To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis Read Free Book Online

Finch, where is she?”
    “In London. She just phoned from the Royal Free.”
    I started up out of the chair.
    “I told her there’d been a mistake in communications,” Finch said, “that Mr. Henry’d been taken to the Royal Masonic.”
    “Good. Ring up the Royal Masonic and tell them to keep her there.”
    “I’ve already done so,” Finch said.
    “Excellent,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Sit down, Ned. Where was I?”
    “Lady Windermere’s fan,” Finch said.
    “Only it wasn’t a fan the historian brought through the net,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “It was—”
    “Did you say brought through the net?” I said. “You can’t bring anything through the net from the past. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”
    “Apparently not,” Mr. Dunworthy said.
    There was a scuffling sound in the outer office. “I thought you said she was at the Royal Free,” Mr. Dunworthy said to Finch, and a short, harried-looking man burst in. He was wearing a lab coat and carrying a bleeping handheld, and I recognized him as the head of Time Travel.
    “Oh, good, you’re here, Mr. Chiswick,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I want to talk to you about an incident concerning—”
    “And I want to talk to you about Lady Schrapnell,” Chiswick said. “The woman’s completely out of control. She pages me night and day, wanting to know why we can’t send people more than once to the same time and place, why we can’t process more drops per hour even though she has systematically stripped me of my research staff and my net staff and sent them running all over the past looking at almsboxes and analyzing flying buttresses.” He waved the bleeping handheld. “That’s her now. She’s paged me six times in the last hour, demanding to know where one of her missing historians is! Time Travel agreed to this project because of the opportunity the money afforded us to advance our research into temporal theory, but that research has come to a complete stop. She’s appropriated half my labs for her artisans, and tied up every computer in the science area.”
    He stopped to punch keys on the still bleeping handheld, and Mr. Dunworthy took the opportunity to say, “The theory of time travel is what I wanted to discuss with you. One of my historians—”
    Chiswick wasn’t listening. The handheld had stopped bleeping, and now it was spitting out inch upon inch of paper. “Look at this!” he said, tearing off a foot and brandishing it before Mr. Dunworthy. “She wants me to have one of my staff telephone every hospital in the greater London area and find this missing historian of hers. Henry, his name is, Ned Henry. One of my staff. I don’t have any staff! She’s taken every single one of them except Lewis, and she tried to take him! Luckily, he—”
    Mr. Dunworthy broke in. “What would happen if an historian brought something from the past forward through the net?”
    “Did she ask you that?” he said. “Of course she did. She’s gotten it into her head to have this bishop’s bird stump she’s so obsessed with if she has to go back in time and steal it. I’ve told her and told her, bringing anything from the past to the present would violate the laws of the space-time continuum, and do you know what she said? ‘Laws are made to be broken.’ ”
    He swept on, unchecked, and Mr. Dunworthy leaned back in his desk chair, took off his spectacles, and examined them thoughtfully.
    “I tried to explain to her,” Chiswick said, “that the laws of physics aren’t mere rules or regulations, that they’re laws, and that the breaking of them would result in disastrous consequences.”
    “What sort of disastrous consequences?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
    “That is impossible to predict. The space-time continuum is a chaotic system, in which every event is connected to every other in elaborate, nonlinear ways that make prediction impossible. Bringing an object forward through time would create a parachronistic incongruity. At best, the incongruity