Lord Kelvin's Machine

THE RETURN OF DR. NARBONDO


Smoking very slowly on his pipe, Mr. Binger stood staring at St. Ives, who smiled cheerfully at him from halfway out of the bathyscaphe hatch. St. Ives had just arrived from out of the aether, surprising Mr. Binger in the pasture. “Good afternoon, Mr. Binger,” St. Ives said.

Furry hopped around, happy to see St. Ives and not caring a rap that he had appeared out of nowhere. Binger looked up and down the road, as if expecting to see a dust cloud. There was nothing, though, which seemed to perplex him. Finally, he removed his pipe and said, nodding at the bathyscaphe, “No wheels, then?”

“Spacecraft,” St. Ives said, and he pointed at the sky. “You remember that problem with the space alien some few years back?”

“Ah!” Binger said, nodding shrewdly. That would explain it. Perhaps it would suffice to explain everything—St. Ives’s sudden arrival, his strange clothes, his being clean-shaven and his hair trimmed. Just a little over two hours ago St. Ives had been in town, disheveled, hunted, looking like the Wild Man of Borneo. He had been babbling about cows and seemed to be in a terrible hurry. Now the mysteries were solved. It was spacemen again.

St. Ives climbed down onto the ground and petted Furry on the back of the head. “Can you help me, Mr. Binger?” he asked.

“Aye,” the man said. “They say it was you that saved old Furry up to town today.”

“Do they?”

“They do. They say you come near to killing yourself over the dog, nearly struck by a wagon. Chased off that bloody mastiff, too. That’s what they say.”

“Well.” St. Ives was at a momentary loss. “They exaggerate. Old Furry’s a good pup. Anyone would have done the same.”

“Anyone didn’t do it, lad. You did, and I thank you for it.”

Anyone didn’t know to do it, St. Ives thought, feeling like a fraud. He hadn’t so much chosen to save the dog as he had been destined to save the dog. Well, that wasn’t quite true, either. The past few hours had made a hash of the destiny notion—unless there were infinite destinies waiting in the wings, all of them in different costumes. One destiny at a time, he told himself, and with the help of Binger and his sons, St. Ives hauled the time machine to the barn, in among the cows, and then Mr. Binger drove him most of the way back to the manor. He walked the last half mile, thinking that if Parsons was lurking about, it would be better not to reveal that Binger was an accomplice.

It was dark when he bent through the French window again and lay down on the divan, telling himself that he ought not to risk waiting, that he ought to be off at once and finish what he had meant to finish. But he was dog-tired, and what he meant to do wouldn’t allow for that. Surely an hour’s sleep...

The street in the Seven Dials came unbidden into his mind—the rain, the mud, the darkness, the shadowy rooftops and entryways and alleys—but this time he let himself go, and he wandered into his dream with a growing sense of purpose rather than horror.

Hasbro shook him awake in the morning. The sun was high and the wind blowing, animating the ponderous branches of the oaks out on the meadow. “Kippers, sir?” Hasbro asked.

“Yes,” said St. Ives, sitting up and rubbing his face blearily.

“Secretary Parsons called again, sir, early this morning. And Dr. Frost, too, some little time later.”

“Yes,” said St. Ives. “Did you tell them to return?”

“At noon, sir. An hour from now.”

“Right. I’ll...” He stood up slowly, wondering what it was he would do. Eat first. Mrs. Langley came in just then, carrying the plate of kippers and toast and a pot of tea. She handed him a newspaper along with it, just come up from London. The front page was full of Dr. Frost, lately risen from his long and icy sleep. He had got the ear of the Archbishop of Canterbury, it said, who had taken a fancy to Frost’s ideas regarding the rumored time-travel device sought after by the Royal Academy.

The journalist went on to describe the fanciful device in sarcastic terms, implying that the whole thing was quite likely a hoax perpetrated for the sake of publicity by Mr. H. G. Wells, the fabulist. Frost already had a large following, though, and considered himself a sort of lay clergyman. He had taken to wearing white robes, and his followers had no difficulty believing that his rising from an icy sleep held some great mystical import. Accordingly, there was widespread popular support for Frost’s own claim to the alleged time-travel device. What Frost had proposed that had won the heart of the Archbishop yesterday afternoon was that a journey be undertaken to the very dawn of human time, to the Garden itself, where Frost would pluck that treacherous apple out of Eve’s hand by main force and beat the serpent with a stick...

The article carried on in suchlike terms, the journalist sneering openly at the whole notion and lecturing his readers on the perils of gullibility. St. Ives didn’t sneer, though. Frost’s, or Narbondo’s, capacity for generating mayhem and human misery didn’t allow for sneering. The journalist was right, but really he knew nothing at all. Frost would take the machine if he could; but he jolly well wouldn’t travel back to eat lunch with Adam and Eve.

St. Ives scraped up the last of the kippers and watched the meadow grasses blow in the wind. Parsons, too. He intended to make careful scientific journeys, he and his cronies. They knew St. Ives had the machine. The evidence was all circumstantial, but it was sufficient. Two days ago they had finished their search of the sea bottom off Dover. There was no trace of the machine, no wreckage beyond that of the sunken ships. And Parsons had made it very clear to St. Ives that Lord Kelvin, just yesterday afternoon, had recorded strange electromagnetic activity in the immediate area of Harrogate.

Parsons had been diplomatic. St. Ives, he had said, was always the most formidable scientist of them all—far deeper than they had supposed. His interest in the machine, his pursuit of it, could not have culminated in his destroying it. Parsons admired this, and because he admired it, he had come to appeal to St. Ives to give the thing up peaceably. There was no profit in coming to blows over it. The law was all on the side of the Academy.

Well, today it would come to blows. His future-time self knew that, and had returned to warn him with the chalk markings in the silo. And Parsons was right. The device did belong to the Academy, or at least to Lord Kelvin. When had Kelvin deduced that St. Ives had it? It was conceivable that he suspected it all along, and that he had let St. Ives fiddle away on it, thinking to confiscate it later, after the dog’s work was done.

Hasbro appeared just then. “Secretary Parsons,” he announced.

“Tell him to give me five minutes. Pour him a cup of tea.”

“Very good, sir.”

St. Ives stood up, straightened his clothes, ran his hands through his hair, and went out again at the window, heading at a dead run for the little stable behind the carriage house. Sitting in the parlor, Parsons wouldn’t see him, and given a five-minute head start, St. Ives didn’t care a damn what Parsons saw. Across the meadow the silo stood as ever, but now with the door ajar. They had broken into it, thinking simply to take the machine, but finding it gone. So much for being peaceable. He laughed out loud.

Hurriedly, he threw a saddle onto the back of old Ben, the coach horse, and old Ben immediately inflated his chest so that St. Ives couldn’t cinch the girth tight. “None of your tricks, Ben,” St. Ives warned, but the horse just looked at him, pretending not to understand. There was no time to argue. St. Ives had to get across the river before he was seen. He swung himself into the saddle and walked the horse out through the open stall gate, heading for the river. The saddle was sloppy, and immediately slid to the side, and St. Ives wasted a few precious moments by swinging down and tugging on the girth, trying to cinch it tighter. Old Ben reinflated, though, and St. Ives gave up. There was no time to match wits with a horse, and so he remounted, hunkering over to the left and trotting out toward the willows along the river.

They crossed the bridge and cantered along the river path, emerging through the shrubbery on the opposite bank. Now the manor was completely hidden from view, and so St. Ives kicked old Ben into the semblance of a run. They skirted the back of Lord Kelvin’s garden and angled toward the highroad, St. Ives yanking at the saddle to keep it on top of the horse. On the road he headed east at a gallop, leaning hard to the left to compensate and keeping his head down along Ben’s neck, like a jockey. Old Ben seemed to recall younger and more romantic days, and he galloped away without any encouragement at all, his mane blowing back in St. Ives’s face.

St. Ives smiled suddenly with the exhilaration of it, thinking of Parsons unwittingly drinking tea back at the manor, wondering aloud of Hasbro whether St. Ives wasn’t ready to see him yet. Suspicions would be blooming like flowers. The man was a simpleton, a bumpkin.

The saddle inched downward again, and St. Ives stood up in the stirrups and yanked it hard, but all the yanking in the world seemed to be useless. Gravity was against him. The right stirrup was nearly dragging on the ground now. There was nothing for it but to rein up and cinch the saddle tight. He pulled back on the reins, shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” but it wasn’t until old Ben had stopped and begun munching grasses along the road, that St. Ives, still sitting awkwardly in the saddle, heard the commotion behind him. He turned to look, and there was a coach and four, kicking up God’s own dust cloud, rounding a bend two hundred yards back.

“Go!” he shouted, whipping at the reins now. “Get!”

The horse looked up at him as if determined to go on with its meal of roadside grass, but St. Ives booted it in the flanks, throwing himself forward in the teetering saddle, and old Ben leaped ahead like a charger, nearly catapulting St. Ives to the road. They were off again, pursued now by the approaching coach. The saddle slipped farther, and St. Ives held on to the pommel, pulling himself farther up onto the horse’s neck. His hat flew off, and his coat billowed out around him like a sail.

He turned to look, and with a vast relief he saw that they would outdistance the coach, except that just then the saddle slewed downward and St. Ives with it, and for a long moment he grappled himself to the horse’s flank, yanking himself back up finally with a handful of mane. He snatched wildly at the girth, trying to unfasten the buckle as old Ben galloped up a little rise. St. Ives cursed himself for having bothered with the saddle in the first place, of all the damned treacherous things. Somehow the girth was as tight as it could be now, wedged around sideways like it was. And it was behind his thigh, too, where he couldn’t see it, and old Ben didn’t seem to care a damn about any of it, but galloped straight on up the middle of the road.

They crested the rise, and there before them, coming along peaceably, was another coach, very elegant and driven by a man in bright red livery. The driver shouted at St. Ives, drawing hard on the reins and driving the coach very nearly into the ditch.

A white-haired head appeared through the coach window just then—Dr. Frost himself, his eyes flying open in surprise when he saw who it was that galloped past him on a horse that was saddled sideways. Frost shouted, but what he said was lost on the wind. St. Ives tugged hard on the girth, feeling it give at last, and then with a sliding rush, the saddle fell straight down onto the road, and old Ben tripped right over it, stumbling and nearly going down. St. Ives clutched the horse’s neck, his eyes shut. And then the horse was up again, and flying toward Binger’s like a thoroughbred.

When St. Ives looked back, Frost’s coach had blocked the road. It was turning around, coming after him. Parsons’s coach was reining up behind it. Good, let them get into each other’s way. He could imagine that Parsons was apoplectic over the delay, and once again he laughed out loud as he thundered along, hugging old Ben’s neck, straight through Binger’s gate and up the drive toward the barn.

“They’re after me, Mr. Binger!” St. Ives yelled, leaping down off the horse.

“Would it be men from the stars again?” Binger asked, smoking his pipe with the air of a farmer inquiring about sheep.

“No, Mr. Binger. This time it’s scientists, I’m afraid.”

Binger nodded, scowling. “I don’t much hold with science,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “Begging your honor’s pardon. You’re not like these others, though. The way I see it, Professor, there’s this kind of scientist, and then there’s that other kind.” He shook his head darkly.

“This is that other kind, Mr. Binger.” And right then St. Ives was interrupted by a clattering out on the road—both the coaches drawing up and turning in at the gate. St. Ives strode straight into the barn, followed by Binger, who still smoked his pipe placidly. One of his sons was mucking out a pen, and old Binger called him over. “Bring the hayfork,” he said. The dog Furry wandered out of the pen along with him, happy to see St. Ives again.

At the mention of the hayfork, St. Ives paused. “We mustn’t cause these men any trouble, Mr. Binger,” he said. “They’re very powerful...” But now there was a commotion outside—Parsons and Frost arguing between themselves. St. Ives would have liked to stop and listen, but there wasn’t time. He climbed aboard the bathyscaphe, pulling the hatch shut behind him. Settling himself in the seat, he began to fiddle with the dials, his heart pounding, distracted by what he saw through the porthole.

Seeing the hatch close down, Frost and Parsons gave off their bickering and hurried along, followed by the driver in livery and two other men who had accompanied Parsons. Binger pointed and must have said something to Furry, because as Parsons and one of the other men made a rush forward, the dog bounded in among them, catching hold of Parsons’s trousers and ripping off a long swatch of material. Parsons stumbled, and the other man leaped aside, swiping at the dog with his hand.

Binger’s son shoved the end of the hayfork into the dirt directly in front of the man’s shoe, and he ran into the handle chin-first, recoiling in surprise and then pushing past it toward the machine as Furry raced in, nipping at his shoe, finally getting hold of his cuff and worrying it back and forth.

Parsons was up and moving again and Frost along with him. Together they rushed at the machine, pushing and shoving at each other, both of them understanding that they had come too late. Furry let loose of his man’s cuff and followed the two of them, growling and snapping so that they were forced to do a sort of jug dance there in front of the porthole while they implored St. Ives with wild gestures to leave off and see reason.

But what St. Ives saw just then was darkness, and he heard the by-then-familiar buzzing and felt himself falling down and down and down, leaving that far-flung island of history behind him, maybe never to return. And good riddance—Narbondo, somehow, wasn’t born to be a man of the cloth. He looked cramped and uncomfortable in his new clothing. And Parsons— well, Parsons was Parsons. You could take a brickbat to history six-dozen times, and somehow Parsons would stride into every altered picture wearing the same overgrown beard.

Just then there was darkness of a different caliber again, nighttime darkness and rain falling. St. Ives came to himself. He patted his coat pocket, feeling the cold bulk of the revolver. He had come too far now to be squeamish about anything, but it occurred to him that there was something ironic about setting out to kill the man whose life you had recently worked so hard to save. But kill him he would, if it took that.

He climbed out into the wind-whipped rain, looking around him, and realized with a surge of horror that he was on the wrong street. He could see it straight off. He had dreamed that line of storefronts and lodging houses too many times to make any mistake now. What he saw before him was utterly unfamiliar. He had been rushed by the imbroglio in Binger’s barn and had miscalibrated the instruments. But how? Panicked, he ran straight up the street, slogging through the flood, listening hard to the sounds of the night.

Lancing suddenly through his head came the confused thought that it might be worse than a mere miscalculation. It was conceivable that anything and everything might have changed by now. He had wanted the same street, but what did the notion of sameness mean to him anymore? He slowed to a stop, rain falling on him in torrents.

Then he heard it—the clatter of a coach. Gunfire!

He ran toward the sound, wiping the water out of his eyes, breathing hard. Another gunshot rang out and then a shriek and, through the sound of the rain, the tearing and banging of the cabriolet going over in the street. He could picture it in his mind—his past-time self running forward, hesitating to shoot until it was too late, and...

He rounded the corner now, his pistol drawn, and nearly ran Narbondo down as he crouched over Alice, whose leg was pinned under the overturned cabriolet. Narbondo pointed his pistol at her head, staring at the rainy street where Langdon St. Ives ought to have been, but wasn’t. Hasbro and Kraken stared at the street, too, but there was nothing at all there save the empty coach, and although St. Ives alone knew why that was, he didn’t give it a moment’s thought, but lashed out with the gun butt and hammered Narbondo across the back of the head.

St. Ives’s hand was in the way, though, and he managed only to hit Narbondo heavily with his fist. Narbondo’s head jerked down, and his hands flew outward as he tumbled away from Alice. He rolled forward, still holding his pistol, struggling to one knee and looking back wild-eyed at St. Ives, then immediately aiming the pistol and shooting it wildly, without an instant’s hesitation.

Already St. Ives was lunging toward him, though, and the shot went wide. Three years of pent-up energy and fear and loathing drove St. Ives forward, unthinking. Narbondo staggered backward, sprawling through the water, starting to run even before he was fully on his feet. St. Ives ran him down in three steps. Too wild to shoot him, St. Ives grabbed the back of Narbondo’s coat and clubbed him again with the pistol butt, behind the ear this time, and Narbondo’s head jerked sideways as he brought his pistol up, firing it pointlessly in the air. St. Ives hammered him again, still clutching his jacket as Narbondo slumped to his knees, his pistol falling into the street. A hand seized St. Ives’s wrist as he raised his gun yet again, and St. Ives turned savagely, ready to strike. It was Hasbro, though, and the look on his face made St. Ives drop his own pistol into the water.

“He shot her,” St. Ives mumbled. “I mean...” But he didn’t right then know what he meant. He was vastly tired and confused, and he remembered the child drinking medicinal beef broth in Limehouse. He looked back down the street. Alice wasn’t shot—of course she wasn’t shot. Kraken bent over her, lifting off the top end of the cabriolet and then stooping to untie her. St. Ives walked toward them, as old suppressed memories freshened and grew young again in his mind. Mercifully, the rain let off just then, and the moon shone through the clouds, lightening the street.

“That were a neat trick, sir,” Kraken said to him enthusiastically, standing up and making way for him. “I could have sworn you was in the coach. Why, I even seen you stepping out through the open door. Then you was gone, and then here your honor was again, smashing your man in back of the head.” He looked at St. Ives with evident pride, and St. Ives kneeled in the flooded street, feeling for a pulse, fearing suddenly that it was too late after all. The crash alone might have... Then Alice opened her eyes, rubbed the back of her head with her hand, winced, and smiled at St. Ives. She struggled to sit up.

“I’m all right,” she said.

Kraken let out a whoop, and Hasbro, who had dragged Narbondo to the roadside, helped both St. Ives and Alice to their feet, pulling them into a doorway out of the rain.

“Tie Narbondo up with something,” St. Ives said to Kraken.

Kraken looked disappointed. “Begging your honor’s pardon,” he said, taking St. Ives aside, “but hadn’t we ought to kill him? I should think that would be recommended, seeing as who he is. You know he would have shot her. A life don’t mean nothing to the likes of him. Give me the word, sir, and I’ll make it quick and quiet.”

St. Ives hesitated, then shook his head tiredly. “No, he’s got too much to do yet. All of us do. Heaven alone knows what will come of the world if we don’t all play our parts—heroes, villains, spectators, and fools. Perhaps it’s already too late,” he said, half to himself. “Perhaps this changes the script utterly. So tie him up, if you will. He’ll spend some time in Newgate before he escapes.”

Kraken nodded, although he looked confused, like a man who understood nothing. St. Ives left him to it and faced Alice again. He sighed deeply. She was safe. Thank God for that. “I’ll have to go,” he said to her.

“What?” Alice looked at him in disbelief. “Why? Aren’t I going with you? We’ll all go, the sooner the better.”

St. Ives was swept with a wave of passion and love. He kissed her on the mouth, and although she was surprised by the suddenness of it, she kissed him back with equal passion.

Hasbro cleared his throat and went off abruptly toward where Kraken was tying up Narbondo with the reins from the wrecked cabriolet.

I will stay, St. Ives thought suddenly. Why not? His past-time self—now nothing but a ghost—wouldn’t be any the wiser. He was already gone, flitted away, into the mists of abandoned time. Why not start anew, right now? They would take a room in the West End, make it a sort of holiday—nothing but eating and the theater and lounging about all day long. He suddenly felt like Atlas, having at last shrugged off the world, ending what had turned out to be merely a lengthy nightmare.

Alice was regarding him strangely, though. “You look awful,” she said, squinting at him as if she realized something was wrong but had no notion how to explain it. He knew what she had meant to say. She had meant to say that he looked old, worn-out, thin, but she had caught herself and had said something more temporary so as to preserve his feelings. “What’s wrong?” she asked suddenly, and his heart sank.

He looked out into the street, where his past-time self lay invisible in the water and muck of the road. You fool, he said in his mind. I earned this, but I’ve got to give it to you, when all you would have done is botch it utterly. But even as he thought this, he knew the truth—that he wasn’t the man now that he had been then. The ghost in the road was in many ways the better of the two of them. Alice didn’t deserve the declined copy; what she wanted was the genuine article.

And maybe he could become that article—but not by staying here. He had to go home again, to the future, in order to catch up with himself once more.

“I won’t be gone but a moment,” he said, glancing back toward where he had left the machine. “And when I appear again, I might be confused for a time. It’ll pass, though. When you see me next, tell me that I’m a mortal idiot, and I’ll feel better about it all.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” she asked, looking at him fearfully, as if he had lost his mind.

He almost started to explain, but it was too much for him. Now that he had made up his mind to leave, the future was calling to him, and the shortest route back to it sat in the middle of the street a block away. “Trust me,” he said. “I won’t be gone a moment.” He kissed her again, and then stepped out of the doorway, turned, and loped off, not looking back, his heart full of gladness and regret.