Abney Park's The Wrath Of Fate

by Robert Brown

  Daniel then got us back to task, “Then we have a plan for the repairing of the Ophelia. What about the mission at hand?”

  “Wait, I think I have an idea,” I said, “How old was Adolf Hitler when he was in power? Specifically, how old would he be right now?”

  April 20, 1889, at precisely 5:45 in the evening, a black motorcycle and sidecar, virtually indistinguishable from bikes that would be used by the German armies some thirty years later, pulled onto the crushed gravel driveway of Gasthof zum Pommer, an inn in Braunau Am Inn, Austria–Hungary.

  A girl in her mid twenties un-straddled the bike, removed her leather jacket and leather helmet, pinned her hair under a small wedge shaped nurse’s hat, and picked up a stack of fresh towels from the side car. She walked slowly to the front doors, she was a bit road sore from her travels, and went in. She had a fresh cut down one thigh, but her skirt nearly hid it.

  Once inside, it was easy to know where she was going. At the bottom of the stairs and across from the front bell-desk was a group of men smoking cigars around a little table while their companion paced nervously. The men made good-natured jokes and taunts to him.

  The men at the table looked up to see the leggy blond nurse enter, “Guten Tag, Fräulein, sind Sie hier, um mit dem Baby zu helfen?”

  “Was denken Sie?” she replied in an annoyed but flirtatious tone.

  Up the stairs she went and into the nursery. There a bald and bespectacled man was taking off his gloves, while another nurse washed a screaming newborn. The mother slept.

  “Wer sind Sie?” the nurse asked Kristina as she entered, which means roughly “Who are you?”

  Kristina then explained that their uncle had sent her because she had delivered his children. She wasn’t supposed to replace the nurse, but simply help, and please don’t send her away, she hadn’t worked in a month.

  “Fine, then you can finish cleaning this brat while I have a piss.” And the nurse stormed out.

  When she’d left, Kristina locked the door and picked up the baby. She stood over the sleeping mother for a moment with a look of pity “Believe me, this will be less painful. You’ll never know what this baby would grow up to become.”

  And with that Kristina climbed out the window down trellis, and headed back to her motorcycle. She set baby Adolf in the sidecar, and kick-started the bike. As she sped out of driveway she thought, …and that was the end of the Third Reich. I wonder what this child will become being raised on an airship amongst pirates? It had to be better the what he would have otherwise become…right?

  ENTROPY

  During Kristina’s “Road trip”, the rest of us made camp in the forest. It was a small camp of makeshift tents, many from old sails on the cold wet pine needle floor, deep in the heart of the Black Forest, in Germany. We pulled timber from the ship that was too shattered and loose to remain, and stacked it around the tents. We deflated the huge gas bag, and found that even deflated it was massive, so we covered it with countless bushes and tree branches in the hope of making it less noticeable. Luckily, at this time in history there wasn’t a lot of air travel, so we weren’t likely to be spotted. This forest was vast, and mostly deserted. We had a good hiding place.

  Our days were filled with hard and bitter work, pulling apart the ship in the effort to take a tally on how much damage was done, and preparing to replace it with undamaged lumber.

  On one of his many walks through the woods, Tanner came across an old, abandoned church. A fire had burnt away a large part of the cathedral, but there was still plenty of old wood that was salvageable. These ancient timbers were of beautifully carved. These ornately carved beams were added to the already culturally eclectic mix of materials the Ophelia had bolted on as we are forced to repair her through the ages. Colored glass windows and lanterns from Persia, tooled leather and silks from Thailand and India, old submarine parts from the auto wrecking yard in Iowa. Every repair job was making her more a work of art than a weapon of war.

  We also, unfortunately, learned some lessons. We learned that just because a man was a strong sailor did not mean he could wield a hammer. Calgori also learned we only had two hammers.It was odd, the doctor was the best builder among us. Anything he worked on came out flush, tightly mounted, and polished. Although he looked like he could barely walk, and he was having trouble remembering why we were here working on this, he could swing a hammer or lift the end of a beam as if he was a man in his thirties, not a man in his late-eighties.

  At times his will and his mind were so strong no one in the room dared dispute him. At other times, he was frail and sad, and looked riddled with guilt. I’m not sure what was going on behind those bushy eyebrows. He was fighting with some internal demons we didn’t understand and he was fighting with his memory. One evening after a very hard day of work he called me father, and asked if he could go to bed. I said “yes”, and no more. I didn’t understand what was happening and wasn’t feeling confident enough to interfere.

  For repairs on the more delicate bits of machinery, as well as specific needs like canvas for sails and airbag, we ordered by telegram. I would drive Calgori to town in The Bandersnatch (that’s the nickname we had given the little motorcycle and sidecar). He would place an order and give a credit account number. That account had been given to him by the English government for his original project of building the Ophelia. This made it less likely to attract suspicion. A few weeks later the supplies would arrive at the train station in town, and we would hire a local horse and cart to deliver the cargo to our camp.

  One day we arrived at train station and found our supplies had not arrived.

  In their place we found a letter. The doctor took it from the clean-cut young German postal employee, and read it with increasingly furrowed brow.

  After reading it, he uttered, “Damit it”, and handed it to me. It read:

  Much Esteemed Doctor,

  It is my unfortunate duty to inform you your account is not being paid as per our original agreement.

  Two disagreeable men came to my office to ask about your location. They made inquires as to why all your orders are being shipped to two separate locations. They also mentioned that you seemed to be nearly doubling the budget they expected from you.

  Forgive me if I’m stepping outside of our business relationship, but we’ve been associates for years and I felt the responsibility to let you know your actions are being questioned.

  With respect and concern,

  ~ Jonathan Farmor,

  When I had finished, the doctor was pacing, “…If they cut off supplies to us, we can make do. But if they cut off supplies to myself, well, there is no telling!” this he mumbled, then he turned to me. “Robert, we have to get to London! Immediately!” He pointed. “Wait, stop that mail boy, we have to send back a letter!”

  The doctor flipped over the letter he just read, and pulling a pen from his waistcoat he wrote:

  Jonathan,

  Thank you for your letter. Please forward supplies to my Whitby address, COD. You may disregard my other orders for the time being.

  I will go to London to speak with my financiers, and make sure your account is paid in full.

  Much indebted,

  Dr. L Calgori

  He folded this letter, put it back into its envelope, and handed it back to the mail boy. Turning to me he said, “It’s important we get to London as fast as possible. I fear I made a mess of my accounts by ordering from this location. The English government has cut off my funding. If they stop sending supplies to the Dr. Calgori that is working in Whitby right now on the Chrononautilus, I won’t be able to build the machine that got us here. What that will do to us as we are stranded here in the forest, I can’t even guess.”

  He paused, and then swore in the most agitated tone I had yet heard from him. “Damn creditors! They will destroy the world one day, mark my words!”

  We left the train station on a breakneck road trip east. I was not comfortable taking him on a long trip, since his hea
lth had not been improving, but he insisted angrily that this would be one of the most important trips we took together.

  “Everything we’ve accomplished will be undone if we don’t do this. We could be trapped here, or we may never have made it here, its impossible to tell!” he exclaimed.

  So we left Germany, and drove through France towards the coast, driving all night long, and into the morning with me throttling the bike hard, or filling our small tank at the very rare petrol stations along the way. The sun rose the next morning and snow started to softly fall. I was cold, and sore from the small bike on the rough roads. As the doctor slept in the sidecar under his fur-collared herringbone coat he looked like he was on his deathbed. Old, pale, and frail beyond measure.

  We took a ferry from Calais to Dover, and then drove west to London.

  He woke and sat up just as the cycle wheels started bumping on the cobblestone streets of Old London. The building we were headed for was on the Thames, and if not for the attire of the people on the streets, or the vehicles we passed, I would swear I was in the modern London I remember from my childhood. The buildings of this neighborhood would remain untouched for hundreds of years.

  All eyes were on me as I pulled the bike to a sputtering stop in front of the large stone stairs. Both the bike and I looked very out of place.

  Calgori stepped from the sidecar into the snow, and pulled his cloths straight. “You need to make yourself scarce, Robert. You and your motorcycle are standing out in a place that does not appreciate things standing out. I will take care of this. Return for me in three hours. If I’m not here, I have gone to the pub for a drink. ” He winked then, but he looked very frail as he turned and trudged up the steps.

  The doctor me told what happened later. I was not there, but he told me about it in as much detail as he could, and I learned more from the people around him at the time I found him.

  Doctor Calgori stormed into the office of Military Science and demanded to speak to his financier. He argued loudly, and made the desk-saddled soldier feel like a foolish, enlisted man.

  “I don’t expect you to understand the processes that I must employ to accomplish this, son. I, in fact, don’t expect you to fully understand what it is I am making, but luckily for us both you are not required to understand a damned thing! Your job is simply to make sure the bills get paid, and then report to your superiors that they have indeed been paid! If I ask that some supplies be sent to a master builder in Germany, who will then send the assembled parts on to me in Whitby, it is your job to simply pay the bill. You do not employ your small mind to the task of questioning my methods. Do we understand each other?”

  For this tirade he stood taller than he had in years. He spoke louder than he had in years. His face grew red with rage, and he ignored the pounding in his head from the injuries he had been hiding for weeks.

  When he was assured three times that all the bills would be paid on time from this point forward without question, he stormed out of the building.

  As yet the second the huge oak doors shut behind him, he sat down in the snow in a swoon. There he remained in the snow getting colder, staring at his legs and feet out in front of him, and he forgot himself entirely.

  He knew the streets. The people felt familiar to him, and sitting on these steps in the snow suddenly reminded him of waiting for his father outside his father’s bank as a teenaged boy. He was getting colder still, and he thought, I need to move around a bit and warm up. Father might still be hours yet, and I don’t want to catch my death waiting for him. Perhaps Charlotte is working today and I could go see her.

  Charlotte was a girl of sixteen that worked at a pub only a few blocks from where his father worked. His father forbid the boy from seeing her, since she was not “of his station”, but as a young man who liked to read Shakespeare, this only made the young barmaid all the more woo-able. So he stood clumsily, thinking to himself, I sat too long, and my legs have fallen asleep! And with that in his head he hobbled carefully down the snowy stone steps.

  He walked the seven blocks slower than a boy of eighteen should have, still thinking his legs were not responding due to the long sit on the cold stone. When he reached the corner of the pub, he was mortally tired.

  And the pub wasn’t there.

  He was so tired now, he started to cry. He started to cross the street to see if the pub was on the other side, for it was now snowing so thickly that he could not see the other side of the road from where he stood.

  Also, the motorcar speeding down the snowy cobblestones could not see him through the snow. It honked angrily and swerved, narrowly missing him, but knocking him to his hands and knees. As he tried to get back up he slipped in horse manure, and he fell hard back into the filth of the street. His head hit the pavement too hard, but he didn’t know the extent of it.

  At this point a carriage driver reined his horse, narrowly stopping before hitting him. He helped the doctor up, and gently carried him to the side of the road, and said, “I hope you’re near your destination, good sir. You look a mess!”

  At that point Calgori saw a pub. Not the pub of his youth, but as he was not thinking clearly, this was close enough to feel a relief. “Yes, I believe I have. Thank you,” he said to the driver, feeling embarrassed to have bothered with his clumsiness.

  And then she walked out of the pub! A delicate young beauty, with smooth golden hair. She was tiny and young, a girl of sixteen with cheeks smooth as peaches, and clean fresh smile that told the world she had never know sorrow. She was just as he remembered her, as she pulled her new coat onto her tiny frame, buttoning the fur sash to cover her soft smooth neck. The girl of his youth could never have afforded such a coat, but the girl of his memories did.

  He was so tired, and he ached all over from his fall, and the cold, and for other reasons he could not remember. The sight of her made him burst into tears, and he ran to her sobbing. Part of his mind felt the emptiness of years of living alone, but the conscious part of him just longed for the love of the girl of his youth. He had hunger and longing that had never been satisfied for the fifty years since he had last seen her.

  When he reached her, he wrapped his muddy and horse-fouled arms around her and cried loudly into her shoulder. He wanted his tears of fear to be quenched by the love of his girl. Here was the comfort he missed for a lifetime, and the beauty he hadn’t seen in years of living alone in his workshop.

  And then she screamed.

  To her, a strange and hideously old man, with blood dripping down his wrinkled and repulsive face and arms had just run out of the street, and grabbed her. She was horrified by his hideous age, by his foul smell, by the look of terror and abandonment in his eyes, she screamed in terror of him.

  A policeman from the corner who had watched this man stumble towards the pub saw the old man grab the young girl. He heard the girl scream, and leaped to her aid. As the Calgori staggered back in terror of the girl’s scream, the policeman clubbed him squarely in the head, cracking his weakened skull mortally.

  I found him moments later. I had come when I heard the girl scream, and I held him in my lap as he bled out in the street. He told me how he had assured our finances for repairs, and he told me it was time for me to go back to my life, and go back for my friends. He told me to have children, while I still could, and love and be loved while it was still wanted of me.

  Then he told me, “I am tired, father, and I miss mother.”

  And then he died in my arms.

  I drove back in the snow, alone and crying. I told the crew what had happened, and many of them cried as well.

  Over the next week many of the original crew gave up. They were nearly back in their own time, and things had fallen apart to the point that putting them back together was simply too much for them.

  Those left continued to finish the repairs the doctor had laid out for us, and at the end of three weeks, the ship was finished and ready to go, but there were only ten sailors left to fly it. Barely enough.


  We discussed what was to come next. We were fairly sure the doctor had already set the map room for a return trip to 2006. The goal was to return before my small plane crashed into the Ophelia, and possibly save my band mates before they plummeted to their death that night.

  After that, perhaps we’d return the remaining crew back to the times we had acquired them, or perhaps we’d all stay in 2006 – we weren’t sure. We were not the least bit confident we could run the Chrononautilus without Calgori.

  For the month that followed, we tied up all the loose ends, both literally and figuratively. The airbag had been patched, and filled, and the rigging had been re-tied as well and doubled in number.

  We also found a home for the stolen baby. A small orphanage about seventy-five miles southeast of us was run by Catholic nuns. They seemed both strict and loving. That alone seemed a combination that would keep this child from developing into the monster he otherwise would have become. A child raised by one set of parents, molded by them, and instilled with the morality they give will become a certain person. Remove their influences, the same child will become someone else.

  In addition to this altering of the child’s history, (and I refused to feel any guilt for this) an orphan in the 1900s simply would not have the resources to rise to become an evil dictator. He would not be afforded the best colleges. He would not spend his teen years and early twenties collecting a network of friends and connections in powerful places. He would end up with a much smaller, and less dangerous level of influence on his country.

  Still, it did raise the moral question of “Can you condemn a baby for what he has not yet done?” Had this been any other child, this argument might have swayed us, but knowing who this baby would become, we decided to leave the child under the care of the holy sisters.