Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

Wherever they were this time, the weather was awful. Lightning crackled about the masts, waves of thunder boomed, wind threatened to blow everyone over the rails, and rain sheeted down, drenching the three of them even as they flailed across the deck, trying to avoid the smoking zones of green fire.

A wave surged over the railing to port, and foam sluiced past their ankles. Isaac yelled over the roar of the storm: “The chalk marks!” The water was washing them away.

It was too late, in any case. Whoever had thrown the switch had caught many of the sailors unawares, out of position. Ahead, three crewmen dropped, screaming, into the mist, as if through a trap door, and disappeared. Two others, pinned to the starboard rail by writhing, advancing ropes of green fire, leapt yelling over the side. Someone else screamed to port — “No! No! No!” — and as Bob turned to look, a running man slammed into him, so hard that Bob could feel the man’s hot, panicked breath. Bob fell backward, grabbed the railing of a ladder to right himself, and gaped when he realized there was no running man — just a disembodied series of No’s above a line of splashes across the standing water on the deck, like those made by a man running straight for the rail. The last No turned into a shriek, and the last little fountain of spray subsided as the shriek faded into the wind.

He tripped on something that gave slightly, and looked down to see a dead man’s yawning head sticking out of the deck, the lower jaw fused with the steel. Bob had kicked the corpse in the teeth.

“Dear God,” Bob said, and for the first time in his life, meant it as a form of address.

Then the green fire was subsiding — and so were the winds, waves, and lightning, Bob was glad to see, though the downpour showed no sign of letup.

The rain washed down over the scene of senseless, senseless death. Bob thought of friends of his who had died at Pearl Harbor, perhaps without even knowing what had happened to them. Did this death have less meaning? Was combat against a human foe morally greater than combat against the cold equations, as Campbell termed them, of physics? He’d wanted to do his part in a just war, but justice had no meaning here.

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.