silo stood as ever, but now with the door ajar. They had broken into it, thinking simply to take the machine, but finding it gone. So much for being peaceable. He laughed out loud.
Hurriedly, he threw a saddle onto the back of old Ben, the coach horse, and old Ben immediately inflated his chest so that St. Ives couldn’t cinch the girth tight. “None of your tricks, Ben,” St. Ives warned, but the horse just looked at him, pretending not to understand. There was no time to argue. St. Ives had to get across the river before he was seen. He swung himself into the saddle and walked the horse out through the open stall gate, heading for the river. The saddle was sloppy, and immediately slid to the side, and St. Ives wasted a few precious moments by swinging down and tugging on the girth, trying to cinch it tighter. Old Ben reinflated, though, and St. Ives gave up. There was no time to match wits with a horse, and so he remounted, hunkering over to the left and trotting out toward the willows along the river.
They crossed the bridge and cantered along the river path, emerging through the shrubbery on the opposite bank. Now the manor was completely hidden from view, and so St. Ives kicked old Ben into the semblance of a run. They skirted the back of Lord Kelvin’s garden and angled toward the highroad, St. Ives yanking at the saddle to keep it on top of the horse. On the road he headed east at a gallop, leaning hard to the left to compensate and keeping his head down along Ben’s neck, like a jockey. Old Ben seemed to recall younger and more romantic days, and he galloped away without any encouragement at all, his mane blowing back in St. Ives’s face.
St. Ives smiled suddenly with the exhilaration of it, thinking of Parsons unwittingly drinking tea back at the manor, wondering aloud of Hasbro whether St. Ives wasn’t ready to see him yet. Suspicions would be blooming like flowers. The man was a simpleton, a bumpkin.
The saddle inched downward again, and St. Ives stood up in the stirrups and yanked it hard, but, all the yanking in the world seemed to be useless. Gravity was against him. The right stirrup was nearly dragging on the ground now. There was nothing for it but to rein up and cinch the saddle tight. He pulled back on the reins, shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” but it wasn’t until old Ben had stopped and begun munching grasses along the road, that St. Ives, still sitting awkwardly in the saddle, heard the commotion behind him. He turned to look, and there was a coach and four, kicking up God’s own dust cloud, rounding a bend two hundred yards back.
“Go!” he shouted, whipping at the reins now. “Get!”
The horse looked up at him as if determined to go on with its meal of roadside grass, but St. Ives booted it in the flanks, throwing himself forward in the teetering saddle, and old Ben leaped ahead like a charger, nearly catapulting St. Ives to the road. They were off again, pursued now by the approaching coach. The saddle slipped farther, and St. Ives held on to the pommel, pulling himself farther up onto the horse’s neck. His hat flew off, and his coat billowed out around him like a sail.
He turned to look, and with a vast relief he saw that they would outdistance the coach, except that just then the saddle slewed downward and St. Ives with it, and for a long moment he grappled himself to the horse’s flank, yanking himself back up finally with a handful of mane. He snatched wildly at the girth, trying to unfasten the buckle as old Ben galloped up a little rise. St. Ives cursed himself for having bothered with the saddle in the first place, of all the damned treacherous things. Somehow the girth was as tight as it could be now, wedged around sideways like it was. And it was behind his thigh, too, where he couldn’t see it, and old Ben didn’t seem to care a damn about any of it, but galloped straight on up the middle of the road.
They crested the rise, and there before them, coming along peaceably, was another coach, very elegant and driven by a man in bright red livery. The driver shouted at St. Ives, drawing hard on the reins and driving the coach very nearly into the ditch.
A white-haired head appeared through the coach window just then — Dr. Frost himself, his eyes flying open in surprise when he saw who it was that galloped past him on a horse that was saddled sideways. Frost shouted, but what he said was lost on the wind. St. Ives tugged hard on the girth, feeling it give at last, and then with a sliding rush, the saddle fell straight down onto the road, and old Ben tripped right over it, stumbling and nearly going down. St. Ives clutched the horse’s neck, his eyes shut. And then the horse was up again, and flying toward Binger’s like a thoroughbred.
When St. Ives looked back, Frost’s coach had blocked the road. It was turning around, coming after him. Parsons’s coach was reining up behind it. Good, let them get into each other’s way. He could imagine that Parsons was apoplectic over the delay, and once again he laughed out loud as he thundered along, hugging old Ben’s neck, straight through Binger’s gate and up the drive toward the barn.
“They’re after me, Mr. Binger!” St. Ives yelled, leaping down off the horse.
“Would it be men from the stars again?” Binger asked, smoking his pipe with the air of a farmer inquiring about sheep.
“No, Mr. Binger. This time it’s scientists, I’m afraid.”
Binger nodded, scowling. “I don’t much hold with science,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “Begging your honor’s pardon. You’re not like these others, though. The way I see it, Professor, there’s this kind of scientist, and then there’s that other kind.” He shook his head darkly.
“This is that other kind, Mr. Binger.” And right then St. Ives was interrupted by a clattering out on the road — both the coaches drawing up and turning in at the gate. St. Ives strode straight into the barn, followed by Binger, who still smoked his pipe placidly. One of his sons was mucking out a pen, and old Binger called him over. “Bring the hayfork,” he said. The dog Furry wandered out of the pen along with him, happy to see St. Ives again.
At the mention of the hayfork, St. Ives paused. “We mustn’t cause these men any trouble, Mr. Binger,” he said. “They’re very powerful…” But now there was a commotion outside — Parsons and Frost arguing between themselves. St. Ives would have liked to stop and listen, but there wasn’t time. He climbed aboard the bathyscaphe, pulling the hatch shut behind him. Settling himself in the seat, he began to fiddle with the dials, his heart pounding, distracted by what he saw through the porthole.
Seeing the hatch close down, Frost and Parsons gave off their bickering and hurried along, followed by the driver in livery and two other men who had accompanied Parsons. Binger pointed and must have said something to Furry, because as Parsons and one of the other men made a rush forward, the dog bounded in among them, catching hold of Parsons’s trousers and ripping off a long swatch of material. Parsons stumbled, and the other man leaped aside, swiping at the dog with his hand.
Binger’s son shoved the end of the hayfork into the dirt directly in front of the man’s shoe, and he ran into the handle chin-first, recoiling in surprise and then pushing past it toward the machine as Furry raced in, nipping at his shoe, finally getting hold of his cuff and worrying it back and forth.
Parsons was up and moving again and Frost along with him. Together they rushed at the machine, pushing and shoving at each other, both of them understanding that they had come too late. Furry let loose of his man’s cuff and followed the two of them, growling and snapping so that they were forced to do a sort of jug dance there in front of the porthole while they implored St. Ives with wild gestures to leave off and see reason.
But what St. Ives saw just then was darkness, and he heard the by-then-familiar buzzing and felt himself falling down and down and down, leaving that far-flung island of history behind him, maybe never to return. And good riddance — Narbondo, somehow, wasn’t born to be a man of the cloth. He looked cramped and uncomfortable in his new clothing. And Parsons — well, Parsons was Parsons. You could take a brickbat to history six-dozen times, and somehow Parsons would stride into every altered picture wearing the same overgrown beard.
Just then there was darkness of a different caliber again, nighttime darkness and rain falling. St. Ives came to himself. He patted his coat pocket, feeling the cold bulk of the revolver. He had come too far now to be squeamish about anything, but it occurred to him that there was something ironic about setting out to kill the man whose life you had recently worked so hard to save. But kill him he would, if it took that.
He climbed out into the wind-whipped rain, looking around him, and realized with a surge of horror that he was on the wrong street. He could see it straight off. He had dreamed that line of storefronts and lodging houses too many times to make any mistake now. What he saw before him was utterly unfamiliar. He had been rushed by the imbroglio in Binger’s barn and had miscalibrated the instruments. But how? Panicked, he ran straight up the street, slogging through the flood, listening hard to the sounds of the night.
Lancing suddenly through his head came the confused thought that it might be worse than a mere miscalculation. It was conceivable that anything and everything might have changed by now. He had wanted the same street, but what did the notion of sameness mean to him anymore? He slowed to a stop, rain falling on him in torrents.
Then he heard it — the clatter of a coach. Gunfire!
He ran toward the sound, wiping the water out of his eyes, breathing hard. Another gunshot rang out and
