Fry and Marlow

In the dim smoking room of a private London club, the old scientists sat by the fire. The elder of the two looked away from the flames.

‘I propose a bet,’ said Marlow.

His colleague, Fry, glanced up from his cigar and said, ‘I’m in.’

‘Let me finish.’

Fry rolled his eyes. He sat up in his chair. ‘On with it, then.’

‘It’s about the Time Machine.’

When Fry and Marlow had unveiled it in 2021, the world had hailed them as heroes. Crusaders of science. Their Machine had broken the limits of human endeavour. The men had enjoyed the flattery and the awards. But the hype lasted just twelve months. The Time Machine, though the only one in existence, was, regrettably, flawed. The driver could only travel in one direction—backwards in time—and to one location—a single street in London. To be precise: Whitehall, March 14th, 1975. And for only an hour, from 9.30 to 10.30 in the morning, before the Machine returned to the present.

Fancy building something so limited. Fry and Marlow came to curse their contraption. In time the scientists visited the London street so often they could retrace it in their sleep.

March 14, 1975 was a grey Friday. And for those sixty minutes between breakfast and lunch, with workers already hidden behind office windows, Whitehall was calm. Big Ben chimes at regular intervals. Rain falls for twenty minutes. A gust of wind sends a page of The Times across the road. Out of sight, a dog whines. At 9.53 a truck passes, a seagull perched on its canvas roof. When the truck reaches the turning for Great Scotland Yard, the bird screeches and flies south towards Westminster. With ten minutes to go the scientists watch the prime minister’s car pass along the boulevard. When the squat, polished vehicle turns right into Downing Street their view of Harold Wilson is blocked, and the street is quiet again. Then: three, two, one. The Machine shudders: Fry and Marrow hold on tight... and return to their present-day lab.

For the first hundred trips Fry and Marlow were thrilled. They documented every detail of the journey: the bizarre stirring in the stomach as the Machine trembled to life; the darkness as the floor spun, followed by a terrifying twenty-three second wait in nothingness; and, finally, bright London yawning into being outside the glass walls. The Machine was slow. With no steering wheel, it floated south at a ghostly 0.33 miles per hour. When the scientists returned, the lab swam in their vision and they shivered (sick buckets and blankets sat ready before each trip). Only a hot bath made them feel right again.

The flight was quite something. But as for the destination, Fry and Marlow wondered after nine thousand journeys what, really, science could glean from this snapshot of metropolitan life. Archive footage on television offered the same insight. The buildings were no different. The climate was familiar. There were dinkier cars and bigger haircuts; but, otherwise, this trip through time was unremarkable.

Marlow and Fry had built the Machine dreaming of dinosaurs and geology, culture and civilisation. Futuristic fantasies and forgotten eras had fed their imagination as they struggled in the lab. The birth of Christ! The Declaration of Independence. Cleopatra. All remained, agonisingly, beyond.

Yet on they strove. For years Fry and Marlow worked to better the technology. The world willed them on. Grants filled their bank accounts. Colleagues gave up their time. But soon, the conclusion was neat: science was too young by a millennium. Fry and Marlow had, after all, invented the Machine half by accident when an unbalanced formula had, somehow, made the Machine go. Demanding that the scientists suddenly master Time Travel was akin to telling Alexander Fleming to cure heart disease a month after discovering penicillin. Fry and Marlow (whose names in the annals of science already sat beside that of Fleming, not to mention those of Galileo and Einstein) came to the disappointing realisation that more spectacular journeys across space and time would not happen in their lifetime.

Marlow looked over at his old friend. The warmth from the fire was comfortable. He sipped his whisky and smiled.

‘The bet is this,’ he said, enjoying Fry’s confusion, ‘that by the end of the year somebody perfects Time Travel.’

Fry’s eyes bulged. He glanced at his wrist.

‘It’s October now! What do you expect to happen by December?’

Marlow smiled. ‘Just a bit of fun, old boy. Are you game?’

Fry scoffed. ‘What’s the prize? Cash?’

‘Naturally.’

Fry scoffed again. Marlow pressed him: ‘It’s just a gambit.’

The men shook on ten thousand pounds. The terms of the bet were these: that by midnight on New Year’s Eve somebody, somewhere, would advance Time Travel beyond their own achievements. With the wager sealed, the men laughed, giddy at the apparent impossibility of it all. Later, after agreeing to meet in the lab on Monday, they left the club and went home for the weekend.

Marlow had a plan to win the bet. Two weekends prior, he had visited Berlin to lecture post-doctoral students at a top scientific university. One pupil stood out. Her name was Hilda, and in recognition of outstanding academic achievement, the university had granted her an hour of personal supervision with Marlow. She entered the temporary office with shy, burning eyes. The young German amazed Marlow. He answered as best he could her multi-clause questions on fluid space, quantum entropy, the Machine’s hardware and even the history of London. When the hour was up, the old man’s head was spinning. Only when he first met Fry had he been so excited by a scientific brain. Hilda was brilliant. She drew spidery formulas on the whiteboard and in fluent English pontificated on theories few people could pronounce. That evening Marlow told the university in Berlin that Hilda would be moving to London to work in the lab that had invented Time Travel.

For a fortnight Marlow had itched to tell Fry. But he held out. His souvenir from Germany would be a surprise. When Monday morning came, Marlow met Fry outside their London lab with a boyish grin.

‘You look chirpy,’ said Fry.

Marlow rocked on the balls of his feet and clapped his hands. He said, ‘I have a surprise for you.’

Marlow led Fry into the lab. Hilda was sitting by the window. She stood when the door swung open and walked over to greet the old scientists.

‘Good day, Mr Marlow, Mr Fry,’ said the young German. ‘I am privileged to be here.’

Fry frowned as he shook Hilda’s hand. He looked to Marlow, who was beaming.

‘This is Hilda,’ Marlow began. His smile faltered; his gaze had shifted to the far end of the lab. A young man with bushy hair and round glasses was striding towards him, arm outstretched. The boy shook Marlow’s hand and called himself Martin.

It was Marlow’s turn to be perplexed. He turned to Fry, who was gesturing to the boy.

‘Martin is a brilliant young scientist whom I met just this week,’ he said. ‘He will be working with us in the lab.’

Fry told the story. He and Martin had encountered each other in a library when they had both reached for the same heavy textbook. The young man revealed himself to be an undergraduate virtuoso who understood physics as well as Marlow. There and then, in a dusty corner of the British Library, Fry had invited Martin to work in the lab.

Marlow spluttered. ‘Well, Hilda is a genius too. I met her in Germany.’

The two newcomers, Martin and Hilda, exchanged nervous glances. Then, after a beat, Fry and Marlow began to laugh.

‘So this is your plan to take my money.’

‘I could say the same thing, old boy!’

But Marlow lost the bet. Somebody, somewhere, did not master Time Travel by New Year’s Eve. Nor did anything happen the year after. It took Hilda and Martin fifteen years to build a new Time Machine—time enough for cancer to kill poor, cigar-loving Fry. The trio named the new Machine after their departed friend.

If the first Machine had been a car, then the next model was a spaceship. Marlow, Hilda and Martin flew back to Ancient Greece, and forward to the next millennium; the trio traced the birth of language and dated the extinction of the Sun. The world, once again, worshipped scientists as Gods.

One day, the trio stepped into the Machine and punched in a new date. Marlow took a deep breath as everything went dark.

He opened the door to the lab.

‘Hello, Fry,’ said Marlow.

The dead scientist looked up from his desk.

‘Hullo—’

Fry’s expression changed as he listened to his friend. Soon he understood and, shakily, embraced Marlow. The friends wept and laughed and kissed; only in dreams and epiphany was human interaction of this kind normally possible.

‘So,’ said Marlow when he had finished sobbing and the reunion of the four scientists was over. ‘Fry: the new Machine is ready. Where, and when, shall we go, dear man?’

His face damp with tears, Fry hesitated. Then he looked into Marlow’s eyes and smiled.

‘Whitehall is always nice.’