by John Wyndham
‘Tavia,’ he said. ‘Come here!’
She didn’t stop talking hurriedly into the telephone. The man stepped forward.
‘Steady on!’ I said. ‘First, I’d like to know what all this is about.’
He looked at my squarely.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said, and raised his arm to push me out of the way.
I have always felt that I would strongly dislike people who tell me that I don’t understand, and try to push me off my own threshold. I socked him hard in the stomach, and as he doubled up I pushed him outside and closed the door.
‘They’re coming,’ said the girl’s voice behind me. ‘The police are coming.’
‘If you’d just tell me –’ I began. But she pointed.
‘Look out! – at the window,’ she said.
I turned. There was another man outside, dressed similarly to the first who was still audibly wheezing on the doorstep. He was hesitating. I reached my twelve-bore off the wall, grabbed some cartridges from the drawer, and loaded it. Then I stood back, facing the door.
‘Open it, and keep behind it,’ I told her.
She obeyed, doubtfully.
Outside, the second man was now bending solicitously over the first. A third man was coming up the path. They saw the gun, and we had a brief tableau.
‘You there,’ I said. ‘You can either beat it quick, or stay and argue it out with the police. Which is it to be?’
‘But you don’t understand. It is most important –’ began one of them.
‘All right. Then you can stay there and tell the police how important it is,’ I said, and nodded to the girl to close the door again.
We watched through the window as the two of them helped the winded man away.
The police, when they arrived, were not amiable. They took down my description of the men reluctantly, and departed coolly. Meanwhile, there was the girl.
She had told the police as little as she well could – simply that she had been pursued by three oddly dressed men and had appealed to me for help. She had refused their offer of a lift to Plyton in the police car, so here she still was.
‘Well, now,’ I suggested, ‘perhaps you’d like to explain to me just what seems to be going on?’
She sat quite still facing me with a long level look which had a tinge of – sadness? – disappointment? – well, unsatisfactoriness of some kind. For a moment I wondered if she were going to cry, but in a small voice she said:
‘I had your letter – and now I’ve burned my boats.’
I sat down opposite to her. After fumbling a bit I found my cigarettes and lit one.
‘You – er – had my letter, and now you’ve – er – burned your boats?’ I repeated.
‘Yes,’ she said. Her eyes left mine and strayed round the room, not seeing much.
‘And now you don’t even know me,’ she said.
Whereupon the tears came, fast.
I sat there helplessly for a half-minute. Then I decided to go into the kitchen and put on the kettle while she had it out. All my female relatives have always regarded tea as the prime panacea, so I brought the pot and cups back with me when I returned.
I found her recovered, sitting staring pensively at the unlit fire. I put a match to it. She watched it take light and burn, with the expression of a child who has just received a present.
‘Lovely,’ she said, as though a fire were something completely novel. She looked all round the room again. ‘Lovely,’ she repeated.
‘Would you like to pour?’ I suggested, but she shook her head, and watched me do it.
‘Tea,’ she said. ‘By a fireside!’
Which was true enough, but scarcely remarkable.
‘I think it is about time we introduced ourselves,’ I suggested. ‘I am Gerald Lattery.’
‘Of course,’ she said, nodding. It was not to my mind an altogether appropriate reply, but she followed it up by: ‘I am Octavia Lattery – they usually call me Tavia.’
Tavia? – Something clinked in my mind, but did not quite chime.
‘We are related in some way?’ I asked her.
‘Yes – very distantly,’ she said, looking at me oddly. ‘Oh, dear,’ she added, ‘this is difficult,’ and looked as if she were about to cry again.
‘Tavia … ?’ I repeated, trying to remember. ‘There’s something …’ Then I had a sudden vision of an embarrassed elderly gentleman. ‘Why, of course; now what was the name? Doctor – Doctor Bogey, or something?’
She suddenly sat quite still.
‘Not – not Doctor Gobie?’ she suggested.
‘Yes, that’s it. He asked me about somebody called Tavia. That would be you?’
‘He isn’t here?’ she said, looking round as if he might be hiding in a corner.
I told her it would be about two years ago now. She relaxed.
‘Silly old Uncle Donald. How like him! And naturally you’d have no idea what he was talking about?’
‘I’ve very little more now,’ I pointed out, ‘though I can understand how even an uncle might be agitated at losing you.’
‘Yes. I’m afraid he will be – very,’ she said.
‘Was: this was two years ago,’ I reminded her.
‘Oh, of course you don’t really understand yet, do you?’
‘Look,’ I told her. ‘One after another, people keep on telling me that I don’t understand. I know that already – it is about the only thing I do understand.’
‘Yes. I’d better explain. Oh dear, where shall I begin?’ I let her ponder that, uninterrupted. Presently she said: ‘Do you believe in predestination?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I told her.
‘Oh – no, well perhaps it isn’t quite that, after all – more like a sort of affinity. You see, ever since I was quite tiny I remember thinking this was the most thrilling and wonderful age – and then, of course, it was the time in which the only famous person in our family lived. So I thought it was marvellous. Romantic, I suppose you’d call it.’
‘It depends whether you mean the thought or the age …’ I began, but she took no notice.
‘I used to picture the great fleets of funny little aircraft during the wars, and think how they were like David going out to hit Goliath, so tiny and brave. And there were the huge clumsy ships, wallowing slowly along, but getting there somehow in the end, and nobody minding how slow they were. And quaint black and white films; and horses in the streets; and shaky old internal combustion engines; and coal fires; and exciting bombings; and trains running on rails; and telephones with wires; and, oh, lots of things. And the things one could do! Fancy being at the first night of a new Shaw play, or a new Coward play, in a real theatre! Or getting a brand-new T. S. Eliot, on publishing day. Or seeing the Queen drive by to open Parliament. A wonderful, thrilling time!’
‘Well, it’s nice to hear somebody think so,’ I said. ‘My own view of the age doesn’t quite –’
‘Ah, but that’s only to be expected. You haven’t any perspective on it, so you can’t appreciate it. It’d do you good to live in ours for a bit, and see how flat and stale and uniform everything is – so deadly, deadly dull.’
I boggled a little: ‘I don’t think I quite – er, live in your what?’
‘Century, of course. The Twenty-Second. Oh, of course, you don’t know. How silly of me.’
I concentrated on pouring out some more tea.
‘Oh dear, I knew this was going to be difficult,’ she remarked. ‘Do you find it difficult?’
I said I did, rather. She went on with a dogged air:
‘Well, you see, feeling like that about it is why I took up history. I mean, I could really think myself into history – some of it. And then getting your letter on my birthday was really what made me take the mid Twentieth Century as my Special Period for my Honours Degree, and, of course, it made up my mind for me to go on and do postgraduate work.’
‘Er – my letter did all this?’
‘Well, that
was the only way, wasn’t it? I mean there simply wasn’t any other way I could have got near a history-machine except by working in a history laboratory, was there? And even then I doubt whether I’d have had a chance to use it on my own if it hadn’t been Uncle Donald’s lab.’
‘History-machine,’ I said, grasping a straw out of all this. ‘What is a history-machine?’
She looked puzzled.
‘It’s well – a history-machine. You learn history with it.’
‘Not lucid,’ I said. ‘You might as well tell me you make history with it.’
‘Oh, no. One’s not supposed to do that. It’s a very serious offence.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I tried again: ‘About this letter –’
‘Well, I had to bring that in to explain about history, but you won’t have written it yet, of course, so I expect you find it a bit confusing.’
‘Confusing,’ I told her, ‘is scarcely the word. Can’t we get hold of something concrete? This letter I’m supposed to have written, for instance. What was it about?’
She looked at me hard, and then away. A most surprising blush swept up her face, and ran into her hair. She made herself look back at me again. I watched her eyes go shiny, and then pucker at the corners. She dropped her face suddenly into her hands.
‘Oh, you don’t love me, you don’t,’ she wailed. ‘I wish I’d never come. I wish I was dead!’
‘She sort of – sniffed at me,’ said Tavia.
‘Well, she’s gone now, and my reputation with her,’ I said. ‘An excellent worker, our Mrs Toombs, but conventional. She’ll probably throw up the job.’
‘Because I’m here? How silly!’
‘Perhaps your conventions are different.’
‘But where else could I go? I’ve only a few shillings of your kind of money, and nobody to go to.’
‘Mrs Toombs could scarcely know that.’
‘But we weren’t, I mean we didn’t –’
‘Night, and the figure two,’ I told her, ‘are plenty for our conventions. In fact, two is enough, anyway. You will recall that the animals simply went in two by two; their emotional relationships didn’t interest anyone. Two; and all is assumed.’
‘Oh, of course, I remember, there was no probative then – now, I mean. You have a sort of rigid, lucky-dip, take-it-or-leave-it system.’
‘There are other ways of expressing it, but – well, ostensibly at any rate, yes, I suppose.’
‘Rather crude, these old customs, when one sees them at close range – but fascinating,’ she remarked. Her eyes rested thoughtfully upon me for a second. ‘You –’ she began.
‘You,’ I reminded her, ‘promised to give me a more explanatory explanation of all this than you achieved yesterday.’
‘You didn’t believe me.’
‘The first wallop took my breath,’ I admitted, ‘but you’ve given me enough evidence since. Nobody could keep up an act like that.’
She frowned.
‘I don’t think that’s very kind of you. I’ve studied the mid Twentieth very thoroughly. It was my Special Period.’
‘So you told me, but that doesn’t get me far. All historical scholars have Special Periods, but that doesn’t mean that they suddenly turn up in them.’
She stared at me. ‘But of course they do – licensed historians. How else would they make close studies?’
‘There’s too much of this “of course” business,’ I told her. ‘I suggest we just begin at the beginning. Now this letter of mine – no, we’ll skip the letter,’ I added hastily as I caught her expression. ‘Now, you went to work in your uncle’s laboratory with something called a history-machine. What’s that – a kind of tape-recorder?’
‘Good gracious, no. It’s a kind of cupboard thing you get into to go to times and places.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You – you mean you can walk into it in 21something, and walk out into 19something?’
‘Or any other past time,’ she said, nodding. ‘But, of course, not anybody can do it. You have to be qualified and licensed and all that kind of thing. There are only six permitted history-machines in England, and only about a hundred in the whole world, and they’re very strict about them.
‘When the first ones were made they didn’t realize what trouble they might cause, but after a time historians began to check the trips made against the written records of the periods, and started to find funny things. There was Hero demonstrating a simple steam-turbine at Alexandria sometime B.C.; and Archimedes using a kind of napalm at the siege of Syracuse; and Leonardo da Vinci drawing parachutes when there wasn’t anything to parachute from; and Eric the Red discovering America in a sort of off-the-record way before Columbus got there; and Napoleon wondering about submarines; and lots of other suspicious things. So it was clear that some people had been careless when they used the machine, and had been causing chronoclasms.’
‘Causing – what?’
‘Chronoclasms – that’s when a thing goes and happens at the wrong time because somebody was careless, or talked rashly.
‘Well, most of these things had happened without causing very much harm – as far as we can tell – though it is possible that the natural course of history was altered several times, and people write very clever papers to show how. But everybody saw that the results might be extremely dangerous. Just suppose that somebody had carelessly given Napoleon the idea of the internal combustion engine to add to the idea of the submarine; there’s no telling what would have happened. So they decided that tampering must be stopped at once, and all history-machines were forbidden except those licensed by the Historians’ Council.’
‘Just hold it a minute,’ I said. ‘Look, if a thing is done, it’s done. I mean, well, for example, I am here. I couldn’t suddenly cease to be, or to have been, if somebody were to go back and kill my grandfather when he was a boy.’
‘But you certainly couldn’t be here if they did, could you?’ she asked. ‘No, the fallacy that the past is unchangeable didn’t matter a bit as long as there was no means of changing it, but once there was, and the fallacy of the idea was shown, we had to be very careful indeed. That’s what a historian has to worry about; the other side – just how it happens – we leave to the higher-mathematicians.
‘Now, before you are allowed to use the history-machine you have to have special courses, tests, permits, and give solemn undertakings, and then do several years on probation before you get your licence to practise. Only then are you allowed to visit and observe on your own. And that is all you may do, observe. The rule is very, very strict.’
I thought that over. ‘If it isn’t an unkind question – aren’t you breaking rather a lot of these rules every minute?’ I suggested.
‘Of course I am. That’s why they came after me,’ she said.
‘You’d have had your licence revoked, or something, if they’d caught you?’
‘Good gracious. I could never qualify for a licence. I’ve just sneaked my trips when the lab has been empty sometimes. It being Uncle Donald’s lab made things easier because unless I was actually caught at the machine I could always pretend I was doing something special for him.
‘I had to have the right clothes to come in, but I dared not go to the historians’ regular costume-makers, so I sketched some things in a museum and got them copied – they’re all right, aren’t they?’
‘Very successful, and becoming, too,’ I assured her. ‘– Though there is a little something about the shoes.’
She looked down at her feet. ‘I was afraid so. I couldn’t find any of quite the right date,’ she admitted. ‘Well, then,’ she went on, ‘I was able to make a few short trial trips. They had to be short because duration is constant – that is, an hour here is the same as an hour there – and I couldn’t get the machine to myself for long at a time. But yesterday a man came into the lab just as I was getting back. When he saw these clothes he knew at once what I was doing, so the only thing I could do was to jump straight back into the mac
hine – I’d never have had another chance. And they came after me without even bothering to change.’
‘Do you think they’ll come again?’ I asked her.
‘I expect so. But they’ll be wearing proper clothes for the period next time.’
‘Are they likely to be desperate? I mean would they shoot, or anything like that?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, no. That’d be a pretty bad chronoclasm – particularly if they happened to kill somebody.’
‘But you being here must be setting up a series of pretty resounding chronoclasms. Which would be worse?’
‘Oh, mine are all accounted for. I looked it up,’ she assured me, obscurely. ‘They’ll be less worried about me when they’ve thought of looking it up, too.’
She paused briefly. Then, with an air of turning to a more interesting subject, she went on:
‘When people in your time get married they have to dress up in a special way for it, don’t they?’
The topic seemed to have a fascination for her.
‘M’m,’ mumbled Tavia. ‘I think I rather like Twentieth-Century marriage.’
‘It has risen higher in my own estimation, darling,’ I admitted. And inded, I was quite surprised to find how much higher it had risen in the course of the last month or so.
‘Do Twentieth-Century marrieds always have one big bed, darling?’ she inquired.
‘Invariably, darling,’ I assured her.
‘Funny,’ she said. ‘Not very hygienic, of course, but quite nice all the same.’
We reflected on that.
‘Darling, have you noticed she doesn’t sniff at me any more?’ she remarked.
‘We always cease to sniff on production of a certificate, darling,’ I explained.
Conversation pursued its desultory way on topics of personal, but limited, interest for a while. Eventually it reached a point where I was saying:
‘It begins to look as if we don’t need to worry any more about those men who were chasing you, darling. They’d have been back long before now if they had been as worried as you thought.’
She shook her head.
‘We’ll have to go on being careful, but it is queer. Something to do with Uncle Donald, I expect. He’s not really mechanically minded, poor dear. Well, you can tell that by the way he set the machine two years wrong when he came to see you. But there’s nothing we can do except wait, and be careful.’