Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  “Glad to be of assistance,” Michael said, absent-mindedly, leaning even closer to his painting. When several moments had passed, though, he became peripherally aware of the fact that Marlstone had not moved, even to remove his hands from his hips or the scowl from his face.

  “What did you feel, when the pulse hit?” Marlstone asked him. “What did you see?”

  “I felt dizzy,” Michael reported, still speaking mechanically. “Unsteady.” He realized that Marlstone might imagine that his earlier warnings were being parodied, and cast around for something more helpful, or at least more detailed, to say. “It seemed that the hedge had come alive,” he went on, with a slight quaver in his voice. “It is alive, of course, but it had previously seemed inert, a mere aspect of the background. I suddenly became aware of its life, and very sharply aware of it…and the Maze seemed to take on a life of its own too, almost as if it were trying to reach out to me, to consume me.…”

  “Really?” queried Marlstone. “That’s not what I experienced at all. I thought…well, as I told you before, I thought I saw myself. A replica of myself, at least. I thought, when I saw it before, that I was seeing a shadow cast through time—a faint image of what I had been doing a few moments before, or would be doing a few moments hence—but this time, it was as if my other self were actually trying to communicate with me, to tell me something.”

  “I got an impression not unlike that,” Michael admitted.

  “You saw a different version of me, who wanted to tell you something?”

  “No, I became aware of the seeming presence of different versions of me, and I tried to exploit the opportunity to discover something—but I couldn’t. Did your replica succeed in saying anything to you?”

  “Nothing intelligible,” Marlstone countered, after a slight hesitation.

  “But it did say something?” Michael asked.

  “I think so—and if only I could read lips, I might have been able to decipher what it was…but there was no sound.”

  “Ah,” said Michael. “That part of your theory checks out, then. The time machine enables you to see the future, but not to hear it.”

  “Apparently so. The time-field cut out before the replica could find some other way of communicating its meaning. That’s when the nausea hit me, and I almost fainted again. I needed a full five minutes to recover before I was able to come out to see whether you were all right.”

  “That’s odd,” Michael said. “Either I lost a couple of minutes somehow, or my vision wasn’t simultaneous with yours—although I suppose it didn’t actually conclude until you were right in front of me. Until then, all I could see was a blur. You were quite unrecognizable”

  “But the time-field was cancelled some time before I came out,” Marlstone objected.

  “It might have been cancelled in there,” Michael said, nodding in the direction of the Keep, “but not out here—unless, as I say, I lost several minutes completely.”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” Marlstone admitted. “Once the old girl starts tampering with time, all sorts of previous impossibilities might become possible: time seemingly stopping dead or speeding up.…”

  “Time branching out,” Michel added. “Empires of eternity forming and dissolving.”

  Marlstone looked at him quizzically.

  Michael grinned, wryly. “Idle conversation in the rose-garden,” he explained. “Someone—if it wasn’t Hope, to begin with, it must have been Escott—suggested that if two time machines could obtain metaphasic hypersynchronicity, the transfer of information and material from the future to the past would dissolve the intermediate history, by unifying the intervening technological progress, establishing an empire that would extend across the whole of future time: a Euchronian Empire, according to Hope, or Hell on Earth, according to Escott.”

  “The whole point about time being particulate, in the Dee-Marlstone theory,” the inventor complained, “is that any communication between resonant points is confined to the elasticity of the moment, incapable of disturbing the continuity of temporal evolution. It’s not, in principle, impossible for material objects or sound vibrations to be displaced in time, but their substance and solidity can only be transferred in the direction of intertemporal gravity…forwards, in vulgar parlance. Entities traveling against the grain of intertemporal gravity—backwards in time—could only be fleetingly and insubstantially manifest at their attempted destination, and the law of conservation of non-identity would ensure any threat to the established continuity resulted in a sort of instantaneous rebound. If that weren’t the case, time—and the universe—would simply disintegrate. Its basic fabric has to be elastic, or we wouldn’t be here at all. Nor would anything else, whether anyone ever invented a time machine or not, because of natural resonances in the intrinsic subvibrations.

  “The overtones that I produce artificially are of course, merely replications and amplifications of temporal phenomena that already exist. How could it be otherwise? I certainly provoked that pulse we experienced just now, but there’s a sense it which it had to be potentially present already, or the stimulus I provided would have been impotent. There’s no need to worry about empires of eternity establishing themselves as a result of future time machines being attuned to their predecessors and facilitating intellectual invasion, or in the main sequence of time generating an infinite number of branches. My theory doesn’t allow for either possibility, let alone require them as logical corollaries.”

  “Do you really think that time and the universe care about what your theory might or might not allow, Mr. Marlstone?” Michael enquired, in a mock-polite manner.

  “Obviously not,” Marlstone snapped back. “But at least I’m attempting to test my hypotheses, in order to discover what’s possible and what’s not. What do Hope and Escott ever do, besides babbling nonsense and making mischief? And what are you doing with your life, apart from painting pretty pictures?”

  Michael winced slightly, and refrained from retorting: Falling in love.

  Marlstone’s scowl deepened even further, and he stared at the painter in a manner that was not far short of menacing. “If I find that I’m wrong,” he said, sullenly, “then I shall have to refine my theory. Unfortunately, while there’s ever only one way to be proved correct, there are a thousand ways to be proved wrong, so I really can’t say what the consequences might be if I do happen to be wrong. When I know a little more than I do now, as a consequence of my empirical enquiries, I’ll be able to decide whether or not to proceed tomorrow.”

  “That’s very worthy of you, Mr. Marlstone,” Michael said, in a placatory tone. “I’m sorry if I offended you. I really am trying to help.”

  The final remark acted as a trigger recalling Marlstone to his duty. He stood up straight, and shook himself slightly, as if shaking off the burden of the previous half hour’s conversation. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “I’m glad you’re all right, Laurel. I don’t imagine that there’ll be any more pulses as powerful as that one, but if there are…well, you’ll know what to expect, won’t you? If you don’t want to take the risk.…”

  “Oh, I do,” Michael assured him. “I know that curiosity kills cats, but I’m an artist, so I have at least nine lives to spare. If I find myself within reach of my future thoughts again, I’ll try harder to grasp one. Good luck with your further enquiries.” And with that, he leaned forward even more ostentatiously than before, applying paint to his canvas with even greater care. From the corner of his eye, though, he saw Gregory Marlstone stalk away, and disappear into the gloomy interior of the Folly.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THORNS IN THE MAZE

  Michael felt a few more flutters of dizziness before the light began to fade, but he experienced no further hallucinations and shrugged off the trivial disturbances as if they were utterly significant—as, indeed, they seemed to be. As s
oon as the sun was low enough in the western sky for the hedge behind him to cast a shadow over his work—which happened some time before the sun would set over the moors on the horizon, as viewed from outside the Maze—he began to pack up his equipment. He set the canvas within a broad woodwork frame fitted with a clasp, in order that he could drape a cloth over it without any danger of smudging his work, and carried it to the gap in the hedge that led into the Maze with the utmost care.

  As soon as he stepped across the threshold of the maze a sense of deep unease descended upon him and consumed him, as if it were devouring him body and soul. The sensation flooded the chambers of his heart and marrow of his bones—and yet, it seemed to be sourceless. It was quite unlike the flickering effects that had “leaked” from the Keep, and he was not at all certain whether he ought to interpret it as something that had been lying in ambush in the Maze, waiting for him to step inside, or whether he ought to consider it as something that had been lurking within him, waiting for exterior gloom before emerging to take possession of his mental empire.

  He almost stopped and turned back, but realized immediately that he could not do that. The Maze surrounded the Keep on all sides; there was no other way out of that strange arena. Besides which, Cecilia had called him brave, and he could not possibly allow the accuracy of her judgment to become questionable. He knew that he not only had to walk on, steadfastly, taking the correct turnings until he emerged from the gap in the outermost hedge, but that he ought to exercise his bravery more fully. As well as enduring the ordeal, he ought to analyze the sensation, and try to figure out what was happening to him.

  He had never been conscious of the thorns lurking in the hedges while walking the Maze before, but he could not help being aware of them now, even though he was in no danger of being pricked while he remained on his feet, upright and mobile. He did not feel that the thorny walls of the labyrinth were reaching out for him—he knew exactly where they were and how they were distributed, so they posed no material peril at all—but their presence remained ominous and oppressive.

  In a sense, he realized, that was the whole problem. He knew exactly where he was, but there was something about his whereabouts—in the broadest possible meaning of the term—that had lost its bearings. It was Langstrade Maze, and perhaps the whole of Langstrade Hall and its grounds, that had somehow become unsteady in time and space, as if teetering on the brink of some unimaginable abyss. Like Lady Phythian before him, he had become sensitive to the everpresence of the Langstrade ghosts, or to the creative principle that was responsible for their periodic appearance.

  He remembered what he had said to Hope and Escott about the possibility that the field of Marlstone’s machine might extend in time as well as space, backwards as well as forwards, so that if the machine were actually destined to work when Marlstone activated it at noon on Saturday, then its effects ought to be evident already, and might well have been evident, albeit fugitively, for years, if not centuries. That, Michael now deduced, must be what had happened, perhaps as a result of this afternoon’s anomalous pulse rather than the time machine’s fully-powered operation on the morrow—unless, of course, the two events were really the same event, distributed through time by the mysterious processes of temporal resonance.

  What actually seemed to have happened, though, was more complicated than the vague possibility that Michael had glimpsed in the course of the speculative conversation in question. He had been thinking then of images thrown back into time from the present, which might be mistaken for “ghosts”—but what seemed to have happened now was that the maze had somehow been “charged” with the leakage of Marlstone’s temporal field, much as a lump of iron placed in a magnetic field inevitably became magnetized itself. Had the maze itself somehow become an extension of the time machine? Had it become a kind of time machine in its own right? Could it throw its own image backwards or forwards in time?

  No sooner had he bravely contemplated that set of possibilities, however, than Michael wondered whether he might have got the whole argument backwards. What if it were not the Maze that had been “charged” but merely his own body and mind? What if the phenomena that he was currently experiencing were internal rather than external in origin? What if he had become an extension of Marlstone’s time machine, or a time machine in his own right?

  The second set of possibilities automatically generated a third. What if he and the maze had both been “charged”, so that some strange form of resonance had been established between them? Indeed, had not some such resonance already been established, before he ever stepped into the maze? Had he not committed it to memory at first glance, so easily that it might already have been present in his mind, merely awaiting activation by the trigger of visual connection?

  It had been reckless, Michael realized, to ignore Gregory Marlstone’s warnings, and to insist on staying in the heart of the maze while the time machine was tested. He had been foolish to dismiss the danger as “minuscule”, on the grounds that Marlstone had obviously come through past tests unscathed and that no one really expected the time machine to work successfully at noon on Saturday, any more than it had done at Horton Lacey or Chatsworth. He had had no choice, though; Cecilia had expectations—indeed, it was obvious now that she had expectations far in advance of anything he had previously dared to hope for, and Cecilia’s whim was irresistible, so far as he was concerned. His objective now was not to waste time regretting what had happened, but to do his level best to work out what its implications might be for the future.

  Perhaps, as with a lump of common iron exposed to a magnetic field, the induced effect would simply wear off. On the other hand, it might well have presently-incalculable consequences on the following day, when Marlstone mounted his full-scale demonstration—in which case…well, as to what those consequences might be, Michael would simply have to wait and see, hoping all the while that they would not damage his prospects with Cecilia.

  Michael was extremely glad when he emerged from the entrance on to the open lawn, and the feeling of unease simply melted away. As soon as he was out of the Maze, the sensation of oppression vanished, so completely that he immediately began to wonder how he could possibly have fallen prey to such a silly illusion. He felt perfectly secure again, not merely in space and time but also in himself…but he knew, somehow, that his security was an illusion, and that the abyss on whose edge everything was tottering had simply been hidden from his consciousness.

  He took a deep breath and raised his face to the sky, closing his eyes momentarily against the sun’s reddening glare. Like its counterpart on the previous day, the impending sunset was glorious, tinted by all the seasonal debris suspended in the humid atmosphere. Almost immediately, while he shaded his eyes, the red-gold disk slipped into partial eclipse behind the chimneys of the Hall, two of which were smoking in spite of the season. Dinner was doubtless in preparation on the vast kitchen range.

  A good day’s work, Michael thought. And now to find Cecilia.…

  That turned out to be easier to think than to achieve, however. When he had stowed his equipment away and returned to the ground floor of the Hall, Cecilia was nowhere to be found. The elder Lady Langstrade had apparently spirited her away, along with the younger Lady Langstrade, Lady Phythian and Carmela Monticarlo, to indulge in some mysterious feminine activity. The violinist was practicing in the Orange Room, while Augustus Carp and Jeanne Evredon could be heard arguing in the Violet Room, so the only people that Michael found when he pursued his search were Lord Langstrade, Hope and Escott, who were playing billiards in the so-called gun-room.

  The gun-room did, indeed, contain a rack of double-barreled shotguns in a locked cabinet—ten in all, although there were brackets for twelve. There was also a pair of antique dueling pistols mounted above the mantelpiece. A second rack, this one not under lock and key, held half a dozen fencing swords—épées, so far as Michael’s inexpert eye could judge—
while a third held eight fishing-rods, a fourth eight billiard-cues, and a fifth no less than a dozen walking-sticks, with Lord Langstrade’s ivory-hilted favorite taking pride of place. The billiard table itself, unlike most of the other equipment, showed unmistakable signs of relentless usage. Lord Langstrade was evidently good at the game, as he had racked up more than twice as many points than his current opponent, Hope.

  Escott, who was watching the game in a desultory manner, his only interest in its result presumably being the mildly delightful inevitability of seeing his friend soundly thrashed, looked up gratefully when Michael appeared in the doorway. “There you are, Laurel!” he exclaimed, as if greeting a long-lost cousin. “Come in, come in! Is Marlstone not with you?”

  “He’s still hard at work in the Keep,” Michael told him. “He was just lighting a lamp as I left, to judge by the glimmer in the windows—Heaven only knows how long he’ll be slaving away.” And Heaven only knows, he added, silently, what he’ll feel when he tries to make his way back through the labyrinth to the world of sanity, solidity and security.

  “We’ll all be slaving away eternally, if Escott’s judgment can be trusted and the world as we know it really does end tomorrow,” Hope put in, so cheerfully that he evidently had as much confidence in Marlstone’s failure as in Escott’s error.

  “He says that was all a misunderstanding of the implications of his theory,” Michael told them. “Can’t we discuss something else? I think I’ve had enough of Marlstone and his time machine for one day.”