Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (38 page)

 
          
 
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 Lime-house 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."

 
          
 
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?"