Philip Jose Farmer (6 page)

Phileas! One more thread, no, cable, rather, in this mysterious network. Passepartout felt frightened. What did all these Phileases mean? Surely an enlightenment would come someday, and what now seemed so complex would turn out to be laughably simple.

When he received his first message, he had assumed that Fogg was another of the long line suspected of being Capellean. But during the trip with Forster to Savile Row, Passepartout knew that he was in a different area of the case. The 2°F. signal told him that both Fogg and Forster were his kind. It only remained to be verified by the code words.

After his new master had left, he inspected the domicile carefully. As the valet, he would have done this anyway, but as an Eridanean he was obligated to, if only for the sake of survival. Verne says that the house seemed to Passepartout like a snail’s shell. This is a more appropriate comparison than Verne knew. A snail’s shell is not only a comfortable home but a fortress. He scoured No. 7 from cellar to garret to determine more than its layout. He wanted to know how vulnerable it was to attackers and what defenses it contained. Curiously, it was its very accessibility to intruders and its total lack of firearms or weapons of any kind which pleased him. This meant that no attacks were expected, and none were expected because its owner did not dream—apparently—that he had any special need for defense.

“Everything betrayed the most tranquil and peaceable habits,” Verne says.

No wonder that Passepartout rubbed his hands and smiled. No wonder that he spoke aloud. “This is exactly what I desired! Oh, we shall get along, Mr. Fogg and I! What a domestic and regular gentleman! A real machine! Well, I don’t mind serving a machine!”

He spoke aloud for several reasons. One, he was genuinely pleased. Two, his words were designed to reassure any hidden recorders or observers that he and Fogg were only what they 
pretended to be. Fogg was a rigidly self-controlled English gentleman, and he was a French itinerant who had finally found a snug and unchanging berth.

Passepartout should have known better. The long string of Phileases should have put him on the alert. But he so needed a rest that he allowed his emotions to overcome his logic. Imagine his consternation when his master entered the house, not at the prescribed hour of midnight but at ten minutes to eight or somewhere near that. Because of surprise and apprehension, Passepartout said nothing to Mr. Fogg as he went into his bedroom. He had to be called twice before he went into the master’s bedroom. Imagine his dismay on hearing that he was to leave with Fogg for Dover and Calais inside the next ten minutes. Picture his near-collapse when he was informed that they were going to journey completely around the Earth in record time. Visualize the lights bursting in his brain and the shivers running through him when he heard that they would be traveling through India. He knew about the rajah of Bundelcund. And they would be taking the distorter so close to him!

At eight o’clock, he was ready. Then he almost collapsed when handed a carpetbag containing the travel expenses. Twenty thousand pounds in bank notes!

So it was true, and here was the result of his investigations into the multi-Phileas! But why had he had to make sure that Sir William Clayton was out of reach of news from the civilized world?

 6 

At the end of Savile Row, the two took a cab, which drove rapidly to the Charing Cross Station. Presumably, the street at the end of Savile Row was Vigo, since to walk to Conduit would have taken them further away from their destination. The traffic must have been excessively heavy that night, and perhaps an accident delayed them. Verne says that they arrived at the station at twenty minutes after eight. Since the station is less than a mile from Savile Row, the two could have walked there more quickly. Especially since they were not overburdened. Fogg carried 
Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Steam Transit and General Guide
 under one arm, and his valet carried the carpetbag. Though Verne states that Fogg’s house contained no books, he must not have counted the 
Bradshaw
 as this type of literature. And if Fogg had memorized the 
Bradshaw
 for the English railways, he had not done so for the continent. Otherwise, he would not have transported the European guide with him. Or perhaps he had committed this to memory, too, but considered that people 
would think it strange if he did not use such a reference.

At any rate, we may be sure that Verne was guessing or exaggerating when he said that the cab drove “rapidly” to the Charing Cross Station.

However, it could be that Verne’s transit time is correct and that something happened on the way which Fogg and his valet would have kept to themselves. Perhaps the Capelleans tried to abduct them. If this were so, then this account is missing an adventure. But Fogg did not record it, and since this is not a novel but a reconstruction of a true story, the gap will regretfully have to be left just that: a gap.

At the entrance to the station, the two were confronted by a wretched beggar woman holding an infant. They were two of the horde that roamed the streets of London. The Western capitals seldom see them now, but then they were an all-too-familiar sight, as common as they are in present-day Bogota, Colombia. The barefooted woman, shivering in the autumnal chill and its fine rain, asked for money.

Mr. Fogg had won twenty guineas at whist, and since he always donated his winnings to charity, and a not inconsiderable sum of his private fortune, he gave her the whole sum.

“Here, my good woman, I’m glad that I met you,” he said.

This incident engendered tears in the soft -hearted Passepartout. His master, after all, was human.

Both men, as a matter of fact, being Eridaneans, were much touched by the poverty, disease, and suffering that afflicted the numerous poor of mid-Victorian England. Such a condition would be wiped out once the Eridaneans had set into motion their long-range program. The ideal society toward 
which they would strive would be modeled on the state which the nonhuman Eridaneans said existed on their home planet. But before that could be brought about, the evil Capelleans must be exterminated.

What Verne does not mention about this incident, but Fogg does, is what the beggar woman exchanged for money. Fogg received a small piece of paper. It was actually a tiny clipping from a newspaper. It was not only meaningless to any Earthling but of no significance to Fogg. It was a few sentences from an article on the bank theft which had been discussed that very evening at the Reform Club.

Fogg pulled out his watch and seemed to be looking at it. In reality, he was absorbing the article, which lay over the front of his watch. His cupped hand prevented anybody but Passepartout from seeing the clipping, and the good Frenchman was looking through tears at the rapidly departing beggar woman and her infant.

The article had been sent by Stuart, of course. But what did it mean? Something to do with him, no doubt, something he would find out in time, though not, he hoped, too late to do him any good.

He snapped the cover of the watch shut, enclosing the folded article in it. Later, he would remove the clipping and swallow it.

There are times, and this was one, when he wished that communication could be conducted, if not more openly, at least more fully. The short cryptic messages often left him as much in the dark as before, if not more so, and invariably filled him with uneasiness. It was true that he did not have to suffer from anxiety unless he wished to. He could block it off mentally and so retain his inward composure. The price (there is always a price) was 
that he had to turn the anxiety back on someday. If he didn’t, it stayed undiminished in the circuit in which he had placed it. Its current, so to speak, would be added to anxieties previously shuttled in and switched into a sidetrack.

Later anxieties would increase the pressure even more, or, to preserve the analogy, congest the tracks. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, he had to open the switch and push some of the anxieties out into the main track. If he didn’t, he’d suffer derailments, cerebral wrecks. The pain and the brain damage would be terrible. He had been assured of this by that old Eridanean, Sir Heraclitus Fogg, the being who had raised him. Sir Heraclitus knew that would happen from personal experience and from having observed other Eridaneans.

The baronet, long involved in a particularly sticky situation, had blocked off his anxieties and many of his passions. And one day, just after he had killed two Capelleans in the Paris sewers, he had been struck down from within. The pain had lasted for days, and he had been half-blind and paralyzed on his right side for a year. Fortunately, Eridaneans, not humans, had found him. If the latter had come along, and he had been carried off to a hospital and given an examination, he might have been exposed as a nonterrestrial. This had happened a few times before, but the Eridaneans, or the Capelleans, had heard of it and managed to hush it up.

Fogg had been only ten at the time. He still remembered his grief and terror when his foster-father was brought home late at night in a van driven by two Eridaneans. The baronet was the only parent he had, the only one he deeply loved. His mother had died when he was four, slain, according to Sir Heraclitus, by 
Capelleans. His real father, he knew, had wanted nothing to do with him and so Phileas hated him.

Not long after his mother’s death, the baronet had begun to drop hints, to tell little stories of far-off places and distant times. Gradually, Phileas had been shown the truth. And so he had grown up, Earthling by heredity but Eridanean by education, conditioning, and love. He had not known how much by love until his foster-father was brought home from Paris. The thought that he might die or remain paralyzed shocked Phileas. Yet, a few minutes later, he was acting as if nothing ever upset him. He had blocked off the trauma. And he was still paying for it. Sir Heraclitus, when well enough to understand what had happened to his foster-son, had almost had a relapse. Quickly, he described to Phileas the results if he did not start releasing the trauma. It would build up as other anxieties and shocks were added to it. One day, the suppressed hurts would flash forth in a devastating neural current.

What young Phileas had to do was to construct the mental equivalent of a trickle capacitor in his circuits. Thus, he could discharge the load slowly. This would hurt, but it would not be ruinous.

Phileas knew what a capacitor was. He had learned about it in the laboratory in the cellar of the manor. It was far advanced over the Leyden jar or condenser of the time, and he had been sworn to secrecy concerning it.

Phileas did as directed, though not always with one hundred percent control. Unfortunately, he had set up in his neural configurations a regenerative feedback. As fast as he bled off the traumas, these bred new energy. Sir Heraclitus was 
puzzled by this and finally called in Andrew Stuart. This was when Phileas was twelve, after the blood-sharing ceremony which made him a full-fledged Eridanean. It had also made him a sick one for a while, since the elder Fogg’s and Stuart’s corpuscles used vanadium, not iron, for oxygen-carriers.

Stuart had said that Phileas’ traumas were feeding off early, and as yet unapproachable, traumas. These had been caused by the desertion of his real father and his mother’s death. He had blocked these off through natural, though not desirable, means. And a natural block had, in a sense, to be tunneled to.

Meanwhile, Phileas was suffering the daily uneasiness, shocks, and hurts that all flesh, terrestrial or not, was heir to. Storing and discharging these occupied much of his time, and so he had never caught up with the main task. Though he had kept to a strict exterior or physical schedule these last four years, he was far behind on his interior, or psychic, timetable.

From twelve until twenty-one, he had been busy with his education. This was gotten from tutors, both human and conventional, and Eridanean and unconventional. After twenty-one, he was a full-time soldier in the war that had been raging quietly for two centuries.

At thirty-six he had completed a long campaign, though as a spy. He had almost drowned but had been picked up off the coasts of the Lofoten islands by a fisherman. He returned to Fogg Hall to convalesce and await further orders. While there he grew his beard as preparation for his reemergence into the world. His foster-father had become a casualty in the campaign. His bones were on the sea floor, which was just as well if he had to die. Any doctor or anthropologist who got a look at them would be filled 
with curiosity quenchable only by death.