"Fine, okay," James says. "We'll see if anything happens."

"Thank you so much!"

And while he waits to hear back on that, he can get some wire and magnets and start making a demonstration-sized electrical generator!

Bruce is SO SMART.

Bruce has Cheaty Future Knowledge! Which Eli will also have very shortly if he holds still long enough to get infodumped at.

He is allowed to think Bruce is smart anyway.

And Bruce is allowed to think Eli is smart right back! Also he'd like Eli's advice on writing up the "discovery" and a description of its potential uses for publication. Has Insula already come up with a convention for positive versus negative electric charge?

Does it seem like Eli is the sort of person who would know this!

He might know where besides Maturin's library to look for it! Bruce remembers (barely) a time before the internet, but not a time before casual instantaneous communication between any two scientists and a new encyclopedia edition every year.

They can figure it out, anyway.

And a few days later they get a letter from James instructing them to PICK UP their new multiversal traveler.

OM(literal?)G it worked it worked repeatable interworld travel! 

Shit they just kidnapped somebody. They should go pick them up so Bruce can apologize.

James has summoned a very very thin man in an asylum uniform with a general aura of misery.

"Hello. How much did James explain to you about what's going on?"

"Apparently I have been transported into a different world. I wish this were more of a surprise than it actually is."

"It's not? Has this happened to you before? Also, I'm sorry for grabbing you away from whatever you were doing; I honestly didn't expect it to work but that's really no excuse."

"I was in a mental asylum so I imagine-- whenever this is-- is going to be an improvement." He looks around. "Nineteenth century?"

Bruce has no idea what the polite response to "I was in a mental asylum" is in any of the three applicable contexts. Instead he says, "The tech level here matches that of the nineteenth century in the timeline I'm from, but they count the years differently here. You look like you're also a human from an Earth; we should compare histories and also maps of the world because apparently you can get humans in timelines with different continents."

"I am in fact from an Earth." What Bruce wants is a reassuringly easy thing to fulfill and also very fun. Also this is possibly a hallucination but it is a much more pleasant one than his actual life so he's going with it. "If you get me paper I can sketch a world map."

It has definitely occurred to Bruce that whatever Lev was in the hospital for might have given him reason to be in even worse Cartesian Doubt than Bruce had been in, but "I appreciate your responsiveness to the untrustworthy sensory inputs I'm sending you" is definitely not the polite thing to say. He finds some writing materials and tries to think of a way to explain the language thing.

Lev's world map has all of the correct continents. Many, many more countries are labeled "the British Empire" than Bruce is used to; Russia is labeled "the USSR", and several other Eastern European countries are named things like "Transcaucasia" and "Yugoslavia"; Thailand is labeled "Siam"; Iran is labeled "Persia" and the Middle East has several other unusual country names, with no Israel.

"Looks like we've got the same geology underneath but different borders . . . if I knew more history I could say whether this is consistent with a past date on my Earth but I don't, so you could be from mine or a third one. What year is it for you and do you count from the early Catholic church's best guess at the birth year of Jesus or something else?"

"1934, and yes we do." He hesitates.

Bruce is having too much fun to notice any hesitation. "2019 for me. Hmm, how to check if our histories are the same . . . we both write down a bunch of major events and their years?"

"Napoleonic Wars are 1803 to 1815? American Civil War from 1861 to 1865? On The Origin of Species in 1859? Periodic table in 1869? Moons of Mars in 1877? World War I from 1914 to 1918? Stock market crash in 1929?"