Doyle could feel his face getting red. “I’ve been trying to be polite, Mr. Darrow, and—”
“You’re right, Doyle, you’re not cynical. You’re just stupid.”
“Why don’t you just go to hell, sir?” said Doyle in a tone he forced to be conversational. “Skate there on your goddamn ice river, okay?” He got to his feet and tossed back the last of his brandy. “And you can keep your five thousand, but I’ll take the return ticket and a ride to the airport. Now.”
Darrow was still frowning, but the parchment skin around his eyes was beginning to crinkle. Doyle, though, was too angry to sit down again. “Get old Nostrand back here and tell him about the water weeds and the rest of your crap,”
Darrow stared up at him. “Nostrand would be certain I was insane.”
“Then do it by all means—it’ll be the first time he was correct about anything.”
The old man was grinning. “He advised me against approaching you, by the way. Said all you were good for was rearranging other people’s research.”
Doyle opened his mouth to riposte furiously, then just sighed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “So calling you crazy would be his second correct statement.”
Darrow laughed delightedly. “I knew I wasn’t wrong about you, Doyle. Sit down, please.”
It would have been too rude to leave now that Darrow was refilling Doyle’s paper cup, so he complied, grinning a little sheepishly. “You do manage to keep a person off balance,” he remarked.
“I’m an old man who hasn’t slept in three days. You should have met me thirty years ago.” He lit still another cigarette. “Try to picture it, now; if you could stand outside the time river, on some kind of bank, say, and see through the ice, why then you could walk upstream and see Rome and Nineveh in their heydays, or downstream and see whatever the future holds.”
Doyle nodded. “So ten miles upstream you’d see Caesar being knifed, and eleven miles up you’d see him being born.”
“Right! Just as, swimming up a river, you come to the tips of trailing weeds before you come to their roots. Now—pay attention, this is the important part—sometime something happened to punch holes in the metaphorical ice cover. Don’t ask me how it happened, but spread out across roughly six hundred years there’s a… shotgun pattern of gaps, in which certain normal chemical reactions don’t occur, complex machinery doesn’t work … But the old systems we call magic do.” He gave Doyle a belligerent stare. “Try, Doyle, just try.”
Doyle nodded. “Go on.”
“So in one of these gaps a television won’t work, but a properly concocted love potion will. You get me?”
“Oh, I follow you. But wouldn’t these gaps have been noticed?”
“Of course. Those binders by the window are full of newspaper clippings and journal entries, dating back as far as 1624, that mention occasions when magic has seemed actually, documentably, to work; and since the turn of the century there’s usually some note, in the same day’s issue, of a power failure or blanket radio interference in the same area. Why, man, there’s a street in Soho that some people still call the Auto Graveyard, because for six days in 1954 every car that drove into it conked out and had to be towed away—by horses!—and then started up fine in the next street. And a third-rate part-time medium that lived there staged the last of her Saturday afternoon tea and seance sessions during that week—no one will ever know what happened, but the ladies were all found dead, ice cold after having been dead less than an hour in a warm room, and stamped on every face was, I understand, the most astonishing expression of dismayed terror. The story was downplayed in the press, and the stalling of the cars was blamed on a, quote, accumulation of static electricity, unquote. And there are hundreds of similar examples.
“Now I came across these when I was… well, trying to accomplish something science had failed to do, and I was trying to find out if, when and where magic might work. I found that these magic-yes-machinery-no fields are all in or around London and are scattered through history in a bell curve pattern whose peak extends roughly from 1800 to 1805; there were evidently a lot of them during those years, though they tended to be very brief in duration and small in area. They become wider and less frequent farther away from the peak years. Still with me?”
“Yes,” said Doyle judiciously. “As far back as the sixteen hundreds, you say? So the gaps then would have been rare, but long when they did show up. And they quickened and shortened until they must have been banging by like clicks from a geiger counter in 1802, say, and then they slowed down and broadened out again. Do they seem to damp out entirely at either end of the curve?”
“Good question. Yes. The equations indicate that the earliest one occurred in 1504, so the curve reaches about three hundred years in each direction, call it six hundred years all told. So anyway, when I began to notice this pattern, I nearly forgot about my original purpose, I was so fascinated by this thing. I tried to get my research boys to work on the puzzle. Hah! They knew senility when they saw it, and there were a couple of attempts to have me committed. But I ducked out of the net and forced them to continue, to program their computers with principles from Bessonus and Midorgius and Ernestus Burgravius; and in the end I did learn what the gaps were. They were —are—gaps in the wall of time.”
“Holes in the ice that covers the river.” Doyle nodded.
“Right—picture holes in that ice roof; now if part of your lifetime, some section of the seventy-year-long trailing weed that’s you, should happen to be under one of the holes, it’s possible to get out of the time stream at that point.”
“To where?” Doyle asked guardedly, trying to keep any tone of pity or derision out of his voice.
“Nowhere,” answered Darrow impatiently. “Nowhen. All you can do is enter again through another gap.”
“And wind up in the Roman Senate watching Caesar being assassinated. No, sorry, that’s right, the holes only extend as far back as 1500; okay, watching London burn down in 1666.”
“Right—if there happens to be a gap then. And there. You can’t reenter at arbitrary points, only through an existing gap. And,” he said with a note of discoverer’s pride, “it is possible to aim for one gap rather than another— it depends on the amount of… propulsion used in exiting from your own gap. And it is possible to pinpoint the locations of the gaps in time and space. They radiate out in a mathematically predictable pattern from their source—whatever that can have been—in early 1802.”
Doyle was embarrassed to realize that his palms were damp. “This propulsion you mention,” he said thoughtfully, “is it something you can produce?”
Darrow grinned ferociously. “Yes.”
Doyle was beginning to see a purpose in the demolished lot outside, all these books, and perhaps even his own presence. “So you’re able to go voyaging through history.” He smiled uneasily at the old man, trying to imagine J. Cochran Darrow, even old and sick, at large in some previous century. “I fear thee, ancient mariner.”
“Yes, that does bring us to Coleridge—and you. Do you know where Coleridge was on the evening of Saturday, the first of September, in 1810?”
“Good Lord, no. William Ashbless arrived in London only… about a week later. But Coleridge? I know he was living in London then…”
“Yes. Well, on the Saturday evening I mentioned, Coleridge gave a lecture on Milton’s Aereopagitica at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand.”
“Oh, that’s right. But it was Lycidas, wasn’t it?”
“No. Montagu wasn’t present, and he got it wrong.”
“But the Montagu letter is the only mention anywhere of that lecture.” Doyle cocked his head. “Uh… isn’t it?”
The old man smiled. “When DIRE undertakes to do a job of research, son, we’re thorough. No, two of the men who attended, a publisher’s clerk and a schoolmaster, left journals which have come into my hands. It was the Aereopagitica. The schoolteacher even managed to get a fair amount of the lecture down in shorthand.”
“When did you find this?” Doyle asked quickly. An unpublished Coleridge lecture! My God, he thought with a surge of bitter envy, if I’d had that two years ago, my Nigh-Related Guest would have got a different sort of review.
“A month or so ago. It was only in February that I got concrete results from the Denver crew, and since then DIRE has been obtaining every available book or journal concerning London in 1810.”
Doyle spread his hands. “Why?”
