“Fake one?”
“Right. We’re in a roomful of people, let’s say, and several of ‘em probably know more about literature than you do, but you’re being billed as the resident expert, so you’ve got to at least look like you know everything. So somebody asks you, uh, ‘Mr. Doyle, to what extent, in your opinion, was Wordsworth influenced by the philosophy expressed in the verse plays of, I don’t know, Sir Arky Malarkey?’ Quick!”
Doyle cocked an eyebrow. “Well, it’s a mistake, I think, to try to simplify Malarkey’s work that way; several philosophies emerge as one traces the maturing of his thought. Only his very late efforts could possibly have appealed to Wordsworth, and as Fletcher and Cunningham point out in their Concordium there is no concrete evidence that Wordsworth ever actually read Malarkey. I think when trying to determine the philosophies that affected Wordsworth it would be more productive to consider—” He stopped, and grinned uncertainly at Darrow. “And then I could ramble indefinitely about how much he was influenced by the Rights of Man business in the French Revolution.”
Darrow nodded, squinting through the curling smoke. “Not too bad,” he allowed. “Had a guy in here this afternoon—Nostrand from Oxford, he’s editing a new edition of Coleridge’s letters—and he was insulted at the very idea of faking an answer.”
“Nostrand’s evidently more ethical than I am,” said Doyle a little stiffly.
“Evidently. Would you call yourself cynical?”
“No.” Doyle was beginning to get annoyed. “Look, you asked me if I could bluff my way out of a question, and so off the top of my head I had a try at it. I’m not in the habit, though, of claiming to know things I don’t. In print, or in class, I’m always willing to admit—”
Darrow laughed and raised a hand. “Easy, son, I didn’t mean that. Nostrand’s a fool, and I liked your bluff. What I meant was, are you cynical? Do you tend to reject new ideas if they resemble ideas you’ve already decided are nonsense?”
Here come the Ouija boards, Doyle thought. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly.
“What if somebody claimed to have incontrovertible proof that astrology works, or that there’s a lost world inside the earth, or that any of the other things every intelligent person knows are impossible, was possible? Would you listen?”
Doyle frowned. “It’d depend on who was claiming it. Probably not, though.” Oh well, he thought—I still get five thousand and a return ticket.
Darrow nodded, seemingly pleased. “You say what you think, that’s good. One old fraud I talked to yesterday would have agreed that the moon is one of God’s stray golf balls if I’d said it was. Hot for the twenty grand, he was. Well, let’s give you a shot. Time is short, and I’m afraid you’re the likeliest-looking Coleridge authority we’re going to get.”
The old man sighed, ran his fingers through his thinning hair, and then gave Doyle a hard stare. “Time,” he said solemnly, “is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curled around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant.” He paused to grind his cigarette out on an antique Moroccan binding.
Doyle was distinctly disappointed to get vague platitudes when he’d expected to have his credulity strained by wild revelations. Apparently there were a few stripped gears in the old man’s head after all. “Uh,” he said, feeling that some response was expected from him, “an interesting notion, sir.”
“Notion?” Now it was Darrow that was annoyed. “I don’t deal in notions, boy.” He lit another cigarette and spoke quietly but angrily, almost to himself. “My God, first I exhaust the entire structure of modern science—try to grasp that!—and then I spend years wringing the drops of truth out of… certain ancient writings, and testing the results and systematizing them, and then I have to browbeat, coerce, and in two cases even blackmail the boys at my chrono labs in Denver—the Quantum Theory lads, for God’s sake, supposed to be the most radically brilliant and elastic-minded scientists at work today—I have to force them to even consider the weird but dammit empirical evidence, and get them to whip it up into some practical shape—they did it, finally, and it required the synthesis of a whole new language, part non-Euclidean geometry, part tensor calculus and part alchemical symbols—and I get the findings, the goddamn most important discovery of my career, or anyone’s since 1916, I get the whole thing boiled down to one sentence of plain English… and do some pissant college teacher the favor of letting him hear it… and he thinks I’ve said ‘Life is but a dream,’ or ‘Love conquers all.’” He exhaled a lungfull of smoke in a long, disgusted hiss.
Doyle could feel his face getting red. “I’ve been trying to be polite, Mr. Darrow, and—”
“You’re right, Doyle, you’re not cynical. You’re just stupid.”
“Why don’t you just go to hell, sir?” said Doyle in a tone he forced to be conversational. “Skate there on your goddamn ice river, okay?” He got to his feet and tossed back the last of his brandy. “And you can keep your five thousand, but I’ll take the return ticket and a ride to the airport. Now.”
Darrow was still frowning, but the parchment skin around his eyes was beginning to crinkle. Doyle, though, was too angry to sit down again. “Get old Nostrand back here and tell him about the water weeds and the rest of your crap,” Darrow stared up at him. “Nostrand would be certain I was insane.”
“Then do it by all means—it’ll be the first time he was correct about anything.”
The old man was grinning. “He advised me against approaching you, by the way. Said all you were good for was rearranging other people’s research.”
Doyle opened his mouth to riposte furiously, then just sighed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “So calling you crazy would be his second correct statement.”
Darrow laughed delightedly. “I knew I wasn’t wrong about you, Doyle. Sit down, please.”
It would have been too rude to leave now that Darrow was refilling Doyle’s paper cup, so he complied, grinning a little sheepishly. “You do manage to keep a person off balance,” he remarked.
“I’m an old man who hasn’t slept in three days. You should have met me thirty years ago.” He lit still another cigarette. “Try to picture it, now; if you could stand outside the time river, on some kind of bank, say, and see through the ice, why then you could walk upstream and see Rome and Nineveh in their heydays, or downstream and see whatever the future holds.”
Doyle nodded. “So ten miles upstream you’d see Caesar being knifed, and eleven miles up you’d see him being born.”
“Right! Just as, swimming up a river, you come to the tips of trailing weeds before you come to their roots. Now—pay attention, this is the important part—sometime something happened to punch holes in the metaphorical ice cover. Don’t ask me how it happened, but spread out across roughly six hundred years there’s a… shotgun pattern of gaps, in which certain normal chemical reactions don’t occur, complex machinery doesn’t work … But the old systems we call magic do.” He gave Doyle a belligerent stare. “Try, Doyle, just try.”
Doyle nodded. “Go on.”
“So in one of these gaps a television won’t work, but a properly concocted love potion will. You get me?”