The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

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Those bits of old flotsam still floated atop it, though, half submerged; he could still make a few of them out, and he knew that soon they would sink forever. Frantically, he searched the desk for a pen and ink. Then, finding them, he began to write. He forced himself to recall the hard, cold base of the tumbler against his ear. And with that, the memory of his first past-time trip to Limehouse ghosted up once again like a feebly collapsing wave, a confused smattering of images and half-dismantled thoughts. The pen scratched across the paper. He barely breathed.

Then, abruptly, it was gone again, whirled away. The very idea of the tumbler against his ear vanished from his head. Weirdly, he could recall that the image of a tumbler had meant something to him only seconds ago; he even knew what tumbler it was that his mind still grappled with. He could picture it clearly. But now it was half full of beef broth, and the mother was feeding it to her sick child, calling him pet names.

Hurriedly, he read over the notes he had scrawled onto the paper — fragments of memory written out in half sentences. “Woman in bed, snoring. Stepping on child. Child nauseated, feverish. Pneumococcal meningitis diagnosed. Child near death. Inflamed meninges cause spinal deformity; hence Narbondo the hunchback? Left coat, money on table. Watch for Parsons snooping along the window…” There was more of the same, then the writing died out. What did it all mean? He no longer knew. It was all fiction to him. It had no reality at all. What coat? He was wearing his coat — or what would become his coat, anyway. Hunchback? Narbondo a hunchback? He cast around in his mind, trying to make sense of it all. Narbondo was not a hunchback. And why would Parsons come snooping along the window? Parsons was no stranger at the manor, not since Lord Kelvin had discovered that St. Ives possessed the machine. Parsons was petitioning him daily to give it up.

Just then he saw something out of the corner of his eye, near the window, but when he turned his head, it was gone. It had looked for all the world like a body, lying crumpled on the floor. His heart raced, and he half stood up, wondering, squinting his eyes. There was nothing, though, only the meadow with the machine sitting among wildflowers like an overgrown child’s toy. St. Ives looked away, but when he did, he saw the thing again, peripherally. He held his gaze steady, focusing on nothing. The thing lay by the window; he must have stepped on it when he came in. It was his past-time self, lying where he had fallen by the window — or rather it was the ghost of his past-time self, unshaven and with wild hair — waiting for his future-time self to leave.

Ghosts — it all had to do with ghosts, with the fading of one world and the solidifying of the next. Just as concrete objects — he, the machine, any damned thing at all — began to fade when a copy of that object appeared from another point in time, so did memory. Two conflicting memories could not coexist. One would supplant the other. Whatever Narbondo had been, or would have become if St. Ives had left him alone, he wasn’t that anymore. St. Ives had dosed him with Fleming’s potion, and he had got well. And the result was that he hadn’t become a hunchback at all, which is what he must have become in that other history that St. Ives had managed to efface. Which meant, if St. Ives read this right, that the sickly child would not have died at all, but must ultimately have recovered, although deformed by the disease.

Fear swarmed over him again. He had gone and done it this time. He was a victim of his own compassion. He had meddled with the past, and the result was that he had come back to a different world than he had left. How much it was different, he couldn’t say. He had forgotten. And it didn’t matter now, anyway; there was no recalling that lost fragment of history. All of that had simply ceased to exist.

What a fool he had been, jaunting around through time as if he were out for a Sunday ramble. Why in heaven’s name hadn’t his future-time self warned him against this? The damned old fool. Perhaps he could go back and unchange what he had changed. Except, of course, that he had made the change over fifty years ago. He would have to return to Limehouse and convince himself not to leave Fleming’s elixir with the mother, but to dump it off the roof instead. Let the child suffer…Well…

Going back would make a bad matter worse. He could see that. He sighed, getting a grip, finally. What else might all this mean? Anything might have changed, maybe for the better. Mightn’t Alice be alive? Why not? He was filled with a surge of hope, which died out almost at once. Of course she wasn’t alive. That much hadn’t changed. His mind worked furiously, trying to make sense of it. Here was his littered desk and his ghostly unshaven self lying in a heap by the window. What was all that but a bit of obscure proof that this world must be in most ways similar to the one he had buggered up?

And more than that, he remembered it, didn’t he? — the business of his going out barefoot, of his finally putting the machine right, of his saving Binger’s dog, of Alice murdered in the Seven Dials.

Where was Mrs. Langley? He must talk to her. At once. Speak to her and get out. He was only a day away from his own rightful time. Minimize the damage, he told himself, and then go home.

He went out into the kitchen. There she was, the good woman, putting a few things into a carpetbag, packing her belongings. She was going to her sister’s house. Her face was full of determination, but her eyes were red. This hadn’t been easy for her. St. Ives hated himself all of a sudden. He would have fallen to his knees to beg her forgiveness, except that she disliked that sort of indignity almost as much as he did.

“Mrs. Langley,” he said.

She turned to look at him, affecting a huff, her mouth set in a thin line. She wasn’t about to give in. By damn, she was bound for her sister’s house, and soon, too. This had gone on entirely long enough, and she wouldn’t tolerate that sort of tone, not any longer. Never in all her born years, her face seemed to say.

Still, St. Ives thought happily, ultimately she wouldn’t go, would she? She would be there to take on Parsons with a rolling pin. St. Ives would succeed, at least in this one little thing. She was regarding him strangely, though, as if he were wearing an inconceivable hat. “I’ve come to my senses,” he said.

She nodded. Her eyes contradicted him, though. She looked at him as if he had lost his senses entirely this time, down a well. Inadvertently he brushed at his face, fearing that something…Wait. Of course. He wasn’t the man that he had been a half hour ago. He was clean-shaven now, his hair cut. He wore a suit of clothes with idiotic lapels, woven out of the wool of sheep that didn’t yet exist. He was a man altered by the future, although there would be nothing but trouble in telling her that.

“What I mean to say is that I’m sorry for that stupid display of temper. You were absolutely right, Mrs. Langley. I was stark raving mad when I confronted you on the issue of cleaning my desk. I know it wasn’t the first time, either. I…I regret all of it. I’ve been…It’s been hard for me, what with Alice and all. I’m trying to put that right, but I’ve made a botch of it so far, and…”

He found himself stammering and was unable to continue. Dignity abandoned him altogether, and he began to cry shamelessly, covering his face with his forearm. He felt her hand on his shoulder, giving him a sympathetic squeeze. Finally he managed to stop, and he stood there sniffling and hiccuping, feeling like a fool.

She brought him a glass of water, which he drank happily. “It’s not every man,” she said to him, “who can eat crow without the feathers sticking to his chin.” She nodded heavily and slowly. “Nothing wrong with a good cry now and then. It’s like rain — washes things clean.”

“God bless you, Mrs. Langley,” he said. “You’re a saint.”

“Not by a considerable sight, I’m not. You come closer, to my mind. But I’m going to be bold enough to tell you that you’re not cut out for saint work. You’ve got the instinct, but you haven’t got the constitution for it. And if I was you I’d find a new situation just as quick as I might. Go back to science, Professor, where you belong.”

“Thank you,” he said, in control of his emotions once more. “That’s just where I intend to go, just as you advise. There’s one little bit of business to attend to first, though, and by heaven, if there were one person on earth I could bring along to help me see it through, you would be that person, Mrs. Langley.”

“I’m good with a ball of dough, sir, but not much else.”

“You’re a philosopher, my good woman, whether you know it or not. And from now on your salary is doubled.”

She started to protest, but he cut her off with a gesture. “I’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Carry on here.”

With that he left her, returning to the study and going out through the window, stepping carefully over that bit of floor where his ghost lay invisible. He clambered straight into the bathyscaphe and left. His past-time self would materialize again and set to work on the machine, never knowing that the Mrs. Langley problem had been solved. It occurred to him too late that he might have written himself a note, explaining that he had come back around to patch things up with her. But to hell with that. His past-time self was a fool — more of a fool, maybe, than his future-time self was — and would probably contrive to muck things up in some new lunatic way,