The Forever Engine Read Free Page A

never even know he’d been there.
    Then I was back in the bed of pain. People spoke to me. I answered, but don’t remember what I said or if it made any sense. Probably not.
    Eventually my senses sharpened and I asked whoever was there not to give me any more of the pain medication. Hard to do. I liked the meds, had started looking forward to my shots.
    The more my thinking cleared, the less everything around me made sense. Where was I? What had happened to me? I couldn’t see because of the bandages, but what did my other senses tell me?
    I was still in England. The nurses’ rural accents were barely intelligible and the food was terrible. The fare that morning, stewed kidney paste on toast, smelled like urine. Who but the Brits would eat that stuff?
    The scent of alcohol, soap, and another strong chemical I couldn’t place hung in the air, but I didn’t hear any of the normal background noises—PA systems, monitor beeps. The breeze brushing my face and the smell of flowers meant an open window instead of central air. That was odd. And just as odd, they actually injected the pain medication with hypodermics. Why not just add it to my IV drip?
    No IV drip.
    Maybe I was in better shape than I thought.
    A doctor—older fellow from his voice—talked with me about my burns. My back and upper arms would scar, but not my face. My hair was already growing back. They expected my eyesight to recover, though they wouldn’t know for certain until the bandages came off. I asked about Reggie and the others. He declined to discuss any other cases, but only after enough of a hesitation to make me fear the worst.
    Had my daughter been notified? The doctor didn’t know but promised he’d look into it.
    A police inspector interviewed me. Beyond the large explosion, he had no idea what had happened. I couldn’t fill him in, not without going to prison for violation of the Official Secrets Act, but I told him I’d talk to someone from military intelligence out of London. I repeated my request twice before he got it. Apparently the British police did not reserve their most intellectually promising officers for service in rural Wessex.
    The doctor removed the bandages from my eyes the next day. Even through blurry eyes, my surroundings looked wrong. No monitors. The bed wasn’t adjustable, just a brass poster with no railings to restrain restless patients. The nurses wore long sleeves, long dresses, and long hair tucked up under little round white caps. Maybe a private Mennonite hospital?
    Yeah, maybe. But that damned coin suggested an alternative. I tried to avoid dwelling on the implications but couldn’t. Had there really been an event-wave passage? Was I in an altered world, and if so, how altered? But if the world had really changed, why did I remember the way it had been? Why weren’t my memories changed? No, none of that made sense.
    The military intelligence guy showed up the following day: a slender, dark-haired captain in his late twenties named Gordon, in his own words “sent out from Horse Guards.”
    My vision had improved to about eighty percent or so. He wore a red uniform tunic and dark blue trousers, like the foot guards in front of Buckingham Palace. Why send someone from the Guards? Why wear the ceremonial uniform? And besides, the Horse Guards wore blue, not red.
    I had learned enough British history to remember the Horse Guards barracks once housed the headquarters of the British Army. “Horse Guards” had been shorthand for Army Headquarters—but not for the last hundred years. So maybe that had changed—or not changed, I guess.
    Gordon started. “You understand, Mr. Fargo, that this whole affair is quite a serious matter. The village of Somerton was all but destroyed, between the blast and fires. Over a hundred people died, and Copley Wood is still burning. Now what’s all this nonsense about some secret law?”
    He took out a pocket humidor, stuck a cheroot in his mouth, and lit the cigar from a big,