was driverless. His past-time self had simply disappeared from the carriage seat, reduced to atoms floating now in the aether. The note blew away into the rainy darkness like a kite battered by a hurricane, and for one desperate moment St. Ives started to follow it, as if he would chase it forever across the countryside. He let it go and turned momentarily back to the road, watching the reins flop across the horses’ backs as they hauled the carriage away, bashing across deep ruts, smashing along toward certain ruin.
St. Ives couldn’t stand to watch. They’ll survive, he told himself. They’ll struggle on into Crick where a doctor will attend to Kraken’s shoulder, and then they’ll be off again for London, with Narbondo almost hopelessly far ahead. Kraken would search him out in Limehouse, surprising him in the middle of one of his abominable meals, and they would pursue him to the Seven Dials, losing him again until early morning when…
There it was, laid out before him, the grim future, or, rather, the grim past, depending on one’s perspective. The time machine was a grand success, and his bid to alter the past a grand failure. It was spilled milk, though. What he had to do now was get out fast. Just as the note had said. Hurry, always hurry. Still he didn’t move, but stood in the rain, buffeted by wind. He couldn’t see far enough up the dark road to make anything out.
“Where to?” he said out loud. Back to the silo, possibly to confront Parsons? Surely not. Back to the silo day before yesterday, perhaps? He could avoid insulting Mrs. Langley that way. But what then? He would be taking the chance of making a hash of everything, wouldn’t he? There was no profit in reliving random periods in his life. Only one event was worth reliving. Only one thing had to be obliterated utterly. Suddenly, he was struck dumb with fear at the very idea of it.
Like a bolt of lightning it struck him: who was to say that his time traveling wouldn’t merely change things for the worse? What if he had managed to give himself that note, and had gotten away in the machine in time? Quite likely they would have overtaken Narbondo within the hour. There would have been no wreck on the North Road, no lost day in Crick, no confrontation in the Seven Dials. The note would then have meant nothing. It would have been turned into senseless gibberish. And the ghastly irony of the business, he shuddered to realize, was that his time traveling, his desperate effort to avert Alice’s death, had been the very instrument that set into motion the sequence of events that would bring about her death. He had killed her, hadn’t he?
Suddenly he began to laugh out loud. The rain pounded down, washing across his face and down his coat collar as he hooted and shrieked in the mud, beating his fists against the brass wall of the time-traveling bathyscaphe until he was breathless, his energy spent. The night was black and awful, and his shoes were sodden lumps of muck and mud from the ditch. His chest heaved and his head spun. Slowly, implacably. he forced himself to crawl back up the rungs to the hatch, shuddering with little spurts of uncontrollable laughter. “Cottage pie,” he said, fumbling with the latch. “Basil, sage, potatoes…“ The list meant nothing to him, but he recited it anyway, until, weary and shivering, he sat once again looking out through the porthole at the night, his laughter finally spent. “Cheese,” he said.
He set the dials and at once activated the machine. There was the familiar bucking and shuddering and the abruptly silenced whine, and then once again he was adrift in the well. It wasn’t night when he materialized, though. There was sunlight filtering through murky water. He was on the bottom of Lake Windermere. He had got the location right. The time ought to have been fifty years past, before he had been born. So there would be no hapless past-time St. Ives in the process of disappearing. He could take his time now, safe from Parsons, safe from himself, invisible to anybody but fish. What he wanted was practice — less hurry, not more of it.
He cast about in his mind, looking for an adequate test. He had the entirety of history to peek in at — almost too much choice. He studied the lake bed outside the porthole. There was nothing but mud and waterweeds. Carefully he manipulated the dials, then threw the lever. There was an instant of black night, then water-filtered sunlight again. He was still on the lake bottom, but in shallow water now, only partly submerged. A slice of sky shone at the top of the porthole.
Cautiously, he pushed up the hatch and peered out, satisfied with where he had found himself. Across twenty yards of reeds lay a grassy bank. Sheep grazed placidly on it, with not a human being in sight. He shut the hatch, fiddled with the controls, and jumped again, into full sunlight this time. The machine sat on the meadow now, among the startled sheep, which fled away on every side. He raised the hatch cover once more and looked around him. He could see now that there was a house some little way distant, farther along the edge of the lake. Two women stood in the garden, picking flowers. One turned suddenly and pointed, shading her eyes. She had seen him. The other one looked, then threw her hand to her mouth. Both of them turned to run, back toward the house, and St. Ives in a sudden panic retreated through the hatch, slamming it behind him, and then once again set the dials, leaping back down into the bottom of the lake, five years hence, safe from the eyes of humankind.
Nimbly, he bounced forward once more, and then back another sixty years, up onto the meadow again. The house was gone, the fields empty of sheep. He crept forward, a year at a time. Sheep came and went. There was the house, half-built. A gang of men labored at lifting a great long roof beam into place. St. Ives crept forward another hour. The beam was supported now by vertical timbers. The sound of pounding hammers filled the otherwise silent morning.
He was ready at last. He was bound for the future, for Harrogate and an encounter with Mr. Binger’s dog. That would be the test. Or would it? He thought for a moment. Perhaps a better test would consist of his
He alighted in a yard off Bow Street, around the corner from the Crow’s Nest. This time there was no hesitation. He climbed out through the hatch and sprinted down the sidewalk, slowing as he approached the corner. He could picture himself bursting out, snatching up the dog, thumbing his nose at Parsons.
Something was wrong, though. He knew that. There was no barking. And no dray, either. He was early. Seeing his mistake he stopped abruptly, swung around, and started back, running toward the machine. How early was he? He thought he knew, but he couldn’t take any chances. He must know for certain. Abruptly, he angled into the weedy back lot behind the Crow’s Nest, slowing down and sneaking along the wall. Carefully he peered around the corner, looking in the rear window of the almost-empty restaurant. There he sat, his past-time self, just then dropping his fork onto his trousers. Slowly the St. Ives inside the restaurant turned around to face the window, and for a split second he looked himself straight in the eye, holding his own gaze long enough for both of him to understand how haggard and drawn and cockeyed he appeared.
Then with that lesson in mind, he was off and running again, leaving his past-time self to grapple with the mystery. He climbed in at the hatch, bumped the time dial forward, and skipped ahead five minutes. When he opened the hatch it was to the sound of barking dogs. He climbed hastily down the side, looking up toward the street corner where he could see the dray already coming along. Christ! Was he too late? He slid to the ground and started out at a run, but the barking abruptly turned to a single cut-off yelp, then silence. The driver shouted, and one of the horses bucked.
Already St. Ives was clambering back into the machine, sweating now, panicked. He backed the dial off slightly, giving himself twenty seconds. Again he leaped backward, rematerializing in an instant and leaping without hesitation at the hatch. He was down and running wildly toward the corner. He could hear the dray again, but this time he couldn’t yet see it. The barking of old Furry, though, seemed to fill the air along with the snarling of the mastiff.
He leaped straight down off the curb, looking back at where a stupefied Parsons stared at him in wide-eyed alarm. Reaching down, he snatched up the dog, nearly slamming into the horses himself. He threw himself backward, turning, holding the struggling dog, and staggered toward the curb, where he let the creature go. Then he took one last precious second to shout like a lunatic at the snarling mastiff, which turned and fled, howling away down the street to disappear behind a milliner’s shop.
“Run,” St. Ives said, half out loud. And he was away up Bow Street again, pursued by Parsons, who huffed along with his hand on his hat. Full of wild energy, St. Ives easily outdistanced the old man, climbing into the machine and closing the hatch. He knew where he was going, where he
As he adjusted the dials, he half expected Parsons to clamber up onto the bathyscaphe or to peer into the porthole and shake his fist. But Parsons didn’t appear.
Of course he won’t, St. Ives thought suddenly. Parsons was too shrewd for that. He was right then searching out a constable, commandeering a carriage in order to race up to the manor and beat the silo door in. St. Ives tripped the lever to activate Lord Kelvin’s machine, and once again he felt himself falling, downward and downward
