by Mark Hodder
“We have to get to the Penfold Sanatorium,” he said. “Maneesh still has the historical records, and I fear Sprocket might be intent on getting them.”
A steam-horse-drawn growler drew to a halt at the kerb. Its engine emitted a gargling sigh and a cloud of white vapour.
The king’s agent directed the driver to the hospital and added, “Make haste, please. It’s an emergency.”
“I’ll do me best,” the man replied, “but the traffic ain’t going to part for us like the bloomin’ Red Seas, if yer don’t mind me a-sayin’ so.”
“There’s a generous tip in it for you if you get us there in good measure,” Burton stated as he climbed aboard.
“Back streets, then. Better hang on. It’ll be a bumpy ride.”
As Swinburne settled beside Burton and the carriage jolted into motion, the poet asked, “How could the doorman know Krishnamurthy has the documents?”
“Grumbles was aware of the fact,” Burton answered. “He was in the room when we spoke about them. I thought he was trying to prevent us from getting to the station when he set upon us in the yard. It might be that he was actually after the satchel. However, he didn’t have the opportunity to speak with Sprocket, so your question stands, and I don’t know the answer to it.”
They grabbed at the leather hand straps hanging over the windows, steadying themselves as, without warning, the vehicle careened to the right. The light dimmed as walls closed in on either side of it. The driver had evidently steered into an alleyway. Burton caught a glimpse of a vagabond pressed against brickwork, his eyes wide with surprise as the wheels missed his toes by mere inches.
Rounding a corner, thundering through a small, litter-strewn square and into another tight passage—this bordered by slouching tenement buildings—the growler bumped over uneven ground and scattered detritus, rocking from side to side and giving its passengers a thorough shaking.
“This is Soho, isn’t it?” Swinburne said, hanging on for all he was worth. “Strange how such a squalid rookery can exist right beside the glamour of the Strand.”
“The British Empire has always been one of contrasts,” Burton replied. He added “Oof!” as the vehicle bounced over a pothole. “And in London, they are condensed and brought into sharp focus.”
From a maze of alleyways, the growler emerged into Oxford Circus where it was immediately hemmed in by a cacophonous profusion of wheeled and multilegged machines. Drivers yelled expletives at each other. Horses reared and whinnied in distress. Spokes tangled with metal knees. Steam and smoke billowed in every direction.
“Get your bleedin’ heap out o’ my way!” their man bellowed. “Coming through! Coming through! And the same to you, matey! Oy! Mind out! Are you blind or what? Yeah? Well why don’t you shove it where the sun don’t shine!”
With a lot of bumping, scraping, and very bad language, they nudged their way across the bustling junction before, like a cork popping out of a bottle, suddenly accelerating into a narrow side street.
Once again, the opulent facade of the city gave way to the inner rot, as they clattered into the grimy backwaters of Marylebone, moving through roads inhabited mainly, it appeared, by beggars, drunkards, ne’er-do-wells, and women of ill repute.
“If Sadhvi and Maneesh stuck to the main roads, which they surely did, we might reach the sanatorium before them,” Swinburne observed.
“So might Sprocket,” Burton countered.
The growler scraped through a very narrow passage, navigated a tight corner, and emerged into a long, straight, and slightly wider alley bordered on either side by the featureless redbrick walls of tall warehouses.
Burton leaned out of the window and looked ahead. The far end of the alley opened onto what appeared to be a main thoroughfare—Weymouth Street, he guessed—and he could see the front of a butcher’s shop.
Momentarily made light-headed by déjà vu, he collapsed back into his seat and grappled with disparate memories, but before he could get a firm grasp on any of them, the vehicle reached the junction and turned with such speed that its left side rose up and Swinburne was knocked into him.
“My hat!” the poet squealed. “The teeth will be shaken from my head at this rate!”
Burton regarded the patch of oil that had been transferred from his companion’s clothes to his own sleeve. “Our cabbie must be in debt. He’s certainly keen on earning that tip.”
Moments later, they swung out onto Marylebone Road and were rattling toward the crossing with Edgware when the driver gave a cry of alarm and jerked the carriage to a halt with such abruptness that both passengers were propelled forward, banging their heads against the opposite wall of the cabin.
Shouts and screams reached them from outside.
“What now?” Swinburne muttered.
Throwing open the door, Burton jumped to the ground and saw, ahead at the junction, that an ornithopter had just landed in the middle of the thoroughfare. It had evidently done so precipitously, for a wagon lay crushed to matchwood beneath it, and vehicles, in seeking to avoid a collision with the wide, still-flapping metal wings, were veering to either side, bumping up onto the pavements and, in one case, as Burton watched, smashing through the front window of a bakery.
Swinburne stepped down to his side and cried out, “Look! Surely that’s Sprocket!” He pointed at a landau that was skidding to a halt in front of the flying machine. A clockwork man was clinging to its back, hitching a ride like a street urchin.
“Sadhvi and Maneesh!” Burton exclaimed and started forward.
He saw the brass doorman drop to the road and stride to the side of the carriage. At the same moment, the ornithopter’s hatch swung open and six mechanical figures emerged and ran the short distance to join Sprocket, who gripped the landau’s door, ripped it off, and flung it aside. A cry of fright came from within.
Burton yelled, “Stop!” as he saw Raghavendra and Krishnamurthy hauled from the cabin.
“Unhand them at once!” Swinburne demanded.
The clockwork men started back toward their flying machine, dragging their captives with them. Raghavendra saw Burton and extended an arm toward him.
“Help, Richard!”
“Sadhvi!”
Two of the mechanicals turned as Burton and Swinburne caught up with the group.
“May I assist you, gentlemen?” one asked. “Perhaps you require a serious injury or a rapid demise?”
“Release them!” Burton commanded. “Where are you taking them? On whose orders?”
“At your service, sir. We aim to please. Have a nice day. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good-bye. Hello. Good-bye.”
“Stop babbling and stand aside!” Swinburne shrieked. He attempted to push past the contraption, but it immediately snatched him by the back of the collar and lifted him from the ground.
“I say!” The poet pedalled his legs frantically. “Put me down!”
“As you wish, sir.”
“No! Don’t!”
Swinburne’s sudden realisation of what would happen came too late. Once again, he was thrown high into the air.
As his somersaulting friend soared over a nearby omnibus, Burton paced forward but was immediately brought up short by the mechanism, which suddenly lunged at him. The king’s agent saw a flash of polished brass as the heel of a metal hand impacted against the side of his head.
Everything went black. There was a sensation of falling. Then there was nothing.
When consciousness reignited, there came the immediate cognisance that only a few minutes had passed. Burton opened his eyes. An enormous goose was peering down at him. Black smoke billowed behind the bird. People were shouting. A horse was whinnying in distress.
The goose sneezed and expelled feathers. They floated down around its head. “Are you all right?” it asked, blinking its bright green eyes.
“I’m—” Burton pushed himself up onto his elbows. “Ouch!”
“You were knocked senseless.”
“Algy? Is that you?”
“Yes. I crashed through the roof of a cargo van. It was transporting feathers for mattresses. They’ve stuck to my oily clothes. In terms of fashion, I doubt the look will catch on. What do you think?”
Ignoring the question, the explorer scrambled to his feet and looked around at a scene of utter mayhem. Through coiling fumes, he saw flickering flames and heaped wreckage. A rotorchair was embedded in the front of a building. Carriages and wagons were scattered around the crossroads, many of them on their sides. A wounded horse was on the ground, kicking wildly, with three men hanging onto its reins, jumping out of the way of its lashing hoofs, while a policeman tried to press a revolver to its head.
Swinburne sneezed again. “Apparently the bucket heads took off in great haste and knocked a couple of rotorchairs out of the sky as they went. One exploded when it hit the ground. There have been fatalities.”
“What of Sadhvi and Maneesh?”
“Abducted.”
Police constables were arriving and attempting to bring some sort of order to the scene. Burton saw one nearby, talking to a woman. He paced over, with his friend following, and interrupted.
“Constable, I’m Burton.”
The uniformed man turned from the woman and saluted. “Yes, sir. The agent. Recognise you. I was at the Leicester Square incident last year. I’m Khapoor. I—that is to say—er—” He gazed in bemusement at Swinburne.
“His Majesty’s special fowl,” the poet snapped authoritatively. “Dispatched to investigate incidents of unlawful flying.”
The policeman removed his helmet and scratched his head. “Um. What?”
“Joking.”
“Ignore my colleague, Khapoor,” Burton advised. “He has a peculiar kink in his brain. It causes him to quip and jape inappropriately during times of duress. He’s playing the fool because he’s deeply concerned. In which direction did the ornithopter depart?”
“I was just asking Mrs. Baker here that very question, sir.”
Burton turned his attention to the woman. She was middle-aged, overweight, and possessed the ruddy, thread-veined complexion of a dedicated gin drinker.
“Mrs. Baker owns the bakery,” Khapoor added. “It was badly damaged.”
Swinburne grinned. “Mrs. Baker the baker? That’s a fortuitous combination.”
The woman eyed him haughtily. “There’s nothing forty-tooty about a broken window, young man. An’ the surname came with marriage. Me maiden name were Potter.”
“Then it’s a good thing you got hitched, ma’am, else you might be kneading clay rather than dough.”
Burton winced. Taking the poet by the shoulders, he turned him and pushed him away. “Algy, go and pluck yourself.”
He waited until Swinburne had moved off before once again addressing Khapoor. “Proceed, please, Constable.”
“Yes, sir. So, Mrs. Baker, you witnessed the entire affair, is that right?”
The woman rubbed her chin with leathery fingertips. “I blimmin’ well did. Nearly got clobbered by that there growler, too. I’d just stepped out o’ the shop to take a few sucks on me pipe, you see, when the horny-chopper fell straight down out o’ the sky an’ landed with a thump on top of a coal cart. Smashed it right to pieces, it did, an’ killed the poor driver dead. Traffic went this way an’ that, an’ I had to jump for me blimmin’ life when the growler came at me shop. Right through the glass it went! That’ll cost a pretty penny to replace, so it will, an’ it won’t be out o’ my pocket, oh no. When you catch ’em what’s responsible, you’ll hand ’em the bill for repairs, hey?”
“We will, ma’am,” Khapoor said. “You saw the machine take to the air again?”
“I were lyin’ in the gutter. In the gutter! At my age! Saw the metal men bundle a lady an’ gent into the flyin’ machine an’ hoff it went. Bang! Crash! More blimmin’ hurly-burly!”
Burton asked, “Which way did it go?”
She pointed westward. “Thataway, sir.”
Khapoor shook his head and said to Burton, “As soon as it vanished over the rooftops it could have turned in any direction. Those contraptions are fast, too. I doubt we’ll find it.”
“Hmm. Will you speak to Detective Inspector Trounce? Ask him to get word to all the city’s police stations. Someone, somewhere, must have seen it land.”
“I will, sir, but there’s a lot of ornithopters. Even more than rotorships, and I just got orders to look out for one of them, too.”
“Yes, the Orpheus. My goodness, Trounce spread the word quickly.”
“I crossed paths with him a little earlier, sir. He was on his way to the Yard. We—”
They all jumped as a shot rang out. Burton looked around and saw that the wounded horse had stopped kicking.
Mrs. Baker clicked her tongue. “What about me blimmin’ window?”
“One moment, please, ma’am,” Khapoor said. “Will there be anything else, Captain Burton?”
“Not for now. Thank you, Constable. Mrs. Baker.”
He left them and rejoined Swinburne, who was standing watching policemen and others attempting to right vehicles and clear the road. The poet’s face was still half concealed by feathers. He turned it toward Burton and said, “You know, there’s only one explanation.”
“For what, Algy?”
“For the bucket heads working in concert like that. They must be able to communicate over a distance, perhaps using something like the radio devices we saw in 1914. Whatever the means, Grumbles used it to inform Sprocket that Krishnamurthy had the document. Sprocket then followed our friends, hitched a ride on the back of their cab, and called down the ornithopter.”
Swinburne put on his hat, then took it off and scratched his hair, causing a cloud of feathers to swirl into the air. He put the hat back on and puffed out his cheeks. “Which makes me think about that transmission the Orpheus’s Mark Three received upon our arrival.”
“Ah,” Burton said. “Yes. We need to locate the source of it.”
“But how, Richard? We’re thoroughly thwarted. I don’t doubt that Babbage is behind all this, but how the devil do we find him?”
“I have no idea, Algy. As you say, we’re stumped.” Burton squeezed his eyes shut and ground the heels of his hands into them. “My head is aching. No wonder, I suppose, after taking a blow from a metal fist. And I feel so suddenly fatigued that I can’t even string my thoughts together.”
“I must confess, I feel the same way, though I can’t fathom why. I slept well enough.”
“As did I. Perhaps it’s just the effects of our journey back from the future.”
Burton frowned, suspecting that he was overlooking something, but whatever it was, it refused to come to him. “Right now, there’s nothing we can do except hope the police discover our missing flying machines. I suggest we withdraw to our respective homes and rest up while they get on with it.”
“And while Gooch investigates Grumbles’ misbehaviour.”
“Indeed.”
Burton hesitated and pulled at his coat cuff distractedly.
Retire from the fray? Hide at home while others do the work? I’m Burton! Why am I acting like—like an old man?
Swinburne cocked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll stroll with you a-ways.”
They returned to their landau and paid the driver, who’d been waiting patiently for them, then moved away from the crossroads and proceeded back along Marylebone Road, passing jammed traffic, swearing drivers, and cursing passengers, pushing through a thickening crowd of the curious until they finally broke free of the crush and turned right into the relatively peaceful Gloucester Place.
Ragamuffins—and a number of adults—directed laughter and clucking noises at Swinburne. He ignored them.
“It occurs to me,” he said, “that Babbage was liable to go off the rails whether we completed our mission in the future or not. You’ll recall what we were told about him in 1914?”
“That he lost his mind,” Burton responded. “That, on the twenty-eighth of Septemb
er, 1861, he destroyed all his prototypes, all the devices he had in his possession, and incinerated his every plan, blueprint, and diary, leaving no trace of his work at all other than the Mark Two probability calculators that occupied the heads of his clockwork men.”
“And which will explode if anyone examines them too closely. If the history we travelled through was one suspended between two probabilities, then the fact we were told that means it is certain to happen either way.”
They passed the mouths of Salisbury Place, Bickenhall Street, York Street, and Crawford Street without further conversation, each entwined in his own thoughts, each battling the exhaustion that had descended so suddenly upon them.
As they approached Montagu Place, they heard someone bellowing, “Hot baked ’tators! Hot baked ’tators! Hot baked ’tators for ’em what wants ’em! Keeps yer warm an’ keeps yer full! Hot baked ’tators!”
“My hat!” Swinburne exclaimed. “It’s our old friend Grub!”
Drawing to a halt, they stood and watched the street vendor. The man bore no resemblance at all to the froggish individual of the far future, but they knew this man was the forebear of that other Mr. Grub.
Centuries from now, this very spot would be a tangle of vermillion jungle. They would stand in its midst. Swinburne would feel the rapture coming. Burton would feel nothing.
Approaching the flat-capped, baggy-clothed man, the explorer exclaimed, “Hallo there, Mr. Grub. You look well.”
“Lord ’elp us, if it ain’t the Cap’n ’imself!” the man cried out, knuckling his forehead. “I thought you’d bloomin’ well moved away, so I did! Been on anuvver of yer hexpiditions ’ave yer? Brought back an African bird, I see. An ostrich, is it?”
Burton chuckled. “This is Algernon. He fell into a feather-delivery van.”
Swinburne raised his hat in greeting. “What ho! What ho! What ho!”
Grub eyed the poet. “Celebratin’, was you, sir?”
“If by that you mean to ask whether I was one over the eight, I was not. I was perfectly sober. How’s the world been treating you, Mr. Grub?”
“Better than it’s been treatin’ you, by the looks of it, if yer don’t mind me a-sayin’ so.”