Lord Kelvin's Machine

MRS. LANGLEY’S ADVICE


There was too much danger in staying. St. Ives would have liked to sleep, to eat, to sit in his study and look at the wall. The beef broth, though, wouldn’t allow for it. Time—that commodity that he ought to have had plenty of—wouldn’t allow for it. It would insist on going on without him, piling up complications, altering everything. Never had he been so aware of the ticking of the clock.

He sneaked into the manor by way of the study window, remaining long enough to fetch out a purse containing twenty pounds in silver, and then, without so much as a parting glance, he loped back out to the silo, climbed into the machine, and sailed away in the direction of midcentury Limehouse.

He arrived a week earlier than he had on his previous visit. The child wouldn’t be so far gone this time around. It was just after midnight, and to St. Ives, looking down over Pennyfields, it seemed as if nothing had changed. There was no fog, and the moon was high in the sky. But the old woman sat as ever, smoking her pipe amid the scattered junk slopping out of the door of the general shop. Sailors came and went from public houses. The seething Limehouse night was oblivious to the tiny tragedy unfolding in the attic room above.

He pulled the garret window open and stepped in carefully, setting the jar beneath the sill. The child slept on the floor, although not under the window now. He breathed heavily, obviously already congested, lying on his back with the ragged blanket pulled to his chin. But for the sleeping child, the room was empty.

“Damn it to hell,” St. Ives muttered. He must talk to the mother. He couldn’t be popping back in twice a day to feed the child the beef broth. He could think of nothing to do except leave, climb back into the bathyscaphe and reset the coordinates, maybe arrive three hours from now, or maybe yesterday. What a tiresome thing. He would make the child drink the broth now, though, just to get it started up. Trusting to the future was a dangerous thing. A bird in the hand... he told himself.

There was a noise outside the door just then, a woman’s high-pitched laughter followed by a man’s voice muttering something low, then the sound of laughter again. A key scraped in the lock, and St. Ives hurried across toward the window, thinking to get out onto the roof before he was discovered. The door swung open, though, and he stopped abruptly, turning around with a look of official dissatisfaction on his face. He would have to brass it out, pretend to be—what? Merely looking grave might do the trick. Thank heaven he had shaved and cut his hair.

In the open doorway stood the woman who must have been the child’s mother. She was young, and would have been almost pretty but for the hardness of her face and her general air of shabbiness. She was half drunk, too, and she stood there swaying like a sapling in a breeze, looking confusedly at St. Ives. Sobering suddenly, she peered around the room, as if to ascertain that she hadn’t opened the wrong door by mistake. Then, as her countenance changed from confusion to anger, she said, “What are you doing here?”

The man behind her gaped stupidly at St. Ives. He was drunk, too—drunker than she was. A look of skepticism came into his eyes, and he took a step backward.

“Who’s this?” asked St. Ives, nodding at the man. He pitched it just as hard and mean as he could, as if it meant something, and the man turned around abruptly, caromed off the hallway wall, and scuttled for the stairs. There was the sound of pounding feet and a door slamming, then silence.

“There goes half a crown,” she said steadily. “I’m not any kind of bunter, so if you’ve been sent round by the landlord, tell him I pay my rent on time, and that there wouldn’t be half so many bunters if they didn’t gouge your eyes out for the price of a room.”

“Not at all, my good woman,” St. Ives said, surprised at first that she was moderately well-spoken. Then he realized that it wasn’t particularly surprising at all. She had been the wife of a famous, or at least notorious, scientist. The notion saddened him. She had fallen a long way. She was still youthful, and there was something in her face of the onetime country girl who had fallen in love with a man she admired. Now she was a prostitute in a lodging house.

She stood yet in the doorway, waiting for him to explain himself, and St. Ives realized almost shamefully that she held out some little bit of hope—of what? That she wouldn’t have lost her half crown after all? St. Ives, her eyes seemed to say, was the sort of man she would expect to find in the West End, not your common sailor rutting his way through Pennyfields before his ship set sail.

“I’m a doctor, ma’am.”

“Really,” she said, stepping into the room now and closing the door. “You wouldn’t have brought a drain of gin, would you? A doctor, is it? Brandy more like it.” She gave him what was no doubt meant to be a coy look, but it disfigured her face awfully, as if it weren’t built for that sort of theatrics, and it struck him that a great deal had been taken away from her. He could hear the emptiness in her voice and see it in her face. The country girl who had fallen in love with the scientist was very nearly gone from her eyes, and there would come a day when gin and life on the Limehouse streets would sweep it clean away.

“I’m afraid I haven’t any brandy. Or gin, either. I’ve brought this jar of beef broth, though.” He pointed at the jar where it sat beneath the window.

“What is it?” She looked at him doubtfully, as if she couldn’t have heard what she thought she heard.

“Beef broth. It’s an elixir, actually, for the child.” He nodded at the sleeping boy, who had turned over now and had his face against the floor molding. “Your son is very sick.”

Vaguely, she looked in the child’s direction. “Not so sick as all that.”

“Far sicker than you realize. In two weeks he’ll be dead unless we do something for him.”

“Who the devil are you?” she asked, finally closing the door and lighting a lantern on the sideboard. The room was suddenly illuminated with a yellow glow, and a curl of dirty smoke rose toward a black smudge on the ceiling. “Dead?”

“I’m a friend of your husband’s,” he lied, the notion coming to him out of the blue. “I promised him I’d come round now and then to check on the boy. Three times I’ve been here, and each time there was no one to answer my knock, so this time I let myself in by the window. I’m a doctor, ma’am, and I tell you the boy will die.”

At the mention of her husband, the woman slumped into a chair at the table, burying her face in her hands. She remained so for a moment, then steeled herself and looked up at him, some of the old anger rekindled in her eyes. “What is it that you want?” she asked. “Have your say and get out.”

“This elixir,” he said, setting to work on the child, “is our only hope of curing him.” The boy awoke just then, recoiling in surprise when he saw St. Ives huddled over him.

“It’s all right, lamby,” his mother said, kneeling beside him and petting his lank hair. “This man is a doctor and a friend of your father’s.”

At the mention of this, the child cast St. Ives such a glance of loathing and repugnance that St. Ives nearly toppled over backward from the force of it. The complications of human misery were more than he could fathom. “Do you have a cup?” he asked the mother, who fetched down the tumbler from the sideboard— the same tumbler that St. Ives, a week from now, would use to...

What? He reeled momentarily from a vertigo that was the result of sudden mental confusion.

“Careful!” the woman said to him, taking the half-filled tumbler away.

“Yes,” he said. “Have him drink it down. All of it.”

“What about the rest of it?” she asked. “A horse couldn’t drink the whole jar.”

“Two of these glasses full a day until the entire lot’s drunk off. It must be done this way if you want the boy to live.”

She looked at him curiously, hesitating for a moment, as if to say that life wasn’t worth so much, perhaps, as St. Ives thought it was. “Right you are,” she said finally, returning the glass to the sideboard. “Go back to sleep now, lamby,” she said to the boy, who pulled the blanket over his head and faced the wall again. She patted her hair, as if waiting now for St. Ives to suggest something further, as if she still held out hope that he might be worth something more to her than the half crown she had lost along with the sailor.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, stepping toward the window. “I’ll just...” He looked down at the jar again. In his haste to leave he had nearly forgotten it. Now he was relieved to see it, if only to have something to say. “This has to be kept cold. My advice is to leave it on the roof, outside the window.”

In truth, the room itself was nearly cold enough to have done the trick. It was a good excuse to swing the window open and step through it, though. Hurrying, he nearly fell out onto the slates. He stood up, brushing at his knees, and leaned in at the window.

“Leaving by way of the roof?” she asked, making it sound as if she had been insulted. It was clear to her now that this was just what St. Ives was doing. He wasn’t interested in what she had to sell. He had chased off the sailor, and to what end? Now she would have to go down into the street again... “Stairs aren’t good enough for you?” she asked, raising her voice. “Don’t want to be seen coming down from the room of a whore? Precious bloody doctor...”

He nodded weakly, then checked himself and shook his head instead. “My... carriage.”

“On the roof, is it?”

“Yes. I mean to say...” He hesitated, stammering. “What I meant to say was that there was the matter of the money.”

“To hell with your filthy money. I wouldn’t take it if I were dying. Lord it over someone else. If the boy gets well, I’ll thank you for it. But you can bloody damn well leave and take your money with you.”

“It’s not my money, madam, I assure you. Your husband and I wagered a small sum four years back. I’ve owed him this, with interest.” St. Ives pulled out the purse he’d taken from his study in Harrogate, full of money that would no doubt mystify her. She would make use of it, though. Here goes another twenty, he thought, handing it in to her. She paused just a moment before snatching it out of his hand. It would buy a lot of gin, anyway... Ah well, he would win it back from Fleming someday in the hazy future. Time and chance, after all...

He tipped his hat and walked away across the roof, having nothing further to say. He would trust to fate. He climbed in through the hatch and calibrated the instruments, his head nearly empty of thought. Then he realized that during the entire exchange in the room he had never once associated the sick child with Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. There seemed to be no earthly connection between the two. Even the look on the child’s face at the mention of his father—a shadow so deep and dark that it belied the child’s age. Well... it didn’t bear thinking about, did it?

As he switched on Lord Kelvin’s machine, he glanced out one last time through the porthole. There was the woman, holding the purse, staring out through the open window with a look of absolute and utter amazement on her face. Then, along with the rest of the world, she vanished, and he found himself hurtling up the dark well of time, her face merely an afterimage on the back of his eyelids.

There was one more task ahead of him before the end. He would pay a visit to Mrs. Langley. Into his head came the vision of her stumping across the grass toward the silo, ready, on his behalf, to beat men into puddings with her rolling pin. He wondered suddenly how it was that virtues seemed to come so easily to chosen people, while other people had to work like dogs just to hold on to the few little scraps they had.

He reappeared directly outside his study this time, on the lawn, and he sat for a moment in the time machine, giving himself a rest. The silo, right now, contained its own past-time version of the bathyscaphe, which would right at that moment be in the process of itself becoming incorporeal. As his future-self had pointed out in the nastily written note, it wouldn’t do to drop straight into the middle of it.

He sat for a moment orienting himself in time. Soon, within the next couple of hours, his past-time self would wander shoeless over to Lord Kelvin’s summerhouse and would hit upon the final bit of information he would need to make the machine work. But right now, his past-time self was disintegrating into atoms, crawling unhappily toward the window. Well, it couldn’t be helped. If his past-time self was irritated at this little visit, then he was a numbskull. It was his own damned fault, treating Mrs. Langley as if she were a serf.

After another few moments, he climbed out onto the ground, nervously keeping an eye open for Parsons even though he knew from experience that he would easily accomplish his task and be gone before Parsons came snooping around. He checked his pocket watch, calculating the minutes he had to spare, then climbed in through the window. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the desk. It was a mess of broken stuff from when he’d hammered everything with the elephant.

Suddenly he staggered and nearly fell. A wave of vertigo passed over him, and he braced himself against the back of a chair, waiting for it to subside. For a moment he was certain what it meant— that one of his future-time selves was paying him a visit, that in a moment there would be two invisible St. Iveses lying about the room. The time machine would sit on the lawn unguarded, except that it, too, would disappear. The whole idea of it enraged him. Of all the stupid...

But that wasn’t it. The vertigo passed. His skin remained opaque. He didn’t disappear at all. This was something else. Something was wrong with his mind, as if bits of it were being effaced. It struck him suddenly that his memory was faulty. Expanses of it were dissipating like steam. Vaguely, he remembered having gone to Limehouse twice, but he couldn’t remember why. The events of the last few hours—the trip to Oxford, then back to Limehouse to dose the child—those were clear to him. But what did he even mean by thinking, “back to Limehouse”? Had he been there twice?

Now for an instant it seemed as if he had, except that one of his visits had the confused quality of a half-forgotten dream that was fading even as he tried desperately to hold on to it. Fragments of it came to him—the smell of the sick child’s room, the sensation of treading on the sleeping form, the cold tumbler pressed against his ear.

All this, though, was swept away again by an ocean of memories that were at once new to him and yet seemed always to have been part of him. These new memories were roiled up and stormy, halfhidden by the spindrift of competing, but fading, recollections that floated and bobbed on this ocean like pieces of disconnected flotsam going out with the tide: the tumbler, the candle, his stepping across to open a heavy volume lying on a decrepit table. Beyond, bobbing on the horizon, were a million more odds and ends of memory, already too distant to recognize. For a moment he was neither here nor there, neither past nor present, and the storm tossed in his head. Then the sea began to calm and authentic memory took shape, shuffling itself into order, solid and real and full.

Those bits of old flotsam still floated atop it, though, half submerged; he could still make a few of them out, and he knew that soon they would sink forever. Frantically, he searched the desk for a pen and ink. Then, finding them, he began to write. He forced himself to recall the hard, cold base of the tumbler against his ear. And with that, the memory of his first past-time trip to Limehouse ghosted up once again like a feebly collapsing wave, a confused smattering of images and half-dismantled thoughts. The pen scratched across the paper. He barely breathed.

Then, abruptly, it was gone again, whirled away. The very idea of the tumbler against his ear vanished from his head. Weirdly, he could recall that the image of a tumbler had meant something to him only seconds ago; he even knew what tumbler it was that his mind still grappled with. He could picture it clearly. But now it was half full of beef broth, and the mother was feeding it to her sick child, calling him pet names.

Hurriedly, he read over the notes he had scrawled onto the paper—fragments of memory written out in half sentences. “Woman in bed, snoring. Stepping on child. Child nauseated, feverish. Pneumococcal meningitis diagnosed. Child near death. Inflamed meninges cause spinal deformity; hence Narbondo the hunchback? Left coat, money on table. Watch for Parsons snooping along the window...” There was more of the same, then the writing died out. What did it all mean? He no longer knew. It was all fiction to him. It had no reality at all. What coat? He was wearing his coat—or what would become his coat, anyway. Hunchback? Narbondo a hunchback? He cast around in his mind, trying to make sense of it all. Narbondo was not a hunchback. And why would Parsons come snooping along the window? Parsons was no stranger at the manor, not since Lord Kelvin had discovered that St. Ives possessed the machine. Parsons was petitioning him daily to give it up.

Just then he saw something out of the corner of his eye, near the window, but when he turned his head, it was gone. It had looked for all the world like a body, lying crumpled on the floor. His heart raced, and he half stood up, wondering, squinting his eyes. There was nothing, though, only the meadow with the machine sitting among wildflowers like an overgrown child’s toy. St. Ives looked away, but when he did, he saw the thing again, peripherally. He held his gaze steady, focusing on nothing. The thing lay by the window; he must have stepped on it when he came in. It was his past-time self, lying where he had fallen by the window—or rather it was the ghost of his past-time self, unshaven and with wild hair—waiting for his future-time self to leave.

Ghosts—it all had to do with ghosts, with the fading of one world and the solidifying of the next. Just as concrete objects— he, the machine, any damned thing at all—began to fade when a copy of that object appeared from another point in time, so did memory. Two conflicting memories could not coexist. One would supplant the other. Whatever Narbondo had been, or would have become if St. Ives had left him alone, he wasn’t that anymore. St. Ives had dosed him with Fleming’s potion, and he had got well. And the result was that he hadn’t become a hunchback at all, which is what he must have become in that other history that St. Ives had managed to efface. Which meant, if St. Ives read this right, that the sickly child would not have died at all, but must ultimately have recovered, although deformed by the disease.

Fear swarmed over him again. He had gone and done it this time. He was a victim of his own compassion. He had meddled with the past, and the result was that he had come back to a different world than he had left. How much it was different, he couldn’t say. He had forgotten. And it didn’t matter now, anyway; there was no recalling that lost fragment of history. All of that had simply ceased to exist.

What a fool he had been, jaunting around through time as if he were out for a Sunday ramble. Why in heaven’s name hadn’t his future-time self warned him against this? The damned old fool. Perhaps he could go back and unchange what he had changed. Except, of course, that he had made the change over fifty years ago. He would have to return to Limehouse and convince himself not to leave Fleming’s elixir with the mother, but to dump it off the roof instead. Let the child suffer... Well...

Going back would make a bad matter worse. He could see that. He sighed, getting a grip, finally. What else might all this mean? Anything might have changed, maybe for the better. Mightn’t Alice be alive? Why not? He was filled with a surge of hope, which died out almost at once. Of course she wasn’t alive. That much hadn’t changed. His mind worked furiously, trying to make sense of it. Here was his littered desk and his ghostly unshaven self lying in a heap by the window. What was all that but a bit of obscure proof that this world must be in most ways similar to the one he had buggered up?

And more than that, he remembered it, didn’t he?—the business of his going out barefoot, of his finally putting the machine right, of his saving Binger’s dog, of Alice murdered in the Seven Dials.

Where was Mrs. Langley? He must talk to her. At once. Speak to her and get out. He was only a day away from his own rightful time. Minimize the damage, he told himself, and then go home.

He went out into the kitchen. There she was, the good woman, putting a few things into a carpetbag, packing her belongings. She was going to her sister’s house. Her face was full of determination, but her eyes were red. This hadn’t been easy for her. St. Ives hated himself all of a sudden. He would have fallen to his knees to beg her forgiveness, except that she disliked that sort of indignity almost as much as he did.

“Mrs. Langley,” he said.

She turned to look at him, affecting a huff, her mouth set in a thin line. She wasn’t about to give in. By damn, she was bound for her sister’s house, and soon, too. This had gone on entirely long enough, and she wouldn’t tolerate that sort of tone, not any longer. Never in all her born years, her face seemed to say.

Still, St. Ives thought happily, ultimately she wouldn’t go, would she? She would be there to take on Parsons with a rolling pin. St. Ives would succeed, at least in this one little thing. She was regarding him strangely, though, as if he were wearing an inconceivable hat. “I’ve come to my senses,” he said.

She nodded. Her eyes contradicted him, though. She looked at him as if he had lost his senses entirely this time, down a well. Inadvertently he brushed at his face, fearing that something... Wait. Of course. He wasn’t the man that he had been a half hour ago. He was clean-shaven now, his hair cut. He wore a suit of clothes with idiotic lapels, woven out of the wool of sheep that didn’t yet exist. He was a man altered by the future, although there would be nothing but trouble in telling her that.

“What I mean to say is that I’m sorry for that stupid display of temper. You were absolutely right, Mrs. Langley. I was stark raving mad when I confronted you on the issue of cleaning my desk. I know it wasn’t the first time, either. I... I regret all of it. I’ve been... It’s been hard for me, what with Alice and all. I’m trying to put that right, but I’ve made a botch of it so far, and...”

He found himself stammering and was unable to continue. Dignity abandoned him altogether, and he began to cry shamelessly, covering his face with his forearm. He felt her hand on his shoulder, giving him a sympathetic squeeze. Finally he managed to stop, and he stood there sniffling and hiccuping, feeling like a fool.

She brought him a glass of water, which he drank happily. “It’s not every man,” she said to him, “who can eat crow without the feathers sticking to his chin.” She nodded heavily and slowly. “Nothing wrong with a good cry now and then. It’s like rain— washes things clean.”

“God bless you, Mrs. Langley,” he said. “You’re a saint.”

“Not by a considerable sight, I’m not. You come closer, to my mind. But I’m going to be bold enough to tell you that you’re not cut out for saint work. You’ve got the instinct, but you haven’t got the constitution for it. And if I was you I’d find a new situation just as quick as I might. Go back to science, Professor, where you belong.”

“Thank you,” he said, in control of his emotions once more. “That’s just where I intend to go, just as you advise. There’s one little bit of business to attend to first, though, and by heaven, if there were one person on earth I could bring along to help me see it through, you would be that person, Mrs. Langley.”

“I’m good with a ball of dough, sir, but not much else.”

“You’re a philosopher, my good woman, whether you know it or not. And from now on your salary is doubled.”

She started to protest, but he cut her off with a gesture. “I’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Carry on here.”

With that he left her, returning to the study and going out through the window, stepping carefully over that bit of floor where his ghost lay invisible. He clambered straight into the bathyscaphe and left. His past-time self would materialize again and set to work on the machine, never knowing that the Mrs. Langley problem had been solved. It occurred to him too late that he might have written himself a note, explaining that he had come back around to patch things up with her. But to hell with that. His past-time self was a fool—more of a fool, maybe, than his future-time self was—and would probably contrive to muck things up in some new lunatic way, threatening everything. Better to let him go about his business in ignorance.

In the time machine, he returned to the now-empty silo, some couple of hours past the time when he had fled from Parsons and the constable. It occurred to him, unhappily, that there had been no Langdon St. Ives existing in the world during the last two hours, and that the world didn’t give a rotten damn. The world had teetered along without him, utterly indifferent to his absence. It was a chilling thought, and was somehow related to what Mrs. Langley had been telling him. For the moment, though, he put it out of his mind.

There were more immediate things to occupy him. It mightn’t be safe to leave the machine in the silo yet, but he couldn’t just plunk down on the meadow every time he reappeared. Parsons had petitioned him, as one scientist to another, to give it up. It belongs to the Crown, he had said. Parsons hadn’t known until that very afternoon in Harrogate, though, that the time machine was workable, that St. Ives had got the bugs out of it at long last. Well, he knew now. There wouldn’t be any more petitions. And next time Parsons wouldn’t just bring the local constable along to help.

St. Ives climbed out wearily, looking around him at the sad mess of tools and debris. He had half a mind to set in on it now— neaten it up, stow it away as if it was himself he was putting right. He couldn’t afford the time, though.

Then he saw the chalk markings—changed again. Lord help us, he thought, feeling again a surge of distaste for his future-self. This was no lark, though. It was a warning: “Parsons looming,” the message read. “Obliterate this and take the machine out to Binger’s.”