Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (32 page)

 
          
 
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
wolild have
to wait.

 
          
 
EVEN AS HE was climbing into the machine he
could hear them outside, through the brick wall of the silo: the carriage
rattling up, the shouted orders, then a terrible banging on the barred wooden
doors. He shut the hatch, and the sounds of banging and bashing were muffled.
In moments they would knock the doors off their hinges and be inside—Parsons
and his ruffians, swarming over the machine. They would have to work on getting
in, though, since it was unlikely that they'd brought any sort of battering
ram. St. Ives prayed silently that Hasbro wouldn't try to stop them. He could
only be brought to grief by tangling with them. They meant business this time,
doubly so, since Parsons knew, or at least feared, that he was already too
late, and that fear would drive him to desperation. And St. Ives's salvation
lay in the machine now, not in his stalwart friend Hasbro, as it had so many
times in the past.

 
          
 
He settled himself into the leather seat of
what had once been Leopold Higgins's bathyscaphe. It made a crude and ungainly
time machine, and most of the interior space had been consumed by Lord Kelvin's
magnetic engine, stripped of all the nonsense that had been affixed to it as
modification during the days of the comet. There was barely room for St. Ives
to maneuver, what with the seat moved forward until his nose was very nearly
pressed against a porthole. An elaborate system of mirrors allowed him to see
around the device behind him, out through the other porthole windows.

 
          
 
He glanced into the mirrors once, making out
the dim floor of the silo: the tumbled machinery and scrap metal, the black
forge with its enormous bellows, the long workbench that was a chaos of debris
and tools. What a pathetic mess. The sight of it reminded St. Ives of how far
he had sunk in the last couple of years—the last few months, really. His mental
energy had been spent entirely, to its last farthing, on building the machine;
he hadn't enough left over to hang up a hammer. He remembered a dim past day
when he had been the king of regimentation and order. Now he was the pawn of
desperation.

 
          
 
It was then that he saw the message, scrawled
in chcdk on the silo wall. "Hurry," it read. ''Try to put things
right on the
North Road
. If at first you fail ..." The message ended there, unfinished, as
if someone—he himself—had abandoned the effort and fled. And just as well. It
was a useless note, anyway. He would remember that in the future. Time was
short; there was none left over for wasted words and ready-made phrases.

 
          
 
He concentrated on the dials in front of him,
listening with half an ear to the muffled bashing of the doors straining
against the bar. He knew just exactly where he wanted to go, but harmonizing
the instrumentation wanted minutes, not seconds. Measure twice, cut once, as
the carpenter said. Well, the carpenter would have to trust to his eye, here;
there was no time to fiddle with tape measures. Hastily, he made a final
calculation and delicately turned the longitudinal dial, tracking a route along
the
Great
North Road
, into
London
. He set the minutes and the seconds and then went after the latitudinal
dial.

 
          
 
There was a sound of wood splintering, and the
murky light of the silo brightened. They were in. St. Ives reeled through the
time setting, hearing the delicate insect hum of the spinning flywheel. The
machine shook just then, with the weight of someone climbing up the side.
Parsons's face appeared in front of the porthole. He was red and sweating, and
his beard wagged with the effort of his shouting. St. Ives winked at him, and
glanced into the mirrors again. The silo door was swung wide open, framing a
picture of Hasbro, carrying a rifle, running across the meadow. Mrs. Langley
followed him, a rolling pin in her hand.

 
          
 
Mrs. Langley! God bless her. She had gone away
miffed, but had come back, loyal woman that she was. And now she was ready to
hammer his foes with a rolling pin. St. Ives very nearly gave it up then and
there. She would sacrifice herself for him, even after his shabby treatment of
her. He couldn't let her do that, or Hasbro either.

 
          
 
For a moment he hesitated. Then, stoically and
calmly, he set his mind again to his instruments. By God, he wouldn't let them
do it. He was a time traveler now. He would save them all before he was
through, whatever it took. If he stayed, if he abandoned the machine to
Parsons, he would be a gibbering wreck for ever and ever.
If
he lived that long.
He'd be of no use to anyone at all.

 
          
 
He heard the sound of someone fiddling with
the hatch. The moment had come. "Hurry,'' the message on the wall had said.
He threw the lever that activated the electromagnetic properties of Lord
Kelvin's machine. The ground seemed suddenly to shake beneath him, and there
was a high-pitched whine that rose within a second to the point of
disappearing. Parsons pitched over backward as the bathyscaphe bucked on its
splayed legs. Simultaneously, there was a shouting from overhead, and a pair of
legs and feet swung down across the porthole. Parsons scrambled upright,
latching on to the dangling man and pulling him free.

 
          
 
And then, abruptly, absolute darkness
prevailed, and St. Ives felt himself falling, spinning round and round as he
fell, as if down a dark and very deep well. His first impulse was to clutch at
something, but there was nothing to clutch, and he seemed to have no hands. He
was simply a mind, spiraling downward through itself, seeming already to have
traveled vast distances along endless centuries and yet struck with the notion
that he had merely blinked his eyes.

 
          
 
Then he stopped falling, and sat as ever in
the bathyscaphe. He realized now that his hands shook treacherously. They had
been calm and cooperative when the danger was greatest, but now they were
letting themselves go. He was still in darkness.
But where?
Suspended somewhere in the void, neither here nor there?

 
          
 
He saw then that the darkness outside was of a
different quality than it had been. It was merely
nighttime
,
and it was raining. He was in the country somewhere. Slowly, his eyes
accustomed themselves to the darkness. A muddy road stretched away in front of
him. He was in an open field, beside the
North Road
.

 
          
 
From out of the darkness, cantering along at a
good
pace,
came a carriage. St. Ives—his past-time
self—was driving it. The horses steamed in the rain, and muddy water flew from
the wheels. Bill Kraken and Hasbro sat inside. Somewhere ahead of them, Ignacio
Narbondo fled in terror, carrying
Alice
with him. They were nearly upon him . . .

 
          
 
Shrugging with fatalistic abandon, the St.
Ives in the machine scribbled a note to himself. He knew that it was possible
that he could deliver the note, if he hurried. He knew equally well what
attempting to deliver it might mean. He had experienced this fiasco once
before, seeing it through the eyes of the man who drove the wagon. He was
filled suddenly with feelings of self-betrayal.

 
          
 
Still, he reminded himself, he could change
the past: witness the saving of Binger's dog. And in any event, what would he
sacrifice by being timid here? His failing to act would necessarily alter the
past, and with what consequences? It wouldn't serve to be stupid and timid
both; one mistake was enough.

 
          
 
He read hastily through the finished note.
"N. will shoot
Alice
on the street in the Seven Dials," the note read, "unless you
shoot him first. Act. Don't hesitate." As a lark he nearly wrote,
"Yrs. sincerely," and signed it. But he didn't. There was no time for
that. Already the man driving the horses would be losing his grip on the reins.
St. Ives had waited long enough, maybe too long. He tripped the lever on the
hatch and thrust himself through, into the rainy night, sliding down the side
of the bathyscaphe onto his knees in ditch water. Rain beat into his face, the
fierce roar of it mixing with the creaking and banging of the carriage.

 
          
 
He cursed, slogging to his feet and up the
muddy bank, reeling out onto the road. The carriage hurtled toward him, driven
now by a man who was nearly a ghost. There was a look of pure astonishment in
its eyes. He had recognized himself, but it was too late. His past-time self
was already becoming incorporeal. St. Ives reached the note up, hoping to hand
it to himself, hoping that there was some little bit of substance left to his
hands. His past-time self spoke, but no sounds issued from his mouth. He bent
down and flailed at the note, but hadn't the means to grasp it.

 
          
 
St. Ives let go of it then, although he knew
it was too late. "Take it!" he screamed, but already the carriage was
driver-less. His past-time self had simply disappeared from the carriage seat,
reduced to atoms floating now in the aether. The note blew away into the rainy
darkness like a kite battered by a hurricane, and for one desperate moment St.
Ives started to follow it, as if he would chase it forever across the
countryside. He let it go and turned momentarily back to the road, watching the
reins flop across the horses' backs as they hauled the carriage away, bashing
across deep ruts, smashing along toward certain ruin.

 
          
 
St. Ives couldn't stand to watch. They'll
survive, he told himself. They'll struggle on into Crick where a doctor will
attend to Kraken's shoulder, and then they'll be off again for
London
, with Narbondo almost hopelessly far ahead.
Kraken would search him out in Limehouse, surprising him in the middle of one
of his abominable meals, and they would pursue him to the Seven Dials, losing
him again until early morning when . . .

 
          
 
There it was, laid out before him, the grim
future, or, rather, the grim past, depending on one's perspective. The time
machine was a grand success, and his bid to aher the past a grand failure. It
was spilled milk, though. What he had to do now was get out fast.
Just as the note had said.
Hurry, always hurry. Still he
didn't move, but stood in the rain, buffeted by wind. He couldn't see far
enough up the dark road to make anything out.

 
          
 
"Where to?" he said out loud.
Back to the silo, possibly to confront Parsons?
Surely not.
Back to the silo day before
yesterday, perhaps?
He could avoid insulting Mrs. Langley that way.
But what then?
He would be taking the chance of making a
hash of everything, wouldn't he? There was no profit in reliving random periods
in his life. Only one event was worth reliving. Only one thing had to be
obliterated utterly. Suddenly, he was struck dumb with fear at the very idea of
it.