Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  And completely unverifiable, Michael thought. So go ahead and improvise to your heart’s content, Dr. Carp—if you can persuade Mademoiselle Evredon to go along with it. Carp’s expression suggested that he was no more confident of the prospect of obtaining useful enlightenment from his forthcoming séance than Lady Phythian, and Michael felt a generous impulse bidding him to help the old man out. He did not have the opportunity to say anything supportive, though, because Lord Langstrade touched him on the arm at that moment.

  “I believe the ladies are retiring now,” the Earl said. “Would you and Dr. Carp care to join me in the smoking-room for a nightcap, Mr. Laurel?”

  “Certainly, Milord,” Michael said, having received his orders and being determined to obey them as heroically as Theseus en route to confront the Minotaur in the Cretan Labyrinth, confident that he would be able to emerge again thereafter, guided by Ariadne’s indicative thread.

  Dr. Carp’s antiquity gave the Mesmerist a legitimate opportunity to decline, however, and he seized it. “I do apologize, Lord Langstrade,” he said, “but traveling is very wearying at my age, even with the aid of the railway. I shall go straight to bed, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all, not at all, Doctor,” said the Earl, breezily. “We’ll see you at breakfast. Come along, Laurel—let’s leave Dr. Carp and the ladies to their much needed rest. Have you met Marlstone?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Michael, as he turned to follow the Earl, after having bowed politely to Lady Phythian, bowed a little more than politely to Cecilia, and nodded to Carp. “A fascinating man—I’m looking forward to his demonstration, and I certainly hope that he’ll succeed in breaching the barriers of time at his third attempt. I’m very grateful to you for inviting me, and giving me the opportunity to witness such an historic endeavor.”

  “Which you’ll doubtless be able to preserve for posterity, by means of sketches,” Langstrade said. “That’s in addition to your landscape of the Keep and its surrounds, of course. I’m assuming that if Marlstone does manage to produce any worthwhile phenomena, you’ll be very enthusiastic to record what you see.”

  “Very enthusiastic,” Michael assured him, carefully refraining from any speculation about what he might or might not be fortunate enough to see. “I’ll be sure to take my sketch-book into the Maze as well as my canvases, so that I’ll be ready for anything when Saturday comes.”

  “That’s the ticket,” said the Earl. “I knew I could rely on you—Cecilia told me so.”

  “She’s too kind,” Michael murmured, hoping that his tone did not betray his true sentiments too openly

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A DISCUSSION IN THE SMOKING-ROOM

  Hope and Escott were already in the smoking-room—which a proprietor with slightly different tastes might have preferred to call the library, as the space was clearly doing double duty. They seemed to be waiting to welcome Michael yet again, in his capacity as a fresh and reasonably obliging audience for their wit and wisdom. Like Dr. Carp before him, Marlstone also seemed glad to see Michael come in, although Michael deduced that the pleasure was symptomatic of the expectation that he might provide some relief from Hope and Escott’s incessant banter. Signor Monticarlo seemed utterly indifferent to his presence, being far more interested in twiddling his moustache, but Michael did not take offence. The violinist was obviously very nervous in this strange social environment, and Michael was certainly able to sympathize with that.

  While Heatherington poured five generous glasses of brandy, Langstrade said: “Well, Mr. Laurel—what do you think of the restoration of the Hall and the grounds, from an artistic point of view?”

  “I’ll have a better idea about the landscaping of the grounds when I see them in daylight,” Michael said, thinking that he ought to be judicious in his flattery “but the Hall is very tastefully done. The drawing-room is pleasantly furnished and artistically decorated, the bedrooms well-appointed, and the overall design very neat. I like the wide corridors and the large windows, and the décor in here is perfect for a smoking-room. Your father obviously went to some trouble to fill out the bookshelves with well-bound volumes.”

  “York’s a fine place for buying good-looking books,” Langstrade assured him. “You could still buy them at a guinea a yard, all novels excluded, in those days—although the books in the alcove, relating to the theory and practice of antiquarianism, were far more carefully selected. We need more art-works, though. No family portraits accumulated over generations, you see. Father was a trifle troubled by the apparent dishonesty of buying pictures of other people’s ancestors to make up the deficit. He preferred landscapes, but the ones he acquired are too uniform in their dreariness for my taste. Too many trees, too many cows and too much cloudy sky. I like historical paintings myself—battles on land and sea, with a deal of action in them. Hunting scenes, too. A few works of those sorts would look very fine in here and along the upper corridors, don’t you think?”

  “There are some very fine historical painters in France,” Michael observed, judiciously, “but the English school has always been stronger in landscape painting and portraiture. Some of my peers do very fine hunting scenes, although I must confess that I don’t feel that I’ve yet mastered the difficult skill of painting galloping horses.”

  “It’s not too late to start building a collection of family portraits, Langstrade,” Quentin Hope put in. “You should take advantage of Laurel—he’s an up-and-coming man, even if he’s not just being modest when he claims to be a duffer with horses. You should certainly commission a new picture of your wife, while she’s still in her prime, and one of your daughter, while she’s still in the full flush of youth—and one of yourself, of course, in your business suit, surrounded by subtle emblems of your trade, with your son and your dogs to either side. Laurel will know how to plan the composition, won’t you, Laurel?”

  “If Lord Langstrade is interested in work of that sort,” Michael said, judiciously, “I’d be very grateful for any work he cared to put my way, and he would be guaranteed my most careful attention.”

  “Let’s see how the picture of the Keep works out,” said the Earl, cautiously. “One can judge a man more accurately when he’s done his stuff, eh, Marlstone?”

  Marlstone’s heavy brows twitched at that, as the builder of time machines tried to work out whether he was being insulted, challenged or merely invited to endorse an anodyne comment. “I’ll be interested to see Mr. Laurel’s work myself,” he said, in the end. “Especially any drawings he is able make of the phenomena that result from the time machine’s operation.”

  “Your daughter’s reputed to be artistic, isn’t she, Signor Monticarlo?” Escott said to the violinist. “We ought to arm her with a sketchpad as well, just in case.”

  “Carmela dabbles in water-colors,” Signor Monticarlo admitted, “but she has sprained her wrist rather badly, and is no more able to hold a pencil than to serve as my accompanist.”

  “Perhaps she’d make a good medium,” Hope suggested. “Dr. Carp seems to have fallen out with his current somniloquist.”

  Signor Monticarlo was evidently less than delighted with that suggestion, but said nothing.

  “Did Carp tell you why he and his assistant had quarreled while he was taking to you by the fireplace, Laurel?” Escott enquired.

  “I’m afraid not,” Michael replied. “We were talking about the maze. He suggested that Lord Langstrade might care to take the document out of its protective frame and let Mademoiselle Evredon handle it tomorrow night, in the hope that she might be able to pick up some impressions from it.”

  “Good idea,” said Hope, but, having glanced at Lord Langstrade, hurriedly added: “Unless, of course, it’s too delicate to be handled.”

  “Might shed some light on the enigma, though,” Escott put in, in loyal support of his great rival.

  “I must admi
t,” Langstrade said, “that I’m more hopeful that Mr. Marlstone will eventually be able to shed light on the history of Langstrade than I am of Mr. Carp. Emily was the one who wanted to bring Carp here—probably because her mother and Lady Phythian put her up to it. Not that I’ve anything against the man, mind. I’m sure there must be something in this mesmerism business—I’m just not sure what it is. I take it all with a pinch of salt.”

  “Quite right,” said Hope. Escott and Marlstone nodded in support. Signor Monticarlo shook his head, but the meaning of the gesture was far from obvious.

  “Dr. Carp seems slightly disillusioned with the revelations of Mesmeric somniloquism himself,” Michael told them. “At dinner in York, he was lamenting the fact that the spirits of the dead seem no more obliging or honest, in general, than the living.”

  “That’s probably why he’s annoyed with his new telegraphic connection to the other world,” Escott suggested. “She’s obviously been channeling bad advice. People always blame the messenger—especially when those who are really to blame are inconveniently out of reach. The problem with mediumistic communication is that it’s purely verbal, and most verbal communication is inherently deceptive.”

  “But seeing is believing,” Hope promptly put in, “and if Mr. Marlstone’s demonstration is successful, we’ll be able to see the dead and the not-yet-born going about their business, but won’t be able to hear them tell us any lies—isn’t that so, Marlstone?”

  “I can’t be certain until the field is actually operative,” Marlstone replied, a trifle grudgingly, “but I hope to open a window into time that will allow us to see into the past and the future. The logic of the situation suggests, however, that any people we are likely to glimpse will be our past and future selves—and the likelihood is that they will, indeed, be mute.”

  “How disappointing!” Escott remarked. “I was hoping for something a little more spectacular, as well as more informative. I must confess that I was a little confused when you were trying to explain your theory of time to Carp in the drawing-room, and I don’t quite see why you can’t attempt to link your machine up to some future machine, in order to achieve a more substantial kind of time travel. You have, after all, taken the trouble to ensure that noon on Saturday is a particularly suitable moment in terms of temporal harmonics.”

  Marlstone frowned at that; the ease with which his features slipped into the expression suggested that he had been doing a lot of frowning recently. “I don’t believe you understand how difficult it would be, Mr. Escott, to establish metaphasic hypersynchrony between two machines situated at widely-spaced points on the intertemporal gravity continuum, even with the aid of a powerful natural harmonic. One would need a machine far more sophisticated than mine, and a skill in operating it that I can hardly hope to acquire in decades, even if Saturday’s experiment turns out to be successful. I certainly hope to build further machines, if my present one works, but the prospect of establishing metaphasic synchronicity between any two of them within my lifetime presently seems very remote indeed.”

  “What on Earth is metaphasic hypersynchronicity?” Lord Langstrade complained. “I didn’t understand a word of what you just said.”

  A quick glance around assured Michael that none of the other listeners was any wiser than Lord Langstrade—and he had his doubts as to whether Marlstone really knew what he was talking about himself.

  “It’s too late at night to begin a full explanation of Dee-Marlstone time theory,” Marlstone said, more resentfully than apologetically. “I hope to find time tomorrow evening to explain the principles of my machine to any interested parties. Briefly, though, if you imagine ordinary synchrony as a matter of setting two clocks so that they provide the same temporal indications, then hypersynchronicity is a matter of setting two time machines so that they provide complementary temporal distortions—complementary attunement, I call it. The metaphasic aspect comes into it because the dimension of time is not continuous and linear, as is commonly believed, but discontinuous and disposed in such a way that certain points in time are, so to speak, in harmony with one another—not unlike corresponding notes in different octaves of the musical scale, the octaves being, in this instance, the relevant temporal phases. As well as providing complementary temporal distortions, therefore, time machines facilitating physical displacement—including the displacement of sound—would need to be placed in a particular locational relationship within the temporal dimension. Even if the hypersynchronicity could be successfully established, there’s still the matter of intertemporal gravity to be taken into account, and conservation of non-identity always has to be respected, so transmitting sound-waves through time—let alone material objects—is likely to be far more complicated than it might seem at first thought.”

  “Of course,” said Escott, with delicate sarcasm. “It’s so obvious when you put it like that.”

  “I still didn’t understand a word of it,” Lord Langstrade confessed. “Did you, Laurel?”

  Michael felt a sudden flash of panic. Cecilia had commanded him to be here in order that he might make a good impression. He had vaguely hoped to do so by passing more-or-less unnoticed, but he felt that a pitfall trap had just opened up in front of him, which might not be easy to avoid.

  “Not exactly, sir,” he confessed, “but if I’ve grasped the essentials correctly, what Mr. Marlstone is saying is that if time machines are to work together—as they must in order for any transfer of goods or sound to take place, in much the same way that telegraphic communication requires a transmitter and a receiver—then they need to be in tune, like the instruments in an orchestra. You understand what I mean, don’t you, Signor Monticarlo.”

  The Italian might not have followed what Michael was saying, but he understood an appeal for help when he heard one, and he was too much of a gentleman to ignore it. “Si,” he said, loyally, “I can—how do you say it?—grasp the principle. Scordatura would complicate the issue, but perhaps time machines are less capricious than violins?” In his turn, the violinist looked back at Michael, hopeful of some recognition of his modest joke.

  Michael laughed, dutifully. “Very good, Signor Monticarlo,” he said. “Do you think, Mr. Marlstone, that one might be able to obtain scordatura effects from cleverly-tuned time machines?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” the inventor confessed, warily, without going so far as to admit that he had no idea what scordatura meant.

  “Well,” said Langstrade, “if even you don’t know, the rest of us can certainly forget all about it. Anyway, all we really need to know, if I’m not mistaken, is that we can expect to see through time on Saturday, even if all we can see is ourselves.”

  “According to my theory,” Marlstone agreed, “we ought to be able to see something when the machine become fully operational at noon on Saturday, although.…” He hesitated.

  “Although?” queried Hope.

  “I knew there’d be a but,” Escott added, with a sigh. “There’s always a but.”

  Marlstone scowled. His physiognomy seemed to have been expressly designed to facilitate scowling and frowning, and as an artist, Michael judged the scowl to be a very effective expression of feeling. “Although,” the inventor continued, emphatically, “it must be admitted that there’s a strong possibility of distortion. Vision through time might well be subject to effects that alter the imagery in a manner that I’m not yet in a position to specify.”

  Hope turned to Michael, in all apparent innocence, and said: “You seem to understand all this better than I do, Laurel, so perhaps you can explain to us in layman’s terms what Marlstone’s getting at?”

  Having avoided the pitfall once, Michael now felt that he was teetering on the brink—and that the smiling Hope was more than willing to give him a push, perhaps purely for the sake of his own amusement, and perhaps because he had a reason for wanting Michael to come a cropp
er in front of Lord Langstrade.

  “I’m just an artist,” he said, speaking slowly to give himself time to think, although he feared that he might be building up a greater sense of expectation, “not a scientist like Mr. Marlstone, but I do have some understanding of visual distortion. We’re used to the simple distortions created by prisms, lenses and curved mirrors, of course, but if you and Mr. Escott were right in what you were saying earlier, in the coupé of the diligence, about displacements in time being responsible for the various sorts of apparitions we mistake for ghosts, then something more awkward and profound might well be going on. I’m just an artist, as I say, so what springs to my mind is the idea that the images we’ll see when Mr. Marlstone’s time machine is put into operation might be more akin to sketches of the past than complete and colorful visual images. It’s a crude analogy, of course. Does that seem reasonable to you, Mr. Marlstone?”

  “Yes, it does,” said Marlstone, grudgingly, presumably because he wanted to put Hope’s nose out of joint rather than because he felt any particular affection for Michael or because what Michael had said really did sound reasonable to him. “I try not to make too much use of analogies, though. The language of mathematics is so much more secure.”

  “But we don’t all speak it, alas,” observed Escott, “So it’s good to have alternative viewpoints, don’t you think?”

  “It’s always as well to have a good balance of minds at a house party,” said Lord Langstrade, peering at the empty brandy decanter. “That’s the art of being a good host. You need a little luck too, of course, for things to go well.” Michael presumed that he was thinking about Carmela Monticarlo’s accident and Augustus Carp’s disappointment with his new somniloquist.

  “Oh, we’ll be lucky,” Hope put in. “My presence is always a lucky charm—don’t you think so, Jim?”