Then, abruptly, it was gone again, whirled away. The very idea of the tumbler against his ear vanished from his head. Weirdly, he could recall that the image of a tumbler had meant something to him only seconds ago; he even knew what tumbler it was that his mind still grappled with. He could picture it clearly. But now it was half full of beef broth, and the mother was feeding it to her sick child, calling him pet names.
Hurriedly, he read over the notes he had scrawled onto the paper—fragments of memory written out in half sentences. “Woman in bed, snoring. Stepping on child. Child nauseated, feverish. Pneumococcal meningitis diagnosed. Child near death. Inflamed meninges cause spinal deformity; hence Narbondo the hunchback? Left coat, money on table. Watch for Parsons snooping along the window...” There was more of the same, then the writing died out. What did it all mean? He no longer knew. It was all fiction to him. It had no reality at all. What coat? He was wearing his coat—or what would become his coat, anyway. Hunchback? Narbondo a hunchback? He cast around in his mind, trying to make sense of it all. Narbondo was not a hunchback. And why would Parsons come snooping along the window? Parsons was no stranger at the manor, not since Lord Kelvin had discovered that St. Ives possessed the machine. Parsons was petitioning him daily to give it up.
Just then he saw something out of the corner of his eye, near the window, but when he turned his head, it was gone. It had looked for all the world like a body, lying crumpled on the floor. His heart raced, and he half stood up, wondering, squinting his eyes. There was nothing, though, only the meadow with the machine sitting among wildflowers like an overgrown child’s toy. St. Ives looked away, but when he did, he saw the thing again, peripherally. He held his gaze steady, focusing on nothing. The thing lay by the window; he must have stepped on it when he came in. It was his past-time self, lying where he had fallen by the window—or rather it was the ghost of his past-time self, unshaven and with wild hair—waiting for his future-time self to leave.
Ghosts—it all had to do with ghosts, with the fading of one world and the solidifying of the next. Just as concrete objects— he, the machine, any damned thing at all—began to fade when a copy of that object appeared from another point in time, so did memory. Two conflicting memories could not coexist. One would supplant the other. Whatever Narbondo had been, or would have become if St. Ives had left him alone, he wasn’t that anymore. St. Ives had dosed him with Fleming’s potion, and he had got well. And the result was that he hadn’t become a hunchback at all, which is what he must have become in that other history that St. Ives had managed to efface. Which meant, if St. Ives read this right, that the sickly child would not have died at all, but must ultimately have recovered, although deformed by the disease.
Fear swarmed over him again. He had gone and done it this time. He was a victim of his own compassion. He had meddled with the past, and the result was that he had come back to a different world than he had left. How much it was different, he couldn’t say. He had forgotten. And it didn’t matter now, anyway; there was no recalling that lost fragment of history. All of that had simply ceased to exist.
What a fool he had been, jaunting around through time as if he were out for a Sunday ramble. Why in heaven’s name hadn’t his future-time self warned him against this? The damned old fool. Perhaps he could go back and unchange what he had changed. Except, of course, that he had made the change over fifty years ago. He would have to return to Limehouse and convince himself not to leave Fleming’s elixir with the mother, but to dump it off the roof instead. Let the child suffer... Well...
Going back would make a bad matter worse. He could see that. He sighed, getting a grip, finally. What else might all this mean? Anything might have changed, maybe for the better. Mightn’t Alice be alive? Why not? He was filled with a surge of hope, which died out almost at once. Of course she wasn’t alive. That much hadn’t changed. His mind worked furiously, trying to make sense of it. Here was his littered desk and his ghostly unshaven self lying in a heap by the window. What was all that but a bit of obscure proof that this world must be in most ways similar to the one he had buggered up?
And more than that, he remembered it, didn’t he?—the business of his going out barefoot, of his finally putting the machine right, of his saving Binger’s dog, of Alice murdered in the Seven Dials.
Where was Mrs. Langley? He must talk to her. At once. Speak to her and get out. He was only a day away from his own rightful time. Minimize the damage, he told himself, and then go home.
He went out into the kitchen. There she was, the good woman, putting a few things into a carpetbag, packing her belongings. She was going to her sister’s house. Her face was full of determination, but her eyes were red. This hadn’t been easy for her. St. Ives hated himself all of a sudden. He would have fallen to his knees to beg her forgiveness, except that she disliked that sort of indignity almost as much as he did.
“Mrs. Langley,” he said.
She turned to look at him, affecting a huff, her mouth set in a thin line. She wasn’t about to give in. By damn, she was bound for her sister’s house, and soon, too. This had gone on entirely long enough, and she wouldn’t tolerate that sort of tone, not any longer. Never in all her born years, her face seemed to say.
Still, St. Ives thought happily, ultimately she wouldn’t go, would she? She would be there to take on Parsons with a rolling pin. St. Ives would succeed, at least in this one little thing. She was regarding him strangely, though, as if he were wearing an inconceivable hat. “I’ve come to my senses,” he said.
She nodded. Her eyes contradicted him, though. She looked at him as if he had lost his senses entirely this time, down a well. Inadvertently he brushed at his face, fearing that something... Wait. Of course. He wasn’t the man that he had been a half hour ago. He was clean-shaven now, his hair cut. He wore a suit of clothes with idiotic lapels, woven out of the wool of sheep that didn’t yet exist. He was a man altered by the future, although there would be nothing but trouble in telling her that.
“What I mean to say is that I’m sorry for that stupid display of temper. You were absolutely right, Mrs. Langley. I was stark raving mad when I confronted you on the issue of cleaning my desk. I know it wasn’t the first time, either. I... I regret all of it. I’ve been... It’s been hard for me, what with Alice and all. I’m trying to put that right, but I’ve made a botch of it so far, and...”
He found himself stammering and was unable to continue. Dignity abandoned him altogether, and he began to cry shamelessly, covering his face with his forearm. He felt her hand on his shoulder, giving him a sympathetic squeeze. Finally he managed to stop, and he stood there sniffling and hiccuping, feeling like a fool.
She brought him a glass of water, which he drank happily. “It’s not every man,” she said to him, “who can eat crow without the feathers sticking to his chin.” She nodded heavily and slowly. “Nothing wrong with a good cry now and then. It’s like rain— washes things clean.”
“God bless you, Mrs. Langley,” he said. “You’re a saint.”
“Not by a considerable sight, I’m not. You come closer, to my mind. But I’m going to be bold enough to tell you that you’re not cut out for saint work. You’ve got the instinct, but you haven’t got the constitution for it. And if I was you I’d find a new situation just as quick as I might. Go back to science, Professor, where you belong.”
“Thank you,” he said, in control of his emotions once more. “That’s just where I intend to go, just as you advise. There’s one little bit of business to attend to first, though, and by heaven, if there were one person on earth I could bring along to help me see it through, you would be that person, Mrs. Langley.”
“I’m good with a ball of dough, sir, but not much else.”
“You’re a philosopher, my good woman, whether you know it or not. And from now on your salary is doubled.”
She started to protest, but he cut her off with a gesture. “I’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Carry on here.”
With that he left her, returning to the study and going out through the window, stepping carefully over that bit of floor where his ghost lay invisible. He clambered straight into the bathyscaphe and left. His past-time self would materialize again and set to work on the machine, never knowing that the Mrs. Langley problem had been solved. It occurred to him too late that he might have written himself a note, explaining that he had come back around to patch things up with her. But to hell with that. His past-time self was a fool—more of a fool, maybe, than his future-time self was—and would probably contrive to muck things up in some new lunatic way, threatening everything. Better to let him go about his business in ignorance.
In the time machine, he returned to the now-empty silo, some couple of hours past the time when he had fled from Parsons and the constable. It occurred to him, unhappily, that there had been no Langdon St. Ives existing in the world during the last two hours, and that the world didn’t give a rotten damn. The world had teetered along without him, utterly indifferent to his absence. It was a chilling thought, and was somehow related to what Mrs. Langley had been telling him. For the moment, though, he put it out of his mind.
There were more immediate things to occupy him. It mightn’t be safe to leave the machine in the silo yet, but he couldn’t just plunk down on the meadow every time he reappeared. Parsons had petitioned him, as one scientist to another, to give it up. It belongs to the Crown, he had said. Parsons hadn’t known until that very afternoon in Harrogate, though, that the time machine was workable, that St. Ives had got the bugs out of it at long last. Well, he knew now. There wouldn’t be any more petitions. And next time Parsons wouldn’t just bring the local constable along to help.
St. Ives climbed out wearily, looking around him at the sad mess of tools and debris. He had half a mind to set in on it now— neaten it up, stow it away as if it was himself he was putting right. He couldn’t afford the time, though.
Then he saw the chalk markings—changed again. Lord help us, he thought, feeling again a surge of distaste for his future-self. This was no lark, though. It was a warning: “Parsons looming,” the message read. “Obliterate this and take the machine out to Binger’s.”
THE RETURN OF DR. NARBONDO
Smoking very slowly on his pipe, Mr. Binger stood staring at St. Ives, who smiled cheerfully at him from halfway out of the bathyscaphe hatch. St. Ives had just arrived from out of the aether, surprising Mr. Binger in the pasture. “Good afternoon, Mr. Binger,” St. Ives said.
Furry hopped around, happy to see St. Ives and not caring a rap that he had appeared out of nowhere. Binger looked up and down the road, as if expecting to see a dust cloud. There was nothing, though, which seemed to perplex him. Finally, he removed his pipe and said, nodding at the bathyscaphe, “No wheels, then?”
“Spacecraft,” St. Ives said, and he pointed at the sky. “You remember that problem with the space alien some few years back?”
“Ah!” Binger said, nodding shrewdly. That would explain it. Perhaps it would suffice to explain everything—St. Ives’s sudden arrival, his strange clothes, his being clean-shaven and his hair trimmed. Just a little over two hours ago St. Ives had been in town, disheveled, hunted, looking like the Wild Man of Borneo. He had been babbling about cows and seemed to be in a terrible hurry. Now the mysteries were solved. It was spacemen again.
St. Ives climbed down onto the ground and petted Furry on the back of the head. “Can you help me, Mr. Binger?” he asked.
“Aye,” the man said. “They say it was you that saved old Furry up to town today.”
“Do they?”
“They do. They say you come near to killing yourself over the dog, nearly struck by a wagon. Chased off that bloody mastiff, too. That’s what they say.”
“Well.” St. Ives was at a momentary loss. “They exaggerate. Old Furry’s a good pup. Anyone would have done the same.”
“Anyone didn’t do it, lad. You did, and I thank you for it.”
Anyone didn’t know to do it, St. Ives thought, feeling like a fraud. He hadn’t so much chosen to save the dog as he had been destined to save the dog. Well, that wasn’t quite true, either. The past few hours had made a hash of the destiny notion—unless there were infinite destinies waiting in the wings, all of them in different costumes. One destiny at a time, he told himself, and with the help of Binger and his sons, St. Ives hauled the time machine to the barn, in among the cows, and then Mr. Binger drove him most of the way back to the manor. He walked the last half mile, thinking that if Parsons was lurking about, it would be better not to reveal that Binger was an accomplice.
It was dark when he bent through the French window again and lay down on the divan, telling himself that he ought not to risk waiting, that he ought to be off at once and finish what he had meant to finish. But he was dog-tired, and what he meant to do wouldn’t allow for that. Surely an hour’s sleep...
The street in the Seven Dials came unbidden into his mind—the rain, the mud, the darkness, the shadowy rooftops and entryways and alleys—but this time he let himself go, and he wandered into his dream with a growing sense of purpose rather than horror.
Hasbro shook him awake in the morning. The sun was high and the wind blowing, animating the ponderous branches of the oaks out on the meadow. “Kippers, sir?” Hasbro asked.
“Yes,” said St. Ives, sitting up and rubbing his face blearily.
“Secretary Parsons called again, sir, early this morning. And Dr. Frost, too, some little time later.”
“Yes,” said St. Ives. “Did you tell them to return?”
“At noon, sir. An hour from now.”
“Right. I’ll...” He stood up slowly, wondering what it was he would do. Eat first. Mrs. Langley came in just then, carrying the plate of kippers and toast and a pot of tea. She handed him a newspaper along with it, just come up from London. The front page was full of Dr. Frost, lately risen from his long and icy sleep. He had got the ear of the Archbishop of Canterbury, it said, who had taken a fancy to Frost’s ideas regarding the rumored time-travel device sought after by the Royal Academy.
The journalist went on to describe the fanciful device in sarcastic terms, implying that the whole thing was quite likely a hoax perpetrated for the sake of publicity by Mr. H. G. Wells, the fabulist. Frost already had a large following, though, and considered himself a sort of lay clergyman. He had taken to wearing white robes, and his followers had no difficulty believing that his rising from an icy sleep held some great mystical import. Accordingly, there was widespread popular support for Frost’s own claim to the alleged time-travel device. What Frost had proposed that had won the heart of the Archbishop yesterday afternoon was that a journey be undertaken to the very dawn of human time, to the Garden itself, where Frost would pluck that treacherous apple out of Eve’s hand by main force and beat the serpent with a stick...
The article carried on in suchlike terms, the journalist sneering openly at the whole notion and lecturing his readers on the perils of gullibility. St. Ives didn’t sneer, though. Frost’s, or Narbondo’s, capacity for generating mayhem and human misery didn’t allow for sneering. The journalist was right, but really he knew nothing at all. Frost would take the machine if he could; but he jolly well wouldn’t travel back to eat lunch with Adam and Eve.
St. Ives scraped up the last of the kippers and watched the meadow grasses blow in the wind. Parsons, too. He intended to make careful scientific journeys, he and his cronies. They knew St. Ives had the machine. The evidence was all circumstantial, but it was sufficient. Two days ago they had finished their search of the sea bottom off Dover. There was no trace of the machine, no wreckage beyond that of the sunken ships. And Parsons had made it very clear to St. Ives that Lord Kelvin, just yesterday afternoon, had recorded strange electromagnetic activity in the immediate area of Harrogate.
Parsons had been diplomatic. St. Ives, he had said, was always the most formidable scientist of them all—far deeper than they had supposed. His interest in the machine, his
pursuit of it, could not have culminated in his destroying it. Parsons admired this, and because he admired it, he had come to appeal to St. Ives to give the thing up peaceably. There was no profit in coming to blows over it. The law was all on the side of the Academy.
Well, today it would come to blows. His future-time self knew that, and had returned to warn him with the chalk markings in the silo. And Parsons was right. The device did belong to the Academy, or at least to Lord Kelvin. When had Kelvin deduced that St. Ives had it? It was conceivable that he suspected it all along, and that he had let St. Ives fiddle away on it, thinking to confiscate it later, after the dog’s work was done.
Hasbro appeared just then. “Secretary Parsons,” he announced.
“Tell him to give me five minutes. Pour him a cup of tea.”
“Very good, sir.”
St. Ives stood up, straightened his clothes, ran his hands through his hair, and went out again at the window, heading at a dead run for the little stable behind the carriage house. Sitting in the parlor, Parsons wouldn’t see him, and given a five-minute head start, St. Ives didn’t care a damn what Parsons saw. Across the meadow the silo stood as ever, but now with the door ajar. They had broken into it, thinking simply to take the machine, but finding it gone. So much for being peaceable. He laughed out loud.
Hurriedly, he threw a saddle onto the back of old Ben, the coach horse, and old Ben immediately inflated his chest so that St. Ives couldn’t cinch the girth tight. “None of your tricks, Ben,” St. Ives warned, but the horse just looked at him, pretending not to understand. There was no time to argue. St. Ives had to get across the river before he was seen. He swung himself into the saddle and walked the horse out through the open stall gate, heading for the river. The saddle was sloppy, and immediately slid to the side, and St. Ives wasted a few precious moments by swinging down and tugging on the girth, trying to cinch it tighter. Old Ben reinflated, though, and St. Ives gave up. There was no time to match wits with a horse, and so he remounted, hunkering over to the left and trotting out toward the willows along the river.
Lord Kelvin's Machine (Langdon St. Ives) Page 23
