Pauline Ashwell: Time's Revenge

“Not very much,” I said cautiously.

“Well, around that time the ruler, Polykrates, had tried to get rid of some… er… dissidents, by shipping them off to visit Cambyses—ostensibly as a sort of embassy, but actually carrying a letter which asked Camybses to have them all put to death. However, they were cannier than he expected; opened the letter on the way and turned back, intending to take Samos over. They didn’t succeed; Polykrats and his mercenary troops were too much for them; but for some hours there was a running battle going on in the lower town and that was what we’d heard. It’s all on record, of course, but nobody gives the dates; and historians’ best guess was that it had all happened the year before.

“Theodoros had been working on the statue out of doors, so that the clay would dry sooner. When the row started his first idea was to get it into the workshop. It was standing on a large board, which was moved about on rollers; but it was an awkward thing to shift—the ground wasn’t exactly level and every time it hit a bump somebody had to steady the figure in case it toppled—I did it a couple of times myself. However we got it inside, and Theodoros barred the doors—with all of us still in there; it didn’t seem a good idea to be left outside. Theodoros just settled down to make sketches of the model from various angles, and the assistants started a dice game in one comer, and I… just wandered around. In a couple of hours the noise stopped, and after another half an hour somebody went out and found all quiet, and by then it was getting on for sunset, so we all went home.

“No trouble, in fact, so far as I was concerned, except that I’d been carrying my E.T.T. in my hand, as a precaution, and—”

“Your what?” I interrupted.

“My—oh. E.T.T.—for Emergency Trans-Temporator. It’s a safety device. If things go seriously wrong and we can’t get to an interface—” He stopped, pulled at his beard, and started again.

“Did I explain that my… er… base of operations is in another universe? Not one of these parallel affairs people write about. It’s a kind of offshoot of this one, but independent—with its own dimensions of space and time. We can set up an interface between it and this one at any place-time we choose, and go through; but that can only be done from the other side—my home side, I mean. We don’t have the… er… machinery in this Universe.

“The usual practice is to set up two or three interfaces, beside recognisable landmarks, so that if for some reason one of them can’t be reached we have an alternative. The E.T.T. is only for use in really urgent danger. It’s always carried, when one of us is in the Main Continuum. It’s quite small, about an inch long and weighing a couple of ounces—but not primed unless there’s likely to be serious trouble. Once it’s been primed a simple twist of the activator will take you straight back to base. You disappear, in fact, with a loud pop—that’s the air rushing in to fill the space.”

“Startling for bystanders,” I said.

“Exactly. That’s one reason why we don’t use the thing if we can possibly help it. The other is that being shot from one universe to another is unpleasant and rather dangerous. One or two people have arrived dead—asphyxiated. We’re warned to take a deep breath before using the thing and to hyperventilate if we have time, but in an emergency people sometimes forget.”

I found that I had taken a deep breath myself and was holding on to it. I let it go, feeling foolish, and said, “Did you say you’d lost the thing?”

“Absolutely. I remembered taking it out and priming it, soon after the noise started, and then holding it in my fist… and then I suppose I forgot about it and let it drop… Oh, don’t worry. Theodoros won’t suddenly find himself in another universe, even if he were to pick it up and fiddle with it. It won’t work for anybody else. It’s sensitized to the chemistry of my skin.”

“Yes, but what happens if you get into real danger and haven’t got it?”

“Oh, I picked up another one. It was a nuisance—I had to spend two days at… er… base, waiting for it to be ready. Then I decided to attend to various matters in this placetime before returning to Samos. I’d spent nearly nine months in various parts of the sixth century B.C.: and I felt like a change…”

The Time Traveler left soon afterwards and I sat in my nice conventional suburban sitting room, contemplating the armchair from which he had just risen and wondering whether the whole episode had been a dream…

A week or so later, however, he dropped in again. Fortunately, although Harold had returned from his latest business trip, he was not at home at the time. It was then that I gave the Time Traveler a schedule of occasions when he could conveniently call on me; and he used it faithfully from that day on.

The arrangement had been in force for about a year and a half, so far as I was concerned. I gathered that in his lifetime the interval had been three or four times as long. He never looked any older to me; but on this occasion he looked tired, discouraged and down in the mouth. He flopped into his usual chair and sat there, staring at the carpet. I gave him a glass of his own whisky (the original bottle had been replaced several times) and asked what had gone wrong.

He uttered a sort of groan, pulled an envelope from his pocket, sorted through the photographs inside it and handed one across.

“Look at that,” he said.

In showed the figure of a woman, in polished bronze. She sat on a kind of throne, looking straight ahead—straight out of the picture. It was a most striking face; young, but formidable. The inlaid eyes with their brilliant white and dark irises were intimidatingly alive.

I remembered his first visit to me.

“This is your ‘Persephone,’ isn’t it?” I said.

He gave a miserable nod and sank his head in his hands.

I looked at the picture again. Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Yes, she looked like that. Now that I knew for sure, I could see other things in the face besides its power; traces of the young girl, Demeter’s daughter, picking flowers in the meadow from which Hades had snatched her into his dark chariot; memories of spring and summer in the world of the living, won for her by a mother who was also formidable in her way.

“Who was the model?” I asked.

“Oh, she was a hetaera. No marriageable girl would pose, and of course no married woman. Theodoros told me something of her history; she’d been stolen by bandits when she was twelve years old, and carried off to their stronghold in the mountains. About three years later the bandits became such a problem that the local lords got together to hunt them down. The men were killed fighting and the women sold as slaves. She was bought by a hetaera who took a fancy to her, had her taught to read and sing and play the lyre and the rest of their arts. The mistress died after a couple of years, killed by a jealous lover; the girl was enfranchised under her will. She became a hetaera herself, and worked her way up from the provinces to Samos. She wasn’t at the top of her profession—too outspoken and not flexible enough in accommodating herself to clients’ fantasies, but she was building up quite a reputation all the same.”

He had revived somewhat while he was speaking, but heaved a sigh and relapsed into gloom immediately when he stopped. I looked at the photograph and tried to assimilate what he had told me about the original. A story that seemed straight out of a classical bodice-ripper; and yet, looking at that face, entirely believable. Of course, Persephone also must have been a survivor, in her own way….

I roused myself to say, “So what went wrong?”