Keith Laumer - Assignment in Nowhere

“Of course, the workrooms are not yet fully restored,” she uttered, hauling a key from a baggy pocket. She got the lock open, stopped as she groped inside, grunted as she found the light switch. A yellowish glow sprang up. Olivia and I stared in at dust, lumpy shapes covered with tarpaulines, dust, heaped cartons, dust, grimed windows, and more dust.

“He worked here?”

“Of course it was not so cluttered then. We’re short of funds, you see, your Grace,” she got the sell in. “We haven’t yet been able to go through the items here and catalogue them, dispose of the worthless things, and restore the laboratory to its original condition… “ She chattered on, unabashed by Olivia’s silence. I poked around, trying to look casual, but feeling far from calm. It was in this shed—or a near facsimile—that Maxoni had first made the breakthrough that had opened the worlds of alternate reality. Somewhere here, there might be… something. I didn’t know what I was looking for: a journal, a working model not quite perfected…

I lifted the corner of the dust cover over a heaped table, glanced at the assortment of ancient odds and ends: awkward, heavy-looking transformers, primitive vacuum tubes, bits of wire—

A massive object at the center of the table caught my eye. I lifted the cover, reached for it, dragged it to me.

“Really, sir, I must insist that you disturb nothing!” my guardian hippo brayed in my ear. I jumped, let the tarp fall; dust whoofed into the air. “This is just as the professor left it, that last, fatal day.”

“Sorry,” I said, holding my face in what I hoped was a bland expression. “Looks like a collection of old iron to me.”

“Yes, Professor Maxoni was a bit eccentric. He saved all sorts of odd bits and pieces—and he was forever trying to fit them together. He’d had a dream, he used to tell my departed Papa—when he was alive, of course—the professor, I mean—and Papa too, of course—”

“Your father worked for Maxoni?”

“Didn’t you know? Oh, yes, he was his assistant, for ever so many years. Many’s the anecdote he could tell of the great man—”

“I don’t suppose he’s still living?”

“Papa? Dear Papa passed to his reward forty-three—or is it forty-four…?”

“He didn’t leave a journal, I suppose—filled with jolly reminiscenses of the professor?”

“No—Papa wasn’t what you’d call a lit’ry man.” She paused. “Of course, the professor himself was most diligent about his journal. Five big volumes. It’s one of the great tragedies of the Society that we’ve not yet had sufficient funds to publish.”

“Funds may yet be forthcoming, Madam,” I said solemnly. “The Contessa is particularly interested in publishing just such journals as you describe.”

“Oh!” The painted-on mouth made a lopsided 0 to match the exclamation. “Your Grace—”

“So if you’d just fetch it along, so that her Grace can glance over it…” I left the suggestion hanging.

“It’s in the safe, sir—but I have the key—I know I have the key, somewhere. I had it only last year—or was it the year before…?”

“Find it, my good woman,” I urged. “Her Grace and I will wait patiently here, thrilling to the thought that it was in this very room that the professor developed his galvanic buggy-whip.”

“Oh, no, that was before he took this house—”

“No matter; the journals, please.”

“Wouldn’t you rather come back inside? The dust here—”

“As I said, we’re thrilling to it. Hurry back…” I waved her through the door. Olivia looked at me questioningly.

“I’ve sent her off to find Maxoni’s journals,” I said. She must have noticed something in my voice.

“Brion, what is it?”

I stepped to the table, threw back the cover. The heavy assembly I had moved earlier dominated the scattering of articles around it.

“That,” I said, letting the note of triumph come through, “is a Moebius-wound coil, the central component of the M-C drive. If I can’t build a shuttle with that and the old boy’s journals, I’ll turn in my badge.”

The workshop I rented was a twelve-by-twenty space under a loft opening off a narrow alleyway that wound from the Strada d’ Allenzo to a side-branch of the Tiber, a trail that had probably been laid out by goats, back before Rome was big enough to call itself a town. The former occupant had been a mechanic of sorts. There were rusty pieces of steam-engine still lying in the corners, a few corroded hand tools resting among the dust-drifts on the sagging wall shelves at one side of the room, odds and ends of bolts and washers and metal shavings trodden into the oil-black, hard-as-concrete dirt floor. The old fellow who leased the premises to me had grumblingly cleared away the worst of the rubbish, and installed a large, battered metal-topped table. This, plus the Moebius coil, which I had bribed the Keeper of the Flame into letting me borrow, and the journals, constituted my lab equipment. Not much to start moving worlds with—but still, a start.

Olivia had gotten us rooms nearby, cheaper and better quarters than the Albergo Romulus. There was a small hot plate in her room, charcoal-fired; we agreed to husband our meager funds by having two meals a day in, and the other at one of the small neighborhood pasta palaces where the carafes of wine were put on the table as automatically as salt and pepper back home.

I started my research program by reading straight through all five journals, most of which were devoted to bitter comments on the current political situation—the capital had just been moved to Rome from Florence, and it was driving prices up—notes on some seemingly pointless researchers into magnetism, the details of a rather complicated but strictly Platonic affair with a Signora C., and worried budgetary computations that enlisted my fullest sympathy.

Only in the last volume did I start to strike interesting passages—the first, tentative hints of the Big Secret. Maxoni had been experimenting with coils; winding them, passing various types and amounts of electric current through them, and attempting to detect results. If he’d known more modern physics, he’d never have bothered, but in his ignorance, he persevered. Like Edison trying everything from horsehair to bamboo splints as filaments for his incandescent bulb, Maxoni doggedly tried, tested, noted results, and tried again. It was the purest of pure research. He didn’t know what he was looking for—and when he found it, he didn’t know what it was—at least not in this world. Of course, there had been no Cocini here. I didn’t know what the latter’s role had been back in the Zero-zero world line. It would be an interesting piece of reading for me when I got back—if I got back—if there were any place to get back to—

I let that line of thought die. It wasn’t getting me anywhere. The last volume of the journal yielded up its secrets, such as they were—a few scattered and fragmentary mentions of the coil-winding, and a line or two regarding strange manifestations obtained with the goldleaf electroscope when certain trickle currents were used.

A week had gone by, and I was ready to start the experimental phase. There were a few electrical supply houses in the city, mostly purveyors to the Universities and research institutes; electricity was far from the Reddy Kilowatt state in this world. I laid in a variety of storage batteries, oscillators, coils, condensers, vacuum tubes as big and clumsy as milk bottles, plus whatever else looked potentially useful. Then, at Olivia’s suggestion, I let her mesmerize me, take notes as I repeated everything my subconscious had retained of the training I’d had in Net Shuttle technology—which turned out to be twice as valuable as Maxoni’s notes.