The Space Machine

by Christopher Priest

  “Yes.”

  “May I enquire what that is to be?”

  She said: “You will be meeting Sir William shortly. Perhaps he will tell you himself.”

  I thought about this for a moment. “You say he is sometimes an uncommunicative man. Maybe he would not tell me.”

  We were once more seated close together beneath the tree.

  Amelia said: “Then you may ask me about it again, Edward.”

  Chapter Four

  SIR WILLIAM EXPOUNDS A THEORY

  i

  Time was passing, and soon Amelia suggested that we return to the house.

  “Shall we race or ride?” I said, not especially anxious to do either, for I had been finding our rest together beneath the trees an exquisite experience. It was still sunny and warm, and there was a pleasant dusty heat rolling through the Park.

  “We will ride,” she said firmly. “There is no exercise in free-wheeling.”

  “And we may take it more slowly,” I said. “Shall we do this again, Amelia? I mean, shall we bicycle together on another weekend?”

  “It will not be possible every weekend,” she said. “Sometimes I am called upon to work, and occasionally I have to be away.”

  I felt a pang of unreasoned jealousy at the idea of her travelling with Sir William.

  “But when you are here, shall we bicycle then?”

  “You will have to invite me,” she said.

  “Then I will.”

  When we mounted our machines we first retraced the way of our race, and retrieved my lost boater. It was undamaged, and I placed it on my head, keeping the brim well down over my eyes so as to prevent it blowing off again.

  The ride back to the house was uneventful and, for the most part, conducted in silence. I was at last understanding the real reason why I had come to Richmond this afternoon; it was not at all to meet Sir William, for although I was still fascinated by what I knew of him I would have gladly exchanged the coming interview for another hour, two hours, or the entire evening in the Park with Amelia.

  We entered the grounds of the house through a small gateway by Sir William’s abandoned flying machine, and wheeled the bicycles back to the outhouse.

  “I am going to change my clothes,” Amelia said.

  “You are delightful just as you are,” I said.

  “And you? Are you going to meet Sir William with grass all over your suit?” She reached over and plucked a stem of grass that had somehow lodged itself under the collar of my jacket.

  We entered the house through the French window, and Amelia pressed a bell-push. In a moment, a manservant appeared.

  “Hillyer, this is Mr Turnbull. He will be staying with us to tea and dinner. Would you help him prepare?”

  “Certainly, Miss Fitzgibbon.” He turned towards me. “Would you step this way, sir?”

  He indicated that I should follow him, and we moved towards the corridor. From behind, Amelia called to him.

  “And Hillyer?” she said. “Would you please tell Mrs Watchets that we shall be ready for tea in ten minutes, and that it is to be served in the smoking-room?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Hillyer led me through the house to the first floor, where there was a small bath-room. Inside, soap and towels were laid out, and while I washed Hillyer took away my jacket to have it brushed.

  The smoking-room was on the ground floor, and it was a small, well-used room, comfortably furnished. Amelia was waiting for me; perhaps my remark about her appearance had flattered her, for she had not after all changed, but had merely put on a tiny jacket over her blouse.

  Crockery had been laid on a small octagonal table, and we sat down to wait for Sir William to arrive. According to the clock on the mantelpiece it was now some minutes after four-thirty, and Amelia summoned Mrs Watchets.

  “Have you sounded the tea-bell?” Amelia said.

  “Yes, ma’am, but Sir William is still in his laboratory.”

  “Then perhaps you would remind him that he has a guest this afternoon.”

  Mrs Watchets left the room, but a moment or two later a door at the far end of the room opened, and a tall, well-built man came in hurriedly. He was in his shirt and waistcoat, and carried a jacket over his arm. He was trying to roll down his shirtsleeves, and as he came in he glanced in my direction I stood up at once.

  He said to Amelia: “Is tea here? I’m nearly finished!”

  “Sir William, do you remember I mentioned Edward Turnbull to you?”

  He looked at me again. “Turnbull? Good to meet you!” He gestured impatiently at me. “Do sit down. Amelia, help me with my cuff.”

  He extended his arm to her, and she reached under it to connect the cuff-link. When this was done, he rolled down his other sleeve and Amelia connected this cuff too. Then he put on his jacket and went to the mantelpiece. He selected a pipe and filled its bowl with tobacco from a jar.

  I waited apprehensively; I wondered if the fact that he had been about to finish his work indicated that this was an unfortunate moment to call on him.

  “What do you think of that chair, Turnbull?” he said, without turning.

  “Sit right back into it,” Amelia said. “Not on the edge.”

  I complied, and as I did so it seemed that the substance of the cushion remoulded itself beneath me to adapt to the shape of my body. The further back I leaned, the more resilient it seemed.

  “That is a chair of my own design,” Sir William said, turning towards us again as he applied a lighted match to the bowl of his pipe. Then he said, seemingly irrelevantly: “What exactly is your faculty?”

  “My, er—?”

  “Your field of research. You’re a scientist, are you not?”

  “Sir William,” said Amelia, “Mr Turnbull is interested in motoring, if you will recall.”

  At that moment I remembered that my samples-case was still where I had left it when I arrived: in the hall.

  Sir William looked at me again. “Motoring, eh? A good hobby for a young man. It was a passing phase with me, I’m afraid. I dismantled my carriage because its components, were more useful to me in the laboratory.”

  “But it is a growing fashion, sir,” I said. “After all, in America—”

  “Yes, yes, but I am a scientist, Turnbull. Motoring is just one aspect of a whole field of new research. We are now on the brink of the Twentieth Century, and that is to be the century of science. There is no limit to what science might achieve.”

  As Sir William was speaking he did not look at me, but stared over my head. His fingers were fretting with the match he had blown out.

  “I agree that it is a subject of great interest to many people, sir,” I said.

  “Yes, but I think it is in the wrong way. The popular thought is to make what we already have work better. The talk is of faster railway-trains, larger ships. My belief is that all these will be obsolete soon. By the end of the Twentieth Century, Turnbull, man will travel as freely about the planets of the Solar System as he now drives about London. We will know the peoples of Mars and Venus as well as we now know the French and Germans. I dare say we will even travel further… out to the stars of the Universe!”

  At that moment Mrs Watchets came into the room bearing a silver tray loaded with teapot, milk-jug and a sugar-bowl. I was glad of the intrusion, for I found the combination of Sir William’s startling ideas and his nervous manner almost more than I could bear. He too was glad to be interrupted, I think, for as the servant set the tray on the table, and began to pour the tea for us, Sir William stepped back and stood by the end of the mantel. He was relighting his pipe, and as he did so I was able to look at him for the first time without the distraction of his manner.

  He was, as I have said, a tall and large man, but what was most striking about him was his head. This was high and broad, the face pale and with grey eyes. His hair was thinning at the temples, but on the crown it grew thickly and wildly, exaggerating the size of his head, and he wore a bushy beard which itself made
more marked the pallor of his skin.

  I wished I had found him more at his ease, for in the few moments he had been in the room he had destroyed the pleasant sense of well-being that had developed while I was with Amelia, and now I was as nervous as he.

  A sudden inspiration came to me, that he himself might be a man not used to meeting strangers, that he was better accustomed to long hours of solitary work. My own occupation involved meeting many strangers, and it was a part of my job to be able to mix well, and so, paradoxical as it might sound, I suddenly realized that here I could take the lead.

  As Mrs Watchets left the room, I said to him: “Sir, you say you are nearly finished? I hope I have not disturbed you.”

  The simplicity of my device had its desired effect. He went towards one of the vacant chairs and sat down, and as he replied his words were phrased more calmly.

  “No, of course not,” he said. “I can continue after tea, I needed a short rest in any event.”

  “May I enquire as to the nature of your work?”

  Sir William glanced at Amelia for a moment, but her expression remained neutral.

  “Has Miss Fitzgibbon told you what I am currently building?”

  “She has told me a little, sir. I have seen your flying machine, for instance.”

  To my surprise, he laughed at that. “Do you think I am insane to meddle with such follies, Turnbull? My scientific colleagues tell me that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. What do you say?”

  “It’s a novel concept, sir.” He made no response but continued to stare at me, so I went on hastily: “It seems to me that the problem is a lack of an adequate power-supply. The design is sound.”

  “No, no, the design is wrong too. I was going about it the wrong way. Already I have made machine flight obsolete, and before I even tested that contraption you saw!”

  He drank some of his tea quickly, then, astounding me with his speed, jerked out of his chair and moved across the room to a dresser. Opening a drawer he brought forth a thin package, and handed it to me.

  “Have a look at those, Turnbull. Tell me what you think.”

  I opened the package and inside found that there were seven photographic portraits. The first one was a head and shoulders picture of a boy, the second was a slightly older boy, the third was that of a youth, the fourth that of a very young man, and so on.

  “Are they all of the same person?” I said, having recognized a recurring facial similarity.

  “Yes,” said Sir William. “The subject is a cousin of mine, and by chance he has sat for photographic portraits at regular intervals. Now then, Turnbull, do you notice anything about the quality of the portraits? No! How can I expect you to anticipate me? They are cross-sections of the Fourth Dimension!”

  As I frowned, Amelia said: “Sir William, this is probably a concept new to Mr Turnbull.”

  “No more than that of heavier-than-air flight! You have grasped that, Turnbull, why should you not grasp the Fourth Dimension?”

  “Do you mean the…concept of…?” I was floundering.

  “Space and Time! Exactly, Turnbull…Time, the great mystery!”

  I glanced at Amelia for more assistance, and realized that she had been studying my face. There was a half-smile on her lips, and at once I guessed that she had heard Sir William expounding on this subject many times.

  “These portraits, Turnbull, are two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional person. Individually, they can depict his height and width, and can even offer an approximation of his depth…but they can never be more than flat, two-dimensional pieces of paper. Nor can they reveal that he has been travelling all his life through Time. Placed together, they approximate the Fourth Dimension.”

  He was pacing about the room now, having seized the portraits from my hands, and was waving them expansively as he spoke. He crossed to the mantel and set them up, side by side.

  “Time and Space are inherently the same. I walk across this room, and I have travelled in Space a matter of a few yards…but at the same moment I have also moved through Time by a matter of a few seconds. Do you see what I am meaning?”

  “That one motion complements the other?” I said, uncertainly.

  “Exactly! And I am working now to separate the two…to facilitate travel through Space discrete from Time, and through Time discrete from Space. Let me show you what I mean.”

  Abruptly, he turned on his heel and hurried from the room. The door slammed behind him.

  I was dumbfounded. I simply stared at Amelia, shaking my head.

  She said: “I should have known he would be agitated. He is not always like this, Edward. He has been alone in his laboratory all day, and working like that he often becomes animated.”

  “Where has he gone?” I said. “Should we follow him?”

  “He’s returned to his laboratory. I think he will be showing you something he has made.”

  Exactly at that moment the door opened again and Sir William returned. He was carrying a small wooden box with great care, and he looked around for somewhere to place it.

  “Help me move the table,” Amelia said to me.

  We carried the table bearing the tea-things to one side, and brought forward another. Sir William placed his box in the centre of it, and sat down. As quickly as it had begun, his animation seemed to have passed.

  “I want you to look at this closely,” he said, “but I do not want you to touch it. It is very delicate.”

  He opened the lid of the box. The interior was padded with a soft, velvet-like material, and resting inside was a tiny mechanism which, on first sight, I took to be the workings of a clock.

  Sir William withdrew it from its case with care, and rested it on the surface of the table.

  I leaned forward and peered closely at it. At once, with a start of recognition, I realized that much of it was made with that queer, crystalline substance I had seen twice before that afternoon. The resemblance to a clock was misleading, I saw now, lent to it simply by the precision with which the tiny parts had been fitted together, and some of the metals with which it had been made. Those I could recognize seemed to be some tiny rods of nickel, some highly polished pieces of brass and a cog-wheel made of shining chrome or silver. Part of it had been shaped out of a white substance which could have been ivory, and the base was made of a hard, ebony-like wood. It is difficult, though, to describe what I saw, for all about there was the quartz-like substance, deceiving the eye, presenting hundreds of tiny facets at whatever angle I viewed it from.

  I stood up, and stepped back a yard or two. From there, the device once more took on the aspect of a clock-mechanism, albeit a rather extraordinary one.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, and saw that Amelia’s gaze was also on it.

  “You, young man, are one of the first people in the world to see a mechanism that will make real to us the Fourth Dimension.”

  “And this device will really work?” I said.

  “Yes, it will. It has been adequately tested. This engine will, depending how I choose, travel forward or backward in Time.”

  Amelia said: “You could demonstrate, Sir William.”

  He made no answer, but instead sat back in his chair. He was staring at the strange device, a thoughtful expression on his face. He maintained this posture for five minutes, and for all the awareness he showed of Amelia and me, we might not have existed. Once he leaned forward, and closely scrutinized the device. At this I made to say something, but Amelia signed to me and I subsided into silence. Sir William raised the device in his hand, and held it up against the daylight from the window. He reached forward to touch the silver cog-wheel, then hesitated and set down the device again. Once more he sat back in his chair and regarded his invention with great concentration.

  This time he was still for nearly ten minutes, and I began to grow restless, fearing that Amelia and I were a disturbance to him.

  Finally, he leaned forward and replaced the device in its case. He stood up.
<
br />   “You must pardon me, Mr Turnbull,” he said. “I have just been stricken with the possibility of a minor modification.”

  “Do you wish me to leave, sir?”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  He seized the wooden box, then hastened from the room. The door slammed behind him.

  I glanced at Amelia and she smiled, immediately lifting the tension that had marked the last few minutes.

  “Is he coming back?” I said.

  “I shouldn’t think so. The last time he acted like this, he locked himself in his laboratory, and no one except Mrs Watchets saw him for four days.”

  ii

  Amelia summoned Hillyer, and the manservant went around the room, lighting the lamps. Although the sun was still up, it was now behind the trees that grew around the house, and shadows were creeping on. Mrs Watchets came in to clear away the tea-things. I realized that I had drunk only half of my cup, and swallowed the rest quickly. I was thirsty from the bicycling expedition.

  I said, when we were alone: “Is he mad?”

  Amelia made no answer, but appeared to be listening. She signalled that I should be silent…and then about five seconds later the door burst open yet again, and Sir William was there, wearing a topcoat.

  “Amelia, I am going up to London. Hillyer can take me in the carriage.”

  “Will you be back in time for dinner?”

  “No…I shall be out all evening. I’ll sleep at my club tonight” He turned to me. “Inadvertently, Turnbull, my conversation with you has generated an idea. I thank you, sir.”

  He rushed out of the room as abruptly as he had entered, and soon we heard the sound of his voice in the hall. A few minutes later we heard a horse and carriage on the gravelled driveway.

  Amelia went to the window, and watched as the manservant drove the carriage away, then returned to her seat.

  She said: “No, Sir William is not mad.”

  “But he behaves like a madman.”

  “Perhaps that is how it seems. I believe he is a genius; the two are not wholly dissimilar.”

  “Do you understand his theory?”