“Oh, I follow you. But wouldn’t these gaps have been noticed?”
“Of course. Those binders by the window are full of newspaper clippings and journal entries, dating back as far as 1624, that mention occasions when magic has seemed actually, documentably, to work; and since the turn of the century there’s usually some note, in the same day’s issue, of a power failure or blanket radio interference in the same area. Why, man, there’s a street in Soho that some people still call the Auto Graveyard, because for six days in 1954 every car that drove into it conked out and had to be towed away—by horses!—and then started up fine in the next street. And a third-rate part-time medium that lived there staged the last of her Saturday afternoon tea and seance sessions during that week—no one will ever know what happened, but the ladies were all found dead, ice cold after having been dead less than an hour in a warm room, and stamped on every face was, I understand, the most astonishing expression of dismayed terror. The story was downplayed in the press, and the stalling of the cars was blamed on a, quote, accumulation of static electricity, unquote. And there are hundreds of similar examples.
“Now I came across these when I was… well, trying to accomplish something science had failed to do, and I was trying to find out if, when and where magic might work. I found that these magic-yes-machinery-no fields are all in or around London and are scattered through history in a bell curve pattern whose peak extends roughly from 1800 to 1805; there were evidently a lot of them during those years, though they tended to be very brief in duration and small in area. They become wider and less frequent farther away from the peak years. Still with me?”
“Yes,” said Doyle judiciously. “As far back as the sixteen hundreds, you say? So the gaps then would have been rare, but long when they did show up. And they quickened and shortened until they must have been banging by like clicks from a geiger counter in 1802, say, and then they slowed down and broadened out again. Do they seem to damp out entirely at either end of the curve?”
“Good question. Yes. The equations indicate that the earliest one occurred in 1504, so the curve reaches about three hundred years in each direction, call it six hundred years all told. So anyway, when I began to notice this pattern, I nearly forgot about my original purpose, I was so fascinated by this thing. I tried to get my research boys to work on the puzzle. Hah! They knew senility when they saw it, and there were a couple of attempts to have me committed. But I ducked out of the net and forced them to continue, to program their computers with principles from Bessonus and Midorgius and Ernestus Burgravius; and in the end I did learn what the gaps were. They were—are—gaps in the wall of time.”
“Holes in the ice that covers the river.” Doyle nodded.
“Right—picture holes in that ice roof; now if part of your lifetime, some section of the seventy-year-long trailing weed that’s you, should happen to be under one of the holes, it’s possible to get out of the time stream at that point.”
“To where?” Doyle asked guardedly, trying to keep any tone of pity or derision out of his voice. Why, to Oz, he thought, or Heaven, or the Pure Vegetable Kingdom.
“Nowhere,” answered Darrow impatiently. “Nowhen. All you can do is enter again through another gap.”
“And wind up in the Roman Senate watching Caesar being assassinated. No, sorry, that’s right, the holes only extend as far back as 1500; okay, watching London burn down in 1666.”
“Right—if there happens to be a gap then. And there. You can’t reenter at arbitrary points, only through an existing gap. And,” he said with a note of discoverer’s pride, “it is possible to aim for one gap rather than another—it depends on the amount of… propulsion used in exiting from your own gap. And it is possible to pinpoint the locations of the gaps in time and space. They radiate out in a mathematically predictable pattern from their source—whatever that can have been—in early 1802.”
Doyle was embarrassed to realize that his palms were damp. “This propulsion you mention,” he said thoughtfully, “is it something you can produce?”
Darrow grinned ferociously. “Yes.”
Doyle was beginning to see a purpose in the demolished lot outside, all these books, and perhaps even his own presence. “So you’re able to go voyaging through history.” He smiled uneasily at the old man, trying to imagine J. Cochran Darrow, even old and sick, at large in some previous century. “I fear thee, ancient mariner.”
“Yes, that does bring us to Coleridge—and you. Do you know where Coleridge was on the evening of Saturday, the first of September, in 1810?”
“Good Lord, no. William Ashbless arrived in London only… about a week later. But Coleridge? I know he was living in London then…”
“Yes. Well, on the Saturday evening I mentioned, Coleridge gave a lecture on Milton’s Aereopagitica at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand.”
“Oh, that’s right. But it was Lycidas, wasn’t it?”
“No. Montagu wasn’t present, and he got it wrong.”
“But the Montagu letter is the only mention anywhere of that lecture.” Doyle cocked his head. “Uh… isn’t it?”
The old man smiled. “When DIRE undertakes to do a job of research, son, we’re thorough. No, two of the men who attended, a publisher’s clerk and a schoolmaster, left journals which have come into my hands. It was the Aereopagitica. The schoolteacher even managed to get a fair amount of the lecture down in shorthand.”
“When did you find this?” Doyle asked quickly. An unpublished Coleridge lecture! My God, he thought with a surge of bitter envy, if I’d had that two years ago, my Nigh-Related Guest would have got a different sort of review.
“A month or so ago. It was only in February that I got concrete results from the Denver crew, and since then DIRE has been obtaining every available book or journal concerning London in 1810.”
Doyle spread his hands. “Why?”
“Because one of these time gaps is just outside Kensington, five miles from the Strand, on the evening of the first of September, 1810. And unlike most gaps that close to the 1802 source, this one is four hours long.”
Doyle leaned forward to help himself to another cupful of the brandy. The excitement building in him was so big that he tried to stifle it by reminding himself that what was being discussed here was, though fascinating, impossible. Stick with it for the twenty thousand, he advised himself, and maybe the possibility of getting your hands on Robb’s journal or that schoolteacher’s notebook. But he wasn’t fooling himself—he wanted to participate in this. “And there’s another gap here and now, of course.”
“Here, all right, but not quite now. We’re”—Darrow looked at his watch—”still several hours upstream of it. It’s of a typical size for one this far from the source—the upstream edge is tonight, the downstream edge at about dawn of the day after tomorrow. As soon as Denver pinpointed this gap I bought the entire area the field would cover, and got busy levelling it. We don’t want to take any buildings back with us, do we?”
Doyle realized his own grin must have looked as conspiratorial as Darrow’s. “No, we don’t.”
Darrow sighed with relief and satisfaction. He picked up the phone just as it started to ring. “Yes?… Get off this line and get me Lament. Quick.” He drained his cup and refilled it. “Been living for three days on coffee, brandy and candy bars,” he remarked to Doyle. “Not bad, once your stomach gets—Tim? Drop the efforts for Newnan and Sandoval. Well, radio Delmotte and tell him to turn around and take him right back to the airport. We’ve got our Coleridge man.”