by Tom Hourie
“Smethings & Sharp. That was the name on Grenville’s bank draft.”
You take banks where I come from, their interiors look like a kids’ playground at McDonald’s. They serve coffee and cookies while you wait. They give you football tickets for opening a savings account. “Whoopee,” they seem to be saying. “Money is fun.”
Messrs.’ Smethings and Sharp took a less frivolous view. Their building was a kind of financial temple with high ceilings, brass-barred teller’s cages and marble countertops, all projecting a pious devotion to the glory of money.
The religious overtones became even stronger when we were granted an audience with the assistant manager, a corpulent man whose black suit and standup celluloid collar would not have disgraced the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The man looked at me through a pair of gold-filled pince nez while I introduced myself as a visiting American and Sarah as my English cousin. I could tell his doubts were growing with each passing word as I explained the reason for our visit.
There was a long pause after I had finished, during which the assistant manager removed his pince nez and cleaned them with a linen handkerchief. He returned them to the bridge of his nose when he was satisfied and looked first at Sarah, then at me. “If I may summarize, Mister Liddel, you and your cousin wish to contact a lost relative, one Henry Babbage, whose only recent interaction with you has been through this bank.”
“He sent me a bank draught from this branch.”
“That may, or may not be, but we here at Smethings and Sharp take our responsibilities to our depositors very seriously. They expect discretion and we provide it. Under no circumstances would we discuss the affairs of a customer.”
“Couldn’t you make an exception in this case? I sail back to America next week. Perhaps if we spoke to the manager?”
“Mister Poole is a very busy man,” he said, nodding toward a glass-walled cubicle where another black-suited acolyte was studying a cloth-bound ledger.
Sarah began kicking me at this point and I glared at her before continuing. “Still,” I said. “I feel it is my duty to cousin Henry to explore all possible avenues.”
The assistant manager removed a hunter-case pocket watch from his waistcoat and opened its circular cover. “You may return in a half-hour if you wish, but I can promise you will receive the same answer.”
“Why did you keep kicking me in there?” I asked Sarah when we were back outside. “It was hard enough talking to that man with him looking at me like I was something nasty stuck to his shoe.”
“His supervisor, the manager.”
“What about him?”
“Didn’t you recognize him? It was Prince Albert.”
“The stage door Johnny who used to send you letters? No!”
“I am sure of it,” she said. “Wait here.”
She was back waving a sheet of paper ten minutes later. “Got it,” she said, with a look of triumph. “He’s not far away.”
Chapter XXXXVII:
Off To See The Wizard – Babbage’s Regrets – A Ray Of Hope
Fourteen Canal Hill turned out to be a converted lock keeper’s cottage with an octagonal toll house in its forecourt. The canal from which the street drew its name had been long abandoned, judging by the weeds and refuse choking its rank water. We tried the front door knocker, a curious fist-shaped mechanism whose loud thumps echoed hollowly along the crumbling embankment.
There was no response at first but then we heard a clanking sound and the toll house window shutters parted to reveal a shadowy figure seated inside. The effect was menacing, as though we had raised the spirit of the dead toll collector.
“Please state your business,” said a disembodied voice.
“We’re here to see Henry Babbage,” I said.
“I did not understand your response,” said the voice. “Please approach the collection window.”
We walked over to the toll house and peered through the grimy window. It was hard to make out who or what was behind. “We would like to speak with Henry Babbage,” I repeated.
“There is nobody here by that name,” said the voice. Whatever was inside lifted its hand and dismissed us with a machinelike gesture.
“It’s not a person, it’s a robot,” I whispered to Sarah.
“What is a robot?” Sarah whispered back.
“You must leave now,” said the voice. “These are private premises and you are trespassing.” There was another clanking noise and the shutters closed in our faces. Then, to add injury to insult, I felt something hit my jacket and looked down to see a yellowy trail of viscous excrement. The culprit turned out to be a glossy black bird sitting a telephone line running from a masthead at one corner of the toll booth to the rear of the cottage.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked
“Looks like a starling. Tell it to stand still so I can get up there and poop on it.”
“No, I mean that wire the bird is perched on. Why would anyone stretch a wire between two buildings?”
Then I remembered. This world didn’t have telephone lines. “Let’s see where it goes,” I said.
The cable ended at a barn-like outbuilding with a pair of wooden sliding doors and a smaller entrance door at one gabled end. We could hear a man’s voice singing inside.
You may look on me as a waster what?
But you ought to see how I fag and swot.
For I’m called by two and by five I’m out,
Which I couldn’t do if I slacked about.
Then I count my ties and I change my kit,
And the exercise keeps me awfully fit!
Once I begin, I work like sin.
I’m full of go and grit.
I tried rattling the latch on the double doors but whoever was inside was too engrossed to hear me. Sarah gone to the entrance door in the meantime and was now staring through one of its diamond-paned windows. I joined her and saw a scene straight out of H.G. Wells. A white-coated man with Einstein hair was seated at a wooden bench surrounded by an extensive array of instruments and tools. He was singing as he adjusted a small clockwork device with a fine screwdriver:
I’m Gilbert the Filbert, the Knut with a “K.”
The Pride of Piccadilly, the blasé roué.
Oh Hades! The ladies who leave their wooden huts,
For Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Knuts.
I pushed the door open and called, “Excuse me sir, can we have a moment of your time?”
There was no answer from the man who was now peering at his work through a pair of magnifying spectacles. “Hello?” I called. Still no answer.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Sarah said, funneling her hands around her mouth. “OY! You there!”
The man jumped from his stool as though he had received an electric shock and ran toward us, flapping his arms like an enraged gander. “Private property, private property,” he shouted, as he tried to push the door closed. “Go away.”
“Mr. Babbage,” I said. “If you can spare us just a moment of your time.”
The man stopped and looked at me with fear in his eyes. “What did you call me?” he said.
“Mr. Babbage.”
“No one here by that name. Go away.”
“We know who you are Mister Babbage,” Sarah said. “We mean you no harm.”
“You may mean no harm, but you are putting me in harm’s way just the same. How did you find me?”
“May we come in?” I asked.
“If you must,” he said, after long pause. I suppose you’ll want tea as well. Let me put the kettle on.”
I brought the dimensional translator from the van and Babbage fiddled with it morosely while I offered him an edited version of the events that had brought us to Totnes. “There was a time when I would have taken an axe to this cursed machine,” he said, when I had finished.
“Why not do it now if you feel so strongly?” I asked.
“There would be no point.”
“I’m confused.”
“Have you ever heard of the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery? How two or more people, unknown to each other, work on the same problem and arrive at the same conclusions simultaneously.”
“Does that happen often?”
Babbage took a long, noisy sip of his tea before continuing. “The examples are numerous. Newton and Leibnitz’ concurrent development of the Calculus. Henry and Faraday each discovering electrical induction while separated by an ocean.”
“How do you explain it?”
“Many theories have been advanced. Group consciousness, morphogenetic fields and the like. All are wrong. The truth is that ideas have a life of their own. Humans are simply the medium that sustains them and allows them to evolve.”
This guy was starting to sound a lot like Bill Fowler. “How can an idea exist independently of people?” I asked, wanting to see just how far the similarity went. “It sounds paradoxical. A song without a singer.”
“I am tempted to say that they represent God’s inner monologue, but perhaps I am overreaching myself.”
“So you think that even if we destroy the translator, someone else will come up with it?”
“Once the cat is out of the bag, there is no getting it back in. The only thing you can do, if I may coin a metaphor, is befriend it and hope it does not bite you.” He stopped to scratch his head with a long bony finger. “And from what you say about Alistair Fox’s machinations in London, it is indeed about to bite us. And it is all my fault.”
“How could it possibly be your fault?”
“If I had handled the translator with respect, I might have learned how to use its power wisely. Instead I treated it like a kind of electrical Planchette, an Ouija Board. And now it is too late. The only person who truly understands the device is in Colorado Springs, wherever that may be.
“You’re talking about Nikola Tesla?”
Babbage looked at me with sudden suspicion. “If you know so much, why are you here bothering me?”
“Sarah’s father mentioned him. Have you ever tried getting in touch?”
“He refuses to communicate with me. It is almost as if he were frightened.”
“And you have no clues as to what he discovered about the translator?”
“Nothing more than a few hints and a piece of equipment.”
“Equipment? What kind of equipment?”
“Tesla called it a Particle Beam Generator. He told me to destroy it before he left, but I hadn’t the heart.”
“Did you ever try to use it?”
“It never entered my mind. Tesla was half mad, but if what he said was true, it has unimaginable destructive powers.”
“That sounds like just what we need to deal with Osgood Wellesley and his crew.”
“In any case, the device won’t function by itself. It needs the translator.”
“Well, there is the translator, sitting right in front of you.”
“There are two problems. First of all, Tesla’s machine is not here.”
“Where is it?”
“Hidden, as you might say, in plain sight. I gave it to The British Museum telling them it was an unknown device built by my father. It was too large to display inside the building so they mounted it on the roof.”
“You said two problems. What is the other?”
“The main component of the translator is its vacuum oscillator.”
“That little glass thing on top?”
“Precisely. And I can tell from the discoloration of the filaments that this one will soon fail.”
“What if I knew where there was another one?”
“Do you?”
“Maybe, but you have to make something for me first.”
Chapter XXXXVIII:
Leather and Brass – Synchronized Time
Babbage’s version of my Lucidream Goggles did not leave me looking like the blind guy in Star Trek. Brass-framed, with leather straps, they looked more like something you’d see on Manfred von Richthofen. It didn’t matter what they looked like so long as they worked. But that was a big if.
“How long do you think you will need to retrieve the new oscillator?” Babbage asked. “This one is close to failure. I daren’t keep it on for an extended time.”
“Hard to say. The other one has a hairline crack in the glass. I’m pretty sure my friend Bill Fowler can fix it but I don’t know how long it will take.”
“That poses a problem doesn’t it? I have no way of knowing when I should energize the translator to bring you back.”
“Why don’t we choose a time when I’m sure to be ready? Say two weeks from now?”
“That would be a good plan if we could be certain time passes at the same rate in both worlds, but what if it does not?”
“You’re saying two weeks there might only be two hours here?”
“It’s possible.”
“Then how about this? You can see into the other world with the translator, can’t you?”
“Only certain places.”
“Can you see University Avenue where it runs through the campus?”
“Part of it. I seem to recall a very nice street clock at the junction in front of the Students’ Union building.”
“Perfect. Turn the translator on for two minutes every hour, starting in two weeks’ time. When I’m ready to come back I will stand next to the clock from four in the afternoon to half past. That will be your signal to bring me back at twelve P.M that night. You can use the speed of the clock’s minute hand to figure out what time that works out to here. Does that sound like a plan?”
“One fraught with risk.”
“What other choice do we have?”
Sarah wanted to stay with me while I went to fetch the new oscillator but I had to tell her no.
“It works best if I’m alone and quiet,” I told her. “The sooner I get there, the sooner I’ll come back.”
“Just see that you do,” she said.
Babbage’s back room filled in for sleep center and instead of a Medex Envirobed I had to make do with a stained military cot. No Tetris either, so I went straight to my relaxation exercises and followed with my mantra. I was surprisingly calm. My mind seemed to be saying “what the hell, either it works or it doesn’t.”
Chapter XXXXIX:
Home again – Overdue Rent – New Accommodations
I almost laughed when I came to and saw the dismayed faces of the robed professors surrounding me. Not exactly a take-charge bunch. You’d think they would have at least managed to get the buffet cart off me by now.
“Don’t move Robert,” said Ross Percival. “The paramedics should be here soon.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes,” I said, pushing the cart away. I got to my feet and wiped the soggy canapés from my face. “Is Bill Fowler around?”
“Over here dumpster boy,” said a familiar voice.
“Could you meet me at the boneyard in twenty minutes? It’s important.”
For once it looked like things were going to work out. All I had to do was get Bill to fix the crack in the oscillator and take it back to Babbage. But as I may have mentioned, the gods of low comedy have it in for me. My room was padlocked when I got to Mrs. Gridestone’s and there was a Notice to Vacate taped to the door.
“I will let you have your belongings when you have paid the rent you owe,” Mrs. Gridestone said, when I tracked her down to the laundry room. “Please be prompt. I am not running a warehouse.”
“Mrs. Gridestone, what did you do with the stuff that was on my night table?”
“It is of no consequence since you will not receive it without payment.”
“How much do I owe?”
“Seven hundred and forty dollars. And sixty-seven cents.”
“Would you take a check?”
“The unreliability of your checks is what has caused these problems in the first place. I will accept only cash.”
“Why didn’t you just make her give it to you?” Bill said, when I told him about the snag
in my plans. “She’s old, you could take her.”
“I’ve made a vow to lead a life of non-violence in the future.”
“And the change from the past would be…?”
“A lot has happened lately,” I said. Bill listened intently as I summarized recent events, asking only the occasional question. That’s one of the things I like about Bill. He’s not always interrupting.
“I think I can see a trace of that scar on your face,” he said, when I had finished. “Like something you got back when you were a kid.”
“Trust me, in the other world I look like Boris Karloff.”
“Ok Boris. Let me see if I have all this straight. You need to take the new oscillator back to the other dimension and you need me to fix it. But you can’t get the oscillator until you pay your landlady seven hundred and forty dollars.”
“And sixty-seven cents.”
“How long do you think it will take you to come up with it?”