“You liked it?”
“It was very impressive.”
Dirk was getting a little impatient. He shot a look to that effect at Richard.
“And I can quite see,” said Richard firmly, “why it’s impossible for you to tell me. I was just interested, that’s all. Sorry I asked.”
“Well,” said Reg in a sudden seizure of doubt, “I suppose . . . Well, so long as you absolutely promise not to tell anyone else,” he carried on, “I suppose you can probably work out for yourself that I used two of the salt cellars on the table. No one was going to notice the difference between one and another. The quickness of the hand, you know, deceives the eye, particularly some of the eyes around that table. While I was fiddling with my woolly hat, giving, though I say so myself, a very cunning simulation of clumsiness and muddle, I simply slipped the salt cellar down my sleeve. You see?”
His earlier agitation had been swept away completely by his pleasure in showing off his craft.
“It’s the oldest trick in the world, in fact,” he continued, “but nevertheless takes a great deal of skill and deftness. Then a little later, of course, I returned it to the table with the appearance of simply passing it to someone else. Takes years of practice, of course, to make it look natural, but I much prefer it to simply slipping the thing down to the floor. Amateur stuff that. You can’t pick it up, and the cleaners never notice it for at least a fortnight. I once had a dead thrush under my seat for a month. No trick involved there, of course. Cat killed it.”
Reg beamed.
Richard felt he had done his bit, but hadn’t the faintest idea where it was supposed to have got them. He glanced at Dirk, who gave him no help whatsoever, so he plunged on blindly.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, I understand that that can be done by sleight of hand. What I don’t understand is how the salt cellar got embedded in the pot.”
Reg looked puzzled once again, as if they were all talking at cross purposes. He looked at Dirk, who stopped pacing and stared at him with bright, expectant eyes.
“Well, that’s . . . perfectly straightforward,” said Reg. “Didn’t take any conjuring skill at all. I nipped out for my hat, you remember?”
“Yes,” said Richard, doubtfully.
“Well,” said Reg, “while I was out of the room I went to find the man who made the pot. Took some time, of course. About three weeks of detective work to track him down and another couple of days to sober him up, and then with a little difficulty I persuaded him to bake the salt cellar into the pot for me. After that I briefly stopped off somewhere to find some, er, powder to disguise the suntan, and of course I had to time the return a little carefully so as to make it all look natural. I bumped into myself in the anteroom, which I always find embarrassing, I never know where to look, but, er . . . well, there you have it.”
He smiled a rather bleak and nervous smile.
Richard tried to nod, but eventually gave up.
“What on earth are you talking about?” he said.
Reg looked at him in surprise.
“I thought you said you knew my secret,” he said.
“I do,” said Dirk, with a beam of triumph. “He, as yet, does not, though he furnished all the information I needed to discover it. Let me,” he added, “fill in a couple of little blanks. In order to help disguise the fact that you had in fact been away for weeks when as far as anyone sitting at the table was concerned you had only popped out of the door for a couple of seconds, you had to write down for your own reference the last thing you said, in order that you could pick up the thread of conversation again as naturally as possible. An important detail if your memory is not what it once was. Yes?”
“What it once was,” said Reg, slowly shaking his white head. “I can hardly remember what it once was. But yes, you are very sharp to pick up such a detail.”
“And then there is the little matter,” continued Dirk, “of the questions that George the Third asked. Asked you.”
This seemed to catch Reg quite by surprise.
“He asked you,” continued Dirk, consulting a small notebook he had pulled from his pocket, “if there was any particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Did he not also ask you, and ask you first, if it was possible to move backward in time, or something of that kind?”
Reg gave Dirk a long and appraising look.
“I was right about you,” he said, “you have a very remarkable mind, young man.” He walked slowly over to the window that looked out onto Second Court. He watched the odd figures scuttling through it hugging themselves in the drizzle or pointing at things.
“Yes,” said Reg at last in a subdued voice, “that is precisely what he said.”
“Good,” said Dirk, snapping shut his notebook with a tight little smile which said that he lived for such praise, “then that explains why the answers were ‘yes, no and maybe’—in that order. Now. Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“The time machine.”
“You’re standing in it,” said Reg.
26
A PARTY OF noisy people spilled into the train at Bishop’s Stortford. Some were wearing morning suits with carnations looking a little battered by a day’s festivity. The women of the party were in smart dresses and hats, chattering excitedly about how pretty Julia had looked in all that silk taffeta, how Ralph still looked like a smug oaf even done up in all his finery, and generally giving the whole thing about two weeks.
One of the men stuck his head out of the window and hailed a passing railway employee just to check that this was the right train and was stopping at Cambridge. The porter confirmed that of course it bloody was. The young man said that they didn’t all want to find they were going off in the wrong direction, did they, and made a sound a little like that of a fish barking, as if to indicate that this was a pricelessly funny remark, and then pulled his head back in, banging it on the way.
The alcohol content of the atmosphere in the carriage rose sharply.
There seemed to be a general feeling in the air that the best way of getting themselves in the right mood for the post-wedding reception party that evening was to make a foray to the bar so that any members of the party who were not already completely drunk could finish the task. Rowdy shouts of acclamation greeted this notion, the train restarted with a jolt, and a lot of those still standing fell over.
Three young men dropped into the three empty seats around one table, of which the fourth was already taken by a sleekly overweight man in an old-fashioned suit. He had a lugubrious face and his large, wet, cowlike eyes gazed into some unknown distance.
Very slowly his eyes began to refocus all the way from infinity and gradually to home in on his more immediate surroundings, his new and intrusive companions. There was a need he felt, as he had felt before.
The three men were discussing loudly whether they would all go to the bar, whether some of them would go to the bar and bring back drinks for the others, whether the ones who went to the bar would get so excited by all the drinks there that they would stay put and forget to bring any back for the others who would be sitting here anxiously awaiting their return, and whether even if they did remember to come back immediately with the drinks they would actually be capable of carrying them and wouldn’t simply throw them all over the carriage on the way back, incommoding other passengers.
Some sort of consensus seemed to be reached, but almost immediately none of them could remember what it was. Two of them got up, then sat down again as the third one got up. Then he sat down.
The two other ones stood up again, expressing the idea that it might be simpler if they just bought the entire bar.
The third was about to get up again and follow them, when slowly, but with unstoppable purpose, the cow-eyed man sitting opposite him leaned across and gripped him firmly by the forearm.
The young man in his morning suit looked up as sharply as his somewhat bubbly brain would allow and, s
tartled, said, “What do you want?”
Michael Wenton-Weakes gazed into his eyes with terrible intensity, and said, in a low voice, “I was on a ship . . .”
“What?”
“A ship . . .” said Michael.
“What ship, what are you talking about? Get off me. Let go!”
“We came,” continued Michael, in a quiet, almost inaudible, but compelling voice, “a monstrous distance. We came to build a paradise. A paradise. Here.”
His eyes swam briefly around the carriage and then gazed briefly out through the spattered windows at the gathering gloom of a drizzly East Anglian evening. He gazed with evident loathing. His grip on the other’s forearm tightened.
“Look, I’m going for a drink,” said the wedding guest, though feebly, because he clearly wasn’t.
“We left behind those who would destroy themselves with war,” murmured Michael. “Ours was to be a world of peace, of music, of art, of enlightenment. All that was petty, all that was mundane, all that was contemptible would have no place in our world . . .”
The stilled reveler looked at Michael wonderingly. He didn’t look like an old hippie. Of course, you never could tell. His own elder brother had once spent a couple of years living in a Druidic commune, eating LSD doughnuts, and thinking he was a tree, since when he had gone on to become a director of a merchant bank. The difference, of course, was that he hardly ever still thought he was a tree, except just occasionally, and he had long ago learned to avoid the particular claret which sometimes triggered off that flashback.
“There were those who said we would fail,” continued Michael in his low tone that carried clearly under the boisterous noise that filled the carriage, “who prophesied that we too carried in us the seed of war, but it was our high resolve and purpose that only art and beauty should flourish, the highest art, the highest beauty—music. We took with us only those who believed, who wished it to be true.”
“But what are you talking about?” asked the wedding guest, though not challengingly, for he had fallen under Michael’s mesmeric spell. “When was this? Where was this?”
Michael breathed hard. “Before you were born—” he said at last. “Be still, and I will tell you.”
27
THERE WAS A long startled silence during which the evening gloom outside seemed to darken appreciably and gather the room into its grip. A trick of the light wreathed Reg in shadows.
Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific loquacity, wordless. His eyes shone with a child’s wonder as they passed anew around the dull and shabby furniture of the room, the paneled walls, the threadbare carpets.
His hands were trembling.
Richard frowned faintly to himself for a moment as if he was trying to work out the square root of something in his head, and then looked back directly at Reg.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I have absolutely no idea,” said Reg brightly. “Much of my memory’s gone completely. I am very old, you see. Startlingly old. Yes, I think if I were to tell you how old I was it would be fair to say that you would be startled. Odds are that so would I, because I can’t remember. I’ve seen an awful lot, you know. Forgotten most of it, thank God. Trouble is, when you start getting to my age, which, as I think I mentioned earlier, is a somewhat startling one—did I say that?”
“Yes, you did mention it.”
“Good. I’d forgotten whether I had or not. The thing is that your memory doesn’t actually get any bigger, and a lot of stuff just falls out. So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I’ve forgotten. And after a while you even forget what it is you’ve forgotten, and after that you even forget that there was something to remember. Then you tend to forget, er, what it was you were talking about.”
He stared helplessly at the teapot.
“Things you remember . . .” prompted Richard gently.
“Smells and earrings.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Those are things that linger for some reason,” said Reg shaking his head in a puzzled way. He sat down suddenly. “The earrings that Queen Victoria wore on her Silver Jubilee. Quite startling objects. Toned down in the pictures of the period, of course. The smell of the streets before there were cars in them. Hard to say which was worse. That’s why Cleopatra remains so vividly in the memory, of course. A quite devastating combination of earrings and smell. I think that will probably be the last thing that remains when all else has finally fled. I shall sit alone in a darkened room, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything but a little gray old head, and in that little gray old head a peculiar vision of hideous blue and gold dangling things flashing in the light, and the smell of sweat, cat food and death. I wonder what I shall make of it . . .”
Dirk was scarcely breathing as he began to move slowly round the room, gently brushing his fingertips over the walls, the sofa, the table.
“How long,” he said, “has this been—?”
“Here?” said Reg. “Just about two hundred years. Ever since I retired.”
“Retired from what?”
“Search me. Must have been something pretty good, though, what do you think?”
“You mean you’ve been in this same set of rooms here for . . . two hundred years?” murmured Richard. “You’d think someone would notice, or think it was odd.”
“Oh, that’s one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,” said Reg, “everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we’d be here till Christmas. Svlad, er—Dirk, my dear fellow, please don’t touch that just at the moment.”
Dirk’s hand was reaching out to touch the abacus standing on its own on the only clear spot on the big table.
“What is it?” said Dirk sharply.
“It’s just what it looks like, an old wooden abacus,” said Reg. “I’ll show you in a moment, but first I must congratulate you on your powers of perception. May I ask how you arrived at the solution?”
“I have to admit,” said Dirk with rare humility, “that I did not. In the end I asked a child. I told him the story of the trick and asked him how he thought it had been done and he said, and I quote, ‘It’s bleedin’ obvious, innit, he must’ve ’ad a bleedin’ time machine.’ I thanked the little fellow and gave him a shilling for his trouble.
He kicked me rather sharply on the shin and went about his business. But he was the one who solved it. My only contribution to the matter was to see that he must be right. He had even saved me the bother of kicking myself.”
“But you had the perception to think of asking a child,” said Reg. “Well then, I congratulate you on that instead.”
Dirk was still eying the abacus suspiciously.
“How . . . does it work?” he said, trying to make it sound like a casual enquiry.
“Well, it’s really terribly simple,” said Reg, “it works any way you want it to. You see, the computer that runs it is a rather advanced one. In fact it is more powerful than the sum total of all the computers on this planet including—and this is the tricky part—including itself. Never really understood that bit myself, to be honest with you. But over ninety-five percent of that power is used in simply understanding what it is you want it to do. I simply plonk my abacus down there and it understands the way I use it. I think I must have been brought up to use an abacus when I was a . . . well, a child, I suppose.
“Richard, for instance, would probably want to use his own personal computer. If you put it down there, where the abacus is, the machine’s computer would simply take charge of it and offer you lots of nice user-friendly time-travel applications complete with pull-down menus and desk accessories if you like. Except that you point to 1066 on the screen and you’ve got the Battle of Hastings going on outside your door, er, if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in.”
Reg’s tone of voice suggested that his own interests lay in othe
r areas.
“It’s, er, really quite fun in its way,” he concluded. “Certainly better than television and a great deal easier to use than a video recorder. If I miss a program I just pop back in time and watch it. I’m hopeless fiddling with all those buttons.”
Dirk reacted with horror at this revelation.
“You have a time machine and you use it for . . . watching television?”
“Well, I wouldn’t use it at all if I could get the hang of the video recorder. It’s a very delicate business, time travel, you know. Full of appalling traps and dangers. If you should change the wrong thing in the past, you could entirely disrupt the course of history.
“Plus, of course, it mucks up the telephone. I’m sorry,” he said to Richard a little sheepishly, “that you were unable to phone your young lady last night. There seems to be something fundamentally inexplicable about the British telephone system, and my time machine doesn’t like it. There’s never any problem with the plumbing, the electricity, or even the gas. The connection interfaces are taken care of at some quantum level I don’t entirely understand, and it’s never been a problem.
“The phone on the other hand is definitely a problem. Every time I use the time machine, which is of course, hardly at all, partly because of this very problem with the phone, the phone goes haywire and I have to get some lout from the phone company to come and fix it, and he starts asking stupid questions the answers to which he has no hope of understanding. Anyway, the point is that I have a very strict rule that I must not change anything in the past at all—” he sighed “—whatever the temptation.”
“What temptation?” said Dirk, sharply.
“Oh, it’s just a little, er, thing I’m interested in,” said Reg, vaguely. “It is perfectly harmless because I stick very strictly to the rule. It makes me sad, though.”
“But you broke your own rule!” insisted Dirk. “Last night! You changed something in the past—”
“Well, yes,” said Reg, a little uncomfortably, “but that was different. Very different. If you had seen the look on the poor child’s face. So miserable. She thought the world should be a marvelous place, and all those appalling old dons were pouring their withering scorn on her just because it wasn’t marvelous for them anymore. I mean,” he said, appealing to Richard, “remember Cawley. What a bloodless old goat. Someone should get some humanity into him even if they have to knock it in with a brick. No, that was perfectly justifiable. Otherwise, I make it a very strict rule—”
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