by Adrian Speed
Chapter II
Despite Sir Reginald’s burst of energy our travel to the twenty-third century was delayed by an invention of the eighteenth century. Sir Reginald might have been settling into the twenty-first century but no force on heaven or earth could persuade him to part with the steam engine that powered his time machine.
The time machine sat in a small yard behind the opticians, visible only to pigeons and crows. It was fifteen feet square, dominated by the huge steam boiler and fly wheel that drove the time machine’s machinery. Beside the boiler lay the true time machine, the collection of glass stems and gears that intertwined like the nerves of a great glass beast.
It always astounded me how clean and pristine the time machine looked, as if it had just been built. Sir Reginald either spent hundreds of hours cleaning it or had infused it with some dirt-repellent from the deep future. I suspected the former; otherwise he would have seen fit to power the machine using an engine more complex than boiled water.
I dreaded the idea of fumbling around a firebox in the heat of high summer. Sir Reginald always made me stoke the boiler while he dealt with the delicacies of setting up the time machine. Which is why it surprised me that Sir Reginald peeled off his jacket, tucked it into his hat and set them both to one side.
“Please prep the time machine to transport us, Hannah,” Sir Reginald said. “I’ll tend to the mundanity of coal.”
“Are you sure?” I hesitated. I’d driven the time machine before when it was fully up to pressure but I’d never had to watch over it and set it up from cold before.
“I will be here beside you.” Sir Reginald squatted down to light some kindling in the firebox. “Should you go wrong, I will correct it.” Tiny tongues of flame crackled around the wood shavings and Sir Reginald blew on them gently. “But you have been watching me carefully enough I doubt you will go far wrong.”
Meagre words of praise, but the trust shown through his offer spoke volumes more. I turned to the control panel, resting my hands on my hips, and tried to run through the process in my head. I could do this. I knew I could. I’d watched Sir Reginald do it a hundred times...
I think I ended sweating more from stress than I would have done from heat stoking the boiler, but after a few false starts and only one correction from Sir Reginald we were ready to get underway within an hour.
“Set coordinates for Lucon, twenty-first of March 2275,” Sir Reginald directed me when the boiler chimed it was at pressure. “Any time in the morning should be fine.”
“Why morning?” I asked, setting the coordinates to bring us in at nine-thirty local time, nonetheless, and locking them in place with a pull of a brass handle.
“Marlin Arnold is over a hundred years old,” Sir Reginald said. “At that age, even in the twenty-third century, he could go at any moment so I’d rather not waste a moment of his time.”
“Ah.”
Sir Reginald wiped the coal dust off his hands with a handkerchief and put on the rest of his suit. It was almost like a robot re-assembling itself as he pulled on the jacket, retied his cravat and donned his hat. He wore the suit so much it had almost become a part of him. It wasn’t until the hat was on his head and his cane was in his hands he seemed fully himself.
“By your leave,” Sir Reginald said.
“Then here we go,” I said and pulled the time travel lever.
The glass time machine lurched into life as it drew power from the boiler. Sparks struck and crackled in the air around us and I felt the world begin to distort. The sparks burst into flames that swirled around the time machine in every colour of the rainbow. The blaze grew and lightning crackled until the entire machine vanished with a pop.
Only a column of smoke remained in the sky to say we had ever been there at all.
*****
Lucon was a city on the moon. More correctly, I suppose, it was a city under the moon, or perhaps inside the moon. Centuries of mining had hollowed out the cavern for the city and it was roofed by a great glass dome for earth and sunlight to shine through.
Skyscrapers rose like stalagmites towards the dome top. Some were glistening white from their moon-crete while others were draped in shrubbery to help keep the city breathing. All of them competed with each other for light and space, and most rose as high as the one Sir Reginald and I climbed to find Marlin Arnold. But I hadn’t expected we’d be visiting the top floor. From up here you could look up and think you were alone on the surface of the moon. Only the occasional spaceship or capsule drifting above the surface of the moon reminded us of the bustling city below.
“Nearly there,” Sir Reginald waved his cane at a doorway. “How are you adjusting to the lunar gravity?”
“Well it was going fine,” I said and awkwardly came to a stop. It was important not to think about it. Like walking downstairs or riding a unicycle, if you thought about how you were doing it you started doing it wrong. “Just give me a second...” I added as I tried to get back into the rhythm of moon walking.
“Marlin Arnold has done quite well for himself,” Sir Reginald said to himself as he waited for me to catch up. “A mansion like this has to be worth millions of lunas.” Sir Reginald ran his eye over the mansion apartment suspiciously, like a man buying a used car. “He must be one of the hundred richest men and women in the city to afford it.”
“So? Maybe he’s looking for the missing branch so he can find an heir?” I landed next to Sir Reginald with a bump.
“So, I had not heard of him before today and I have visited Lucon many times,” Sir Reginald frowned for a moment but let it break into a warm smile. I was at his side and he rapped on the doorway with his cane.
The door opened to reveal a robot hanging from the ceiling. Four arms dangled from a central, near featureless torso. It gleamed with white plastic and its only feature seemed to be two dark pits in its chest where cameras gleamed.
“Arnold residence,” the robot announced. “Please state your name and purpose.”
“My name is Sir Reginald Derby and this is my associate Ms Hannah Delaronde,” Sir Reginald said. “Our purpose is to solve your master’s problem.”
“Mr Arnold will be pleased, he has been forced to use the guest bathroom for two days.” The robot said and retreated from the doorway, allowing us inside. I shot a confused glance at Sir Reginald.
“We’re not plumbers,” I said. “We’re detectives.”
The robot paused and turned back to us. There was a faint whirring like a camera focussing and refocussing its lens and it froze into uncanny stillness.
“He wrote a letter? We’re here to find the missing branch of his family.”
“Ah. Then you are not here to solve Mr Arnold’s problem. You are here to solve the problem of all Arnolds.” The robot returned to motion and beckoned us inside while closing the door behind us. “Mr Arnold is in the living room, may I take your coat and hat?”
Sir Reginald waved the offer away and we followed the robot through the house. Initially it was hard to take my eyes off the robot. It rolled along the ceiling and clung to it as if it was held like a magnet. With its four dangling arms it could happily reach anywhere in the house, folding out like a concertina, but they ended with unnervingly human-like hands.
But no robot could compete with the treasures lying in the rooms we passed. A statue of Romulus and Remus suckling at their she-wolf mother, a bronze bust of Caligula, and a dozen other renaissance artworks lay in a pile in one room as if glanced at once and then discarded. There were a stack of paintings in another room half hidden by a protective cloth. It opened up just far enough to see a painting of the dome of St Paul’s rising out of dockside London by Canaletto.
It was as if all these things had been bought at auction and simply dumped in the house, untouched, because that’s what rich people were supposed to own. Their owner had no attachment to them whatsoever. Even the house seemed impersonal. White walls, white furniture, crystal glass and stainless steel holding the frame together, it remi
nded me more of a hospital than a home.
After a few corridors the robot led us into a wide room overlooking a walled garden. I thought it was empty when I first stepped into it but as the robot drew to a halt I saw the fragile little man beside which it hung. The man might have started tall but time had wilted him. He lingered like a raisin, twisted and sunken. Sitting even on a sparse sofa he seemed to hide between the cushions.
“Sir Reginald Derby and Hannah Delaronde to see you, sir,” the robot announced as they entered.
“I only wrote to you yesterday.” Despite his fragility the man leapt to his feet and bundled over to us. Between his clothes I could see flashes of metal at his wrists and ankles, and a slightly mechanical nature to his movement. “Letter would barely have got to the space port by now.” He glared at Sir Reginald suspiciously.
It wasn’t a look of wealth or power. I’d seen the cold cruelty of a jaded businessman, and I’d seen the gathering storm of an emperor’s wrath, but this look didn’t fit either of them. This was the look of a man short-changed in the pub, but even that didn’t quite fit. It certainly wasn’t the look of a man who’d amassed a fortune of lunas.
“You alluded in your letter to certain... advantages... we have over other detectives,” Sir Reginald didn’t retreat from the bluster. “If you believe what you’ve heard it should not surprise you that we arrive... promptly.”
This seemed to appease the old man who slumped a little. He reached up to stroke his chin and his sleeve slipped, showing off the cuff of an exo-skeleton suit. No wonder he seemed so spritely. It wasn’t his muscles doing the moving.
“Well... I suppose I could believe that,” the man made a face as if he could excise all his suspicious thoughts with a facial contortion. “Marlin Arnold.” He introduced himself and held out his hand. Sir Reginald shook it and after that Marlin held it out to me as well. “I suppose you’d better sit down, this is going to take a bit of explaining.” He cast his eye up to the robot hanging from the ceiling. “Vlad, go make us some coffee.”
“At once, sir.” The robot rolled away.
“I call him Vlad because he hangs upside down,” Marlin explained as he sat down. “Like a bat. Ha!” His faced rolled up as he laughed at his own joke. I tried to smile politely and began the difficult task of sitting down in lunar gravity. You couldn’t just let yourself fall into the chair; you’d bounce right out of it. I had to lower myself carefully and then hold myself there until the bouncing stopped.
“First, a little test, right?” Marlin held up a finger. “You’ve seen me, you’ve seen my house, what do you think I did for a living, a full fifty years of my life?” The man’s eyes dashed from me to Sir Reginald and settled on me again, as if pressing me for an answer.
If this had been the twenty-first century, I’d have said oil. Not one of the riggers, but someone who worked with them often. Educated, intelligent, but still hands-on, still working, an engineer or technician, or something like that. But as it was the twenty-third century I guessed.
“Colonial Commission?” I suggested. “In the energy sector.”
Marlin’s expression betrayed nothing. He turned to Sir Reginald. “What about you, hat man? You agree with that?”
“Mining engineer,” Sir Reginald said, adjusting his cuffs. “Born and raised on earth, but educated and expatriated to the Moon at a young age. Took an office role at age sixty, retired on or around eighty.”
The moment Sir Reginald said it the clues all fell into place. You could tell by his frame he hadn’t been brought up from birth in the lunar gravity, and mining engineer fitted the profile of educated but hands-on perfectly. He wore simple, tight clothes, and short hair, so nothing would catch in machinery, and yet the fingers he held up showed no signs of calluses from operating the mining machinery all day. An engineer looking over the city’s energy production would never have got close enough to the reactors to need to worry about catching in machinery.
Sir Reginald glanced at me, saw in my face I’d unpicked the clues, and so he pressed on.
“You did not write to us to tell you your life story,” Sir Reginald chastised.
“You sure you didn’t look me up before you landed?” Marlin’s eyes narrowed.
“It was your idea for a test,” Sir Reginald shrugged. “Now please, indulge me as to the full extent of your problems.”
“Well... it’s like this see,” Marlin began, rubbing the back of his neck. “For the last... ten... twenty years I was pretty happy just being retired. I had Vlad for company, and a lifetime’s worth of films to watch. I never... I never married but I was sort of... OK, with it. Right? I’d had people who were close, and people who’d drifted away, and I never felt any of it was a waste, or had gone wrong, right? Then, about.... two years ago?”
“Two years, one hundred and seventeen days,” Vlad said as it returned with a tray of coffee. It handed a cup and saucer to each of us and at Sir Reginald’s request added four sugars to his.
“Right, yeah, two years ago,” Marlin continued. “I get this call saying a distant relative had died and left me all his pots of money. I’d never heard of him, but by the sound of it he was in the same position as me, childless, few friends, and he’d inherited all the money from some distant relative of his.” Marlin took a sip of coffee. “There weren’t a lot of us Arnold’s left, apparently and now... and now there’s just me. The last of the Arnolds.” He smiled weakly. “At least those of us whose surname is Arnold. But I want to be sure, Sir Reggie, I want to be absolutely sure. So I’ve been doing all this research into the family history, trying to make sure.” Marlin waved a hand at Vlad to get the robot’s attention. “Can you bring Reggie the research?” The robot trundled off to another part of the house.
“See, this inheritance has done a lot for me,” Marlin said, looking down at the surface of his coffee. His face drooped as if the heat of the coffee was melting off his skin. “Got me the exoskeleton. Allowed me to visit earth and stand under real sky one last time before I die. But it can do more. If I’d got even a fraction of this money when I was in my thirties there were... things that could have been done. Things would have gone very differently, and maybe I’d have had more company in my nineties than Vlad and the boys at the Retired Miners Club.”
“Here is the first box of research,” Vlad placed a large brown box of papers and books down beside Sir Reginald. It had originally been labelled one of three, but that had been scrawled out and replaced several times until it finally read one of twelve.
“Right now, this money is either going to go to charity or the government,” Marlin said. “And they’ll spend it and they probably won’t do a terrible job of spending it, but it won’t change anyone’s life. If there is anyone, anyone at all who has an honest, family claim to this money... I want it to go to them.”
“And you say there’s a missing branch of the family?” I asked.
“Exactly!” Marlin broke out of his reverie and punched the air. “There’s references... oh all here and there... but nothing concrete, right? Nothing easy to prove. No-one ever wrote in their diary ‘oh, and by the way the Blobby-blob family are a junior branch’. There’s just these... cryptic little clues.”
“And do you think the junior branch will have survived when all of the Arnolds have died out?” Sir Reginald asked, gently swirling coffee around his mug in idle thought.
“They might be all gone too,” Marlin shrugged. “One way or another, over the millennia, all families are going to die out. But if there is anyone, anyone at all, from that branch left... the money should go to them. It could change their lives.”
“Box two,” Vlad announced.
“I don’t think I will be able to carry twelve boxes of research away with me...” Sir Reginald said.
“Oh I have them digitally as well,” Marlin offered, and brought out a tablet.
“Hannah, if you would be so kind,” Sir Reginald waved a hand and I brought out my phone. It took a bit of discussion and inter
cession from Vlad the robot, but eventually I managed to get the files off of Marlin’s computer and onto my own despite the three hundred year difference in technology. It took a little more effort to make sure my phone could read them. “I can always reproduce myself a proper copy should I need it.”
“Do you know when the junior branch line diverged?” I asked.
“Most of the clues I’ve found would suggest the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but I can’t even guarantee that,” Marlin shrugged. “If I knew, I wouldn’t need the help of time detectives.”
“It’s certainly plausible.” I rested my thumb against my lips. “Too many sons in one house, one goes off to the colonies and is never seen again...”
“It’s going to be like searching for needle in a hay stack, I’m afraid,” Marlin grinned.
“More like a particular piece of hay in a hay stack,” Sir Reginald sighed. “A needle might be small, but it is easily distinguished.” Sir Reginald stood up. “Thank you for your research, Mr Arnold. We’ll take over from here. When you next see us, we’ll be able to tell you one way or another if there is anyone left.”
“Before you go you should see some of the physical evidence, the things I couldn’t perfectly digitise,” Marlin stood up and waved for us to follow. “I’ve got a pendant from the order of the Golden Fleece, not sure who that belonged to, an old film projector, real celluloid, and miniature-“
Marlin stumbled, as if he had been struck, and blood bubbled out of his chest, dripping to the floor and furniture. Marlin fell slowly, and I leapt to try and help him. Vlad got there faster, robotic arms cradling the man and stopping his fall, while one hand reached down to the wound and oozed a gel over it.