The Forever Engine Read Free Page B

sulfurous match. In a hospital!
    A nurse came in with a pitcher of water, and when she didn’t bat an eye at the cigar, my pulse increased and sweat broke out on my forehead. I remembered Reggie’s words: it’s something of a time machine. My breathing became labored, as if my ribs had fused and would not expand to inflate my lungs. A hundred years? No, too crazy. But that damned coin . . .
    “Are you unwell, Mr. Fargo?” Gordon’s tone told me the question was pro forma ; he didn’t really give a damn.
    “What year is it?”
    “You don’t remember?”
    “What year is it, goddammit?”
    “No need to be a bore.” Disdain saturated his voice. “It is 14 September, the year of our Lord 1888.”
    Sarah! Somehow I had to get back to my daughter. Crazy. She wouldn’t be born for another century, or might not be born ever, but I couldn’t believe that. As hopeless as it might sound, one thought came to me and stuck: wherever I was, whenever I was, if there was a way here, there had to be a way back.
    Gordon was talking again, and I knew I had to pay attention. I needed an ally, and Gordon was my best candidate.
    “I’m sorry, Captain, what were you saying?”
    “I wonder if you could identify this item.”
    Careful to keep the object out of my reach, he held up a flat sliver of aluminum and plastic. He needn’t have bothered—there wasn’t anyone in this century to call, even if the plastic buttons and screen weren’t melted and fused into the frame. A bandage covered a still-healing burn on my right hip about where the phone had rested in my pocket.
    “It’s my . . . oh boy. It’s called an allphone. It’s a communication device and . . . um, a web-access tool.”
    “I see.” Gordon made no attempt to hide his disbelief. “And this ring found beside you. Can you identify it?” He handed Reggie’s ring to me. Soot still blackened the crevices. My throat tightened,
    “It’s a class ring of a friend. You say it was beside me. My friend . . . ?”
    “Deceased. All we found was the one arm and part of a skull, both badly charred. What does the inscription signify?”
    Reggie dead? Reggie was . . . indestructible.
    I looked up from the ring. What an odd question from a British officer.
    “RMA Sandhurst? It means the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.”
    He frowned. “Interesting. And the number 2006?”
    “His year of graduation.” I watched his face for reaction. Mounting anger replaced his disbelief.
    “Two thousand and six you say? AD? What do you take me for?”
    What did I have to lose? Nothing. So I told him everything—who I was, when I’d been born, why Reggie had called me in, what the Wessex project was attempting, and the little I knew about what went wrong. I left out the part about trying to change the past back to what it had been, not knowing whether this time was part of the reality I wanted to save or the one I would have to extinguish to do so.
    All that took a while. By the time I was done he was on his second cheroot and his anger had given way to contempt. He sat and smoked his cigar for a while, saying nothing. It’s a good interrogation technique—people like to fill the silence with sound. I filled it with my own silence. After a few minutes he gave in.
    “You expect me to believe all this rubbish?”
    “Not really.”
    “Then why waste my time with it?”
    “It’s all I’ve got, Captain Gordon. The truth. Who could make something like that up?”
    “Some arrogant American scoundrel could. You think foreigners will believe any silly twaddle you invent. An attack on an English village gone wrong, an attempt to shift the blame to the British military—you could at least have done some research. The Royal Military Academy is at Woolwich, not Sandhurst.”
    Anti-American bias on top of everything else. So much for my potential ally. Time to change direction.
    “Maybe you better put me in touch with the American embassy.”
    “That will be difficult, as I am sure