St. Ives sat up, mumbling his thanks. It was all right, he said. He wasn’t sick. His head was clear again, and he wanted nothing more than to be on his way. The two men nodded at him and moved off, back to their table, one of them advising him to go home and both of them looking at him strangely. “I tell you he bloody well disappeared,” one man said to the other, staring once more at St. Ives. His companion waved the comment away.
“Disappeared behind the table, you mean.” They went back to their fish, talking between themselves in low voices.
St. Ives was suddenly desperate to reach the sidewalk. These spells were happening too often, and he believed that he understood what they meant, finally. What could he have seen but his future-time self, coming and going, hard at work? He had seen the dominoes falling, catching glimpses of them far down the line. The machine would be a success. That must be the truth. He was filled with optimism, and was itching to be away, to topple that first domino, to set the future into motion.
He left three shillings on the table and nodded his thanks at the two men as he strode toward the door. They looked at him skeptically. He burst out into the sunlight, nearly knocking straight into Parsons, who retreated two steps away, a wild and startled look on his face, as if he had been caught out. Parsons yanked himself together, though, and reached out a hand toward St. Ives. For a moment St. Ives was damned if he would shake it. But then he saw that such a course was unwise. Better to keep up the charade.
“Parsons!” he said, forcing animation into his voice.
“Professor St. Ives. What an unbelievable surprise.”
“Not terribly surprising,” St. Ives said. “I live right up the road. What about you, up on holiday?” He realized that his voice was pitched too high and that he sounded fearful and edgy. Parsons by now was the picture of cheerful serenity.
“Fishing holiday, actually. Lot of trout in the Nidd this time of year. Fly-fishing. Come into town to buy supplies, have you? Going somewhere yourself?” He squinted at St. Ives, taking in the down-at-heels look of him. Parsons couldn’t keep an element of discomfort out of his face, as if he regretted encountering a man who was so obviously out humiliating himself. “You look…tired,” he said. “Keeping late hours?”
“No,” St. Ives said, answering all of Parsons’s questions at once. Actually, he had been keeping late hours. Where he was going, though, he couldn’t rightly say. He knew just where he wanted to go. He had the coordinates fined down to a hair. His mind clouded over just then, and he again felt momentarily dizzy, just as he had the other three times. Some sort of residual effect, perhaps. He couldn’t attend to what Parsons was saying, but was compelled suddenly to concentrate merely on staying on his feet. Basil, potatoes, cheese…he said to himself. It was happening again — the abysmal and confusing light-headedness, as if he would at any moment float straight up into the sky.
Parsons stared at him, and St. Ives shook his head, trying to clear it, realizing that the man was waiting for him to say something more. Then, abruptly, as if a trapdoor had opened under him, St. Ives sat down hard on the sidewalk.
He was deathly cold and faint. There could be no doubt now. Here he was again — his future-time self — the damned nitwit. He had better have a damned good excuse. His brain seemed to be a puddle of soft gelatin. He pictured the pie in his head, straight out of the oven, the cheese melting. Sometimes he made it with butter rather than cheese. Never mind that. Better to concentrate on one thing at a time.
There was a terrible barking noise. Some great beast…He looked around vaguely, still sitting on the sidewalk, holding on to his mind with a flimsy grasp. A dog ran past him just then, a droopy-eyed dog, white and brown and black, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. Even in his fuddled state he recognized the dog, and for one strange moment he was filled with joy at seeing it. It was Furry, old Binger’s dog, the kind of devoted animal that would come round to see you, anxious to be petted, to be spoken to. A friend in all kinds of weather…Another dog burst past, nearly knocking Parsons over backward. This one was some sort of mastiff, growling and snarling and snapping and chasing Binger’s dog. Weakly, St. Ives tried to throw himself at the mastiff, nearly getting hold of its collar, but the dog ran straight on, as if St. Ives’s fingers were as insubstantial as smoke.
Through half-focused eyes, St. Ives saw Binger’s poor dog running straight down the middle of the road, into the path of a loaded dray. The air was full of noise, of clattering hooves and the grinding of steel-shod wheels. And just then a man came running from the alley behind the Crow’s Nest. He waved curtly to Parsons as he leaped off the curb, hurtling forward into the street, his arms outstretched. St. Ives screwed his eyes half-shut, trying to focus them, the truth dawning on him in a rush. He recognized the tattered muddy coat, the uncombed hair. It was the same man whose reflection he had seen in the glass. It was himself, his future-time self. Parsons saw it too. St. Ives raised a hand to his face, covering his eyes, and yet he could see the street through his hand as if through a fog.
The running man threw himself on the sheepdog. The driver of the dray hauled back on the reins, pulling at the wheel brake. A woman screamed. The horses lunged. The dog and its savior leaped clear, and then the street and everything in it disappeared from view, winking out of existence like a departing hallucination.
Suddenly he could see again. And the first thing he noticed was Parsons, hurrying away up the sidewalk in the direction taken by the St. Ives that had saved the dog. There’s your mistake, St. Ives said to himself as he struggled to his hands and knees. You’re already too late. He felt shaky, almost hung over. He staggered off toward the corner, in the opposite direction as that taken by Parsons. The man would discover nothing. The time machine had gone, and his future-time self with it. St. Ives laughed out loud, abruptly cutting off the laughter when he heard the sound of his own voice.
Mr. Binger’s dog loped up behind him, wagging its tail, and St. Ives scratched its head as the two of them trotted along. At the corner, coming up fast, was old Binger himself. “Furry!” he shouted at the dog, half mad and half happy to see it. “Why, Professor,” he said, and looked skeptically at St. Ives.
“Have you got your cart?” St. Ives asked him hastily.
“Aye,” said Binger. “I was just coming along into town, when old Furry here jumped off the back. Saw some kind of damned mastiff and thought he’d play with it, didn’t he?” Binger shook his head. “Trusts anybody. Last week…”
“Drive me up to the manor,” St. Ives said, interrupting him. “Quick as you can. There’s trouble.”
Binger’s face dropped. He didn’t like the idea of trouble. In that way he resembled his dog. “I don’t take any stock in trouble,” he had told St. Ives once, and now the look on his face seemed to echo that phrase.
“Cow in calf,” St. Ives lied, defining things more carefully. He patted his coat, as if somehow there was something vital in his pocket, something a cow would want. “Terrible rush,” he said, “but we might save it yet.”
Mr. Binger hurried toward his cart, and the dog Furry jumped on behind. Here was trouble of a sort that Mr. Binger understood, and in moments they were rollicking away up the road, St. Ives calculating how long it would take for Parsons to discover that the man he was chasing was long gone, off into the aether aboard the machine. He was filled with a deep sense of success, transmitted backward to him from the saving of old Furry. It was partly the sight of himself dashing out there, sweeping up the dog. But more than that, it was the certainty that he was moments away from becoming a time traveler, that he could hurry or not hurry, just as he chose. It didn’t matter, did it?