The Steam-Driven Boy Page 8

  The fellow made no reply, but gazed about him in some consternation.

  ‘Or is it Methodism you’re spreading? Or Dissention?’ Jones snarled. ‘You’ll do a barrel more converts if you bag a decent periwig.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Strathnaver, tittering, ‘perhaps the gentleman believes it is Satanic to adorn the body.’

  ‘Yes, well, you’ll take note he has no scruples against hiding his spindly calves, however, My name is Dr Lemuel Jones, sir. You’ll forgive me for not rising. I am rather gouty this evening. What might your name be?’

  The man put out his left hand, withdrew it, then offered it again. Finally he extended his right and shook.

  ‘My name is Darwin Gates,’ he said shyly. ‘And I’m from the Twentieth Century.’

  Dr Jones’ hand hesitated just a fraction as he reached for his snuffbox. ‘Is it a place, then?’ he said, offering snuff around. ‘I should have thought it a direction. But it is very interesting to meet you, sir. I suppose you have all manner of wonders to divulge to this fortunate company, do you not?’

  Mr Gates sat down and leaned forward earnestly. ‘As a matter of fact, I do. You wouldn’t believe the half –’

  ‘Indeed? But I have a reputation for credulosity,’ Jones said. A sly smile was beginning to play about his great, ugly mouth. ‘You will want to tell me no doubt of carriages that operate without benefit of horses. Of engines that carry men through the air likes birds. Of ships without sails.’

  The man flushed darkly and stammered, ‘As a matter of fact –’

  Jones’ voice rose in both pitch and volume. ‘Of machines which carry men under the waters of the sea like fish, where they witness countless wonders. Of mechanical horses capable of drawing a dozen carriages at once. Of artificial candles, powered by some mysterious force of which we know nothing as yet. Of buildings made of crystal and iron, perhaps, wherein one may order servants to select the weather one desires. Is that the sort of Future you are about to describe for us, Mr Gates?’

  The poor visitor looked positively apoplectic with embarrassment and chagrin. I had no doubt but that he had planned a much poorer tale than this. ‘I –’ he stammered, ‘– that is, I –’

  ‘BUT,’ continued Dr Jones, grinding his teeth, ‘I speak only of mere physical inventions, devices which any clod Mechanick may surmise. ’Twould do you no credit at all, sir, if you had not a better tale than this. Perhaps you come to tell me of the Politicks of the Twentieth Century. Let me see – there would be no war, because terrible Weapons would have been invented, the which are too dangerous to be used. The colonies in America will have rebelled and become a Powerful Nation, where, they will claim, All Men are Equal. Mayhap they will even free the slave Negroes, though that is perhaps too much to expect of our American friends.’

  ‘Just a minute!’ said the visitor. ‘I resent that. I’m an American.’

  ‘Tush!’ said Jones. ‘Next you will be a Red Indian. I warn you, sir, it was I who exposed George Psalmanazar, who posed forty years as a “Formosan”, having made up his own “language”.’ All this Jones delivered in an undertone, then resumed his ordinary Rasp and said, ‘I suppose the Powers and Alliances of all Europe will have shifted considerable. England’s monarch will have no more weight than a common sweep, I suppose.’

  ‘How did you know?’ asked the astonished Mr Gates.

  ‘Pooh, sir, I am merely spinning my tale to keep from being bored by yours. But be so good as to let me go on. I have not yet discoursed upon the Future state of Painting, of Musick, of Moral and Natural Philosophy –’

  ‘First we must give Mr Gates a cup of punch,’ murmured Strathnaver. ‘Assuming, that is, that persons from that time so little evident to our senses can drink and eat. Are you, Mr Gates, an aethereal spirit, like one of Mr Milton’s angels? Do you sleep, ingest food, and so on?’

  While the poor stranger was helped to a cup of punch, Dr Jones sat back and regarded him incuriously. I read contempt in Jones’ face; whenever the right side of his mouth gets drawn up, as though attracted to the wart just above it at the corner, then he is in a phrenzy of contempt.

  ‘Of Painting I know little,’ he said. ‘It is at best a clumsy art, making awkward imitations of Nature. I expect patrons will grow weary of Copyism, and turn their attention elsewhere.

  ‘Everyone in the Twentieth Century will of course have Musick at hand as he desires it. I can well imagine the deleterious effect this will have upon Taste & Sense, when every cordwainer or every smith can hammer upon shoes to Musick of his own chuzing. Art does not, sir, lend itself to Dilution.

  ‘There will always be a plethora of varieties in the Garden of Philosophy from which to make a nosegay. At some point, men will stop speaking of Reason and start speaking of Responsibility. There is, as they will say, no order in the Universe but what we chuse to see – as there were no Giants in Sir Quixote’s windmills. Absurdity will become a philosophical catchword – there will be a Silly Season.

  ‘Of Natural Philosophy I can well imagine the devising of all manner engines and games. No doubt men of the Twentieth Century will go to and fro the Moon, if not the Sun. Astronomy, Chimistry, Mathematics and Medicine will all advance space. Plague will be almost unknown. I daresay it will have been proven to everyone’s satisfaction that Tobacco is a poisonous weed.’

  ‘Amazing!’ quoth our visitor. ‘How did you know –’

  ‘I have met better mountebanks than you, sir!’ said Jones, fetching him a stern look. ‘I am forced by gout to sit here night after night, prey to every single one of ’em. Only last month I was confronted by a “man from Not-Yet” who puts you to shame. Not only had he elegant manners and wondrous tales to tell, he looked exactly like me!’

  Our visitor looked pale and ill. ‘Like you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. The rogue tried to convince me that he was me, but I have not yet met the man I could not outreason. I proved to him, as I shall prove to you, that man cannot travel from the Future to the Past.

  ‘Man cannot move about in Time as though it were Space. Nature forbids it, as she forbids Levitation or a Vacuum. Think of the awful Paradoxes which might occur! Should you, for example, return to your childhood, you might see yourself as a child. Yet suppose your carriage ran over that child? Would you then cease to be? How then would you yet be alive? And there are Paradoxes even more hideous to contemplate. Suppose you got a child upon your own mother, and suppose the child were you? How then, may a man be his own father or son, a travesty of Physical and Moral Law? I do not even dare consider that weightier problem by far: Which of you, should you meet yourself, would have your Soul? Is the Soul single or divisible? Would some of your selves be soulless animals, mere Automata?

  ‘You cannot be from the Future because the Future is, by definition, that which is not yet. There is no Future. And even were travel in time possible, you would not be from Posterity. I believe that Man grows every generation more happily endowed with Understanding – yet you are content to sit here gape-mouthed, listening to specious arguments.’

  ‘Please,’ said Mr Gates. ‘I can prove I’m from the Future. I have built the only Time Machine ever. Let me prove it. Here is a coin –’ He fumbled at the hip of his breeches for a moment. ‘Here is a quarter of a dollar, United States of America currency,’ he announced proudly, handing the coin to Strathnaver. ‘You’ll see the date is nineteen-something.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Strathnaver. ‘The poor wretch has made himself credentials. This is no more a coin than I am. Hoho, Mr Gates, I must give you a lesson in minting, someday. When you design a die, you must reverse the image, so that it comes out proper on the coin.’

  He passed the coin round, and we could all see that the inscription was backwards. It was poor forgery.

  ‘Things have got reversed somehow!’ shouted Gates. ‘I don’t know how. What can I do to make you believe me?’

  ‘Nothing on earth,’ said Jones. ‘The last knave shewed me a curious engine he called a Ligh
ter – but when I examined it, ’twas nothing but a tiny oil-wick lamp with a matchlock flint attached.’

  ‘I’ll take you back to my own time, and that will convince you!’

  ‘A pretty idea,’ said Mr Strathnaver, ‘but you’ll never get him away from the fire.’

  ‘What?’ said Jones. ‘Quit the fire to wander about in the aguey snow until this rascal’s fellows waylay me and kill me? I cannot say I like the prospect.’

  ‘Oh, we needn’t go far,’ said Gates. ‘My Time Machine is very close by – and some of your friends can follow and watch. Can it be you are afraid to prove me right?’

  For once, Jones had no answer. He leapt up with surprizing agility and signalled for his cloak and hat. ‘Let us see it, you dog,’ he rumbled.

  Dick Blackadder and I were elected to follow. We went but twenty paces in the snow when we encountered the ‘Time Machine’. It was somewhat like a sedan-chair, somewhat like a bathing-machine and no little like an upright coffin on wheels. Gates opened a panel in it, and the two men got themselves inside. The panel closed up.

  Dick and I watched the device closely, ready for any trick. All was deathly still.

  ‘I fear something has happened to Lemuel,’ said Dick. ‘He could never keep silence this long.’

  I wrencht at the handle of the panel, but it was fast. An unearthly light seemed to stream from crevices and cracks about the door, increasingly bright. I applied my eye to a crack and peered in.

  There was not a soul inside.

  The light got brighter and brighter until, with a thunderclap, the entire machine fell to pieces about me. I was knocked flat by the Great Noise, and when I regained my feet, I was amazed to see Dr Jones standing alone amidst the wreckage.

  ‘Are you hurt, Dr Jones?’ asked Dick, scrambling to his feet.

  ‘No, I – No.’

  ‘But where is Mr Gates?’

  ‘It would seem,’ said Jones, looking about, ‘that he is blown into aeternity.’

  We helped him back to the fireside, where, as I recall, he was strangely silent and morose all evening, and would not respond to no amount of badinage. He remained muffled in his cloak and refused to say a word.

  That is all I know of the incident, Jerry. Hoping this account is of some good, I remain

  Your affectionate

  Timothy Scunthe

  To Sir Timothy Scunthe, Bart.

  Sept. 9

  Dear Tim,

  Rec’d your story and am truly amazed at the copiousness of your memory and notes. Surely you are more the man to pen a Reminiscence than I. You have captured nicely the flavour of the old Warthog’s speach, and I find your account exact in nearly every Particular.

  Do give my regards to Dr Jones and pray him to send me some little item of interest to go in my Reminiscences. If it would not inconvenience him, I would like mightily to hear more of his Experience that strange evening. Eternally gratefull I remain

  Your affectionate

  Jeremy Botford

  Postscript. How is it you say the Doctor has a wart upon the right side of his mouth? I have before me a miniature of him, shewing the wan plainly on the left.

  Yours &c.,

  Jer. Botford

  To Jeremy Botford, Esq.

  Sept. 14

  Dear Jerry,

  Business is pressing. This is only a brief billet to inform you that I have spoken to Dr J. and he has promised to send you something. ‘But I doubt (said he) that he will want to use it.’ Do you understand this? I confess I do not. More later from

  Your affectionate

  Timothy Scunthe

  To Jeremy Botford, Esq.

  Sept. 15

  … I hope you will find it in you to pity its author. Do not, I beg you, judge me until you have read here the truth of my plight.

  Having departed on December 10, 1762 from the yard of Crutchwood’s, I journeyed into the Future. Having made my jokes about the Twentieth Century, I lived to see them, tragically, become Real. I saw Art & Architecture decline to Nursery Toys, and Literature reduced to Babel. Morality vanished; Science pottered with household Enjines. The main buziness of the time seemed to be World-Wide War, or man-made Catastrophe. Whole cities full of people were ignited and cooked alive.

  Betwixt the two wars, people drive about the countryside in great carriage-enjines, which poison the air with harmful vapours. These carriages have o’erlaid the cities with smoak, black and noxious. There is in the Twentieth Century neither Beauty nor Reason, nor any other Mark which sheweth Man more than a beast.

  But enough of a sad sojourn to a dismal place. I was sickened by it to near the point of madness. I knew I had done Wrong in accompanying Mr Gates to his Land of Horrors, and so I devized a plan for cancelling my visit.

  I came back to November 1762 and saw myself. I earnestly entreated myself not to attempt such a voyage – but the object of this entreaty was so intent on proving me a scoundrel and imposter than my arguments were in vain.

  I had then but one chance left – to appear at the time and place in which my unsuspecting self was departing for the Future, and to stop myself, by force if need be. Gates and poor Jones had just climbed into the Time Machine when I materialized. They disappeared at the same moment, and the combined Force of our multiple Fluxions destroyed the machine utterly. It was the first and last of its kind. I believe.

  For some reason I cannot determine, I am reversed. Mr Gates thought that perhaps each Time-Journey reversed all the atoms of one’s body. If you recall, when Gates first appeared, he kept trying to shake hands with his left hand. Likewise the coin in his pocket was backwards. In my journey to posterity, I was reversed. When I came back to speak to myself, I was put to rights again. Now I am again reversed.

  You will not be able to include this in your book, I fear, unless as a Specimen of a madman’s raving, or as a silly Fiction. Let it be a Fiction, then, or ignore it, but do not deride me for a Lunatic.

  For I have seen the Future; that is, I have peered into the pit of Hell.

  I pray you remain constant to

  Your friend,

  Lemuel Jones

  To Jeremy Botford, Esq.

  Sept. 15

  Dear Jerry,

  I have not yet time to answer your letter properly. I trust Dr J. has sent you or will send you his Reminiscence. I may say he certainly acts peculiar nowadays. I understand his demeanour has declined steadily over the past ten years. Now he is often moody and distracted, or seemingly laughs at nothing.

  For example, he burst out laughing today, when I asked him his opinion on American taxation. He is an enigma to

  Your affectionate

  Timothy Scunthe

  Postscript. Your miniature lies, for I have just today looked on the original. My memory may be faulty but my eyes are keen. The wart is on the right.

  Yours, &c.,

  T. Scunthe

  THE SHORT, HAPPY WIFE OF MANSARD ELIOT

  Mansard Eliot’s shadow, long with aristocracy, came out of his gallery on Fifth Avenue and moved along the sidewalk. Eliot knew exactly how he looked, with the sun gleaming in his hair. The hair would be parted slightly to one side, smoothed flat all over, and rich with dark, oily health. And the teeth: so white and even that Gladys said they reminded her of bathroom tiles.

  Today he’d asked Gladys to become his wife. And if Dr Sky didn’t like it, so what? Dr Sky, with his ‘separation of dream life from reality’, his ‘horizontal cracks in the ego structure’! Let him try flopping down on the truth table like a seal pup and trying on the hard hat of memory … Mansard would, by Heaven, marry beneath his station.

  Today she was making up her mind. While he waited, Mansard recalled the formula for locating street addresses on Fifth Avenue. From 775 to 1286, he knew, one dropped the last figure and subtracted 18. It was just something like that, he supposed, some geographical or historical fact, that had made him rich. So today he had asked Gladys to divorce her husband, Dean, who was unemployed. As soon as
she answered ‘Yes’, Mansard would rush away to tell Dr Sky.

  ‘I can’t divorce Deanie,’ she whined. ‘It would break his back.’

  ‘I see.’ Mansard was grave. His cereal company had founded a sports foundation, whose director was just now clearing his throat to make an announcement. Mansard Eliot owned at least one tweed sports jacket, one black or navy blue blazer, one sterling shoehorn, one pair heavy slacks, one summer suit, one drip-dry shirt, one raincoat, one pair cotton slacks, two neckties, two sportshirts, one pair dress shoes, one pair canvas shoes, one light bathrobe, three pairs of socks, three sets of underwear, two handkerchiefs, one bathing suit, toilet and shaving articles (adapted for European use), and the building in which Gladys was a scrubwoman.

  ‘Deanie needs me,’ she explained. ‘People try to harm him. Yesterday I came home and found him sleeping on the couch, and the kids had put a plastic bag over his head. They hate his guts. He could have died. He hates their guts, too.’

  What does Monique van Vooren do after dinner? A candle sputters. She fingers the bottle’s long, graceful neck. Suddenly there is a shower of liquid emeralds. Mansard was taller than Gladys, who, of Gladys, Mansard and Dean, was not the shortest.

  ‘He beats me,’ she explained. ‘He makes me have children I don’t want. He doesn’t want them either. He makes me go out and work, while he just lays around the house, guzzling two kinds of beer. My mother hates his guts. She’ll be glad when I divorce him.’

  The Stallion is a westernized shirt, extremely tapered, of cotton chambray. Why be bald?

  ‘Everyone just hates his guts,’ she explained. ‘He even hates himself. Only I understand and love and cherish him. Or maybe it’s only hate. Well, anyway, at least he loves his kids.’ Minnesota has 99 Long Lakes and 97 Mud Lakes.

  ‘Why don’t we just pick up and go to Europe?’ Mansard asked, glancing at himself in the lake. ‘Or somewhere else?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t leave the kids. They don’t get along with Deanie too well. They just don’t get along.’ Gladys put down her mop and pail and accepted a cigarette from the gold case he proffered. Satin sheets and pillow cases are a must for the compleat bachelor’s apartment. The Doggie Dunit makes an ideal gift memento or ‘ice-breaker’ at parties. So realistic your friends will gasp. Mansard’s hand trembled as he lit two cigarettes with a special lighter, then handed one to Gladys.