The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 5

  We crossed the meadow, finding St. Ives within the confines of the stone tower, a circular vaulted room with a polished stone floor and high windows radiating sunlight. A veritable scourge of sucking noises proceeded from a great conical device raised on an iron platform in the center of the floor, and it didn’t take more than a moment to deduce the fact that this device, a gothic assemblage of metal and glass, was the Professor’s spacecraft. I had been expecting a saucer, perhaps ringed with porthole windows and with a whirring combine beneath. This ship, however, had the appearance of a ruddy great bullet that had been decorated in the style of Chartes Cathedral.

  St. Ives puttered about, tugging on one thing and another and grappling with levers and switches. Hasbro took up a position outside the tower door, armed with his weapon. Unbeknownst to me, the hour of our departure was approaching, and the Professor and Hasbro knew that the pig men had to act if they were going to squelch things for good and all. St. Ives fully expected a cutting out expedition, and we were all of us on our guard. I was put to work, I can tell you, and I sweated like a banshee all afternoon over a complexity of whatnots and doodads. There were gyros to ameliorate and fluxion sponges to douse, and all of it accomplished within the space of thirty-eight seconds, with no margin of error, lest, as Shakespeare himself was wont to say, we tread untimely the fields of Elysium, pig men be damned. It was an unforgiving machine that could dash out our brains on the instant, and so my earthbound familiarity with the controls was vital if I were to be midshipman among the stars.

  Late in the afternoon I was tolerably familiar with endless buttons and dials and switches, and I moved about the cork floor in my stocking feet with something like confidence. The cork that made up the immense undercarriage of the ship, and which must have cost Spain half her annual production, was apparently the key to mass and buoyancy, the two great levelers of an air-going craft just as they were at sea. Stone ships, as the Professor put it, sink like the popular phrase. Long past noon, and with a growing peckishness, I found myself quite alone, left to batten down the hatches before popping over to the manor for a meat pie and a pint. The Professor and Hasbro had gone thither a half hour past. I stood now on the small iron quarterdeck, I guess you would call it, and spied through the tower window a man on the meadow, a stout man, with a suspicious creeping gait, who must have been hidden from view of the manor by the tower itself.

  I had the uncanny notion that I had seen the man before, and of course I had, for he could have been a twin of the man who had stopped on the lawn last night to parlay with Hasbro’s bullet. But that man by now had almost certainly been reduced to the sum of his parts. This one, like his fellows, possessed an uncannily rolled up face and tiny eyes, and he walked along on the tips of his toes like a chap might walk over hot sand. He was dressed in lederhosen in the manner of a comical German, and he carried a bamboo whangee, as if this unlikely stick would lend him the innocent air of a man on a walking tour. On his head was an oversized hat of the variety commonly called a poma, with a rounded point at its crown and with a turned up brim. Smoke seemed to rise from his ears.

  I shouted at him through the tower window: “What ho the masquerade!” I called out wittily, at which the man leapt into the air, looking around with a caught-in-the-act countenance. In a nonce he had pulled off his cap, removing from the smoking interior a black fizz bomb the size of a twelve pounder cannonball. Even in the afternoon sunlight the fuse was visibly sparking. He turned and ran even as he pitched the bomb at the tower, fleeing away in mincing steps toward Epping Forest. He had a tolerably good aim, I’ll give him that, for the black orb shattered the glass of one of the lower windows and clunked down onto the floor.

  “Here’s a jolly filthy mess,” I said to myself, clambering downwards. I’ll admit that my mind contemplated the open door, through which I was tempted to flee, but there’s something in a man that doesn’t love a bomb, and it was that which inclined me to risk everything on the chance of pinching out the fuse. I went for it like billy-o, scooping the thing up and, casting danger to Aeolus and his kin, attempted to smother the sputtering flame. It was no go. The fuse would stay lit despite my antics. And a fine fool I must have looked, juggling the bomb like a hot potato, dancing about on my toes, when I heard a voice shout, “Throw it away, sir! Out the door with it!” And without a second thought I did just that—pitched it through the open door, out onto the meadow, where it rolled like a game of nine-pins down the hill toward the forest, gathering speed, bouncing and hopping toward the very place where the pig man had taken shelter.

  Hasbro entered the tower. “I trust you’re unharmed, sir?” he asked.

  “Quite,” I told him, although in truth my fingertips were singed from my unsuccessful efforts with the flaming wick.

  “Then I suggest that we ascend to the upper reaches, sir, so that we might have the advantage of elevation.”

  Bounding up the stairs again was the work of a moment, and we had no sooner poked our heads through the porthole on the second balcony when a whopping great bang, a puff of black soot, and a regular bingo of fine orange spark and flame whooshed up from the forest. A cascade of tree limbs, leaves, and dirt rained roundabout for a time until the air over the wood was empty but for suspended dust, a bit of curling smoke, and the pig man’s hat turning end over end, buoyed for a moment on the recently charged atmosphere before falling groundward.

  We watched for movement in the fringe of the trees, but there was nothing, only the still-settling dust. The Professor appeared on the veranda and waved to us. We made our way down the stairs again and out onto the meadow, joining him. “Jolly stupid chaps, aliens,” I muttered as the three of us approached the woods.

  “Their powers of observation are singularly weak,” said the Professor. “If only their explosive devices were equally inadequate, we might almost find the creatures amusing.”

  “That chap with the bomb might have been the dead man on the lawn. Absolute likeness. Why do they all look so frightfully piggish?”

  “It has been observed,” said Hasbro, “that to the Asian gentleman all white Europeans look quite moderately alike. This is a similar phenomenon, I believe.”

  “Perhaps even more so,” I said, “these being space aliens.”

  “Entirely within the sphere of the possible, sir.”

  “We’re dealing with an entire race of pig men.”

  “So it would seem,” the Professor said. “Pig men down to the ground.”

  Just inside the line of trees we found a fine crater blown into the earth, but there was no sign of the alien, no hooves or sow’s ears or soused pig’s face. The singed hat lay in the crater, as if perhaps he had lost it as he fled.

  “I have a hunch,” St. Ives said, “that these aliens have a base right here in Epping Forest, perhaps even a spacecraft, hidden in the woods.”

  “Let’s flush the buggers out,” I said. “Ferret them out like stoats. Stoat them out like ferrets. They seem a stupid enough bunch.”

  “Perhaps too stupid.” The Professor looked thoughtful. “Rather like dealing with a dozen escaped loonies from Chigwell Hatch. Impossible to read them.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” I said. In the heat of the recent victory, however, I was fired up, and determined to be on the offensive for once. “But we can’t simply allow them to storm in waving fizz bombs whenever they feel up to it. After all, there might be dozens of them.”

  “I doubt it, sir, if you’ll pardon a word or two,” Hasbro put in. “If there were a quantity of them, they could have overpowered us easily. They are wary, I believe, because there are so few of them.”

  “Quite so,” responded St. Ives. “And, more to the point, we’ve really little to fear from the handful we suppose are in the woods, as long, that is, as we stay alert. I believe it was Addison who said something about leaping over single foes to attack entire armies, and that, in fact, is just the point. When one’s roof leaks, one doesn’t merely place a bucket beneath the drip. One cli
mbs atop the roof and jolly well plugs the hole. Do you follow me?”

  I said that I did, and we left Hasbro standing guard with his elephant gun and a brass bell to ring if he needed reinforcements. The Professor and I returned to the manor. We were to sail at dusk—blast off, I should say—and we spent the remainder of the afternoon loading supplies and closing up shop. Birdlip’s manuscript caught my eye as I was hauling beakers of water, and I realized that the succulents and begonias were still a mystery to me. I picked the thing up and waved it at St. Ives. “About the manuscript,” I began, but the Professor interrupted me with his inscrutable smile.

  “Ah, yes,” said he. “The false clue.”

  “Quite,” said I, “but why? Why slip the pig men a worthless book?”

  “Birdlip’s manuscript, my dear Owlesby, refers to certain plants—begonias, if you will, of outstanding girth, large as a man’s head, veritable trees. They shimmered, according to Birdlip and Kraken, and were surrounded by a halo, an aura of roseate darkness that suggested the black hole through which the two scientists had made an entrance into the universe where they had very much found themselves. These begonias appeared to be parasitical, attached as they were to the immense tangerine trees of which I have already spoken.”

  “Immense?”

  “Quite. Fully as large as the greater Norwegian alder, which, I needn’t add, is quite the largest tree on the globe, although it’s worthless for anything but firewood and the carving of figureheads. But do you know what the corker was?”

  “I’m ashamed to say I do not.”

  “Tangerines were sprouting and growing on the trees like…”

  The Professor groped for a word.

  “Like banshees,” I said helpfully.

  “I don’t follow you,” said he. “The simile conveys no meaning to my mind.”

  “It’s a general purpose word that I use for comparison. Works virtually anywhere.”

  “Yes,” said he. “Well. Kraken advanced the hypothesis that these begonias were somehow connected to the black hole, and that energy, or something quite like it, was jolly well sailing through the hole from our universe into theirs.”

  “A bleed-off, would you call it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And that’s why the trees are big as legends and growing fruit like popping corn.” It only has to snow once before Jack Owlesby gets the drift, as my old mother used to say, and I could see in an instant what these filthy alien interlopers were up to and why they’d handed me a fizz bomb for my troubles.

  “There you have it,” said St. Ives, shaking snuff onto the edge of his thumb.

  “These aliens are drawing off the essential humors,” said I, by way of clarification.

  “Filching our essences,” agreed the Professor. “And to bring up their plans with a round turn, I slipped an expurgated edition into the Museum and told old Dr. Lester that he was to release it only to you. The aliens, I found, tried to obtain the thing no less than eight times. Lester supposed it was the same whey-faced man dressed like lunacy each time. In his final attempt he was dressed as a red Indian, feathers protruding from his hat at a dozen angles and painted up like a grandee and wearing a pair of golden Arab slippers with the toes curled back in a point. Lester threatened to set the constable on him, and he fled through a rear exit and never made another attempt.”

  “Who first put them on to Birdlip?”

  “Kraken’s son, mad Bill.”

  “Their agent?”

  “I’m afraid so, poor devil. No fault of his own, though. They worked on his mind, what there was of it.”

  “Ah,” I said sadly. “That explains the Fauntleroy suit and the wig. It was their idea.”

  “Apparently so, though Lord knows why. The note was my own. I knew that you’d fetch the book from Lester, that the aliens would steal it and discover the false clue: that we blast off tomorrow, on the 24th.”

  “The night of the full moon.”

  “Just so. Actually,” he said, grinning like a grampus, “we blast off tonight.” He checked his pocket watch. “In an hour and a half exactly.”

  With that the Professor tucked the unexpurgated copy of Birdlip’s manuscript into his coat and busied himself with a crate of tinned foods and a cask of ship’s biscuit. When we returned to the tower we found Hasbro watering yew sproutlets in the greenhouse on the second level. I was sharp enough from the outset to realize that these shrubs and ferns and such would provide us with the necessary oxygen. St. Ives’s craft was turned out like a ship of the line.

  This is the part of the adventure where the minutes drag past like starfish, which, if you follow me, have enough legs to hie along like anything, but instead can do nothing but creep. Night had fallen an hour before, and the weather was exceptional—nothing between us and the hovering stars but vacant space, not even a cloud.

  We popped right to it, sealing hatches, zipping up atmosphere bulwarks, setting gyros and elasto-turbans, battening hatches, and all that sort of thing. I was smitten by a sense of adventure, and had there been a bowline or a capstan bar I would have hauled upon it with the heartiest sort of heave-ho, the consummate deckhand. By half past eight we were strapped into cushioned loungettes in the prow. Hasbro unshipped the deadlights and found his way back to his own loungette, all of us silent as we gazed out through the thick glass of the portholes through the top of Chingford Tower, which was unlidded, roofless, open to the elements so as to reveal a circle of sky as through the lens of a telescope.

  The Professor jabbed buttons, nodded meaningfully to Hasbro and I, and then reached across and heaved on a bloody great anti-something-or-other crank with silver wires sprouting from it like tentacles. There was a wild crash and clatter and a cacophonous whir reminiscent of a scourge of locusts setting up for a concert. In that moment there was a muffled explosion that brought the Professor up short. “What…?” he began to ask, but the entire tower quivered like a column of aspic, and we jolly well ripped out through the roofless roof like a comet trailing a universe of sparks.

  I’ll admit that I myself was smug in my ignorance, and not only about our having given the pig men the slip. I had a hand, you see, in making earth safe from their depredations: we were more than a match for a gaggle of ill-dressed loonies. I could visualize them leaping to their feet about now, from where they were hunkered down in Chingford Forest, punching each other on the shoulder, leaping up and running hatless onto the meadow. Imagine my surprise when that’s precisely what I did see, not forty feet below us.

  Odd thing, spaceships, they have these gyro gizmos that make a chap feel right side up in spite of the fact that he’s not—saves him a good deal of uneasiness, I suppose. It took a moment, then, for me to understand what had happened. The aliens, apparently, had chucked in one of their fizz bombs just as we launched our craft, and the concussion in the base of the tower had cannoned us upward, setting the bloody ship mad. Dials were spinning like whirligigs, and St. Ives was a veritable octopus, arms flailing hither and yon in an effort to stabilize our madcap flight.

  The ship capered along haywire above the green, and the pig men, dressed for a masquerade, ran in a wild rout in our wake, carrying lighted torches. St. Ives and Hasbro enlivened the necessary retros and stabilizers, and we banked into one last side-crushing loop before bowling off westward toward the common. Pig men gave way to costumed Boy Scouts about then, several hundred of the blighters on the evening march, who broke and ran like mice as we flew overhead, all shot up with flame and whizzing a universe of parti-colored sparks. We were out of sight quickly enough after setting aflame several score of tents, and (here I only speculate from newspaper accounts) the Scouts were regrouping when from over the rise, led by a gigantic alien dressed as a cartoon devil, came the pig men, shouting unfathomable drivel and brandishing torches.

  The rest of the Chingford Common fracas is history, and a dozen wild and equally unlikely stories have been offered by unfortunate witnesses, so I won’t say more about it exce
pt that none of those stories holds a candle to the truth, which, the philosopher tells us, is often the case. As for the ship, we managed to yank it up into the proper trajectory and, through the skills of science and the will of God, raced outward through the void toward the black hole that yawned like a tunnel of infamy off the port side of Mars.

  ***

  In truth, there’s not much more to say—not yet anyway. We whizzed along for six days before it occurred to me to ask the Professor just how long we’d be engaged in our modest heroics. He was evasive. That is to say, he hinted that the mission might be a protracted one indeed, and that the business of shutting a door sometimes requires stepping through that door and slamming it firmly shut behind one—a notion that in my weakness I understood to have been revealed to me in what might be called an untimely fashion, if you follow me.

  On the thirteenth day, late in the long and lightless afternoon, with Earth in our wake reduced to a speck of flame in the vast heavens, we saw the orbicular shadow of what a futuristic poet might, in his paroxysms of language, call something slightly more grand than a simple black hole: an ebony hiatus, perhaps, the looming mouth of a dark destiny encircled by a whirling vaporous darkness and shot through with rainbow lights as if a thousand twirling prisms danced above the abyss.

  “There she blows,” Hasbro muttered helpfully, mixing grog in a chemical beaker.

  “Still a good way off,” I responded, awestruck by the sight and helping myself to the contents of the beaker.

  “Its appearance is deceptive,” said the Professor, winking at me. “It looks as if it’s a thousand miles across from this distant perspective, when actually it’s a tiny thing, not much broader, shall we say, than the base of this ship, although all talk of breadth is purely conceptual. You see, Jack, there are walls.”