The failure convinced me that this model was too much trouble and I abandoned it, although with the greatest reluctance. That was why I thought of Henry, once he told me of his reawakened passion for fantastical tales. I realised instantly that because of his reluctance to do more than sketch out notes, his Anterwold would be perfect for my purposes.
Henry had returned to academia after the war and buried himself in an ideal past of words. Poetry became his reality, the people who wrote it his gallery of saints. His knowledge and imagination mingled to produce Anterwold. To the outside world, this might sound sad, even pathetic, but it was not so unusual. Many people nurse their own passions, which are the more valuable because of their privacy. In that time, some read novels or painted; still more dug their gardens or went fishing. All such activities were useless, if you define them in a purely utilitarian way. But they were also a form of contemplation in one of the last moments of humanity’s existence when people were allowed time to think. ‘A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’ A poem Henry recited to me once to explain a line of fishermen, sitting morosely in the rain, their lines dangled into a filthy and self-evidently lifeless canal. I pointed out there was no chance of them catching any fish, and it would be quicker to get them at the fishmonger; he pointed out that they didn’t want to catch anything. That wasn’t why they were there.
His story would never be completed, never published, never read. His hiding place would be snatched away if it ever was. Its purpose for him was to be forever malleable, evolving in his mind and in the innumerable notebooks in which he jotted thoughts and ideas. He wasn’t, in any case, trying to write anything as banal as a novel, nor was he trying to please anyone but himself. Rather, he wished to construct a world that worked, rather like some people labour away in their attics building model railways that are better (certainly cleaner and more punctual) than the real thing.
His withdrawal from active life was hardly monastic, though. Although he never referred to it directly, I gathered that he still dabbled, when asked, in the mucky ponds of intelligence work. He taught, attended dinner parties, went to the pub. These Saturday meetings became crucial, for they guided him, steered his mind away from unlikely fantasies, added layer upon layer of human knowledge and history so that his conception became ever richer and stronger.
When I was certain that Henry was doing something to bring all the notes and jottings that he had been making for nearly twenty years into a usable form, I persuaded him to let me store my equipment in his cellar. He had no idea what it was, of course, and I rarely went to check on it. I wasn’t particularly afraid of it being tampered with; it was of such a design that no one could even recognise it as a piece of machinery.
This time I planned a very cautious development. Once I got going — I finished the tests and switched the machine to autonomous operation in April 1960 — I spent weeks simply waiting for the ground to form; I didn’t anticipate anything like animals or people for months, if not years. My timetable was to have a perfectly static empty world in twelve months, evidence for the existence of people in about eighteen, and then — only then — would I risk venturing in to see how solid it was. But only for a few seconds, at the most, and I thought that sending in an animal on a lead might be a good start. I had my eye on that snarling, spitting abomination of Henry’s which had scratched my leg very nastily once. Exposing it to the dangers of cosmic annihilation seemed only fair.
My mistake — and it was a big mistake — was to omit to set the machine for a global prohibition. Henry had almost no visitors, and certainly no one who ever stayed overnight. I discounted the possibility of a stray burglar as it was an era of exceptionally low crime, and he simply never mentioned the existence of the young girl who had begun to visit him and feed his cat. Besides, for the first few months nothing happened. The damn thing just sat there, occasionally humming to itself, but otherwise entirely inert.
Then, all of a sudden, the device switched from absorption to production. A vacant universe (so I assumed) began to take form and develop at remarkable speed.
I was immensely excited by this and didn’t worry too much about why it had suddenly got a move on. I assumed initially that the preparation had somehow reached a tipping point, a bit like a kettle coming to the boil after a long period of heating up. It was only when I settled down and reviewed progress properly that I realised something far more dangerous had taken place.
Anterwold had been entered, long before I would have considered it safe to do so, and it had not only remained stable, it had begun to grow magnificently as a consequence. Whereas my entry into Middle Earth had realised its impossibilities, this time the opposite had happened.
When I reviewed the security systems I had installed — not very good ones, admittedly — I spotted a girl coming down into the cellar, pulling aside the curtain that I had thrown over the pergola, staring for a while, then stepping through and, a fraction of a second later, stumbling back and running up the stairs in panic.
Over the next few days, I had some hard thinking and working to do. It had never occurred to me until then that such a powerful reaction could take place, and I needed to know how it had happened. I had an acute moral dilemma as well. Either I could guard against any risk of harm coming to the girl — for if she went through again there was no certainty she would be so lucky second time round — and shut down the machinery for a while, or I could permit her to go through, and monitor very much more carefully what happened when she did.
I decided to be responsible. Believe me when I say I had to overcome a powerful temptation; it showed how the non-utilitarian moralism of the twentieth century had affected me. Back home, the potential sacrifice of one girl for the sake of so much knowledge would not even have been worth worrying about. I went to Henry’s house and closed down the machine, took a more thorough output of readings and returned home to go through them. Even the few seconds the girl had been in Anterwold had generated a rich stream of data, and I was eager to begin analysing it. It was the better part of a day before I spotted the anomaly that made me realise, with a shock, that I was too late. She had already gone back through. And I had locked her in.
Naturally, the first thing I thought of was restarting the machine so that the girl could come back, but that wasn’t so easy; it would reset itself, as it had done last time. According to my calculations, after I briefly closed it down in order to take the readings it had reopened some eighty kilometres to the south-east, and five years and two months later. This was mainly because I hadn’t been paying any attention; I wasn’t trying to get it close to its previous location. I could do better, although only with a lot of work. Even then, it still wouldn’t be precise, so how could the girl possibly find it?
Although I didn’t mind in theory someone going into a universe created from Henry’s head, there were obvious issues. I didn’t know the effect of forging such a strong link between the two universes, but it was most certainly too early to find out. This was meant to be an informal experiment, just to see what happened, little more than calibrating the machinery. The trouble was, when I closed down the machine and opened it up again later, Anterwold was still there. I suspected that as long as that girl was inside it, I would not be able to shut it down. Because she was observing it as an external figure, it would continue to exist. I would have to wait until she came back, and if she didn’t come back on her own, then someone would have to go and get her.