Steam #2
Flushing again, this time with excitement of a more cerebral and emotional nature, David hurried to finish uncovering and dusting off every precious piece of equipment in the attic.
Pushing his bowler hat back on his head, David lined up his feet on the floor and lifted the dart in his hand.
The noise in the pub swelled for a moment, then quieted again, allowing him to hear the thwup!
of his dart hitting the dartboard for a fifteen-point score.
His teammate and buddy Kevin cheered, clapping him on the shoulder while the other two guys groaned.
Turning around to face them, David caught sight of the television over the bar.
The sports channel had given way to a weather update.
One of the words on the screen captured his attention: Thunderstorm.
“Uh . . . I gotta go, guys.” Glad he had chosen to stick to a flavoured club soda, David grabbed his long brown duster and shrugged into the leather overcoat.
He paused to fetch his darts from the board, packing them into their plastic case, and tucked the case in his pocket. “We’ll continue this later, right?”
“But . . . we’re winning!” Kevin protested. “And what is up with you and bad weather, lately? Ever since you inherited that house on the hill, you’ve been vanishing into it any time a thunderstorm rolls along!”
“Maybe he’s fancying himself as a modern-day Doctor Frankenstein,” one of the other two dart players drawled, then laughed as he picked up his beer.
“Maybe I am.” David fl ashed his friend a grin and a wink.
Tugging at the brim of his hat to make sure the wind outside wouldn’t sweep it away, David nodded a polite fare well to the three of them and left the bar.
The drive home in his truck didn’t take long, but the lightning was already flickering in the distance by the time he got out.
Hurrying inside, David didn’t bother to remove his coat.
That storm was approaching fast, and he didn’t want to miss a possible lightning strike.
As soon as he reached the attic, he double-checked the batteries of the flashlight on the neatly tidied desk.
One of the many notes to himself he had found had concerned the power going out for a few moments.
Once he was satisfied he would still have light if the storm overloaded the power grid, he moved to the switch board.
They were large, stiff, old-fashioned levers insulated with glass and padded with rubber, and the thought of his Elaine – well, she wasn’t his just yet – playing with such dangerous equipment made him nervous.
The flare of light and rumble of sound encouraged him to try. Grasping the wooden handles, David pulled each of the four levers down. The arrays of copper wiring, glass tubes, brass fixtures and those strange wire-wrapped hoops forming a sort of oval-sided cage . . . did nothing.
Nothing.
Disappointed, David wondered if he had done everything right.
Some of the equipment had been replaced over the years by more modern versions, and he had added a few replacements of his own, mainly of things which had corroded or deteriorated with time.
The instructions in Elaine’s diary weren’t always clear, though the worst parts had been appended in his own handwriting with terminology the twenty-first century man could understand. But the machine wasn’t working.
It is predestination paradox, David reminded himself, staring at the inert machinery. I know these things are going to happen, because they already did happen. I—
KERBOOMMMM!
Dazzled by the flare of daylight-bright whiteness, deafened by the window-rattling explosion, David struggled to see and hear.
He could feel every hair on his body prickling up at the sheer proximity of all that electricity.
Blinking several times, he finally focused on the oval cage and found it glowing with an eerie purplish-white light.
That light suddenly stretched inwards to the centre of the rectangular cage, shading from violet to blue, green, gold, red, and crimson where all the streaking lines met in the three-dimensional centre.
Then they flared outwards again, opening into a rippling mirage of milk-white light.
It blurred the lines of the machinery visible on the far side, and distorted the voice, too, but not so far that David couldn’t tell it belonged to a young woman.
“Oh! Oh, I did it! I actually did it! I’ve invented a temporal vortex! But . . . to the past or to the future?”
Prompted by all the notes and clues left by his future and past selves, David moved closer and called out to her. “ To the future, my lady!”
“Oh! Uh . . . who is this, please?”
“David Maddock. I take it you are Miss Elaine Cuttleridge?”
“Uh, yes. Yes, I am. But I am T-totally surprised you should know my name – unless I’m F-famous in the future?”
Good grief, she even talks like she writes, David thought, amused.
She didn’t stammer, she pronounced the letter, stating it as eff-famous.
He knew it had been an affectation in some American circles a hundred or so years ago, meant to emphasize a particular word by stating its starting letter as a sort of fancy prefix.
The verbal and print version of italics, back in an era where italic fonts hadn’t been differentiated yet .
. . “I’m afraid not, Miss Cuttleridge. It seems I know you because I inherited this house .
. . from my time-travelling self, in association with you. ”
“Oh – oh, that is utterly I-impossible!” she snapped, and the blurry, milk-water oval rippled.
A tallish woman dressed in a waistcoat, ruffle-necked blouse, long skirts, and ankle boots, carrying a carpet bag in her hand, stepped through the milky oval.
She did so very carefully, making sure to not brush the wire-wrapped oval frames with anything, not even a stray bit of hem.
“I’m glad I made the transduction ovals big enough .
. . It is I-impossible, Mr Maddock, because I am moving into the future.
I refuse to spend any more time living in the O-outmoded past.”
Her long brown curls, swept up at the top but left hanging free in the back, had auburn highlights. Her eyes were hazel green, and her chin was lifted in a stubborn, defiant tilt. Her declaration caught David by surprise, but his mind leaped swiftly through the variables of her claim.
“The future, my dear, is incredibly complex. First of all, you—”
“Don’t patronize me!” Elaine snapped, lifting her chin a little higher. “I may be a ‘mere’ woman, but I am clearly quite intelligent!”
“I am not patronizing you. I’m explaining certain facts, of which you need to be aware in order to live in this century,” David countered patiently.
I can see why I wrote myself a note; she’s a real firecracker.
Brilliant, beautiful and bearing a chip on her shoulder.
A Suffragette as well as a scientist, if I’m not mistaken.
Glancing at the oval behind her, David saw the bluish-white glow beginning to fade.
“Look, according to the notes I read, you will have five days in the future before the next thunderstorm rolls through and the machines can be linked again. Between now and then, I will show you the complexities of life in the twenty-first century. But you have to promise me to keep an open mind, and not prejudge me, thinking I’ll treat you like a nineteenth-century man. I am not one.”
Her hazel eyes glittered with wariness. “Go on . . .”
“First of all, you don’t have an identity established with the government.
If you don’t have an identity, you’ll find integrating yourself into the future to be very difficult.
And if you claim to be from a hundred or so years in the past,” David explained patiently, remembering to pick words she would understand, “they’ll lock you up in a sanitarium, and throw away the key.
I’m sure that’s hardly the sort of future life you’d want to lead.
Going back into the past – for select periods of time – will allow both of us to help establish an identity for you which you can use here and now in the future.
But it must be timed and targeted just right.
“I could easily step into the past and establish myself as . . . David Cuttleridge. Or Marvin Melmack. Or James Earl Jones. And no one would gainsay my identity,” David pointed out.
“The government did not have the ability to gather and process information at the turn of the twentieth century that it has in the twenty-first century, so I could get away with establishing an identity in the past. For you .
. . it will be a lot more difficult. Not insurmountable, but hard all the same.
“And there is another reason to go back into the past, and maintain ties to the past. A couple of reasons,” David amended.
Setting her carpet bag down, Elaine folded her arms across her breasts. “What reasons?”
Trying hard not to think of her baring her breasts, David outlined his reasons.
“First of all, this house needs to be kept intact and in good shape. If you abandon it completely to the future . . . who will inherit it, what will they do with it and wouldn’t some stranger dismantle all of your equipment, utterly ruining your temporal experiment?
Because I found out all of the information I needed to know to make sure the machine was in working order, I know that you – and I myself – went back into the past, and probably did so several times, to ensure the sanctity of this house and its equipment.