Many Dimensions, Charles Williams [black authors fiction TXT] 📗

what was happening now actually happening or was it merely

foresight?

 

Sir Giles in a burst of anger and something remarkably like alarm,

realized that he didn’t know.

 

He remembered the knocking, the caretaker, the entrance of the

inspector to whom Palliser was talking—very well the Professor was

doing, Sir Giles thought, only he probably hadn’t realized the

difficulty; he wouldn’t, not with that kind of cancer-eaten sponge he

called an intellect. “But I remember,” Tumulty thought impatiently.

“How the hell could I remember if it hadn’t happened? There’d be

nothing to remember.” He plunged deeper. “But at twelve I should

remember. Then if it’s come off—I remember what hasn’t happened. I’m am

in a delusion. I’m’m mad. Nonsense. I’m in the twelve state of

consciousness. But the twelve state couldn’t be unless the eleven to

twelve state had been. Am I here or am I sitting in that blasted chair

of Palliser’s knowing it from outside time? “

 

He had a feeling that there was another corollary just round the corner

of his mind and strained to find it. But it avoided him for the moment.

He looked over his shoulder to find that the inspector was going, and

as soon as the departure was achieved rushed across the room to

Palliser. “Now,” he said, “what ‘has happened? 0 never mind about your

fly-blown policeman. What has happened ?”

 

“Nothing has happened,” Palliser said staring. “It evidently doesn’t

work in the future.”

 

“You seem jolly sure about it,” Sir Giles said. “How do you know? You

wanted to be as you would be at twelve, didn’t you? Well, how do you

know you’re not? You seem to remember, I know; so do I”

 

“Well then,” Palliser argued-“Yes, I see what you mean. This is merely

knowledge—premature knowledge? Umph. Well, let’s return to eleven-thirty.” He took a step towards the safe, but Sir Giles caught him by

the wrist. “Don’t do that, you fool,” he said. “Why the hell didn’t I

see it before? If you once go back, you’ll bind yourself to go on doing

the same thing—you must.”

 

Palliser sat down abruptly and the two looked at each other. “But you

said the present would be bound to become the future,” he objected.

 

“I know I did,” Sir Giles almost howled at him. “But don’t you see, you

fool, that the action of return must be made at the starting-point?

That’s why your oyster-stomached helot vanished; that’s the trick

that’s caught you now. I won’t be caught; there must be a way out and

I’ll find it.”

 

“Look here, Tumulty,” Palliser said, “let’s keep calm and think it

out. What do you mean by the action of return being made at the

starting-point?”

 

“O God,” Sir Giles moaned, “to be fastened to a man who doesn’t know

how to ask his mother for milk! I mean that you must condition your

experiment from without and not from within; you must define your

movement before you make it or your definition will be controlled by

it. You can say I will go and return in such and such a manner, but if

you only say I will go your return is ruled by sequence. Can’t you

think, Palliser?”

 

“Then we are in the future?” Palliser said, “and we can’t go back to

live that half-hour? Well, does it very much matter?” “If we are,” Sir

Giles said, “we-O it’s no good trying to

explain to you.” He began to walk about and then went back to the chair

in which he had been sitting originally and stared at it. “Now am I

there?” he asked grimly, “or am I here?”

 

There was a silence of some minutes. Then Palliser said again, “I still

can’t see why you’re so excited. That half-hour wasn’t of any

importance, surely?”

 

Sir Giles, having reached his limit of exasperation, became

unexpectedly gentle. He went back to Palliser and said almost sweetly,

“Well, don’t worry over it, don’t hurt your brain, but just try and

follow. If this is a forecast in consciousness, that consciousness is,

so to speak, housed somewhere. And it’s housed in your body. And

where’s your body? And how do you get your mind-time and your body-time

to agree?”

 

“My body is here,” Palliser said, patting it.

 

“O no,” Sir Giles said, still sweetly. “At least perhaps it is and

perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps all this is occupying a millionth part of a

second and we’re still sitting there.”

 

“But Pondon disappeared?” Palliser objected, “into his past, I suppose?

Mayn’t we have disappeared into our future?”

 

“I hope we have,” Sir Giles assented. “But we seem to remember—or to

know—what happened, don’t we? We seem to know that we talked and the

police came and so on? Did it happen or has it got to happen or hasn’t

it happened and will it never happen? If we will to return we seem to

me—but of course I’m a little child crooning on your knee—to be in a

constant succession of the same period. And if we don’t?”

 

“Well, we go on,” the Professor said.

 

“Till we become conscious of death?” Sir Giles asked. “And then what

happens? Till these apparent bodies die and corrupt and our minds

return to our real bodies and live it again—is that the truth? Years

and years and years and all in less than a second and all to be

repeated—do you like it, Palliser?”

 

“But Pondon disappeared,” the Professor said again.

 

“You keep on repeating that,” Sir Giles told him. “Don’t you see, you

cow, that the conditions may be different? Whatever the past is, it has

been in everyone’s knowledge; whatever the future is it hasn’t.”

 

“What do you propose to do about it, anyhow?” the Professor asked.

 

Sir Giles considered. “I propose to think over it for a few days,” he

said, “and see if I can think of any formula to find out, first where

that assistant of yours is and secondly where we are. Also to see if

Whitehall is doing anything, because I’m not going to be taken by

surprise by them, not under present conditions. So I shall go back to

London this afternoon.”

 

All the way to Euston—he didn’t want to use the Stone again at the

moment-Tumulty brooded over the problem that confronted him. He devised

several formulae for getting into touch with the unfortunate Mr.

Pondon; the most obvious experiment—that of willing him back—had been

tried by himself and the Professor on the previous evening without

success. It seemed that the Stone could not be used to control others;

its action was effective only over the action of whoever held it. Sir

Giles regretted this rather keenly; the possibility of disarranging

other people’s lives had appeared to him a desirable means of

experiment, since he was on the whole reluctant to conduct experiments

on himself. That state of being which lies between mysticism, madness,

and romanticism, had always been his chosen field, but it was a field

in which few suitable subjects grew. He found it impossible not to

desire to be able to dispose of objectionable people by removing them

to some past state of being, and he almost sent a telegram to Palliser

urging him to acquaint Mrs. Pondon and the police with the facts of the

case and to inquire whether the police “in the execution of their

duty,” would be bound to follow the vanished assistant to the day

before yesterday. Pondon had certainly gone of his own free will, even

if his superior had refrained from explaining the possibilities clearly

enough. However, Pondon could wait a few days. That morning, Sir Giles

had noticed in their short interview, he had cut himself while shaving;

it afforded Tumulty a certain pleasure to think of that small cut being

repeated again and again until he himself

had time, inclination, and knowledge to interfere. But the other

problem worried him more considerably. That missing half hour haunted

him; had he lived through it or had he not, and if he had not could

even the Stone release him from the necessity of doing so?

 

He began to wonder if the Stone could help him, but he didn’t see how,

unless it could present thoughts to his mind or to other people’s. If

there was someone he could trust to tell him what could be learnt from

such a trial of the Stone? He thought of Lord Arglay, a trained and

detached, and not unsympathetic, mind. Palliser was no good because

Palliser was mixed up with it. And you couldn’t go to everyone asking

them to help you look for half an hour you had mislaid. Also Arglay

would know if Whitehall were moving—not that he minded very much if it

were.

 

At Euston he took a taxi (to the Chief Justice’s.

 

Lord Arglay’s Saturday afternoon therefore broke suddenly into

activity. Some time after tea, while he was playing with the idea of

bringing Organic Law into the Stone’s sphere of activity, though he

felt certain the Haji would disapprove of any such use, he was startled

by the announcement that Mrs. Sheldrake had called. “Miss Burnett is

with her, sir,” the maid added.

 

“Now what on earth,” Lord Arglay said as he went to the drawingroom,

“is Chloe doing with -Mrs. Sheldrake? How did she get hold of her, I

wonder? and has she brought her here to be instructed or to be

frightene&”

 

It soon appeared however that if anyone were frightened it was Chloe

herself. Mrs. Sheldrake took the conversation into her own hands, with

a brief explanation of her connection with the Stone, and a light

reference to the fact that it had been, for the moment, mislaid. She

wanted to know, since Miss Burnett had mentioned Lord Arglay several

times, whether he claimed any rights in the Stone.

 

“Not in that particular Type,” Lord Arglay said.

 

“Type, Lord Arglay?” Cecilia asked. “How do you meanType?”

 

“The position is a little obscure,” the Chief Justice said, considering

rapidly Mrs. Sheldrake’s appearance and manner, Mr. Sheldrake’s riches

and position (which he had looked up), and the desirability of subduing

them both without antagonism. “I say Type because the Stones which

exist—and there are several—are apparently derivations from one

Original, though (and perhaps therefore) possessed of the same powers.

But how far they are to be regarded as being identical with it, for

proprietary reasons, I cannot at the moment say. Nor in whom the title

to the property inheres. I may add that certain foreign representatives

are deeply interested, and the Government is observing matters. I think

that in the present situation your husband should preserve the utmost

secrecy and caution. His title appears to me uncertain, both so far as

the acquisition of his Type is concerned and in the relation of that

Type to the Original.”

 

He delivered this with occasional pauses for meditation and with a

slight pomposity which he put on at necessary moments. Mrs. Sheldrake,

a little impressed, nevertheless appeared to receive it with frigidity.

 

“But, Lord Arglay,” she said, “we can’t be expected to sit quiet while

other people use our property in order to ruin our companies. I am

thinking of the effect it may have on Atlantic Airways. What is this

original you are talking about?”

 

“It is the centre of the derivations,” Lord Arglay said at random, but

ridiculously enough the phrase in Chloe’s mind suddenly connected

itself with “the End of Desire.” The chance and romantic words came to

her like a gospel, none the less emotionally powerful that at the

moment she didn’t understand it. What were the derivations? She had a

vague feeling that the sentence suggested Lord Arglay himself as the

centre though she