Escott gave the impression that nothing was further from his mind. “There’s no such thing as luck, alas,” he said. “There’s merely the blind operation of chance. Of all the superstitions of the ancients, belief in luck—faith in a magical ability to defy the calculus of probability, that is—was the most desperate.”
Langstrade suppressed a frown, obviously having had no intention of setting Hope and Escott off again.
“The trouble with pessimists,” Hope said, serenely, “is that they think luck’s a dirty word, because they think all luck all bad. I don’t—and I wish Lord Langstrade, and Mr. Marlstone, all the luck in the world with regard to the weekend’s endeavors.”
Heatherington had stepped forward, ready to fill the decanter again if need be, but the Earl shook his head. He had obviously had enough intertemporal gravity for one evening. He stubbed out his cigar expressively.
Obedient to the rules of etiquette, his guests did likewise, and drained their glasses.
“Well, chaps,” Langstrade continued, “Mr. Marlstone’s absolutely right about one thing: it really is too late at night for delving into such deep and intricate mysteries. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for my bed now. I look forward to resuming our discussions tomorrow. A cold breakfast will be set out by six, and the hot dishes will be added by seven, but you mustn’t feel any compulsion to be punctual. Don’t feel obliged to follow me up now, either, but I’ve had a busy day and I fear that I must bid you good night.”
The principles of etiquette, of course, made it absolutely compulsory for all the guests to follow their host’s example, and there was an immediate hectic flurry of goodnights directed in every direction, muttered more in confusion than harmony, but effective nevertheless.
Within a matter of minutes, Michael was back in the safe seclusion of the Red Room. He was far too tired to attempt any conscientious reappraisal of the day’s achievements—or, indeed, to do anything else except collapse into bed and dream about Cecilia.
CHAPTER NINE
IN THE HEART OF THE MAZE
Michael got up at five-thirty the next morning, intent on catching the early light. He expected to be the first one down to breakfast, when the last chime of six had hardly died away, and he did find the breakfast-room empty, save for the inevitable servants, but when he made a semi-apologetic comment to Heatherington about his excessive promptitude, the butler told him that Mr. Marlstone had made a special arrangement to have coffee, toast and hard-boiled eggs served in his room, and had already gone to work in the Keep.
Michael wondered whether it might be possible to put in a special order himself for a couple of soft-boiled eggs, but his courage failed him and he settled for bread and marmalade with a glass of milk. The freshness of the produce made up for the poverty of choice. While he ate he studied the paintings on the dining-room walls, and concluded that Lord Langstrade had been absolutely right about his father’s taste in landscapes. He did not know whether to be glad that the standard he would have to surpass was so low, or worried lest his own painting be considered out of keeping with those among which it would supposedly be hung.
No one else appeared while he was eating, and less than a quarter of an hour had passed when Michael set down his napkin and got up from the table. Heatherington immediately hurried to his side, clutching a piece of paper.
“Lady Langstrade asked me to make sure that every guest should have one of these, sir,” the butler said.
Michael took the paper automatically, not realizing until he had looked down at it that it was a map of the Langstrade Maze. Although he had no need of it, it would have been more trouble to hand it back than to keep it, so he thanked Heatherington, folded it up, and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he went back upstairs to collect his equipment.
A few minutes later, having donned his smock, he staggered out of the side door of the Hall, clutching his easel and a bag containing two ready-stretched and primed canvases, a sketch-book, an abundance of charcoal, numerous brushes, several lead tubes stuffed with variously-colored oil paints—which he had carefully mixed himself before leaving London—and a palette.
As he had anticipated, the Maze gave him no trouble at all, and he did not have to take the map out of his pocket at all. His memory had retained a perfect visual image of the layout of the hedges, and he had already worked out the system of turns that would take him to the center with the least possible delay. His path required him to spiral more than half way around the center of the maze five times over, but that did not seem unduly excessive, in a seven-ring maze, and his tread was perfectly resolute.
The approximately-rectangular central clearing at the heart of the maze seemed narrower and more crowded than he had anticipated. As Lady Phythian had vaguely indicated on the train, the space within the innermost hedge measured some fifty yards across, but the bulk of the Keep made the remaining rectangle of lawn very much smaller. The façade of the Keep facing the only exit from the Maze into the central arena was only forty feet broad, but the edifice was surrounded by a moat that added a further five feet all round.
Fortunately, the building was not as deep as it was broad, and it was set back toward the hedge that had no exit, so there was a margin of about twenty-five yards between the Keep’s only door and the exit from the maze. Even so, the Keep seemed to loom up to an alarming height, and Michael immediately began to wonder whether it might not be far more convenient to obtain a much longer perspective, perhaps by building a platform somewhere within the maze that would allow him to look over its hedges. Unfortunately, a platform tall enough to let him see the whole of the doorway—not to mention the entirety of the yew-tree that was growing to the right of the door and obviously predated everything else in the vicinity by several decades—would have been uncomfortably vertiginous as well as impractical, so he had no alternative but to make the best of his less-than-desirable proximity.
After comparing several candidate positions, and studying the Keep at closer range—which revealed that the moat was almost empty of water, thanks to the recent lack of rain, although it retained a thick layer of fetid mud—Michael eventually set up his easel to the left of the exit from the maze, so that he was at an angle of about thirty-five degrees from the yew tree, relative to the parallel lines of the innermost hedge and the Keep’s façade.
He placed one of the canvases on the easel, selected a piece of charcoal and took a deep breath by way of mental preparation. Then he studied the façade of the Keep carefully, noting the exact height of the loophole-like windows that were its only source of daylight, and the angles they made with the top of the arched doorway and the crenellations of the fake battlements. The resultant diagram imprinted itself in his mind just as the diagram of the Maze had done, and his hand transferred the key points to the canvas as charcoal strokes positioned with perfect accuracy.
If only I were capable of such precision in everyday matters, Michael thought. When I’m in society, though, or going about my domestic occupations, I’m no more than an unskillful sketch of my real self—assuming that the artist is my real self.
He had hardly begun to fill in the principal lines connecting the key points, providing the outlines of the Keep, the yew, the opposite faced of the hedge and the distant scar, when Gregory Marlstone suddenly emerged from the building’s dark interior.
Marlstone set himself squarely upon the little drawbridge that spanned the empty moat in front of the door, almost as if he were getting ready to defend the edifice against some marauding horde, and stared at the painter for a few seconds before advancing across the lawn to speak to him.
“Lord Langstrade assured me that I was to have exclusive use of the Keep today, Mr. Laurel.” Marlstone said.
“And so you may, sir,” Michael assured him. “I shall not need to come any closer than my present position in order to execute my commission.”
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p; Marlstone appeared to be making an effort not to scowl, although the alignment of his features was unsympathetic to the process of repression. “Do you intend to remain here very long?” he asked.
“For as long as the daylight lasts,” Michael told him. “I shall take an hour’s break to let the initial washes dry—which will give me time for a spot of lunch—but I have a lot of work to do today, and I need to take full advantage of the clear skies.
“That won’t be possible, I’m afraid,” Marlstone said.
“I, too, am working at Lord Langstrade’s request,” Michael pointed out, although what he actually had in mind was Cecilia’s irresistible command. He did not stop sketching while he engaged in the verbal combat.
“I have nothing against you, my dear fellow,” Marlstone said, still striving for politeness and amiability. “Indeed, I suppose I owe you a small debt of gratitude for the assistance you attempted to render last night, when those clowns Hope and Escott were trying to provoke me, but I fear that I can’t grant you more than two hours this morning, at the most. I must ask you to leave by nine-thirty. I need to be left alone for the remainder of the day.”
“I have a deadline too, Mr. Marlstone,” Michael told him, stubbornly. “Although I could, in principle, put the finishing touches to my painting in London, I really ought to make every effort to complete it within the next four days, before I catch the train to London on Tuesday morning. In order to have any chance of doing that, I need to make a very solid start today, on the painting as well as the sketching. Oil-paint takes time to dry, you see, and I shall need to apply it in several careful stages. I assure you that I shall not set foot in the F…the Keep, and will not disturb you in the least.”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Laurel,” Marlstone informed him, flatly. “As soon as my assistants have completed the assembly of the machine’s principal parts—which, with luck, will not take more than two hours—then I shall need to run a series of tests in preparation for tomorrow’s demonstration. Although I shall not make any attempt to set up an extensive field until noon tomorrow, when the conditions will be most propitious, I shall have to establish a series of limited fields today, in order to bring the machine into readiness, and there may be some danger of…leakage.”
“Leakage of what?” Michael enquired, innocently.
“What I mean,” Marlstone said, making an obvious effort to find words that a mere artist might be able to comprehend, “is that the experimental time-fields set up momentarily within the Keep might, on occasion, extend beyond its walls, perhaps as far as your present position. Would it be possible, do you think, to make your preliminary sketches from outside the maze?”
“I’m afraid not,” Michael said. “It’s not just that I need to be able to see the doorway, the moat and the yew, but that I have to organize the composition relative to the background. Would it be possible for you to run your preliminary tests after dusk, when I shall be forced to retire to the Hall?”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Marlstone said, grimly, seemingly ruling out any possibility of negotiation on that score.
“In that case,” Michael said, “might I not be allowed to take the risk of remaining here, assuming full responsibility for any danger I might run? Given that I shall certainly not impede your work in any way, I don’t see how you could have any objection to that. You’re obviously prepared to run the relevant risks yourself, and I’m inclined to trust your judgment, even though I don’t have the least idea how your machine is supposed to work, let alone what side-effects it might produce. Given that the entire house-party will be here tomorrow, when you activate the machine at full power, and all the people then gathered here will be vulnerable to any perils your machine might produce, I really can’t see that you can object to my solitary presence while you run your preliminary tests.” He was still working away assiduously, although he knew that it was rather rude of him to continue the conversation while hardly sparing his interlocutor a sideways glance.
“A scientist has to be prepared to take risks in the course of experimentation,” Marlstone said, loftily, “but he has no right to expose others to such risks until he is certain that he has done everything possible to minimize them. The whole point of choosing noon tomorrow for the demonstration is that it should be relatively easy to establish a secure and stable temporal field at that time, with a clearly-defined range in both duration and spatial area. The fields I shall establish today, in order to adjust the apparatus, will be very brief in duration, but also highly unstable. Unlikely as it is that they will obtain any significant resonance from other points in the temporal continuum, there is a small possibility that exotic mental and visual effects might be produced.”
Michael’s hand had begun to tremble slightly, under the strain of the dispute, and he had to step back from his canvas and take a firm grip on himself. “I quite understand, Mr. Marlstone,” he said, “how important the success of your demonstration is, not merely to you but to science. By comparison, a landscape painting undertaken by an unknown artist must seem a very trivial matter—but in the context of my own life and hopes, this commission is not trivial at all. My entire future might depend on it. I’m more than willing to run the risk of a few exotic mental and visual effects in order to accomplish it swiftly and with maximum effect. If you’re afraid that I might interfere with your work, or attempt to spy on it, you can always bolt the door of the Keep and raise the drawbridge.”
Marlstone scowled so magnificently that Michael was tempted to take out his sketch-book and start drawing, in order to record the expression for posterity. “The door has no bolt and the drawbridge is a fake,” the inventor stated. “There is no mechanism inside by means of which it can be taken up. Lord Langstrade, being concerned purely with appearances, evidently thought it an unnecessary expense.”
“In that case,” Michael said, “you’ll have to be content with leaving the door on the latch and taking my word for it that I’ll remain by my easel—but I will remain by my easel for as long as I think it necessary, whatever the risk. If you’re prepared to accept that risk, so am I. Did you run your tests successfully before your attempted demonstrations at Horton Lacey and Chatsworth?”
Marlstone was slightly taken aback by that, but his reply was simple enough. “Yes, I did,” he said.
“Well, you seem to have come through those experiences quite unscathed. What mental and visual effects did you experience?”
The inventor seemed a trifle reluctant to answer that question, but he relented soon enough, perhaps because he thought it his moral duty to warn Michael what might happen, and perhaps because he could not, in the end, resist the temptation to share his secret.
“I experienced a sort of vertigo,” Marlstone admitted, “and a curious confusion of thought, almost as if I were no longer in sole possession of my own mind and body—although I can only suppose that the latter effect was an illusion caused by the temporal redistribution of my own personality. I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm to obtain a second description of such phenomena, given that they must have a significant subjective element, and my own experience might not be typical. As to what I saw…well, I saw myself. That wasn’t particularly surprising, given that I was alone when I conducted the tests, and that the only person I could possibly have seen, by gazing through time across an interval of a few minutes, was me. The images were odd, though: attenuated almost to the point of transparency and.…” He hesitated, searching for an appropriate term.
“Sketchy,” Michael supplied, remembering his improvisation of the previous evening.
“Unsteady,” Marlstone concluded. “Other objects in the vicinity also became blurred, probably because of the superimposition of competing visual imagery from slightly different times.”
“Times in the plural,” Michael observed. “You didn’t manage to stabilize the field, then?”
“That was
n’t really the problem,” Marlstone said, drawn into discussion in spite of a gathering impatience that was evidently urging to put an end to the confrontation. “In my judgment, the effect was due to…well, to extend the musical analogy we were using last night, I suppose one might liken them to overtones: the subsidiary elements making up a complex musical tone, and determining its quality. It’s a crude analogy, but not inapt.”
“I see,” said Michael, feeling rather like the proverbial blind man who said “I see” when he couldn’t see at all. “Did these overtones have anything to do with the fact that your demonstrations failed when you tried to increase the magnitude of the field?”
“I don’t think so. I’m almost certain that the fault was in the regulatory apparatus maintaining the fundamental harmonic, which needs to be very precise if…well, extending the same crude analogy to rather absurd extremes, if the resonance between the machine and the intrinsic subvibrations of time is to be perfect and sustained. Otherwise, the necessary homeostasis—stabilizing feedback, in layman’s parlance—can’t be maintained and the whole ensemble becomes, as it were, discordant, not so say cacophonous. I’ve done everything possible since the last catastrophe to refine the mechanism—but in order to make quite sure of that, I need to extend the range of my preparatory tests today, making them more elaborate than before. You really would be well advised to leave, Mr. Laurel, when I send my assistants away. If all goes well, I suppose it might be safe for you to return later—at three o’clock, say—but if there’s any hitch.…” He trailed off.
“I must repeat,” Michael said, “that I need to work to my own timetable—or, rather, the timetable dictated by the necessity of completing the painting in good time. That is what Ce…Lord Langstrade would wish me to do,” Michael felt proud of his amazing steadfastness in the face of menaces and ominous warnings, which was quite uncharacteristic of his normal, rather timorous self. What an enigmatic caprice love is! he thought.
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine Page 10
