Lord Kelvin's Machine (Langdon St. Ives)

by James P. Blaylock

  Parsons stared at him, and St. Ives shook his head, trying to clear it, realizing that the man was waiting for him to say something more. Then, abruptly, as if a trapdoor had opened under him, St. Ives sat down hard on the sidewalk.

  He was deathly cold and faint. There could be no doubt now. Here he was again—his future-time self—the damned nitwit. He had better have a damned good excuse. His brain seemed to be a puddle of soft gelatin. He pictured the pie in his head, straight out of the oven, the cheese melting. Sometimes he made it with butter rather than cheese. Never mind that. Better to concentrate on one thing at a time.

  There was a terrible barking noise. Some great beast... He looked around vaguely, still sitting on the sidewalk, holding on to his mind with a flimsy grasp. A dog ran past him just then, a droopy-eyed dog, white and brown and black, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. Even in his fuddled state he recognized the dog, and for one strange moment he was filled with joy at seeing it. It was Furry, old Binger’s dog, the kind of devoted animal that would come round to see you, anxious to be petted, to be spoken to. A friend in all kinds of weather... Another dog burst past, nearly knocking Parsons over backward. This one was some sort of mastiff, growling and snarling and snapping and chasing Binger’s dog. Weakly, St. Ives tried to throw himself at the mastiff, nearly getting hold of its collar, but the dog ran straight on, as if St. Ives’s fingers were as insubstantial as smoke.

  Through half-focused eyes, St. Ives saw Binger’s poor dog running straight down the middle of the road, into the path of a loaded dray. The air was full of noise, of clattering hooves and the grinding of steel-shod wheels. And just then a man came running from the alley behind the Crow’s Nest. He waved curtly to Parsons as he leaped off the curb, hurtling forward into the street, his arms outstretched. St. Ives screwed his eyes half-shut, trying to focus them, the truth dawning on him in a rush. He recognized the tattered muddy coat, the uncombed hair. It was the same man whose reflection he had seen in the glass. It was himself, his future-time self. Parsons saw it too. St. Ives raised a hand to his face, covering his eyes, and yet he could see the street through his hand as if through a fog.

  The running man threw himself on the sheepdog. The driver of the dray hauled back on the reins, pulling at the wheel brake. A woman screamed. The horses lunged. The dog and its savior leaped clear, and then the street and everything in it disappeared from view, winking out of existence like a departing hallucination.

  Suddenly he could see again. And the first thing he noticed was Parsons, hurrying away up the sidewalk in the direction taken by the St. Ives that had saved the dog. There’s your mistake, St. Ives said to himself as he struggled to his hands and knees. You’re already too late. He felt shaky, almost hung over. He staggered off toward the corner, in the opposite direction to that taken by Parsons. The man would discover nothing. The time machine had gone, and his future-time self with it. St. Ives laughed out loud, abruptly cutting off the laughter when he heard the sound of his own voice.

  Mr. Binger’s dog loped up behind him, wagging its tail, and St. Ives scratched its head as the two of them trotted along. At the corner, coming up fast, was old Binger himself. “Furry!” he shouted at the dog, half mad and half happy to see it. “Why, Professor,” he said, and looked skeptically at St. Ives.

  “Have you got your cart?” St. Ives asked him hastily.

  “Aye,” said Binger. “I was just coming along into town, when old Furry here jumped off the back. Saw some kind of damned mastiff and thought he’d play with it, didn’t he?” Binger shook his head. “Trusts anybody. Last week...”

  “Drive me up to the manor,” St. Ives said, interrupting him. “Quick as you can. There’s trouble.”

  Binger’s face dropped. He didn’t like the idea of trouble. In that way he resembled his dog. “I don’t take any stock in trouble,” he had told St. Ives once, and now the look on his face seemed to echo that phrase.

  “Cow in calf,” St. Ives lied, defining things more carefully. He patted his coat, as if somehow there was something vital in his pocket, something a cow would want. “Terrible rush,” he said, “but we might save it yet.”

  Mr. Binger hurried toward his cart, and the dog Furry jumped on behind. Here was trouble of a sort that Mr. Binger understood, and in moments they were rollicking away up the road, St. Ives calculating how long it would take for Parsons to discover that the man he was chasing was long gone, off into the aether aboard the machine. He was filled with a deep sense of success, transmitted backward to him from the saving of old Furry. It was partly the sight of himself dashing out there, sweeping up the dog. But more than that, it was the certainty that he was moments away from becoming a time traveler, that he could hurry or not hurry, just as he chose. It didn’t matter, did it?

  The truth was that he was safe from Parsons. The saving of the dog meant exactly that, and nothing less. He was destined to succeed that far, at least. He laughed out loud, but then noticed Mr. Binger giving him a look, and so he pretended to be coughing rather than laughing, and he nodded seriously at the man, patting his coat again.

  The manor hove into view as Mr. Binger drove steadily up the road, smoking his pipe like a chimney. There, on the meadow, grazed a half-dozen jersey cows. A calf, easily two months old, stood alongside its mother, who ruminated like a philosopher. “Well, I’ll be damned,” St. Ives said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the calf. “Looks like everything’s fine after all.” He smiled broadly at Mr. Binger, in order to demonstrate his deep delight and relief.

  “That ain’t...” Mr. Binger started to say.

  St. Ives interrupted him. “Pull up, will you? I’ll just get off here and walk the rest of the way. Thanks awfully.” Mr. Binger slowed and stopped the horses, and St. Ives gave him a pound note. “Don’t know what I’d do without you, Mr. Binger. I’m in your debt.”

  Mr. Binger blinked at the money and scratched his head, staring out at the two-month-old calf on the field. He was only mystified for a moment, though. The look on his face seemed to suggest that he was used to this kind of thing, that there was no telling what sorts of shenanigans the professor might not be up to when you saw him next. He shrugged, tipped his hat, turned the wagon around, and drove off.

  St. Ives started out toward the manor, whistling merrily. It was too damned bad that Mrs. Langley had gone off to her sister’s yesterday without having waited for morning. St. Ives hadn’t had time to put things right with her. What had he been thinking of, talking to her in that tone? The thought of his having run mad like that depressed him. He would fetch her back. He had tackled the business of Binger’s dog; he could see to Mrs. Langley, too. With the machine he would make everything all right.

  Then he began to wonder how on earth he had known about Binger’s dog. In some other historical manifestation he must have witnessed the whole incident, and it must have fallen out badly— Binger’s dog dead, perhaps, smashed on the street. Via the machine, then, St. Ives must have come back around, stepping in out of time and snatching the dog from the jaws of certain death. Now he couldn’t remember any of that other manifestation of time. The first version of things had ceased to exist for him, perhaps now had never existed at all. There was no other explanation for it, though. He, himself, must have purposefully and effectively altered history, even after history had already been established, and in so doing had obliterated another incarnation of himself along with it. Nothing is set in stone, he realized, and the thought of it was dizzying— troubling too. What else might he have changed? Who and what else might he have obliterated?

  He would have to go easy with this time-traveling business. The risks were clearly enormous. The whole thing might mean salvation, and it might as easily mean utter ruin. Well, one way or another he was going to find out. He no longer had any choice, had he? There he had been, after all, peeking in at the window, saving the dog in the road. There was no gainsaying it now. What would happen, would happen—unless, of course, St. Ives himself came back and ma
de it happen in some other way altogether.

  His head reeled, and it occurred to him that there would be nothing wrong, at the moment, with opening a bottle of port—a vintage, something laid down for years. Best taste it now, he thought, the future wasn’t half as secure as he had supposed it to be even twenty minutes past. He set out for the manor in a more determined way, thinking happily that if a man were to hop ten years into the future, that same bottle of port would have that many more years on it, and could be fetched back and...

  Something made him turn his head and look behind him, though, before he had taken another half-dozen steps. There, coming up the road, was a carriage, banging along wildly, careering back and forth as if it meant to overtake him or know the reason why. Mrs. Langley? he wondered stupidly, and then he knew it wasn’t.

  Fumbling in his pocket for the padlock key, he set out across the meadow at a dead run, angling toward the silo now. For better or worse, the past beckoned to him. The bottle of port would have to wait.

  THE TIME TRAVELER

  Even as he was climbing into the machine he could hear them outside, through the brick wall of the silo: the carriage rattling up, the shouted orders, then a terrible banging on the barred wooden doors. He shut the hatch, and the sounds of banging and bashing were muffled. In moments they would knock the doors off their hinges and be inside—Parsons and his ruffians, swarming over the machine. They would have to work on getting in, though, since it was unlikely that they’d brought any sort of battering ram. St. Ives prayed silently that Hasbro wouldn’t try to stop them. He could only be brought to grief by tangling with them. They meant business this time, doubly so, since Parsons knew, or at least feared, that he was already too late, and that fear would drive him to desperation. And St. Ives’s salvation lay in the machine now, not in his stalwart friend Hasbro, as it had so many times in the past.

  He settled himself into the leather seat of what had once been Leopold Higgins’s bathyscaphe. It made a crude and ungainly time machine, and most of the interior space had been consumed by Lord Kelvin’s magnetic engine, stripped of all the nonsense that had been affixed to it as modification during the days of the comet. There was barely room for St. Ives to maneuver, what with the seat moved forward until his nose was very nearly pressed against a porthole. An elaborate system of mirrors allowed him to see around the device behind him, out through the other porthole windows.

  He glanced into the mirrors once, making out the dim floor of the silo: the tumbled machinery and scrap metal, the black forge with its enormous bellows, the long workbench that was a chaos of debris and tools. What a pathetic mess. The sight of it reminded St. Ives of how far he had sunk in the last couple of years—the last few months, really. His mental energy had been spent entirely, to its last farthing, on building the machine; he hadn’t enough left over to hang up a hammer. He remembered a dim past day when he had been the king of regimentation and order. Now he was the pawn of desperation.

  It was then that he saw the message, scrawled in chalk on the silo wall. “Hurry,” it read. “Try to put things right on the North Road. If at first you fail...” The message ended there, unfinished, as if someone—he himself—had abandoned the effort and fled. And just as well. It was a useless note, anyway. He would remember that in the future. Time was short; there was none left over for wasted words and ready-made phrases.

  He concentrated on the dials in front of him, listening with half an ear to the muffled bashing of the doors straining against the bar. He knew just exactly where he wanted to go, but harmonizing the instrumentation wanted minutes, not seconds. Measure twice, cut once, as the carpenter said. Well, the carpenter would have to trust to his eye, here; there was no time to fiddle with tape measures. Hastily, he made a final calculation and delicately turned the longitudinal dial, tracking a route along the Great North Road, into London. He set the minutes and the seconds and then went after the latitudinal dial.

  There was a sound of wood splintering, and the murky light of the silo brightened. They were in. St. Ives reeled through the time setting, hearing the delicate insect hum of the spinning flywheel. The machine shook just then, with the weight of someone climbing up the side. Parsons’s face appeared in front of the porthole. He was red and sweating, and his beard wagged with the effort of his shouting. St. Ives winked at him, and glanced into the mirrors again. The silo door was swung wide open, framing a picture of Hasbro, carrying a rifle, running across the meadow. Mrs. Langley followed him, a rolling pin in her hand.

  Mrs. Langley! God bless her. She had gone away miffed, but had come back, loyal woman that she was. And now she was ready to hammer his foes with a rolling pin. St. Ives very nearly gave it up then and there. She would sacrifice herself for him, even after his shabby treatment of her. He couldn’t let her do that, or Hasbro either.

  For a moment he hesitated. Then, stoically and calmly, he set his mind again to his instruments. By God, he wouldn’t let them do it. He was a time traveler now. He would save them all before he was through, whatever it took. If he stayed, if he abandoned the machine to Parsons, he would be a gibbering wreck for ever and ever. If he lived that long. He’d be of no use to anyone at all.

  He heard the sound of someone fiddling with the hatch. The moment had come. “Hurry,” the message on the wall had said. He threw the lever that activated the electromagnetic properties of Lord Kelvin’s machine. The ground seemed suddenly to shake beneath him, and there was a high-pitched whine that rose within a second to the point of disappearing. Parsons pitched over backward as the bathyscaphe bucked on its splayed legs. Simultaneously, there was a shouting from overhead, and a pair of legs and feet swung down across the porthole. Parsons scrambled upright, latching on to the dangling man and pulling him free.

  And then, abruptly, absolute darkness prevailed, and St. Ives felt himself falling, spinning round and round as he fell, as if down a dark and very deep well. His first impulse was to clutch at something, but there was nothing to clutch, and he seemed to have no hands. He was simply a mind, spiraling downward through itself, seeming already to have traveled vast distances along endless centuries and yet struck with the notion that he had merely blinked his eyes.

  Then he stopped falling, and sat as ever in the bathyscaphe. He realized now that his hands shook treacherously. They had been calm and cooperative when the danger was greatest, but now they were letting themselves go. He was still in darkness. But where? Suspended somewhere in the void, neither here nor there?

  He saw then that the darkness outside was of a different quality than it had been. It was merely nighttime, and it was raining. He was in the country somewhere. Slowly, his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness. A muddy road stretched away in front of him. He was in an open field, beside the North Road.

  From out of the darkness, cantering along at a good pace, came a carriage. St. Ives—his past-time self—was driving it. The horses steamed in the rain, and muddy water flew from the wheels. Bill Kraken and Hasbro sat inside. Somewhere ahead of them, Ignacio Narbondo fled in terror, carrying Alice with him. They were nearly upon him...

  Shrugging with fatalistic abandon, the St. Ives in the machine scribbled a note to himself. He knew that it was possible that he could deliver the note, if he hurried. He knew equally well what attempting to deliver it might mean. He had experienced this fiasco once before, seeing it through the eyes of the man who drove the wagon. He was filled suddenly with feelings of self-betrayal.

  Still, he reminded himself, he could change the past: witness the saving of Binger’s dog. And in any event, what would he sacrifice by being timid here? His failing to act would necessarily alter the past, and with what consequences? It wouldn’t serve to be stupid and timid both; one mistake was enough.

  He read hastily through the finished note. “N. will shoot Alice on the street in the Seven Dials,” the note read, “unless you shoot him first. Act. Don’t hesitate.” As a lark he nearly wrote, “Yrs. sincerely,” and signed it. But he didn’t. T
here was no time for that. Already the man driving the horses would be losing his grip on the reins. St. Ives had waited long enough, maybe too long. He tripped the lever on the hatch and thrust himself through, into the rainy night, sliding down the side of the bathyscaphe onto his knees in ditch water. Rain beat into his face, the fierce roar of it mixing with the creaking and banging of the carriage.

  He cursed, slogging to his feet and up the muddy bank, reeling out onto the road. The carriage hurtled toward him, driven now by a man who was nearly a ghost. There was a look of pure astonishment in its eyes. He had recognized himself, but it was too late. His past-time self was already becoming incorporeal. St. Ives reached the note up, hoping to hand it to himself, hoping that there was some little bit of substance left to his hands. His past-time self spoke, but no sounds issued from his mouth. He bent down and flailed at the note, but hadn’t the means to grasp it.

  St. Ives let go of it then, although he knew it was too late. “Take it!” he screamed, but already the carriage was driverless. His past-time self had simply disappeared from the carriage seat, reduced to atoms floating now in the aether. The note blew away into the rainy darkness like a kite battered by a hurricane, and for one desperate moment St. Ives started to follow it, as if he would chase it forever across the countryside. He let it go and turned momentarily back to the road, watching the reins flop across the horses’ backs as they hauled the carriage away, bashing across deep ruts, smashing along toward certain ruin.

  St. Ives couldn’t stand to watch. They’ll survive, he told himself. They’ll struggle on into Crick where a doctor will attend to Kraken’s shoulder, and then they’ll be off again for London, with Narbondo almost hopelessly far ahead. Kraken would search him out in Limehouse, surprising him in the middle of one of his abominable meals, and they would pursue him to the Seven Dials, losing him again until early morning when...