The Forever Engine Read online

  “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 Ov
erseas.

  “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.”

  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 swimm
ing.” 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.”