“Yes,” he said at last. “This place is, by reliable reports, haunted. Or once was. One sole manifestation, which is, I gather from physical students, most unusual.”
“Give,” I said. “Or does your scientific mind reject it?”
“So many scientific minds have rejected what I have accomplished that I keep my own mind open, or try to. But this is a curious incident. It was before my tenancy, when the villa belonged to its original owner, the British novelist Uptonleigh. One day in 1937, I believe, in the midst of a house party, there suddenly appeared a ghost. A black-faced ghost, like a relic from one of the minstrel shows of my boyhood, clad in dirty dungarees and tattered tennis shoes. He spoke with an American accent and announced that he had just been treacherously murdered and had never expected heaven to be like this. The guests were sufficiently merry when he arrived, as was usually the case with Uptonleigh’s guests, to enter into the spirit with the spirit, so to speak; if it chose to believe that heaven was one long party, they would give it one long party. The party lasted, I believe, for six weeks, almost equaling the record set by the wake which Uptonleigh held when his best novel was filmed. In that time the ghost assumed civilized attire, washed its face and grew a beard. The party might have gone on to a new record if the ghost had not vanished as abruptly as it appeared. It has never been seen since.
Dr. Palgrave related this preposterous narrative as calmly as he had told of his time machine, as calmly as he had accepted Colonel von Schwarzenau’s manifestos of the New Order. I smiled politely. “Some drunken American who decided to crash a good party,” I suggested.
Dr. Palgrave shook his head. “You do not understand. The ghost appeared suddenly from nowhere in the midst of them. One moment there was empty space, the next this black-faced intruder. All accounts allow of no rational explanation.”
The Barras works thumped. I stared at the thin-bearded scientist. Did nothing interest him, nothing perturb him but his ventures into the past with senile guinea pigs and rusting iron? “It would be fun,” I said, “to see your ghost meet your colonel.” Dr. Palgrave half smiled. “But we talk of these trivial matters when I have so much to show you, Holding. I want so very much to interest you in my experiments. I even dare hope that if I can convince you—”
There was an honest-to-God gleam in his eye. “Hold on,” I said hurriedly. “You aren’t aiming to graduate from guinea pigs to me, are you?”
“I should not have put it quite that way, but my thought was something of that nature.”
“I’m afraid,” I said politely, “I haven’t any scientific aptitude. I’d never learn to handle the controls on a time machine. I can’t even drive a car.”
“Oh, that would be nothing. I have a remote-control panel so that I can operate the machine from such a distance that its field does not affect me. Contact with the field, you see, sets up a certain sympathetic parallel in the electronic vibrations of the blood stream; it is that that enables me to recall a living object from the past even if it has left the physical bounds of the machine.”
“Then you have brought them back alive?”
“Guinea pigs, yes. But I have not had the opportunity to experiment with higher forms of life. How the field would affect the nervous system, whether there might be certain synaptic short circuits—Antoine refuses to make the attempt. And moreover he is so valuable a cook— But if I could interest you in the tremendous possibilities—”
I cursed Henri-Marie de Champsfleuris thoroughly up one side and down the other. It wasn’t enough that he should play purloined letter with me under the nose of a Gestapo colonel. No; he has to expose me as guinea pig to a time-machine crackpot. I began to think it would have been a simpler and safer life to hide in hedges, sleep in haymows, and live off ditch water till that fishing boat sailed. I couldn’t antagonize my host; but I was damned if I was going to have curious currents shot through me, whether they transported me in time or not. I was trying to frame a courteous excuse when I heard a thud that wasn’t from the Barras works.
It was the steady rhythmic clump of trained marchers. They went to the back of the house first, and I heard sullen curses and a sharp scream that must have come from Antoine. Then they came back, thudding across the terrace.
The Barras works thumped out death for all men. The feet on the terrace thumped an unknown but far more immediate peril. And Dr. Palgrave talked about the effect of a temporomagnetic field on the ganglia of guinea pigs.
The French windows opened and a squad of four men came in, in gray uniforms with swastika brassards. A corporal saluted us and said nothing. His hand was an inch from his automatic as the men searched the room.
Dr. Palgrave paid no attention to them. I started to speak, but I thought better of it when I caught the corporal’s hard eye and saw his fingers twitch. I sat there listening to the details of the Palgrave remote-control time mechanism while the four men completed their wordless search.
The corporal saluted again in silence, and the searchers filed out. I stared at Dr. Palgrave.
“It is nothing,”
