“There’s something wrong with the pantograph.”
Hell.
Of course there was. There was always something wrong with the pantograph…no matter which kind of pantograph, and no matter how much time passed.
Once an engineer, always an engineer. That’s what they told me, and they had no idea how right they were.
Right now I was a 26-year-old electrical engineer based in Melbourne. My name was Harry Gaidaros and I had no girlfriend. A fairly normal guy – except that I remembered my past life.
I was an engineer. And I was one in the life before that. I’ll save you the trouble of asking. Yes, I remember all of them, and yes, I have always been an engineer. Originally, I was Hero of Alexandria, the great inventor of the 1st century. As him, I wrote about the pantograph, an automatic writing device – hence the name: panto, all; graphos, write – but I didn’t manage to make one then.
It took about sixteen hundred years, until the time I was friends with Chris Scheiner – anyway, let’s move on. Point is, I’ve been tinkering with this thing and having problems with it for literally thousands of years. Problems of mirroring. In reproducing the small on a large scale, faults emerge. Little inaccuracies. It’s all one can do to keep things as they were. Stubbornness is required.
Now Roger, my boss, was atop this stranded train, waving at me to follow him up.
I climbed to stand beside him atop the train. I saw the lifting control box had been completely burned, and everything inside was covered with a black and septic yellow stain, as though someone had smashed an egg in it. “The hell is that?”
“Who knows. Smell that?”
“Now, yeah.” I gagged. Rotten egg. Sulphur.
“Someone left it here as a solid lump, I bet, and when the train started, the electricity set it alight and it wrecked everything. The burning temperature of sulphur’s pretty low.”
“Why would someone do that?”
Roger shrugged. “A prank?”
“Not the sort of trick usually pulled by the crowd who hang out around trains.”
“It’s a well-considered crime, isn’t it? You’d have to know a little more than the basics. And you’d need time to set up. What does that make you think?”
“That either someone has expertise and too much time on their hands, or…”
Or that it mattered to someone that this train was stopped here.
Roger and I were quite well known around here, in engineering circles. We worked well and were very consistent. Could it be a competitor messing with us?
Could someone know we’d come here? Could they have timed the breakdown using the sulphur’s size?
Maybe.
Suddenly we heard a person approaching, and saw, a figure, made invisible by a sudden blast of sunlight right in our eyes.
“You there!”
“What is it?” Roger called.
“Not you! I’m talking to him! The kid.”
I turned my head toward the figure.
“Yes, you, Hero of Alexandria. I’ve come for you.”
verso folio 