The Time Traveller's Servant

'Daisy,' he said after some moments. 'Do you believe that it is possible to travel in time?'

She regarded him with some astonishment. 'You mean, to put yourself into the future, but keep your age as it is now?'

He nodded, his eyes on her face. 'Or to the past, I suppose. Any point in time, forwards or back.'

Daisy thought about it. 'I hadn't given it any thought, Professor. My mind tells me that it is impossible, as it is a dimension outside of those we consider to be physical, but...'

He interrupted her. 'I assume you mean the three dimensions that we normally use to consider and measure our world - length and breadth and thickness?'

She nodded. 'It is easy to imagine traveling along any of those dimensions, since all of them may be thought of as lines drawn on a piece of paper or marked out on the ground, along which we can move. I can travel the length of ground from here to Oxford, or to Reading, and I could even travel a distance under the ground or up in the air, if someone were to build a tunnel or a tower. But to travel through time...'

He laughed. 'There is nothing wrong with your reasoning, Daisy,' he said, 'it is exactly what most of us would think - because we do not regard time as a physical dimension, that we can touch or see. And yet I would argue that it is, because we can measure and plot it.' He smiled at her. 'It is a dimension, just like length and breadth and thickness - only our perception of it is different.'

Daisy shook her head. 'I do not understand how you can consider time to be a physical dimension, Professor.'

He leaned forward and seized a pencil from the table adjacent, and his fingers moved rapidly to mark several dots on the flyleaf of the book on his lap. 'Consider this, Daisy. If I read the temperature of the air at various moments of time - say, on every hour, then I can draw a line between them that marks the change of temperature over that period.' He joined the points and held the graph up for her to see. 'Is that not a dimension on a piece of paper, just as, say, a map of the road from here to Oxford is?'

Daisy regarded his work doubtfully. 'I suppose it is,' she said at length.

'And does it not represent time, at least in this axis?' He drew his finger along the bottom of the line, and watched as the girl beside him nodded. 'And if we can represent the passage of time in this way, should we not be able to travel along that dimension, just as we can travel along a line between two other points - say, London and Oxford?'

'But we have no means of doing so,' she said.

He leaned forward. 'You are right, Daisy, but consider this. To travel the road of distance, which is one of the physical dimensions that we understand so clearly, you would use your feet, or perhaps a horse or carriage. That is what we humans are equipped to do. There was a time that we could not fly upwards, nor burrow downwards if we wished to travel along the road of thickness, if we consider that aspect to be such a dimension.' He paused, watching to see that she followed his argument, and then continued. 'But that has now changed. We can go upwards, now that balloons are available to us, and we have tunnels in which we can burrow under the ground - and I have no doubt that one day someone will develop a machine to go under the sea with us inside it.'

He leaned forward and flicked the firm grey ash of his cigar into a nearby ashtray. 'So the ability to move on these lines of dimension requires only the means to do so - an air machine or a submersible to conquer some of the physical dimensions, or....a time machine to move along the dimension of time.'

Daisy stared at him. 'But such a machine is impossible!'

He smiled. 'I thought so too, until I began to reason with the problem. And now I think I have it.'

'You mean, you have designed such a machine?'

He nodded, his eyes bright with excitement. 'Better than that. I have built one.'

'May I see it?'

The Professor shook his head. 'Tomorrow, Daisy. I am entertaining some gentlemen to dinner, and I wish to demonstrate what I have done. Please make sure that you are present in the room after the meal, for I would like you to hear what is said and to see what I will show them,' and he would say no more on the issue, although Daisy was bursting with impatience to know what he had done.

And so it was, the following evening, that Daisy found herself waiting on a select group of the Professor's friends and colleagues in the cosy warmth of his dining room. She had met many of them before at previous occasions when they called to play cards or to share a glass, and she looked around the table. There was the Doctor, his round face beaming and his cheeks rosy with the flush of the wine he had drunk, and Filby to his right, his red hair shining in the flickering light of the fire and his eyes like those of a ferret - bright with intelligence and angry with disagreement. The Psychologist was there too, mopping his bald head with a spotted handkerchief and peering over the half moon glasses perched on his nose, and the Provincial Mayor, a sombre man not inclined to joviality. On the far side of the table were two new faces, a young man who said little; and another, who Daisy took to be some kind of reporter.

The meal was done and the plates were cleared, and the men leaned back in their chairs and sipped at their brandy. Soon the room was thick with the fragrance of cigar smoke and Daisy saw the Professor glance across at her. It was time.

'Gentlemen,' he said, waving his cigar expansively so that the tip glowed red with the passage of air. 'Aside from enjoying your erudite company, I asked you here this evening to discuss a project that I have been working on, and which I believe may be of some interest to you.'

Daisy could see the interest in their eyes, for the Professor was known for conversation that challenged the mind - particularly after good food and fine wine. She watched as they leaned forward, their eyes on his face as he spoke.

'You will need to follow me carefully,' he said, 'for I shall have to challenge one or two ideas that are seeped in acceptance.' He drew on his cigar for a moment, watching the faces around him. 'The geometry that you learned at at school, for example, does not fit with what I have discovered...'

She listened avidly as he took them to the idea of time as a fourth dimension, drawing out each point much as he had with her the day before. She could see that Filby was in disagreement with the principle but the Professor's logic was irrefutable, and the others were nodding in agreement, but without knowing where he was taking them. It was strange how the mood of the room was changing, she thought, from a jovial after dinner discussion to something more sinister, as if the Professor was challenging them.

At length the discussion reached a plateau, with the Doctor summing up the collective feeling of those present. 'I accept your thesis, Professor,' he said, 'that time could be regarded as a fourth dimension - although I see the whole thing as conceptual. You simply cannot move at all in time...you cannot get away from the present.'

'I agree,' said the Psychologist. 'You can move about in all physical directions of space, but you cannot move about in Time.'

Daisy leaned forward, watching the Professor's face. This was the point she had reached yesterday and it was now that he would reveal what he had done to disprove the argument.

'Ah,' said the Professor, smiling. 'That is the crux of my great discovery, and it shows that you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in time. Imagine for a moment you recall an event in the past: can you not go back in your mind to that instant? Some would call it absent-mindedness, but I jump back for a moment. Of course it is in your mind only, but I have transcended time - I am living that moment in the past. Suppose I was able to capture that ability in a physical sense...to transport the whole body rather than just the mind? To drift along the time-dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?'

'It's against reason,' said Filby. 'You can expound the concept as much as you like, but you will never convince me.'

'Possibly not,' said the Professor, 'but you begin to see the reasoning behind my work into the geometry of four dimensions - about a machine that would travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the driver decides -'

Filby laughed briefly, a short dismissive snort of contempt.

The Professor stopped abruptly and regarded him for a moment at the implied insult. 'I have experimental verification,' he said, quietly. 'I have built such a machine.'

'Then let us see it,' said the Psychologist, 'though it's all nonsense, you know.'

The Professor smiled at us and with his hands deep in his trouser pockets he walked slowly out of the room, and we heard his footsteps shuffling down the corridor to his laboratory.

Daisy listened to the conversation in his absence, which was dismissive, and she felt anger towards them. Filby, in particular, was drawing a parallel with a conjurer he had seen in Burslem, as if to imply that somehow the Professor was of that kind too, but he was interrupted by the door opening. The Professor appeared, holding a small object in his hand.

'So what do you have?' asked the Doctor.

The Professor approached an occasional table in front of the fire and set down a small metallic framework about the size of a clock on its polished surface. The others crowded around, looking down at it. Daisy could see that it was mostly made of brass, the metal gleaming like butter in the soft light of the fire. She observed that there was ivory in it too, as well as some transparent crystalline substance, and in its centre was a small saddle beside a lever that could move forward and back.

'This has taken two years to make,' said the Professor quietly. 'It is a small scale of one much bigger, but it works exactly the same way.' He leaned over the machine and pointed with his lean forefinger. 'This lever, being pressed forward, sends the machine into the future, or into the past if pulled back...and the saddle represents the seat of the larger machine.' He looked up at the circle of faces around him, then across at Daisy who was stood a little back from the others. 'In a moment I am going to press the lever and off the machine will go. It will vanish into future time...disappear. Now, have a good look at it, and satisfy yourselves that there is no trickery here. I don't want to waste my work and then be told that I'm a fraud.'

For a moment there was silence save for the crackling of the logs on the fire. None of the men moved, each staring down at the little machine as if it was about to make them disappear too. Daisy noticed that there was no joviality now - the mechanism on the table had drawn them into a spell, each of them was aware that something astonishing was about to happen, and that they were a part of it.

At length the Professor put his finger forward, almost touching the little lever. 'Now,' he said, 'watch carefully.' For a moment he held it there, and then said suddenly. 'No, let us use another.' He turned to the Psychologist and taking his hand he told him to extend his forefinger, and caused him to push the lever forward.

Daisy saw it all happen before her very eyes. There was a breath of wind in the room that caused the candles on the mantelpiece to flicker, and one of them to extinguish. The little machine seemed to rise briefly off the table and to swing around, and then it became indistinct, as a watercolour painting might look if doused in water. The crisp outline of its framework became blurred and then flickered once, affording a brief flash of crystal and brass and ivory; and then it was gone, leaving the surface of the table empty.

There was absolute silence in the room for perhaps a minute, and then the Psychologist moved forward and leaned over the table, almost as if it was against his will, to look to the right and the left and eventually, underneath. 'Where did it go?' he asked.

The Professor smiled. 'As it told you, it has been sent into the future. It is traveling, if you like, along that line of the fourth dimension that we discussed.'

'How far? Will we ever see it again?' the Doctor interjected.

The professor turned towards him. 'I doubt it, Sir,' he said. 'The machine will move forward for as long as the lever is pressed forward, and there is nothing to change that as it has no pilot.' He paused for a moment, thinking. 'I rather think that it is destined to move on until there is simply nothing left of this earth...until the end of time, if that doesn't sound too melodramatic.'

There was a clamour of voices, of questions, eager and shrill, and he held up both hands to forestall them. 'Gentlemen! Please! I understand that you have questions and I will do my best to answer them, but first let us sit awhile and partake of a cigar and perhaps a little Port.' He turned to Daisy. 'Would you mind, my dear?'

Daisy nodded, and moved quietly from the room. She could hear them talking still, their voices pitched high with excitement, and she smiled at how quickly they had turned from disbelievers to preachers. In her own mind she knew that what the Professor had done was exactly as he had said it was, and that it was something that would forever change the world in which she lived. She did not know how he had done it but she felt a strange contentment, for she would be a part of it from now on.

She hurried down the corridor to the kitchen, her mind in turmoil.

*****

Over the next few weeks Daisy was drawn increasingly into the Professor's trust, working with him on a full size replica of the machine. She could not understand the complexity of the physics that he had used to fathom out the concept, nor precisely how the device worked - but she became familiar with the construction of the machine, and with the concept of its operation. She questioned him constantly, building her knowledge with each answer.

'So how will time appear to you, if you are sitting in the machine traveling forward?' she asked one day, as they were grinding the fine filaments of rock salt to be fitted into the quartz rods behind the pilot's seat.

The Professor glanced up at her. 'That depends on how fast you are travelling' he said.

'In what way?'

'Imagine that you are in a theatre, Daisy, and that your seat is in this machine and the stage is what you can see from it.' He stopped working for a moment, brushing his hair back from his eyes with the back of his hand. 'In normal time, it may take a minute for a person to walk from one side of the stage to the other, but when you push the lever forward, everything on it will appear to speed up. If you apply the lever sparingly, the actors will appear to walk more quickly: and if you place the lever fully forward, they would move from one side to the other in a second, or perhaps less.' He thought about it for a moment. 'In fact, at full speed, a whole day and night may only take less than a second, just as if someone shone a strobe light at you, with each flicker representing a day.

'And when I stop the machine? What will happen then?'

'Then you will be injected into the time to which you have traveled. If the machine is stopped, so too will you - and you could alight from it and walk about, just as you could get up from your chair now and walk to the other side of this room.'

'And could I interact with the people of that time?'

He nodded. 'Of course.'

Daisy thought about it for a moment. 'Will the pilot be able to choose the exact time and place to which he will travel?'

The Professor resumed polishing the rock on which he had been working, and he smiled at her earnestness. 'The exact time, yes. He will be able to set the year, day, hour, minute and second here, on the control panel, by means of these counters. The machine will take him to them, slowing as it approaches the appointed moment so that it does not overshoot.' He stopped for a moment to allow himself time to peer along the length of the rod, to check for its alignment. 'So too will he be able to set the point at which he wishes to land, but means of these second counters -' he pointed briefly to blank holes in the control panel. 'But we have yet to fit them, Daisy.'

'And what of the past? Can I go back and change it?'

He regarded her thoughtfully. 'I assume you are talking figuratively, Daisy. I do not intend that you should travel in time - it is far too dangerous. As to your question, it is a good one, and none of us know the answer to it precisely. But let us think about it for a moment.' He closed his eyes briefly. 'Suppose I was to go back in time and kill my mother before she gave birth to me - what would become of me? Clearly I would not be born, and therefore I would not exist and therefore it would not be possible for me to go back and kill her.'

'So are you saying that you would disappear in the instant that you killed her?'

'No, Daisy. Because if I was not born, I would not exist and I could not sit here contemplating the murder of my mother...but I am here.' He smiled at her. 'It is a conundrum, is it not? I suspect that the answer to your question is more complex.' He was silent for a while, and Daisy could see him thinking as he polished the glittering crystal in his hand. At length he turned to her again. 'One answer might be this, Daisy. I see no reason why we cannot go back and interact with the past as we see fit - but it will change nothing.'

'What do you mean, Professor?'

'Well, to use my example. Suppose I do go back, and I kill the woman I think was to be my mother. She is dead and she cannot give birth to me, but I am here nonetheless. What does that tell you?'

Daisy thought about it for a moment. 'The only conclusion is that she was not your mother.'

'Exactly. Despite what we do, what will happen in the future will happen. In fact, what we do when we travel will become a feature of that time, and everything that happens after it will take it into account...we will actually change nothing.'

'So every aspect of our life is pre-destined?'

He shrugged. 'Not necessarily. But what happens, whether it is because of the events of the time or because someone has traveled to that time and tried to change things, will happen, and it will be part of the destiny of that moment.' He looked at her briefly. 'These are weighty concepts, Daisy, and perhaps it is best if we don't dwell on the notion that we can change things...I am convinced we cannot.' He leaned forward and carefully slid the crystal that he had been polishing into the quartz tube on the main console. 'Ah, look at that!' he exclaimed. 'A perfect fit!'

Daisy handed him the crystal that she had been polishing. 'Would this do as well?' she asked.

He leaned over and measured it against the tube opposite his own. 'Almost. Just a little more and I think it will be done.' He handed it back to her and their fingers touched, a moment of intimacy before he stood back and regarded the machine. 'Another few days, Daisy, and it will be ready.'

*

That night Daisy dreamed of Rory again, as she did more and more often. She was looking back from the high wooden seat of the Dray, feeling the pull of the reigns as the two horses bucked and fought in their traces, rearing up in unexpected terror. She could see Rory lying in the mud on his back, his lower legs twisted at an impossible angle and his pale face framed by the thick black treacle of the mud. She heard her own voice screaming in terror and she saw the two barrels tumbling through the air as if in slow motion, and she saw his naked fear as he comprehended his death. She scrambled down from the seat and ran to him, her legs stumbling through earth as thick and cloying as cold tar, and she lifted his head to wipe the bright blood from his mouth and to scream his name into the empty blue sky. His eyes were on hers and his expression was of intense sadness, and he tried to speak but the effort was too great.