Tales of the Shadowmen 1: The Modern Babylon

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  “By studying the surveillance tapes you have running all the time at the Louvre.”

  Muscat smiled faintly. “You know my methods, Watson,” he quoted. “We have studied the tapes. They were blanked out or somehow malfunctioned 15 minutes on either side of the theft.” He studied Wimsey’s card. “It says here in very tiny print that you are a psychic investigator.”

  Wimsey nodded. “I don’t talk about it much, but it’s a fact.”

  “You solved the mystery of The New Hebrides liner some years ago.”

  “I was involved in that case. I wouldn’t say I solved it, I discovered an important discrepancy in the testimony.”

  “And it is a discrepancy that you will look for here?”

  Wimsey smiled faintly. “Something that will excite my psychic fancy.”

  “Fantômas is not enough?”

  “Something in addition to Fantômas could be useful.”

  “You don’t believe the man himself was responsible?”

  “Anyone could write ‘Fantômas’ on a calling card. The name hints at a certain presumption rather than an established fact.”

  “You don’t think Fantômas exists?”

  “I’m pretty sure something psychic exists here,” Wimsey said.

  “But, my dear sir, how can this theft be involved with a psychic matter?”

  “How can it not, once the name Fantômas is invoked?”

  Muscat looked bewildered. “And why do you wish to speak with this girl?”

  “I am merely following the clues least likely to succeed, since they are the most promising ones.’

  “Oh, have no fear, I will find her. We have her photograph, as you pointed out; and her name will be in the guest book. I should have her by the end of the day.”

  Wimsey left and returned to his hotel room. Once there, he took off his shoes and put on comfortable slippers. Then he went to his luggage and removed a small leather case. Carrying this to the window, he removed the back with the screwdriver tip of his pocket knife. Within the box, he found a switch and turned it. Then, he said, in a conversational voice, “Mrs. Rosenberg, are you there?”

  “I am here, Mr. Wimsey, just as you requested. May I pour myself a cup of tea before we begin?”

  “By all means, Mrs. Rosenberg.”

  He waited. Presently Mrs. Rosenberg’s voice came on again. “There! That’s much better. I haven’t taken my mind off the subject since you contacted me yesterday.”

  “Did you view the Exhibition room in the Louvre?”

  “Indeed I did. I saw you there, Mr. Wimsey. You looked very nice in your new red tie. Was it a present?”

  The old lady in Wiltshire was incurably nosy. Wimsey ignored her question and asked, “Did you see the theft of the Paris-Ganymede clock?”

  “Of course, sir. It is what I was asked to observe, was it not? I saw everything clearly, as long as conditions permitted, sir. But conditions were not good.”

  “Was there a problem?”

  “A phase shift, sir. Didn’t you notice it? It ruins reception as long as it lasts.”

  “You’re quite certain it was a phase shift?”

  “Quite certain, sir. The red glow was unmistakable. I tried to get my familiar to look through it, but he refused.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He said that something unholy was going on. Something that had to do with black science. He refused to look until it was over. By that time, the clock was gone.”

  “You noted the time, of course?”

  “Of course. The shift began at 3:05 p.m. Paris time, and ended 15 minutes later.”

  “I was there throughout?” Wimsey asked.

  “You were, sir. Though you didn’t seem to notice a thing.”

  “Typical of me. Did you notice a little girl with long blonde hair?”

  “I did. There seemed to be an accentuation of some sort around her.”

  “Anything else?”

  Mrs. Rosenberg shook her head. “Except that she was there one moment, gone the next. I can’t account for her, sir.”

  “Excellent, Mrs. Rosenberg. I will get back to you presently. But first I must ask a favor of you.”

  “Of course.”

  “I need to speak to the Observer.”

  “How did you know about the Observer, Mr. Wimsey?”

  “Never mind. Can you ask him to speak with me?”

  “You must know he doesn’t like interviews.”

  “I know. But I have to ask him something.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Rosenberg said, “I’ll see what I can do.” She broke the connection.

  Wimsey had time for a light dinner in a nearby cafe and a short walk along the Seine. Then, he returned to his hotel room. It took him a moment to realize there was a man sitting in one of the chairs near the window.

  “You are the Observer?” Wimsey asked.

  “I am indeed,” the man said. He was short and strongly made, round-headed and with dark curly hair. He wore a plain dark business suit. His shoes were freshly polished, but there were cracks along the caps.

  “You asked to see me, sir?” the Observer said.

  “I did,” Wimsey said. “And I must beg your forgiveness. I know this is unusual, perhaps unprecedented. But I am working on an important case and I didn’t know who to turn to–”

  The Observer lifted his hand. “Not to worry, Mr. Wimsey. I was glad to come. Frankly, I welcome the break. When they made me Observer, more years ago than I care to remember, they never bothered their heads about providing a relief for me. I had to train my own. They seemed to think I could just go on doing it. Well, that’s simply not the way it is.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course not. Nobody knows about the Observer, except perhaps a psychic such as yourself. Oh, to be sure, some scientists have entertained the notion. I believe a fellow called Heisenberg discussed it with some of his colleagues a long time ago, and then published his thoughts in what they call a learned paper. I didn’t read it. I may even have the name wrong. Was it Bohr I’m thinking of?”

  “I really don’t know,” Wimsey said.

  “Before your time, was it? Well, it was one of those chaps. One of the brilliant ones. It’s all pretty obvious, as far as I’m concerned. The only mystery is who appoints the Observer.”

  “How did you get to be Observer?” Wimsey asked.

  “Don’t remember any longer. It was a long time ago. Someone told me I was the new Observer. Never mentioned what happened to the old Observer. And that’s all there was to it.”

  “Yes, it works that way sometimes. That’s more or less how I became a psychic detective. In my case, the gift ran in the family.”

  The Observer nodded, but asked no questions.

  “I wanted to ask,” Wimsey said. “Have you seen a man named Fantômas?”

  “I don’t know,” the Observer said. “I see everyone. But I don’t remember their names. It’s not required, you know.”

  “I thought you might have noticed him. He’s not a normal human, you know.”

  “Sorry, sir, I have nothing more to add.”

  “Thank you very much,” Wimsey said.

  The Observer left. Wimsey sat quietly in a chair. He noticed a flash of red out of the corner of his eye. Before he could react, he suddenly found himself in a different place.

  He was sitting on a rounded boulder on a wide, bleak granite plain. It was growing dark. At the edge of the plain, a swollen red sun was sinking. Above it was a small black object, another sun, perhaps. It, too, was sinking. It was a melancholy sight. Wimsey had the impression of a dying world.

  He turned and saw a bald old man sitting on another boulder to his left and slightly behind him. The old man was dressed in a dark blue robe. His features were human-like, but Wimsey didn’t think he was human.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Wimsey. I am Adnan. My people sent me to give you some explanation of recent happenings.”

  �
��Thank you.”

  “We do not do this for you, personally. It is for ourselves. To set the accounts as correctly as we can at this point.”

  “Where does it begin?” Wimsey asked.

  “With the clock.”

  Wimsey listened while Adnan explained that his people once lived on the moon called Ganymede. But it was not their home. During their space-traveling days, they had made a civilization on this world. It was one of many worlds they had settled, and then decided to abandon. There were difficulties with Ganymede. These could have been solved if the will had been there, but the will to populate other worlds had been lost after the paradigm shift that occurred. Adnan’s people had decided to give up expanding into space. It was no longer necessary. They had a stable population of several billion on their home world. The home planet was in no danger of imminent catastrophe. It was time to reduce their numbers.

  So Ganymede was stripped. All artifacts of their civilization, any evidence pointing to their existence, was taken away.

  “Actually,” Adnan said, “one thing remained. The artifact you called the Paris-Ganymede clock. There was a person assigned to carry it away. But this person died unexpectedly before this could be done. Knowledge of this did not reach us before your own spaceship landed on Ganymede.”

  “I am confused,” Wimsey said. “Why was it so important for you to remove all artifacts? Why did you not want us to know of your existence? What has happened to the clock now? Who took it?”

  “One thing at a time,” Adnan said. “My dear friend, you must take what I give you in the limited time available to me and not try to look beyond it. A hundred lifetimes would not be sufficient for me to explain the reasons behind all our actions to you. To address the main point: we did not want to be discovered by you. We wanted to leave no clues as to our existence. The Paris-Ganymede clock was proof that an intelligent alien race did exist.”

  “What was so wrong about us knowing that?”

  “You would have come looking for us. We knew that this quest, once there was some proof, would turn into a planet-wide obsession. It would become tantamount to looking for God–only with a much better chance of accomplishment.”

  “And what was so wrong about that?”

  “From your point of view, nothing. From ours, a great deal. My race has come to a stage of contemplation of, and assistance to, each of its individual member. No one is left out, no one is ignored, no one is considered inferior. This has come about only in fairly recent times. Many other problems had to be solved first. Major political issues had to be settled, or at least a way had to be found to navigate through them. Racial differences had to be addressed. Religions had to be taken into account. This, and much more, had to be accomplished before we could turn to the individual.”

  Wimsey said, “I don’t see where that situation affects your need to remain hidden.”

  “To remain hidden,” Adnan said, “is to exclude. We excluded all other intelligent creatures alien to us. We had never encountered any before, so the point was academic until we encountered you humans.”

  “I don’t see how that will accomplish anything. We have seen the clock. We know that another intelligent race exists.”

  “Oh, you know now. That is, some of you do. But in years to come, without a miraculous artifact to turn to, how long will your race believe it? Will you still believe it in a hundred years? In a thousand years? With no physical proof? In time, the Paris-Ganymede clock will be relegated to the annals of imaginary or fake history.”

  “I won’t forget it,” Wimsey said.

  “That is why my people sent me. To satisfy you, personally. But if you tell this story, it and you will be relegated to the region of cranks with interesting but unprovable theories.”

  Wimsey nodded. He understood that what was happening to him now, was a story he could not tell. Not if he wanted to continue living a reasonably sane life.

  “At least, tell me the truth about Fantômas. Is there such a being? Did he take part in what happened here? Is he one of your people, or something else entirely?”

  “I can say no more,” Adnan said. “You should know better than anyone, Mr. Wimsey, that there is always a mystery remaining. It is not necessary for you or anyone else to know the truth about Fantômas.”

  Adnan rose from the boulder and gathered his robe around him.

  Wimsey said, “Are you just going to leave it at that? Without hope of Earth ever knowing the truth of this matter? It seems to me you’re behaving in an underhanded fashion.”

  “That question will have to be pondered in our Councils. Are we acting ethically here? I don’t pretend to know the answer. There is always the hope of a day to come when our race knows how to deal with yours. I doubt that either you or I will live to see that day.”

  Adnan made a graceful gesture, and vanished.

  Wimsey was alone on the dying planet. There was just one thing left. Adnan seemed to have left behind the Paris-Ganymede clock. It was standing at the base of the boulder Adnan had been sitting on. Wimsey walked over and picked it up. As he bent to pick it up, as he touched it, there was a flash of light and a deep musical sound. Wimsey found himself back in his hotel room, without the clock.

  No one could close this book better than Brian Stableford; no story could close this book better than The Titan Unwrecked. Just as we have entered a new century, fraught with new perils, Stableford turns his eyes towards that same transition, a little over a century ago. His stage: a mythical journey where a great cast of writers mingles with an equally superb cast of legends…

  Brian Stableford: The Titan Unwrecked; or, Futility Revisited

  North Atlantic, 1900

  Having narrowly avoided an iceberg on her third return trip the Titan had fulfilled all the expectations entertained of her. She had, as anticipated, established the promptitude and regularity of a railway train in shuttling back and forth between New York and Southampton, making the distance between Sandy Hook and Daunt’s Rock well within her six-day schedule almost without fail. When she set out westbound from Southampton Water on the evening of Boxing Day in the year 1900, she carried a full complement of passengers, whose expectations of celebrating the dawn of a new century on the night before their disembarkation in New York generated a mood of unparalleled cheerfulness and hopefulness from the moment she slipped anchor.

  The Titan’s passenger-list was the customary deep cross-section of Anglo-American society, ranging from a duke and several millionaires in the finest staterooms to 2,000 hopeful emigrants in steerage, but the significance of the voyage–the last Atlantic crossing of the 19th century–had attracted an unusually high proportion of romantics of every stripe, including a large company of Frenchmen who had come from Cherbourg to join the ship, and a considerable number of writers–true literary men as well as newspaper reporters–in search of inspiration.

  Certain elements of the Titan’s cargo were equally exotic, or so it was rumored. In addition to the usual mundane treasures, her secure hold was said to contain the entire contents of a recently-looted Egyptian tomb, and an exotic biological specimen of mysterious nature and origin had allegedly been brought from the Isle of Wight with only hours to spare before the hour of departure. Few, if any, of the crew had actually see these alleged marvels; although many more had seen a large collection of coffin-like boxes that had been stowed in the main luggage-hold, and a series of crates containing an elaborate array of what appeared to be electrical and acoustic apparatus, which had been carefully packed away in the space reserved for fragile items.

  Because the purser had a mischievous sense of humor, almost all of the writers found themselves seated at the same table in the first-class dining-room for the evening meal whose serving began while the ship was rounding Land’s End. The main course was the breasts of pheasants and partridges shot in the run up to Christmas Eve and hung over the festive season; the legs were, as usual, directed to the second-class dining room, while the offal was added to the sausa
ge-meat reserved for steerage rations. The writers eyed one another suspiciously, all of them anxious for their relative positions on the highest literary ground and each one wondering who among them would be first to describe the Titan as a “ship of fools.”

  “I, for one,” said Mr. Henley, seemingly by way of breaking the tension, “will not be sorry to see the very end of the so-called fin de siècle. I have had my fill of decadence, and I feel sure that the new century will be a vigorous and prosperous era, in which there will be a new alliance between the manly and aesthetic virtues–an alliance that will revolutionize moral and intellectual life, and quicken the march of progress.”

  This bold assertion caused some offense to Monsieur Lorrain, whose consumptive cough suggested that New York might be only a stopping-point for him, en route to the warm, dry air of Arizona or Nevada. “The century may change,” he said, softly, “but the faltering steps of civilization will not recover their sturdy gait by means of optimism alone. We are products of the 19th century ourselves; there is a sense in which the Titan is already a ghost-ship, whose parody of life is but painted artifice.”

  Monsieur Lorrain’s immediate neighbors, Mr. Huneker and Mr. Chambers, nodded in polite but half-hearted assent, but stronger support was provided by Mr. Vane. “We are indeed ghosts without knowing it,” he said, dolefully, “sailing to judgment while in denial, afraid to confront our sinful souls.”

  “Well, I feel perfectly fine,” said a reporter from the Daily Telegraph. “And I’m with Henley. The Boer War is won, the siege of the Peking legations is lifted, the Empire is in the best of health...”

  His colleague from the Daily Mail took up the refrain: “Oscar Wilde’s rotting in Paris; Lillie Langtry’s on her way to New York aboard this very vessel, without her new husband in tow; Sherlock Holmes is busy investigating the robberies at Asprey’s of Bond Street and St. James’s Palace, and all’s right with the world.”

  “Is Miss Langtry really aboard?” asked Miss Lee, who was the only woman at the 13-seater table. She had to turn around to squint myopically through her eyeglasses at the Captain’s table, some 20 yards away.