We hurried down to the station to do his bidding. It was the least we could do. His just giving in like that made the business doubly sorrowful, and although I was tempted for a moment to wear them, I left the beard and wig at the Apple.
The train was chuffing there on the track, the passengers already boarded. We ran along the platform. St. Ives was certain that there was some good reason for Parsons’s having summoned him, and that it was his duty, our duty, after exploding Parsons’s dreams, to see what it was that the old man wanted, what last tearful throwing-in-the-towel statement he would utter. Let him complain to our faces, I thought, taking the long view. He had been riding high just yesterday, astride his charger, but now, as they say, the mighty had fallen. The race was not always to the swift. Parsons could have his say; I wouldn’t begrudge him.
But where was he? The cars were moving along. We trotted beside them, keeping up, out toward the empty tracks ahead, the train chugging forward and away. Then, as the last car but one rolled past, a window slid down, and there was Parsons’s face grinning out at us like a winking devil. “Haw! Haw! Haw!” he shouted, apparently having run mad, the poor bastard.
Then he dangled out the window a bound notebook, tattered and old-looking. Streaked across it in faded ink was the name “John Kenyon,” written in fancy-looking heavy script — the name, of course, of Mrs. Pule’s derelict father. Despite what was utterly obvious, and thinking to put on a show of being interested in the old man’s apparent glee, I was witless enough to yell, “What is it?” as we watched the train pick up speed and move away from us toward London.
And he had the satisfaction of leaning out even farther in order to make a rude gesture at us, shouting in a sort of satisfied whinny, “What the hell do you think it is, idiot?” Then the damned old fool drew the notebook in and slammed the window shut, clipping off the sound of his own howling laughter.
The train bore Parsons away to London, along with — if the half-frozen doctor had only been aware of his victory, of this renewed promise of resurrection — the gloating still-animate body of Ignacio Narbondo.
Part III
The Time Traveler
Air hissed through rubber tubing like the wheezing of a mechanical man. There was the odor of machine oil and metal in the air, mixed with the damp aquarium smell of seawater seeping slowly past riveted joints and rubber seals. The ocean lay silent and cold and murky beyond porthole windows, and St. Ives fought off the creeping notion that he had been encased in a metal tomb.
One of the bathyscaphe’s jointed arms clanked against the brass hull with a dull echo, a sound from a distant world. St. Ives felt it in his teeth. He smeared cold sweat from his forehead and focused his mind on his task — recovering Lord Kelvin’s machine from the debris-covered sandbar forty feet beneath the Dover Strait. The hulks of three ships lay roundabout, one of them blown apart by the dynamite bomb that St. Ives had dropped into its hold six months past.
He pulled a lever in the floor, feeling and hearing the metallic ratchet of the pair of retractable feet that thrust out from the base of the bathyscaphe. Laboriously, inch by inch, the spherical device hopped across the ocean floor. Fine sand swirled up, obscuring the portholes, and for the space of a minute St. Ives could see nothing at all. He shut his eyes and pressed his hands to his temples, aware again of the swish of air through tubing and of the sound of blood pounding in his head. He felt a great pressure, all imaginery, but nonetheless real for that, and he began to breathe rapidly and shallowly, fighting down a surge of panic. The portholes cleared, and a school of John Dory lazied past, gaping in at him, studying him as if he were a textbook case on the extravagances of human folly…
“Stop it!” he said out loud. His voice rang off the brass walls, and he peered forward, trying to work the looped end of line around the far side of the machine.
“Pardon me, sir?” The stalwart voice of Hasbro sounded through the speaking tube.
“Nothing. It’s close down here.”
“Perhaps if I had a go at it, sir?”
“No. It’s nothing. I’m at the end of it.”
“Very well,” the voice said doubtfully.
He let go of the line, and it slowly sank across the copper shell of the machine, drifting off the far edge and settling uselessly on the ocean floor. Failure — he would have to try again. He closed his eyes and sat for a moment, thinking that he could easily fall asleep. Then the idea of sleep frightened him, and he looked around himself, taking particular note of the dials and levers and gauges. He needed something solid to use as ballast for his mind — something outside, something comfortable and homely.
Abruptly he thought of food, of cottage pie and a bottle of beer. With effort, he began to think through the recipe for cottage pie, reciting it to himself. It wouldn’t do to talk out loud. Hasbro would haul him straight out of the water. He pictured the pie in his head — the mashed potatoes whipped with cream and butter, the farmer’s cheese melted across the top. He poured a mental beer into a glass, watching it foam up over the top and spill down the sides. Keeping the image fresh, he pulled in the line again, working diligently until he gripped the noose once more. Then, slowly, he carried it back out with the mechanical hand. He dropped it carefully, and this time it floated down to encircle a solid piece of outthrust metal.
“Cottage pie,” he muttered.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“Got its. . eye,” he said weakly, realizing that this sounded even more lunatic than what he had said. It didn’t matter, though. He was almost through. Already the feeling of desperation and confinement was starting to lift. Carefully, he clamped on to the line again, pulling it tight inch by inch, working steadily to close the loop. If he could attend to his work he would be on the surface in ten minutes. Five minutes.
“Up we go,” he said, loud this time, like a sea captain, and in a matter of seconds there was a jolt, and the bathyscaphe tilted just a little, lifting off the ocean floor. It rose surfaceward in little jerks, and the school of John Dory followed it up, nosing against the portholes. St. Ives was struck suddenly by how friendly the fish were, nosing against the glass like that. God bless a fish, he thought, keeping a man company. The water brightened around him, and the feeling of entombment began to dissipate. He breathed deeply, watching bubbles rush past now and the fish turn in a school and dart away. Suddenly the wave-lapped surface of the gray ocean tossed across the porthole, and then the sea gave way to swirling fog, illuminated by a morning sun and enlivened by the muffled sound of water streaming off the sides of the bathyscaphe. Then there was the solid clunk of metal feet settling on a wooden deck.
St. Ives opened the hatch and climbed out, and immediately he and Hasbro swung the dripping bathyscaphe across the deck so as to make room for Lord Kelvin’s machine. They unfastened it from the jib crane and lashed it down solidly, hiding it beneath oiled canvas, working frenziedly while the sun threatened to burn off the fog and to reveal their efforts to the light of day. Hurrying, they fixed the line that grappled Lord Kelvin’s machine to the jib crane and set about hauling it out of the water, too, afterward hiding it beneath more tied down canvas.
In another twenty minutes the steam trawler, piloted by the man that St. Ives knew as Uncle Botley, made off northward. St. Ives remained on deck for a time, watching through the mist. Soon they would be far enough from the site that they could almost pretend to be innocent — to have been out after fish.