«Ignore that! Do you at last understand?»
«Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!»
«No, a future brave with motion, 'tween my legs. You have come a long way, Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?»
«Well,» said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. «Ah,» he said.
«Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!»
«But.. .» said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back, alarmed. «What have I done!» he cried.
Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. «Your presence is known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic.»
And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.
«There they are!» someone cried.
«Have you come to take him away?» someone else shouted.
«Yah» echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.
Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, «Yes. I will take him away!» And turned back to the old man.
«Take me where, Doctor?» whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.
«One moment!» cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs. «Let me think.»
Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then massaging his brow for rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.
«I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers, to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them.»
«What, what, Doctor?»
«Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .
«To what purpose?»
«Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you spoke of at some future time!»
«The road, the path, the surface?»
«The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmigod, for all your needs!»
«Needs?»
«Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!»
«Oh, dear God,» murmured Wetherby, «why didn't I think?»
«If you had you would've been too shy to ask!»
«The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!»
And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.
«Don't cry,» said Dr. Goff.
«I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?»
«My good man, here's my hand!»
They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.
«The excitement will kill me,» said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.
«No better way to die! Tomorrow night?»
«But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?»
«If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off.»
«Be careful downhill.»
«Careful.»
Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said:
«Did you see the lunatic?»
«I did.»
«Will you take him to a madhouse?»
«Yes. Asylum.» Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. «Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!»
«Good!» said all as he passed.
«Grand,» said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.
And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?
Dr. Goff snorted.
«Think on it,» he said, half aloud, «no more horses, no
more manure! Think!»
And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.
At the End of the Ninth Year
1995 year
«Well,» said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, «here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year.»
Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journal saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. «What?»
«I said,» said Sheila, «the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore.»
Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said:
«Not married?»
«No, that was another time, another body, another me.» She buttered more toast and munched on it philosophically.
«Hold on!» He took a stiff jolt of coffee. «Explain.»
«Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-«
«Oh, get to it,» he grumbled. «The point, wife, the point!»
«The point, dear Tom,» she replied, finishing her toast, «is that with this breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is not the woman you married-«
«I have often said that!»
«Be serious.»
«Are you?» he said.
«Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Saturday nine years ago this very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the Journal. The other, now that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!»
She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.
«Wait!» He gave himself another jolt of coffee. «Where are you going?»
Hallway to the door, she said, «Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!»
«Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!»
She hesitated as he assumed his lion-tamer's voice. «Dammit. You owe me an explanation. Sit!»
She turned slowly. «For only as long as it takes to draw a picture.»
«Draw it, then. Sit!»
She came to stare at her plate. «I seem to have eaten everything in sight.»
He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it in front of her.
«There.! Speak with your mouth full.»
She forked in the eggs. «You do see what I'm driving at, don't you, Tomasino?»
«Damnation! I thought you were happy!»
«Yes, but not incredibly happy.»
«That's for maniacs on their honeymoons!»
«Yes, wasn't it?» she remembered.
«That was then, this is now. Well?»
«I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin prickle, my pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone mad in the mirror.»
«All right, all right!» He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the slops from the saucer. «Sum it up!»