Steam City Pirates (26 page)

“This time machine is the one you want to use,” said Seth, strolling slowly over to my crystal capsule holding the clock by its chain.

I climbed out of my old machine and stood next to the boy. He looked up at me and grinned.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because it has
another
home button,” said Seth.

“Another home button? I don’t understand,” I said.

“You know how I pushed this home button when we traveled to the underground pirates’ caves?” Seth pointed to a small red button on the top of the clock next to the stem piece.

“Yes, I do remember. You pressed it, and we were able to go together,” I said.

“This other button was placed there for the Grand Inquisitor Manette. When pressed, it takes the time traveler to July 6, 2344. I discovered this button whilst I was playing around inside the clock. It was hidden within behind the gear mechanism and marked with a reset label. The date was inscribed directly under it, so I determined it must be the default time-travel button.” Seth handed me the clock. It was cold and about ten inches in circumference, and Seth had attached a copper chain to it that I could wear around my neck.

“Put it on, Detective,” said Seth.

I reluctantly did so.

“You will now be able to take one other person back with you,” said Seth, smiling.

“But, according to Doctor Biggs-Pemberton, it will violate the multiverse Network’s laws,” I pointed out. “What if they send out enforcers to arrest me?”

My lover, Rebecca Charming Jones chose that moment to walk up to me. She placed her lovely lips close to my ear and whispered, “If you get arrested or hurt in any way, Patrick James, I will not marry you when you return,” she said.

I felt my heart soar. I had been pursuing Becky ever since our days in the war together wallowing in the mud across the South—she, as the Madame in charge of the troopers’ unit of prostitutes—me, as a trooper in charge of taking care of General William Tecumseh Sherman. She helped me learn how to use my intuitive powers to find clues and, most importantly, overcome my dreaded fear of women and intimacy. She also is the most intelligent, bravest, and most beautiful woman I have ever known. The strangest event in my life had happened to me because I had never asked Becky to marry me. It was she who was now asking me, and I had my best reason for returning home safely from my journey.

I hoped that Seth was correct about this reset button being a trip to 2344. What if I were to land in a wasteland where the air was poisoned, and I was immediately struck dead? Manette told me he was sent by the scientists to escape the nuclear devastation that was to occur above ground. If I did not return to the same place, then I would be directly in the atmosphere that was so gruesomely described by those witnesses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 Japan.

“Good luck, Detective!” said Doctor Adler.

“Farewell, darling,” said Becky.

Seth, Bessie and Walter McKenzie all waved at me as I pressed the reset button inside Jane the Grabber’s clock. I immediately felt the vibrating energy rush through my body, and I thought the others must have seen steam coming out of my ears, as I had the distinct impression that my body was exploding into space.

This time, I lost consciousness. It must have been the extra time I was traveling that put me out of touch with reality. I dreamed I was lost as a boy in Kilkenny, Ireland. My mother was calling me from the far end of a deep tunnel, and it seemed as though I could never reach her. My legs were like rubber, and I could only take a few steps at a time in slow motion.

When I came to my senses once again, my mother had disappeared, and I was inside of a great arena. All around me were rows of seats that extended upward in an amphitheater shape. I was the center of attraction, it seemed. I had no understanding of why all the hundreds of people should be out there gazing down at me. How could they have known I was coming?

“Why are you looking at me?” I asked them. I noticed that my voice was being amplified out over the seated audience in this vast circular arena just outside the globular covering of my bright empty space.

“We were notified that someone had reset,” said a voice from outside. I could not make out from which person this voice was emanating, as none of these faces was distinguishable from the next. They all had the same gray, pear-shaped visage, and there were no mouths below their noses that I could see. These beings almost resembled the aliens of the fantasy that I had described to the World Eugenics Collective in the mystery involving the kidnapping of Doctor Arthur Mergenthaler. My aliens were from the planet Mars, however, and this was supposed to be beneath a mountain in Colorado.

I decided to take a chance and address these people with what I knew and what I wanted to know from them. I realized everything in this case, perhaps even my own life, was hanging in the balance, but it was time to establish a connection with the future.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I possess a time machine that was first given to one Abraham Toky Manette. He is now living in New York City, and the year is 1869. He told me his duty was to save this planet because of its imminent destruction by nuclear weapons. Do you know about him and his supposed duties?” My mouth felt dry, and I was hoping I would be able to get this over pretty quickly.

The same voice came out over the dark crowd. “Yes, he was sent on his mission by us. The world will end in conflagration and radiation poisoning if the technology is not kept in check. He was sent to establish a blockage in the space-time continuum with steam monotechnology.”

I had half of my problem addressed. Now I needed to obtain the answer to the other half. I took a deep breath. The same gray population stared down at me.

“I was also told that there is a multiverse Network of officers that wants to stop the human computer Manette from doing his job. The man who told me this is Doctor Franklin Biggs-Pemberton. He told me he represents the freedom of time travel and the creation of new universes. The resultant destruction of the Earth, therefore, according to Doctor Biggs-Pemberton, is a necessary evil. Is this man telling me the truth?” I could hear many voices conferring at once, but the heads of the audience did not move toward each other to communicate in normal human ways. Instead, I believe they were conferring together by telepathy or brain waves.

Finally, they had an answer for me. I listened carefully.

“You have come to us from the designated era wherein we have sent our agent Abraham Toky Manette. He is not human, but he is very wise. We do not know your name, and we do not care who you are. This man Franklin Biggs-Pemberton, Warden, HMPS Lunar Facility 8, is not telling you the truth because
we
are the Network. He was our warden at the prison on the lunar surface. He was also in charge of the miniaturization of offenders from the nearby galaxies. We gave him the authority to do this, but he began to rebel. He sent miniature men down by spacecraft to spy on us, and the result was what you have perceived in your city. Franklin Biggs-Pemberton is an escaped criminal, and he is extremely dangerous. Biggs-Pemberton was able to stow away on a journey to your era along with our agent, Manette, by making himself microscopically small.”

I had to break into their soliloquy. Biggs-Pemberton had lied when he told me Manette was a cyborg. He was not. Manette was a computer man. “How small is Biggs-Pemberton? He is what we call a midget right now. A little over three feet in height.”

“No, he was as small as a bacterium. He was a microscopic organism on the inside of Manette’s Nemes. We have not sent anybody to imprison or capture him because we have evolved past violence. We would not know how to stop a man like Biggs-Pemberton. He is the last of a dying breed in this small Milky Way galaxy. We thought he would be the one who could keep our violent ones peacefully in storage inside our lunar facility. Each prisoner comes from a different planet in a different galaxy, and even a different universe, so they had to be cared for with great delicacy and genetic know-how. However, that was not the case. This warden we appointed was quite efficient with drugs, and with genetic engineering, but he was also able to do one more thing that makes him especially dangerous to you. When we sent our agent Manette back to your era, we could not restrict the quantity of transmitted life-force waves. Our time travel is much more efficient now because we transfer the seed of each human, and it grows to full size once it reaches the destination. This is the way we populate new universes and the inhabitable planets therein.”

“Yes, I heard about your repopulation program,” I said. “But what about Doctor Frankin? What did he do that is so dangerous?”

“The warden was able to transmit the entire population of Lunar Prison Facility 8. The violent prisoners were all reduced to bacteria size, and they all traveled to your era along with our agent, Abraham Toky Manette.”

“How many were there?” I was afraid to ask that question, but I now saw the logic of why I needed to ask it. Franklin had already informed me of his fellow members of the Network who were working with him in New York City. Now I could find out exactly how many of these prisoners there were.

“Five thousand,” said the voice.

“Did you say five thousand?” I asked. The number was far more than I had ever imagined was possible.

“Yes. The entire population of Lunar Facility 8 escaped. This is why Doctor Biggs-Pemberton is so dangerous to you and to us. If he and his prisoners are not stopped, then the future of the planet Earth will not continue.”

I was still a bit confused about the logic of how it was to this Network’s advantage if they were still on Earth. I wanted to ask them, but I needed to collect my thoughts. I moved my eyes over the hundreds of the same gray faces in the arena outside staring down at me. Could this be in our future?

“Won’t you be destroyed if Manette is successful at stopping the development of your technology which has proven to give the world peace for all time? Don’t you want to exist in peace and freedom?” I asked.

“We know how to evolve and move to other universes. This universe is finite, just as all universes are finite. This galaxy is finite, as is this infinitesimal planet Earth. Only the Network itself is infinite. If we can plug the hole in the Earth’s technological disaster bubble, then perhaps the citizens can exist many more years without killing the ecology and the people with weapons of mass destruction as they have done, and its plague of violence won’t be able to spread to other universes.”

At that same moment, I could hear a whirring sound, and I looked up to the roof of my globular cage. It was opening slowly to reveal the dull gray world beyond our confines. It was a scene from a Poe nightmare. Desolate and vast stretches of empty wasteland covered the landscape. Empty and ragged buildings that soared to the sky were torn apart as if they had been sawed in half with some kind of huge appliance. Skeletons dotted the empty roads beside torn vehicles of some kind. Carcasses hung out of the vehicles and were strewn about like jetsam on an ocean after a ship wreck. This was the nuclear holocaust! It had already occurred. The Network had come from some other universe to save us!

The covering on the roof again began to move, and soon it was back to darkness. The over-soul voice again began to boom out over the area outside my cage. “If we can plug the hole in your time disaster, then we shall have accomplished our mission. You see, we are stardust. We are golden. And we must get ourselves back to the garden. Those are words from a song written by one of the artists in your future. Embrace the moment. You have no future other than your own. Farewell, visitor. We hope you have the information for which you came. Your mission, I am afraid, has just begun.”

I glanced down at the brass clock sagging around my neck. It felt like the albatross of the Ancient Mariner. These Network scientists or philosophers were forcing me back again to a place and time where my friends were waiting for me. My future wife was waiting for me! Time must proceed, even if it is merely a human measurement and an instrument of excruciating torture. A man is about to be hanged on a bridge for murder. Just as he is falling from the scaffold, the noose encircled tightly around his neck, the split-second before his neck snaps, he has a long hallucination about getting free. The rope breaks, he falls into the water, and he is reborn again, gasping to the surface of time and life once more.

Freedom is the fantasy of a dying man, and the moment just before his death is more important than all the years of his entire life which came before. Yes, and even the Buddhists, according to my Becky Charming, my future betrothed, believe that whatever you imagine just before you die will happen. But you must believe it strongly enough, and meditate upon it powerfully enough, just seconds before you die.

I was certainly not wanting to die at this moment, but after I pushed the button to go “home” to the underground caves of Central Park, I had an entirely new outlook on life and about the people in it. The button was hard, and my mind was as soft as jelly. I knew unconsciousness would come upon me again, and I was yearning for my “old” time machine. Abraham Toky Manette’s method of time travel could crucify one’s soul.

April 21, 1869, New York City

Consciousness slowly came back to me. The last picture I saw was the dull vision of an arena filled with members of the multiverse Network staring down upon me, and I thought I had become one of them. I felt my mouth to see if it were still under my nose. Yes! I was lying upon the cave floor. I turned my head, and I could see steam rising from the floor of the cavern, and I could feel the sway. The floor stretched across the grotto for hundreds of yards, and the walls were shining with copper. I knew I was inside the main cave of the Steam City Pirates.

My first order of business was to go to Abraham Toky Manette’s cave and tell him what I knew. I was not aware of the time. Perhaps Manette had already left for the grand opening of the Steam City Amusement Park. He might have also sent out the submarine with torpedoes into the harbor to sink one of the merchant ships. I knew this was the least of his worries, and I also knew we had to become allies very quickly in order to counter the immediate threat to both New York City and the world.