The Forever Engine Read Free

we have, and then to help formulate a plan. If someone has altered our past, we need to change it back, and I suspect we will have only one opportunity to do so.”
    I sat back and thought about that, and I didn’t much like it. This was their plan? Poke around, see what turned up, and hope I could pull a quantum rabbit out of the hat? Jesus Christ!
    He drew a polished metal flask from his pocket, took a drink, and handed it to me. I noticed his hand trembled as he did so. I’d never seen Reggie’s hand shake. I took a long pull. Irish—Reggie always preferred Irish to Scotch.
    “If I’m going to do this,” I said, “I need to talk to someone from the physics side, someone who can explain things in English instead of foot-long equations on a blackboard. I’ll need to see the existing artifacts as well. Presumably you have a database started?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay. I need to know the plan, the logic of their search for artifacts, and see if we can tweak that to get better results. Well, that’s a start.”
    “Right. I’ll go find the others, introduce you to the team— your team. I knew you were the right man for this.” He rose and turned to leave.
    “One more thing, Reggie. I want to call Sarah. My phone’s not going to screw anything up, is it?”
    “No, certainly not, but you may have trouble getting a signal once the accelerator starts, so I’d call now.” He left through a door opposite the side we’d entered, and I took out my phone.
    “Call Sarah.” I heard the line ring at the other end three times, and then she answered, voice foggy with sleep.
    “Mmm . . . hello?”
    “Hey, kiddo, it’s just me. Sorry I woke you.”
    “Mmm . . . Dad?”
    “Yeah. Go back to sleep. I just called to let you know I’m safe and sound and . . . to tell you I love you.”
    The sleepiness vanished from her voice. “Dad, what’s wrong?”
    “Nothing. Everything’s fine. I’m—”
    The lights dimmed again, more this time, and flickered. The phone crackled, the connection starting to breaking up. “. . . ad . . . oo . . . and . . .”
    “I can’t hear you, honey. The connection—”
    My phone sounded the three quick beeps of a dropped call. The lights came back up, brighter than before, and an alarm chimed from deep within the facility. I started to redial, but the phone just displayed the searching for service message. Reggie burst back through the door looking confused and alarmed.
    “Something’s gone wrong,” he said. “I’m not sure what, but you’d better go back to the front entrance for now.”
    I slipped the phone in my pocket and started to stand.
    The world turned white, unbearably hot. The thundering roar of dying atoms and molecules tore through every nerve in my body and drowned out my scream of agony, and all I could think was, the event wave!

TWO
    Somewhere in England

    I lay in a bed, my eyes bandaged. Those bandages on my eyes frightened me more than anything else, more than the waves of pain that washed over me and made me cry out and try to sit up. Someone spoke, someone pricked my arm, the pain left, and for a while I floated in a narcotic fever dream.
    In the dream Sarah needed a bigger bed. I got one of those kits from Ikea, and Tommy Nash, my platoon sergeant, came over to help. We had the parts spread all over the floor, trying to figure out which peg G went into which socket M, while Sarah stood in the doorway watching. She was small, though, only about six years old, with short brown hair like mouse fur. How could she go to college when she was so tiny?
    After ten minutes, she asked, “How many hillbillies does it take to put together a bed?”
    I laughed and grabbed for her, but she ran away giggling.
    I turned back to Tommy, but he was dead, his legs blown off by an RPG round. He lay on the riverbank and his blood stained the water of the Darya-ye Helmond pink, but only for about ten meters downstream. Then it turned back to the same muddy brown as always, and you’d