Lord Kelvin's Machine (Langdon St. Ives)

by James P. Blaylock

  They crossed the bridge and cantered along the river path, emerging through the shrubbery on the opposite bank. Now the manor was completely hidden from view, and so St. Ives kicked old Ben into the semblance of a run. They skirted the back of Lord Kelvin’s garden and angled toward the highroad, St. Ives yanking at the saddle to keep it on top of the horse. On the road he headed east at a gallop, leaning hard to the left to compensate and keeping his head down along Ben’s neck, like a jockey. Old Ben seemed to recall younger and more romantic days, and he galloped away without any encouragement at all, his mane blowing back in St. Ives’s face.

  St. Ives smiled suddenly with the exhilaration of it, thinking of Parsons unwittingly drinking tea back at the manor, wondering aloud of Hasbro whether St. Ives wasn’t ready to see him yet. Suspicions would be blooming like flowers. The man was a simpleton, a bumpkin.

  The saddle inched downward again, and St. Ives stood up in the stirrups and yanked it hard, but all the yanking in the world seemed to be useless. Gravity was against him. The right stirrup was nearly dragging on the ground now. There was nothing for it but to rein up and cinch the saddle tight. He pulled back on the reins, shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” but it wasn’t until old Ben had stopped and begun munching grasses along the road, that St. Ives, still sitting awkwardly in the saddle, heard the commotion behind him. He turned to look, and there was a coach and four, kicking up God’s own dust cloud, rounding a bend two hundred yards back.

  “Go!” he shouted, whipping at the reins now. “Get!”

  The horse looked up at him as if determined to go on with its meal of roadside grass, but St. Ives booted it in the flanks, throwing himself forward in the teetering saddle, and old Ben leaped ahead like a charger, nearly catapulting St. Ives to the road. They were off again, pursued now by the approaching coach. The saddle slipped farther, and St. Ives held on to the pommel, pulling himself farther up onto the horse’s neck. His hat flew off, and his coat billowed out around him like a sail.

  He turned to look, and with a vast relief he saw that they would outdistance the coach, except that just then the saddle slewed downward and St. Ives with it, and for a long moment he grappled himself to the horse’s flank, yanking himself back up finally with a handful of mane. He snatched wildly at the girth, trying to unfasten the buckle as old Ben galloped up a little rise. St. Ives cursed himself for having bothered with the saddle in the first place, of all the damned treacherous things. Somehow the girth was as tight as it could be now, wedged around sideways like it was. And it was behind his thigh, too, where he couldn’t see it, and old Ben didn’t seem to care a damn about any of it, but galloped straight on up the middle of the road.

  They crested the rise, and there before them, coming along peaceably, was another coach, very elegant and driven by a man in bright red livery. The driver shouted at St. Ives, drawing hard on the reins and driving the coach very nearly into the ditch.

  A white-haired head appeared through the coach window just then—Dr. Frost himself, his eyes flying open in surprise when he saw who it was that galloped past him on a horse that was saddled sideways. Frost shouted, but what he said was lost on the wind. St. Ives tugged hard on the girth, feeling it give at last, and then with a sliding rush, the saddle fell straight down onto the road, and old Ben tripped right over it, stumbling and nearly going down. St. Ives clutched the horse’s neck, his eyes shut. And then the horse was up again, and flying toward Binger’s like a thoroughbred.

  When St. Ives looked back, Frost’s coach had blocked the road. It was turning around, coming after him. Parsons’s coach was reining up behind it. Good, let them get into each other’s way. He could imagine that Parsons was apoplectic over the delay, and once again he laughed out loud as he thundered along, hugging old Ben’s neck, straight through Binger’s gate and up the drive toward the barn.

  “They’re after me, Mr. Binger!” St. Ives yelled, leaping down off the horse.

  “Would it be men from the stars again?” Binger asked, smoking his pipe with the air of a farmer inquiring about sheep.

  “No, Mr. Binger. This time it’s scientists, I’m afraid.”

  Binger nodded, scowling. “I don’t much hold with science,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “Begging your honor’s pardon. You’re not like these others, though. The way I see it, Professor, there’s this kind of scientist, and then there’s that other kind.” He shook his head darkly.

  “This is that other kind, Mr. Binger.” And right then St. Ives was interrupted by a clattering out on the road—both the coaches drawing up and turning in at the gate. St. Ives strode straight into the barn, followed by Binger, who still smoked his pipe placidly. One of his sons was mucking out a pen, and old Binger called him over. “Bring the hayfork,” he said. The dog Furry wandered out of the pen along with him, happy to see St. Ives again.

  At the mention of the hayfork, St. Ives paused. “We mustn’t cause these men any trouble, Mr. Binger,” he said. “They’re very powerful...” But now there was a commotion outside—Parsons and Frost arguing between themselves. St. Ives would have liked to stop and listen, but there wasn’t time. He climbed aboard the bathyscaphe, pulling the hatch shut behind him. Settling himself in the seat, he began to fiddle with the dials, his heart pounding, distracted by what he saw through the porthole.

  Seeing the hatch close down, Frost and Parsons gave off their bickering and hurried along, followed by the driver in livery and two other men who had accompanied Parsons. Binger pointed and must have said something to Furry, because as Parsons and one of the other men made a rush forward, the dog bounded in among them, catching hold of Parsons’s trousers and ripping off a long swatch of material. Parsons stumbled, and the other man leaped aside, swiping at the dog with his hand.

  Binger’s son shoved the end of the hayfork into the dirt directly in front of the man’s shoe, and he ran into the handle chin-first, recoiling in surprise and then pushing past it toward the machine as Furry raced in, nipping at his shoe, finally getting hold of his cuff and worrying it back and forth.

  Parsons was up and moving again and Frost along with him. Together they rushed at the machine, pushing and shoving at each other, both of them understanding that they had come too late. Furry let loose of his man’s cuff and followed the two of them, growling and snapping so that they were forced to do a sort of jug dance there in front of the porthole while they implored St. Ives with wild gestures to leave off and see reason.

  But what St. Ives saw just then was darkness, and he heard the by-then-familiar buzzing and felt himself falling down and down and down, leaving that far-flung island of history behind him, maybe never to return. And good riddance—Narbondo, somehow, wasn’t born to be a man of the cloth. He looked cramped and uncomfortable in his new clothing. And Parsons— well, Parsons was Parsons. You could take a brickbat to history six-dozen times, and somehow Parsons would stride into every altered picture wearing the same overgrown beard.

  Just then there was darkness of a different caliber again, nighttime darkness and rain falling. St. Ives came to himself. He patted his coat pocket, feeling the cold bulk of the revolver. He had come too far now to be squeamish about anything, but it occurred to him that there was something ironic about setting out to kill the man whose life you had recently worked so hard to save. But kill him he would, if it took that.

  He climbed out into the wind-whipped rain, looking around him, and realized with a surge of horror that he was on the wrong street. He could see it straight off. He had dreamed that line of storefronts and lodging houses too many times to make any mistake now. What he saw before him was utterly unfamiliar. He had been rushed by the imbroglio in Binger’s barn and had miscalibrated the instruments. But how? Panicked, he ran straight up the street, slogging through the flood, listening hard to the sounds of the night.

  Lancing suddenly through his head came the confused thought that it might be worse than a mere miscalculation. It was conceivable that anything and everything might hav
e changed by now. He had wanted the same street, but what did the notion of sameness mean to him anymore? He slowed to a stop, rain falling on him in torrents.

  Then he heard it—the clatter of a coach. Gunfire!

  He ran toward the sound, wiping the water out of his eyes, breathing hard. Another gunshot rang out and then a shriek and, through the sound of the rain, the tearing and banging of the cabriolet going over in the street. He could picture it in his mind—his past-time self running forward, hesitating to shoot until it was too late, and...

  He rounded the corner now, his pistol drawn, and nearly ran Narbondo down as he crouched over Alice, whose leg was pinned under the overturned cabriolet. Narbondo pointed his pistol at her head, staring at the rainy street where Langdon St. Ives ought to have been, but wasn’t. Hasbro and Kraken stared at the street, too, but there was nothing at all there save the empty coach, and although St. Ives alone knew why that was, he didn’t give it a moment’s thought, but lashed out with the gun butt and hammered Narbondo across the back of the head.

  St. Ives’s hand was in the way, though, and he managed only to hit Narbondo heavily with his fist. Narbondo’s head jerked down, and his hands flew outward as he tumbled away from Alice. He rolled forward, still holding his pistol, struggling to one knee and looking back wild-eyed at St. Ives, then immediately aiming the pistol and shooting it wildly, without an instant’s hesitation.

  Already St. Ives was lunging toward him, though, and the shot went wide. Three years of pent-up energy and fear and loathing drove St. Ives forward, unthinking. Narbondo staggered backward, sprawling through the water, starting to run even before he was fully on his feet. St. Ives ran him down in three steps. Too wild to shoot him, St. Ives grabbed the back of Narbondo’s coat and clubbed him again with the pistol butt, behind the ear this time, and Narbondo’s head jerked sideways as he brought his pistol up, firing it pointlessly in the air. St. Ives hammered him again, still clutching his jacket as Narbondo slumped to his knees, his pistol falling into the street. A hand seized St. Ives’s wrist as he raised his gun yet again, and St. Ives turned savagely, ready to strike. It was Hasbro, though, and the look on his face made St. Ives drop his own pistol into the water.

  “He shot her,” St. Ives mumbled. “I mean...” But he didn’t right then know what he meant. He was vastly tired and confused, and he remembered the child drinking medicinal beef broth in Limehouse. He looked back down the street. Alice wasn’t shot—of course she wasn’t shot. Kraken bent over her, lifting off the top end of the cabriolet and then stooping to untie her. St. Ives walked toward them, as old suppressed memories freshened and grew young again in his mind. Mercifully, the rain let off just then, and the moon shone through the clouds, lightening the street.

  “That were a neat trick, sir,” Kraken said to him enthusiastically, standing up and making way for him. “I could have sworn you was in the coach. Why, I even seen you stepping out through the open door. Then you was gone, and then here your honor was again, smashing your man in back of the head.” He looked at St. Ives with evident pride, and St. Ives kneeled in the flooded street, feeling for a pulse, fearing suddenly that it was too late after all. The crash alone might have... Then Alice opened her eyes, rubbed the back of her head with her hand, winced, and smiled at St. Ives. She struggled to sit up.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  Kraken let out a whoop, and Hasbro, who had dragged Narbondo to the roadside, helped both St. Ives and Alice to their feet, pulling them into a doorway out of the rain.

  “Tie Narbondo up with something,” St. Ives said to Kraken.

  Kraken looked disappointed. “Begging your honor’s pardon,” he said, taking St. Ives aside, “but hadn’t we ought to kill him? I should think that would be recommended, seeing as who he is. You know he would have shot her. A life don’t mean nothing to the likes of him. Give me the word, sir, and I’ll make it quick and quiet.”

  St. Ives hesitated, then shook his head tiredly. “No, he’s got too much to do yet. All of us do. Heaven alone knows what will come of the world if we don’t all play our parts—heroes, villains, spectators, and fools. Perhaps it’s already too late,” he said, half to himself. “Perhaps this changes the script utterly. So tie him up, if you will. He’ll spend some time in Newgate before he escapes.”

  Kraken nodded, although he looked confused, like a man who understood nothing. St. Ives left him to it and faced Alice again. He sighed deeply. She was safe. Thank God for that. “I’ll have to go,” he said to her.

  “What?” Alice looked at him in disbelief. “Why? Aren’t I going with you? We’ll all go, the sooner the better.”

  St. Ives was swept with a wave of passion and love. He kissed her on the mouth, and although she was surprised by the suddenness of it, she kissed him back with equal passion.

  Hasbro cleared his throat and went off abruptly toward where Kraken was tying up Narbondo with the reins from the wrecked cabriolet.

  I will stay, St. Ives thought suddenly. Why not? His past-time self—now nothing but a ghost—wouldn’t be any the wiser. He was already gone, flitted away, into the mists of abandoned time. Why not start anew, right now? They would take a room in the West End, make it a sort of holiday—nothing but eating and the theater and lounging about all day long. He suddenly felt like Atlas, having at last shrugged off the world, ending what had turned out to be merely a lengthy nightmare.

  Alice was regarding him strangely, though. “You look awful,” she said, squinting at him as if she realized something was wrong but had no notion how to explain it. He knew what she had meant to say. She had meant to say that he looked old, worn-out, thin, but she had caught herself and had said something more temporary so as to preserve his feelings. “What’s wrong?” she asked suddenly, and his heart sank.

  He looked out into the street, where his past-time self lay invisible in the water and muck of the road. You fool, he said in his mind. I earned this, but I’ve got to give it to you, when all you would have done is botch it utterly. But even as he thought this, he knew the truth—that he wasn’t the man now that he had been then. The ghost in the road was in many ways the better of the two of them. Alice didn’t deserve the declined copy; what she wanted was the genuine article.

  And maybe he could become that article—but not by staying here. He had to go home again, to the future, in order to catch up with himself once more.

  “I won’t be gone but a moment,” he said, glancing back toward where he had left the machine. “And when I appear again, I might be confused for a time. It’ll pass, though. When you see me next, tell me that I’m a mortal idiot, and I’ll feel better about it all.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” she asked, looking at him fearfully, as if he had lost his mind.

  He almost started to explain, but it was too much for him. Now that he had made up his mind to leave, the future was calling to him, and the shortest route back to it sat in the middle of the street a block away. “Trust me,” he said. “I won’t be gone a moment.” He kissed her again, and then stepped out of the doorway, turned, and loped off, not looking back, his heart full of gladness and regret.

  EPILOGUE

  He landed on the meadow, half expecting heaven knew what. There was no telling what was what anymore. Maybe Parsons would leap out of the bushes and claim the machine. Maybe Narbondo, or Frost, or whatever he called himself now, would menace him with a revolver. Maybe anything at all—he didn’t care. They could have the machine. He didn’t want it anymore. His work was done, and he was ready to confront the results, whatever they were, and then to give up his chasing around through time. At least for the moment.

  What he couldn’t do, though, was face himself. There were two present-time copies of him now, and he was determined to let the other one depart gracefully and, he hoped, privately. What sort of man had he become? A happy man, perhaps, who wouldn’t relish the idea of this copycat St. Ives popping in at the window to replace him? Or, just as easily, a miserab
le man, who might gladly hand over the reins and disappear forever.

  Fragments of his memory were even now starting to wink out like candle flames in a breeze. His nightmares about the Seven Dials, the very fact of his returning there, his whole tiresome rigamarole life during the past three years—all of it would become vapor.

  And good riddance, too. He would welcome new memories, whatever they were. He realized that this was bluff, though. He thought one last time of the child Narbondo, huddled in dirty rags in Limehouse, and of his mother and the sailor in the doorway. There were memories worse than his own. That’s partly why he was still sitting there in the machine, wasn’t it? He had no idea what he would find inside the manor—who he would discover himself to be.

  He climbed through the hatch into the wind. It was sunny and fine with just the hint of a smoky autumn chill in the air. He pulled his coat straight and fiddled with his tie, realizing that he was a wet and dirty mess. But he felt fit, somehow, as if a great weight had fallen away from him, and then, in a confused shudder of memory, it occurred to him that he couldn’t bear eating eggplant again. Not once more.

  His head reeled, and he nearly fell over. Eggplant? It was starting. His memories would depart like rats from a ship. Disconcerted, he hurried through the window, into the study, and there stood Hasbro, staring at him strangely.

  “We’ll have to move the time machine into the silo,” St. Ives said to him. “I wasn’t sure whether it was empty or not.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “The machine on the meadow,” St. Ives said. “We’ll want to get it into the silo, out of the weather.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t aware that Dr. Frost had returned it. This comes as a surprise. I was under the impression that he had stolen it from Secretary Parsons. He’s brought it here, has he?”