In Bed With Lord Byron by Deborah Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

ready to sign by then. Great – just what I was in the mood for. At the bottom of the Post-it she had added,
Have you replied to Dr Schwartzman yet? Plse thank him
for the time m. and say I am away on business but will be in touch soon – or he may start ringing the office in his persistent manner. And plse sort the time m. out.
    Well, I figured that getting on with things would help me to blot out Anthony and hide from reality. I found the letter that had come with the machine and reread the first page:
    My dear Kay,
    As you know, ten years ago people laughed at me when I first proposed that I would be able to build a time machine that worked. You were one of the few professionals who defended me at
     that dreadful conference in Berlin (oh Kay, I have not forgotten the week we spent there!) and saved me from losing my tenure. Now, ten years on, the fools are finally coming round. But they
     ought to have come round fifty years ago. It is simply absurd that they should stick to their outdated Newtonian beliefs that time is straight and uniform and never deviates and always flows
     at the same rate. For God’s sake – Einstein pointed out that this is quite untrue: time meanders, speeds up and slows down around stars and galaxies. And in 1937 W.J. Stockum took
     an infinitely long cylinder that was spinning like a maypole and found that if you danced around it you would come back before you had left . . .
    As the letter went on, it became more and more technical, with references to wormholes and negative energy and collapsing plates causing zero energy, not to mention the pages and pages of
equations that followed, interspersed here and there with romantic remarks such as ‘Oh, kiss me, Kay’ or ‘How I long for your rosebud lips’, which was rather incongruous but
touching all the same.
    The time machine box was still taking up a huge patch of space on the other side of the room. I went over to it, curiously pulling out the parts.
    As a child, I had always enjoyed doing puzzles, and on the Tube home I regularly tackled the
Daily Telegraph
crossword. There is something satisfying about solving puzzles –
everything resolved by logic, not too much patience required, and the joy of a neat conclusion: order created from disorder. Now I spread the instructions on the carpet and laid out all the pieces
around me, feeling a little like a mechanic about to work on a car.
    Hours must have passed, and finally it was assembled.
    It certainly didn’t look how I had imagined a time machine should look. Nothing
Dr Who
about it. Nor was it like the machines in movie adaptations of H.G. Wells’ book: huge,
grand, gold-plated things with wings and fancy gadgets. In terms of gadgets, this was pretty shabby: a digital timer where you punched in the date which looked as if it had been detached from a
large egg-timer; and a gear shift which had once lived in a Ford Fiesta. As had the leather seat, with its detachable sheepskin cover. I couldn’t help thinking that as a whole the machine
looked like one of those buggies old people rumble about in – small, squat, cream-coloured, with rather thin perspex glass. Still. Don’t judge a book by its cover and all that.
    I heard approaching footsteps and jumped. I suddenly realised that the whole morning had gone by and Dr Merrick was back. I also realised – with a sinking of my heart – that I had
managed to forget Anthony. Now my grief returned in a fresh wash of grey.
    ‘Well, Lucy, have you finished those letters—’ Dr Merrick stopped short. ‘Goodness. Well, goodness me. This isn’t
quite
what I was expecting,’ she
added, but her tone was intrigued.
    ‘D’you think it could really work?’ I cried. ‘I mean – the letter was quite convincing, though I’m still not sure if I can make out what a wormhole
is.’
    ‘A wormhole is a term used by physicists,’ Dr Merrick murmured, inspecting the machine closely. ‘A mathematician called Rob Kerr found that a