THIRTY-SIX

October 13, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

Woe for the wooing of disaster-fraught women.

At least that’s what Euripides figured, and he must have known a thing or two about the subject. Half-naked, bleeding, shivering with cold and smelling of vomit, I sat chained in Tesla’s dungeon alone—as alone as I had been the first day in this world. More so. I had nothing that first day. This day I’d had people I’d come to care about and then lost them all, either to death or betrayal. I tried to imagine Gordon, Thomson, and the others dead, tried to and failed. And Gabrielle . . .

Gabrielle’s was the most bitter loss. The others had left my side through no choice of their own; Gabrielle had meant to all along. All along. Why?

During World War II, the U.S. built airstrips on a lot of remote and primitive Pacific islands and flew in cargo to sustain air and naval bases built there. The local base troops passed on food and some hardware to the locals, partially to keep their good will and partially out of natural generosity. It didn’t amount to much for the U.S. armed forces, but it constituted unimaginable wealth for the islanders. When the war was finished, the U.S. troops left, and the cargo stopped coming.

Religions sprang up on a lot of those islands, religions collectively called cargo cults. Their followers would build imitation air strips, use old scrap metal to build dummy airplanes, and light fires at night like runway landing lights, hoping to lure back the cargo. If they went through all the right motions, they figured, they would get the good stuff and be happy again.

Gabrielle had started her own one-person cargo cult.

She had latched on to family as her cargo, and figured if she found a blood relative and acted as if they were a family, everything else would happen magically. She had a powerful and orderly mind, but in some respects it was unsophisticated. The biological component of family was easy for her to understand, easy to define and confirm, so that’s what she had grabbed hold of with the desperation of a drowning woman clutching a life preserver. And she was drowning—just not in a way most people could see.

Gabrielle had asked which man I was. Was I the man I had become by chance or the one I had later become by choice? As I thought about it, I wondered if her question had as much to do with her own choice as it did with mine.

It seemed to me that choice reflected the true self, but Gabrielle had suggested my choice was not made for me, or even for Sarah, but rather for Joanne, my dead wife. She thought it was a form of suicide. Is choosing a life path which subordinates your own sense of person to someone else’s expectations a form of suicide?

Maybe it is.

Which man was I? It was a question with less meaning for me than I think it had for Gabrielle, but often the questions posed by folks with Asperger’s made little sense to others. The three Asperger’s doctoral candidates I mentored at UC had remarkably similar childhoods, which is why I could peg Gabrielle’s so closely, but they were distinctly different adults. All of them struggled with interpersonal issues. In some cases they had trouble with day-to-day maintenance of relationships; in other cases the whole concept eluded them.

Ann Girrardella alone had not finished her degree, and she had been the least socially adept of the three. She never understood “that romance stuff,” as she used to say. She ended up a veterinarian, which was a good match for her. She liked animals, in a thoroughly unsentimental way.

Gabrielle reminded me of Ann in some ways, in her honest bewilderment concerning intimate relations of the heart, although Gabrielle was more determined to crack the mystery, whatever it took.

So here I was, chained in a lightless dungeon, all alone, and at Tesla’s mercy. I should have been thinking about options, escape, turning the tables. Instead, all I could think about was Gabrielle’s prospects and difficulties, after she had switched sides, betrayed me, left me here to rot.

I felt weightless, unattached to anything, not simply alone in the world but alone in the universe, the cosmos. What right did I have to feel loss at the deaths of Thomson and Gordon when I was hell-bent on destroying their world to save my own? What right did I have to feel betrayed by Gabrielle when the betrayal I contemplated dwarfed hers?

Would I find a way to save my own world, save Sarah and everyone else I had known from extinction? Hard to see how, but if I did, if I managed to extinguish this world and every soul in it to save my own, would I be able to face Sarah with that atrocity on my conscience? “Hi, Honey, Daddy’s home. Guess what I did to save your life?”

A world, an existence, has a right to self-defense, a right to preserve itself, and it fell to me to be the instrument of that preservation. Tough luck for me. But would I do what needed doing when the time came? Yes, I would.

Yes, I would.

I just could not imagine surviving the act, could not imagine going about life afterwards. Perhaps it would have been different if I had not named the lobsters, but I didn’t think so.

The door at the head of the stairs creaked open, light flooded down into the dungeon, and Tesla and two burly guards joined me. I steeled myself for a beating, but that wasn’t what this was about at all.

“This business with the rotational momentum of the earth and its magnetic field,” Tesla began without preamble. “I still do not understand how you came to the conclusions you did based on such little information. How is this possible?”

“It’s my specialty. It’s the reason I’m here, actually. The people who brought me into the Wessex project did so because I can make logical inferences with limited data—I can connect the dots when nobody else can. Also, I have a really good memory—for some things, anyway. That helps.”

“It is hard to believe,” he said.

“It’s my gimmick. Some people do card tricks. Now, those are hard to believe.”

He stood there quietly for a while, thinking that over.

“What does your good memory tell you will be the result of a reduced magnetic field?”

“The big thing is solar wind and cosmic rays. The magnetic field deflects them. Reduce the field and more will start getting through, which will increase the cancer rate. The solar wind will start stripping some of the atmosphere, too. I don’t know what the threshold levels are for serious results. If you stop now, maybe the effects won’t even be noticeable.”

“A large steam power plant will produce sufficient power,” he said, “but building one here two years ago would have been obvious and difficult. The Forever Engines I use were more practical for my immediate needs, and . . . the concept intrigued me. But I will stop soon.”

“Sure, you can stop any time you want. Spoken like a true junkie.”

“I do not know what that word means. I assume it is unflattering, but that is neither here nor there. What happens in this time will be of little concern to you.

“I have penetrated the curtain between different times repeatedly and reliably. If you are as astute as you claim, you must have realized this already. I offer you a way back to your own time, back to your daughter. Gabrielle tells me this is what you desire above all other things. I tell you I think she has misunderstood your purpose here, has misunderstood exactly what has happened. I realized when you made that slip of the tongue in London and then tried to cover it up. You remember? Concerning alternating versus direct current?”

I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t feel like throwing in my cards yet. He might be bluffing. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, such transparency! You are not from our future, Professor Fargo, but a different one. But you hide this fact while revealing the rest. Why?”

“You tell me.”

He shook his head impatiently. “Still you try to mislead and confuse when all is revealed. You do this to mask your intentions. What are they? You mean to do violence to our world, I think, in order to save your own. Is that not your purpose? Come now and tell me the truth. Nothing is gained by these pointless denials.”

Maybe nothing was gained by them, but I’d be damned if I’d admit it to him. We traded stares for a while, and finally he shook his head again.

“You are a fool, Fargo. You think you can extinguish this reality? How? I think there is as much danger of you erasing my world’s existence as there is of fairies being real, as there is of you becoming a rose bush by simply wishing it so.

“No, the only real danger you pose lies in your capacity for extreme violence. I owe you a debt for keeping my sister safe on her odyssey here. Also, she seems to feel an attachment to you, which makes her anxious concerning your health in this dungeon. So this afternoon I will have a room ready for you upstairs in the house—one with suitable security. You will find it more comfortable than this. I would like to converse with you about your world. If you accommodate me, I will accommodate you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will send you back to your time.”

This was where I’d figured I’d be arguing with Tesla, trying to find a way to persuade him to send me back, find something I could do to make it worth his while. Instead, he was offering me almost exactly what I wanted. So why wasn’t I jumping at the chance? Well, it wasn’t enough, was it? Going home wouldn’t save my time.

“Thanks for nothing.”

He looked at me and frowned, then paced the length of the narrow confines of the dungeon, across the cell and back.

“Very well. Answer my questions about your world and I will give you access to my research findings on my experimental time soundings. I cannot guarantee the answer you seek—or believe you seek—is there, but it is all I have to offer you. When you believe you have an answer, I will send you wherever in time you desire, provided it is within the physical capacity of my apparatus.”

“Somebody from the German Army vehicle from my time survived the transition to this time. That was obvious. Why don’t you ask him about my world?”

“So stupid! The soldier survived the journey of over a hundred years and then died when the zeppelin crashed on the mountainside. That gave me another reason to kill Radojica, as if I did not have enough already.”

I’d have liked to talk to that fellow myself. Speaking with someone from my own time would have made this all seem less surreal.

Tesla paced back and forth again. Was he just upset over the soldier’s death, or was there something more? Why was he offering me everything on a platter? Why was he willing to risk annihilation of his time and world for answering questions about my world? Sure, there would be answers to some questions about lines of scientific progress which might help him out down the road, but was it worth the gamble? I couldn’t see that it was. That must mean either he needed to know something very important—vitally important—about my time or that he did not believe there was anything I could do to threaten his world. Maybe he just wouldn’t deliver on the promise when the time came.

Still, what did I have to lose? I wasn’t getting anywhere in this dungeon. Even if his offer of a return to my time was a lie, access to his research notes might tell me something. After that I’d be on my own, but I’d been on my own all along.

“How are you going to get me back to my time, or any other, without turning me to ash? Going through your hole in time seems like a game of Russian roulette.”

Tesla smiled and relaxed. “Oh, that is elementary. I have been experimenting for over a year, and I derived the formulae for adjusting the electrical input based on mass transference and temporal deflection easily. It was only the coincidence of your laboratory people aiming their device here at the same time as mine was active which set off that violent and very distorted effect. They must have used an extravagant amount of power. But normally I have experienced no such ill effects. The birds the locals call azhdaja, for example, survived the transition from their time to ours.”

He must have brought a whole flock of them back. There were a lot of azhdaja wandering around, and no one had seen them until the last couple of months, so there hadn’t been time for them to breed and populate, unless they grew really fast.

“I will have a room for you upstairs this afternoon,” he said. “In the meantime, consider my offer.”

He and the guards climbed the stone stairs and left me in the dark with my thoughts and my throbbing left arm.

All I had to do was say yes. Study his notes, find a clue to what was happening, and if all else failed just go home, hope I got there in time to see Sarah one more time before the effect wave extinguished us. But then I’d never get to see her graduate, see her find someone to spend her life with, build a family, maybe even end up with a few grandkids of my own to spoil.

Or maybe . . .

Could Tesla return me even earlier? Ten years earlier? Early enough to save my wife and son? Why not? The idea came like a flash, left me sweating and dizzy. If I could figure a way to save the whole world, why couldn’t I also fix it to save Joanne and little Jack? If I was going to surrender my life, maybe my soul, to save my world, that didn’t seem like too much of a reward to demand.

But a remembered voice nagged at me as well: Jovo Radojica’s last words spoken to me.

Singe the Old Man’s whiskers, and that’s payment enough.

Was that a debt I could ignore?

Two guards came for me an hour later. Gabrielle and I had been blindfolded when they brought us here, and this time they covered my head with a canvas sack, I guess to keep me disoriented. They shackled my wrists together in front of me and led me up the stone stairs, down wooden hallways, up a carpeted set of stairs, more hallways, and then a warm, humid room. They pulled the hood off and I found myself in an austere but clean bedroom with a steaming tub of water in the middle of the floor. The guards waited till I stripped off the filthy rags of my clothing then gathered them up and left.

I slipped cautiously into the tub, but the water wasn’t all that hot; it steamed more because the air in the bedroom was cool. I scrubbed myself until the water turned gray and I washed with particular care the patch on my left shoulder where they’d taken a chunk of my hide when I arrived. I resisted the temptation to soak; I didn’t know when Tesla would show up and didn’t want to be at a disadvantage, however slight, when he did. I dried off with coarse towels and found clean clothes folded on the bed—a little large but close enough once I pulled the belt tight. There was also gauze and tape, which I used to dress the wound on my shoulder.

The bedroom had a single door, which was locked, and a single window, covered on the outside by substantial-looking iron bars. For furniture the room boasted a single bed with a covered chamber pot underneath, a desk and straight-backed chair, another straight-backed armchair in the corner, a dresser with china water pitcher and bowl, and a wardrobe with a clean shirt and clean pair of trousers hanging within. The desk drawers were empty while the dresser held two pairs of long underwear and two pairs of woolen socks.

I put on a pair of the socks and settled into the armchair to wait. Within a quarter hour I heard the door unlocked. Tesla entered, a leather portfolio under his arm and two big guards in tow. He moved quickly, but not nervously—a man with a lot of things to do and a purposeful approach to getting them done.

“Have you considered my proposal?” he asked without preamble.

“A bit, but I have some questions. Assuming you can get me back to my own time—”

“I can,” Tesla said with confidence.

“Yeah, okay. Assuming you can, how do you know you can hit my time exactly? What if I come out fifty years in the future? Or fifty years in the past? Fifty years is nothing compared to some of the time differences you’re playing around with.

“For that matter, what if I come out, say, ten years in my past and meet myself? Does the time-space fabric rupture or something? Or is that possible?”

Tesla’s eyebrows went up slightly.

“Interesting questions, which I expected you to ask. There are vibrational properties unique to the objects from each point in time, properties which manifest themselves in a particular type of spectroscopic analysis I have perfected. Using this, I can calibrate my device to access that precise time.”

I touched the bandage on my left arm, hidden by my shirt.

“Is that why you carved on my arm with a knife yesterday? To get a sample of me for spectroscopic analysis?”

“Yes, of course. And that is why there was no need to take such a sample from Gabrielle.”

“Is that how you brought back all those azhdaja?”

He smiled

“Exactly so. I sent several large oxen through with iron filings implanted in their flesh. Then several hours later I recalibrated and exchanged a large number of rocks for a surprising number of these avian predators. I had hoped to capture a single large predator. Usually small animals do not hunt large ones, you know, unless they do so in concert. Unfortunately, this animal engages in collective hunting. Most of them escaped and seem to be thriving in the hills.”

“Where they are killing people. Your people. They almost killed Gabrielle twice.”

“And you twice saved her life, I understand, for which I am grateful. But as to the larger picture, the food chain will adapt to them.”

“Yeah. Like Asian carp in the Mississippi River.”

He nodded. Of course, he didn’t know that in my time Asian carp had all but ruined the Mississippi ecosystem.

“That Roman coin I brought with me—you were anxious to recover it as well.”

“Yes, and my agent managed to pass it to the man who escaped from Dorset House. It arrived here shortly before you did. But its spectroscopic properties were confused.”

“Now that I have answered your questions, I hope you will be sensible and cooperate,” Tesla said. “Dinner at 7:30 PM,” he said over his shoulder as he left, and the guards closed and bolted the door behind them.

I sat there and thought about the coin for a while. What had Tesla called its time signature? Vibrational properties. Why would they be confused? Maybe because the melted plastic from my time got mixed up with the silver of the coin from the past.

Yeah. That had to be it.