THIRTY-SEVEN

October 13, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

Two guards came to collect me for dinner—one a beefy fellow in peasant smock, the other in the black uniform of Tesla’s zeppelin crews, with his left arm in a cast and sling and his right hand resting on the grip of a revolver thrust into his belt. The peasant gestured down the hall and walked at my side. The pistolero followed at a distance.

I turned and looked at him, and his eyes burned with hatred.

“Do we know each other?” I asked in German. He said nothing, and his expression remained frozen.

Oo-kay.

The house looked new and was more modest than I had imagined when I was blindfolded—plain, but spotlessly clean. The hardwood floors were varnished but not stained. The plaster walls lacked decorative wainscoting or crown molding. The coarse brown carpeting on the stairs clearly was intended only to muffle noise.

We descended a broad staircase to the main floor, ended up facing a large front door, but turned right into the dining room. I started composing a mental map of the place, now that I could see.

Tesla and Gabrielle, already seated, waited for me. Tesla sat at the head of the table, Gabrielle to his right. The circles under her eyes bore testimony to our arduous journey here, but she looked rested, even fresh otherwise. She smiled when I entered, and I saw a light in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. She had found her family, a goal to which she had devoted herself with single-minded determination for quite some time, and I wasn’t entirely blind to what that might mean for her. It wasn’t my place to judge her about other responsibilities and loyalties. Realistically, I had to be near the bottom of that list in any case. Because of all we had gone through together, and all I’d shared about my own life with her, it seemed like longer, but the truth was we had only known each other for nine days. I had no claim on her, and no right to judge her betrayal. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to smile back.

“You are well, Jack?” she asked.

“Better, anyway. Amazing what a bath and a nap can do sometimes. A meal won’t hurt, either. You okay?”

“Yes,” she said, and she smiled at Tesla. “I am quite well. I have already learned a great deal more about my family, things which simple newspaper reports and gossip could not tell me.”

Tesla returned her smile and gestured to the seat to his left, across from Gabrielle.

I sat and the peasant guard left, although the black-clad pistolero remained, standing discreetly in the corner behind me. I turned and glanced at him.

“I understand that you are a dangerous man, Dr. Fargo,” Tesla said. “Dangerous in many ways, perhaps, but also in a personal, physical sense. I do not wish to have to shackle you, but I need to take precautions with my own safety and that of Gabrielle.”

“I wouldn’t harm Gabrielle.”

“But you do not deny that you might harm me. That is understandable, given your circumstances. I hope to persuade you otherwise, but in the meantime I prefer to have a guard present, one who understands the necessity of vigilance. Dragomir is one of the men you attacked in Munich. The local doctor says he will probably lose the use of his left arm. He is unlikely to underestimate the danger you pose, and will certainly not hesitate to shoot you should you attempt violence. Only his loyalty to me keeps him from doing so now.”

I looked at the guy again.

“Dragomir. Ich entschuldige mich für das Schädigen Ihres Armes,” I said. I apologize for the injury to your arm.

His expression didn’t change, and I didn’t know if he even understood German, but I made the effort anyway.

All violence has victims. I lived in a time—two times now—where sometimes there were no obvious alternatives to violence, but that didn’t mean I had to tell myself fairy tales about how everyone I hurt deserved everything they got. That was one lie I’d given up a long time ago.

A servant brought steaming bowls of vegetable soup and a platter of thick-sliced bread which smelled freshly baked. My mouth watered, but I made myself eat slowly, partly because I didn’t want to get sick, partly because I didn’t want to show weakness to Tesla.

“Have you considered my offer?” Tesla asked as the soup bowls were cleared away. “Surely you understand there is no other way to return to your daughter. That, I understand, is your principal motivation.”

I looked at Gabrielle. She wore a confident, happy expression, and Tesla seemed at ease as well. Suddenly I saw my edge, if I could figure out how to leverage it. Both of them had very limited, simplified views of human motivation and behavior. Gabrielle understood me only in terms of my love for my daughter, and had communicated that to Tesla. For the moment, the most important thing was to play to that belief. It gave me the most options down the road. I made up my mind.

“Okay, I’m in.”

For the rest of dinner Tesla began his “conversation” with me about my world, which amounted to an interrogation, but that’s what I figured. He was uninterested in our space program and had surprisingly little interest in weapons technology, given his ongoing fight here. I would have thought he’d want some more goodies like the gun turret his men had scavenged from the Puma back in Bavaria, but that wasn’t the case. Instead he was much more interested in the data infrastructure of my world: the Internet, wireless communication, satellite GPS systems, the data cloud. Those things fired his imagination, would leave him lost in thought for several minutes after a round of answers, and then suddenly full of an entirely new line of questions.

This went on long after dinner was done and the dishes cleared away. His other interest, not surprisingly, was magnetic fields, and he sucked whatever information I had on the subject as a man might suck the marrow from a bone after stripping every shred of meat from it. Magnetism and planetary magnetic fields led to the solar magnetic field, or rather series of changing magnetic fields, and how the current thinking in my time was that changes and collapses in local solar magnetic fields led to solar flares.

The largest known solar flare had happened in 1859, when Tesla was just a little boy. He didn’t remember it but had heard stories of the electrocution of telegraph operators and the brilliant night auroras. A flare of that intensity would have fried most of the communications and computer systems in my world.

After an hour or so, Tesla finally pushed back from the table.

“Fascinating conversation, but it grows late and I still have work to do before I retire. I now have a good deal to think over, and for that I am most appreciative, Professor Fargo. Tomorrow perhaps we can discuss what you know of particle accelerators. The guards will see you back to your room.”

He rose and bowed to Gabrielle before leaving. Once he was gone I got to my feet as well, but Gabrielle spoke for the first time since the dinner dishes had been cleared away.

“Jack, I know you must think ill of me, and I cannot blame you. I feel no guilt over what I did, but I feel something. Regret, I suppose. I am uncertain I can accurately characterize it.”

“It’s okay. You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“No, I do not think so, either. But I wish you to be comfortable and even happy, if that is possible. I found this book in the library.” She leaned over and picked up a heavy volume from the floor and placed it on the table. “It is about the subject dear to you, I think. Perhaps it will remind you of your home.”

I walked around the table and picked up the book: the first volume of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Despite myself, I smiled.

“Thanks. Nothing helps me sleep like Gibbon.”

She smiled in reply, oblivious to the irony in my words, but then grew pensive.

“Why do you think it so wrong to believe in the possibility of a perfect world?” she asked.

I looked down at the book for a moment, tempted to let the question slide, to tell her maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. What did it matter to me anyway, one harmless lie more or less? But I’d let enough lies stand for the last ten years.

“Because only that belief can make otherwise-sane and good-hearted people commit unspeakable evil.”

We said our polite good-nights, and the guards followed me back up to my room and saw me securely locked in. I undressed, but as soon as I slipped under the cold sheets I thought better of it, rose, and put on a pair of long underwear from the dresser. Then it was just me, Edward Gibbon, and a gas light. The Gibbon volume had been about as thoughtful and tender a gesture from Gabrielle as I figured she was capable of, and reading Gibbon’s carefully measured prose probably would bring back pleasant memories of graduate school at the University of Illinois.

I picked up the volume and had a sudden thought, one which should have occurred to me sooner except I’d had a lot on my mind. What had three years, as opposed to three months, of Galba as emperor done to the history of Rome? It didn’t make any difference to my mission, but as an historian I was curious. I opened Gibbon to find out.

Huh!