by C. S. Lewis
‘Well,’ said Orfieu, as he finished reading out the corrected time-table, ‘that’s settled. And there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t take a couple of days off at the end of next week, Scudamour.’
‘Going away?’ said I.
‘No,’ said Scudamour. ‘My fiancée is coming down—of course I could put her off till October.’
‘Not at all, man, not at all,’ said MacPhee. ‘If you’ve been watching those devils all this term, you’ll want a change. Send him away for the weekend, Orfieu.’
Orfieu nodded and then smiled. ‘You don’t like them?’ he queried.
‘Likes and dislikes ought not to be brought into science, I confess,’ said MacPhee; and then after a pause, ‘Man, I wish we knew whether it’s in the future or the past. But it can’t be the past. There’d be bound to be some traces of that civilisation left. And if it’s the future—God, to think of the world coming to that, and that nothing we can do will prevent it.’
‘I don’t believe,’ said I, ‘that archaeologists know half so much as you make out. It is only by chance, after all, that pots and skulls get left behind for them to dig up. There may have been dozens of civilisations that have left no trace.’
‘What do you think, Ransom?’ said Orfieu.
Ransom was sitting with his eyes cast down as he played with the kitten. He was very pale and did not look up as he replied.
‘If you want the truth, I’m afraid the things we were looking at last night may be in the future for any of us.’ Then, seeing that we did not understand, he added with visible reluctance, ‘I think that Dark Tower is in hell.’
The remark might have passed, at least with some of us, for a harmless eccentricity, but I suppose that the experiences of the preceding night had left us in a slightly abnormal condition. For my own part, I remember feeling at that moment—and it has proved an unforgettable moment—an intense anger against Ransom combined with an uprush of wildly unusual and archaic thoughts; thoughts without a name, and sensations which seemed to rise from a remote, almost a pre-natal, past. Orfieu said nothing, but knocked out his pipe on the frame of his deck-chair so violently that it broke, and then flung the fragments away with a curse. MacPhee gave one of his guttural growls and shrugged his shoulders. Even Scudamour looked down his nose as if something indecent had been done, and began to hum a tune. There was rank hatred in the air. Ransom continued to stroke the kitten.
‘Mind you,’ said MacPhee presently, ‘I’m not admitting that those things are in the past or future at all. The whole business may be a hallucination.’
‘You are at liberty to make any investigations you like,’ said Orfieu with what appeared to me such unnecessary rudeness that I said (much louder than I meant), ‘Nobody’s talking about investigations. He said a hallucination, not a trick.’
‘It was not we who first insisted on having the room darkened, sir,’ said Scudamour to me with icy politeness.
‘What on earth are you suggesting?’ I asked.
‘It is you who are making suggestions, sir.’
‘I’m doing nothing of the sort.’
‘What the devil is the matter with you both?’ said MacPhee. ‘You’re like a pack of children today.’
‘It was Mr Lewis who first used the word trick,’ said Scudamour.
MacPhee was about to reply when Ransom suddenly remarked with a smile, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, quietly setting down the kitten, he rose and walked away. The device worked admirably. The remaining four of us at once fell to discussing Ransom’s peculiarities and in a few minutes we had once more talked ourselves into good humour.
A continuous narrative of our lives and observations from this point to the night on which our real adventures began would serve no purpose. I shall content myself with recording two or three things that now seem of importance.
In the first place, we became familiar with the outside of the Dark Tower by daylight. We learned—what night had concealed during my first view of it—that the building was incomplete. The scaffolding was still up and gangs of labourers were busily employed upon it from sunrise to sunset. They were all of the same type as the young man whom I had seen automatised by the Stingingman, and like him wore no clothing but a short kilt of some red material. I have never seen more energetic workers. They seemed to rush at their task like ants and the rapid complexity of their moving crowds was the most noticeable feature of the whole scene. The background of their activities was the flat, well-timbered country about the Dark Tower; there were no other buildings in sight.
But the workers were not the only characters in the scene. Every now and then it would be invaded by what seemed to be soldiers or police—strutting and grinning columns of men whose clockwork movements made it clear that they had undergone the stinging operation. At least they behaved just as the young worker had behaved after the sting, and we inferred that their behaviour had the same cause. Besides the marching columns, there were invariably a few small pickets of these ‘Jerkies’ as we called them, posted here and there, apparently to superintend the work. The midday meal for the workmen was brought by a company of female Jerkies. Every column had its flags and its band, and even the small pickets usually boasted some instrument of music. To us, of course, the whole Othertime world was absolutely silent: in reality, what between the bands and the noise of the workmen, it must have been dinning with sound. The pickets carried whips but I never saw them strike the workmen. Indeed the Jerkies seemed to be popular and the arrival of one of their larger companies was usually greeted with a short cessation of work and with gestures that suggested cheering.
I cannot remember how often we had studied this scene before we began to notice the man whom we called ‘Scudamour’s Double’. It was MacPhee who gave him that name. Two men, near the front of our field of vision, were engaged in sawing a block of stone, and I think all of us had been puzzled for some time by something indefinably familiar in the face of one of them, when the Scotsman suddenly cried out, ‘It’s your double, Scudamour. Look at it, man. It’s your double.’
Once the thing had been stated there was no denying it. One of the workmen was more than like Scudamour: he was Scudamour, nail for nail, hair for hair, and the very expression of his face as he looked up to make a remark to the other sawyer was one we had all seen on Scudamour’s face a dozen times that very morning. One or two of us tried to treat the thing as a joke, but I think Scudamour himself was uncomfortable about it from the very beginning. It had, however, the advantage of making these busy scenes (which often occupied the chronoscope for hours at a time) more interesting. To pick out the Double in the crowd and follow him wherever he went became our amusement; and when anyone returned to our sessions after an absence, his first question was usually ‘How’s the Double been getting on?’
Every now and then the scene changed, just as it changes in imagination. We never discovered why. Without any power of resistance we would suddenly find ourselves back in the chamber of the Stingingman, and thence be whisked away to barrack-like rooms where we saw Jerkies eating, or perhaps to some little cell-like cubicle where a tired workman lay asleep, and out again to the clouds and the tree-tops. Often we looked for hours at things which repetition had already staled, and were tantalised with hurried glimpses of what was new and interesting.
And all this time none of us doubted that we were looking either at the far future or the far past, though MacPhee sometimes felt it his duty to point out that this was not yet proved. And still none of us had noticed the most obvious thing about the scenes we were looking at.
For this discovery we were indebted to MacPhee; but before it can be told there is one more scene to be recorded. As far as I am concerned it began with my looking into the ‘observatory’, as we now called Orfieu’s smaller sitting-room, before I went to bed at about five o’clock one morning. Scudamour was on duty there and I asked him as usual how the Double was getting on.
‘I think he’s dying,’ said Scudamour.
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sp; I glanced at the screen and saw at once what he had meant. Everything was very dark but by the light of a single taper I could see that we had before us the interior of one of the small cells in the Dark Tower. There was little more in it than a low bed and a table. On the bed there sat a naked man who was bowing his head till it almost touched his knees and at the same time pressing both his hands to his forehead. As I looked he suddenly straightened himself like one in whom a period of dogged endurance has given way to intolerable pain. He rose and looked wildly about him; his face was white and drawn with suffering but I recognised him as the Double. He took two or three turns about the room and presently stopped at the table to drink greedily from a jug that stood there. Then he turned and groped at the back of his bed. He found a rag there, dipped it in the jug, and pressed it, dripping with water, against his forehead. He repeated the process several times but apparently without gaining relief, for he finally flung the rag from him with a gesture of impatience and stretched himself on the bed. A moment later he was doubled up again, clasping his forehead, and rolling to and fro, while his shoulders shook as if he sobbed.
‘Has this been going on long?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a long time.’
There was a pause.
‘The poor devil,’ Scudamour broke out. ‘Why can’t they do something for him? Why doesn’t he go and get help? Leave him like that—what a filthy time that Othertime is.’
It was certainly extremely painful to have to watch a fellow creature, however many centuries remote, suffering like that, and to be unable to do, or even to say, anything for his comfort. It was all so real, so like something happening in the same room, that we both felt a certain guilt in being merely passive spectators. At the same time the unusual energy of Scudamour’s voice—even a hint of hysteria in it—surprised me. I dropped into the chair beside him.
‘I wish to God we’d never started this infernal chronoscope,’ he said presently.
‘Well,’ said I, ‘I expect you and Orfieu have had about enough of it.’
‘Enough—!’
‘Look here, you mustn’t let it get on your nerves. As we can’t do anything for that poor fellow, I can’t see that there’s any point in watching him all night.’
‘The moment I knocked off the scene might change.’
‘Well, I’ll stay. I’m not particularly sleepy.’
‘Nor am I. And there’s nothing wrong with my nerves, only I’ve got such a splitting headache. Thanks all the same.’ ‘Well, if you’ve a headache you’d certainly better knock off.’
‘It isn’t exactly the headache . . . it’s nothing to make a fuss about. Not really. But it’s just here.’
He forgot that in the darkness I could not see his gesture; for all this time we could not see each other, but only (and that by the light of a taper burning in another world) the Double, shut up alone with his pain in some cell of the Dark Tower. Yet I hardly needed Scudamour’s next words.
‘It’s just where his is,’ he whispered. ‘Here in my forehead. Like his. I’ve got his pain, not my own. You don’t think—’
What both of us thought was hardly capable of being put into words. What I actually said was, ‘I think if we allow our imaginations to run away with us over this chronoscope, we’ll go off our heads. We’re all dead tired, you most of all, and we’ve seen enough of the Othertime to show that D.T. is a game in comparison. It’s no wonder you’ve got a bad head. Now look here. With the curtains drawn we can see just enough of what’s going on on the screen to notice whether it shifts to somewhere else.’ I got up and pulled back the curtains, and the blessed daylight and the noise of the birds came pouring in. ‘Now,’ I continued, ‘go and get some aspirin and make a pot of strong tea for the pair of us and let’s sit it out together and be comfortable.’
It was hours later, when the room had been darkened again and Scudamour and I were both (fortunately) in bed, that dawn came into the Double’s room in Othertime. What it revealed I learned from Ransom. He said that the taper had apparently burned itself out, and that when there was enough daylight to see things by, they found the bed empty. It took them some time to discover the Double; when at last they made him out, he was sitting on the floor in one corner all hunched up. He was not now writhing or showing any signs of pain—indeed he was unnaturally still and stiff. His face was in shadow. He sat like that for a long time while the room grew lighter and nothing happened. At last the light fell on his face. At first they thought he had a bruise on his forehead and then they thought he had a wound. The reader will understand that they began with the knowledge that he had passed the night in great pain, and that is doubtless why they did not guess the truth sooner. They did not guess it until a Jerky had come into the room swaggering and cracking his whip, and then, after a glance at the Double, had fallen flat on his face. He went out backwards covering his eyes with his hands. Other Jerkies, and some workmen, came in. They also fell flat and went out backwards. At last female Jerkies came in. They crawled on their bellies, dragging a black robe, and laid it on the bed, and crawled out again. A number of people, all flat on their faces, waited just inside the door of the cell. The Double had watched all this without moving. Now he rose and came into the centre of the room (his worshippers grovelled closer to the floor and Ransom says they did not kiss, but licked, it) and the truth became visible to our observers. He had grown a sting. The pains of the night had been birth pains. His face was still recognisable as that of Scudamour’s Double, but it had already the yellow pallor and immobility of the man we had seen in the carved room. When he had put on the black robe he was unmistakable: he had gone to bed a man and risen a Stingingman.
Of course this could not be concealed from Scudamour and, equally of course, it did not help to ease the nervous tension in which he was living. We all of us agreed afterwards that from this time on he was increasingly strange in his behaviour; and even at the time Ransom urged Orfieu to persuade him to give up his work immediately and not to wait for his fiancée’s visit. I remember Ransom saying, ‘That young fellow may blow up any moment.’ We ought all to have taken more notice of this. In our defence I may plead that Miss Bembridge was expected in a very few days (three, I think), that we were very much preoccupied with our observations, and that what happened on the following day was startling enough to drive all other considerations out of our heads.
It was MacPhee who released the bomb. We were all together in the observatory, watching the usual busy scene outside the Dark Tower—and watching it inattentively because it was so usual—when he suddenly swore and then stood up.
‘Orfieu!’ he said.
All our heads turned in MacPhee’s direction. His voice had not sounded exactly angry, but it had a note of solemn adjuration in it that was more compelling than anger.
‘Orfieu,’ he said again, ‘once and for all. What game are you playing with us?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Orfieu.
‘Understand,’ said MacPhee, ‘I’m not going to quarrel with you. But I’m a busy man. If all this has been a hoax, I’ll not call you a humbug—you can have your joke—but I’m not going to stay here to be hoaxed any longer.’
‘A hoax?’
‘Aye. I didn’t say a trick, so you need not get angry. I said a hoax. But I’m asking you now, on your word and honour—is it a hoax?’
‘No, it isn’t. What on earth do you mean?’
MacPhee stared at him for a moment almost, I think, in the hope of detecting some sign of embarrassment in his face; but there was none. Then, plunging his hands into his pockets, the Scotsman began pacing to and fro with an air of desperation.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Very well. But if it’s not a hoax, we’re all madmen. The universe is mad. And we’re blind as bats too.’ He suddenly paused in his stride and wheeled round to address the whole company. ‘Do you mean to tell me that not one of you recognises that building?’—here he flung out a hand towards the Dark Tower.
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��Yes,’ said Ransom, ‘I thought it familiar from the very first, but I can’t put a name to it.’
‘Then you’re less of a fool than the rest of us,’ said MacPhee. ‘You’re the one-eyed man among the blind.’ He stared at us again as if awaiting some response.
‘Well,’ said Orfieu at last, ‘how should we recognise it?’
‘Why, man,’ said MacPhee, ‘you’ve seen it hundreds of times. You could see it from here if the curtains were drawn.’ He walked to the window and pulled them. We all came crowding behind him to look out, but after a glance he turned back into the room. ‘I’m wrong,’ he said. ‘The houses get in the way.’
I was beginning to wonder whether MacPhee were out of his wits, when Scudamour said, ‘You don’t mean—?’ and paused.
‘Go on,’ said MacPhee.
‘It’s too fantastic,’ said Scudamour, and at the same moment Orfieu suddenly said, ‘I’ve got it.’
‘So have I,’ said Ransom. ‘The Dark Tower is an almost exact replica of the new university library here in Cambridge.’
There was complete silence for several seconds.
Orfieu was the first who attempted to pick up the fragments of our previous tranquillity and see if they could be fitted together again.
‘There certainly is a resemblance,’ he began, ‘a distinct resemblance. I’m glad you have pointed it out. But whether—’
‘Resemblance, your grandmother,’ said MacPhee. ‘They’re identical, except that the tower in there’ (he pointed to the screen) ‘is not quite finished. Here, Lewis, you can draw. Sit down and do us a wee sketch of the Dark Tower.’
I cannot really draw very well, but I did as I was told and succeeded in producing something fairly recognisable. As soon as it was finished we all went out into the town except Ransom, who volunteered to stay behind and watch the chronoscope. It was after one o’clock when we returned, very hungry for our lunch and very thirsty for the tankards of beer which Orfieu provided. Our investigations had taken us a long time because it was not easy to find a place from which we could get the university library at just the same angle as the Dark Tower—and that, by the by, may explain our failure to recognise it at the outset. But when at last we had found the right position MacPhee’s theory became irresistible. Orfieu and Scudamour both fought against it as hard as they could—Orfieu coldly, like an esprit fort, and Scudamour with a passion which I did not then fully understand. It was almost as if he were begging us not to accept it. In the end, however, the facts were too strong for both of them. The library and the Dark Tower corresponded in every detail, except that one was finished and the other was still in the hands of the builders.