The Anubis Gates

“Oh, that’s right. But it was Lycidas, wasn’t it?”

“No. Montagu wasn’t present, and he got it wrong.”

“But the Montagu letter is the only mention anywhere of that lecture.” Doyle cocked his head. “Uh… isn’t it?”

The old man smiled. “When DIRE undertakes to do a job of research, son, we’re thorough. No, two of the men who attended, a publisher’s clerk and a schoolmaster, left journals which have come into my hands. It was the Aereopagitica. The schoolteacher even managed to get a fair amount of the lecture down in shorthand.”

“When did you find this?” Doyle asked quickly. An unpublished Coleridge lecture! My God, he thought with a surge of bitter envy, if I’d had that two years ago, my Nigh-Related Guest would have got a different sort of review.

“A month or so ago. It was only in February that I got concrete results from the Denver crew, and since then DIRE has been obtaining every available book or journal concerning London in 1810.”

Doyle spread his hands. “Why?”

“Because one of these time gaps is just outside Kensington, five miles from the Strand, on the evening of the first of September, 1810. And unlike most gaps that close to the 1802 source, this one is four hours long.”

Doyle leaned forward to help himself to another cupful of the brandy. The excitement building in him was so big that he tried to stifle it by reminding himself that what was being discussed here was, though fascinating, impossible. Stick with it for the twenty thousand, he advised himself, and maybe the possibility of getting your hands on Robb’s journal or that schoolteacher’s notebook. But he wasn’t fooling himself—he wanted to participate in this. “And there’s another gap here and now, of course.”

“Here, all right, but not quite now. We’re”—Darrow looked at his watch—”still several hours upstream of it. It’s of a typical size for one this far from the source—the upstream edge is tonight, the downstream edge at about dawn of the day after tomorrow. As soon as Denver pinpointed this gap I bought the entire area the field would cover, and got busy levelling it. We don’t want to take any buildings back with us, do we?”

Doyle realized his own grin must have looked as conspiratorial as Darrow’s. “No, we don’t.”

Darrow sighed with relief and satisfaction. He picked up the phone just as it started to ring. “Yes?… Get off this line and get me Lament. Quick.” He drained his cup and refilled it. “Been living for three days on coffee, brandy and candy bars,” he remarked to Doyle. “Not bad, once your stomach gets—Tim? Drop the efforts for Newnan and Sandoval. Well, radio Delmotte and tell him to turn around and take him right back to the airport. We’ve got our Coleridge man.”

He replaced the phone. “I’ve sold ten tickets, at one million dollars apiece, to attend the Coleridge lecture. We’ll make the jump tomorrow evening at eight. There’ll be a catered briefing session at six-thirty for our ten guests, and naturally for that we ought to have a recognized Coleridge authority.”

“Me.”

“You. You’ll give a brief speech on Coleridge and answer any questions the guests may have concerning him or his contemporaries or his times, and then you’ll accompany the party through the jump and to the Crown and Anchor Tavern—along with a few competent guards who’ll make sure no romantic soul attempts to go AWOL—take notes during the lecture and then, back home again in 1983, comment on it and answer any further questions.” He cocked an eyebrow sternly at Doyle. “You’re being paid twenty thousand dollars to see and hear what ten other people are paying a million apiece for. You should be grateful that all our efforts to get one of the more prominent Coleridge authorities failed.”

Not too flatteringly phrased, Doyle thought, but “Yes,” he said. Then a thought struck him. “But what about your… original purpose, the thing science failed to do, the reason you found these gaps in the first place? Have you abandoned that?”

“Oh.” Darrow didn’t seem to want to discuss it. “No, I haven’t abandoned it. I’m working on it from a couple of angles these days. Nothing to do with this project.”

Doyle nodded thoughtfully. “Are there any gaps, uh, downstream of us?”

For no reason Doyle could see the old man was beginning to get angry again. “Doyle, I don’t see—oh, what the hell. Yes. There’s one, it’s forty-seven hours long in the summer of 2116, and that’s the last one, chronologically.”

“Well.” Doyle didn’t mean to provoke him, but he wanted to know why Darrow apparently didn’t intend to do what seemed to Doyle the obvious thing. “But couldn’t this… thing you want done … be done very easily, probably, in that year? I mean, if science could almost do it in 1983, why by 2116…”