Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [28]
'Possibly,' I replied, but he wasn't listening anymore. I was confused as to why he was in this cabin at all. Simpkins had told me earlier that it was never occupied. 'I had been told that this room was always unoccupied,' I said.
'You were misinformed,' came the simple reply. 'It's amazing what ten pounds can buy. Especially from ship's crew open to bribes. I sensed the vibrations, didn't you?'
I nodded. 'Something terrible has gone on in this place.' I left it at that.
'The other thing that people do that really annoys me –' he began, as though our previous conversation had never happened, 'not that you're annoying me you understand, but just say you were – is when they say something horribly offensive to someone and then add "no offence" at the end, as though that somehow wipes out all the hurt and the spite in the original statement.' My host was talking through gritted teeth now, as if from a bitter and long-standing personal experience. 'That gets me so angry. Doesn't it get you angry?'
He hadn't taken his eyes from the page in front of him all the while. His cold and measured tone was a million miles away from the uncontrollable raging and frothing that might have been expected. I politely ignored this loaded question and looked around the room. The cabin interior, on the surface, looked just like all the others that I had seen during the voyage. Except that this one contained, resting on the night-table beside the bed, a large bell-shaped jar with a cork lid. I cautiously approached it and peered at it closely. The glass had a rich, slightly blue tinge that I recognised from looking through the eyes of the ghostly manifestations.
Wires led away from the jar towards various pieces of electrical equipment strewn randomly around the floor of the room and all linked together by bulldog clips and thick copper wiring wrapped around with sticky tape. It was a chaotic and eccentric contraption built, seemingly, from a metronome, an electrical pulse generator, two tin cans soldered together to form a primitive tachyon particle accelerator and, most horrifying of all, the large glass jar sitting at the centre of the wires like a big fat spider at the heart of its sinister web. The invention seemed to have been cobbled into shape from odds and ends, knick-knacks of every shape and description.
With my more than elementary knowledge of tachyon physics I realised instantly that this machine would, given the right conditions, function.
As a death-trap, at the very least.
'Be careful with that device,' a dismissive, almost parental voice told me
from over my shoulder. I turned, but the man still hadn't raised his head from his work. 'It's a somewhat delicate contraption. My life's work, such as it is. Did I ask you if you would like some tea? I'm becoming so forgetful these days.'
'No, thank you,' I said, declining his offer. 'Wait a moment. Don't I know you from somewhere?' Realisation came to me as I recalled the newspaper article and accompanying photograph that I had briefly glimpsed a couple of days earlier in the forward bar. 'You're Professor Peter Osbourne, the man who's supposed to be building a time machine.'
Can I note, here and now, that I managed to say all this without breaking into hysterical laughter; which was, I consider after the event, to be a feat well worth boasting about. 'Is that what this is?' I asked, suppressing the merest hint of a snigger on my lips and waving my hand over his collection of radio ham amateur electronics. 'That is what all this is supposed to represent?'
'A time visualiser,' corrected Osbourne, with a big-toothed grin. 'The purpose of this invention of mine is to allow a view into the