Then he pulled himself together. Quickly he dismantled the rifle, clipped the sections into their hasps and lowered the lid, then placed the case in the bottom drawer of the bureau, adding the key to his chain ring. Locking the door behind him, he made his way out of the hotel, a determined spring in his step.
Two hundred yards down Grosvenor Place, he turned into Hallam Street, a small thoroughfare interspersed with minor art galleries and restaurants. Sunlight played on the striped awnings and the deserted street might have been miles from the crowds along the Coronation route. Dr Jamieson felt his confidence return. Every dozen yards or so he stopped under the awnings and surveyed the empty pavements, listening to the distant TV commentaries from the flats above the shops.
Halfway down the street was a small caf with three tables outside. Sitting with his back to the window, Dr Jamieson took out a pair of sunglasses and relaxed in the shade, ordering an iced orange juice from the waitress. He sipped it quietly, his face masked by the dark lenses with their heavy frames. Periodically, prolonged cheers drifted across the roof-tops from Oxford Street, marking the progress of the Abbey ceremony, but otherwise the street was quiet.
Shortly after three o’clock, when the deep droning of an organ on the TV sets announced that the Coronation service had ended, Dr Jamieson heard the sounds of feet approaching on his left. Leaning back under the awning, he saw a young man and girl in a white dress walking hand in hand. As they drew nearer Dr Jamieson removed his glasses to inspect the couple more closely, then quickly replaced them and rested one elbow on the table, masking his face with his hand.
The couple were too immersed in each other to notice Dr Jamieson watching them, although to anyone else his intense nervous excitement would have been obvious. The man was about twenty-eight, dressed in the baggy impressed clothes Dr Jamieson had found everyone wearing in London, an old tie casually hand-knotted around a soft collar. Two fountain pens protruded from his breast pocket, a concert programme from another, and he had the pleasantly informal appearance of a young university lecturer. His handsome introspective face was topped by a sharply sloping forehead, thinning brown hair brushed back with his fingers. He gazed into the girl’s face with patent affection, listening to her light chatter with occasional amused interjections.
Dr Jamieson was also looking at the girl. At first he had stared fixedly at the young man, watching his movements and facial expressions with the oblique wariness of a man seeing himself in a mirror, but his attention soon turned to the girl. A feeling of enormous relief surged through him, and he had to restrain himself from leaping out of his seat. He had been frightened of his memories, but the girl was more, not less beautiful than he had remembered.
Barely nineteen or twenty, she strolled along with her head thrown back, long straw-coloured hair drifting lightly across her softly tanned shoulders. Her mouth was full and alive, her wild eyes watching the young man mischievously.
As they passed the caf she was in full flight about something, and the young man cut in: ‘Hold on, June, I need a rest. Let’s sit down and have a drink, the procession won’t reach Marble Arch for half an hour.’
‘Poor old chap, am I wearing you out?’ They sat at the table next to Dr Jamieson, the girl’s bare arm only a few inches away, the fresh scent of her body adding itself to his other recollections. Already a whirlwind of memories reeled in his mind, her neat mobile hands, the way she held her chin and spread her flared white skirt across her thighs. ‘Still, I don’t really care if I miss the procession. This is my day, not his.’
The young man grinned, pretending to get up. ‘Really? They’ve all been misinformed. Just wait here, I’ll get the procession diverted.’ He held her hand across the table, peered critically at the small diamond on her finger. ‘Pretty feeble effort. Who bought that for you?’
The girl kissed it fondly. ‘It’s as big as the Ritz.’ She gave a playful growl. ‘H’m, what a man, I’ll have to marry him one of these days. Roger, isn’t it wonderful about the Prize? Three hundred pounds! You’re really rich. A pity the Royal Society don’t let you spend it on anything, like the Nobel Prizes. Wait till you get one of those.’
The young man smiled modestly. ‘Easy darling, don’t build your hopes on that.’
‘But of course you will. I’m absolutely sure. After all, you’ve more or less discovered time travel.’
The young man drummed on the table. ‘June, for heaven’s sake, get this straight, I have not discovered time travel.’ He lowered his voice, conscious of Dr Jamieson sitting at the next table, the only other person in the deserted street. ‘People will think I’m insane if you go around saying that.’
The girl screwed up her pert nose. ‘You have, though, let’s face it. I know you don’t like the phrase, but once you take away the algebra that’s what it boils down to, doesn’t it?’
The young man gazed reflectively at the table top, his face, as it grew serious, assuming massive intellectual strength. ‘In so far as mathematical concepts have their analogies in the physical universe, yes — but that’s an enormous caveat. And even then it’s not time travel in the usual sense, though I realize the popular press won’t agree when my paper in Nature comes out. Anyway, I’m not particularly interested in the time aspect. If I had thirty years to spare it might be worth pursuing, but I’ve got more important things to do.’
He smiled at the girl, but she leaned forward thoughtfully, taking his hands. ‘Roger, I’m not so sure you’re right. You say it hasn’t any applications in everyday life, but scientists always think that. It’s really fantastic, to be able to go backward in time. I mean—’
‘Why? We’re able to go forward in time now, and no one’s throwing their hats in the air. The universe itself is just a time machine that from our end of the show seems to be running one way. Or mostly one way. I happened to have noticed that particles in a cyclotron sometimes move in the opposite direction, that’s all, arrive at the end of their infinitesimal trips before they’ve started. That doesn’t mean that next week we’ll all be able to go back and murder our own grandfathers.’
‘What would happen if you did? Seriously?’
The young man laughed. ‘I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t like to think about it. Maybe that’s the real reason why I want to keep the work on a theoretical basis. If you extend the problem to its logical conclusion my observations at Harwell must be faulty, because events in the universe obviously take place independently of time, which is just the perspective we put on them. Years from now the problem will probably be known as the Jamieson Paradox, and aspiring mathematicians will be bumping off their grandparents wholesale in the hope of disproving it. We’ll have to make sure that all our grandchildren are admirals or archbishops.’
As he spoke Dr Jamieson was watching the girl, every fibre in his body strained to prevent himself from touching her on the arm and speaking to her. The pattern of freckles on her slim forearm, the creases in her dress below her shoulder blades, her minute toenails with their chipped varnish, was each an absolute revelation of his own existence.
He took off his sunglasses and for a moment he and the young man stared straight at each other. The latter seemed embarrassed, realizing the remarkable physiognomical similarity between them, the identical bone structure of their faces, and angled sweep of their foreheads. Fleetingly, Dr Jamieson smiled at him, a feeling of deep, almost paternal affection for the young man coming over him. His naive earnestness and honesty, his relaxed, gawky charm, were suddenly more important than his intellectual qualities, and Dr Jamieson knew that he felt no jealousy towards him.
He put on his glasses and looked away down the street, his resolve to carry through the next stages of his plan strengthened.
The noise from the streets beyond rose sharply, and the couple leapt to their feet.
‘Come on, it’s three-thirty!’ the young man cried. ‘They must be almost here.’
As they ran off the girl paused to straighten her sandal, looking back at the old man in dark glasses who had sat behind her. Dr Jamieson leaned forward, waiting for her to speak, one hand outstretched, but the girl merely looked away and he sank into his chair.
When they reached the first intersection he stood up and hurried back to his hotel.
Locking the door of his room, Dr Jamieson quickly pulled the case from the bureau, assembled the rifle and sat down with it in front of the window. The Coronation procession was already passing, the advance files of marching soldiers and guardsmen, in their ceremonial uniforms, each led by a brass band drumming out martial airs. The crowd roared and cheered, tossing confetti and streamers into the hot sunlight.
Dr Jamieson ignored them and peered below the blind onto the pavement. Carefully he searched the throng, soon picked out the girl in the white dress tip-toeing at the back. She smiled at the people around her and wormed her way towards the front, pulling the young man by the hand. For a few minutes Dr Jamieson followed the girl’s every movement, then as the first landaus of the diplomatic corps appeared he began to search the remainder of the crowd, scrutinizing each face carefully, line upon line. From his pocket he withdrew a small plastic envelope; he
