Here there was no justice, no right or wrong. But wait. He’d forgotten the one element that smacked of Axis sabotage: the supposedly classified torpedo tubes, to which he’d been denied access at the beginning of the voyage. Which lay directly below the mysterious monitoring room.
He didn’t go looking for the others. He was a Navy man, after all. He would check this out himself.
“Don’t touch that dial,” said a strangely distorted voice.
Bob spun around from the control panel, in a crouch, ready for anything.
On the other side of the small room was the image of a little old man with a moustache. It flickered like an old movie, not flat against a bulkhead as a projection should, but in the middle of the floor. It was three-dimensional, sepia-toned. It moved jerkily, as if the flickering concealed movement that the eye couldn’t quite follow. It spoke again:
“Don’t touch it. The experiment has yet to run its course.” The voice sounded far away and staticky, like a storm-ravaged radio signal.
“Who authorized you to be here?” Bob demanded. It wasn’t much, but it was better than “Who are you?” or “Damn! You scared the juice out of me, Pops.”
The old man smiled. Something about him was vaguely familiar. “It’s my experiment,” he said. “My coils. My generator. My wireless transmission system. My genius.”
Bob blinked. He remembered that face.
The old man gave a courtly Old World bow. “Nikola Tesla, at your service.”
“But you died,” Bob said. “Back in January. I read about it in the Philadelphia Bulletin. St. John the Divine was packed with Nobel laureates. It was quite a funeral.”
“What is death? The Mahat, or Ishvara, continues. Throughout space there is energy, the Akasha, acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force.” His voice hardened. “Step away from that panel.” Tesla gestured, and Bob saw that his right arm was wrapped in wire, as a caduceus is wrapped in snakes. The end of the wire vanished in the floor, at the edge of the sepia light.
Suddenly more angry than bewildered, Bob said, “You can’t stop me. You’re not really here. You’re just a projection.”
“More like a broadcast,” Tesla said. “I’ll happily share the details with you, if you like. But for now, come away from those controls.”
Bob did take a couple of steps toward Tesla, unwittingly, in his excitement.
“It was you. You’re the one who’s been meddling with our experiment.”
“I improved the experiment, my military colleagues and I.” Tesla sighed raspily. “Ah! How good it was, finally to have friends in high places. You didn’t go far enough, you know. Using my coils merely to shield a ship from radar! How could you fail to see that the same technology could be used to teleport a ship and its crew almost infinite distances in an eyeblink?”
Tesla added, not unkindly: “But you see, your project served its purpose. It provided us a ship and an admirable cover to put my theories into secret operation. So everything is going according to plan.”
“Are you mad?” Bob retorted. “Can you actually see what’s going on aboard this ship, from — wherever you are? We’ll be lucky if any of us get out alive. Listen.” He felt he was arguing not with a ghost, but with less than a ghost — a notion, a memory, a dream. “I’m a fiction writer. A couple of years ago, I wrote a story about an architect who designs an inter-dimensional….”
“Yes, I read that one.”
Bob momentarily forgot his anger. “You did?”
“I read all the Gernsback magazines.” Tesla lifted his coil-wrapped arm in a gesture that might have been wistful if not for the stroboscopic effect, which reduced it to a visual stutter. “I found it an entertaining conceit. Though it was of course more a lecture than a story. With some trick effects at the end.”
Bob flushed, but plowed on. “Then you know what I’m talking about. The effect is uncontrollable. The architect and his friends barely make it out of the house with their lives. That’s what’s happening here on the Eldridge, Dr. Tesla. We’re not jumping through three-dimensional space, we’re jumping across the dimensions themselves.”
“A simple malfunction, easily corrected once you return to port.”
“How do we get back? How do we terminate the experiment?”
Tesla winked out of existence, leaving Bob dazed and blinking at a bulkhead, as if he had been staring, eyes burning, into a light bulb at the moment it was switched off. Then Tesla was at his elbow. Bob yelped. Close up, Tesla’s face was grainier, like the front-row view of the bottom edge of a movie screen.
“How can you give up now?” Tesla asked. “As the jumps come faster and faster, you won’t even register their passage. All possible worlds will cycle past you, faster and faster, until all realities are experienced simultaneously.”
Through Tesla’s glowing face, Bob could discern the faint lines of the instrument board. “But how will we get home? How will we stop?”
With a pop of static, Tesla winked. The effect was not comforting, as the eyelid stayed down just a half-second too long. “Who cares? Think of the glory!” The old man was no longer looking at Bob, but lost in his own reverie. “Only by annihilating distance,” he murmured, “can humans ever end the scourge of war. Imagine! Instantaneous transport — all men neighbors! No more war!”
Nikola Tesla — whether dead or alive, real or not — was mad as a hatter. Bob realized that the time for talk was over. It was time for action.
Bob leaped for the control panel he had been warned away from. There was a joystick there, mated to a potentiometer. It was calibrated from a central point with positive and negative numbers, and the pointer was set to the extreme left. He slammed it all the way to the right.
Tesla snapped out of existence, leaving only a lingering aftereffect on Bob’s strained eyeballs, and a faint acrid odor, like a carbide lamp.
The now-familiar rumbling started again.
Grace
From a raging storm, the ship had been transported to a sea that was as still as glass. The sky was dark but it slowly filled with millions of twinkling mothlike creatures the shape and texture of doilies, and the size of delicate clumps of snowflakes. They glowed faintly. But they seemed to be harmless, though their trilling was threatening to get on Grace’s nerves.
Grace stood on deck, watching the snowflakes swirl. It was night here, wherever “here” was. By ship’s time, it was also night. Grace had set a watch and ordered all sailors not on watch to their bunks. Everyone was tired, and tired men made mistakes. She herself was weary to the bone. How long had it been since she had stopped to rest or had grabbed a bite to eat? She had volunteered for this assignment so eagerly! All she had wanted was a bit of experience at sea, all but impossible for a woman to get. And now she had a command.
The moon was almost full. Overhead, the snowflakes spun in the moonlight. Tiny flying flecks of lace, each about as big across as the tip of her little finger. A few of them landed on the deck, and she examined them. Each had a unique pattern on its lacy wings. Like snowflakes, maybe — no two alike.
Idly, she held out her hand and watched as a snowflake landed on it. Its tiny feet tickled her palm. Its wings, extended, formed a lacy circle around a tiny body no bigger than the head of a pin. As she was watching it, a snowflake landed on her other hand. She was idly studying the newcomer when two snowflakes that were somehow joined together fluttered past, just in front of her eyes. Were they mating?