Chronica Read online

  Chapter 7

  [New York City, March, 1899 AD]

  Heron decided as soon as he left Porter's company that he needed someone more high-powered to get the Chronica from Appleton. Even if Porter's failure to see Appleton was not his fault this time, the point still held. Heron should have realized this all along.

  He walked as quickly as could up to the Millennium, gambled that the real J. P. Morgan was not standing in the vestibule, and almost lost.

  "Mr. Morgan," a man who looked and sounded like a British butler from the early 20th century greeted Heron with a smile. "You're back again! Welcome!"

  Heron nodded, grunted, and hustled up all of the stairs to the room with the Chairs. He needed to clear the air, clear his head – see a little more clearly, perhaps, how his present predicament had come to be, and maybe set something in motion to change it – and nothing provided as good an opportunity for that as a little trip to the past. He timed this one to be about two months before he was now.

  [New York City, January, 1899 AD]

  He found a public phone at Grand Central, away from the seafood restaurant and any possibly prying eyes. Yes, it was time to bring in reinforcements, with someone whom he trusted about as much as Porter, which was to say not that much at all, but who had had much greater impact on the world, in large part due to information supplied by Heron. That would be Porter's boss.

  Heron had his phone number committed to memory.

  A groggy, gruff voice answered the phone. "Hello?"

  "Mr. Edison?" Heron looked at the clock on the far wall. It was 2:45 in the afternoon. This lunatic was likely taking his famed afternoon nap. "Did I wake you?"

  "Yes, you did," Edison replied. "Do I know you?"

  "Your phone number is not widely available, so likely you do," Heron replied.

  "Your voice does sound familiar," Edison said.

  "I need to see you," Heron said. "This afternoon."

  "That sounds more like an order than a request," Edison said.

  "When you realize who I am, you'll understand," Heron said.

  "I'm in West Orange, New Jersey," Edison said.

  "I'd prefer we meet in Grand Central Terminal in New York, in about two hours. Is that satisfactory?" Heron asked.

  Silence. Then, "I know who you are – yes, I'll meet you at Grand Central in two hours – the train and ferry service is frequent at this time of day, but still not as efficient as it could be," Edison said.

  "Good," Heron said, and told Edison to meet him at the seafood restaurant. "One other thing – I'll be looking like J. P. Morgan."

  ***

  Edison sat down at Heron's table in the restaurant. "You look like J. P., but you certainly didn't sound like him on the telephone. That was apparent to me even with my partial deafness."

  "I could have undertaken a vocal chord reconstruction, but I won't be staying here as J. P. Morgan very long," Heron replied, "and you likely would have thought I was J. P. Morgan not me on the telephone, whatever I said to the contrary, if I had J. P. Morgan's voice." Heron knew about Edison's hearing impairment, but, like the rest of the world, was unclear about its extent. Heron did know that Edison told at least half a dozen stories about what had caused his hearing loss, ranging from ear infections to being smacked on the side of his head by a train conductor.

  "J. P. Morgan has been one of my financers," Edison said. "I know him well. I'm not very comfortable with you having taken his face." Edison rubbed the stubble on his own unshaven face.

  Heron was always slightly surprised by Edison's unkempt hair and appearance, and that he smelled like someone from the mostly unwashed Middle Ages. "Are you comfortable with the many designs for inventions I have given you?" Heron asked.

  The waiter appeared.

  "I'll have a plate of shrimp," Edison told the waiter.

  "I'm fine," Heron said.

  "Your designs have served me well," Edison said to Heron, as the waiter departed. "That is why I am here. Do you have something new for me?"

  "As a matter of fact, I do," Heron said, and favored Edison with one of his rare smiles. "It concerns time travel."

  "Time travel?" Edison repeated, with a touch of ridicule. "Isn't that the stuff of scientific romance?"

  "So was the use of electricity to illuminate cities, until I gave you a copy of Babylon Electrified, brought back through time from 1889, to where you were in 1879, still perfecting your carbon filament light bulb, which I grant you was your invention entirely."

  Edison nodded. Acknowledgement of his genius independent of Heron placated him, as Heron hoped it would. "That's certainly true," Edison said. "And I'll freely admit – to you – that your advice about the recording of moving images enabled me to get the jump on the Lumière Brothers in France and Friese-Greene in England both."

  Heron smiled through J. P. Morgan's moustache again. "I have been working towards such wheel-of-life inventions for a very long time." He thought it best not to tell Edison that he had given similar advice to the Lumières and William Friese-Greene, whom he had found much more convivial than Edison.

  "I'm still not convinced, however, that time travel is possible," Edison said. "You may have received the information you gave to me about new inventions not from the future but from other sources alive in the world today, who are known to you but not to me."

  Heron considered and reached another decision. "I shall prove it to you. I'm going to leave right now. I'll be back in a moment and certainly before your plate of shrimp arrives – back with information obtained from your future self, which I could obtain only through time travel, and not from someone unknown to you now."

  Edison shrugged and nodded. "I'm always in the market for a palpable demonstration."

  Heron rose and walked to the door of the restaurant. Their waiter was standing there, talking to the maître d'hôtel. "I'll be back in just a minute," Heron said to them.

  He hustled again up to the Millennium. Mr. Bertram, another Brit in service to the Clubs with too much time on his hands, was now at the door. He merely nodded at Heron, looking like J. P. Morgan, and said nothing about Morgan's being or having recently been in the club. Good.

  Heron set the Chair to March, 1899, for a few days after his meeting with Porter, whom he did not want to cross paths with in this trip to demonstrate time travel to Edison. There were three other Chairs in the room, but he didn't have the time to figure out who had brought them there.

  [New York City, March, 1899 AD]

  The weather was warmer. Heron walked to Grand Central, and again called Edison in New Jersey, from a public telephone. He insisted as before on Edison coming into the city and meeting him at the seafood restaurant. Edison grumbled, cursed, and agreed.

  Edison arrived two hours later, still annoyed.

  Heron bid him to sit, which Edison did, still muttering.

  "I apologize for this inconvenience," Heron said, honestly. "It is on behalf of an important cause, which you will understand when this pair of meetings – this is just one of two meetings we are having – is concluded.

  Edison rolled and closed his eyes, then opened them. "I'm listening."

  "I need you to tell me something you experienced in the past two months – something no one other than you would know about," Heron said.

  "I rescued a dog in the blizzard we had last month," Edison immediately responded, "at the beginning of the big storm. But I didn't bring it home. It jumped out of my arms before I could bring it to a shelter. I haven't told anybody about that – I have a reputation as a dog-hater, because I electrocuted Dash and a few other mutts to demonstrate the dangers of AC electricity. But I have nothing against dogs, and I didn't want to tell anyone about the dog I rescued which got away because I didn't want anyone to think I had harmed the animal."

  Heron took it all in. "Thank you – that is perfect for my purposes." He stayed with Edison over cups of soup, which both professed to enjoy, only Edison truthfully, and the two then walked out onto 42nd Stree
t.

  "Thank you, again," Heron said, and walked north, once again, to the Millennium. His luck was apparently getting better and better. No one was at the door at all, this time.

  But as Heron proceeded up to the room with the Chairs, he thought he caught sight of that fool Cyril Charles, on the second library floor, in the periphery of his vision. Charles might have noticed Heron, but Heron couldn't be sure, and he didn't have the wherewithal to deal with this now.

  [New York City, January, 1899 AD]

  The British butler was of course at the door, as he had been when Heron had arrived in January. "Important business bids me to leave," Heron said to the Millennium doorman.

  "Have a good day, Mr. Morgan," the doorman replied.

  Heron walked down Fifth Avenue to the seafood restaurant, where Edison was still seated.

  "You beat the plate of shrimp," Edison said to Heron with a harsh laugh.

  "As I said I would," Heron said.

  "What have you to tell me?" Edison asked. "What can you tell me that I won't know until sometime in the future?"

  "You will rescue a dog in a big snowstorm in New Jersey in February," Heron replied.

  "That is very specific," Edison replied.

  Heron nodded. "That should make this proof more convincing."

  "But how do I know you are not now just giving me the idea of rescuing a dog in the snow, which I will do next month only because we are having this conversation?" Edison asked.

  "Because if were that so – that I don't know the future and I am just introducing this idea to you now – there is surely no way that I could make a dog materialize for you in a blizzard," Heron replied. "Further, the information your future self just gave me is that the dog escaped from you before you had a chance to bring it to a shelter. When the storm comes and you have the dog in your arms, try to hold on to it, and see what happens. It will no doubt escape, however hard you try to not let that happen." Heron also knew he was changing history with this conversation, and the Edison he had talked to the month after next had had no recollection of this conversation, which had not yet happened in his reality.

  "Tell me more about the time travel," Edison quietly said, very seriously, "and what you want me to do. I am inclined to give you the presumption, for now, that you have indeed just time traveled – it certainly tickles my fancy, as they say. Tell me what you want me to do. And if your prediction about the dog in the snowstorm comes true in February, I may endeavor to help you."

  Heron now had to be exceedingly careful. He did not want Edison to attempt to create a time traveling Chair. There was insufficient collateral technology in this age for Edison or anyone to do that now, in 1899 or even 1999, anyway. But if Edison made the attempt, and received publicity about that – which he would, given his stature, and lots of it – that could get other inventors interested. Who wouldn't want to invent a time machine? And that could result in a discovery of the Chairs. "There is a book I wrote," Heron said.

  "Yes?"

  "It was stolen from me," Heron said. "I need your help in reacquiring it." The Chronica, Heron hoped, was still in the ancient Greek in which Heron had written it as a vain young man, nearly two millennia ago. Edison was an autodidact – famously self-educated, with some courses at Cooper Union, and Heron was all but certain none of them included reading of ancient Greek. So if Edison could get the Chronica, and Heron could take it from Edison before the boorish genius could bring it to a translator, Heron would get what he needed.

  "Who stole it from you?" Edison asked.

  "That is not relevant," Heron replied. "What matters now is who has it."

  The waiter appeared with Edison's plate of shrimp.

  "Anything else?" the waiter inquired.

  Edison brushed him away, dug into the shrimp, and belched his appreciation. "And who would that be?"

  "William Henry Appleton," Heron replied.

  "The publisher?" Edison asked.

  "Yes."

  "I don't know him," Edison said. "I did build the first hydroelectric plant in Appleton, Wisconsin – named, I believe, after a Samuel Appleton. Any relation?"

  "I don't know," Heron replied. "Samuel's family came from New Hampshire, as did William's. They could be distant cousins – I haven't investigated it further."

  "Curiouser and curiouser," Edison grunted and laughed through a mouth of shrimp.

  "There was a house built in Appleton, Wisconsin called the White Heron," Heron said. "I'm sure that is total coincidence." Heron didn't believe in coincidence, but he didn't want to make this too convoluted for Edison.

  "I'm sure it is," Edison said, and laughed again. "How do you suggest I approach William Appleton? I'm not exactly known as a man of letters."

  "Tell him you're thinking of writing an autobiography," Heron said. "And you can also mention your work in Appleton, Wisconsin – that could attract William's interest as well." Heron again expected it could be helpful to stroke Edison's ego, as the quickly emerging psychologist, Sigmund Freud, might say. In fact, one of the reasons Heron had thought to contact Edison for this task was the inventor's Appleton, Wisconsin connection.

  ***

  The two passed by another pair of men standing about half a block from the restaurant, dressed in black, with full facial hair, conversing in a language Heron did not recognize.

  "That's Yiddish," Edison said, "a mongrel tongue of a mongrel people, Jews. You know of them?"

  "One of my best students was a Jew," Heron said, thinking of Jonah. "He was highly intelligent, and he was very loyal, until—"

  "He knifed you in the back?" Edison broke in. "That's the way it is with those people, loyal only to themselves and their money."

  Heron chose not to contest the point, but noted that this celebrated inventor was not only a boor but a bigot. "Please attend to the Appleton matter as soon as you can, timing is everything in this business we are in."

  Edison bristled at being directed so explicitly what to do, and about being in any kind of business with a man as bizarre as Heron. "And if I'm too late with Appleton? If he no longer has your book?"

  "Then I might have to go further back in time and have this same conversation with you, all over again for me, first time for you," Heron said.

  "And I wouldn't be remembering it now, because?" Edison asked.

  "Because even though it would be happening to you earlier than now, it would not have happened to you yet, if that makes any sense," Heron replied.

  "It gives me more of a headache than anything else," Edison said.

  ***

  The two parted company on Fifth Avenue. "I'm taking the ferry to New Jersey -- I have work to do in Menlo Park. I'll see to your Appleton assignment first thing tomorrow, if that's ok with you," Edison said and headed west on 42nd Street, without waiting for Heron's answer.

  Heron walked north on Fifth Avenue. He thought again about Porter's failure with Appleton. Enlisting Edison's help was only a part of what Heron intended to do about this.

  Heron didn't believe in bad luck – or, if it happened, he believed its occurrence was far less frequent than most people thought. When plans did not proceed as intended, it was usually not because of bad luck but bad planning, which hadn't foreseen that someone might interfere.

  Appleton was already ill, Heron was willing to concede, on his way to dying in October. But already too ill to see someone who wanted to make a movie – or whatever it was called in this time and place – about Hypatia, whom Appleton had struggled so hard to protect when she was Sierra Waters? This Don Quixote Victorian tilting so nobly at time was still the better part of a year away from his deathbed. The more Heron thought about it, the more he doubted that Appleton had refused to see Porter because Appleton was too ill.