And yet I can’t help looking through my old notes now, wondering if I missed something. Perhaps time travel without a vessel, without an anil or exotic matter is possible. . . .

All this has me thinking about Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist.

Tesla spent a lot of time and money attempting to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires—in other words, the coil.

You know the coil. It was that big copper ball that shot off sparks of electricity. Basically, it made Tesla look like some sort of crazy mad scientist, and, unfortunately, he never actually got it working correctly. A lot of his theories about how energy and electricity move through the earth’s crust were based on faulty science, and he ended up pursuing this idea of “free energy” until all his funding ran out and his reputation was, basically, in ruins. It’s a shame, too, because he was one of the smartest people the world had ever seen. A true genius.

In any case, I bring Tesla up now because he spent a lot of time observing the electronic noise of lightning strikes, and this led him to conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy for free. He was super wrong, unfortunately, but the science itself wasn’t bad. He was just wrong about how the earth would react to the science.

The anil, on the other hand, reacts exactly how he expected it to.

I won’t bore you with the details. All you need to know is that Tesla was right; he just didn’t know what he was right about. Most scientists working today believe that there are actually a great many more anils all over the world, but they’re buried deep within the earth’s crust. The working theory is that the Puget Sound anil was only made visible by the movement of tectonic plates and that, given another couple hundred years and further erosion of the earth’s crust, more tunnels through time will appear. If that’s true, it’s possible that Tesla actually managed to connect his original experiments with some underground anil that he didn’t even know was there.

So, in effect, Tesla was the very first time traveler. He’s even quoted as saying that he’s seen the future. Once, after being struck by a jolt of electricity coming off his coil, he said, “I saw the Past, Present, and Future at the same time.”

If that’s true, if he did see the past, present, and future at the same time, then he, somehow, managed to travel through time without access to an anil, without any exotic matter, and without a vessel.

It’s imperative that I speak with him.

5

Dorothy

The Fairmont’s garage was dark when they landed, and empty. Roman and Dorothy gathered the stolen artwork from the back of the time machine and headed down the stairs in silence, stopping in front of a heavy, unmarked door deep in the Fairmont’s basement.