Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

He rested his arms on the oaken table and smiled.

There was an anguished pause.

One of the others present made bold to answer: “What are you proposing?”

“Something grand.” And he made no grand gesture to accompany his words; and this lack of a gesture served as the gesture itself, in the same way that an absence may more acutely define a presence and the depiction of the space around an object outline that object with awful clarity. There was a snuffling behind him and he nodded.

The eyes of the notables peered in that direction.

“Was it necessary to—”

“I am sorry to say that it was.” Moriarty was the only one who did not look back. “Because this city of yours is infested with heroes who are fools but inconvenient all the same; and although our chamber is difficult to enter without permission, it still takes only boldness and determination to bypass the other security measures and burst in upon us. One extra safeguard is not a bad thing. A last line of slobbering defence.”

“He has the girth of a Cerberus!”

“Yes, he does, rather.”

Yellow eyes shone weakly in the gloom and though they were a sickly hue, the beast itself was in robust health, a mass of blackness with the occasional gleam of tooth and sparkling chain of saliva, a drool consisting of prismatic pearls on a slimy cord that pooled at the front paws of the slavering bulk. Felt rather than seen or heard, the hound imposed its presence by increasing the pressure on the ambient shadows.

Moriarty had chained him to a bronze ring on the wall, which was the last reminder of days when Chaud-Mellé students rode horses to the college and stabled them in lecture theatres.

His existence was a magnetic anomaly in the room.

Attracting anxieties like iron filings.

“Most heroes who live here,” ventured an old fellow, “have been put in jail. I assert that one can be too cautious and that some precautions are a graver danger than the thing they avert.”

“I never saw a more malevolent beast,” said another.

“Barely a dog at all but a—”

Moriarty replied crisply, “He is a black Šarplaninac, a breed from the mountains of Albania, but this is unimportant. What I wish to discuss with you is the subject of profits through science.”

Only with glacial urgency did the attention of the attendees return to a contemplation of the business at hand, the plotting and planning of crimes to supplement their meagre academic salaries.

“I intend, gentlemen, to bend the fourth dimension to my will.”

“Time travel!” came the communal gasp.

“Of a special kind, yes.”

“But that is absurd and outrageous!”

Moriarty shrugged and his shrug demonstrated purer tedium than the widest yawn. It seemed to agree with the sentiment that had been expressed and yet despise it at the same time; and also to be weary of the contradiction. Everyone waited for him to speak but he was plainly in no rush. He drew the moment out by rubbing his jaw slowly.

Then he said, “Nonetheless, I have found a method.”

“A time machine? Surely not!”

Now he rubbed the nape of his neck, eyes shut.

His other hand was busy tapping the tip of his walking cane against the wooden floorboards, a gentle rhythm.

“Gentlemen, you are not amateurs, you are not beguiled by fantasies, I will never be able to trick you with words. Of course I am not talking about using a time machine in order to enhance our prospects. It would be useless for such a purpose. In fact, I have one with me and it has never been of any benefit at all. Permit me to demonstrate.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a thin silver spoon and a metal spring, then placed them on the table with an air of mock reverence and pushed the handle of the spoon into the spring so that the coils encircled it like the solidified orbits of agitated air molecules.

Then he stood straight and nodded benignly at nothing. “May I have your opinion, gentlemen?”

“ That is a time machine?”

“Not exactly.” He gazed sadly down at the conjoined objects. “But it might as well be, for it is no less effective than a real time machine and just as useful to us, which is to say, not at all.”

The murmuring was subdued but deeply unhappy.

“You jest with us, but why?”

Moriarty sighed. “Very well. If I must explain everything, then I shall. Were our little gathering to agree to employ a time machine in the evolution of our plans, we would have to invent the device ourselves, for I am utterly convinced that one does not exist elsewhere.”

He rocked on his heels and continued. “Pay attention now. Suppose a machine of this kind was actually developed. We rejoice at the belief we are free to create all sorts of havoc in the past, to manipulate events in previous ages in order to enhance our present prospects; but that assumption is a gross error; for the instant we attempt to propel the device against the flow of time our hopes fly apart. They disintegrate even as the body of the machine does, for its component parts have a personal history that is no less real than the history of the greater world in which they exist.

“Do you follow? The nuts and bolts, cogs and wires, all the elements that constitute the body and engine of the device only come into conjunction with each other at the instant when the contraption is created. Thus the time machine cannot be sent back to a time earlier than that, because the separate parts necessarily exist in different locations.

“So when a brave explorer mounts the vehicle and, gripping the lever resolutely in his hands with a faraway look in his eyes, shifts it into reverse, the vehicle must come to a halt at the precise time it was first completed. It cannot proceed any further backwards, because the parts that make it work will no longer be together but in the places they originally came from, the drawer of a junk room, the highest shelf of an electrician’s garage, the cellar of an ironmonger’s. They will be scattered.

“Thus to employ a time machine to travel a great distance backwards in time, for example, several centuries, we must construct the device and then wait for a length of time exactly equivalent to those centuries. Our maximum range into the past is only the moment when the machine was successfully completed. That is why this humble object on the table before you is, to all intents and purposes, a working time machine, for it is equally useless to us, equally incapable of taking us into the past.”

With the air of a lecturer who has rushed through a lesson in order to go to lunch early, Moriarty spread his arms.

They were offended, humiliated.

“So much for the past!” huffed one guest. “What about the future? A time machine could be used to facilitate illegal deeds in coming weeks. To anticipate stock market fluctuations and—”

“The future? Gentlemen, the future is overdue.”

There was a dull reverberation at the solid door that was the only entrance and exit from the chamber. It was an explosion but oddly muted, as if the entire force of the blast had gone into the body of the door and remained there. But the door swung open anyway.

The intruder lurched forward, regained balance.

His silk costume was so dark and so perfectly clean that it was plainly visible in the muddier gloom beyond the reach of the lamp above the table. The eyes behind the mask scanned the chamber, fixed on Moriarty, and the entire mask creased itself, powered by a hidden frown. “Here is the future,” said Moriarty theatrically. “A little late.”

The Bone of Contention took a determined step.

And the dog was on him.

The chain that held it to the bronze ring was long.

The lunge was horribly graceful.