But unknown wouldn’t be the correct word now. At this very moment it was evident who that covered visage belonged to – him. Again, Blake found himself caught in the act of changing nothing and crafting everything as it had been; like a memorized script quoted verbatim.
***
It had been an unproductive trip, but the cogs in Blake’s mind were spinning. Ben might have been right – how could he change things if he didn’t know what choices would generate which outcomes?
He would work with Dr. Amhurst until he died if that’s what it took. He was determined to get home somehow. Then again, how well would that go? Should he just try to build another life for himself when he got there, or should he confront his future self? Blake was thankful he wasn’t married; that would have made for a complicated dynamic.
Would Ben have even recruited him if he’d been tied to a family? And then, for the first time in his life, Blake wished he had taken the time to settle down. Sharing his years with a special someone, and sleepless nights with a newborn seemed like a paradise to him now. The image of Art and his family rose in Blake’s mind and his chest constricted.
He arrived at Amhurst’s and lumbered up the steps. The effects of the drug had almost worn off now. With each passing hour, the ache in his arm magnified and he felt the strength draining from his battered body.
When he walked inside, Tobias was in the living room, straightening the table to its correct position. This was all still so eerie; it wouldn’t feel normal looking at his own doppelganger anytime soon. “Where’s Amhurst?”
“The lab.”
“I’ll be down there with him. How about you make us some coffee?”
Tobias dipped his head like a simpleton being ordered by a superior and went silently to the kitchen. Blake watched him go with mixed feelings. He couldn’t help thinking Tobias was a pansy compared to the man he’d known growing up and he had trouble reconciling the differences. Would he ever be able to?
Blake went down the steps that led to the laboratory. Doctor Amhurst was in the middle of cleaning up ashes from the floor. Tables had been rearranged in the large open space and Satoshi’s body had been hauled off as well.
Amhurst looked up as Blake descended the stairs. “How did it go at the beach?”
Blake leaned against one of the tables and tried to cross his arms, but the posture sent a sting of pain through his limb and he let them both drop. “It was a wasted trip. But I had some productive thoughts while I was there.”
The doctor raised an eyebrow. “How productive?”
“I’ll get into that later, but first, let’s start by you telling me how all this works.”
Amhurst propped the broom in a corner and hesitated before answering. “I’m guessing you know why this all started.”
“Dead wife and child,” Blake said.
It had been almost three decades but the wound was still raw, given the look of pain on the other man’s face. Blake had never felt like more of an ass. “I’m sorry, that was out of line. It’s natural to try and save the ones we love. Tobias and I are cases in point.” Apologies didn’t come naturally to him, and this one felt pathetic at best, but Amhurst seemed to accept it.
After a moment more of silence, the doctor said, “The seed began as a mere thought of, ‘what if’? I started following the work of Nikola Tesla, a true genius and good friend.”
“You didn’t just work with him; you were friends with Nikola Tesla as well.”
“Yes, and it pains me that the death of his mind came before that of the body. Senility strikes many of us in the end. Pigeons.”
Blake’s eyelids flickered as he tried to follow the sudden shift in Amhurst’s monologue. “I’m sorry, did you say pigeons?” He couldn’t suppress a chuckle.
“It was all the man cared about near the end; feeding the birds.”
“I do hate to bring you back on point,” Blake said – and silently congratulated himself on not rolling his eyes or sighing loudly. “I can understand the loss of a friend, but this time travel idea … where did it come from?”
Amhurst looked mildly surprised, as though Blake had missed something obvious. “From Tesla, of course. Have you ever heard of the Tunguska event?”
“No, what’s that.”
“In 1908, something fell from the sky in Russia. Tesla went to investigate, and this is what he found.” Dr. Amhurst indicated the chunk of rock that had been Blake’s mission priority. “It was Tesla’s team that found it,” he continued. “Later, when I proved myself to the man, he allowed me to help in the pursuit.
“In the beginning, Tesla had hoped to channel the energy that could be stored and was going to harness that power for something he called ‘The Peace Ray’. It was to be an instrument so powerful that it could end all wars. Not until later – and quite by accident – he discovered its true potential.”
“That’s pretty ironic, don’t you think?” Blake said. “End all wars, my ass.” He gestured to the iron beast in the corner. “This thing ends up causing World War III.”
Amhurst didn’t respond.
“Alright, continue with the story then,” Blake said impatiently. “What was its true potential?”
Something haunted shimmered in Amhurst’s eyes. “That it could tear open a hole in a time stream and theoretically push something forward or back. Unfortunately, the corruption of his mind began to hinder our progress and the solution was left to minds not as great as his. Mine.” The doctor shook his head with sadness. “The world had a treasure with him, and didn’t even know it.”
“And this brought you here,” Blake said quickly, lest Amhurst get lost in reverie again.
“Yes, I moved back here after I plundered all of Tesla’s writings and work from his safe. I couldn’t allow them to fall into the wrong hands.”
“So they fell into your unstable hands.” Blake grimaced, disgust evident in his face.
Amhurst said nothing to that, just stared down at the floor.
“You do realize if you hadn’t started messing with such things, none of this would be happening now and I wouldn’t be here.” Blake started pacing in agitation. “I could be in New York, sipping whiskey.”
“That is not entirely true. You would be the man upstairs cleaning this house.”
Dammit, the old man has a point. His fate would have never altered course in the first place, and he’d be the pansy of a man that was Tobias, who was now brewing coffee in the kitchen.
Amhurst said, “I know it is hard, but we shouldn’t dwell on what has happened. It is done and over.”
“It’s not nearly over for me.”
“Fair enough,” the doctor conceded. “Now where were we?”
“Tesla’s plans falling into your unstable hands.”
“Ah, yes,” Amhurst said without reacting. It seemed he’d already built a solid tolerance for Blake’s jibes. “I moved back here and continued to work on the research. Tesla had many other fantastic ideas and plans that I feel mankind would have been better off with.”
“All I’m concerned with is the one I’m staring at that we could have done without. If it wasn’t my ticket home, I’d destroy the damn thing now.”
“It is still an option,” Amhurst reminded him with a look of dare.
“Don’t think I’ve taken it off the table. The only thing holding me back is the Russians. They have a large piece of that Tuskegee rock, so they’ll still be able to time travel at some point.”
“Tunguska.”
“What?” Blake snapped.
“You said Tuskegee. It’s Tunguska.”
“Whatever,” he said, feeling like a child but not giving a shit. “Tobias and I need to leave 1948. We both can’t fit into that hulking Iron Man suit together. If one goes in the suit, the other is stuck here.” Blake pushed away from the table and beckoned the doctor. “Follow me.”
Blake led him to the freezer and opened the door. “I need you to take this.” He reached inside and pulled out his severed
arm.
“Your arm?” Amhurst’s face wrinkled.
“Not the arm. The watch. Tobias should have one too. You’ll need to see if you can get them both to send us forward in time. Can you do that?”
A spark of interest flared in the man’s eyes. “I’ll certainly try.”
He took the arm from Blake and began fiddling with the watch. It wouldn’t come off easily at first, but he managed to wriggle a bony finger under the hooks and pry them loose from the pallid skin. Blake suppressed a shudder.
Amhurst handed the appendage back to Blake, who stared at it with remorse for a few seconds before looking back at the other man. “I have one more question, Doc.”
“And that is?”
“Do you have a knife?”
46 The Geiger Sanction
December 1, 1948, 11:14 AM
Blake had taken his coffee to go and headed back to his rented room. With the pain returning to his body and sleep not an option, that meant another injection. As before, moments after the injection, the feeling of weightlessness and renewed vigor flowed into him, and he sighed with pleasure. This could turn into an addicting habit.
He collected his belongings and checked out of his room at The Lion Inn, then made the trek back to Amhurst’s and parked himself in one of the upstairs rooms. After washing up, he went back to the lab, where it felt like class was now in session. Amhurst started babbling on about the intricacies of his personal experiment and it was all Blake could do not to break into a series of yawns. Either the second injection wasn’t lasting him as long, or the good doctor was boring him to sleep. He rubbed his eyes to clear the tiredness from them. Sleep had to wait for later.
Amhurst said, “As you know now, the meteorite fragment is not only an excellent conductor, but it also has the capacity for energy storage on an extraordinary scale.”
Blake nodded, but it bugged him that he alone was subjected to this torture. Tobias was upstairs, resting – that irritated him too.
It had only been a few hours since Blake had met his twin, but that brief passage of time had underscored what Blake intuited shortly after their introduction – besides identical DNA, there was nothing similar between them.
Tobias was skittish, nervous about almost everything. And there was no doubt that he’d never taken a life, unlike himself. Both were products of their environment, though Blake would have figured that someone with Tobias’s background had developed a tougher hide. He found it hard to fathom the great differences that were evident in his own life just from growing up with parents for a few extra years.
Crap, was that a question? Dr. Amhurst was still talking, but something in his speech pattern had changed. The sentence was repeated, taking an upward pitch again, and Blake snapped into focus. “I’m sorry, what was that? My brain turned into diarrhea for a second.”
Amhurst frowned like a teacher dealing with an incorrigible student. “I said, I’ve removed the depleted cell you arrived with from your gadget and inserted a new one. Like this.” Amhurst demonstrated, holding up the watch as he replaced the small piece with another object.
“What is that? It doesn’t look like the battery you showed that it had before.”
“I’ve substituted the depleted energy cell for a small piece of the meteorite. The fragment is melted, and from there we can mold it however it needs to be. Once that is done, I charge the material. The size of the energy that can be amassed has yet to be calculated. I’d already created this type of power source for Gernot’s watch, so it was easy to duplicate.”
“So how do we test it?”
“On these.” The doctor directed Blake’s attention to a glass tank that held two small white lab rats with mischievous-looking red eyes. “Snow and White,” Amhurst said.
Oh geez, tell me I didn’t hear that. He’s named them after that chick that shacked up with the seven little men?
Amhurst took the watch and wrapped it around one of the squirming rats, ignoring the creature’s small squeak of protest. “I’ll affix the watch around Snow just like what was done to you before you arrived.”
Blake remembered the sharp hooks that had dug themselves into his now absent wrist and glanced quickly down at the bandaged nub of his arm before putting his attention back on Amhurst.
The doctor rotated a dial on the watch and there was a click followed by a squeal of pain as the hooks embedded into the rat’s back. Blake winced in sympathy.
“Here is when we find out if everything works the way I’ve theorized,” Amhurst said. “I’ll set the LOC1 and adjust the time for return to this location, exactly thirty seconds from now.” He placed Snow back in the container and pressed the activation prong. On the face of the watch a three second countdown began ticking.
The rat was motionless, probably still stunned from the four barbs jabbed into its body. There was a low hum, a crackling of static, and then a loud WHOOSH. This was followed by a crunching, cracking sound as the bottom of the cage was ripped away and sucked into the vacuum of nothingness with the time traveling rat.
In the silence that followed, Amhurst observed, “Ah, as I expected; just like what happened with Gernot, the matter in a small field around the traveling host is taken as well.”
“That didn’t happen when I came to Adelaide.”
Amhurst considered that a moment, then concluded, “This is obviously a side-effect of the excessive charge the fragment possesses.”
“Is there a possibility the charge won’t be enough to get the subject to its destination?”
“Theoretically, no. The charge that is initially used is all that is needed, but I guess we will see.” Amhurst tapped his grizzled chin, silently counting down the remaining seconds.
Blake’s eyes were glued to the hole that had been left at the bottom of the cage on the other side of the rat container. Suddenly, White scurried around in a frenzy, sensing the arrival of something unknown and ominous, like a dog fearing an impending thunderstorm. A quick hum sounded, followed by a forceful rush of air and there it was: Snow appeared with the watch still strapped to its back.
It had been zapped right back to where it was thirty seconds prior, this time hovering over the hole that had been created. The rat fell into the small hole along with chunks of the yanked matter from its first trip, and they clattered about on the tank floor as they rained down. From inside the hole, a pink nose shot out, and Snow hoisted itself up – tentatively at first – then, like nothing had happened, began inspecting its surroundings.
“Okay, so we know it works,” Blake said. “Give it another shot and see what happens.” He motioned to Amhurst, who seemed more than willing to give it another go in the name of science.
The old man set the timepiece again and put the rat back down quickly so his hand would be a safe distance away from the time vacuum. They waited, yet nothing happened. Amhurst made a noise of impatience and took the watch off the squirming critter to access the underside of the device. He withdrew the meteorite fragment and placed a set of prongs against it.
He sighed. “It’s depleted. The charge needed for time travel is extreme.” He paused a moment in thought, then continued, “I’ll just replace it with another charged piece.”
A few minutes later, he came back and attached the watch to White’s back this time. Snow was still scurrying around the tank, oblivious to the four bright red dots of blood trickling down its sides.
Amhurst said, “I’m curious about something, and I’d like to give it a test before we attempt another jump.”
“You’re the scientist, Doc Brown.”
The cultural reference was clearly lost on Amhurst; the doctor gave him a blank stare, then shrugged and began fiddling with the device again. “Okay, what I’ve done is recalibrate the process. It’s now programmed to jump from Location One, or LOC1, to Location Two, LOC2. It should be instantaneous, and it isn’t quite time travel, more like, well, teleportation.” He reached deftly into the container and clicked the button. Again came the soft hu
m.
Without warning, Snow rushed toward its teleporting companion. “No, no, no, no, no!” Amhurst shouted.
There was a sucking sound, then a popping as expected, but these were followed by a new, wet sound. Blood sprayed against the sides of the glass and the edges of the new crater.
Blake and Amhurst stared in stunned amazement at the tank. Half of Snow had been ripped free from its body and carried into the void with White. Guts, bones, and other viscous matter had been thrown everywhere.
“What the hell?” Blake looked at Amhurst, who was eyeing the bloody mess with revulsion. He can torture a human being and not bat an eye, but a dead lab animal gives him the queasies?
“It would appear,” Amhurst began, but stopped a moment as the return hum and loud flush of air sounded. White reappeared, falling into its own crater like Snow had. A second later it crawled out of the hole and began trudging through the blood swamp of its now deceased tank mate, sniffing at what remained of the body.
The pathetic sight of Snow’s maw twitching with a constant spasm seared itself into Blake’s mind. He arched a brow. “You were saying?”
Amhurst cleared his throat and began again, “It would appear that the watch only takes with it the same organic material that matches the genetic coding, preserving only the traveler. Anything that is not the same as the traveling host – but is within the immediate area around the jumper – is snatched up with it in the process of teleportation. Perhaps if Snow had been closer to the circle, this would not have been the result.”
“You said, ‘Anything that is not the same.’ So would it not happen if they were twin rats?”
“I suppose, but they would probably need to be touching, just in case. Otherwise, the outcome might be the same.”
“Well, I say we iron out the kinks a few more times just to be sure. I’d like to make it home in one piece.”