by C. S. Lewis
Ransom led us at once to the great gate of the college. It was only about nine o’clock and the light showed in the porter’s lodge. As I caught up with the others the porter was just telling Ransom that he had not seen Mr Scudamour go out.
‘Is there any other way out of college?’ asked Ransom.
‘Only the St Patrick gate, sir,’ said the porter, ‘and it’d be shut in the vacation.’
‘Ah—but Mr Scudamour would have a key?’
‘Well, he ought to have a key,’ said the porter. ‘But I reckon he’s mislaid it, seeing as he borrowed one off me the night before last and gave it back to me yesterday morning. I said to myself at the time, Mr Scudamour’s gone and mislaid his key again. Shall I give him any message, sir, if I do see him?’
‘Yes,’ said MacPhee after a moment’s thought. ‘Tell him all’s well and ask him to go to Dr Orfieu as soon as he can.’
We moved away from the lodge.
‘Quick,’ said Ransom. ‘I’ll try his rooms and you two go to the other gate.’
‘Come on,’ said MacPhee. I wanted to question him but he was running now, and in a few seconds we were at the St Patrick gate. I am not sure what he expected to find there, but he was certainly disappointed.
‘What on earth is the matter?’ I asked him as he turned away from it. But at the same moment I heard the sound of hasty footsteps and Ransom appeared at the other end of the path.
‘His rooms are empty,’ he shouted.
‘He might be in any of these rooms then?’ replied MacPhee, indicating with a wave of his hand the rows of windows which gazed down on the little court with that peculiarly dead expression familiar to all who have lived in a college during the vacation.
‘No,’ said Ransom. ‘Thank heaven they lock them up.’
‘Are you never going to tell me,’ I began, when suddenly MacPhee seized my arm and pointed. Ransom had reached us by now: all three of us stood in a bunch together, holding our breaths, and looking up.
The block of buildings which shut off our view towards the west was of a type common in university towns—two storeys of full-sized windows, then a row of battlements, and then dormer-windows behind the battlements projecting from a high-pitched roof. The sky behind it was clear and tinted with the greenish-blue that sometimes follows sunset. Against this, clear as a shape cut out of black paper, a man was moving on the ridge-tiles. He was not crouching, or going on all fours, or even spreading out his arms to balance himself: he was walking with his hands clasped behind his back as easily as I might walk on level ground, and he was turning his head slowly from left to right like one who takes stock of his surroundings.
‘That’s him, all right,’ said MacPhee.
‘Mad?’ I suggested.
‘Oh worse, worse,’ replied Ransom, and then, ‘Look, he’s going down.’
‘And on the outside,’ added MacPhee.
‘Quick,’ said Ransom. ‘That’ll bring him down into Pat’s Lane. There’s just a chance.’
Once more we dashed back to the great gate, all of us, this time running as fast as we could, for I had seen enough to convince me that Scudamour must be captured at all costs. The porter seemed to move with maddening slowness as he came out of his lodge to open the postern. I felt the seconds ticking past as he fumbled for his key—talking, always talking—and as Ransom and I for very haste impeded each other at the narrow opening, MacPhee behind growled at us to get on. Then we were out at last and racing along the front of the college and round into Pat’s Lane—a silent little alley between two colleges, defended from wheeled traffic by a couple of posts. I do not know how far we ran down it: over the bridge, anyway, and far enough to see the buses and cars on a big thoroughfare beyond the river. It is difficult to run seriously when you have no certainty whether your quarry is ahead of you or behind you. We tried several directions. From running we came to quick walking; from quick walking to slow walking; from slow walking to indetermine hanging about. Finally, at about half past ten, we were all standing still (in Pat’s Lane again) mopping our foreheads.
‘Poor Scudamour,’ I panted. ‘But it may be only temporary.’
‘Temporary?’ said Ransom in a voice that made me pause.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘You said “temporary”. What hope is there of getting him back? Specially if we’ve lost the other one?’
‘What are you talking about? What other one?’
‘The one we’ve been chasing.’
‘You mean Scudamour.’
Ransom gave me a long look. ‘That!’ he said. ‘That wasn’t Scudamour.’
I stared at him, not knowing what I thought but knowing that in my thoughts there was something horrible. He went on.
‘That wasn’t Scudamour who winded me. Did it look like him? Why did it not answer? Why was it backing out of the room? Why did it put down its head and butt? Scudamour wouldn’t fight that way if he wanted to fight. Don’t you see? When it put down its head it was relying on something it thought it had—something it had been in the habit of using. Namely, a sting.’
‘You mean,’ said I, resisting a strong feeling of sickness, ‘you mean that what we saw on the roof was . . . was the Stingingman?’
‘I thought you knew,’ said Ransom.
‘Then where’s the real Scudamour?’
‘God help him,’ said Ransom. ‘If he’s alive he’s in the Dark Tower in Othertime.’
‘Jumped through the chronoscope?—but this is fantastic, Ransom. Didn’t Orfieu explain all along that it’s only like a telescope? The things we’ve been seeing weren’t really close to us, they were millions of years away.’
‘I know that’s Orfieu’s theory. But what is the evidence for it? And does it explain why Othertime is full of replicas of things in our own world? What do you think, MacPhee?’
‘I think,’ said MacPhee, ‘that it is now perfectly certain that he is working with forces he does not understand, and that none of us knows where or when the Othertime world is or how it is related to our own.’
‘Except,’ said Ransom, ‘that it contains these replicas—one building, one man, and one woman so far. There may be any number of others.’
‘And what, exactly, do you think has happened?’ I asked.
‘You remember what Orfieu said the first evening about time-travel being impossible, because you’d have no body in the other time when you got there. Well, isn’t it obvious that if you got two times that had replicas that difficulty would be overcome? In other words I think that the Double we saw on the screen had a body not merely like poor Scudamour’s but the same: I mean, that the very same matter which made up Scudamour’s body in 1938 made up that brute’s body in Othertime. Now if that were so—and if you then, by any contrivance, brought the two times into contact, so to speak . . . you see?’
‘You mean they might . . . might just jump across?’
‘Yes, in a sense. Scudamour, under the influence of a strong emotion, makes what you might call a psychological leap or lunge at the Othertime. Ordinarily nothing would result—or perhaps death. But as bad luck would have it on this occasion, his own body—the very same he’s used all his life in our time—is there waiting for him. The Othertime occupant of that body is caught off his guard—simply pushed out of his body—but since that identical body is waiting for him in 1938, he inevitably slips into it and finds himself in Cambridge.’
‘This is getting very difficult,’ said I. ‘I’m not sure that I understand about these two bodies.’
‘But there aren’t two bodies. There’s only one body existing at two different times—just as that tree existed yesterday and today.’
‘What do you think of it, MacPhee?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ said MacPhee, ‘I do not start with the simple theory of an entity called the soul as our friend does, and that makes things more complicated for me. But I agree that the behaviour of Scudamour’s body, since the crash, is just what we should expect to see if that bo
dy had acquired the memory and psychology of the Stingingman. I am therefore ready, as a scientist, to work on Ransom’s hypothesis for the present. And I may add that, as a creature of the passions, emotions, and imagination, I don’t feel—I’m speaking of feeling, ye understand—any doubt about it. What’s puzzling me is something else.’
We both turned to him with the same question.
‘I’m wondering,’ said MacPhee, ‘about all these replicas. It’s long odds—in fact it’s all but infinite odds—against getting the same particles organised as a human body in two different times. And now we’ve got that happening twice, the boy and the girl. And then there’s the building. Man, there’s too much coincidence about this affair.’
There was silence for a few moments, and then, wrinkling his brow, he proceeded, half to himself, ‘I don’t know at all. I don’t know. But could it be the other way round? Not that we happen to have reached a time that contains replicas of our own, but that it’s the replicas that are bringing the times together—a sort of gravitation. You see, if two times contained exactly the same distribution of matter, they would become simply the same time . . . and if they contained some identical distributions they might approach . . . I don’t know. It’s all daft.’
‘On that view,’ said Ransom, ‘the chronoscope would be of quite secondary importance.’
‘Ach!’ ejaculated MacPhee. ‘What’s the chronoscope got to do with it? It produces no phenomena, it only lets you see them. This was all going on before Orfieu made his instrument and would have been going on whether or no.’
‘What do you mean by “this”?’ I asked.
‘I hardly know,’ said MacPhee after a long pause, ‘but I think we’re in for more than Orfieu supposes.’
‘In the meantime,’ said Ransom, ‘we must get back to Orfieu and make some plans. Every minute that creature may be getting further away.’
‘He can’t do much harm without his sting, I suppose,’ said I.
‘I shouldn’t be too sure even of that,’ said Ransom. ‘But I was thinking of something else. Don’t you see that our only chance of ever getting Scudamour back is to bring him and the Stingingman together again—with a chronoscope between them? Once we lose touch with the Stingingman our last hope is gone.’
‘In that case,’ said I, ‘he ought to have the same motive for sticking to us, if he wants to get back to his own time.’
We were now in sight of the college gate and already instinctively turning over in our minds what we would say to Orfieu, when suddenly the postern opened and Orfieu himself appeared—an Orfieu I had not yet seen for he was in a towering rage. He wanted to know where—where the hell—we’d all been and why we’d left him to face the music. We inquired, not in the best of tempers ourselves, what music he meant.
‘That infernal woman,’ snapped Orfieu. ‘Yes, Scudamour’s fiancée. The Bembridge woman. On the telephone. And now, what are you going to tell her when she comes round tomorrow?’
V
At this point it will be convenient if my narrative turns to Scudamour. The reader will understand that the rest of us heard his story much later; that we heard it gradually and with all those repetitions and interruptions which arise in conversation. Here, however, it will be straightened out and tidied up for your benefit. No doubt I lose something from the purely literary point of view by not leaving you for the next few chapters in the same uncertainty which we actually endured for the next few weeks, but literature is not here my chief concern.
According to Scudamour’s account he had no plan of action in his mind when he rose and leaped upon the chronoscope. Indeed he would never have done so if his excitement had allowed him to reflect, for, like the rest of us, he regarded the instrument as a kind of telescope. He had no belief that you could get through it into Othertime. All he knew was that the sight of Camilla in the clutches of the Stingingman was more than he could bear. He felt that he must smash something—preferably the Stingingman, but at any rate something—or go mad. In other words, he ‘saw red’.
He remembers dashing forward with outstretched hands, but he does not remember the sound of the breaking bulb. It seemed to him that as his hands went out he just found them closing on the girl’s arms. His impression was one of incredulous triumph: he thought in some confused way that he had pulled Camilla out of Othertime—right through the screen into Orfieu’s room. He thinks that he shouted out something like ‘It’s all right, Camilla. It’s me.’
The girl’s back was towards him and he was holding her by the elbows. She twisted herself and looked back over her shoulder as he spoke. He still thought that it was Camilla and was not surprised that she was pale and looked terrified. Then he felt her grow suddenly limp in his hands and realised that she was going to faint.
He sprang up at this—for he found that he was sitting—and laid her in his chair, at the same time shouting to the rest of us to help. It was at this moment that he became aware of his novel surroundings. Up to that point there had been a certain strangeness in the whole experience. It had been more like meeting Camilla in a dream than like meeting her in real life; but, like a dream, it was accepted without question. But as he shouted to us a number of facts were forced upon him all at once. In the first place he realised that the language in which he had shouted was not English. Secondly, that the chair in which he was laying the girl (whom he still thought of as Camilla) was not one of the chairs in Orfieu’s room—and also that he was not in his ordinary clothes. But what startled him far more was that in the very act of setting the girl down he found his whole mind reeling under the effort of resisting a desire which horrified him both by its content and by its almost maniacal strength. He wanted to sting. There was a cloud of pain in his head so that he felt his head would burst if he did not sting. And for one horrible moment it seemed to him that to sting Camilla would be the most natural thing in the world. For what other purpose was she there?
Of course Scudamour has read his psychoanalysis. He is perfectly well aware that under abnormal conditions a much more natural desire might disguise itself in this grotesque form. But he is pretty sure that this was not what was happening. The pain and pressure in his forehead, as he still remembers them, leave no room for doubt. This was a desire with a real physiological basis. He was full of poison and ached to discharge it.
As soon as he realised what his body was urging him to do he fell back several paces from the chair. He dared not look at the girl for a few minutes, whatever assistance she might need: certainly he must not go near her. As he stood thus, with clenched hands, fighting down the riot of his senses, he took in his surroundings without much immediate attention. He was certainly in the carved room of the Dark Tower. On his right was the dais with the balustrade which he already knew so well. On his left was that part of the room which none of us had ever seen. It was not very large—perhaps about twenty feet long. The walls were completely covered with such decorations as I have described before. There was another door in the far wall and, on each side of this, a low stone seat running the width of the room. But between him and that seat there was something that took his breath away; it was a broken chronoscope.
In all essentials it was identical with Orfieu’s instrument. There was a wooden frame from which, at this moment, the shreds of a torn screen were hanging. On a table in front of this there hung a grey convoluted object which he had no difficulty in recognising. With a sudden gleam of hope he bent to examine it. It was torn in two places and quite useless.
I think it is greatly to Scudamour’s credit that he retained his self-control. His own account of the matter is that the terror which arose in his mind was so great that the mind simply refused it and left him comparatively cool and resolute. He realised in an abstract sort of way that he was cut off from all hope of ever regaining our world, surrounded on every side by the unknown, and burdened with a horrible physical deformity from which horrible and, perhaps in the long run, irresistible desires would pour into his conscious
ness at every moment. But he did not apprehend all this emotionally. That, at least, is what he says. I myself still believe that he showed extraordinary manhood.
By this time the girl had opened her eyes and was staring at him with an expression of terrified wonder. He tried to smile at her, and realised that the muscles of his face—the face he now had—were very unused to smiling.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid. I will not sting you.’
‘What is that?’ said the girl almost in a whisper. ‘What do you mean?’
Before I go any further I had better explain that as long as he lived in Othertime Scudamour found no difficulty in speaking and understanding a language which was certainly not English, but that he did not succeed in bringing a single word of this language back with him. Orfieu and MacPhee both regard this as confirming the theory that what occurred between him and his Double was a real exchange of bodies. When Scudamour’s consciousness entered the Othertime world it acquired no new knowledge in the strict sense of the word knowledge, but it found itself furnished with a pair of ears and a tongue and vocal cords that had been trained for years in receiving and making the sounds of the Othertime language, and a brain which was in the habit of associating those sounds with certain ideas. He thus simply found himself using a language which, in another sense, he did not ‘know’. This view of the matter is borne out by the fact that if, in Othertime, he ever attempted to think what he was going to say, or even paused to choose a word, he at once became speechless. And if he failed to understand what an Othertimer said to him he could never lay his finger on any one word and ask what it meant. Their utterances had to be taken as a whole. When all went well, and when he was thinking hard of the subject-matter and not at all of the language, he could understand; but he could not take their talk to pieces linguistically or pick out nouns and verbs or anything of that sort.
‘It’s all right,’ Scudamour repeated. ‘I said I will not sting you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said the girl.