Zora sniffed. “You seem a little off.”
“I’m fine.”
Chandra snorted.
“We could all use a break,” Willis said, placing his whittling on a small table beside him. Now that it wasn’t hidden inside his massive hands, Ash could see a man’s head and shoulders taking shape in the wood. “Dante’s?”
Zora stretched her arms over her head, yawning. “I’d be down for a drink.”
“And a shower,” Chandra said, wrinkling her nose.
Zora shot her a look, and Chandra shrugged.
“When was the last time you washed yourself in the bathroom instead of out of that pitcher?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Willis said quietly.
Ash was still holding the rope. He’d knotted it so tightly that individual fibers were beginning to unravel. There were rope burns on his palms.
The idea of going to Dante’s, of sitting in their regular booth and drinking hooch and forcing himself to laugh at Willis’s jokes or Chandra’s sad attempts at flirting caused a dull ache to spread through his skull. He cringed and tried to rub away the pain.
“Ash?” It was Chandra, concern threading through her voice. “Are you okay? I know that you were hoping . . .”
Ash felt his muscles go stiff and shook his head. “I need some air,” he said, zipping his jacket up to his chin.
Chandra’s face fell.
“Come drink with us, Captain,” Willis said. “It’ll be fun.”
“I’ll just go around the block.” Ash crossed to the door on the other side of the workshop. “I’ll meet you all at Dante’s or wherever. Later, though.”
Willis started to say something else, but Zora lifted a hand, interrupting him.
“Let him go.” Her voice was low, and she didn’t look Ash in the eye. So, she was pissed. Zora tended to respond to people having emotions that she didn’t approve of by getting pissed at them. It was a personality quirk that Ash wasn’t interested in dealing with just now.
He pushed the workshop door open and stepped out onto the docks. Bitterly cold air bit at his cheeks and whipped his jacket against his body.
He thought of Dorothy’s dark hair. Dorothy’s eyes.
He needed some time alone.
He needed to think.
LOG ENTRY—JUNE 14, 2074
11:47 HOURS
THE WORKSHOP
Today marks the first time that I’ve stepped foot inside my workshop all week. I used to be in and out at least once a day but, lately, ironic though it may seem, I haven’t been able to find the time.
There are daily training sessions with NASA and my new team of explorers, meetings with WCAAT, not to mention press conferences to inform the public of what we’re up to. Most of today was taken up by a photo shoot. A photo shoot, of all things.
It’s disappointing, to say the least. I’m a scientist, after all, and I’d like to be left to do my work. But the success of my past experiments has made me into a minor celebrity, of sorts, which was never my intention. I find myself longing for the days when no one knew who I was, when time travel was just a puzzle I couldn’t stop thinking about.
You know, in those early days, a time machine wasn’t even part of my plan. It’s actually rather inconvenient to have to worry about an entire ship whenever you want to blip back in time, not to mention the time tunnel itself, and the exotic matter, of which there’s a rather limited supply. I may have discovered how to travel through time much sooner, in fact, but I wasted years trying to figure out how to work around these problems, and those early attempts were all massive, messy failures.
And yet I can’t help looking through my old notes now, wondering if I missed something. Perhaps time travel without a vessel, without an anil or exotic matter is possible. . . .
All this has me thinking about Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist.
Tesla spent a lot of time and money attempting to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires—in other words, the coil.
You know the coil. It was that big copper ball that shot off sparks of electricity. Basically, it made Tesla look like some sort of crazy mad scientist, and, unfortunately, he never actually got it working correctly. A lot of his theories about how energy and electricity move through the earth’s crust were based on faulty science, and he ended up pursuing this idea of “free energy” until all his funding ran out and his reputation was, basically, in ruins. It’s a shame, too, because he was one of the smartest people the world had ever seen. A true genius.
In any case, I bring Tesla up now because he spent a lot of time observing the electronic noise of lightning strikes, and this led him to conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy for free. He was super wrong, unfortunately, but the science itself wasn’t bad. He was just wrong about how the earth would react to the science.
The anil, on the other hand, reacts exactly how he expected it to.
I won’t bore you with the details. All you need to know is that Tesla was right; he just didn’t know what he was right about. Most scientists working today believe that there are actually a great many more anils all over the world, but they’re buried deep within the earth’s crust. The working theory is that the Puget Sound anil was only made visible by the movement of tectonic plates and that, given another couple hundred years and further erosion of the earth’s crust, more tunnels through time will appear. If that’s true, it’s possible that Tesla actually managed to connect his original experiments with some underground anil that he didn’t even know was there.
So, in effect, Tesla was the very first time traveler. He’s even quoted as saying that he’s seen the future. Once, after being struck by a jolt of electricity coming off his coil, he said, “I saw the Past, Present, and Future at the same time.”
If that’s true, if he did see the past, present, and future at the same time, then he, somehow, managed to travel through time without access to an anil, without any exotic matter, and without a vessel.
It’s imperative that I speak with him.
5
Dorothy
The Fairmont’s garage was dark when they landed, and empty. Roman and Dorothy gathered the stolen artwork from the back of the time machine and headed down the stairs in silence, stopping in front of a heavy, unmarked door deep in the Fairmont’s basement.
Roman dug an old key out from under his coat, and Dorothy heard the click of metal in a lock. The door creaked open, revealing a deeper, velvety darkness beyond.
Another click and the room was illuminated.
As always, Dorothy felt her breath catch. It was hard to know where to look first. There was the stack of scrolls gathering dust in the corner, stolen from the Library of Alexandria moments before the siege in 48 BCE. The missing panels from the Bayeux Tapestry hung from the wall before her, showing William the Conqueror’s Christmas Day coronation, in 1066. On a table below sat the long-lost crown jewels of King John.
Dorothy smiled as she looked at the jewels, remembering the week she and Roman had spent on the Wash in 1216. There’d been a lot of discussion throughout history about how the fool king had managed to lose his jewels, but it turned out that the luggage containing them had simply fallen off of the back of his carriage as he rode beneath the Sutton Bridge. Dorothy and Roman had waited for the king and his soldiers to gallop past, and then they’d taken the abandoned luggage for themselves. Roman had worn the magnificently jeweled crown the entire ride home.