The Forever Engine by Frank Chadwick

had swept him up. This wasn’t my world, and I was glad it wasn’t, because it was in bad trouble.

    I gathered the plan had been to throw me in prison after the interview. Things having turned out as they had, they decided against prison, but that left my domestic arrangements up in the air. It turns out there were bedrooms on the third floor of the house for unexpected guests like me. I also found out the house had a name—Dorset House.
    A maid—she couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve—showed me to my room and brought some cold cheese sandwiches and a pot of lukewarm tea. She also pointed out, with much blushing, the commode down the hall, where I was pleasantly surprised to find a functioning flush toilet.
    I turned in early but had trouble getting to sleep. I wasn’t used to sleeping in odd places. A hospital, a bed-and-breakfast, that’s different. Those are places with labels, so you know how you’re supposed to feel about them. Dorset House—what kind of place was that? Also, I wasn’t sure when I was going to get a clean change of clothes, so I slept in the raw. The bed was cold and the sheets stiff and scratchy. I could have used a change of bandages on my burned back as well, but that would have to wait.
    My thoughts didn’t help me doze off. Sitting in the interview room with Grover, the Cockney hashshashin , for just a moment I’d felt closer to an answer, closer to the way home. But since I’d come to this thoroughly screwed-up place, all I’d seen were hostile faces, violent death, and a London right out of a bad acid trip. I’d played this game of looking for allies, planning my next move—for what? Even if I found some “hole in time,” what then? How much closer would I be to finding what had altered my past and then undoing it? Not one inch. Lying there alone in that cold bed, I felt impossibly far away from anyone and anything I had ever cared about. And in that cold darkness, I couldn’t believe there was a way back to the warmth and light. I just couldn’t.

SIX
    September 24, 1888, London, England

    The next morning an older maid woke me up with tea—hot for a change—some crisp toast held upright in a silver toast rack, and the news that I was wanted downstairs as soon as I could dress. I’m not sure why, but a hot cup of tea, and the thought of someone—even assholes—waiting for me, restored my confidence.
    “Outrageous! Do you hear me? It is bloody outrageous, and I will not bloody have it. I will not!! ”
    I paused in the doorway, glanced around the office, and saw three red-faced junior officers at rigid attention—with Gordon the reddest of them all—in front of the ranting older officer. I recognized the two others with Gordon as the men I had taken for detectives the day before. Thomson sat in a chair in the corner, puffing on his pipe and lost in thought. He noticed me at the door and took the pipe from his mouth to wave me in.
    The tall, stout officer turned his ferocious glare on me. His eyes narrowed and his gray moustache bristled like the whiskers on a walrus.
    “So, the mysterious Mr. Fargo joins us. Because of you they said my ‘talents’ were needed here, in the Intelligence Department. They’re bringing that doddering old fool Baker back from India to give him my seat on the Army Board. That was Wood’s handiwork, I’ll wager. Well damn Wood, damn the Board, damn Rossbank for getting himself killed, and damn all of these fools for not dying in place of him!”
    “Don’t forget to damn me,” I said.
    “ Damn you , sir!”
    “Fargo, allow me to introduce the new director of military intelligence,” Thomson said from his chair. “Major General Sir Redvers Buller, VC. General, as you correctly deduced, this is Professor James Fargo of the University of Chicago.”
    VC after his name meant Buller had the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for heroism, the equivalent of our Medal of Honor.
    “University of Chicago?” Buller said.