Lord Kelvin's Machine

THE SAVING OF BINGER’S DOG


St. Ives sat in the chair in his study. It was a dim and wintry day outside, with rain pending and the sky a uniform gray. He had been at work on the machine for nearly six months, and success loomed on the horizon now like a slowly approaching ship. There had been too little sleep and too many missed or hastily eaten meals. His friends had rallied around him, full of concern, and he had gone on in the midst of all that concern, implacably, like a rickety millwheel. Jack and Dorothy were on the Continent now, though, and Bill Kraken was off to the north, paying a visit to his old mother. There was a fair chance that he wouldn’t see any of them again. The thought didn’t distress him. He was resigned to it.

A fly circled lazily over the clutter on the desk, and St. Ives whacked at it suddenly with a book, knocking it to the floor. The fly staggered around as if drunk. In a fit of remorse, St. Ives scooped it up on a sheet of paper, walked across and opened the French window, and then dumped the fly out into the bushes. “Go,” he said hopefully to the fly, which buzzed around aimlessly, somewhere down in the bushes.

St. Ives stood breathing the wet air and staring out onto the meadow at the brick silo that rose there crumbling and lonely, full to the top with scientific aspirations and pretensions. It looked to him like a sorry replica of the Tower of Babel. Inside it lay Lord Kelvin’s machine, along with Higgins’s bathyscaphe. St. Ives had removed and discarded most of the shell of the machine, hauling the useless telltale debris away by night. What was left was nearly ready; he had only to wheedle what might be called fine points out of the gracious Lord Kelvin who would abandon Harrogate for Glasgow tomorrow morning.

St. Ives hadn’t slept in two days. Dreaming had very nearly cured him of sleep. There would be time enough for sleep, though. Either that, or there wouldn’t be. On impulse, he left the window open, thinking to show other flies that he harbored no ill will toward them, and then he slumped back across to the chair and sat down heavily, sinking so that he rested on his tailbone. A shock of hair fell across his eyes, obscuring his vision. He harrowed it backward with his fingers, then nibbled at a grown-out nail, tearing it off short and taking a fragment of skin with it. “Ouch,” he said, shaking his hand, but then losing interest in it almost at once. For a long time he sat there, thinking about nothing.

Coming to himself, finally, he surveyed the desktop. It was a clutter of stuff—tiny coils and braids of wire, miniature gauges, pages torn out of books, many of which torn pages now marked places in other books. There was an army of tiny clockwork toys littering the desktop, built out of tin by William Keeble. Half of them were a rusted ruin, the victims of an experiment he had performed three weeks past. St. Ives looked at them suspiciously, trying to remember what he had meant to prove by spraying them with brine and then leaving them on the roof.

He had waked up in the middle of the night with a notion involving the alteration of matter, and had spent an hour meddling with the toys, leaving them, finally, on the roof before going back to bed, exhausted. In the morning, somehow, he had forgotten about them. And then, days later, he had seen them from out on the meadow, still lying on the roof, and although he remembered having put them there, and having been possessed with the certainty that putting them there was good and right and useful, he couldn’t for the life of him recall why.

That sort of thing was bothersome—periods of awful lucidity followed by short bursts of rage or by wild enthusiasm for some theoretical notion having to do with utter nonsense. Moodily, he poked at the windup duck, which whirred momentarily to life, and then fell over onto its side. There were ceramic figures, too, sitting among comical Toby mugs and glass gewgaws, some few of which had belonged to Alice. Balls of crumpled paper lay everywhere, along with broken pens and graphite crumbs and fragments of India-rubber erasers. A lake of spilled ink had long ago dried beneath it all, staining the brown oak of the desktop a rich purple.

Filled with a sudden sense of purpose, he reached out and swept half the desk clear, the books and papers and tin toys tumbling off onto the floor. Carefully, he straightened the glass and ceramic figurines, setting a little blue-faced doggy alongside a Humpty Dumpty with a ruff collar. He stood a tiptoeing ballerina behind them, and then, in the foreground, he lay a tiny glass shoe full of sugar crystals. He sat back and looked at the collection, studying it. There was something in it that wasn’t quite satisfying, that wasn’t—what? Proportionate, maybe. He turned the toe of the glass shoe just a bit. Almost... He rotated the Humpty Dumpty so that it seemed to be regarding the ballerina, then slid the dog forward so that its head rested on the toe of the shoe.

That was it. On the instant, meaning had evolved out of simple structure. Something in the little collection reminded him of something else. What? Domestic tranquillity. Order. He smiled and shook his head nostalgically, yearning for something he couldn’t recall. The comfortable feeling evaporated into the air. The nostalgia, poignant as it had been for that one moment, wasn’t connected to anything at all, and was just so much vapor, an abstraction with no concrete object. It was gone now, and he couldn’t retrieve it. Maybe later he would see it again, when he wasn’t trying so hard.

Frowning, he returned to the window where he worked his fingers through his hair again. There was a broken limb on the bush where he had dropped the fly, as if someone had stepped into it clumsily. For a moment he was puzzled. There hadn’t been any broken limb a half hour ago.

A surge of worried excitement welled up in him, and he stepped out through the window, looking up and down along the wall of the house. Here he is again! he said to himself. No one was visible, though.

He sprinted to the corner, bursting quickly past it to catch anyone who might still be lurking. He looked about himself wildly for a moment and then ran straight toward the carriage house and circled entirely around it. The door was locked, so he didn’t bother going in, but headed out onto the meadow instead straightaway toward the silo. He realized that he should have fetched Hasbro along with him, or at any rate brought a weapon.

He had left the silo doors double-locked, though. They were visible from the house, too—both from the study and from St. Ives’s bedroom upstairs. Hasbro’s quarters also looked out onto the meadow, and Mrs. Langley could see the silo from the kitchen window. St. Ives had been too vigilant for anyone to have... And no one had. The doors were still locked, the locks untouched. Carefully, he inspected the ground finding stray shoeprints here and there. He stepped into them, realizing only then that he was in his stocking feet. Still, there was one set of prints that were smaller even than his unshod foot. They wouldn’t belong to Hasbro, then. Possibly they were Bill Kraken’s, except that Kraken was up in Edinburgh and these prints were fresh. Parsons! It had to be Parsons, snooping around again. Who else could it be? No one.

Finally he jogged off toward his study window, pounding his fist over and over into his hand in a fit of nervous energy. His mind was a turmoil of conflict. He had to sort things out... The ground outside the French windows was soft, kept wet by water falling off the overhanging eaves. A line of shoeprints paralleled the wall, as if someone had come sneaking along it, stepping onto the bush in order to sandwich himself in toward the window without being seen. In his excitement St. Ives hadn’t seen the prints, but he stooped to examine them now. The toes were pressed deeply into the dirt, so whoever it was had been hunched over forward, keeping low, moving slowly and heavily. Small shoeprints again, though. Certainly not his own.

St. Ives hurried back into the study. He opened a desk drawer and rooted through it, pulling out papers and books until he found a cloth-wrapped parcel. He pulled the cloth away, revealing four white plaster-of-Paris shoeprint casts. He turned them over, and, on the bottom, printed neatly in ink, were dates and place-names. The first set was dated six months past, taken in Sterne Bay from the dirt outside the icehouse. The second pair were taken a week past, down along the River Nidd. They were from different pairs of shoes of the same size.

He put the first pair back into the drawer and carried the second outside, laying them into appropriate prints. They settled in perfectly. On his hands and knees he squinted closely at one of the heel prints in the dirt. The back outside corner of the heel was gone, worn away, so that the heel print looked like someone’s family crest, but with a quarter of the shield lopped away. An image leaped into his mind of Parsons walking along in his usual bandy-legged gait, scuffing the leather off the corners of his heels. The heels on the plaster casts were worn out absolutely identically. There couldn’t be any doubt, or almost none. Parsons had come snooping around. He couldn’t have been entirely positive that the man he had seen skulking along the river had been Parsons. It had been late evening, and drizzling. Whoever it had been, though, it was the same man who, within the last half hour or so, had sneaked along the wall of the house, stepped into the bush and broke off the limb, and then, no doubt, peered in at the window.

He climbed back into the room, rewrapping the plaster casts and closing them up in the drawer. Then, pulling on his coat, he strode out across the meadow once again like a man with a will, noticing only when he was halfway to the River Nidd that he still wasn’t wearing any shoes.

He returned late that afternoon in an improved mood, although he felt agitated and anxious. He had spent three hours with Lord Kelvin. The great scientist had come to understand that tragedy had turned St. Ives into a natural fool. He had even patted St. Ives on the head once, which had been humiliating, but to some little extent St. Ives had been grateful for it—a sign, he realized, of how dangerously low his spirits had fallen. But things were looking up now. His efforts weren’t doomed after all, although he was certain that he was running a footrace with Parsons and the Royal Academy. When they were sure of themselves, they would merely break down the silo door—come out with a dozen soldiers and checkmate him. The game would be at an end.

The idea of it once again darkened his thoughts. His elation at having swindled Lord Kelvin out of certain tidbits of information suddenly lapsed, and he slumped into his chair feeling fatigued and beaten. He seemed to swing between two extremes—doom and utter confidence. Middle ground had become the rarest sort of real estate. What he needed, desperately, was to be levelheaded, and here he was atilt again, staggering off course.

Tomorrow, though, or the next day, he would set out. Right now he would rest. Lord Kelvin had taken pity on him this afternoon. That was the long and the short of it. One look at St. Ives’s face, at his disheveled clothes, and Lord Kelvin had been ready to discuss anything at all, as if he were talking to the village idiot. The man had a heart like a hay wagon, to be sure. St. Ives’s wandering over without any shoes on had probably done the trick. Kelvin had finally warmed to the subject of time travel, and St. Ives had led him through a discussion of the workings of the machine itself as if he were a trained ape.

That was clever, he told himself, going out shoeless was. He half believed it for a moment. Then he knew that it hadn’t been clever at all; he had gone out shoeless without meaning to, and in late autumn, yet. He would have to watch that sort of thing. They’d have him tied down in Colney Hatch if he wasn’t careful. He was too close to success. He couldn’t chance a strait-waistcoat. Seeing things clearly for the moment, he looked at himself in the cheval glass on the desk. A haircut wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Perhaps if a man affected sanity carefully enough...

Almost happy again, he stepped into his slippers and lit a pipe, sitting back and puffing on it. Failure—that’s what had squirreled him up. Too much failure made a hash of a man’s mind... He thought for a moment about his manifold failures, and suddenly and inexplicably he was awash with fear, with common homegrown panic. He found that he could barely keep his hands still.

Immediately, he tried to recite the cottage-pie recipe, finding that he couldn’t remember it. He pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and studied the writing on it. There it was—sage and sweet basil. Not sweetbread. He could feel his heart flutter like a bird’s wings, and he felt faint and light-headed. Desperately, he breathed for a moment into a sack until the light-headedness began to abate. Sweetbread? Why had he thought of sweetbread? That was some kind of gland, wasn’t it? Something the French ate, probably out of buckets and without the benefit of forks.

With an unpleasant shock, he noticed just then that someone had cleaned up his desk. The debris on the floor was separated into tidy piles against the wall. The papers were shuffled, and the books stacked. The glass and ceramic figurines were dusted and lined up together. The neatened desk baffled him for a moment. Then, slowly, a dark rage began to rise in him, and the whole business of an orderly desk became an affront.

He bent down and tossed together the stuff on the floor, mixing it into a sort of salad. Then he kicked through it, sending it flying, winding himself up. He turned to the desk itself, methodically picking up books and shaking out the loose leaves so that they fluttered down higgledy-piggledy. He picked up a heavy iron elephant paperweight and one by one smashed his quill pens, accidentally catching the squared-off edge of the crystal ink bottle and smashing it too, so that ink spewed out across his shirtfront. The shock of smashing the glass made him bite down hard on the stem of his pipe. He heard and felt the stem crack, and quickly let up on it. The pipe fell neatly into two pieces, though, so that the stem stayed in his mouth and the bowl fell down onto the desktop, wobbling around in the ink and broken glass like a drunkard. Furious, he picked up the elephant again and smashed the pipe, over and over and over, until he noticed with a deep rush of demoralizing embarrassment that Mrs. Langley stood in the open door of the room, her eyes wide open with horror and disbelief.

Coldly he put the elephant down and turned to her, realizing without knowing why that she had become an obstruction to him. Somehow, his rage had been transferred en masse to the housekeeper, to Mrs. Langley. He had no need for a housekeeper. He saw that clearly. What he had a need for was to be left alone. His desk, his books, his things, wanted to be left alone. Soon he would be gone altogether, perhaps never to return. A page in his life was folding back, a chapter coming to a close. The world was rife with change.

And this wasn’t the first time that she had cut this sort of caper. He had spoken to her about it before. Well, the woman had been warned, hadn’t she? There wouldn’t be any need to speak to her about it again. “As of this moment, Mrs. Langley,” he said to her flatly, “you are relieved of your duties. You’ll have three months’ severance pay.”

She put her hand to her mouth, and he realized that his eye was twitching badly and that every muscle in his body was stiff with tension, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. He gestured toward the window, the open road. “Must you stare so?” he demanded of her.

“He’s gone stark,” she muttered through her fingers.

He clenched his teeth. “I have not gone stark,” he said. “Understand that! I have not gone stark!” Even as he said it, there flickered across his mind a vague understanding of what it meant— that he had gone mad, utterly. He wasn’t quite sane enough to admit it, though, to hold on to the notion. He was too far around the bend to see it anymore, but could merely glimpse its shadow. He knew only that he couldn’t have Mrs. Langley meddling with his things, chasing after him with a dust mop as if he wanted a keeper. He watched her leave, very proudly, with her head up. She wasn’t the sort to forgive easily. She would be gone, up to her sisters. Well... For a moment he nearly called her back, but was having difficulty breathing again. He put his head into the sack.

After a moment he sat back down in his chair and contrived to rearrange the four objects amid the clutter on the desktop. His hand shook violently, though, and he accidentally uncorked the glass shoe, spilling out half the sugar crystals. Then he knocked the Humpty Dumpty over twice. He concentrated, making himself breathe evenly, placing the objects just so. Surely, if he could get them right, he would regain that moment of indefinable satisfaction that he had felt a few hours past. It would settle him down, restore a sense of proportion. It wouldn’t work, though. He couldn’t manage it.

He forced himself to concentrate on the desktop again. There was something in the arrangement that was subtly wrong. The figurines stood there as ever, the dog with his head on the shoe, the Humpty Dumpty gazing longingly at the ballerina. But there was no pattern any longer, no art to it. It was as if the earth had turned farther along its axis and the shadows were different.

He found his shoes, putting them on this time before going out. Work was the only mainstay. He would let Mrs. Langley stew for a while and then would commute her sentence. She must learn not to treat him like a child. Meanwhile he would concentrate on something that would yield a concrete result. With effort, with selfcontrol, he would have what he wanted within twenty-four hours. Where the machine would take him was an utter mystery. Probably he would be blown to fragments. Or worse yet, the machine would turn out to be so much junk, sitting there in the silo with him at the controls, making noises out of his throat like a child driving a locomotive built out of packing crates. He stood by the window, focusing his mind. There wasn’t time to regret this business with Mrs. Langley. There wasn’t time to regret anything at all. There was only time for action, for movement.

His hands had stopped shaking. As an exercise, he coldly and evenly forced himself to recite the metals in the order of their specific gravities. The cottage-pie recipe was well and good when a man needed a simple mental bracer. But what he wanted now was honing. He needed his edges sharpened. With that in mind, he worked through the metals again, listing them in the order of their fusibility this time, then again backward through both lists, practicing a kind of dutiful self-mesmerization.

Halfway through, he realized that something was wrong with him. He was light-headed, woozy. He held on to the edge of the desk, thinking to wait it out. He watched his hand curiously. It seemed to be growing transparent, as if he had the flesh of a jellyfish. It was happening to him again—the business on the North Road, the ghostly visitation. His vision was clouded, as if he were under water. He slid to the floor and began to crawl toward the window. Maybe fresh air would revive him. Each foot, though, was a journey, and all at once his arms and legs gave way beneath him and he slumped to the floor, giving up and lying there unhappily in front of the open window, thinking black thoughts until suddenly and without warning he thought no more at all.

And then he awakened. His head reeled, but he was solid again. He stood up and studied his hand. Rock steady. Opaque. How long had he been away? He couldn’t say. He was confused for a moment, trying to make sense of something that didn’t want sense to be made of it. Either that or it already made sense, and he was looking for something that was now plain to him.

Suddenly full of purpose, he straightened his collar and went out into the deepening twilight, having already forgotten about Mrs. Langley but this time wearing his shoes.

His cod had got cold, and the restaurant, the Crow’s Nest in Harrogate, had emptied out. Lunch was over, and only a couple of people lingered at their tables. St. Ives sat in the rear corner, his back to the window, doodling on a pad of paper, making calculations.

He felt suddenly woozy, light-headed. Lack of sleep, he told himself, and bad eating habits. He decided to ignore it, but it was suddenly worse, and he had to shove his feet out in order to brace himself. Damn, he thought. Here it was again—another seizure. This time he would fight it.

He heard muffled laughter from across the room and looked up to see someone staring back at him, someone he didn’t recognize. The man looked away, but his companion sneaked a glance in St. Ives’s direction, his eyes full of furtive curiosity. Nettled, St. Ives nodded at the man and was suddenly aware of his own slept-in clothes, of his frightful unshaven face. His fork, along with a piece of cod, fell from his hand, dropping onto his trousers, and he stared at it helplessly, knowing without trying that his hand would refuse to pick it back up.

In a moment he would pass out. Better to simply climb down onto the floor and be done with it. He didn’t want to, though, not in public, not in the condition he was in. He pressed his eyes shut. Slowly and methodically he began to recite the cottage-pie recipe, forcing himself to consider each ingredient, to picture it, to smell it in his mind. He felt himself recover momentarily, as if he were grounding himself somehow, holding on to things anchored in the world.

Hearing a noise, he slumped around in his chair, looking behind himself at the window. Weirdly, a man’s face stared back in at him, past the corner of the building. He was struck at first with the thought that he was looking at his own reflection—the disheveled hair, the slept-in clothes. But it wasn’t that. It was himself again, just like on the North Road, his coat streaked with muck, as if he had crawled through every muddy gutter between Harrogate and London. The ghost of himself waved once and was gone, and simultaneously St. Ives fell to the floor of the restaurant and knew no more until he awoke, lying in a tangle among the table legs.

The two men who had been staring were endeavoring to yank on him, to pull him free of the table. “Here now,” one of them said. “That’s it. You’ll be fine now.”

St. Ives sat up, mumbling his thanks. It was all right, he said. He wasn’t sick. His head was clear again, and he wanted nothing more than to be on his way. The two men nodded at him and moved off, back to their table, one of them advising him to go home and both of them looking at him strangely. “I tell you he bloody well disappeared,” one man said to the other, staring once more at St. Ives. His companion waved the comment away.

“Disappeared behind the table, you mean.” They went back to their fish, talking between themselves in low voices.

St. Ives was suddenly desperate to reach the sidewalk. These spells were happening too often, and he believed that he understood what they meant, finally. What could he have seen but his future-time self, coming and going, hard at work? He had seen the dominoes falling, catching glimpses of them far down the line. The machine would be a success. That must be the truth. He was filled with optimism, and was itching to be away, to topple that first domino, to set the future into motion.

He left three shillings on the table and nodded his thanks at the two men as he strode toward the door. They looked at him skeptically. He burst out into the sunlight, nearly knocking straight into Parsons, who retreated two steps away, a wild and startled look on his face, as if he had been caught out. Parsons yanked himself together, though, and reached out a hand toward St. Ives. For a moment St. Ives was damned if he would shake it. But then he saw that such a course was unwise. Better to keep up the charade.

“Parsons!” he said, forcing animation into his voice.

“Professor St. Ives. What an unbelievable surprise.”

“Not terribly surprising,” St. Ives said. “I live right up the road. What about you, up on holiday?” He realized that his voice was pitched too high and that he sounded fearful and edgy. Parsons by now was the picture of cheerful serenity.

“Fishing holiday, actually. Lot of trout in the Nidd this time of year. Fly-fishing. Come into town to buy supplies, have you? Going somewhere yourself?” He squinted at St. Ives, taking in the down-at-heels look of him. Parsons couldn’t keep an element of discomfort out of his face, as if he regretted encountering a man who was so obviously out humiliating himself. “You look... tired,” he said. “Keeping late hours?”

“No,” St. Ives said, answering all of Parsons’s questions at once. Actually, he had been keeping late hours. Where he was going, though, he couldn’t rightly say. He knew just where he wanted to go. He had the coordinates fined down to a hair. His mind clouded over just then, and he again felt momentarily dizzy, just as he had the other three times. Some sort of residual effect, perhaps. He couldn’t attend to what Parsons was saying, but was compelled suddenly to concentrate merely on staying on his feet. Basil, potatoes, cheese... he said to himself. It was happening again— the abysmal and confusing light-headedness, as if he would at any moment float straight up into the sky.

Parsons stared at him, and St. Ives shook his head, trying to clear it, realizing that the man was waiting for him to say something more. Then, abruptly, as if a trapdoor had opened under him, St. Ives sat down hard on the sidewalk.

He was deathly cold and faint. There could be no doubt now. Here he was again—his future-time self—the damned nitwit. He had better have a damned good excuse. His brain seemed to be a puddle of soft gelatin. He pictured the pie in his head, straight out of the oven, the cheese melting. Sometimes he made it with butter rather than cheese. Never mind that. Better to concentrate on one thing at a time.

There was a terrible barking noise. Some great beast... He looked around vaguely, still sitting on the sidewalk, holding on to his mind with a flimsy grasp. A dog ran past him just then, a droopy-eyed dog, white and brown and black, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. Even in his fuddled state he recognized the dog, and for one strange moment he was filled with joy at seeing it. It was Furry, old Binger’s dog, the kind of devoted animal that would come round to see you, anxious to be petted, to be spoken to. A friend in all kinds of weather... Another dog burst past, nearly knocking Parsons over backward. This one was some sort of mastiff, growling and snarling and snapping and chasing Binger’s dog. Weakly, St. Ives tried to throw himself at the mastiff, nearly getting hold of its collar, but the dog ran straight on, as if St. Ives’s fingers were as insubstantial as smoke.

Through half-focused eyes, St. Ives saw Binger’s poor dog running straight down the middle of the road, into the path of a loaded dray. The air was full of noise, of clattering hooves and the grinding of steel-shod wheels. And just then a man came running from the alley behind the Crow’s Nest. He waved curtly to Parsons as he leaped off the curb, hurtling forward into the street, his arms outstretched. St. Ives screwed his eyes half-shut, trying to focus them, the truth dawning on him in a rush. He recognized the tattered muddy coat, the uncombed hair. It was the same man whose reflection he had seen in the glass. It was himself, his future-time self. Parsons saw it too. St. Ives raised a hand to his face, covering his eyes, and yet he could see the street through his hand as if through a fog.

The running man threw himself on the sheepdog. The driver of the dray hauled back on the reins, pulling at the wheel brake. A woman screamed. The horses lunged. The dog and its savior leaped clear, and then the street and everything in it disappeared from view, winking out of existence like a departing hallucination.

Suddenly he could see again. And the first thing he noticed was Parsons, hurrying away up the sidewalk in the direction taken by the St. Ives that had saved the dog. There’s your mistake, St. Ives said to himself as he struggled to his hands and knees. You’re already too late. He felt shaky, almost hung over. He staggered off toward the corner, in the opposite direction to that taken by Parsons. The man would discover nothing. The time machine had gone, and his future-time self with it. St. Ives laughed out loud, abruptly cutting off the laughter when he heard the sound of his own voice.

Mr. Binger’s dog loped up behind him, wagging its tail, and St. Ives scratched its head as the two of them trotted along. At the corner, coming up fast, was old Binger himself. “Furry!” he shouted at the dog, half mad and half happy to see it. “Why, Professor,” he said, and looked skeptically at St. Ives.

“Have you got your cart?” St. Ives asked him hastily.

“Aye,” said Binger. “I was just coming along into town, when old Furry here jumped off the back. Saw some kind of damned mastiff and thought he’d play with it, didn’t he?” Binger shook his head. “Trusts anybody. Last week...”

“Drive me up to the manor,” St. Ives said, interrupting him. “Quick as you can. There’s trouble.”

Binger’s face dropped. He didn’t like the idea of trouble. In that way he resembled his dog. “I don’t take any stock in trouble,” he had told St. Ives once, and now the look on his face seemed to echo that phrase.

“Cow in calf,” St. Ives lied, defining things more carefully. He patted his coat, as if somehow there was something vital in his pocket, something a cow would want. “Terrible rush,” he said, “but we might save it yet.”

Mr. Binger hurried toward his cart, and the dog Furry jumped on behind. Here was trouble of a sort that Mr. Binger understood, and in moments they were rollicking away up the road, St. Ives calculating how long it would take for Parsons to discover that the man he was chasing was long gone, off into the aether aboard the machine. He was filled with a deep sense of success, transmitted backward to him from the saving of old Furry. It was partly the sight of himself dashing out there, sweeping up the dog. But more than that, it was the certainty that he was moments away from becoming a time traveler, that he could hurry or not hurry, just as he chose. It didn’t matter, did it?

The truth was that he was safe from Parsons. The saving of the dog meant exactly that, and nothing less. He was destined to succeed that far, at least. He laughed out loud, but then noticed Mr. Binger giving him a look, and so he pretended to be coughing rather than laughing, and he nodded seriously at the man, patting his coat again.

The manor hove into view as Mr. Binger drove steadily up the road, smoking his pipe like a chimney. There, on the meadow, grazed a half-dozen jersey cows. A calf, easily two months old, stood alongside its mother, who ruminated like a philosopher. “Well, I’ll be damned,” St. Ives said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the calf. “Looks like everything’s fine after all.” He smiled broadly at Mr. Binger, in order to demonstrate his deep delight and relief.

“That ain’t...” Mr. Binger started to say.

St. Ives interrupted him. “Pull up, will you? I’ll just get off here and walk the rest of the way. Thanks awfully.” Mr. Binger slowed and stopped the horses, and St. Ives gave him a pound note. “Don’t know what I’d do without you, Mr. Binger. I’m in your debt.”

Mr. Binger blinked at the money and scratched his head, staring out at the two-month-old calf on the field. He was only mystified for a moment, though. The look on his face seemed to suggest that he was used to this kind of thing, that there was no telling what sorts of shenanigans the professor might not be up to when you saw him next. He shrugged, tipped his hat, turned the wagon around, and drove off.

St. Ives started out toward the manor, whistling merrily. It was too damned bad that Mrs. Langley had gone off to her sister’s yesterday without having waited for morning. St. Ives hadn’t had time to put things right with her. What had he been thinking of, talking to her in that tone? The thought of his having run mad like that depressed him. He would fetch her back. He had tackled the business of Binger’s dog; he could see to Mrs. Langley, too. With the machine he would make everything all right.

Then he began to wonder how on earth he had known about Binger’s dog. In some other historical manifestation he must have witnessed the whole incident, and it must have fallen out badly— Binger’s dog dead, perhaps, smashed on the street. Via the machine, then, St. Ives must have come back around, stepping in out of time and snatching the dog from the jaws of certain death. Now he couldn’t remember any of that other manifestation of time. The first version of things had ceased to exist for him, perhaps now had never existed at all. There was no other explanation for it, though. He, himself, must have purposefully and effectively altered history, even after history had already been established, and in so doing had obliterated another incarnation of himself along with it. Nothing is set in stone, he realized, and the thought of it was dizzying— troubling too. What else might he have changed? Who and what else might he have obliterated?

He would have to go easy with this time-traveling business. The risks were clearly enormous. The whole thing might mean salvation, and it might as easily mean utter ruin. Well, one way or another he was going to find out. He no longer had any choice, had he? There he had been, after all, peeking in at the window, saving the dog in the road. There was no gainsaying it now. What would happen, would happen—unless, of course, St. Ives himself came back and made it happen in some other way altogether.

His head reeled, and it occurred to him that there would be nothing wrong, at the moment, with opening a bottle of port—a vintage, something laid down for years. Best taste it now, he thought, the future wasn’t half as secure as he had supposed it to be even twenty minutes past. He set out for the manor in a more determined way, thinking happily that if a man were to hop ten years into the future, that same bottle of port would have that many more years on it, and could be fetched back and...

Something made him turn his head and look behind him, though, before he had taken another half-dozen steps. There, coming up the road, was a carriage, banging along wildly, careering back and forth as if it meant to overtake him or know the reason why. Mrs. Langley? he wondered stupidly, and then he knew it wasn’t.

Fumbling in his pocket for the padlock key, he set out across the meadow at a dead run, angling toward the silo now. For better or worse, the past beckoned to him. The bottle of port would have to wait.