The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure)

by Mark Hodder

  James Honesty said, “We quite understand, sir. There are two points of business remaining before we get to work modernising the Orpheus. The first is that, during the months before Mr. Michael Faraday passed away, when it was obvious that we could no longer rely on Mr. Babbage, he created a device for us. It is a beacon that can signal to your ship while it is speeding through time. We know your next scheduled stop is the year 2000. However, if the beacon functions as he promised, then the Cannibal Club can summon you to an earlier date should we deem it necessary. If we detect any sign of Edward Oxford, and if you now give us permission, we shall do so.”

  “Permission is enthusiastically granted,” Burton said. “That’s an excellent development.”

  Honesty continued, “The second matter is this, Sir Richard: we feel it wise that a member of our group join you. We all have half a century’s worth of knowledge that you and your associates lack. What you encounter and may not understand at your next stop might be somewhat more familiar to a person from the year 1914.”

  Burton pondered this. “I can’t disagree, Mr. Honesty. Whom have you elected?”

  Herbert Wells stood up. “Me, sir.”

  “Then welcome aboard the time machine, Mr. Wells.”

  They emerged from whiteness.

  Herbert Wells put his hands to his head. “Ouch! What a ghastly sensation.”

  The Orpheus said, “We have been waylaid. This is not the year 2000.”

  “What happened?” Nathaniel Lawless demanded.

  “The Cannibals have used their Faraday beacon. It is ten o’clock on Sunday morning, the seventeenth of March, 1968.”

  “Another jump of fifty-four years,” Burton murmured. “Coincidence?”

  “My hat! We’re over a century into the future!” Swinburne exclaimed.

  “Marvellous!” Wells cried out. “Though it’s just half the time for me, of course. Nevertheless, marvellous!”

  “There is an incoming radio transmission,” Orpheus said.

  Lawless and Burton crossed to the box-like contraption the 1914 Cannibals had added to the bridge.

  “It was this, wasn’t it?” Burton asked, lifting a fist-sized semicircular object from the side of the device.

  “Yes,” Lawless said. “Blue to receive, green to send.”

  The king’s agent pressed a blue button. Immediately, a female voice filled the bridge. “Orpheus? Hello, Orpheus? Respond, please.”

  “Now the green, and answer,” Lawless instructed.

  Burton did as directed. The voice was cut off. He spoke into the object in his hand. “This is Burton, aboard the Orpheus. Can you hear me?”

  Blue button.

  “Sir Richard! Hi. Right on. You made it. Welcome to 1968. Listen, this is important. Fly your ship twenty miles to the east. You’re too exposed there and badly outdated. You’ll be noticed. We have a replacement vessel waiting for you.”

  “Understood. We’re on our way. To whom am I speaking?”

  “My name is Jane Packard, daughter of Eliza Teed, née Murray. I’m Admiral Henry Murray’s great-granddaughter. I have with me an Honesty, a Penniforth, a Slaughter, a Bhatti and a Brabrooke. The Cannibals are still going strong, sir.”

  “Splendid! We look forward to meeting you, Miss Packard. I assume you have news for us?”

  “We do. I’d prefer to tell you face to face, if that’s cool with you.”

  “Cool? Er, all right? Yes, it’s fine. We’ll rendezvous with you in—” He looked at Lawless, who said, “Fifteen minutes.” Burton relayed this before breaking contact.

  “A replacement?” the Orpheus said. “What do they mean, a replacement? I’m in fine fettle. I don’t want to be replaced.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lawless replied. “You’ll be transferred to the new ship.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “I say,” Swinburne announced. “That Miss Packard sounded rather—um—casual, didn’t she?”

  “An alteration in tonal communication,” Burton observed. “We must expect such modifications over the years. Language is flexible. It adapts.”

  Wells said, “It might be an indication of her social standing. Such matters were in upheaval during my time. There was a rapidly expanding middle class.”

  “It being?” Burton asked.

  “The bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie.”

  “I think I understand the reference. There were signs of such a phenomenon in the eighteen sixties. No doubt, had this middle class been better established in the mid-nineteenth century, I would have been labelled as such. I never quite made the grade as far as the gentry were concerned.”

  Lawless consulted the meteorological console and murmured, “Exceptionally mild for the time of year, by the looks of it.” He joined Burton, Swinburne and Wells at the window and peered ahead at the horizon. After a while, they discerned two objects brightly reflecting the spring sunshine, one in the air and the other on the water.

  A couple of minutes later, Orpheus said, “They’re calling us again.”

  Burton went to the radio, clicked the switch, and listened as Jane Packard said, “We have you in sight, Orpheus.”

  “Acknowledged, Miss Packard. We can see you, too. What do you want us to do?”

  “Have yourself, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Trounce, Miss Raghavendra and Mr. Wells lowered onto the yacht. We’ll take you to London. You’ll be staying with us for a couple of days. Captain Lawless, Mr. Gooch and Mr. Krishnamurthy should follow our airship in the Orpheus. They’ll be escorted to a secluded cove on the coast of Holland, where your babbage devices will be transferred from the old ship into the new and your people will be instructed in the piloting of the updated vessel.”

  “We’re in your hands, Miss Packard.”

  A few moments later, the other flying ship drew alongside. It was a streamlined affair, with a white tubular body, sharply pointed at the front but flaring into a vertical sail-shape at the rear. Two spinning rotors, each enclosed in a flat circular housing, were inset into wide triangular wings, which made the entirety of the vessel a horizontal V-shape. Steam was blasting out from beneath it, rolling out across the water’s surface and half obscuring the yacht.

  “My goodness!” Wells exclaimed. “Will you look at that!”

  “She’s a Concorde class jump jet,” Jane Packard transmitted. “Created by British and French engineers and just coming into service.”

  Nathaniel Lawless glanced at Swinburne and whispered, “Jump jet?”

  “Machines will soon seem like magic to cavemen like us,” the poet muttered. “I fear they’re already far beyond our comprehension.”

  Half an hour later, all but Lawless, Gooch and Krishnamurthy had been lowered onto the deck of the large and extraordinarily luxurious yacht. They stood beside Jane Packard and watched—their hair whipped about by the sea breeze—as the two airships receded into the east.

  Wells whispered, “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. And my goodness, how we humans adapt!”

  “The Concorde is a real beauty, Mr. Wells,” Packard conceded. “And futuristic in design. We hope she won’t appear too out of place at your next destination.”

  She was the only person, aside from them, on the deck. Perhaps in her late forties but young-looking, she was slim and athletic, with very long blonde hair and a freckled face free of cosmetics, though adorned with spectacles. She was clothed in such a shocking outfit that Burton hardly knew where to look. Her upper body was scarcely covered by a sleeveless, buttonless and collarless thin white shirt upon which the face of an African was depicted along with the mysterious word Hendrix. Over this, she had what was either a sleeveless coat or an absurdly long waistcoat of fringed suede leather. Her legs were encased in—of all things—trousers, tailored from some manner of light canvas, faded blue in colour, and breathtakingly tight around the knees, thighs and loins but wide and flappy at the ankles. She had a string of beads around her neck, another around her left wrist, and wore moccasin
s, or something very similar, on her feet.

  As mild as the weather was, she was underdressed for it and plainly cold.

  “Come below,” she said as the yacht’s engine growled and the vessel started westward. “The club has a lot more members since 1914. A few of my comrades are aboard, but you’ll meet others in London, including Mick, who we’ve selected to join your expedition.”

  “Is he related to one of the originals?” Swinburne asked.

  “Nope.”

  She guided them down and into a lounge room that was furnished in garishly bright colours with its fittings and decor moulded from a waxy material similar to the skin of the Spring Heeled Jacks. In response to Burton’s query, she informed him that it was “plastic.”

  A small group rose from sofas to greet them. All were garbed, like Packard, in such an informal manner they might as well have just got out of their beds.

  “Wow!” one of them said. “Sir Richard Francis Burton—in the flesh! And Algernon Swinburne! This is way out there!” He stepped forward and extended his hand. “Mark Packard.”

  “My younger brother,” Jane added.

  Burton took the hand and shook it. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Packard. Long hair has come back into fashion for gentlemen, I see. I noticed it was worn rather short in 1914.”

  “Still is among the straights,” Packard replied.

  “Straights?”

  Jane Packard interjected, “We’ll explain all that in a minute. Let’s get everyone acquainted first.”

  She introduced the rest, who’d all been gaping as if Burton and his friends were ghosts. The Cannibals were Patricia Honesty, Trevor Penniforth, Eddie Brabrooke, Jimmy Richardson—who bore an uncanny resemblance to Shyamji Bhatti—and Miranda Kingsland of the Slaughter family, plus Karl von Lessing, grandson of Erik, and a new recruit named Jason Griffith.

  Everyone settled on seats and sofas. Penniforth and Kingsland served coffee. Mark Packard and Jason Griffith lit what initially appeared to be roughly rolled white cigarillos but which, once their fumes reached his nostrils, Burton instantly recognised as hashish. Brabrooke offered him a tobacco cigarette.

  “Manufactured in France?” Burton asked the young man.

  “Made and smoked everywhere now,” Brabrooke responded.

  Burton couldn’t help but give a grunt of shock as Miranda Kingsland and Patricia Honesty both started to smoke. Women did so in his own time, of course, but rarely in company with gentlemen.

  Kingsland, noticing his expression, grinned. “My gender is making great progress in liberating ourselves from the restrictions yours has imposed on us throughout history.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Burton said. He drew on the cigarette, coughed, made a face, muttered, “Bismillah!” and took a gulp of coffee, which tasted even worse.

  Sadhvi Raghavendra—dressed in a loose Indian smock and looking surprisingly contemporaneous with the Cannibals—addressed Jane Packard, “If I may ask, you said the Cannibal Club has expanded. How many more are there?”

  “Phew!” Packard answered. “Thing is, you see, we’ve kind of become a social movement.”

  Burton frowned. “Our mission is supposed to be secret.”

  “Oh yeah, man!” Jason Griffith interjected. “Still is. We’re in on it, and Mick and the Deviants know the game, but the rest are like, kicking against the straights without knowing the full story, if you dig what I’m saying.”

  Trounce shifted in his seat and looked at his companions in utter bafflement.

  “Deviants?” Swinburne asked. “Straights? Dig?”

  “We should start at the beginning,” Miranda Kingsland put in.

  “And in English,” Trounce muttered.

  “Yeah, but when was that?” Griffith asked her.

  “1950s,” Karl von Lessing said decisively.

  “Sir,” the king’s agent said to him, “perhaps we have too many speaking at once. With due deference to your friends, may I suggest you take centre stage and recount to us what has occurred during the course of the past fifty-four years, who Mick is, what these ‘deviants’ and ‘straights’ are, and why you and your colleagues felt the Orpheus should be summoned to 1968?”

  Von Lessing looked at the others. They each gave words of consent:

  “Sweet.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “I can dig it.”

  “Okay, so here’s the scene,” von Lessing said. “First, secrecy. Your brother was a genius. He created an investments company that, for years, has been like, thriving, man. The Bendyshe family runs it—” He broke off as Burton laughed.

  “Sir Richard?”

  “Good old Bendyshe! I’d never have predicted his line to be so responsible!”

  “The original, the Thomas you knew, gave really—what’s the word?”

  “Prescient,” Mark Packard put in.

  “Yeah—prescient advice to the old minister of chronological affairs. This yacht and our Concorde are privately owned by the Bendyshe Foundation, which has offices in Bombay and is currently headed by Joseph and James Bendyshe. So, you see, the Cannibal Club is well financed and, as I said, thriving, but still completely hidden.”

  “We’ll keep it that way,” Jason Griffith added. “You can be sure.”

  Burton gave a grunt of approval.

  “So,” von Lessing continued, “on to the history lesson. I guess things started to get a bit flaky back in the 1930s. Real bad famines had been weakening Russia since Rasputin’s death, and China was winning the war. Then, from 1935 to ’40, led by Poland, the Eastern European countries—Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic states—ousted their occupying governments and declared independence. Russia was on the brink of total collapse until, in 1940, assistance came from an unexpected quarter.”

  Burton raised an eyebrow enquiringly.

  “China,” von Lessing said. “It declared a complete ceasefire, handed back captured territory, and flooded the country with aid. It then rebuilt its former enemy’s industrial infrastructure and established exclusive trade relations. In 1949, they merged and became the United Republics of Eurasia.”

  “That’s rather a startling turnaround,” Swinburne observed.

  “Too right. For sure, it caught us—and the Yanks—on the hop. So now the world had three superpowers: the A.S.E., the U.S.A., and the U.R.E.”

  “My hat! What a badly curtailed vocabulary you have.”

  “Yeah. Maybe the abbreviations reflect our politicians’ tiny minds. Anyway, the Anglo-Saxon Empire and the United Republics are separated by a belt comprised of Slavic Eastern Europe, the Middle East, British India—which is the A.S.E.’s only direct border with the U.R.E.—and the South East Asian countries of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.”

  “Thailand?” Burton asked.

  “You knew it as Siam. The belt countries are stable and at peace except for South East Asia, which is currently the scene of a bloody conflict between the U.R.E. and U.S.A.”

  “America? Why America?”

  “Ideology. East Eurasia has adopted socialist principles. America is concerned that if these are imposed on South East Asia, which China lays claim to, they’ll easily spread through India and into the Anglo-Saxon Empire, which actually isn’t as crazy as it sounds, since many of the kids—particularly in France—are already socialists.”

  “Or, at least, say they are,” Patricia Honesty murmured.

  “Bravo!” Herbert Wells said quietly. “I’m convinced that socialism has the potential to lead us to a more humane system than capitalism allows. Through it, we can destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. I believe it to be the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”

  “And women, Mr. Wells,” Honesty put in.

  “Of course! Of cour
se! Forgive me my antiquated methods of reference.”

  “Forgiven. You’re obviously ahead of your time.”

  Wells laughed. “I most certainly am!” He slapped his thigh. “Corporeally!”

  “But why is America doing the fighting and not us—not the A.S.E.?” Swinburne asked.

  Von Lessing answered, “Firstly, because America’s prosperity has come about largely through its alliance with us; an alliance it suspects might crumble if we lose our enthusiasm for the frenzied capitalism it so fervently preaches. Secondly, because there’s a strong independence movement in India, and if we made that country the front line in a war, for sure it would leave the A.S.E., taking our strongest manufacturing regions with it and depriving America of its principal source of trade. And thirdly, because with the U.S.A. doing the fighting, the conflict has a better chance of being contained. If we participated, the hostilities would undoubtedly spread. China detests us, and has done since your time.”

  “Thanks to Lord Elgin,” Burton said. “But surely your politicians have tried to make amends for his ill-judged actions? His vandalism occurred over a century ago.”

  “Squares don’t apologise. They just make excuses.”

  “Squares?”

  “The straights.”

  Swinburne squealed and flapped his arms. “What in blue blazes are you talking about? Straight squares? Have you ever heard of bent ones?”

  “Yeah, man. There are plenty.”

  “What? What? What?”

  Sadhvi Raghavendra said, “Perhaps you could endeavour to employ rather more traditional language, Mr. von Lessing?”

  “Yes, please,” William Trounce grumbled.

  “I must confess,” Wells added, “I’m a bit lost.”

  Von Lessing held up a hand. “Sure. Sure. I’m trying. Um. So, like, remember how, back in your day, the politicians either came through Oxford or Cambridge universities or were, at least, aristocrats, yeah?”

  “Yes,” Burton and Wells chorused.

  “That never changed, and those people have increasingly bungled it on the political scene. They’re stuck in their ways, man. Completely out of touch. Following outdated traditions. They don’t know how to work with East Eurasia, whose people they regard as savages.”