Thirteen Phantasms (29 page)

The morning was fast declining, and although we had, as I said, Ruhmkorff lamps, and had brought along food in our bags, and so could have passed a comfortable enough night there on the plain, St. Ives was in a hurry to finish his research and be off. The lamps were an emergency precaution, he said. If all went according to plan, we’d while away the afternoon and launch at dusk. We mustn’t be seen, he reminded us again. We had accomplished a third of our mission by having arrived at all—the half-completed painting was proof enough that we’d effectively disposed of several hundred centuries. We would accomplish another third when we found ourselves safe at home at last, or at least once again in our own century, where we could spend the night on the plain if we chose to. The final third was simple enough, it seemed to me: we’d observe,
is
what we’d do. A “field study” St. Ives called it, although it seemed to
him
to be the most ticklish business of the lot. We would lounge about, keeping ourselves hidden behind a tumble of rock a hundred meters above the cave, and every now and again we’d pop up and snap a photograph of a wandering bison or cave bear, and haul the evidence back to London, where the Royal Academy would be toppled onto their collective ear.

I hefted my bag and slung a tripod over my shoulder and made as if to set out. St. Ives nearly throttled himself stopping me. “Your footprints!” he said, pointing to the soft silt of the cave floor. And there, sure enough, were the prints of a pair of boots bought in Bond Street, London, either three weeks or thirty-five centuries earlier, I couldn’t have said for certain at the time. St. Ives yanked a feather duster out of his bag and went to work on the prints. He was a man possessed. There mustn’t be a trace, he said, of our coming and going. It took us the better part of an hour, sneaking and skulking and breaking our backs with the hurry of it, to transport the machine, which, thank heaven, was remarkably light and could be partially dismantled, up to our aerie in the rocks. Then we were at it for another hour in the gloom of evening, dusting away tracks, replacing pebbles kicked aside in haste, grafting the snapped limb of a scrub plant back onto itself—taking frightful care, in other words, that no sentient being could remark our passing, and all the time Hasbro keeping watch above, whistling us into hiding at the approach of so much as a rodent.

We daren’t, said St. Ives, meddle with anything. The slightest alteration in the natural state of the landscape might have ungovernable consequences in ages to come. The universe, it seems, is but a tenuous, delicate composition, rather like the reflected jumble of tinted jewels in a kaleidoscope. If one holds still while gazing into the end of the thing, the jewels sit there perfectly at ease, as if the reflected pattern isn’t a clever ruse after all, but
is
a church window fixed into a wall of cut stone. But the slightest jiggling—the blink of an eye or the tremor of a sudden chill—casts the jewels into disarray, and no earthly amount of twisting and shaking and wishing will fetch them back again in the lost order. And so goes the universe.

What if a bug, said St. Ives, were crushed inadvertently underfoot, and that bug weren’t as a result, eaten, say, by the toad which, historically, would have eaten that bug had the bug not been crushed by a bootheel that had no business being there in the first place. That toad might die—mightn’t he?—for lack of a bug to eat, or from having eaten another bug out of desperation that he hadn’t ought to have eaten. And the wild dog that would have eaten the toad, he’d go hungry, you see, and attempt the conquest of a toad which the universe had earmarked for an utterly different dog, who, everything being built upon everything else, like the crystals, as I said, in a kaleidoscope, would have to turn out and eat a rabbit. And that rabbit, which otherwise would have lived into a satisfying old age and bore six dozen rabbits very much like it, would be dead—wouldn’t it?—and no end of prehistoric beasts would be denied the pleasure of dining on those six dozen rabbits.

You see how it goes. When St. Ives laid it out for me I was transfixed. I could tell straightaway that our puny comings and goings through the veil of time were as nothing in the eyes of the universe, compared to the brief few hours we intended to spend among the stones of the hillside. A bug and a toad and six dozen rabbits and pretty soon the entire local crowd is in an uproar. The universe they thought they could depend on has gone to smash. A megatherium looks for roots to nibble one morning and the roots are gone, because a half score wild dogs have moved to the coast where the rabbit population
is
more dependable, and the rabbits, finding travel a safer thing than it was last week, reproduce tenfold and make up, as they say, for lost time. Their offspring eat the roots that the megatherium thought he could count on and so he eats someone else’s roots and so on and so on, magnified over countless centuries.

The crowning result is that the people of London aren’t the people of London anymore at all. The Romans never arrived, for reasons that can be traced, if one had the right instruments, to the crushed bug. The Greeks, say, got in before them, and lived in the countryside in huts, spinning philosophies, and made peace with their Celtic neighbors and the middle ages crept past without so much as a mention of feudal states. I can tell you that it boggled my mind, to use the popular phrase, when St. Ives told me about it. That crushed bug, depend on it, would send the jewels tumbling, and where they’d fall, no one on Earth could puzzle out, try as he might and given a notebook and pen to calculate with.

•

We were dusty and hot before we were done that evening. A mammoth had come past, as if looking for something he’d lost, and St. Ives snapped a dozen photographs of the beast before it ambled away. Then a rhinoceros of some vintage appeared, and out came the camera again. I was a frightful mass of dirt and stinging insects and, indelicate as it sounds, perspiration, and was surprised to find a pool of clear water in the rocks, the product of a slowly running spring. I spent a cool half hour scrubbing up, and was happy enough to have brought along the requisite toiletries.

One is tempted—or at least I am—to dispense with the niceties when traveling rough. What purpose
is
there in trimming one’s mustache, you ask, when one is tenting in the Hebrides? We can take a lesson from Robinson Crusoe, who maintained a degree of gentility even when lost forever, he supposed, on a desert island. Which one of us wouldn’t have run naked with the savages before the month was gone? Not Crusoe. And so with me. I tread on the temptation to run with the savages, and although in truth I neglected to bring a mustache scissors (we were to be away, at most, for half a day) I carried with me a comb and brush and a bottle of rose oil, and, as I say, I wielded those tools to good effect while St. Ives, caught up in the fever of his picture-taking, let me go about my business.

And I was careful. There were tiny fish, in fact, down in that shallow pool, fish that had no need for a dose of rose oil. I skimmed three broken hairs from the placid surface—which surface I had used as a mirror—and I put the hairs in my pocket and carried them back with me.

I had finished up and felt entirely restored when the sun, with a rapidity which never fails to amaze me, sank beyond the primeval horizon. Night descended like a lead curtain, and almost at once there sounded roundabout us such a shrieking and mewling and growling as I hope never to hear again. The night was alive with prowling beasts, and us with neither shelter nor fire. We were at it again, hustling the machine back into the cave. Our cave painter hadn’t yet returned. With a cloth thrown over a lamp, once again we scoured out our footprints, watching with wary nervousness the pairs of eyes that shined at us out of the darkness. We launched an hour after sunset, and I heartily believed, along with St. Ives and Hasbro, that we left behind us not a trace of our having been there—nothing which might in the least joggle the delicate mechanism of the temporal and spacial universe.

We arrived in the twentieth century, in the familiar cave on the Salisbury Plain. All of us, since St. Ives’ remonstrances, were leery of what we’d find. Stonehenge, we feared, would be whisked away and replaced by a picket fence enclosing a pumpkin patch. The wagon load of tourists bound for Wiltshire would have their hats on backward or would wear spectacles the size and shape of starfish. When one thought about it, it seemed almost a miracle that no such incongruity confronted us when we peered out of the door of that cave. There was the plain, dusty and hot, Marlborough to the north, Andover to the east, London, for aught we could determine, bustling along the shores of the Thames some few miles away, beyond the horizon.

I, for one, breathed a hearty sigh of relief. The last third of our mission had been ticked off the list, and another chapter in the great book of the adventures of Langdon St. Ives had come to a happy close. His camera was full of photographs. His time machine was faultless. There lay our cart and tarpaulin. We had only to load the
device
and the gear and away. The Royal Academy was a plum for the plucking.

I hefted my bag, grinning. For the moment. Something, however, seemed to be tugging at the corners of my mouth, effacing the grin. What was it? I gave St. Ives a look, and he could see quite clearly, from the puzzlement on my face, that something was amiss. I felt, abruptly, like a caveman smitten across the noggin with a stone.

My toiletries kit—I’d left it by the spring! There wasn’t a thing in it, beyond a comb and brush, a bar of soap and a bottle of rose oil for the hair. I tore open my bag, hoping, in spite of my certain knowledge to the contrary, that I was wrong. But such wasn’t the case. The kit was gone, lost in the trackless centuries of the past.

Our first thought was to retrieve it. But that wouldn’t do. As fine as St. Ives’s calculations were, we might as easily arrive a week early or a week late. We might appear, as I’ve said, while the cave painter was at work, and have to knock him senseless in order to squelch the news of our scissoring at the fabric of time. The universe mustn’t get onto us, although, as I pointed out to St. Ives, it already had, due to my incalculable stupidity. St. Ives pondered for a moment. Returning would, quite likely, compound the problem. And there was our wagon, wasn’t there? The universe hadn’t gone so far afoul as to have eradicated our wagon. Surely the Romans had arrived after all. Surely the megatherium had nosed a sufficient quantity of roots out of the dirt to satisfy itself and the universe both. The toad had eaten his bug and all was well. The panic had been for nothing.

We turned, intending to dismantle the ship, to hoist it onto the wagon preparatory to returning to Harrogate via London. There on the wall before us was the cave painting—the likeness of the artist himself, the scattered beasts beyond. We stood gaping at it, unbelieving. I blinked and stepped forward, running my hand across the time-dried paint. Was this some monstrous hoax? Had some grinning devil had a go at the painting at our expense while we dawdled in pre-history?

The painting was wonderfully detailed—his broad nose, his overhung brow, his squinty little pig eyes. But instead of that troubled frown, his face was arched with a faint half smile that Da Vinci would have paid to study. His hair, in another lifetime shaggy and wild, was parted down the center and combed neatly over his ears. The artist had been clever enough to capture the sheen of rose oil on it, and the passing centuries hadn’t diminished it. His beard, still monumental by current standards, was combed out and oiled into a cylinder like the beard of a pharoah. My comb was thrust into it by way of ornament. He held my brush in one hand; in the other, gripped at the neck and drawn with reverential care, was the bottle of hair oil, tinted pink and orange in the dying sunlight.

•

I fear that after the shock of it had drained the color from my face, I pitched over onto that same article and had to be hauled away bodily in the cart. The rest you know. The cave on the Salisbury plain is no more, and, happily, the tenuous and brittle fabrication of the universe isn’t quite so tenuous and brittle after all. Or so I tell myself. With the cave went the great mass of St. Ives’s evidence. His photographs were cried down as frauds—waxwork dummies covered in horsehair. He’s planning another journey, though. He’s found the foreleg of a dinosaur in a sandpit in the forest near Heidelberg, and he intends to compel it to spirit us back to the Age of Reptiles.

Whether I accompany him or stay in Harrogate to look after the tropical fish is a matter I debate with myself daily. You can understand what an unsettling thing it must be to teeter on the brink of bringing down the universe in a heap, and then to be snatched away at the last moment by the timely hand of Providence. And besides, I’m thinking of writing a monograph on the Crusoe matter—a little business regarding the civilizing influences of a good tortoiseshell comb. Desperate as it was, the incident of the toiletries bag has rather revived my interest in the issue. The truth of it, if I‘m any judge, has been borne out quite nicely

I won’t say that this was the final adventure of Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro—Colonel Hasbro since the war—but it was certainly the strangest and the least likely of the lot. Consider this: I know the Professor to be a man of complete and utter veracity. If he told me that he had determined, on the strength of scientific discovery, that gravity would reverse itself at four o’clock this afternoon, and that we’d find ourselves, as Stevenson put it, scaling the stars, I’d pack my bag and phone my solicitor and, at 3:59, I’d stroll out into the center of Jermyn Street so as not to crack my head on the ceiling when I floated away. And yet even
I
would have hesitated, looked askance, perhaps covertly checked the level of the bottles in the Professor’s cabinet if he had simply recounted to me the details of the strange occurrence at the Explorers Club on that third Thursday in April. I admit it the story is impossible on the face of it.