The Forever Engine (3 page)

FOUR

September 23, 1888, London, England

Like a ghostly demon, London enveloped me in sulfurous tendrils of mist and smoke that smelled of hot metal, burning coal, and rotting garbage. The open air train platform stood at least twenty feet above street level, held up by iron girders. It reminded me of the Chicago Loop’s “El,”—the elevated train—or what it might have looked like a century ago. My gaze swept across the faint powdering of dirt and coal dust blowing across the platform’s walkway, the rust-streaked metal uprights and railings with their damp, grimy look, and then the city.

Brick and stone buildings rose into the sky, taller than seemed right for the period. Many larger ones sported an iron girder tower on top, with dirigibles docked to several of those. Two large flying machines droned slowly through the smoke and haze, but I couldn’t tell if they were also dirigibles or more of those flying ironclads.

The people on the platform around me wore ankle-length coats in dark colors—browns and grays and dusty blacks. They conversed with muffled voices, hair hidden under hats, faces behind goggles and dark fabric masks. Many women wore elaborate dark veils tucked into the collars of their coats. They reminded me of Afghan women in burkas, at least in their impersonal anonymity. But instead of hiding their shape, their coats exaggerated the female figure, accenting ample bosoms, flaring from narrow waists out over bustled skirts. The women glided across the platform with a deliberate grace I found seductive and creepy at the same time.

This wasn’t the London I had expected, but I had already abandoned my attachment to expectations.

“This way, Fargo,” Gordon grunted from under a rubberized mask that included both goggles and air filter. Two different Bobbies now accompanied us, having taken over from the rural constabulary at Paddington Station, our port of entry to Greater London. The Wessex men had, in retrospect, been easy-going compared to these two. Like Gordon they both wore goggles and masks. Their uniforms seemed darker and were augmented by thick gauntlets and taller helmets. They had a lean, tough look compared to their more portly country cousins, and black varnished wooden truncheons dangled from wrist thongs. One of them poked me in the back for encouragement. I’d put on the long coat they gave me, but no face protection was offered. My eyes burned already.

Ten minutes on a metro train brought us to a smaller station deeper in the city—St. John’s Square, the sign told me. Two flights of wrought-iron steps took us down to ground level, where horse-drawn cabs clip-clopped along crowded, litter-strewn streets, side by side with worn-looking freight wagons and one smoking steam-powered autocarriage. Most of the people here didn’t have elaborate masks and goggles. Instead, men in threadbare coats with collars turned up wore handkerchiefs tied over nose and mouth, and watched the Bobbies warily through red-rimmed eyes. They knew more about this world than I did, and they were afraid of the uniforms. Point taken.

We walked briskly for two blocks, then up the stone steps of a brownstone house, a knock, a few exchanged words between Gordon and a doorman, and we moved from the gloom of the streets into the gaslit twilight of the interior.

Heavy furniture, that was my first impression: big wardrobes, massive dark wood tables with legs carved to look like lion paws, overstuffed chairs, leather couches, and heavy brocade curtains hanging from near the high ceiling, puddling on the floor. Thick oriental carpets, bunches of them, carpets on top of carpets. Big oil paintings in heavy gilt frames covering whatever wall space was left—landscapes, seascapes, pictures of the moors or heaths or whatever, and one portrait of an angry old man whose eyes seemed to follow me as we marched through the front room.

“Who’s your decorator?” I asked. “Count Dracula?”

But it was just bravado, just whistling past the graveyard. The place had me spooked.

Up a broad flight of polished wood stairs, down a hall, and finally to a pair of sliding doors. Gordon knocked, the doors slid open a crack for a moment, he exchanged a few hushed words with whoever was inside, and then the doors slid open to let us in.

“You two wait out here,” he ordered the Bobbies. “And you mind yourself in here, Fargo. I have a revolver.”

He patted his right coat pocket to let me know he meant business.

We entered what I guess they called a sitting room. Four men conversed in the center of the room, and they turned to look me over without warmth. All wore dark suits except for one in an army uniform—same red tunic and dark blue trousers as Gordon but heavier with gold braid. Gordon joined them after gesturing for me to wait by the door.

One of the older men smiled and shook Gordon’s hand, and Gordon returned the smile. First time I’d seen him show any warmth at all.

This was supposed to be my interrogation, and I was here, but nothing was happening, so I figured we were waiting for someone else to show up. I glanced around the room. There were a couple love seats and wingback chairs set away from the walls but leaving a large open area in the center of the room covered by a single oriental rug. By the standards of the rest of the place, or what I’d seen of it, this room was sparsely furnished.

The double-paneled door we came through was behind me, and drapes on the opposite wall covered two windows, so that must be an exterior wall. As I faced the exterior wall, I had a fireplace to my left and then another double-paneled door on the wall to my right, so two ways in and out if you didn’t count the windows. Good to know if I had to make a break for it. I wasn’t sure where I’d run to, but I had a very bad feeling about this place.

Under the odor of cigar smoke, the room was filled with that same unfamiliar chemical scent I’d noticed at the hospital, and it seemed to be coming from the windows. Was that a room deodorizer of some kind? Maybe. It reminded me a little of Listerine.

“What’s that smell?” I asked, and the gang of five turned to me with startled expressions, as if a statue or caged animal had suddenly spoken.

“I beg your pardon?” one of them asked after a moment.

“That chemical odor. I smelled it at the hospital and now here, but I don’t recognize it. I think it’s coming from the drapes.”

They exchanged looks—confused, unbelieving, impatient.

“Carbolic acid,” the tall officer snapped, and the five went back to their conversation, but the three men in suits stole glances back at me.

Carbolic acid was an early disinfectant. I’d probably have recognized its odor from high school chemistry class, except I took biology and physics instead.

The paneled doors to my right slid open and another man strode purposely toward us, his eyes taking in the conversational group and then locking on me. He wore his big shock of reddish-brown hair, graying at the temples, like a well-groomed lion’s mane. His dark suit looked expensive, carefully tailored.

“Colonel Rossbank, gentlemen. So this is the fellow. What do we know of him?”

His voice filled the room without straining—a voice accustomed to filling rooms.

“Good day, Sir Edward,” the tall officer, presumably Colonel Rossbank, answered. “Aside from his preposterous story, I’m afraid we know nothing. The Americans profess ignorance, of course.”

“Of course,” Sir Edward answered. He stopped a couple feet away facing me, hands clasped behind his back under the tails of his coat, and he leaned forward and squinted at me as if I were some sort of museum display.

“
Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?”
I asked him.

The five others shifted with surprise and muttered to each other, but Sir Edward barked a short laugh.

“Damn me if I wasn’t about to ask you almost the same thing. ‘How long, Cataline, will you abuse our patience?’” he translated. “Cicero’s ringing denunciation of Cataline’s base treason—very apropos, although I rather think of
you
in the role of Cataline. Now, what is a spy doing quoting Cicero? Oh, that’s right! You’re pretending to be an ancient historian, aren’t you?”

“Marduk belu rabu uihdiema, ana ia’ati.”
I answered. This time he didn’t laugh. His face clouded over with uncertainty.

“I’m afraid I am unfamiliar with that passage, or even the language.”

“‘Marduk the great lord rejoiced in my pious deeds, and gratefully blessed me,’” I translated in turn. “It’s ancient Persian, a passage from the Babylonian Cylinder of Cyrus the Great, which, as I recall, currently resides in the British Museum.”

He studied me seriously for several seconds, arms folded across his chest and eyes narrow, before giving a slight nod.

“Very well, I accept your academic credentials, Professor Fargo. I am Sir Edward Bonseller, personal secretary to the prime minister. You will understand, given the circumstances, if I do not offer my hand. Have you met the others?

“Well, you know Captain Gordon, of course. Colonel Rossbank is director of the military intelligence department at Horse Guards. Professor Tyndall is retired from the Royal Institution, but circumstances have conspired to interrupt his well-deserved rest. I hope you are well, sir.”

The older man who earlier had greeted Gordon with affection was frail and birdlike, with a high forehead and a fringe of white hair around his chin and skull like the ruff of an owl. He now patted his side coat pocket, much the same way Gordon had.

“I am armed, Sir Edward, which is more to the point.” His accent had a trace of Irish, and his voice, reedy with age, nearly cracked as he spoke. “They killed poor Huxley last evening. Had you heard?”

“Yes. You have my sympathy, Tyndall. Damned shame. That makes six, doesn’t it?”

“Aye, six with Huxley. Of the entire membership of the X Club there remains only Hooker, Frankland, and myself, and this scoundrel came within an ace of getting me.” He pointed at me. “Louisa and I were visiting relatives in Somerton when this fellow blew half of it to pieces.”

That could put you on edge, I supposed. I was probably going to have a hard time convincing him it was all just a coincidence, scientists being generally skeptical of the notion that something “just happened.”

“Tyndall is one of our most respected physicists, and Professor Thomson is another,” Bonseller continued, gesturing to a man of similar age but stout and full-bearded, bearlike in physique. “Thomson’s come down from Glasgow University, where he holds the chair in physics, to help us sort your story out. He’s helped the government on a number of thorny matters. Good to see you again, Billy.”

“A wonder I can see at all, dragged down from my clean Sco’ish air into this sewage dump,” he answered in a soft brogue. “What’s keeping you from doing something about the blasted air, Eddie? Waiting till Tyndall here makes his second million off patented respirators?”

“Damn your eyes,” Tyndall hissed back, and the heavy-set Scotsman turned toward him, the malice between the two men suddenly as obvious as a bloodstain.

Bonseller held his hand up to cut off the argument

“Oh, and Meredith is the cabinet’s science advisor,” he added, finishing the introductions.

The last one was younger, probably in his late thirties or early forties, pear-shaped and balding, with only a sparse moustache for facial hair. His eyes darted from Bonseller to me, to the window, the door, the floor. He bobbed his head nervously in acknowledgment.

“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