As to the veracity of the history he related to me, on board the Virtuous Persistence, I can give no avowal. At the time, tete-a-tete in our mutual captivity, the vision be spun from the empty air, of fabulous machinery and the Future revealed by it, weighted my soul with an oppressive certitude. At this remove, safe by my sanctuary's fire, I entertain neither Belief nor Unbelief; in this one matter, at least, I have fallen into that dismal position, below that of the most wretched atheist, of not knowing what I believe. The reader must determine his own stance with no assistance from me.
"The thing is," said Scape after a moment's thought, "I wasn't always this – what d'ya call it, 'person of your character'. I mean, I didn't talk like this, f'r instance. Maybe you've noticed I sound a little bit different from you?"
"It had struck my attention."
Scape nodded. "You see, I used to talk pretty much like you do; that kind of stodgy way. Maybe a little hipper, because I was – how d'ya say it – in the business. The life. You know what I mean?"
I hazarded a guess: "Criminal activity?"
His brow furrowed from the wince behind the blue lenses. "Christ, Dower; you don't have to make it sound that bad. Let's just say I was out there, doing a little… hustling. Just sorta getting by, no great shakes. Me and Miss McThane, she's still down below, sleeping; she had a late night, trying to put the moves on one of these Godly Army guys, before she gave it up as a lost cause anyway, the two of us had a little travelling-show sort of thing, what we called "An Assemblage of Curiosities". You see quite a few of 'em out in the towns and villages; those yokels really go for that sort of thing. We didn't have anything too impressive – a stuffed seal with a wig on it that we tried to pass off as a mermaid, a wind-up mannikin that could raise a horn to its mouth and go toot-toot except that it usually stuck it in its eye; just junk. Because, you see, the whole thing was really just an excuse to go travelling around from place to place, kinda give you a reason for pulling into some of these burgs." He nodded again, this time relishing some memory. "You'd be surprised, man, at the amount of money some of these old country squires have got stashed away. Or some pillar of the community in one of these grimy-ass manufacturing towns – fat city. Ab-so-lutely ready for the plucking. Because they got nothing else to spend it on, right – the old guy and maybe his hot-blooded eldest son – they're grate ful for a little excitement in their lives. Plus they all think they're too friggin' clever to get taken, because they've had nothing to compare their brains to except a bunch of dumb dirt-farmers out in the field." He smiled to himself, deep in his reminiscence. "I tell ya, it was great. Shoulda stuck with it – me and her could've retired by now, instead of being stuck out here with the glum bunch."
The recital disturbed me a bit. "What part did Miss McThane play in your enterprise?"
"Oh, she was in on the hustle, too. She pulled her weight."
"Are you saying-"
He caught my meaning straightaway. "Naww – she didn't have to put out, or anything. Well… not often, at any rate. Didn't have to. She'd just give the marks the eye while they were at the table, and they'd jack up their bets just to try and impress her. By the time they figured out they'd been fleeced, we'd already have split, down the road to the next town." His voice took on a more philosophical tone. "It's a living. But then one time, this old dude – I think it was up around Birmingham – he got into us for more than he could pay off. Said he had a couple of interesting clockwork devices, valuable collector's items; made by that renowned inventor George Dower, Senior. I've always been a sucker for that kind of stuff, so I took 'em instead-"
I interrupted him: "And one of the devices was the Paganinicon."
"Yeah, right. They filled you in on that, didn't they? Helluva thing, ain't it? Musta really knocked you on your ass when you saw it – I just about shit when I went back to Bendray's hunting lodge and there it was, walking around and talking."
"It was indeed… marvellous," I agreed.
He leaned closer to me. "Well, get this; the other device I got off the old guy, it was even wilder."
"Indeed? What was it?"
"To look at it," said Scape, "you wouldn't have thought it was much, of anything. I mean, compared to a whole clockwork violinist, for Christ's sake. What it was, was a box about yay big" – he held his hands a little over a foot apart – "like one of those slide projector-type things… what d'ya call 'em… magic lantern, right. With a little compartment for a paraffin lamp inside, and a lens on the front. But no place to put in slides or anything like that; most of the device was just filled up with your father's weird gears and stuff. It took me a while, but I got the thing working. And it was wild."
"What did it do?"
Scape gazed at me with smug complacency. "It flashed," he said simply.
For not the first time, I was mystified. "'Flashed'?"
"You looked into the lens, see, and it flashed at you. The clockwork controlled a shutter opening and closing in front of the light. Real fast, and with a certain rhythmic pattern." He nodded, pursing his lips for a moment. "Damnedest thing lever did see."
"What was so wonderful about it?" Perhaps my earlier impressions of him were correct, and he was simply demented.
"You looked into it while it was flashing, and you'd see things." His voice lowered, imparting the secret. "You'd see… the Future."
The fervour in his voice, almost religious in nature, traced a shiver tip my spine. "The Future, you say."
He nodded. "Yeah – I thought I was going crazy when it started to happen. But it all just went on unreeling inside my head, and I knew it was the real thing. Really the Future; a hundred years or more ahead. Seeing everything that was going to happen, through the eyes of my children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Wild, huh?"
"Indeed," I murmured.
"You see, Dower," he said excitedly, "your old man – what a genius that sonuvabitch was! – he figured out a way to alter, like, brain waves and stuff – all the things that go on inside your head – through this goddamn flashing light. And he wasn't even the first, man! Ol' Bendray showed me some stuff from the Royal Anti-Society archives; Catherine de Medici, back in the sixteenth century, had a tower built for her pet prognosticator Nostradamus, and that was how he worked it. He'd sit up there looking at the sun, and fanning his fingers in front of his eyes – real quick, like flickering – and then he'd see stuff! The Future! That's how he made all those predictions; more of 'em are gonna come true, too; you just wait and see. But anyway, what ol' Nostradamus just bashed away at, your father worked out scientific how to do it right. The Paganinicon – did he tell you a buncha stuff about a sort of medium, that certain fine vibrations from the human brain travel through?"
I nodded.
"Okay; what the deal is – that medium's not limited by spatial dimensions, like he told you. But it's not limited by Time, either. It extends through Past, Present, Future, all together. No difference, everything simultaneous. And the flashing light – if you get the speed and the pattern just exactly right – it can alter what section of that medium you perceive. Instead of this little piece that you normally see, you can just go sliding off into the Future. It's like genetic time-travel. What you get are the perceptions what they see, what they think and know – of your own descendants, laid on top of your own. Dig it: you see the world to come through your own children's eyes."