He set the dials and at once activated the machine. There was the familiar bucking and shuddering and the abruptly silenced whine, and then once again he was adrift in the well. It wasn’t night when he materialized, though. There was sunlight filtering through murky water. He was on the bottom of Lake Windermere. He had got the location right. The time ought to have been fifty years past, before he had been born. So there would be no hapless past-time St. Ives in the process of disappearing. He could take his time now, safe from Parsons, safe from himself, invisible to anybody but fish. What he wanted was practice — less hurry, not more of it.
He cast about in his mind, looking for an adequate test. He had the entirety of history to peek in at — almost too much choice. He studied the lake bed outside the porthole. There was nothing but mud and waterweeds. Carefully he manipulated the dials, then threw the lever. There was an instant of black night, then water-filtered sunlight again. He was still on the lake bottom, but in shallow water now, only partly submerged. A slice of sky shone at the top of the porthole.
Cautiously, he pushed up the hatch and peered out, satisfied with where he had found himself. Across twenty yards of reeds lay a grassy bank. Sheep grazed placidly on it, with not a human being in sight. He shut the hatch, fiddled with the controls, and jumped again, into full sunlight this time. The machine sat on the meadow now, among the startled sheep, which fled away on every side. He raised the hatch cover once more and looked around him. He could see now that there was a house some little way distant, farther along the edge of the lake. Two women stood in the garden, picking flowers. One turned suddenly and pointed, shading her eyes. She had seen him. The other one looked, then threw her hand to her mouth. Both of them turned to run, back toward the house, and St. Ives in a sudden panic retreated through the hatch, slamming it behind him, and then once again set the dials, leaping back down into the bottom of the lake, five years hence, safe from the eyes of humankind.
Nimbly, he bounced forward once more, and then back another sixty years, up onto the meadow again. The house was gone, the fields empty of sheep. He crept forward, a year at a time. Sheep came and went. There was the house, half-built. A gang of men labored at lifting a great long roof beam into place. St. Ives crept forward another hour. The beam was supported now by vertical timbers. The sound of pounding hammers filled the otherwise silent morning.
He was ready at last. He was bound for the future, for Harrogate and an encounter with Mr. Binger’s dog. That would be the test. Or would it? He thought for a moment. Perhaps a better test would consist of his not saving Mr. Binger’s dog. That might answer his questions more adequately. But what then? Then the dog would die. The answer to that particular question was evident. Old Furry would run under the wheels of that carriage. St. Ives had no choice.
He alighted in a yard off Bow Street, around the corner from the Crow’s Nest. This time there was no hesitation. He climbed out through the hatch and sprinted down the sidewalk, slowing as he approached the corner. He could picture himself bursting out, snatching up the dog, thumbing his nose at Parsons.
Something was wrong, though. He knew that. There was no barking. And no dray, either. He was early. Seeing his mistake he stopped abruptly, swung around, and started back, running toward the machine. How early was he? He thought he knew, but he couldn’t take any chances. He must know for certain. Abruptly, he angled into the weedy back lot behind the Crow’s Nest, slowing down and sneaking along the wall. Carefully he peered around the corner, looking in the rear window of the almost-empty restaurant. There he sat, his past-time self, just then dropping his fork onto his trousers. Slowly the St. Ives inside the restaurant turned around to face the window, and for a split second he looked himself straight in the eye, holding his own gaze long enough for both of him to understand how haggard and drawn and cockeyed he appeared.
Then with that lesson in mind, he was off and running again, leaving his past-time self to grapple with the mystery. He climbed in at the hatch, bumped the time dial forward, and skipped ahead five minutes. When he opened the hatch it was to the sound of barking dogs. He climbed hastily down the side, looking up toward the street corner where he could see the dray already coming along. Christ! Was he too late? He slid to the ground and started out at a run, but the barking abruptly turned to a single cut-off yelp, then silence. The driver shouted, and one of the horses bucked.
Already St. Ives was clambering back into the machine, sweating now, panicked. He backed the dial off slightly, giving himself twenty seconds. Again he leaped backward, rematerializing in an instant and leaping without hesitation at the hatch. He was down and running wildly toward the corner. He could hear the dray again, but this time he couldn’t yet see it. The barking of old Furry, though, seemed to fill the air along with the snarling of the mastiff.
He leaped straight down off the curb, looking back at where a stupefied Parsons stared at him in wide-eyed alarm. Reaching down, he snatched up the dog, nearly slamming into the horses himself. He threw himself backward, turning, holding the struggling dog, and staggered toward the curb, where he let the creature go. Then he took one last precious second to shout like a lunatic at the snarling mastiff, which turned and fled, howling away down the street to disappear behind a milliner’s shop.
“Run,” St. Ives said, half out loud. And he was away up Bow Street again, pursued by Parsons, who huffed along with his hand on his hat. Full of wild energy, St. Ives easily outdistanced the old man, climbing into the machine and closing the hatch. He knew where he was going, where he had to go. He had done all the necessary calculations at the bottom of Lake Windermere.
As he adjusted the dials, he half expected Parsons to clamber up onto the bathyscaphe or to peer into the porthole and shake his fist. But Parsons didn’t appear.
Of course he won’t, St. Ives thought suddenly. Parsons was too shrewd for that. He was right then searching out a constable, commandeering a carriage in order to race up to the manor and beat the silo door in. St. Ives tripped the lever to activate Lord Kelvin’s machine, and once again he felt himself falling, downward and downward through the creeping years, until he came to rest once again, in London now, in Limehouse, sometime in 1835.
A cold autumn fog was settling over Limehouse, and St. Ives counted this as a piece of luck, a sign, perhaps, that his fortunes were turning. The mist would hide his movements on the rooftop, anyway, although it would also make it tolerably hard to see. There was a moon, which helped, but which also would expose his skulking around if he didn’t keep low and out of sight. For the moment, though, he was fascinated with the scene round about him. He looked down onto Pennyfields and away up West India Dock Road and watched the flickering of lights in windows and the movements of people below him — the streets were crowded despite the hour — sailors mostly, got up in strange costumes. There were Lascars and Africans and Dutchmen and heaven knew what-all sorts of foreigners, mingling with coal-backers and ballast-heavers and lumpers and costermongers and the thousands of destitute rag-bedraggled poor who slept in the streets in fair weather and under the bridges in foul.