The Devil's Mirror (9 page)

‘Graner,’ said Fairbank, ‘did they have movies during the Civil War period? Colour movies, at that?’

‘Very funny,’ said Graner. ‘That’s a film clip from some Hollywood epic. Raymond Massey or Henry Fonda or somebody.’

‘Really? You’ve made this period your specialty. You’re an expert, a recognised authority. The walls of your study are lined with Matthew Brady photographs. You, of all the men I know, should be able to tell the difference between a painted actor and...’

Fairbank’s finger touched the CLOSE-UP switch. The sad, bearded face filled the screen.

Graner slowly stood up. Softly, he spoke. ‘Good Lord. Good Lord, Fairbank. That’s no actor. No fake. That’s—why, he’s
saying
something! Can’t you get any
sound
, man?’ Temple, his eyes fixed to the lips of the bearded man, said:

‘“Four... score... and seven years... ago... ”’ Fairbank flipped a switch and the picture died.

‘
No!
’ cried Graner. ‘Don’t kill it!’

‘You can see it again,’ said Fairbank, ‘as often as you like. Longshot, close-up, slowed down, speeded up, frozen. I’m sorry about the lack of sound. That will have to be the next development. It’s been enough just mastering light.’

Fairbank turned away from Graner and addressed them all. ‘What
is
light? Waves of various lengths that travel very fast. 186,000 miles a second. Every schoolboy knows this. But what
happens
to light? Where does it go? Does it vanish? Dissipate like smoke? Change into something else? Or does it just... keep travelling? Of course, that’s exactly what it does.’

‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ said Father Mac.

‘I suppose it is. I’m sorry. Let me press on to something that isn’t elementary. Something every schoolboy
doesn’t
know. Something nobody knew or even suspected, until Thelma and I discovered it.’

He pointed upward. ‘Up there, thousands of miles above the surface of the Earth, is a strange phenomenon you have heard of, even though you are not physicists as I am. The Van Allen Belts. Shields of energy, solar electrons, cosmic albedo, encircling the world—their nature and properties but dimly understood. I know now that one of those properties is a kind of snare—a snare for light. The light that travels from our planet—and that means every visible happening—is trapped up there, just for an instant, before it continues on its journey into the depths of space. And in that instant, it is duplicated, you might even say recorded, locked forever into the charged radioactive particles of the Belts.
Every visible happening,
gentlemen.’

He nodded towards the organ. ‘This is the key that unlocks those images, by probing and tapping the Van Allen Belts. An organ that plays not music but history... prehistory... the huge and limitless symphony of the past.’

There was silence in the cellar workroom, except for the generator’s hum. Finally, Father Mac spoke. ‘How... far back?’

‘As long as the Belts have existed. For all practical purposes, as far back as the dawn of time. For instance—’

He played with stops and switches. On the screen, they saw an image of themselves, dressed in black, in the living room upstairs.

Father Mac said, ‘Why—that’s the day of Thelma’s funeral!’

Fairbank nodded. ‘It’s not what I meant to show you.’ He adjusted a drawbar. The picture wavered and was gone. ‘There is a strong tendency on the part of the instrument to capture the very recent past of this precise locality, this room, this house. It requires a certain amount of practice to overcome that tendency, to recreate the distant past of distant places. There—look!’

On the screen: a rain forest of impenetrable density. Festoons of drifting steam. A saurian head, attached to a long serpentine neck, stretched itself easefully to eat the brilliant green leaves at the top of a giant tree. The neck belonged to a massive quadruped—tons of flesh and bone, ending in a sinuous, flicking tail.

‘Brontosaurus,’ smiled Fairbank, ‘enjoying a little salad.’ The picture wobbled and disappeared. ‘Stability is another problem,’ he muttered. ‘The pictures tend to come and go haphazardly.’

Haskell’s briar had gone out again, but he didn’t care. He spoke, excitedly: ‘Fairbank—do you think I might see... Shakespeare? Rehearsing at the Globe?’

‘I’ve seen him,’ said Fairbank, ‘and so shall you. Weiss—you shall see Bach. Temple—you shall see Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel. Not Charlton Heston. Michelangelo. But not tonight. The machine will soon grow overheated. I must turn it off. Tomorrow—’

‘Marcus, wait,’ said Father Mac. ‘Before you turn it off—may I see...’ His eyes beseeched.

Fairbank hesitated, then said, ‘Of course.’ He turned to the keyboard. In a very few moments, the screen sharpened.

They saw a place of skulls. Milling crowds under a roiling sky. Three wooden torture-gibbets, each in the shape of the letter T. Fairbank caused the centre T to fill the screen.

No one spoke. Father Mac, poleaxed by awe, sank to his knees. His lips trembled. ‘My God,’ he said, with perfect literalness.

The picture danced and was sucked into the vortex of time. Father Mac rose from his knees. He blinked hot tears from his eyes. He cleared his throat and spoke, in a no-nonsense tone. ‘I see a possible moral problem here, Marcus,’ he said. ‘This organ—this great wonder—it can show us everything that ever happened, anytime, anywhere on Earth?’

Fairbank nodded.

‘It can peer even into sealed chambers?’

‘Yes. Light cannot be contained. It has to go somewhere. It all ends up in the Van Allen Belts.’

‘You could show us, for example, George Washington courting Martha?’

‘Easily.’

‘Then you must ask yourself this, Marcus: do you, do we, does anyone have the right to see George and Martha at
every
moment of their lives?’

Fairbank frowned. ‘I think I see what you’re driving at, Mac, but—’

The priest went on: ‘We hear a great deal these days about the invasion of privacy. In unethical hands, couldn’t this organ be the cause of the grossest invasions of privacy ever imagined? Indiscriminate snooping into the private lives of the great and the humble, the living and the dead, prying into their very bedrooms and bathrooms?’

‘You have a point, Father,’ said Haskell, ‘but even so—’

‘Uh, speaking of bathrooms,’ said Weiss, jerking a thumb in the direction of the screen.

They all looked up. Fairbank had forgotten to turn off the organ. On the screen was a faithful rendering of the largest of the two Fairbank bathrooms, and, sitting calmly in the tub, a grey-haired lady—the late Thelma Fairbank.

‘Turn it off, Marcus,’ Father Mac said, gently.

Fairbank moved towards the organ.

‘Hold it,’ said Graner harshly, grabbing Fairbanks arm. ‘Let’s watch this.’

Haskell snapped, ‘What kind of creep are you, Graner?’

‘Shut up and watch the screen,’ said Graner. ‘Don’t you remember how Thelma is supposed to have died?’

On the screen, Fairbank had entered the bathroom and was standing over the tub. As they watched, horrified, he pushed his wife’s head under the water and held it there, while the bubbles rose, for what seemed an age. She did not appear to struggle. When the image of Fairbank straightened and turned away from the tub, it was gruesomely obvious that his wife was dead. The grim picture slid off the screen.

The real Fairbank was shaking and backing away from the organ, his eyes haunted.

Father Mac was the first to find his voice. ‘May God forgive you!’

A single hoarse syllable sprung from the throat of Temple: ‘
Why?
’

Fairbank had grown small. He stood, shrunken, in the middle of the cellar, still on his feet but collapsed, destroyed, ringed by the shocked, accusing faces of his friends.

Weiss repeated Temple’s question. ‘Why, Marcus?’ Several heavy seconds passed. And then:

‘It was the money, you see,’ Fairbank said in a barely audible whisper. ‘We were so close to the completion of the project... so close to success... but we had no more money. We couldn’t wait—I was close to seventy years old, Thelma was sixty-five—we couldn’t afford to wait. Then she thought of her insurance. Twenty thousand dollars! More than enough to finish the project! She said to me: “I’m an old woman, Marcus. Let me do this thing for us, for you, for our work.” But I couldn’t let her.’ Fairbank turned, with agonised eyes, to the priest. ‘
You
understand why I couldn’t let her do that, don’t you? Suicide—a mortal sin! So I took the sin upon myself, and committed murder.’

He buried his face in his hands. Spasms shook his body. At last, looking up, he spoke again, but incoherently. He spoke of the Devil. He asked the priest if he had ever wondered what the Devil looked like. He pointed to the organ, and his voice rose to a screech. He said the Devil looked like
that
, a machine, cables and switches and dials. He said the Devil smiled with those white keys... tempted in the sacred name of Science... tempted one to evolve noble excuses for the vilest sins... even for murder.

Then, insanely shrieking, he fell upon the organ. ‘Devil!’ he cried. ‘Damn you!... damn you!...’ Savagely, he ripped out wires, smashed tubes, disrupted circuits.

‘Marcus!’ shouted the priest.

‘Don’t destroy it!’ Haskell howled.

But, in a shower and sizzle of sparks that stung the nostrils and whitened the cellar workroom for a hideous instant, both the organ and Fairbank died.

Later, after the police and the questions, the five friends sat stunned in a nearby bar, nursing glasses of badly-needed brandy.

Father Mac, in a faded voice, said to Haskell, ‘Well. Your friend Shakespeare had the words for it, didn’t he?’

‘Hm?’ Haskell was attempting to re-light his cold briar.

‘
Murder will out,
’ the priest explained.

‘Oh. Yes.’ (Smack, slurp.) ‘Yes, I see. It’s a (suck, smack) common misquotation. Actually, it’s
Murder will speak,
not
Murder will out.
’ (Slurp, slurp.) ‘
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
(suck, slurp, smack-smack, puff)
with most miraculous organ
.’

Buon giorno. It’s an absolutely
super
morning. I’ll bet you wouldn’t say no to a nice hot cup of tea, eh, dearie? Coffee? Righty-o, I’ll join you. Prosit! Down the hatch! Yum sing! Ah, that hits the spot, it do. Now then, permit me to introduce myself. My name is Sallybill, and I’m here to offer you three wishes. No, you’re not dreaming—I’ll pinch you, see? Give a listen. In my century, we’ve achieved a lot of achievements. Most of them you wouldn’t even
understand
if I told you about them—I don’t understand half of them my
own
self! But some of them are fairly simple and even a primitive like you (no offence) can probably grasp them. For instance, airlove and bloodsongs and skycandy, stuff like that. Well, one of the newer wrinkles is this wish shtick. I don’t think you chaps had it in this timezone. The way it works is like this. Any body of third level status or above, who’s passed the 920 exams and doesn’t have any bluejacks on his/her record, can grant three wishes to anyone,
provided
that the granting is done in a timezone prior to the grantor’s birth. Grantor, c’est moi. Don’t ask me why it has to be that way—some technicality about spacetime continuum stress factors. Needless to say, we cracked the time barrier
long
ago. So anyhoo, since I passed my 920’s with flying colours yesterday—well, of course it wasn’t really yesterday, it—was ist los, ma’am?

You’re sitting on my foot. And that’s sir, not ma’am
.

Sorry, is that better—sir? This old fixed-gender stuff always throws me. Can we get on with the wishes, do you think? I’d really like to be shlepping back to my own zone.

Can I go to the bathroom first?

The whatroom?

Bathroom.

¿Por qué?

Well, it’s rather indelicate, but, not to put too fine a point on it, I want to empty my bladder
.

Done and done. Your bladder’s empty.

Amazing! It really is empty. How did you do that?

Elementary interdimensional portation. Kid’s stuff. Now, how’s about your second wish?

What? You mean that bladder trick was my first wish???

Natürlich.

But I could ham done that myself!

Not to worry, old bean. You still have two more to go. Make the most of ’em, wot? Eh? Eh?

Yes, but I wish I knew exactly
—

Cave quid dicis! Don’t say I Wish or I Want unless you mean it.

May I ask a question?

By my guest.

Can I wish far anything? Anything at all?

Absotively.

And I’ll get it?

Posilutely.

Then I wish for three thousand wishes instead of just three.

Nyet, that’s out.

But you said anything
.

Anything but that. Stress factors again.

Oh, all right. I wish I could live far
—

Durak! Were you going to wish for immortality?

Yes—but I suppose that’s out, too?

No, it’s allowable. But take my advice. In your case, that would be a wasted wish. Besides, some of my best friends are immies, look you, and they are very unhappy people, whatever.

I’ll take your word for it. Then I wish for a billion
—

Trust me. Don’t ask for money.

Why not?

Shure, an’ you wouldn’t be knowin’ what to do with it at all, at all.

Oh yes I would!

You only think you would. Besides, without going into a whole song and dance, just believe that you wouldn’t
believe
what’s going to happen to money. Stay away from money.

If you say so. Let’s see. Then I wish to possess that which all the sages, in vain, have
—

Cool it, man. Infinite wisdom, right? Hey, you don’t need any more wisdom than you already got. And some of my best buddies are wizzies, and they’re real downbeat dudes, you dig?

You’re certainly making it difficult. And you’re sitting on my other foot now.

Excusez-moi. Try again.