by Tom Hourie
I realized I still had a leather bag hanging from my shoulder. “I don’t think so,” I said. “His was heavier.”
There was a small brass key protruding from the bag’s clasp. I turned it and looked inside to find a black shirt, a clerical collar and a well-thumbed paperback novel titled Girls in Tunics. I opened the book randomly and read ‘Melissa writhed sensuously to the rhythm of the Headmistress’ caresses until she gushed forth a stream of womanly love cream.’ I took a second look at the bag and saw the name Reverend E. Bunsen embossed on the side. “You naughty Reverend,” I said. “I bet they called you Bunsen burner back at the seminary.”
I relocked the bag and was putting the key in my pocket when the train lurched forward, causing me to fall into the seat next to Sarah. “That’s funny,” I said, feeling around in my pocket.
“What is?”
“The American passport your chum Alistair Fox gave me. I could have sworn I left it there.”
I was rummaging through my other pockets when we heard the conductor coming down the corridor checking for tickets. I had to do something fast. The last thing I wanted was to get thrown off the train in the middle of God knows where.
There was nothing else for it. I opened the side door, stepped out onto the outside footplate and scrunched down below the window hanging onto the door handle. It looks exciting when you see someone do it in an old spy thriller but trust me, hanging on in mid-air with railway ties speeding past your feet at sixty miles an hour is no fun. I tried to get back in as soon as the conductor was gone, but the handle was stuck. What now? If I got Sarah to push the door open, there was a good chance I would get thrown off onto the tracks. Then I noticed the window in the next car forward was open. I stretched sideways and was just able to reach its handle. I inched along the side of the car trying to ignore the smoke and cinders blowing into my face and pulled myself in through the window where I was confronted by the indignant Reverend Bunsen who got up to call the conductor.
“I wouldn’t do that Rev,” I said. “I might be tempted to tell your good wife about the girls and their tunics.”
The Reverend’s face became beet red and he sat down heavily. I noticed Schrödinger’s bag in the overhead rack, took it down and opened the door leading to the corridor. The Reverend’s relief at seeing me go was evident but even so, he had to try for the last word.
“Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life,” he intoned. “The general epistle of James.”
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it,” I replied. “Oscar Wilde.”
Chapter XIX:
Schrödinger’s Bag – A Disguise – A Honeymoon – An Overheard Conversation
I opened Schrödinger’s bag when I got back to Sarah’s compartment and sure enough, there was the dimensional translator.
“What is it?” Sarah asked.
“My only contact with the real world,” I said, as I examined the device that had caused me so much trouble.
I was glad when the train got to Wiltshire. At least now I had a purpose. Cruikshank, the lawyer, had said that the dimensional translator had been stolen from HMIS headquarters in Amesbury. If Sarah’s father could tell my how the device worked, it might show me a way to get back home.
But nothing in this life is ever easy. The station at Amesbury was swarming with police, uniformed and otherwise, who no doubt were on the lookout for a well-dressed peeress accompanied by a slovenly American.
“Do you have a scarf in that trunk of yours?” I asked Sarah.
“I may do.”
“Well wrap it around your face and walk with a limp,” I said, as I reached for Reverend Bunsen’s bag.
And so, dressed as the Reverend Bunsen and his invalid mother, we ran the gauntlet of watching police, one of whom was even so kind as to help me lift Sarah’s trunk into a waiting cab. I knew it would be poor form to offer him money for his services so I presented him with Bunsen’s copy of A Young Man’s Guide To Self-Control and waved a genial blessing at him as we drove away.
As expected, Sarah kicked up a major fuss about the notion of sharing a hotel room but I was in no mood to listen to her ‘of all the effronterys’ and ‘If you think I am going tos.’
“For a suffragette you seem surprisingly willing to assume the role of the persecuted maiden,” I said, cutting her off in mid-sentence. “Over the last two days I have been arrested, beaten, arrested again, publicly humiliated and forced to play Spiderman on the side of a moving train. If you think I want anything more than a wash, something to eat and a good night’s sleep, you overestimate your personal attractions.”
I could see she had a lot more to say about my many behavioral deficiencies but she seemed to realize that now was not the time to say them. She even managed to come up with a surrogate wedding ring from somewhere in the depths of her handbag and kept her mouth shut as we checked in at the Amesbury Arms.
“We run a respectable establishment here, Mister and Mrs. Liddel,” said the beady-eyed woman behind the counter. “I take it you can provide proof you are married.”
“Indeed I can,” I said, retrieving the registry office license from my pocket. “We were married today.”
“My congratulations,” she said, after inspecting the document. “We don’t often get honeymooning couples in this part of the world. Please let me know if there is anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant.”
“All we want is peace and quiet,” I said.
The room was pretty much what you would expect. Greeny yellow wallpaper, worn hardwood floors and a brass framed bed complete with knobby bits on the corner posts. I was relieved to see it also featured wash stand as well as a camel-backed settee that would serve as a second bed.
I filled the basin of the wash stand from a cracked ceramic pitcher as soon as we were alone. Sarah gasped when I stripped off my shirt and I was expecting yet another lecture on propriety. Instead she came over and began to examine purple and yellow contusions covering my torso.
“These are serious injuries,” she said. “You say Alistair Fox had this done to you?”
“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” I said. “That guy Flowers is a professional. He knows how to inflict pain without causing any real damage.”
“I may have something that will help,” she said. She began to rummage, yet again, in her handbag and came out with a tin of something called Featherstone’s Zum-Buk Ointment which she applied to my bruises with surprisingly gentle fingers. It was on my tongue to ask what other surprises she had in that bag of hers, a baby grand piano maybe, but I kept quiet. This was the first sign she had shown of anything resembling human feeling and I didn’t want to spoil the moment.
I had thought I would sleep forever but I woke up on the settee four hours later with a crick in my neck and an Oxfam-sized hunger.
“I was beginning to think you would never wake up,” Sarah said. “The kitchen stops serving at nine. Are you hungry?”
“I could eat a buttered doorknob,” I said.
Sarah had gone for a walk to check out HMIS headquarters while I was sleeping and the results of her scouting expedition were discouraging. Not only was the place surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall but it was ringed with surveillance balloons like the ones we had seen in the newsreel back at the Brompton Road Kinescope.
Sarah seemed to be expecting some comment on the situation and I suddenly realized my recent enforced exploits had given her the mistaken notion I was a man of action. I kind of liked the image so I washed down the last of my fish and chips with a mouthful of dark ale and tried to look as though I was deciding among several plans of approach.
It was at this point that I became aware of a nearby conversation between two familiar voices. Sarah was about to speak but I touched my finger to my lips and rolled my eyes to the glass partition behind me.
“Is there any chance of another pint?” said a voice from the next booth whose deep, sono
rous tones could only belong to Schrödinger. “And possibly some more of that delightful shepherd’s pie?”
“You should think yourself bleedin’ lucky you got anything,” said his companion. I had only heard ‘Mister Flowers’ speak once or twice but I was pretty sure it was him.
“It was good of you to provide sustenance,” Schrödinger said. “Especially after the trouble we had with my caravan.”
“If it was down to me, we’d ‘av left it,” Flowers said. “But Fox says you’ll be needing it for what he has in mind.
“And what might that be?”
“Ask him yourself when we get there. Hurry up and finish that pint.”
I touched my finger to my lips one more time and pointed to the side door. We were outside in the forecourt a moment later next to Schrödinger’s caravan.
“Do you think it is open?” Sarah asked.
“Only one way to find out,” I said.
Chapter XX:
A Trojan Horse – A Surprise Meeting
Max the cat did his best to escape when we opened the back doors of the caravan but Sarah grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and soothed his wounded feelings with ear scratches and traditional feline endearments along the lines of ‘Is he a pretty boy then? Oh yes he is.’ A soppy look of devotion appeared on the animal’s battle-damaged face and he began to purr so loudly I was afraid he might give us away.
We had just gotten ourselves hidden in the space beneath the day bed when the cab door opened and the caravan’s primitive suspension system creaked with the weight of someone getting in.
“Just follow me and don’t try anything funny,” we heard Flowers say.
“I wouldn’t dream of it old boy,” Schrödinger answered.
One of the advantages of steam power over internal combustion is that the engine has full torque right from the get go and doesn’t need a clutch or transmission. Sounds great right? But believe me, those first piston strokes can be brutal, especially when you’re stuck in a cramped space. The ride finally smoothed out once we built up speed but even so, we both breathed sighs of relief when the van came to a stop and we heard the steam escaping from the boiler.
We waited until we thought it was safe and crept out from beneath the daybed. Sarah gave Max a last tummy scratch and we opened the back doors to find ourselves beneath the roof of a porte-cochère attached to large limestone building.
Our luck held and the side door was unlocked. Once inside, we faced a long, institutional-looking corridor leading who knows where and a set of stairs going down to the basement level. We chose the stairs which took us to a kind of lunchroom furnished with hard-backed chairs and a long trestle table on which sat a copper tea urn.
“What shall we do now?” Sarah said.
“You wanted to find your father so we’re going to have to look for him,” I said.
I had just finished offering this keen insight into the obvious when we heard footsteps in the corridor outside. The door opened and a stout man wearing a gray frocked dressing gown and tattered brown carpet slippers entered and shuffled slowly over to the tea urn. His hair was disheveled as though he just awakened from a deep sleep and the impression of somnambulism was heightened by the fact that he seemed not to notice us. I took him for an aged caretaker but once again I was wrong.
“Father!” Sarah said.
“Oh hello Sadie,” the man said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
Chapter XXI:
Lord Newford’s Story
“Was it wise of you to come here?” he continued. “They are looking for you, you know.”
“Yes father, I know,” Sarah said. “Is there someplace we could talk?”
‘Someplace’ turned out to be Lord Newford’s private quarters at the rear of the building, in a room lined with oak bookshelves containing row upon row of bound volumes.
I sank gratefully into a soft leather armchair as Lord Newford sipped his tea and listened to his daughter’s explanation of how we came to be there.
“It would appear you owe Mister Liddel a debt of gratitude,” he said, when she had finished. “He has shown great resourcefulness.”
“Yes, I suppose he has,” Sarah said, looking at me as though for the first time.
“I am grateful that you thought to rescue me from ‘durance vile’ but, as you can see, my living conditions are more than bearable,” he said, gesturing to his comfortably furnished surroundings. “So the question now is not how to save me, but what you should do to save yourselves. Normally, I would say that we should simply arrange a meeting with young Mister Fox to smooth out what, after all, is little more than misunderstanding, but political considerations might intrude.”
“What political considerations?” Sarah asked.
“As you must be aware, your continuing crusade for women’s suffrage has ruffled more than a few feathers. It would suit certain persons very well to have your views tarred with the brush of sedition and anarchy.”
“If I am a Fascist then all suffragettes must be Fascists?”
“Precisely. The curious thing is that the Fascists enjoy considerable support in certain government circles. I sometimes wonder if the anti-Fascist rhetoric is merely a smokescreen for some darker purpose.”
“Then why did you ask me to keep watch on Schrödinger’s shop?”
“To see if my suspicions were correct. Unfortunately, as I recall, you saw no sign of anything irregular.”
“Not to intrude,” I intruded, “But if there is no Fascist conspiracy, then who has been painting the letters ‘BLF’ on walls all around London? And more important, who stole the dimensional translator and why?”
“Very pertinent questions, young man,” Lord Newford said. “Is there really a conspiracy? Do we have a traitor in our midst? Questions we had hoped to answer by setting up Schrödinger’s shop.”
“Hang on,” I said. “You set up Schrödinger’s shop?”
“It was Fox’s idea. We knew that whoever had stolen the translator would have little idea of how to use it. Fox planted an article under Schrödinger’s name in The Journal of Scientific Progress which discussed the possibility of using a communication device to contact alternate worlds. The hope was that the thief or thieves would contact Schrödinger to find out more.” He stopped to take another sip of his tea and looked up suddenly. Once again I was reminded of a sleepwalker who had just awakened. “You must think me very rude,” he said. “May I offer you anything to drink? I have some excellent whisky.”
“You know I never touch spirits,” Sarah said.
“No problem,” I said. “I’ll have her share.”
Lord Newford poured me three generous fingers of the best Scotch I have ever tasted and I settled back to enjoy its peaty warmth. “I’m still confused,” I said, after my second gratifying sip. “Why is this Dimensional Translator thingamajig so important? As far as I know, all it does is make bad movies.” As you can tell, I was still offended at being cast as ‘Backward Bob.’
“You are quite right in saying that we use it as little more than an electrical peephole to another world, but even that capability has its dangers. It has, in fact, caused a major shift in the policies of Her Majesty’s Government.”
“In what way?”
“I will offer a brief history lesson, if I may. The Dimensional Translator was invented four decades ago by a very brilliant chap named Charles Babbage. Babbage was devoutly religious and came to believe the device was a tool of Satan.”
“So why does it still exist? Why didn’t he smash it?”
“It seems he didn’t have the heart to destroy his creation. He locked it in a vault beneath his home where it was discovered a number of years ago by his son, Henry, who had none of his father’s scruples and used it to produce popular entertainment such as you describe.”
“So where’s the danger?”
“At first there was none. But then the phantom world in Henry’s kinescopes began to deviate from our own. Its social order began to crumbl
e. Monarchies became republics. Empires disintegrated. We began to see signs of unrest in our own world, despite the fact that none of the new kinescopes had been released publicly.”
“Almost as if ideas were using dreams to spread themselves from one dimension to another,” I said, recalling Bill Fowler’s comment when I showed him the ornament from Max’s collar. What was it he thought it looked like? A vacuum tube?
“Indeed. And then young Babbage made the error of releasing a film featuring a German Jew named Karl something or other.”
“Marx?”
“That’s the Johnny. Marx’s prediction that the internal tensions of the existing class structure would lead to its collapse proved to be the final straw. Her Majesty’s Intelligence Service seized the device and brought it here to Amesbury Park. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in retrieving Babbage’s notes, or Babbage himself, for that matter. Chap vanished and hasn’t been seen since. Our last information is that he is somewhere in Devon.”
“If the Translator is so dangerous then why didn’t you destroy it?”