OF COURSE the fellow was foolish to leave his notebook sticking out six or seven inches into the passage between the tables. It was reasonably natural that, laden with a cup of coffee and a plate of ham rolls, I should move the thing with the tail of my jacket—perfectly natural that the long book should recede and push over, in its turn, his coffee. The fault was not altogether mine. I said I was sorry: a cloth was promptly obtained from the waitress, his sleeve was wiped, the table was wiped, even the infernal note-book was somehow cleaned up. And not a word of comment did I get from him! He ignored me.
‘Cambridge manners, I suppose,’ I grumbled loudly to the King’s man who was with me. ‘After all, he left the book sticking out. And I did what I could.’
‘What can one say, Travis, when some careless lout spills hot coffee on one’s pet jacket? He is righteously angry, and so should I be.’
‘He could open his lips on the odd syllable.’
‘The only possible answers would be false. “It’s nothing”—when it’s plainly maddening! “Don’t worry”—when you very properly should worry! My suggestion is another café.’
‘Darned if I move. You all right now, sir?’ I inquired again, but the fellow just smoothed back the offending note-book and immersed himself in some lather of chemistry symbols.
A bearded young man was sitting beside him: you know the kind, with a cherubic face, recently attained black whiskers, and suede shoes. Later in the day this Beard stepped up to me as I was walking through Trinity, and said:
‘I am sorry you were puzzled by my friend this morning. He couldn’t answer in English, as a matter of fact. He is Russian.’
Utter idiocy must have shown in my face. ‘Bless me! I never thought of his being foreign. Pray offer my apologies again, will you?’ My congenital rudeness reasserted itself a little. ‘I should have thought it possible to smile, though, in any language.’
‘Samoylenko never smiles; he hardly ever talks. Eternally lost in calculations is our Grigory Daviditch. They all are. I speak Russian pretty well, but the accomplishment is wasted on my sombre team.’
‘Team?’
He gave me his whimsical glance. ‘A team of research workers. We live on the Trumpington Road—very austere, very serious, up to marvellous things in the Russian language. But, oh dear! oh dear! How I sigh for a bit of English flippancy at times!’
He offered me a cigarette. ‘You at the University?’ he then asked.
‘No. I am a musician. I do some coaching here and there, to eke out a miserable income. No one will play anything I have written. To be frank,’ I laughed, ‘the only public performances of my work have taken place at the “Dorothy”—where I used to play the piano whilst everyone else ate sausages and chips.’
The Beard became very nice, sympathetic. A friendly hand strayed in my direction. ‘Horrible for you.’
‘Not a bit. Quite funny at times. I remember ploughing through a very recondite Passacaglia I had written, whilst a Girton girl was raising a shindy about some meat. Up came the manageress, on went the Passacaglia. Voices rose, the more inept passages of my masterpiece were mercifully drowned. “Oh, play something cheerful a moment, Mister,” the manageress snapped—and I modulated into Carmen.’
My companion went into peals of delightfully young laughter.
‘We—we ought to meet now and then, in the intervals between work,’ he said at the end of it.
‘You think I should supply the bit of English flippancy?’
‘Well, you are certainly English enough.’
‘Foolish enough?’
‘Shall we leave it at “sufficiently gay”?’
‘Feather-headed? A light-weight?’
‘I should not be so discourteous as to think so.’
‘Thank you. I am reputed to be rather moody. A string quartet I play for calls me Dismal Dan.’
‘You don’t look dismal today.’
My glance roved about the court of Trinity in which we were standing. Leaves had turned to the red of October on the lovely old walls, the tree in the central lawn was full of chattering birds, a very blue sky capped the grey stone.
‘Who could be gloomy—in such a setting?’
‘If you were brooding on a composition, I suppose you could. But I spoke of the intervals between our respective work.’
‘You—you are a research chemist?’
‘Mathematics are my game. I love the rhythm of them.’
‘Ha! Then I am no fit companion for you. I invariably get two or three different answers to the simplest sum, and choose the one I fancy most.’
He persisted, in the most complimentary way. ‘What does that prove? I never progressed beyond five-finger exercises on the piano.’
There was a happy pause. We looked at each other more closely. He had pleasant grey eyes, above the beard.
‘If you have time for a brief stroll now——’ he said.
‘Quarter of an hour, to be exact. I have a rehearsal to take at four-thirty here.’
‘Good. Good.’ He led the way over Trinity Bridge and along the path by the Cam, where golden willows dipped their last leaves towards the water, the glory of St John’s closing our vista with its towers and great gateway and crimson creeper.
I left both direction and subject to him, and his conversation was—well, surprising. ‘Have you seen anything of the people from Mars yet, Mr—Mr——’
‘Travis. Mark Travis is my name.’
‘Mine is Jones, the largest family in Britain—just plain Fred Jones. I asked you about the folk from Mars because it happens that we have some of them here, in Cambridge.’
‘Martians? The creatures who scared the breath out of me for most of my boyhood?’
‘Yes. Tchelkalov had them up, to check on some calculations. They are not at all terrifying, really. The blue skin and the fuzzy hair alienate you for a time, but you get used to the eight fingers on each hand and the lack of ears.’
‘Do you?’ I exploded. ‘I jolly well shouldn’t! Just think of what they could do to a keyboard, with sixteen fingers.’
‘They have no sense of music at all, being deaf to terrestrial sound——’
‘Ugh,’ I grunted. ‘Worse and worse. I saw those Martian scientists on TV and switched off after a few minutes. People from the different planets were not meant to mingle.’
‘Nonsense, Travis—ignorant musicians’ drivel,’ plain Fred Jones retorted. ‘You might as well say people from the different continents should not mingle——’
‘No, I won’t. Oh no, I shall not. It can be agreed that I have a brain the size of a walnut, but I see no good coming of all these interplanetary chats and visits and exchanges. On the day when half our civilization stopped work to hear messages from the first men to land on the Moon I was delighted, absolutely overjoyed, to learn that our satellite is uninhabited.’
My companion indulged again his youthful laughter. ‘Weren’t you even sorry to learn that the Moon is not made of green cheese?’
‘It pleases you to be humorous, Mr Jones,’ I said severely. ‘But whatever does your Mr Chelly—Chelka——’
‘Mr Tchelkalov.’
‘Whatever does your Khrushchev Minor want from Martians in quiet little Cambridge? Can’t he do his own sums?’
We had been strolling slowly and turned at the water-cutting between John’s and Trinity because my watch showed the nearness of four-thirty.
He laid a hand upon my arm. ‘Now I can scarcely tell you everything at a first meeting, can I, Beethoven Minor? You must come out to Trumpington and see for yourself one day.’
‘With Martians round the teapot? No thank you.’
He sighed his suffering. ‘Travis, you must emerge from the age of Mozart and Haydn. When our first ships got to Mars we could not avoid courteous relations with the people of that planet. Remember the hordes of circular ships which descended upon us after our visit: two-way traffic had been established, and most of our ideas are being revolutionized. Now Tchelkalov has found a method whereby——’
The minute hand of my watch was poised firmly upon four-thirty.
‘I must fly!’ I cried. ‘Tell me in a word what Tchelkalov is up to. We can discuss it more fully tomorrow.’
‘In a word? In a thousand words? Impossible. I can assure you that the great Russian has a mathematical conception which will astound humanity and Martians alike. Good-bye! Good-bye! See you here at the same time tomorrow.’
I was suddenly and enormously excited. The man’s enthusiasm had at last penetrated my doltishness. As I ran to get to the piano in Goff’s study my brain was rioting with pictures of the possibilities on other planets. My fingers began to roll through Bach’s grand periods, but my mind was in outer Space, lost amid stars and comets and asteroids, horrified by ghastly gulfs of nothingness, then entranced by visions of alien worlds, queer people, flowers and trees and skies unlike anything seen by plain, ordinary humanity.
All night I dreamed of those things, and I awoke convinced that plain Fred Jones’ ‘Russian team’ was planning an expedition into far regions and that somehow I was fated to accompany them. No doubt that is the artist’s temperament: one minute he is dull, the next he has sprung to extreme awareness.
‘Which planet are you aiming for?’ I demanded the instant Jones and I met on the second afternoon.
The beard gave an effect of curling in astonishment. ‘Planet? I did not speak of travelling, did I?’
‘But the Martian checking of figures, the startling new——’
He threw up both arms in despair. ‘I say! I say! You have come out of the age of Mozart and Haydn in a hurry!’
‘And the age of Elgar, too—not to mention Bartok and Rubbra and Mludu Shran! I am with you in all this. I want to meet the great Mr Tchelkalov.’
‘Do you—oh, do you? The redoubtable Mr Tchelkalov is one of the most elusive men in the world to meet. You might come to Trumpington half a score of times and never see him. He just sits and sits—and sleeps at night—in his study. Even when you meet him he hasn’t a word of English.’
‘What is he doing? What are you all doing, plain Fred Jones? The bit you told me yesterday was enough to intrigue a brass trumpet.’
‘Figures, you know—astronomical calculations. How far do you think the planet Saturn is from the Earth?’
‘A very respectable distance, I am told.’
‘Roughly it is seven hundred and ninety-three million miles away, to use the layman’s method of calculation. The sun itself is only ninety-three million miles away from us.’
My face took on, I am sure, the bovine look customary when immense figures are quoted. ‘It was never my intention to spend a holiday on either,’ I remarked with what I am informed is my incurable facetiousness.
‘But it is our intention. Our team proposes to visit the planet Saturn.’
Not being altogether an idiot I replied: ‘But surely it would take a lifetime—even several lifetimes—to cover seven hundred and ninety-three million miles. The successful expedition to Mars was a doddle against that!’
He nodded delightedly. ‘Yes. Even the Martians told us the thing is impossible.’
‘Have you a new fuel, the use of some natural force, perhaps, to carry you at incredible speeds? How will the human frame stand up to them?’
‘Quite easily. We are not going to travel in that way at all, or at least, very briefly. Tchelkalov experiments with a method of progressing through Time.’
‘TIME?’ I cried. ‘Oh come: we have all read Wells’ book about the Time Machine—a jolly good yarn—but is it possible to create a thing like that? You haven’t an Invisible Man round the corner, I hope, or a tin of the Food of the Gods?’
We were walking past the Fitzwilliam Museum as I spoke, and Jones waved his cigarette towards it. ‘I could show you a hundred things in there,’ he said, ‘which would prove the practicability of time travelling. But the brilliant H. G. Wells made one big mistake in his guess: his Time Traveller returned to the laboratory from which he started—which is an impossibility.’
‘Yes? How?’
‘It happens, Travis, that the Earth would be moving all the days he was away. When he returned to his own time the Earth would have left that particular point in Space, and he would have found himself floating in the void.’
My ignorant impulse to argue could not be resisted. ‘Yet if Wells’ Time Traveller returned to his own time he’d have gone back to the day when the Earth still was at that “point in Space”.’
‘Actual calculation now proves that wrong,’ the bearded youth answered. ‘He made a physical journey, took along his body with him, his clothes, the things in his pockets, not to mention a largish machine. Therefore he was subject to physical laws. And those laws spun the Earth away. Wells provided no means of moving in space as well as time. Tchelkalov is busy doing that very thing now. The astronomical calculations involved are——’
He gesticulated with a gloved hand.
I noticed that we were walking steadily out towards Trumpington and a queer horror touched me. ‘You are not going out of the body, or anything mystical like that?’ I gasped.
Plain Fred Jones reassured me with a smile. ‘There is nothing whatever mystical about Tchelka,’ he said. ‘Good firm fact is his medium—always.’
‘Gasps of relief!’ I said. ‘Now tell me what all this has to do with the planet Saturn.’
‘It concerns the impossible distance, to begin with. You are perfectly right in s. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
