There was a war on, but it made no difference to Thomas James Lloyd. The war was an inconvenience, and it restricted his freedom, but on the whole it was the least of his preoccupations. Misfortune had brought him to this violent age, and he wanted none of its crises. He was apart from it, shadowed by it.
He stood now on the bridge over the Thames at Richmond, resting his hands on the parapet and staring south along the river. The sun reflected up from it, and he took his sunglasses from a metal case in his pocket and put them on.
Night was the only relief from the tableaux of frozen time; dark glasses approximated the relief.
favorites of that sort (Voyagers in Time, 1967); for another, I want to offer here a group of time-travel stories of a different sort, more subtle variants on the basic notion, stories of people who float back and forth along the time stream in ways even more intricate than those imagined by the old pioneer, H. G. Wells. I think they succeed in providing that heady sense of liberation from the rigid three-dimensional confines of reality that science fiction so uniquely affords. And they provide, also, that sense of strangeness, that sense of peering into unfathomable deeps, which keeps us returning to science fiction again and again.
It seemed to Thomas Lloyd that it was not long since he had last stood untroubled on this bridge, although by deduction he knew that this was not so. The memory of the day was clear, itself a moment of frozen time, undiminished. He remembered how he had stood here with his cousin, watching four young men from the town as they manhandled a punt upstream.
Richmond itself had changed from that time, but here by the river the view was much as he remembered it. Although there were more buildings along the banks, the meadows below Richmond Hill were untouched, and he could see the riverside walk disappearing around the bend in the river towards Twickenham.
For the moment the town was quiet. An air-raid alert had been sounded a few minutes before, and although there were still some vehicles moving through the streets, most pedestrians had taken temporary shelter inside shops and offices.
Lloyd had left them to walk again through the past.
He was a tall, well-built man, apparently young in years. He had been taken for twenty-five several times by strangers and Lloyd, a withdrawn, uncommunicative man, had allowed such errors to go uncorrected. Behind the dark glasses his eyes were still bright with the hopes of youth, but many tiny lines at the corners of his eyes, and a general sallowness to his skin, indicated that he was older. Even this, though, lent no clue to the truth. Thomas Lloyd had been born in 1881, and was now approaching sixty.
He took his watch from his waistcoat pocket, and saw that the time was a little after twelve. He turned to walk towards the pub on the Isleworth road, but then noticed a man standing by himself on the path beside the river. Even wearing the sunglasses, which filtered away the more intrusive reminders of past and future, Lloyd could see that it was one of the men he called freezers. This was a young man, rather plump and with prematurely balding hair. He had seen Lloyd, for as Lloyd looked down at him the young man turned ostentatiously away. Lloyd had nothing now to fear from the freezers, but they were always about and their presence never failed to make him uneasy.
Far away, in the direction of Barnes, Lloyd could hear another air-raid siren droning out its warning.