in wireless research.”

  Things were going better than I’d expected, a lot better. They obviously had some sort of advanced science to work with. I figured if they could manage to make great big ironclads fly like balloons, they knew something we didn’t. Now if I could get Tyndall and Thomson to kiss and make nice, I had three potential allies: the Irish owl, the Scottish bear, and, most importantly, the English lion Bonseller. I’d known men like him before—men who could open doors. Men who thought the world could be fixed and they were just the guys to do it. Dangerous men, but useful ones, too, up to a point.

  I heard a thud out in the hallway, where the Bobbies were waiting, and then what sounded like a scuffle.

  “What the devil’s going on out there, Gordon?” Colonel Rossbank demanded.

  “I’ll find out, sir.”

  Rossbank shook his head and dropped his cigar in a brass spittoon.

  “I’ll sort it out. I need some air.”

  He walked to the doors and slid one back.

  “What’s all this, then?” he demanded, but he suddenly choked in pain, staggered backward a step or two, and fell, blood spraying across the floor.

  We stood frozen as two dark shapes filled the doorway, paused for an instant to scan the room, then an arm snapped and a blade flew through the air. Tyndall staggered back, eyes bulging, blood bubbling from his throat and mouth. He turned as he fell, for a moment the light of a gaslight sparkled from the diamond stickpin in his cravat, and then he collapsed twitching to the floor.

  “NO!” Gordon shouted, his voice rising almost to a scream.

  Blood pounded in my ears, and my perception became jerky, strobelike: shouts, curses, scrambling bodies, overturned furniture, and one of the dark shapes raising his hand and pointing at me.

  “‘Ere ’e is. Git ’im!”

  The other’s hand, holding a steel blade rose, and snapped toward me.

  FIVE

  September 23, 1888, London, England

  The dagger wasn’t meant for me. I heard Bonseller cry out in pain and fear, and that shocked me into action. I staggered away from the door, my feet clumsy, balance screwed up. Nothing around me made sense, because my heart rate had gone through the roof and a lot of frontal brain functions were shutting down, but I remembered enough to start tactical breathing. Inhale for a five count, hold it for a five count, exhale for a five count, wait for a five count, start again.

  Someone grabbed me by the right arm, one of the men from the door. He wore some sort of black coverall and a black cap. His mouth twisted open in a grimace showing me yellow and black jack-o’-lantern teeth, and his breath came as a physical shock almost as potent as the thrown knife. A blade flashed toward my face, and I tried to twist away, but his grip was strong. The knife stopped millimeters from my throat.

  “Come wi’ us or you’re a dead ’un,” he growled.

  I nodded mutely.

  Exhale for five, hold for five . . .

  Three serving-platter-sized metallic spiders scrabbled past my feet, making whirring, clicking noises.

  What the hell?

  The other man in black yanked down the big drapes from the window, pulling the curtain rod and mounts away from the ceiling in a small shower of plaster dust. Light exploded in through the large window, and I saw a smoky rectangle of the London skyline. He kicked at the window, and glass shattered.

  “Where’s the bleedin’ coin?” the man holding me shouted as he pulled me toward the window.

  “I . . . I don’t—” I stammered.

  “Here!” someone yelled. I recognized Meredith’s voice. His plump hand appeared from behind the overturned writing desk, holding a melted slug of clear plastic.

  Inhale for five, hold for five. Vision came into sharper focus, legs grew steadier. Around the periphery of my vision the old blackness crept, the blackness I thought gone forever.

  Where was Gordon and his revolver? Tyndall’s pistol was in his coat pocket on the floor. No time to get it. The man at the window had his back to me as he used his fist to knock out the remaining broken shards of glass. The thug holding me shoved me toward the window and let go to reach out to grab the coin.

  Action without thought. Two long steps to launch myself into the air, catch the man at the window with both of my feet squarely in his back. Kick hard to transfer momentum to him, come down in a crouch as he plunged screaming out the window. Anticipation, experience, memory—indistinguishable.

  With neither thought nor emotion I rose and turned to the other thug and I knew my face was as empty as the abyss. Did I know it then or know it later? There was no then or later. He hesitated,
his knife held wrong for a throw.

  “Halt in the name of the crown! Hands up!”

  Gordon!

  Face white, pistol raised and shaking, Gordon stood at the double paneled door through which Bonseller had entered. The thug didn’t even glance back at him. Instead, his eyes flickered to the open window behind me. He licked his lips, calculated, then lunged toward me.

  I sidestepped, Gordon’s pistol fired, the sound exploding like thunder in the confined space of the room. The man staggered forward and fell against the window sill, then straightened, put his foot on the sill, and jumped.

  Through the window, I saw the thug swinging from a rope ladder a dozen feet from the building, and as I watched, he rose up and away, and the blackness behind my eyes fled with him.

  I stuck my head out farther and looked up—some sort of elongated powered balloon. The chugging engine rose in volume as the balloon gained speed and disappeared up and into the mists. Thoughts returned.

  What the hell was going on?

  The pistol barked again, and a slug slammed into the windowsill above my head, throwing splinters of wood and glass into my scalp. I flinched to the side and then dove for cover behind a heavy leather sofa. Thomson was already there, kicking one of the metal spiders away.

  “Nicely done, laddie,” he said.

  “Tell that to Gordon.”

  The pistol fired again, and a slug blew through the back of the couch, showering us with horse-hair furniture entrails.

  “Captain Gordon!” Thomson shouted. “Cease fire, ya great bloody idiot! I’m back here, and Fargo is on our side, not theirs.”

  “Yes, for God’s sake stop shooting.” That was Bonseller’s voice. He sounded weak, but he wasn’t dead. I helped Thomson to his feet and then hurried over to Bonseller’s prone form. Gordon stood in the doorway uncertainly, pistol drooping. A mechanical spider scrambled toward him, he fired his revolver, knocked wood from the floor six inches to the side, fired again, and then again, finally hitting it.

  “Damn,” he muttered. Several men in suits pushed past him from behind.

  I knelt beside Bonseller. He was trying to sit up but having a hard time. Blood soaked his left sleeve around the hilt of a throwing knife that was buried in his arm above the elbow. I grabbed his upper bicep in my left hand, my thumb on the pressure point to cut off the blood flow.

  “Take it easy, Bonseller. You’re bleeding a lot. The knife must have nicked an artery. I’m going to put a pressure bandage on it.”

  I started to pull open his coat, when a mechanical spider scrabbling across the floor bumped Bonseller’s leg. It stopped and locked steel mandibles on his calf, then made a loud whirring sound, started vibrating, and Bonseller cried out in pain. I felt an electric shock through my thumb and jumped back.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  I kicked the spider away from Bonseller and grabbed his arm again. He trembled from the shock and groaned but didn’t seem much worse otherwise. He still needed a compression bandage, so I unbuckled his belt and pulled it out as gently as I could.

  “Stand away from Sir Edward, Fargo,” Gordon ordered. I hadn’t even noticed him walk up. He raised the shaking revolver, pointed it at my forehead, and cocked the hammer back.

  “You’re dry, Gordon,” I told him, “unless that’s a seven-shooter.”

  Gordon looked at his revolver in confusion.

  “Oh, put the bloody gun down, man,” Thomson ordered. “And where did you get off to, anyway?”

  “I went for help,” he explained.

  “This may hurt a bit, but I need to get this knife out of the way,” I said. I took the handle in my fist, made sure I was lined up squarely, and slid it up and out of the wound, trying not to make things any worse. Bonseller gasped but made no other signs of pain. More blood oozed out of the slit in the coat, but not much. I wrapped the belt three times around Bonseller’s upper arm over the wound and pulled it tight. He drew in air sharply as I did, but he took it pretty well, all things considered.

  “That should hold you until a surgeon can stitch you up. Just make sure you keep the pressure on the wound.”

  I looked up as the room filled with excited servants, men who looked like clerks, and two who looked more like police detectives or bodyguards from their grim composure. Meredith, supported by two men, rose weakly from behind the overturned desk. Most of the others clustered around us, but a few checked Tyndall and Colonel Rossbank for signs of life. Gordon drifted over to stand by the silent form of his older friend, his empty revolver dangling limply in his hand.

  “A couple of you find something to use for a stretcher,” I ordered, “and get rid of these damned spiders. Somebody else get a carriage, or whatever you use to get people to the hospital. And grab the bad guy I pushed out the window; it’s only two stories down, so he’s probably still alive, and maybe mobile. Hurry!”

  The closest ones looked uncertainly from Thomson to Bonseller.

  “Yes, yes,” Bonseller said. “Get to it.”

  Two of them dashed for the door, and a couple others started looking for lightweight furniture—good luck with that.

  “You got a favorite hospital, Sir Eddy?” I asked.

  “St. George’s on Grosvenor Place, and damn you for a cheeky bastard. ‘Sir Eddy’ indeed. What of the others? How is Tyndall?”

  I was sure Tyndall was dead; the thrown knife had severed his carotid artery. I glanced over to the doorway where Rossbank lay. One of the detective-looking men stood and spread an overcoat over his motionless form. Past them, through the open panel doors, I saw the still form of one of the Bobbies.

  “Tyndall and the colonel are both dead, probably both constables as well. Everyone else seems okay.” I sniffed and looked around.

  “Someone shit their britches. Was that you, Gordon?”

  Publicly humiliating him might cause problems later, but I didn’t care. Survivor’s high does that. Gordon’s already-red face turned a brighter shade, and he shot me a look of hatred and shame all mixed up together.

  The truth was all of us who’d been in the room—Bonseller, Thomson, Gordon, and probably me as well—had bright red faces by then. It’s the normal response of the circulatory system to danger; first it chokes off blood to the extremities to concentrate it in the core organs, so the face goes white. Then, when the all-clear sounds, the blood comes pounding back into the skin—instant tomato face. Bonseller’s complexion was the first to start to lose its color again.

  “I’m feeling a bit lightheaded.”

  “Yeah. You’re probably going to faint,” I told him.

  “I dare say. Billy, you are in charge here until I’m back from the hospital. Try to sort all this out, will you? And don’t let Gordon shoot anyone.”

  People with purpose bustled in and out of the room, giving reports to Thomson and getting orders. I sat on the leather sofa that had a bullet hole through its back, looked at the small pile of broken mechanical spiders, one of their legs still twitching and clawing the air, and I collected my thoughts.

  Thomson came over and sat down heavily on the sofa next to me. He exhaled shakily.

  “I’m still a bit overwhelmed by all this,” he said. “But you’re a very cold-blooded fellow, aren’t you?”

  In response I held out my hand. It trembled uncontrollably.

  “I think I might throw up,” I added.

  “If so, do it now, while Gordon is off changing his trousers. You wouldn’t want to give him that satisfaction, would you?”

  “For an old, fat Scotsman you’re pretty observant.”

  He chuckled.

  “You have a knack for making insults palatable, Fargo, damn me if I understand how.

  “We’ve asked you a great many questions today. I’d say you’ve earned some answers of your own. I imagine you have more questions than I can address all at once, so for now, which one is most important to you?”

  One question?

  Why did the bad guys want Tyndall dead? Why did Tynd
all think I was part of that? Why did the bad guys want the coin? Why did they want me? What were those spiders? Why does London have elevated trains instead of a subway? What’s wrong with the air? How did the South win? What the hell holds those flying ironclads up?

  “How do I get back to my daughter?” I said.

  He leaned back on the sofa and examined me. I could tell he had no answer, but the question interested him.

  One of the clerks walked through the door and hurried over to us.

  “Professor Thomson, the villain who fell from the window is conscious and his injuries do not seem life-threatening. We have him in a room off the front parlor for now. To where should we have him taken?”

  “I think we’ll talk to him there. Find Captain Gordon and have him join us, would you?”

  He turned to me as the clerk left.

  “Come along, Fargo. I will tell you honestly that I cannot imagine how it is possible to return you to your time, but I know of one man who might help us. First, however, we must attend to this business.”

  When we got downstairs, Gordon was already questioning the thug, had already finished in a sense.

  “This blackguard won’t tell us anything,” he announced in disgust as soon as we arrived. I glanced over at the fellow—thin in the face, wiry-looking, but a thick torso under his coveralls. His face was skinned up, nose broken, with blood caked around his mouth and chin. He sat on a sofa with his left leg propped up on it.

  I walked over and had a look at his leg, touched it below the knee, and he winced in pain. The trouser leg was bloodstained, and the irregular bulge suggested a bone sticking out of the skin.

  “Nasty compound fracture you got there. If a doctor doesn’t take care of it, you could end up with gangrene, lose the leg.”

  He licked his lips, and sweat trickled down the side of his face.