Doyle nodded. “Go on.”
“So in one of these gaps a television won’t work, but a properly concocted love potion will. You get me?”
“Oh, I follow you. But wouldn’t these gaps have been noticed?”
“Of course. Those binders by the window are full of newspaper clippings and journal entries, dating back as far as 1624, that mention occasions when magic has seemed actually, documentably, to work; and since the turn of the century there’s usually some note, in the same day’s issue, of a power failure or blanket radio interference in the same area. Why, man, there’s a street in Soho that some people still call the Auto Graveyard, because for six days in 1954 every car that drove into it conked out and had to be towed away—by horses!—and then started up fine in the next street. And a third-rate part-time medium that lived there staged the last of her Saturday afternoon tea and seance sessions during that week—no one will ever know what happened, but the ladies were all found dead, ice cold after having been dead less than an hour in a warm room, and stamped on every face was, I understand, the most astonishing expression of dismayed terror. The story was downplayed in the press, and the stalling of the cars was blamed on a, quote, accumulation of static electricity, unquote. And there are hundreds of similar examples.
“Now I came across these when I was… well, trying to accomplish something science had failed to do, and I was trying to find out if, when and where magic might work. I found that these magic-yes-machinery-no fields are all in or around London and are scattered through history in a bell curve pattern whose peak extends roughly from 1800 to 1805; there were evidently a lot of them during those years, though they tended to be very brief in duration and small in area. They become wider and less frequent farther away from the peak years. Still with me?”
“Yes,” said Doyle judiciously. “As far back as the sixteen hundreds, you say? So the gaps then would have been rare, but long when they did show up. And they quickened and shortened until they must have been banging by like clicks from a geiger counter in 1802, say, and then they slowed down and broadened out again. Do they seem to damp out entirely at either end of the curve?”
“Good question. Yes. The equations indicate that the earliest one occurred in 1504, so the curve reaches about three hundred years in each direction, call it six hundred years all told. So anyway, when I began to notice this pattern, I nearly forgot about my original purpose, I was so fascinated by this thing. I tried to get my research boys to work on the puzzle. Hah! They knew senility when they saw it, and there were a couple of attempts to have me committed. But I ducked out of the net and forced them to continue, to program their computers with principles from Bessonus and Midorgius and Ernestus Burgravius; and in the end I did learn what the gaps were. They were—are—gaps in the wall of time.”
“Holes in the ice that covers the river.” Doyle nodded.
“Right—picture holes in that ice roof; now if part of your lifetime, some section of the seventy-year-long trailing weed that’s you, should happen to be under one of the holes, it’s possible to get out of the time stream at that point.”
“To where?” Doyle asked guardedly, trying to keep any tone of pity or derision out of his voice. Why, to Oz, he thought, or Heaven, or the Pure Vegetable Kingdom.
“Nowhere,” answered Darrow impatiently. “Nowhen. All you can do is enter again through another gap.”
“And wind up in the Roman Senate watching Caesar being assassinated. No, sorry, that’s right, the holes only extend as far back as 1500; okay, watching London burn down in 1666.”
“Right—if there happens to be a gap then. And there. You can’t reenter at arbitrary points, only through an existing gap. And,” he said with a note of discoverer’s pride, “it is possible to aim for one gap rather than another—it depends on the amount of… propulsion used in exiting from your own gap. And it is possible to pinpoint the locations of the gaps in time and space. They radiate out in a mathematically predictable pattern from their source—whatever that can have been—in early 1802.”
Doyle was embarrassed to realize that his palms were damp. “This propulsion you mention,” he said thoughtfully, “is it something you can produce?”
Darrow grinned ferociously. “Yes.”
Doyle was beginning to see a purpose in the demolished lot outside, all these books, and perhaps even his own presence. “So you’re able to go voyaging through history.” He smiled uneasily at the old man, trying to imagine J. Cochran Darrow, even old and sick, at large in some previous century. “I fear thee, ancient mariner.”
“Yes, that does bring us to Coleridge—and you. Do you know where Coleridge was on the evening of Saturday, the first of September, in 1810?”
“Good Lord, no. William Ashbless arrived in London only… about a week later. But Coleridge? I know he was living in London then…”
“Yes. Well, on the Saturday evening I mentioned, Coleridge gave a lecture on Milton’s Aereopagitica at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand.”
“Oh, that’s right. But it was Lycidas, wasn’t it?”
“No. Montagu wasn’t present, and he got it wrong.”
“But the Montagu letter is the only mention anywhere of that lecture.” Doyle cocked his head. “Uh… isn’t it?”
The old man smiled. “When DIRE undertakes to do a job of research, son, we’re thorough. No, two of the men who attended, a publisher’s clerk and a schoolmaster, left journals which have come into my hands. It was the Aereopagitica. The schoolteacher even managed to get a fair amount of the lecture down in shorthand.”
“When did you find this?” Doyle asked quickly. An unpublished Coleridge lecture! My God, he thought with a surge of bitter envy, if I’d had that two years ago, my Nigh-Related Guest would have got a different sort of review.
“A month or so ago. It was only in February that I got concrete results from the Denver crew, and since then DIRE has been obtaining every available book or journal concerning London in 1810.”
Doyle spread his hands. “Why?”
“Because one of these time gaps is just outside Kensington, five miles from the Strand, on the evening of the first of September, 1810. And unlike most gaps that close to the 1802 source, this one is four hours long.”
Doyle leaned forward to help himself to another cupful of the brandy. The excitement building in him was so big that he tried to stifle it by reminding himself that what was being discussed here was, though fascinating, impossible. Stick with it for the twenty thousand, he advised himself, and maybe the possibility of getting your hands on Robb’s journal or that schoolteacher’s notebook. But he wasn’t fooling himself—he wanted to participate in this. “And there’s another gap here and now, of course.”
“Here, all right, but not quite now. We’re”—Darrow looked at his watch—”still several hours upstream of it. It’s of a typical size for one this far from the source—the upstream edge is tonight, the downstream edge at about dawn of the day after tomorrow. As soon as Denver pinpointed this gap I bought the entire area the field would cover, and got busy levelling it. We don’t want to take any buildings back with us, do we?”
Doyle realized his own grin must have looked as conspiratorial as Darrow’s. “No, we don’t.”
Darrow sighed with relief and satisfaction. He picked up the phone just as it started to ring. “Yes?… Get off this line and get me Lament. Quick.” He drained his cup and refilled it. “Been living for three days on coffee, brandy and candy bars,” he remarked to Doyle. “Not bad, once your stomach gets—Tim? Drop the efforts for Newnan and Sandoval. Well, radio Delmotte and tell him to turn around and take him right back to the airport. We’ve got our Coleridge man.”
He replaced the phone. “I’ve sold ten tickets, at one million dollars apiece, to attend the Coleridge lecture. We’ll make the jump tomorrow evening at eight. There’ll be a catered briefing session at six-thirty for our ten guests, and naturally for that we ought to have a recognized Coleridge authority
.”
“Me.”
“You. You’ll give a brief speech on Coleridge and answer any questions the guests may have concerning him or his contemporaries or his times, and then you’ll accompany the party through the jump and to the Crown and Anchor Tavern—along with a few competent guards who’ll make sure no romantic soul attempts to go AWOL—take notes during the lecture and then, back home again in 1983, comment on it and answer any further questions.” He cocked an eyebrow sternly at Doyle. “You’re being paid twenty thousand dollars to see and hear what ten other people are paying a million apiece for. You should be grateful that all our efforts to get one of the more prominent Coleridge authorities failed.”
Not too flatteringly phrased, Doyle thought, but “Yes,” he said. Then a thought struck him. “But what about your… original purpose, the thing science failed to do, the reason you found these gaps in the first place? Have you abandoned that?”
“Oh.” Darrow didn’t seem to want to discuss it. “No, I haven’t abandoned it. I’m working on it from a couple of angles these days. Nothing to do with this project.”
Doyle nodded thoughtfully. “Are there any gaps, uh, downstream of us?”
For no reason Doyle could see the old man was beginning to get angry again. “Doyle, I don’t see—oh, what the hell. Yes. There’s one, it’s forty-seven hours long in the summer of 2116, and that’s the last one, chronologically.”
“Well.” Doyle didn’t mean to provoke him, but he wanted to know why Darrow apparently didn’t intend to do what seemed to Doyle the obvious thing. “But couldn’t this… thing you want done … be done very easily, probably, in that year? I mean, if science could almost do it in 1983, why by 2116…”
“It’s very annoying, Doyle, to give someone a cursory glance at a project you’ve been working hard at for a long time, and then have them brightly suggest courses which, as a matter of fact, you considered and dismissed as unworkable long ago.” He blew smoke out between clenched teeth. “How could I know, before I got there, whether or not the world in 2116 is a radioactive cinder? Hah? Or what sort of awful police state might exist then?” Exhaustion and brandy must have undermined a lot of Darrow’s reserve, for there was a glisten in his eyes when he added, “And even if they could and would do it, what would they think of a man from more than a century in the past?” He crumpled his paper cup, and a trickle of brandy ran down his wrist. “What if they treated me like a child?”
Embarrassed, Doyle instantly changed the subject back to Coleridge. But that’s it, of course, he thought—Darrow’s been the captain of his own ship for so long that he’d rather sink with it than accept the condescension of a life preserver tossed from some Good Samaritan vessel, especially a grander one than his own.
Darrow too seemed eager to steer the conversation back to business.
* * *
The sky had begun to pale in the east when Doyle was chauffeured by another driver to a hotel nearby, and he slept until, late in the afternoon, a third driver arrived to take him back to the site.
The lot was now planed flat as a griddle, and all the tractors were gone; several men were at work with shovels and brooms cleaning up horse dung. The trailer was still there, looking adrift now that its telephone and power cables had been removed. Another trailer, big enough to be called a mobile home, was pulled up alongside it. As Doyle got out of the car he noticed pulleys and lines at intervals along the fence top and a collapsed tarpaulin lying at the base of the fence all around the perimeter. He grinned. The old man’s shy, he thought.
A guard opened the gate for him and led him to the new trailer, the door of which stood open. Doyle went inside. At the far end of the walnut-panelled and carpeted room Darrow, looking no more tired than he had last night, was talking to a tall blond man. Both men were dressed in the pre-Regency style: frockcoats, tight trousers and boots; they wore them so naturally that Doyle momentarily felt ridiculous in his polyester-cotton suit.
“Ah, Doyle,” said Darrow. “I think you already know our chief of security.”
The blond man turned around and after a moment Doyle recognized Steerforth Benner. The young man’s once-long hair had been cut short and curled, and his wispy moustache, never very evident, was now shaved off.
“Benner!” Doyle exclaimed, pleased, as he crossed the room. “I suspected you must be connected with this project.” His friendship with the young man had cooled off in the last month or two, since Benner’s DIRE recruitment, but he was delighted to see a familiar face here.
“Colleagues at last, Brendan,” said Benner with his characteristic wide smile.
“We jump in a little less than four hours,” resumed Darrow, “and there are a lot of things to get done first. Doyle, we’ve got a period suit for you, and those doors at that end are changing rooms. I’m afraid you’ll be supervised, but it’s important that everyone dress the role from the skin out.”
“We’re only going to be staying four hours, aren’t we?” Doyle asked.
“It’s always in the realm of possibility, Doyle, that one of our guests might run off, despite the efforts of Benner and his boys. If one does, we don’t want him to be carrying any evidence that he’s from another century.” Darrow snapped his hand up, as though physically fielding Doyle’s next question. “And no, son, our hypothetical escapee wouldn’t be able to tell people how the war will turn out or how to build a Cadillac or anything. Each guest will swallow a capsule, just before we go, of something I think I’ll call Anti-Transchrono Trauma. ATCT. What it will actually be, and please don’t start yelling yet, Doyle, is a fatal dose of strychnine in a capsule set to dissolve after six hours. Now when we get back they’ll have their entire GI tracts pumped full of an activated charcoal solution.” He smiled frostily. “Staff is exempt, of course, or I wouldn’t be telling you this. Each guest has agreed to these conditions, and I think most of them have guessed what they mean.”
And maybe they haven’t, Doyle thought. Suddenly the whole project looked like lunacy again, and he imagined himself in court, some day soon, trying to explain why he hadn’t informed the police about Darrow’s intentions.
“And here’s a speech you can make at the briefing,” Darrow went on, handing Doyle a sheet of paper. “Feel free to change it or rewrite it entirely—and if you could have it memorized by then I’d be very pleased. Now I imagine you two would like to compare notes, so I’ll get busy in my trailer. Staff won’t be permitted to drink at the briefing, but I don’t see any harm if you have a couple right now.” He smiled and strode out, looking piratically handsome in the archaic clothes.
When he was gone Benner opened a cupboard that proved to be a liquor cabinet. “Aha,” he said, “they were ready for you.” He pulled down a bottle of Laphroaig, and in spite of his worries Doyle was pleased to see that it was the old 91.4 proof kind, in the clear glass bottle.
“God, pour me some. Neat.”
Benner handed him a glass of it and mixed a Kahlua and milk for himself. He sipped it and grinned at Doyle. “I think a bit of liquor is as essential as the lead sheathing; you wouldn’t catch me standing in the path of all that radiation without some hooch under my belt.”
Doyle had been about to demand a phone to call the police with, but this brought him up short. “What?”
“The tachyon conversion process. Didn’t he explain how the jump will work?”
Doyle felt hollow. “No.”
“Do you know anything about Quantum Theory? Or subatomic physics?”
Without conscious volition Doyle’s hand lifted the glass and poured some scotch into his mouth. “No.”
“Well, I don’t know nearly enough about it myself. But basically what’s going to happen is we’ll all be lined up in the path of a blast of insanely high frequency radiation, way up above gamma ray frequencies—photons haven’t got any mass, you know, so you can send one phalanx of ‘em out right after another without them stepping on each other’s heels—and when it hits us, the odd properties of the
gap field will prevent whatever would ordinarily occur. I’m not sure what would ordinarily happen, though it’d certainly trash us.” He sipped his drink cheerfully. “Anyway, since we’ll be in the gap, what will happen—the only way nature can reconcile the inequities involved—is that we’ll become, in effect, honorary tachyons.”
“Christ,” exclaimed Doyle hoarsely, “we’ll become ghosts. We’ll see Coleridge, all right—we’ll see him in Heaven.” A car horn blared past on the street, sounding more distant than Doyle knew it must be, and he wondered where some innocent soul was driving to, and what trivial difficulty had made him honk his horn. “Benner, listen to me—we’ve got to get out of here and get to the police. My God, man—”
“It really is perfectly safe,” Benner interrupted, still smiling.
“How can you possibly know that? The man is probably a certifiable lunatic, and—”
“Take it easy, Brendan, and listen. Do I look all right? Is the fence still standing? Then stop worrying, because I made a solo jump to a brief gap in 1805 two hours ago.”
Doyle stared at him suspiciously. “You did?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die. They dressed me up like—oh, picture a Ku Klux Klansman who favors metallic robes and doesn’t need eyeholes—and then had me stand on a platform by the fence while they lined up their infernal machinery on the other side of the fence. And then whoosh!—one minute I was here and today, the next I was in a tent in a field near Islington in 1805.”
“In a tent?”
Benner’s smile took on a puzzled quirk. “Yeah, it was weird, I landed in some kind of gypsy camp. The first thing I saw when I ripped off the hood was the inside of this tent, and it was all fumy with incense and full of Egyptian-looking stuff, and there was a cadaverous old bald-headed guy staring at me in extreme surprise. I got scared and ran outside, which wasn’t easy in that robe, and it was English countryside I saw, and no highways or telephone poles, so I guess it really was 1805. There were a lot of horses and tents and gypsy types around, and all the gypsies were staring at me, but the gap came to its end just then—thank God I hadn’t run outside the field—and the mobile hook snatched me back to here and now.” He chuckled. “I wonder what the gypsies thought when I just disappeared, and the robe fell empty without me in it.”