Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  Hope took advantage of the pause to say: “Well then, Mr. Laurel—what did you think?”

  “It just occurred to me,” Michael said, now addressing the whole group, “that if Dr. Carp is right, and time can indeed branch in the fashion that he indicates, then the result of what he calls ‘budding’ would be two parallel moments, in one of which the time machine had worked, and in the other of which it hadn’t. If that’s the case, not only might time branch tomorrow, but it might have branched twice already, when Mr. Marlstone conducted his trials at Horton Lacey and Chatsworth—and it might keep on branching, every time he or anybody else tries again, from now until…well, as Mr. Escott says, the very end of time.”

  He wondered, then, whether the other presences he had briefly imagined to be sharing his mental space might have been parallel selves in the process of dissociation rather than slightly-displaced past and future selves—if, indeed, they had been anything other than a mundane unsteadiness of his own consciousness

  “Very good!” Escott exclaimed, mockingly. “Bravo, Mr. Laurel! You’ve just proved, by the time-honored method of reductio ad absurdum, that—at least so far as we’re concerned—there’s no possibility at all of Marlstone’s machine working tomorrow, or ever. I shall be more than glad to leave you the responsibility of telling him that, when you have the chance.”

  “That all depends what you mean by we.” Michael said. “If it were true that the labyrinth of time could divide in this manner—and I hope with all my heart that it isn’t—there would be other versions of ourselves existing in the parallel moments that have already branched off, and there’ll be others in all the branches formed in the course of our lifetimes. And if you, rather than Mr. Hope, are correct about the nature of those empires of eternity, every single one of our parallel selves will be condemned to a kind of Hell…and I shall be more than glad to leave the responsibility of telling Mr. Marlstone that to you, Mr. Escott, when you have the chance.”

  At that, Quentin Hope burst out into such loud sustained laughter that he turned purple, and almost choked—which was not at all the kind of reaction that might have been expected from a man who had just been told that he might be spawning secondary versions of himself continually, every one of which might be able to live in the Earthly paradise of his own optimistic expectation.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FURTHER UNCANNY RIPPLES IN TIME

  When Michael arrived back in the center of the Maze, shortly after one o’clock, he felt an inevitable temptation to march over the drawbridge and thump the door with his fist, demanding that Marlstone come out and listen to all the fearful anxieties that had been raised at lunch—but he did no such thing.

  The fact was that, as soon as the lunch was over, the whole edifice of speculation had come to seem more than a little absurd. It was, after all, based on Hope and Escott’s irreverent extrapolations of what Augustus Carp had inferred from a few remarks that Marlstone had made the previous evening, regarding a theory that must be reckoned dubious, even if it really implied what Carp had deduced from it. That did not seem to be sufficient reason for violating Marlstone’s strict injunction that he did not want anyone else to come near him while he made his preliminary trials. In consequence, Michael simply put on his smock, took up his palette again, squeezed various colors out of the lead tubes he had carefully loaded in London, and began to apply his brush to the background of his painting.

  As usual, Michael was soon totally absorbed in his work, oblivious to everything external to the painting and the image that he was trying to reproduce. He was concentrating so fiercely that when he felt the first flicker of vertigo he simply blinked his eyes, held his brush in suspension for a second or two, and then carried on, without sparing any thought at all as to the possible causes of the disturbance. When he felt another, ten or twelve minutes afterwards, he did exactly the same thing. It was not until the third such interruption, which lasted slightly longer than its predecessors, that he finally thought to connect the phenomenon with his earlier discussion with Gregory Marlstone, and with his brief experience in the Maze. Even then, his initial reaction was to reject the hypothesis.

  It’s just the heat, he told himself, glancing up and behind him at the blazing sun. I’m concentrating so hard that I’m losing my mental balance slightly. I mustn’t start attributing it to the possible effects of Marlstone’s machine, or I’ll begin to imagine all sorts of weird and horrid possibilities. Satisfied with this rebuttal, he took a step back to appraise his work, his gaze flickering back and forth between the developing image on the canvas and the stern stones of the actual keep. The high-set windows now seemed more reminiscent of the dark slits that the pupils of some nocturnal animals became in bright daylight, and he had the strange impression that the Keep was watching him, as if studying him with a painter’s expert eye, in preparation for making a portrait of him.

  Oddly enough, though, it was the image on the canvas, not his view of the actual Keep, that suddenly seemed to become unsteady, as if its expert gaze were wavering. Michael immediately appreciated Marlstone’s difficulty in finding a word to describe the phenomenon, and the inventor’s reasons for eventually settling on that particular adjective. It was not that the lines of his sketch began to blur or flicker, or that the colors he had so far applied changed their tone. He was not even tempted to believe, in fact, that the painting had suffered any objective alteration. He was perfectly certain that the effect originated from his own consciousness, and was confined there. If there had been anything actually to see, he would have been “seeing things”, but he could not be sure that there was anything else involved but an exaggerated sense of the possibility that the painting might be other than it was: that the lines might have been drawn in slightly displaced positions, that the colors might have been applied so as to produce subtly different shades, and that the loophole-like windows might really be loopholes…or the eyes of some exotic nocturnal animal.

  The only unsteadiness here, he thought, is my own. I’ve lost a little confidence in the sureness of my hand and eye. It’s my own actions and judgments that have somehow come to seem precarious and dubious. It’s just a feeling, nothing more. I have such sensations all the time when I’m not painting—my perennial awareness of my own clumsiness. I’m just not used to them when I’m focused on my work. There’s nothing supernatural about it.

  That seemed so reasonable that he was able to shrug his shoulders, and resume work—and for a quarter of an hour, the phenomenon did not recur. When it did, though, it seemed worse than before. This time, his head reeled as he stared at the painting, which had somehow come to seem very uncertain indeed. He had to look away—but that didn’t help. This time, the Keep itself seemed slightly unsteady, and so did the thick, neatly-groomed greenery of the surrounding hedge. The loophole-eyes might have been those of some gigantic worm rearing up from the ooze of the moat…or some baleful dragon, resentful at being confined to the center of a maze.

  Michael had always been aware that there were living things moving within the hedge—a few small birds and a host of insects—but he now acquired an exaggerated awareness of the movements that might be going on within it, and of the vegetal life that the hedge itself possessed. He felt that he could somehow sense the hedge growing, and not merely at the tips of its branches. He felt that he could sense the hedge growing in every direction, including previously unimaginable directions that could not be accommodated within the usual three dimensions of space. He became more aware than before of the hedge’s thorniness, to the extent that the mere thought of its multitudinous thorns made his skin prickle. All that was trivial, however, compared to the sharp exaggeration of his awareness of the hedge’s maziness.

  Michael still had a diagrammatic image of the Langstrade Maze engraved in his memory. He was confident that he could walk it faultlessly, even in pitch darkness. He did not lose that confidence now—but he felt that,
in addition to the particular configuration of the actual maze, he was simultaneously aware of thousands, or even millions, of alternative configurations: that he had not only internalized the design of the Langstrade Maze but every possible seven-ring maze that could have been constructed by the same hedges within the same geographical bounds—and that made the Maze, and everything it contained, including himself, seem very unsteady indeed. It was almost as if the Maze itself had come to life, and that it was hungry.…

  Don’t look! he commanded himself, abruptly and urgently, even though he knew that the command made no sense. Don’t lose yourself! Don’t let it suck you in! Think about Cecilia!

  It was the last of these commands, rather than any of the others, that he was able to obey. He thought about Cecilia: about her face, her eyes, her lips, and about her apparent eagerness to be in his company, her apparent determination to woo him as he hoped to woo her, to the absolute exclusion of Quentin Hope, Carmela Monticarlo and everyone else in the entire world.

  The sensation of dire unease passed yet again. The life that had suddenly infused the Maze relaxed, becoming dormant if not actually inert.

  Michael sneezed, and blinked furiously. His head seemed crowded again, overfull of thoughts—not only those he was thinking now, but all those he had thought before, at least in the last fortnight, and all those he had not yet thought, but would within some unspecifiable interval.

  He made a sudden effort to grasp some of those future thoughts, in order to get a grip of the sensations attached to them—to see, as it were, what they were responding and reacting to—but he could not do it. The past and present kept getting in the way, causing his intention to stumble. He felt certain that the future was there, potentially graspable, even though temporally confused, but the fact that he could not do it, even to the extent of capturing a single image or idea, was deeply frustrating.

  You clumsy oaf! he chided himself. It’s you that’s confused, not the world. A better man could make use of this, and become a true seer.

  He began to feel horribly sick then, and felt sure that he was about to faint, as if under the onslaught of his own self-criticism. He seemed to crumple up rather than collapsing, though, and was able to control his fall sufficiently to ensure that he ended up in a sitting position, holding his palette and brush safely aloft, like trophies. His head cleared again, and he never actually lost consciousness. His smock was long enough to protect his trousers from grass stains—which was perhaps as well, given that he only had two pairs, the other being partnered with his dinner-jacket

  As he came to his feet again—without much delay, albeit rather awkwardly—he saw the door to the Keep open, and saw someone step out. He knew that it was Gregory Marlstone—who else, after all could it possibly be? He could not see Gregory Marlstone, however. He saw a strange blur, vaguely human in shape but quite unidentifiable in individual terms.

  It was not until this monster arrived within a couple of feet of him, and began staring him in the face, that the blur resolved, and became—inevitably—Gregory Marlstone.

  “Thank God!” Marlstone said. “For a moment there, when you fell over, I thought I’d lost you. Are you all right, Laurel?”

  “Fine,” Michael replied, finding his voice a trifle thick. “Are you?”

  “I think so. I did warn you, didn’t I? I gave you fair warning that something of the sort might happen—not that I expected that.”

  Michael blinked, and tried to focus his eyes on his painting. It wasn’t easy, but in the end, he satisfied himself that the painting was unscathed. “What was that, exactly?” he asked. “I felt the other ripples, of course—at least four of them, if I’m not mistaken, although I might have missed a couple while I was lunching in the rose-garden—but that last one certainly topped the rest.”

  “It certainly did,” Marlstone admitted. “There’s no way it should have been able to muster that sort of intensity. The field was highly unstable, of course, but the machine wasn’t functioning at anything like full power, and if my previous measurements were correct, there isn’t any natural harmonic moment that the machine could tune into within a hundred years, let alone a few minutes. It’s almost as if it found something resonant outside time—something from which it could actually draw power to amplify its own.”

  “Dr. Carp was saying at lunch that your theory allows the possibility that on every occasion that a time machine operates, time might branch,” Michael told him. “That time might not be a linear sequence, however intensively coiled into a unicursal labyrinth, but a multicursal maze, in which new openings produce parallel sequences.”

  “Ridiculous!” was Marlstone’s almost-automatic response. “The fellow’s completely misunderstood what I was trying to explain to him last night. I was talking about quasi-lateral shifts, not branches: the possibility that the induction of complex resonances between the discrete moments of the temporal sequence by virtue of time machines operating in series might distort the unicursal pattern, perhaps contriving a permanent alteration. There can’t be more than one temporal sequence—that would imply that there was more than one universe. The Dee-Marlstone theory doesn’t permit that.”

  “Perhaps the theory’s wrong!” Michael objected, more emphatically than he intended.

  Marlstone put his hands on his hips and scowled—but he repressed the angry riposte that had obviously sprung to his lips and collected himself. “Perhaps it is,” he said, “since I can’t explain what just happened. She shouldn’t have been able to produce a pulse like that. In fact, she couldn’t. Ergo, she must have been channeling it from somewhen else. Which implies that time, as we experience it, really might have an outside of some sort, with potential resonance points of its own, or.…” He stopped.

  “Or what?” Michael prompted.

  Marlstone hesitated for a long time, but finally said: “Or there really is another time machine operating way down the line—in the far future, I mean—which has somehow contrived to string together a whole series of harmonically sensitive moments and feed its own power through the chain as far as the present. Except that it’s impossible, because there’s no such sequence of moments within the natural harmonic sequences…so that idea is just as silly as the idea that there’s an outside to time—or, as you put it, that time is multicursal rather than unicursal.”

  He fell silent again. Michael looked at his brush and his palette, carefully applied one to the other, and then started spreading paint judiciously on to his canvas again, working patiently on the blue of the sky. After a few seconds, though, he stopped. “What about Signor Monticarlo’s suggestion?” he said.

  “What suggestion?” Marlstone asked.

  “Scordatura,” Michael said. “There’s more than one way to tune a violin, and you can still make music with unorthodox tunings. Is there more than one way to tune a time machine, do you think?”

  Marlstone did not reject the notion out of hand—he had, after all, argued himself into an impasse, and could not afford to ignore any potential exit. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “It’s a checkable hypothesis, though—I suppose I could try it out. Maybe if I tune the old girl differently, not even bothering to seek the natural harmony…if I could pick up some unanticipated resonances that way, and then, perhaps.…”

  Michael continued painting, while Marlstone lost himself in a speculative reverie. Again, it was Michael who eventually broke the silence. “Are you going ahead with the trial?” he asked.

  Marlstone frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it would be best to call it off, at least until I can figure out what happened just now. On the other hand.…” He waited for Michael to prompt him.

  “On the other hand?” Michael queried, obligingly.

  “We’re all right, aren’t we? No harm done.”

  “It would seem so,” Michael admitted, “but.…” He waited in his
turn.

  “But?” Marlstone promoted, returning the compliment.

  “But we’re not really sure how far the ripple extended, are we?” Michael asked. “In time, or in space. I can’t help wondering…I had a brief conversation with Jeanne Evredon a little while ago, when she told me that something from outside the range of her normal experience has been trying very hard to put her off coming here this weekend. I’m not at all sure that Carp will be able to persuade her to go ahead with tonight’s planned séance, although I did seem to succeed in cheering her up slightly, more by luck than judgment. Signor Monticarlo has been forced to change his intended program because his daughter sprained her wrist. Now you’re in two minds as to whether to go ahead with your demonstration. Coincidence, do you think?”

  “I must assume so,” Marlstone said, flatly. “The events seem quite unconnected to me. Have you felt any mysterious influence trying to keep you away from Langstrade, or from completing your assignment?”

  “Quite the contrary,” Michael assured him. “But I’m just a humble painter. You and Carp are both tampering, in your different ways, with time…rattling the chains of causality, as it were. If the ripple that disturbed us just now really did spread out much further than you could have anticipated, in time as well as space…who knows what other effects it might have had? Not on me, though—I’m just a painter.”

  “Yes, you are,” Marlstone said, waspishly, “and you’ve been hanging around with Hope and Escott, who seem to have infected you with their perpetual intellectual mischief-making. Not that they’re fools, mind—they might be able to make something of themselves if they could only direct their infernal curiosity and diabolical cleverness to better purposes than rooting around in the ruins of Knossos or combing the Egyptian desert for Herodotus’ mythical City of Crocodiles. And I have to admit that you’ve given me some food for thought. I’ll have to check this scordatura possibility out, even if it takes me all afternoon and all night. I really do need to be sure that tomorrow’s demonstration won’t put us in undue danger.”