Trouble is, when you start getting to my age, which, as I think I mentioned earlier, is a somewhat startling one — did I say that?»
«Yes, you did mention it.»
«Good. I'd forgotten whether I had or not. The thing is that your memory doesn't actually get any bigger, and a lot of stuff just falls out. So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I've forgotten.
And after a while you even forget what it is you've forgotten, and after that you even forget that there was something to remember. Then you tend to forget, er, what it was you were talking about.»
He stared helplessly at the teapot.
«Things you remember…» prompted Richard gently.
«Smells and earrings.»
«I beg your pardon?»
«Those are things that linger for some reason,» said Reg, shaking his head in a puzzled way. He sat down suddenly. «The earrings that Queen Victoria wore on her Silver Jubilee. Quite startling objects.
Toned down in the pictures of the period, of course. The smell of the streets before there were cars in them. Hard to say which was worse.
That's why Cleopatra remains so vividly in the memory, of course. A quite devastating combination of earrings and smell. I think that will probably be the last thing that remains when all else has finally fled.
I shall sit alone in a darkened room, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything but a little grey old head, and in that little grey old head a peculiar vision of hideous blue and gold dangling things flashing in the light, and the smell of sweat, catfood and death. I wonder what I shall make of it…»
Dirk was scarcely breathing as he began to move slowly round the room, gently brushing his fingertips over the walls, the sofa, the table.
«How long,» he said, «has this been» —
«Here?» said Reg. «Just about two hundred years. Ever since I retired.»
«Retired from what?»
«Search me. Must have been something pretty good, though, what do you think?»
«You mean you've been in this same set of rooms here for… two hundred years?» murmured Richard. «You'd think someone would notice, or think it was odd.»
«Oh, that's one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,» said Reg, «everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we'd be here till Christmas. Svlad, er — Dirk, my dear fellow, please don't touch that just at the moment.»
Dirk's hand was reaching out to touch the abacus standing on its own on the only clear spot on the big table.
«What is it?» said Dirk sharply.
«It's just what it looks like, an old wooden abacus,» said Reg.
«I'll show you in a moment, but first I must congratulate you on your powers of perception. May I ask how you arrived at the solution?»
«I have to admit,» said Dirk with rare humility, «that I did not. In the end I asked a child. I told him the story of the trick and asked him how he thought it had been done, and he said and I quote, „It's bleedin' obvious, innit, he must've 'ad a bleedin' time machine“. I thanked the little fellow and gave him a shilling for his trouble. He kicked me rather sharply on the shin and went about his business. But he was the one who solved it. My only contribution to the matter was to see that he must be right. He had even saved me the bother of kicking myself.»
«But you had the perception to think of asking a child,» said Reg.
«Well then, I congratulate you on that instead.»
Dirk was still eyeing the abacus suspiciously.
«How… does it work?» he said, trying to make it sound like a casual enquiry.
«Well, it's really terribly simple,» said Reg, «it works any way you want it to. You see, the computer that runs it is a rather advanced one. In fact it is more powerful than the sum total of all the computers on this planet including — and this is the tricky part — including itself. Never really understood that bit myself, to be honest with you. But over ninety-five per cent of that power is used in simply understanding what it is you want it to do. I simply plonk my abacus down there and it understands the way I use it. I think I must have been brought up to use an abacus when I was a… well, a child, I suppose.
Richard, for instance, would probably want to use his own personal computer. If you put it down there, where the abacus is the machine's computer would simple take charge of it and offer you lots of nice user-friendly time-travel applications complete with pull-down menus and desk accessories if you like. Except that you point to 1066 on the screen and you've got the Battle of Hastings going on outside your door, er, if that's the sort of thing you're interested in.»
Reg's tone of voice suggested that his own interests lay in other areas.
«It's, er, really quite fun in its way,» he concluded. «Certainly better than television and a great deal easier to use than a video recorder. If I miss a programme I just pop back in time and watch it.
I'm hopeless fiddling with all those buttons.»
Dirk reacted to this revelation with horror.
«You have a time machine and you use it for… watching television?»
«Well, I wouldn't use it at all if I could get the hang of the video recorder. It's a very delicate business, time travel, you know. Full of appalling traps and dangers, if you should change the wrong thing in the past, you could entirely disrupt the course of history.
Plus, of course, it mucks up the telephone. I'm sorry,» he said to Richard a little sheepishly, «that you were unable to phone your young lady last night. There seems to be something fundamentally inexplicable about the British telephone system, and my time machine doesn't like it. There's never any problem with the plumbing, the electricity, or even the gas. The connection interfaces are taken care of at some quantum level I don't entirely understand, and it's never been a problem.
The phone on the other hand is definitely a problem. Every time I use the time machine, which is, of course, hardly at all, partly because of this very problem with the phone, the phone goes haywire and I have to get some lout from the phone company to come and fix it, and he starts asking stupid questions the answers to which he has no hope of understanding.
Anyway, the point is that I have a very strict rule that I must not change anything in the past at all» — Reg sighed — «whatever the temptation.»
«What temptation?» said Dirk, sharply.
«Oh, it's just a little, er, thing I'm interested in,» said Reg, vaguely, «it is perfectly harmless because I stick very strictly to the rule. It makes me sad, though.»
«But you broke your own rule!» insisted Dirk. «Last night! You changed something in the past» —
«Well, yes,» said Reg, a little uncomfortably, «but that was different. Very different. If you had seen the look on the poor child's face. So miserable. She thought the world should be a marvellous place, and all those appalling old dons were pouring their withering scorn on her just because it wasn't marvellous for them anymore.
I mean,» he added, appealing to Richard, «remember Cawley. What a bloodless old goat. Someone should get some humanity into him even if they have to knock it in with a brick. No, that was perfectly justifiable. Otherwise, I make it a very strict rule» —
Richard looked at him with dawning recognition of something.
«Reg,» he said politely, «may I give you a little advice?»
«Of course you may, my dear fellow, I should adore you to,» said Reg.
«If our mutual friend here offers to take you for a stroll along the banks of the River Cam, don't go.»
«What on earth do you mean?»
«He means,» said Dirk earnestly, «that he thinks there may be something a little disproportionate between what you actually did, and your stated reasons for doing it.»