The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (5 page)

It was the sort of night that prompts one to muse on the infinite and to consider what might be out there, beyond the scattering of stars that we egotistically consider our own. I used to think, when I was a lad, that there was likely a big stone wall that one would encounter should one run one’s space galleon far enough out into the void. I chose a wall, I believe, simply to provide a boundary. The idea of the endlessness of anything was something I was unprepared to grapple with. I even dreamed about it—of just such a night—blasting away beyond the planets through a heaven alive with stars whirling like pinwheels, only to run headlong, finally, into a wall painted up with strange and leering lunatic faces. I remember that old Sidcup Catford, the Dean of Lewisham Boys Academy, was along in the ship, and that he blamed me for having drawn comic faces on the walls of heaven. It ruined the dream, old Catford showing up like that. Funny to discover these long years later that the walls exist after all, even if they’re not made of stone.

Anyway, here I was feeling fearfully bucked by the rum and the pint of stout I chased it with, and musing, as I’ve already said, on the infinite, when I sighted Chingford Tower, strangely aglow in the distance. The vision was heartening, because St. Ives Manor would soon pop up from behind the rows of yew trees on the left. And up it popped like a shot, smoke from the chimney and St. Ives’ man Hasbro visible within the bright interior, brewing up the late afternoon tea.

I drained a cup or two before the fire, and had warmed up considerably, when through the door strode Professor Langdon St. Ives with a strength of purpose that was admirable. He always displayed that same strength of purpose whether tying into a bowl of soup or preparing to save the world from an alien threat. It’s the sort of thing that I might muster for an hour or so on a good day, but which would drain me entirely before midafternoon. Those sorts of purposeful, hie-on-into-the-fray chaps seem always to stride about for some reason, mere walking or strolling being foreign to their very being. Carlyle, I think it was, pointed that out in his treatise on heroes and great men, although it might have been Newman. Either one of them were up to it.

So there I was, firmly ensconced at Chingford-by-the-Tower, slurping away at a cup of what appeared to be some oriental notion of tea, Malay Oolong, if I’m any judge, and here was the greatest physicist since what-was-his-name, gazing at me through slit lids, as they say, with as businesslike an eye as has ever seen daylight.

“Did you bring it, Jack?” he asked.

“Bring it?”

“The book. Birdlip’s succulents. Telegram.”

“Oh, ah,” I replied weakly. “Yes, and then again, no.”

“Hah!” cried the Professor, rising up out of his seat. “Did they pinch it?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, mystified by his enthusiasm. “They pinched it. Or rather,
he
did, whoever he was. I hadn’t time to inquire, and he wasn’t inclined to chat. He took the book and flung me out the window.”

“Capital!” shouted the Professor, accepting these odd goings-on in the jolliest of spirits. I wasn’t half so sanguine, in fact I was more or less hipped, but this fell into the line-of-duty category, and like a good soldier I awaited further orders.

Hasbro cleared away the tea apparatus and, in a wink, slid round with a tray of essentials: small cakes and glasses and a bottle of Spanish sherry—none of your French vinegar fattened up with cheap brandy. Tea, I’ve always said, is your man for the pick-me-up, the restorative. But it doesn’t stick with you, if you follow me; it’s gone as soon as it clears your gums. It takes the real fuel oil to keep the fire lit, and I can tell you that it slipped down the throat like a healing zephyr, giving me what the ancients referred to as the will to live.

St. Ives sat nodding, his mind running on before him, his lips pursed in a knowing and thoughtful way. “Say on, Jack,” he said suddenly. “Was it an obese man in a Chinese mandarin jacket and a Leibnitz hat? A beady-eyed man with a face screwed up like a prune? A face like a peccary?”

“That’s the bird,” I said. “Only without the Chinese clothes. And now that you mention it, no hat either. But he had the warthog face and a flat nose like a whacking great beacon.”

St. Ives nodded with apparent satisfaction. “You see, Jacky,” he said, “there are those roundabout us who would rather we didn’t make this little…voyage. You’ve met one of their chiefs, I’m afraid.”

“Saboteurs is it?”

“Just so. But I’ve been onto them now for a month. I suspected them after the first voyage, after we’d successfully charted the hole. It’s the crowd that Birdlip hinted at in his last letters.”

I was thunderstruck. “The same crowd that planted the bomb under Birdlip’s laboratory?”

“Just so. And they wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to blow us all to Kingdom Come, Jack.” He slumped now, and tugged at his chin in the fashion of a man treading the mental pathways, a man who didn’t entirely like the look of the landscape. “And now they’ve gotten off with the book! Or at least its facsimile. They’ve played their hand. I know them now.”

“So it was a ruse, the succulent book?”

“Clever, eh?”

“Indeed,” I said, although I wasn’t feeling it. I was hipped again. “Quite a gag. I laughed myself into a ditch full of gorse, lost my pipe, my thermos bottle, and my dinner into the bargain, and then I walked from Stoke Newington to Woodford.”

“Your thermos bottle do you say?”

“Absolutely.”

“Keeble’s device for the maintenance of temperature within an enclosed space?”

“That’s it exactly. Very nearly irreplaceable, too.”

“Do you know that it was the invention of the thermos bottle that excluded Keeble from the Royal Academy?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. (William Keeble, I’ll reveal here, is my protector and benefactor, a toy maker and inventor extraordinaire.) “Why on earth would they
exclude
him?”

“He explained his device to the members, do you see?—telling them that it kept hot things hot and cold things cold.”

“Ah.” I nodded.

“But they were skeptical. It sounded like gibberish to them, hot things hot and cold things cold. It was a conundrum, a contradiction in terms. They held the device in their hands, peered inside, sniffed it, handed it round. It was Lord Kelvin himself who asked the decisive, ruinous question. The question for which there was no answer.”

“Ah,” I said, waiting.

“Kelvin looked at him over the top of his spectacles in that way he has, and asked, quite simply, and with great finality, ‘how does it
know?”

I stared at St. Ives, blinking once or twice, waiting for his words to convey some meaning to my mind. It had been a long and trying day.

“The question baffled poor Keeble. He didn’t expect it. But they were adamant. It’s the scientific method or nothing with them, you know, and too often nothing comes of it. Far too often. Do you follow me?”

I poured myself another glass of sherry and nodded. “The succulents and begonias book—I take it you don’t rue the loss. And yet your telegram seemed to hint that the volume was of a vital nature.”

“And perhaps it was, in its roundabout way. Tell me, do you read the work of Mr. Poe?”

“Too morbid for my taste.”

“He’s a master of the crime story. Pioneered the device of the false clue, the red herring, the specious oddity that throws your man off the track.”

“Or onto the track, in my case,” I said, cramming a cake into my mouth, a very delicate seeded cake tasting of anise, and I nodded my appreciation at Hasbro as he reentered the room bearing what appeared to be manuscript pages.

“Quite so. But you see, I knew that these—these pig men, I suppose we can call them, would purloin that telegram and then deliver it themselves. They’re keen on the manuscript, you see. As a
ruse de guerre,
I deposited the false volume, the mockup, with Dr. Lester, then gave the missive to Bill Kraken and had him dash down to London to deliver it.”

“Bill Kraken!” I was aghast. Of all the unreliable drunkards! “You can’t mean old Cuttle Kraken’s mad brother?”

“The same.” The Professor uttered a sort of sigh and drained his glass, helping himself to one of the cakes. He took the manuscript from Hasbro. “Pour yourself a glass of this sherry,” he said, smiling at the man. “We’re a company now.”

“Yes, sir,” Hasbro said, pouring himself an unconvincing dribble.

“Unfortunately poor Bill was knocked on the head in a tavern in Limehouse. He’ll recover, thank God, but they weren’t kind to him. They took the message around to your digs themselves, delivered it to you, and then accosted you on the train in order to steal the book after old Lester had entrusted it to you.”

I was dumbstruck. “And so the book is gone! I still don’t fathom…”

“
This
is the Kraken-Birdlip manuscript,” St. Ives said, winking at me and handing me the loose pages that he’d taken from Hasbro. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was indeed reading Birdlip’s treatise on succulents and begonias. I gave St. Ives the searching stare and awaited a further explanation. I had been practiced upon, and I wasn’t smiling and winking, although he was, apparently tremendously pleased with himself.

“Another ruse?” I asked him.

“Indeed. Ruse upon ruse. This, of course, is the treatise on alien botanicals prepared by Cuttle Kraken and Dr. Birdlip after their first venture through the hole. After Cuttle’s death in the explosion, Birdlip spirited it away, consigning it to me before he went into hiding. It constitutes evidence, of course, which ought to have been destroyed in the conflagration in Birdlip’s laboratory. But as you can see, it wasn’t destroyed. How the pig men divined the truth is hard to say, but I became certain that they had.” He laughed now, out of high spirits. “I had almost said ‘deveined’ as if the truth were a shrimp.”

“And so you fabricated this, this
red herring de guerre,
this
shrimp de mer,
just in order to confound them?”

“Just so.”

St. Ives was triumphant, proof positive that my little contribution to his scheme was well worth a few gorse spines, but before I could utter a word there was a tremendous explosion that brought me catapulting out of my chair, dumping a half glass of sherry down the front of my trousers. I saw that Hasbro stood at the open French window, his hair whisking about on the wind and a regular torrent of rain from a renewed storm sluicing into the room. In his hands was a long smoking rifle of monstrous proportions—a death-dealer from the look of it.

“What-ho Hasbro?” St. Ives stood up unflustered, peering out into the night.

“Prowlers, sir.”

“Did you bring any down?”

“Yes, sir. I seem to have dropped one, as the white hunter would say. He’s lying on the lawn, apparently immobilized.”

The Professor had a lantern in hand in a nonce, and we were out the door and into the rain, warily approaching the creature, Hasbro brandishing his weapon, ready to blow the interloper to Kingdom Come. The fallen man, if a man he was, apparently now trod on more hallowed ground than had been available in the environs of Chingford-by-the-Tower.

I’ll admit that I’d had a sip or two that evening, but I was sober enough to see with relative clarity, and, I might add, I’m a man who prides himself in his straightforward veracity. Ask any of the lads at the old Scout’s Rest, and they’ll back me to a man. Jack Owlesby, they’ll say, is solid as the Rock. And it took that sort of solidity, I can assure you: when St. Ives held the lantern over the wound, it ran with green blood—a murky and fibrous green, as if spun into tangled clumps of dirty Irish cobweb. St. Ives was grim, but was not particularly taken aback. He reached down and popped the corpse’s shoe off, and, with a wide gesture, as if introducing a fairly so-so pianist, waved at the thing’s cloven hoof, the ghastliest bit of anatomical peculiarity I’d hitherto had the pleasure to encounter. The beast had the foreleg of a pig, and, indeed, appeared to be the very gentleman, if gentleman I can call him, who had propelled me through the open train window that very afternoon. He was dead as a Yorkshire ham, and already he had begun to stink.

Another thing Jack Owlesby isn’t is a coward. I mean to say, I was pitched from the window of a moving train, an incident that would discourage the stoutest heart, and yet I trudged like a trooper through the night to a rendezvous with a scientist—not mad, strictly speaking, but eccentric, given to flights of fancy—whose intention it was to shoot me into outer space in an utterly unlikely machine. Mere pluck isn’t in it, from my point of view. But when I caught sight of that hoof, attached to the end of a pinkish but rather human-looking leg, I let fly a “Yoicks!” that might have been heard as far away as Stoke Newington, and took off, as my old mother would say, like a dirty shirt toward St. Ives Manor, where I finished off the sherry bottle and opened a second without invitation.

Later, St. Ives and Hasbro slid back in, having deposited the corpus delecti with the local vivisectionist. I was storming the gates of fear with another scupper of Spanish sherry, but I was sober as a judge, much to my dismay. The whole rum puncheon ran contrary to what one might call my better judgment—a dead man, after all, or some facsimile of one—but the Professor had a different way of seeing things. Langdon St. Ives has always seen things in his own light, although the wavelength is off the visible spectrum, a sublunar light, if you follow me, but, admittedly, the light of rare genius. He assured me that if we all kept a judicious eye peeled for scalawags, we’d last out the night in good health. Consider for a moment how cheered I was by this observation.

And it was a vigil that we kept: Hasbro with his elephant rifle scouring the grounds; Professor St. Ives at the lookout, first at one window, then at the next; and I holding sway before the fireplace, guarding the chimney flue and the sherry bottle lest the hoofed men try to slip in from above. A roaring fire, I’ve heard, fends off even the most fearsome night denizens, and by God I kept the fire hot. And in the long night I learned several bits of information that served merely to increase the general rumminess. First, I caught on that these cloven-hoofed pig men were not at all human, a fact I had rather suspected, and that they were intent upon putting the damper on our mission into space. It seems that these aliens, these Citronites (Birdlip and the elder Kraken had, apparently, dubbed their planet Citrona after finding vast tangerine orchards in evidence) had been slipping in through what Birdlip and St. Ives have dubbed “black holes”—a single black hole, actually.