Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (34 page)

 
          
 
There was no latch on the window at all, which
was jammed shut with a folded-up bunch of paper torn out of a book. Without
hesitation he wiggled it open and bent quietly down into the dark interior,
wishing he had brought along a lantern and nearly recoiling from the fetid
smell of sickness in the close air of the room. He held on to the window frame
and felt around for the floor with his foot, kicking something soft, which
shifted and let out a faint moan. Abruptly he pulled his foot back, perching on
the sill like an animal ready to bolt. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the
darkness, which, despite the thickening fog, was still lit by pale moonlight.

 
          
 
The room was almost empty of furniture. There
was an old bed against one wall, a couple of wooden chairs, and a palsied table.
Against another wall was a broken-down sideboard, almost empty of plates and
glasses, as if it had no more day-today reason to exist than did the two
sleeping humans who inhabited the room. A book lay open on the table, and more
books were scattered and piled on the floor, looking altogether like
superfluous wealth, an exotic treasure heaped up in a dark and musty pirates'
cavern. The rags beneath his feet moved again and groaned, and then shook as
the child covered by them was convulsed with coughing. On the bed someone lay
sleeping heavily, unperturbed by the coughing.

 
          
 
Carefully now, St. Ives reached his foot past
the sleeping form on the floor and pushed himself into the room, swinging the
window shut behind him. He stepped across to the table to examine one of the
books, which was moderately new. He was only half surprised to find that it was
a volume of the Illustrated Experiments with Gilled Beasts, compiled by Ignacio
Narbondo senior. St. Ives shook his head, calculating how long ago it must have
been that Narbondo senior had been transported for the crime of vivisection.
Not long—a matter of a couple of years. This collection of books seemed to be
the only thing he had left to his abandoned family, except for his taste for
corrupt knowledge. And now the son, young as he was, already followed in the
father's bloody footsteps.

 
          
 
The little boy sleeping on the floor began to
breathe loudly—the labored, hoarse wet breathing of someone with congested
lungs. St. Ives bent over the convulsed form, gently pulling back the dirty
blanket that covered it. He lay stiffly on his side, neck straight, as if he
were endeavoring to keep his throat open. His arms were sticklike, and his
pallid cheeks sagging. St. Ives ran his hand lightly down the child's spine,
looking for the bow that would develop one day into a pronounced hump.

 
          
 
Strangely, there was no bow; the back was
ramrod stiff, the flesh feverish. Through the thin blanket he could feel the
air gurgling in and out of the child's lungs. St. Ives stood up, looking around
the room again, and then immediately stepped across and fetched a glass tumbler
from the sideboard. He stooped again and pressed the open end to the child's
back, then listened hard to the closed end. The lungs sounded like a troubled cesspool.

 
          
 
The boy was taken with another coughing fit,
hacking up bloodstained froth as St. Ives jerked away and stood up again.
Clearly, he was far gone in pneumonia. There could be no doubt about it. He had
been nauseated, too. In his weakened condition the child would die. The sudden
knowledge of that washed over St. Ives like a dam breaking. Murder wasn't in
the cards at all. Even if such a thing had appealed to St. Ives, it would be a
redundant task. Nature and circumstance and the poverty of a filthy and
overcrowded city would kill Narbondo just as surely as a bullet to the brain.
St. Ives had only to crouch back out through the window and lose himself in the
future.

 
          
 
And yet the idea of it ran counter to what he
knew to be the truth. How could Narbondo die without St. Ives's helping him to
do it? A man might alter the future, but how could the future alter itself? He
examined the child's face, thinking things through. He needed light. Hurrying
to the sideboard again, he carefully opened cupboard doors until he found
candles and sulphur matches. The woman on the bed wouldn't awaken. She was lost
in gin, snoring loudly now, her head covered with blankets. He struck a match
and lit the candle, bending over the child and studying his face, looking for a
telltale rash. There was nothing, only the sweating pale skin of an
undernourished sick child.

 
          
 
Surely it hadn't a chance of survival. The boy
would be dead tomorrow.
Two days, maybe.
Pneumococcal meningitis —that was his guess.
It was a hasty
candlelight-and-glass-tumbler diagnosis, but the pneumonia was certain, and
alone was enough to kill him. He stood for
a moment
thinking. Meningitis could explain the hump. If Narbondo lived, the spinal
damage might easily pull him into a stoop that would become permanent over the
years . . .

 
          
 
It really didn't matter how accurately he
understood the child's condition. The boy was doomed; of that St. Ives was
certain. He pulled the blanket back up, taking off his coat and laying that too
over the sleeping child, who exhaled now like a panting dog, desperately short
of breath. St. Ives couldn't bring himself to equate the suffering little human
with the monster he had shot in the Seven Dials. They simply were not the same
creature. "Time and chance . . .," he thought, then remembered that
he'd said the same thing not six months back —about himself and what he had
become, and the feelings of melancholy and futility washed over him again.

 
          
 
He had a vision of all of humanity struggling like
small and frightened animals in a vast black morass. It was easy to forget that
there had ever been a time when he was happy. Surely this dying child couldn't
remember any such happiness. St. Ives sighed, rubbing his forehead to drive out
the fatigue and doom. That sort of thinking accomplished nothing. It was better
to leave it to the philosophers, who generally had the advantage of having a
bottle of brandy nearby. Right now all abstractions were meaningless alongside
the fact of the dying child. Abruptly, he made up his mind.

 
          
 
He left his three silver coins on the table
and stepped out through the window, pulling it shut, leaving his coat behind.
If he failed to return, they could have the coat and the silver both; if he did
return, they could have it anyway. He shivered on the rooftop, hurrying across
toward the bathyscaphe, no longer interested in the early morning bustle below.

 
          
 
AS HE STEPPED into the study through the open
French window—all still very much as he remembered it—he half expected to see
himself as an old man, disappearing into the atmosphere. But by now he would
already have vanished. It had taken that long to get out through the window of
the silo and sneak across to the manor. He might be long ago dead, of course.
It was 1927, a date he had struck upon randomly. The manor might have a new
owner, perhaps a man with a rifle loaded with bird shot. The interior of the
silo, however, argued otherwise. It was full of faintly mystifying apparatus
now, but it was the sort of apparatus that only a scientist like St. Ives would
possess, and it wasn't rusty and scattered, either; instead it was orderly, not
the ghastly mess that he had let it decline to back . . . when? For a moment he
was disoriented, unable to recall the date.

 
          
 
The study was neatened up, too—no books
scattered around, no jumbled papers. He thought guiltily of Mrs. Langley, and
then quickly pushed the thought from his mind. Muddling himself up wouldn't
serve. Mrs. Langley would wait. There were interesting and suggestive changes
in the room around him. From the study ceiling hung the wired-together skeleton
of a winged saurian, and leaning against one wall, braced by a couple of wooden
pegs, was the femur of a monstrous reptile, something the size of a
brontosaurus. So he had followed his whims, had he? He had taken up
paleontology. How so? Had he utilized the time machine? Traveled back to the
Age of Reptiles? A thrill of anticipation surged through him along with the
knowledge, once again, that things, ultimately, must have fallen out for the
best. Here was evidence of it—the well-apportioned room of a man in possession
of his faculties.

 
          
 
Then it struck him like a blow. He wasn't any
such man yet. There was no use being smug. He had to go back, to return to the
past, to drop like a chunk of iron into the machinery of time, maybe fouling it
utterly. This was one manifestation of time, no more solid than a soap bubble.
He caught sight of himself in the mirror just then, recoiling in surprise. A haunted,
gaunt, unshaven face stared out at him, and involuntarily he touched his cheek,
forgetting his newfound optimism.

 
          
 
A note lay on the cleaned-off desk. He picked
it up, noticing only then that a bottle of port and a glass stood at the back
corner. He smiled despite himself, remembering suddenly all his blathering
foolishness about fetching back bottles of port from the future. To hell with
fetching anything back; he would have a taste of it now. "Cheers," he
said out loud.

 
          
 
He settled himself into a chair in order to
read the note. "I cleared out the silo," it read. "You would
have materialized in the center of a motorcar if I hadn't, and caused
who-knows-what kind of explosion.
Quit being so proud of
yourself.
You look like hell.
Talk to Professor Fleming
at
Oxford
.
He can be a bumbling idiot, but he possesses what you need. We're
friends, after a fashion, Fleming and I. Go straightaway, and then get the hell
out and don't come back. You're avoiding what you know you have to do. You're
purposefully searching out obstacles. Look at you, for God's sake. You should
make yourself sick."

 
          
 
Frowning, St. Ives laid the note onto the
desk, drinking off the last of his glass of port. He was in a foul mood now.
The note had done that. How dare he take that tone? Didn't he know whom he was
talking to? He had half a mind to . . . what? He looked around, sensing that
the atoms of his incorporeal self were
hovering
roundabout somewhere, grinning at him. Maybe they inhabited the bones of the
pterodactyl hanging overhead. The thing regarded him from out of ridiculously
small, empty eye sockets, reminding him suddenly of a beak-nosed schoolteacher
from his childhood.

 
          
 
He searched in the drawer for a pen, thinking
to write himself a note in return. What should he say?
Something
insulting?
Something incredibly knowledgeable?
Something weary and timeworn?
But what did his present-time
self know that his future-time self didn't know? In fact, wouldn't his
future-time self know even the contents of the insulting note? He would simply
rematerialize, see the note, and laugh at it without having to read it. St.
Ives put down the pen dejectedly, nearly despising himself for his
helplessness.

 
          
 
The door opened and Hasbro stepped in.
"Good morning, sir," he said, in no way surprised to see St. Ives and
laying out a suit of clothes on the divan.

 
          
 
"Hasbro!"
St. Ives shouted, leaping up to embrace the man. He was considerably older. Of
course he would be. He still wasn't in any way feeble, though. Seeing him so
trim and fit despite his white hair caused St, Ives to lament his own fallen
state. "I'm not who you think I am," he said.

 
          
 
"Of course you're not, sir. None of us
are. This should fit, though."

 
          
 
"It's good to see you," St. Ives
said. "You can't imagine . . ."

 
          
 
"Very good, sir.
I've been instructed to trim your hair." He looked St. Ives up and down,
squinting just a little, as if what he saw amounted to something less than he'd
anticipated. He went out again, saying nothing more, but leaving St. Ives
openmouthed. In a moment he returned, carrying a pitcher of water and a bowl.
"The ablutions will have to be hasty and primitive," he said. 'Tm
afraid you're not to visit any other room in the house for any reason whatever.
I've been given very precise instructions. We're to go straightaway to
Oxford
, returning as soon as possible and keeping
conversation to a minimum. I have a pair of train tickets. We board at the
station in fifty-four minutes precisely."