The truth was that he was safe from Parsons. The saving of the dog meant exactly that, and nothing less. He was destined to succeed that far, at least. He laughed out loud, but then noticed Mr. Binger giving him a look, and so he pretended to be coughing rather than laughing, and he nodded seriously at the man, patting his coat again.
The manor hove into view as Mr. Binger drove steadily up the road, smoking his pipe like a chimney. There, on the meadow, grazed a half-dozen jersey cows. A calf, easily two months old, stood alongside its mother, who ruminated like a philosopher. “Well, I’ll be damned,” St. Ives said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the calf. “Looks like everything’s fine after all.” He smiled broadly at Mr. Binger, in order to demonstrate his deep delight and relief.
“That ain’t…,” Mr. Binger started to say.
St. Ives interrupted him. “Pull up, will you? I’ll just get off here and walk the rest of the way. Thanks awfully.” Mr. Binger slowed and stopped the horses, and St. Ives gave him a pound note. “Don’t know what I’d do without you, Mr. Binger. I’m in your debt.”
Mr. Binger blinked at the money and scratched his head, staring out at the two-month-old calf on the field. He was only mystified for a moment, though. The look on his face seemed to suggest that he was used to this kind of thing, that there was no telling what sorts of shenanigans the professor might not be up to when you saw him next. He shrugged, tipped his hat, turned the wagon around, and drove off.
St. Ives started out toward the manor, whistling merrily. It was too damned bad that Mrs. Langley had gone off to her sister’s yesterday without having waited for morning. St. Ives hadn’t had time to put things right with her. What had he been thinking of, talking to her in that tone? The thought of his having run mad like that depressed him. He would fetch her back. He had tackled the business of Binger’s dog; he could see to Mrs. Langley, too. With the machine he would make everything all right.
Then he began to wonder how on earth he had known about Binger’s dog. In some other historical manifestation he must have witnessed the whole incident, and it must have fallen out badly — Binger’s dog dead, perhaps, smashed on the street. Via the machine, then, St. Ives must have come back around, stepping in out of time and snatching the dog from the jaws of certain death. Now he couldn’t remember any of that other manifestation of time. The first version of things had ceased to exist for him, perhaps now had never existed at all. There was no other explanation for it, though. He, himself, must have purposefully and effectively altered history, even after history had already been established, and in so doing had obliterated another incarnation of himself along with it. Nothing is set in stone, he realized, and the thought of it was dizzying — troubling too. What else might he have changed? Who and what else might he have obliterated?
He would have to go easy with this time-traveling business. The risks were clearly enormous. The whole thing might mean salvation, and it might as easily mean utter ruin. Well, one way or another he was going to find out. He no longer had any choice, had he? There he had been, after all, peeking in at the window, saving the dog in the road. There was no gainsaying it now. What would happen, would happen — unless, of course, St. Ives himself came back and made it happen in some other way altogether.
His head reeled, and it occurred to him that there would be nothing wrong, at the moment, with opening a bottle of port — a vintage, something laid down for years. Best taste it now, he thought, the future wasn’t half as secure as he had supposed it to be even twenty minutes past. He set out for the manor in a more determined way, thinking happily that if a man were to hop ten years into the future, that same bottle of port would have that many more years on it, and could be fetched back and…
Something made him turn his head and look behind him, though, before he had taken another half-dozen steps. There, coming up the road, was a carriage, banging along wildly, careering back and forth as if it meant to overtake him or know the reason why. Mrs. Langley? he wondered stupidly, and then he knew it wasn’t.
Fumbling in his pocket for the padlock key, he set out across the meadow at a dead run, angling toward the silo now. For better or worse, the past beckoned to him. The bottle of port would have to wait.
Even as he was climbing into the machine he could hear them outside, through the brick wall of the silo: the carriage rattling up, the shouted orders, then a terrible banging on the barred wooden doors. He shut the hatch, and the sounds of banging and bashing were muffled. In moments they would knock the doors off their hinges and be inside — Parsons and his ruffians, swarming over the machine. They would have to work on getting in, though, since it was unlikely that they’d brought any sort of battering ram. St. Ives prayed silently that Hasbro wouldn’t try to stop them. He could only be brought to grief by tangling with them. They meant business this time, doubly so, since Parsons knew, or at least feared, that he was already too late, and that fear would drive him to desperation. And St. Ives’s salvation lay in the machine now, not in his stalwart friend Hasbro, as it had so many times in the past.
He settled himself into the leather seat of what had once been Leopold Higgins’s bathyscaphe. It made a crude and ungainly time machine, and most of the interior space had been consumed by Lord Kelvin’s magnetic engine, stripped of all the nonsense that had been affixed to it as modification during the days of the comet. There was barely room for St. Ives to maneuver, what with the seat moved forward until his nose was very nearly pressed against a porthole. An elaborate system of mirrors allowed him to see around the device behind him, out through the other porthole windows.
He glanced into the mirrors once, making out the dim floor of the silo: the tumbled machinery and scrap metal, the black forge with its enormous bellows, the long workbench that was chaos of debris and tools. What a pathetic mess. The sight of it reminded St. Ives of how far he had sunk in the last couple of years — the last few months, really. His mental energy had been spent entirely, to its last farthing, on building the machine; he hadn’t enough left over to hang up a hammer. He remembered a dim past day when he had been the king of regimentation and order. Now he was the pawn of desperation.
It was then that he saw the message, scrawled in chalk on the silo wall. “Hurry,” it read. “Try to put things right on the North Road. If at first you fail…“ The message ended there, unfinished, as if someone — he himself — had abandoned the effort and fled. And just as well. It was a useless note, anyway. He would remember that in the future. Time was short; there was none left over for wasted words and ready-made phrases.
He concentrated on the dials in front of him, listening with half an ear to the muffled bashing of the doors straining against the bar. He knew just exactly where he wanted to go, but harmonizing the instrumentation wanted minutes, not seconds. Measure twice, cut once, as the carpenter said. Well, the carpenter would have to trust to his eye, here; there was no time to fiddle with tape measures. Hastily, he made a final calculation and delicately turned the longitudinal dial, tracking a route along the Great North Road, into London. He set the minutes and the seconds and then went after the latitudinal dial.
There was a sound of wood splintering, and the murky light of the silo brightened. They were in. St. Ives reeled through the time setting, hearing the delicate insect hum of the spinning flywheel. The machine shook just then, with the weight of someone climbing up the side. Parsons’s face appeared in front of the porthole. He was red and sweating, and his beard wagged with the effort of his shouting. St. Ives winked at him, and glanced into the mirrors again. The silo door was swung wide open, framing a picture of Hasbro, carrying a rifle, running across the meadow. Mrs. Langley followed him, a rolling pin in her hand.