Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  “That’s a good question” Hope said, seemingly sincere in the compliment. “You might be right, of course, and seeing through time might prove to be just as impractical as leaping back and forth between the centuries, but Marlstone seems to have observed visual phenomena during this small-scale tests, so he’s convinced that there must be something special about light particles or the luminiferous ether that supports their vibrations. He rabbits on occasionally about the particulate nature of time, the harmonic subvibrations of the temporal ether and similar philosophical fancies but I’m not sure that his heart’s really in it. I think he’s prepared to accept the apparent fact, for now, and see how far such visions can be taken before attempting a fuller explanation. If his experience thus far is anything to go by, of course, then they probably can’t be taken very far at all—maybe no further than a trivial optical illusion.”

  “Actually,” Escott said. “I don’t think Hope’s explaining this very well—perhaps because he doesn’t really understand it. As I see it, Marlstone thinks that the primary influence of the time machine—and perhaps the only one—isn’t on matter but on mind. His time machine isn’t like a railway carriage in which one can sit, able to look out and watch the past or the future go by; it’s more like a magnet, which produces a field around it, which has the effect that people standing within the field—which is where all Lord Langstrade’s guests will be standing on Saturday, if Marlstone has his way—will be able to reach out with their minds, to the extent that the field’s intensity will permit. If they really are able to see their surroundings as those surroundings once were, or will be, they won’t really be seeing them in the same straightforward way that their eyes transmit sensory information via the optic nerves; it’ll be more like a vision conjured up by the imagination—a dream, if you like, but an accurate dream.”

  “In a dream, though, you can hear people speak and touch them,” Michael pointed out.

  “Well, yes—but what they say, and any apparent touch sensations, are products of the dreamer’s imagination. As I understand it, Marlstone thinks that the way his time-field will operate on the imagination will impart true visual information, but not true auditory or palpatory information. That’s where his notion of the essential harmonics of the temporal ether comes in. The idea is that the time-field works in a fashion analogous to the luminiferous ether, not sound-bearing media or tangible matter. As Hope says, though, it might all be complete rubbish. Marlstone’s supposed sophistication of Dee’s theory might be so much nonsense, like phlogiston theory.”

  “Mind you,” Hope said, “if there’s anything in it at all, Saturday’s experiment might just provide us with an explanation of Lady Phythian’s apparitions. If Marlstone does get his machine to work within the Keep, you see, and some or all of us are able to make use of its field to reach out into the past or future, those of us who reach out into the past, traveling distances in some way proportional to the intensity of the field at the point at which we’re standing, might become the ghosts that have been seen on the site of the Maze. I’m assuming, of course, that the field works both ways, allowing Lady Phythian and others to reach out from the past just as easily as it will allow us to reach out from the present.”

  “Not that it’s at all likely, mind,” Escott put in, “given that Lady Phythian’s ghosts seemed to be going into the maze rather than out of it, and we’ll already be in the central arena when Marstione’s time-field takes effect. If it takes effect.”

  Michael took another moment to think about the new possibilities his companions had raised. There was a certain delightful irony about the proposal that the second Earl of Langstrade and the guests that he had invited to help him celebrate the millennium of Harold Longstride’s supposed combat with Emund Snurlson might actually become the “ghosts” that Lady Phythian and others had mistaken for the shades of Harold Longstride and his companions.

  He shielded his eyes against the blood red glare of the sun, which was setting almost directly ahead of the diligence’s course, amid the smoky haze that rose up from the land every day now that the harvest had begun and the stubble was being burned in the fields as the crops were cleared. Then another thought occurred to him. “If people living in the past or the future will be able to reach into the present, in the same way that we’ll be able to reach out of it,” he said, pensively, surely some sort of communication will be possible, even if we have to use sign language—or signaling lanterns.”

  “Good idea!” said Hope. “Perhaps the moving lanterns that Lady Phythian saw weren’t walking or dancing the maze at all, but were merely trying to make some sort of message comprehensible by means of a code.”

  “Do you understand any codes of that sort, Hope?” Escott asked him. “I don’t, and I cannot imagine that Carp or Monticarlo does—but I suppose Marlstone might. How about you, Laurel? Your father was a naval man, wasn’t he? Did he teach you to read flags while he dandled you on his knee as an infant?”

  Michael shook his head. Precisely because his father had been a naval man, away at sea for ten months a year, there had been precious few occasions for such dandling—which made it all the more unfair that his father had accused him, contemptuously, of being a “mummy’s boy” when he had told him of his decision to train as a painter rather than a sailor.

  “Mind you,” Escott went on, “it might be more interesting, if the damn thing does turn out to work, not to bother reaching out with our own minds at all, but simply to wait and see who—or what—might reach out to us. The people of the future will have the advantage—which Lady Phythian and her fellow ghost-seers did not—of knowing exactly when and where Marlstone’s experiment took place, and whether it was successful or not. If there’s anything they want to communicate to us, they’ll surely be able to find a better way than waving lanterns around. Putting up posters on the inner walls of the Maze might do the trick.”

  “That’s typical of you, Jim,” Hope observed. “Given the chance to look into the future for yourself, and see what progress might bring, you’d prefer to remain in the present, and see what—if anything—might come to you. You’d be just as delighted to see Harold Longstride peering myopically out of the year 822, I dare say, as you would be to glimpse your descendants from 2822, who’ll have taken progress to a much further extreme and become godlike in their abilities.”

  “Lord Langstrade’s the only one likely to be nursing faint hopes of catching a fleeting glimpse of Harold Longstride some day,” Escott retorted, evidently stung by Hope’s sarcasm, “not merely because the fellow never existed, but because Marlstone doesn’t dare claim that he’ll ever be able to generate a temporal field capable of extending vision over a thousand years. He refuses to offer estimates, claiming that once he’s got the machine working he’ll have to calibrate it, but he’s only prepared to speculate about months—years, at the most—even when he’s off on one of his hypothetical flights of fancy. On that sort of basis, the only people likely to be around in a future from which it’s practicable to send messages back to us are…well, us. Our future selves, that is.”

  “Would minds reaching out from the past or future be limited to the present moment while the machine is actually in operation?” Michael asked, hopeful that he wasn’t being too naïve. “If they could somehow fall short or overshoot within the field, they might be responsible for Lady Phythian’s apparition, rather than us…us as of this Saturday, that is”

  “That’s an interesting suggestion,” Hope conceded. “If Marlstone’s field is to extend in time as well as space when it’s switched on, past and future moments might be theoretically accessible from all points within it…within a limited range, of course. Months, as Escott says, or maybe years.…”

  “If that were the case,” Escott was quick to deduce, “then the field must already be in existence, if Marlstone’s machine is actually going to work, and must have been in existence, albeit with
ever-decreasing intensity, for some considerable time. If so, it’s no wonder Lady Phythian thought she could sense the field’s presence even when she couldn’t actually see anything. If so, in fact, the three of us ought be able to nip into the heart of the maze as soon as we get to Langstrade, and start reaching out without even waiting for Marlstone to throw the switch. And if we can’t do that, we’ll know that the machine isn’t going to work, so we won’t have to bother turning up to the scheduled demonstration on Saturday.”

  “It might be worth a try,” Hope agreed, although he couldn’t suppress a chuckle as he contemplated the apparent absurdity. “But if we fail, it won’t necessarily mean that the time machine won’t work at all—it might only mean that there’s a flaw in the particular hypothesis we’ve just been extrapolating. Perhaps the field won’t extend in time as well as space, or perhaps it will only extend forwards not backwards.…”

  “In which case,” Escott concluded, “we’d be back to square one in the matter of explaining Lady Phythian’s ghosts, if the time machine can provide an explanation at all.”

  “That’s Socratic logic for you,” said Hope, blithely. “An authentic Labyrinth, in the strict sense of the word. You go round and round and round and—hey presto!—you find yourself back at square one. If and when the machine actually works, I suppose we’ll find out soon enough what its capabilities are, so we might just as well wait and see—but it’s fun to speculate, isn’t it, Laurel?”

  “I suppose so,” Michael answered, dutifully, although he felt that his head was spinning. All the possibilities that his companions seemed to see so readily, and in which they were capable of taking such manifest delight, picked up his own stray thoughts like a dizzying whirlwind.

  There were no telegraph poles beside the road along which they were traveling—although Michael suspected that there soon might be, as the network gradually extended adventitious nerves from the central spinal column provided by the London-to-York railway and its signaling systems—but the slow retreat of the landscape, as the gently-rocking diligence hastened forward, still had a slightly mesmeric effect on his weary brain. Dusk was falling now that the sun had sunk into a cloudy lake of blood, and fugitive candlelight was beginning to appear in the windows of the farmhouses and cottages that were scattered at intervals by the roadside, nestling amid the spinneys and the hedgerows. The travelers were still in the heart of the Vale of York, of which Langstrade’s so-called dale was a sloping extension between half-hearted hills, but the silhouettes of loftier moors were looming ever higher on the northern and western horizons: monstrous lumpen shadows gradually but inexorably encroaching upon a sky that would soon be spangled with stars.

  The diligence lurched as it passed over a slightly humpbacked bridge.

  “Was that the Nidd we just went over?” Escott asked, trying to peer around the edge of the vehicle into the gathering gloom behind. “We’re making good time, if so.”

  “We’re on the old Roman road,” Hope reminded him. “It’s still as good as ever. It’s a pity we can’t follow it all the way to Knaresborough before turning off on to mere cart tracks, but the road through Arkendale and Staveley is sound enough at this time of year. After that, we’ll just have to trust to luck.”

  “Langstrade’s no more than twenty-five miles from York, is it?” Michael said. “Surely it won’t take us longer than two hours to get there.”

  Hope and Escott exchanged a glance, but the moonlight wasn’t quite bright enough to show Michael their expressions. “He’s a city boy,” Escott said, as if that explained everything. To Michael, he said: “Twenty-five miles is a mere bagatelle, if you’re traveling on an express train, or even if you’ve got four fine horses pulling a light carriage along an old Roman road—but our carriage isn’t light, our horses aren’t first rate, and the road will get a lot worse when we take a turn toward Arkendale. We’ll have to make a stop somewhere, hopefully to change the horses—if we can only water them and let them rest, that’ll add a further hour on to the journey—and by the time we get to within five miles of Langstrade, even if they’ve been changed for better animals, they’ll be making such heavy weather of the uphill haulage that they’ll be walking a good deal slower than we could. Better reckon on four hours, to be on the safe side.”

  “It’ll be enough, at any rate, to make even Escott yearn for the speed of a railway locomotive,” Hope added.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Escott told him. “The weather’s good, the company’s good—thanks to you, Laurel—and the road hasn’t become bumpy yet. Even the most pleasant of journeys tends to be exhausting—but think how grateful we’ll be to sink into our beds when we finally arrive!”

  “For a sophisticated pessimist, Jim,” Hope opined, “you have an authentic talent for searching out primitive crumbs of comfort.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A WARM WELCOME AT LANGSTRADE HALL

  James Escott turned out—not for the first time, Michael surmised—to be a trifle too pessimistic. After changing horses in Arkendale—which required so little time that the passengers on the diligence hardly had time to stretch their legs before climbing aboard again—the heavily-loaded vehicle made short work of the next stage of the journey, and the horses were still fresh enough to tackle the slopes beyond Staveley with a will. The party arrived at Langstrade Hall shortly after ten o’clock. The night was bright, as Hope had promised, and still warm; the only exceptional discomfort the travelers had suffered was the acrid dust projected into the air by the burning of stubble, which had been particularly irritating in the exposed coupé. Michael’s nose had been running for some time, and he had had to make frequent use of his handkerchief, but the embarrassment had been lessened by the fact that Hope and Escott had fared no better.

  The current Lord and Lady Langstrade came out with the dowager Lady Langstrade, Cecilia and a clutch of valets to meet the coach. Grooms uncoupled the weary horses and led them away to the stables, while the valets set about the Herculean task of unloading the vehicle, and then sorting out the luggage and distributing its various components to various bedrooms within the Hall. The moon was descending into the west by now, as the sun had done long before, but it had not yet sunk so low in the sky that the bulk of the Hall interrupted the play of its light on the battlements of the Keep or the crowns of the tall hedges of the surrounding maze.

  Michael was, inevitably, the last person to be greeted by his hosts, but there was nothing cursory about the way that Lord Langstrade shook his hand and bade him welcome—or, more importantly, about the way in which Cecilia smiled at him. The Earl straightened up immediately thereafter and informed his guests that cocoa would be served in the large drawing-room, followed by brandy in the smoking-room, should any of the gentlemen prefer not to retire along with the ladies. First of all, however, Michael was shown up to his room—which was called the Red Room, to distinguish it from the other guest bedrooms, although it had very little red in its décor—in order that he might wash and change out of his traveling clothes.

  He took his time over his ablutions, fearful of attracting attention to himself if he should chance to be the first one down, but then had difficult locating a servant to direct him to the large drawing-room. He would have been the last to arrive had not Augustus Carp and his somniloquist been delayed by a quarrel, the muffled progress of which Michael overheard through the door of the Violet Room, situated at the opposite end of the corridor from his own, close to the stair-head.

  The first thing he noticed, on entering the large drawing-room, was the presence of a burly stranger with bushy eyebrows seated in a vast leather-clad armchair. Because Lord Langstrade was in conversation with Signor Monticarlo, while their respective daughters dutifully danced attendance upon them, and both Lady Langstrades had been buttonholed by Lady Phythian, Escott and Hope were able to swoop upon their new friend and bear him away in the direction of the strange
r.

  “My dear Marlstone,” said Hope, “may I introduce the celebrated artist Michael Laurel, with whom we had an extremely interesting conversation on the intricacies of time travel in the diligence. Laurel, this is Gregory Marlstone, who was fortunate enough to arrive without incident this morning, and has spent the day tirelessly transporting all his equipment into the Keep, ready for assembly tomorrow.”

  Marlstone stood up and shook Laurel’s hand gravely. “I’m delighted to meet you, sir,” Marlstone said. “Any man capable of taking an intelligent interest in the subject of time travel is very welcome at my demonstration. I hope to show you something on Saturday that will reward your interest lavishly.”

  “I’m exceedingly glad to meet you, sir,” Michael replied, loyally, “and I look forward to your demonstration with great excitement.”

  “Mr. Laurel was wondering in the diligence about the range of the time-field you intend to produce, Marlstone,” Escott said, mischievously, “and whether it will extend in time as well as space—and whether, if so, it will extend backwards as well as forwards. I fear that Hope and I were unable to enlighten him, as we were slightly uncertain about the modifications you’ve made to John Dee’s theory of time—especially the precise relevance of the law of conservation of non-identity, the practicalities of complementary attunement and the effects of intertemporal gravity. Perhaps you’d care to explain it to him.”