Lord Kelvin's Machine

PART III

THE TIME TRAVELER





IN THE NORTH SEA


Air hissed through rubber tubing like the wheezing of a mechanical man. There was the odor of machine oil and metal in the air, mixed with the damp aquarium smell of seawater seeping slowly past riveted joints and rubber seals. The ocean lay silent and cold and murky beyond porthole windows, and St. Ives fought off the creeping notion that he had been encased in a metal tomb.

One of the bathyscaphe’s jointed arms clanked against the brass hull with a dull echo, a sound from a distant world. St. Ives felt it in his teeth. He smeared cold sweat from his forehead and focused his mind on his task—recovering Lord Kelvin’s machine from the debris-covered sandbar forty feet beneath the Dover Strait. The hulks of three ships lay roundabout, one of them blown apart by the dynamite bomb that St. Ives had dropped into its hold six months past.

He pulled a lever in the floor, feeling and hearing the metallic ratchet of the pair of retractable feet that thrust out from the base of the bathyscaphe. Laboriously, inch by inch, the spherical device hopped across the ocean floor. Fine sand swirled up, obscuring the portholes, and for the space of a minute St. Ives could see nothing at all. He shut his eyes and pressed his hands to his temples, aware again of the swish of air through tubing and of the sound of blood pounding in his head. He felt a great pressure, all imaginary, but nonetheless real for that, and he began to breathe rapidly and shallowly, fighting down a surge of panic. The portholes cleared, and a school of John Dory lazied past, gaping in at him, studying him as if he were a textbook case on the extravagances of human folly...

“Stop it!” he said out loud. His voice rang off the brass walls, and he peered forward, trying to work the looped end of line around the far side of the machine.

“Pardon me, sir?” The stalwart voice of Hasbro sounded through the speaking tube.

“Nothing. It’s close down here.”

“Perhaps if I had a go at it, sir?”

“No. It’s nothing. I’m at the end of it.”

“Very well,” the voice said doubtfully.

He let go of the line, and it slowly sank across the copper shell of the machine, drifting off the far edge and settling uselessly on the ocean floor. Failure—he would have to try again. He closed his eyes and sat for a moment, thinking that he could easily fall asleep. Then the idea of sleep frightened him, and he looked around himself, taking particular note of the dials and levers and gauges. He needed something solid to use as ballast for his mind— something outside, something comfortable and homely.

Abruptly he thought of food, of cottage pie and a bottle of beer. With effort, he began to think through the recipe for cottage pie, reciting it to himself. It wouldn’t do to talk out loud. Hasbro would haul him straight out of the water. He pictured the pie in his head—the mashed potatoes whipped with cream and butter, the farmer’s cheese melted across the top. He poured a mental beer into a glass, watching it foam up over the top and spill down the sides. Keeping the image fresh, he pulled in the line again, working diligently until he gripped the noose once more. Then, slowly, he carried it back out with the mechanical hand. He dropped it carefully, and this time it floated down to encircle a solid piece of outthrust metal.

“Cottage pie,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Got its... eye,” he said weakly, realizing that this sounded even more lunatic than what he had said. It didn’t matter, though. He was almost through. Already the feeling of desperation and confinement was starting to lift. Carefully, he clamped on to the line again, pulling it tight inch by inch, working steadily to close the loop. If he could attend to his work he would be on the surface in ten minutes. Five minutes.

“Up we go,” he said, loud this time, like a sea captain, and in a matter of seconds there was a jolt, and the bathyscaphe tilted just a little, lifting off the ocean floor. It rose surfaceward in little jerks, and the school of John Dory followed it up, nosing against the portholes. St. Ives was struck suddenly by how friendly the fish were, nosing against the glass like that. God bless a fish, he thought, keeping a man company. The water brightened around him, and the feeling of entombment began to dissipate. He breathed deeply, watching bubbles rush past now and the fish turn in a school and dart away. Suddenly the wave-lapped surface of the gray ocean tossed across the porthole, and then the sea gave way to swirling fog, illuminated by a morning sun and enlivened by the muffled sound of water streaming off the sides of the bathyscaphe. Then there was the solid clunk of metal feet settling on a wooden deck.

St. Ives opened the hatch and climbed out, and immediately he and Hasbro swung the dripping bathyscaphe across the deck so as to make room for Lord Kelvin’s machine. They unfastened it from the jib crane and lashed it down solidly, hiding it beneath oiled canvas, working frenziedly while the sun threatened to burn off the fog and to reveal their efforts to the light of day. Hurrying, they fixed the line that grappled Lord Kelvin’s machine to the jib crane and set about hauling it out of the water, too, afterward hiding it beneath more tied down canvas.

In another twenty minutes the steam trawler, piloted by the man that St. Ives knew as Uncle Botley, made off northward. St. Ives remained on deck for a time, watching through the mist. Soon they would be far enough from the site that they could almost pretend to be innocent—to have been out after fish.

It had been six months since anyone from the Royal Academy had been lurking in the area. So they ought to have been safe; the issue of the machine was officially closed. Yet St. Ives was possessed with the notion that he would be discovered anyway, that there was something he had missed, that his plans to save Alice would fail if he wasn’t vigilant night and day. Fears kept revealing themselves to him, like cards turned up in a deck. He kept watch for another hour while the fog dissipated on the sea wind. The horizon, when he could see it, was empty of ships in every direction.

Exhausted, he went below deck and fell into a bunk as the trawler steamed toward Grimsby, bound, finally, up the Humber to Goole. In three days he would be home again, such as it was, in Harrogate. Then the real work would start. Secrecy now was worth—what? His life, pretty literally. Alice’s life. They would transport the machine overland from Goole, after disguising it as a piece of farm machinery. Even so, they would keep it hidden beneath canvas. No one could be trusted. Even the most innocent bumpkin could be a spy for the Royal Academy.

When they reached the environs of Harrogate they would wait for nightfall, sending Kraken ahead to scout out the road. That’s when the danger would be greatest, when they got to within hailing distance of the manor. If the Academy was laying for St. Ives, that’s where they would hide, waiting to claim what was theirs. How desperate would they be? More to the point, how far would St. Ives go to circumvent them?

He knew that there were no steps that Parsons wouldn’t take in order to retrieve the machine. If Parsons knew, that is, that the machine was retrievable. For the fiftieth time St. Ives calculated the possibility of that, ending up, as usual, awash with doubts. Parsons was a doddering cipher. He had out-tricked St. Ives badly in Sterne Bay, and the only high card left to St. Ives now was the machine itself. Parsons hadn’t expected St. Ives to destroy it, and he certainly couldn’t have expected St. Ives to pretend to destroy it. Perhaps he should pretend to destroy it again, and so confuse the issue utterly. He could spend the remainder of his life pretending to have destroyed and recovered the machine. They could scuttle Uncle Botley’s trawler after transferring the machine to some other vessel, making Parsons believe that it was still on board. Of course, Parsons didn’t know it was on board in the first place; they would have to find a way to reveal that. Then they could pretend to pretend to scuttle the ship, maybe not move the machine off at all, but only pretend to...

He tossed in his bunk, his mind aswirl with nonsense. Finally the sea rocked him to sleep, settling his mind. Water swished and slapped against the hull, and the ship creaked as it rose and fell on the ground swell. The noises became part of a dream—the sounds of a coach being driven hard along a black and muddy street.

He was alone on a rainy night in the Seven Dials, three years past. At first he thought his friends were with him, but around him now lay nothing but darkness and the sound of rain. There was something—he squinted into the night. A shop window. He could see his own reflection, frightened and helpless, and behind him the street, rain pelting down. The rainy curtain drew back as if across a darkened theater stage, and a picture formed in the dusty window glass: a cabriolet overturned in the mud, one spoked wheel spinning round and round past the upturned face of a dead woman...

He jerked up out of his bunk, fighting for breath. “Cottage pie,” he said out loud. Damn anyone who might hear him. What did they know? He was a man alone. In the end, that was what had proved to be true. It wasn’t anybody’s fault; it was the way of the world. He lay down again, feeling the ship rise on the swell. He thought hard about the pie, about the smell of thyme and rosemary and sage simmering in a beef broth, about the herb garden that Alice had started and that was now up in weeds. He hadn’t given much of a damn about food before he knew Alice, but she had got him used to it. He had kept the herb garden flourishing for a month or so, in her memory. But keeping the memory was somehow worse than fleeing from it. Moles were living in the garden now—a whole village of them.

He drifted off to sleep again, dreaming that he watched the moles through the parlor window. One of them had the face and spectacles of old Parsons. It pretended to be busy with mole activities, but it regarded him furtively over the top of its spectacles. Away across the grounds lay the River Nidd, fringed with willows. Through them, his beard wagging, stepped Lord Kelvin himself, striding along toward the manor with the broad ever-approaching gait of a man in a dream. He wasn’t in a jolly mood, clearly not coming round to chat about the theory of elasticity or the constitution of matter. He carried a stick, which he beat against the palm of his hand.

Willing to take his medicine, St. Ives stepped out into the garden to meet him, nearly treading on the mole that looked like Parsons. Weeds crackled underfoot and the day was dreary and dim, almost as if the whole world were dilapidated. This wasn’t going to be pretty. Lord Kelvin wasn’t a big man, and he was getting on in years, but there was a fierce look in his eyes that seemed to say, in a Glasgow brogue, “You’ve blown my machine to pieces. Now I’m going to beat the dust out of you.”

What he said was, “I spent twenty-odd years on that engine, lad. I’m too old to start again.” His face was saddened, full of loss.

St. Ives nodded. One day, maybe, he would give it back to the man. But he couldn’t tell him that now.

“I’m truly sorry...” he began.

“Ye can’t imagine what it was, man.” He gestured with the stick, which had turned into a length of braided copper wire.

On the contrary, St. Ives had imagined what it was on the day that he walked into Lord Kelvin’s barn, looking to ruin it. He took the braided wire from the old man, but it fell apart in his hands, dropping in strands across his shoes.

“We might have gone anywhere in it,” the old man said wistfully. “The two of us. Traveled across time...” He could be open and honest now that he thought the machine was blasted to pieces. There was nothing to hide anymore. St. Ives let him talk. It was making them both feel better, filling St. Ives with remorse and happiness at the same time: the two of them, traveling together, side by side, back to the Age of Reptiles, forward to a day when men would sail among the stars. St. Ives had worked too long in obscurity, shunned by the Academy and so pretending to despise it—but all the time pounding on the door, crying to be let in. That was the sad truth, wasn’t it? Here was its foremost member, Lord Kelvin himself, talking like an old and trusted colleague.

Lord Kelvin nodded his head, which turned into a quadrant electrometer. In his hand he held a mariner’s compass of his own invention. The needle pointed east with awful, mystifying significance.

“I knew what it... what it was,” St. Ives said remorsefully. “But I wanted the machine for myself, to work my own ends, not yours. I’ve given up science for personal gain.” He couldn’t help being truthful.

“You’ll never be raised to the peerage with that attitude, lad.”

St. Ives noticed suddenly that the mole with Parsons’s face was studying him out of its squinty little eyes. Hurriedly, it turned around and scampered away across the meadow, carrying a suitcase. Lord Kelvin looked at his pocket watch, which swung on the end of a length of transatlantic cable. “If he hurries he can catch the 2:30 train to London. He’ll arrive in time.”

He showed the pocket watch to St. Ives. The crystal was enormous, nearly as big as the sky, filling the landscape, distorting the images behind it like a fishbowl. St. Ives squinted to make things out. The hands of the watch jerked around their course, ticking loudly. Behind them, on the watch face, a figure moved through the darkness of a rainy night. It was St. Ives himself, wading through ankle-deep water. It was fearsomely slow going. Like quicksand, the water clutched his ankles. Going round and round in his head was a hailstorm of regrets—if only the ships hadn’t gone down, if he hadn’t missed his train, if he hadn’t come to ruin on the North Road, if he could tear himself loose now from the grip of this damnable river... He wiped rainwater out of his eyes. Crouched before him in the street was Ignacio Narbondo, a smoking pistol in his hand and a look of insane triumph on his face.

St. Ives jackknifed awake again. The air of the cabin was cold and wet, and for a moment he imagined he was once more in the bathyscaphe, on the bottom of the sea. But then he heard Uncle Botley shout and then laugh, and the voice, especially the laughter, seemed to St. Ives to be a wonderful fragment of the living world— something he could get a grip on, like a cottage pie.

St. Ives studied his face in the mirror on the wall. He was thin and sallow. He felt a quick surge of terror without an object, and he realized abruptly that he had gotten old. He seemed to have the face of his father. “Time and chance happeneth to them all,” he muttered, and he went out on deck in the gathering night, where the lights of Grimsby slipped past off the starboard bow, and the waters of the Humber lost themselves in the North Sea.