by Tom Hourie
“Hope, I’m kind of in a rush. Besides, you should get home before you catch cold.”
She moved into a pool of light beneath an overhead street lamp. I couldn’t help feeling she was intentionally trying to add dramatic emphasis to her next statement. “I have come to a decision Robert,” she said.
“Could you tell me some other time? I really am in a hurry.”
“I have decided to give myself to you.”
“Say what?”
“I will let you have your way with me.”
I knew she expected me to ask about her change of heart, but I kept silent. The last thing I needed was to get involved in a relationship discussion on the sidewalk. Besides, I felt sorry for her. Her offer of sexual surrender sounded like it had been cribbed from a Victorian melodrama.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no candidate for sainthood. My main emotion was not one of sympathy, but relief. The future was not Hope’s friend, but that was her problem, not mine.
“Hope, I’m really flattered, but I’m going to pass,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” I turned toward the sleep center where I could see George getting ready to lock the door.
“How dare you turn your back on me?” Hope screeched behind me. “I will not be ignored.”
“I didn’t have you down for tonight,” George said, when he opened the door to let me in.
“New secretary in the department,” I said. “She must have forgotten.”
“Who’s that out on the sidewalk? She with you?”
Hope was now stabbing at the buttons of her cell phone with a rigid forefinger. The left side of her hair had come undone and was blowing wildly in the wind.
“Should I ask her in?” George asked. “It looks like rain soon.” His offer lacked enthusiasm. I wasn’t surprised. In the harsh light, Hope’s jerky movements and disheveled appearance made her look like one of the furies.
“Oh geez no. Don’t do that.”
“Whatever,” George said with relief. “She’s your friend.”
Chapter XXXXXV:
Better Living Through Chemistry – The Traveller’s Return – New Political Developments
A couple of months earlier I had spent an excruciating ninety minutes with a pharmaceutical representative who would not listen when I told him one of the fundamental principles of my research is that sleep has to be natural. Just to shut him up I let him leave me with samples of his company’s products. Now I was grateful to him. I had only a few minutes left of Babbage’s promised two hours and I couldn’t fool around.
I swallowed twenty milligrams of something called Zaleplon as soon as George had finished hooking me up. Where do they come up with these drug names? It’s like you grabbed a random handful of Scrabble tiles and threw them down on the board.
The drug lived up to its billing, funny name or not. My eyes closed in minutes and I had the distant sensation of someone stroking my hand.
I was just coming back to consciousness when I felt a strong electrical pulse throw my body into momentary convulsions.
“Blast and damnation,” I heard Babbage say.
“Oh my God, you’ve killed him,” Sarah cried.
“No, I think I’m Ok,” I tried to say, but my tongue was so thick I couldn’t get the words out. I opened my eyes to see Sarah clutching my hand and Babbage standing over the dimensional translator whose oscillator was emitting sparks through newly-formed cracks in its glass casing.
Sarah threw herself onto me with both arms around my neck. “Please don’t die,” she said.
“I’m not dying,” I managed to croak. “I think I’ll be alright.”
“You are not alright,” Sarah said. “Listen to your breathing. It sounds awful.”
“That is because you are choking me.”
“Oh yes, I suppose I am. Is that better?”
I spent the next few minutes drinking tea and telling Babbage and Sarah what had happened while I was away. I held off showing the repaired oscillator until the end of my tale on the principal of saving the best for last. My ‘Ta Daa’ moment did not get the response I expected.
“Yes that looks to be in order,” Babbage said, peering at the oscillator through the Ziploc baggy. “Clever chap, your Bill Fowler. But what material is this translucent, flexible pouch made from?”
“You mean the baggie? It’s plastic.”
“Plass-tick,” Babbage said, turning the word over in his mouth. “What will you do with it?”
“Throw it out?”
“Certainly not,” Babbage said in horror, as though I had just proposed chucking the crown jewels into the Thames. “May I keep it?”
“Be my guest.”
Sarah had different concerns. “This Hope Buchan woman,” she said. “How long have you known her?”
I wasn’t the only one with news. Babbage showed me a front page story in The Times describing recent events in London. The number of black dirigibles patrolling the airspace over London had grown exponentially since the newsreel Sarah and I had seen in Totnes. A wide-angle photograph taken from the roof of the Senate House showed a menacing cigar shape hovering over ever major intersection in the city.
“What’s the point of all this?” I asked.
“Osgood Wellesley is demanding the government invoke martial law to cope with civil unrest,” Babbage said.
“So he just gets to blanket London with gunships? Who put him in charge?”
“The belief is that he is nothing but a proxy for conservative forces looking for an excuse to keep the lower classes in check. They chose Wellesley as their spokesperson because his status as Minister of Defense gives him control of the armed forces.”
“So what’s the holdup? Why hasn’t he already gotten his way?”
“He wants Her Majesty’s seal of approval on the new order. He plans to use her Silver Jubilee speech Houses of Parliament as the occasion for the formal announcement.”
“When’s her speech?”
“Thursday afternoon.”
“But that’s the day after tomorrow,” Sarah said. “Whatever shall we do?”
"Extremis malis, extrema remedia. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Now that you have the translator, you need to connect it to Tesla’s machine on the roof of the British Museum.”
“How are we going to do that?” I asked. “They already sent Bennie Sherman looking for us. They have our descriptions and they know what the van looks like.”
“I always feel that the simplest solutions are best. Why don’t you travel by rail?”
“Not on your life. The train stations are the first place they’ll be looking for us.”
“It should not be a problem if you travel in disguise. I think I may have the solution.”
Chapter XXXXXVI:
Lieutenant Liddel? – Max’s Escape – A Missing Cable
Our host disappeared into a storeroom at the rear of the workshop. We heard boxes being shifted and the lids being opened and closed. At one point there was a loud crash followed by yet another cry of ‘Blast and damnation.’ Babbage reappeared a few moments later triumphantly holding a crocodile leather suitcase.
“I knew I still had it,” he said, undoing the bag’s snaps. There was a sudden smell of mothballs as he held up an army officer’s uniform. “Mine,” he said. “From my youthful flirtation with la vie militaire.”
“I look like a complete idiot,” I said, as I surveyed my khaki-clad reflection in the mirror.
“I think you look rather dashing,” Sarah said. “Pity it isn’t a smarter regiment. Oh dear, I am sorry,” she apologized, when she saw the offended look on Babbage’s face.
“We cannot all serve in the Brigade of Guards,” he said, stiffly. “Those boots could do with a shine. I think I have some oxblood polish around somewhere. And the buttons of course.”
We spent the next half hour polishing boots and brassoing buttons. I put the uniform back on once we were finished and Babbage pronounced himself satisfied.
“Nothing to be done about the mothball smell, I’m afraid,” he said. “And you had better leave the holster since I no longer have my service pistol.”
“No problem, I still have Lord Newford’s. Hang on while I get it.”
The back of the van was caked with mud and I had to brace my right foot against the jamb and tug the door handle to get inside. I felt a furry shape race past my leg as soon as the door opened and realized Max the Cat had made yet another bid for freedom. Normally I would have tried to recapture him but I had more important things to attend to.
The Adams revolver fit the holster perfectly. If you are thinking “of course it did” then you are an American. Officers supply their own uniforms and equipment in Babbage’s world and are given wide latitude as to how they configure their kit.
Babbage had placed the translator inside the crocodile leather suitcase when I returned and was busy filling the empty spaces with rags. “Where is the cable?” he said, when his packing was complete.
“What cable?”
“The cable that goes with the translator. You didn’t imagine you could simply place the translator on the Particle Beam Generator, did you? The two need to be connected. Oh dear,” he said, seeing my look of incomprehension.
“If it’s just a cable, couldn’t you make one? You did a great job on the glasses.”
“The cable itself would be relatively easy. It is the end connectors that would pose a problem. Are you sure you haven’t seen it? It is a flat, striped affair about four inches long.”
“Striped?”
“Each strand is individually color coded.”
I permitted myself a long sigh. Why could nothing ever be easy? “Yes I have seen it,” I said.
“Well, where is it?”
“Probably out fighting or getting some lady cat pregnant. It’s Max’s collar.”
We finally found Max on the roof of the toll booth, getting ready to pounce on the starling that had crapped on me earlier. Ok, maybe it wasn’t the same bird, but it sure looked like it.
“Max,” I shouted, “you get your ass down here right now.” Never let it be said Max lacks focus. He paid no attention at all. His whole being was concentrated on the glossy black bird. “Max, we don’t have time for this,” I said. “You’ve got thirty seconds and then I’m going to shoot you.” I unbuttoned Babbage’s holster to show him I meant business.
“You will do no such thing,” Sarah said, batting my hand away from the holster. “He’s probably frightened to death up there.”
“Yeah, he really looks scared,” I said. “That’s why his tail is quivering like a violin string.”
Babbage had gone to his workshop while Sarah and I were discussing Max’s emotional state and now returned with a folding library ladder which he placed next the wall of the toll booth. He was about to climb up when Sarah pushed him aside. “Let me do it,” she said. “Neither of you can be trusted.”
This I had to see. Sarah had already changed into her travelling costume consisting of a long gray tweed skirt, matching jacket and straw boater. How she planned to climb a ladder in that getup was beyond me. Once again I had underestimated her. She spat on her hands, pulled her skirt above her waist, stuck its hem between her teeth and scrambled up the ladder like a buccaneer. She was back a moment later with Max cradled in her arms.
“Who’s a pretty boy then?” she said, nuzzling Max’s battered face. “Where you very frightened up there?”
Max glowered at me with yellow eyes that would have done credit to Old Nick himself. Shoot me, will you? You could hear him thinking. I’ll rip you a third nostril.
I had the last word though. I told Sarah it would be best to leave him with Babbage while we were gone. She agreed reluctantly. “Mommy will be back for you as soon as she has sorted out the naughty men in London,” she explained to the cat.
“You shouldn’t have any trouble as long as you keep your hands away from his mouth,” I whispered to Babbage.
Two hours later, we were sitting in a first class railway carriage behind “The Spirit of Birkenhead,” a Brunswick-green locomotive emblazoned with the gold-leaf logo of the Great Western Railway. I had objected to spending any of our meager resources on first class tickets but Sarah was adamant that ‘an officer would never ask a lady to travel second or third class.’
“What makes you an expert on military matters?” I asked.
“It’s the sort of thing one knows. Most of the men in my family have served as officers at one time or another.”
I found out how much she knew during a crash course on army etiquette that started the moment I sat down.
“What on earth are you doing?” she said, when I began to unfasten my Sam Brown belt.
“Getting comfortable.”
“Not by undoing your uniform. An officer should be impeccable at all times.”
So I spent the next two hours harnessed like a draft horse learning the army rank structure in which, paradoxically, a Major General is outranked by a Lieutenant General (pronounced by some other quirk as ‘Leftenant General). I learned that ‘one never salutes with one’s hat off’ and that politics, religion and women are forbidden topics in an officers’ mess.
“Must make for some quiet evenings,” I said.
“And do try not to speak like an American.”
“No problem. I’ll swallow my consonants, round my vowels and shove in dipthongs where they don’t belong.”
The steel-arched roof of Paddington station finally came into view and we saw first-hand the effects of the government decrees. Armed soldiers patrolled every platform. There was none of the milling about usually found in train stations. Passengers collected their luggage as quickly as possible and scurried out the exits.
Our only luggage was the crocodile leather suitcase which I held under my left arm as I extended my right to help Sarah out of the carriage. I heard the cadence of marching feet behind me as she was getting onto the platform followed by the command “Eyes left.” I was all set to throw her over my shoulder and run when she kicked me in the shin. “Salute, salute,” she hissed.
I turned and performed a shaky imitation of the drill movement Sarah had taught me a half hour earlier as a khaki-clad platoon of soldiers led by a Sergeant with a bristling red moustache marched past. “Eyes front,” the Sergeant bellowed as his hand snapped back to his side in a display of precision that put my own poor attempt at saluting to shame.
“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered.
We had already agreed to hole up at the Cowans’ while we considered our next move. The steamcab driver looked at us dubiously when I gave him the address. “Doesn’t seem like your sort of place,” he said. “Been a lot of bother down that way lately.”
We saw what he was talking about when we reached the East End. The military presence at the train station was nothing compared to what was going on here. There were patrols at every intersection. It had been raining and the soldiers wore glistening rubber capes extending from their putteed legs to their wash basin helmets. They looked medieval seen through the mist, as though they had stepped from a panel of the Bayeux Tapestry.
I paid the driver before we got out of the cab so that we could get to the Cowan’s front door as quickly as possible. I whispered a silent prayer as I knocked on the door. If nobody was home I had no backup plan. For once luck was with me. There was a sound of footsteps from inside, the door opened a crack and Edith Cowan’s face peered out.
Chapter XXXXXVII:
A Reunion – Percy’s Thoughts
“Why do you lot keep bothering me?” Edith said. “It’s like I told the other officer, Percy ain’t here and I don’t know where he is.”
“Edith, it’s us,” Sarah said, pushing me aside. “Let us in.”
“Lord I’m glad to see you,” Edith said, pulling her inside and holding the door open for me as an afterthought.
“I ought to wallop you for showing up dressed like that,” she said to me a few moments later while
she bustled around making tea. “You didn’t half give me a turn. Still, I can see you’ve done your duty by our Sarah, so there’s that to be said for you.”
“She doesn’t need that much looking after,” I said. “Pretty much takes care of herself.”
“I wasn’t talking about that you great git. Honestly, men can be so thick sometimes. Isn’t that right Sarah?”
“Thick as two planks,” Sarah agreed.
“How far along are you dear? Couple of months?”
“A bit more.”
“Wait a second,” I said, now that I understood what we were talking about. “How did you know Sarah was pregnant?”
They both looked at me with scorn. “Tchaah” they said in perfect unison as though they had pre-rehearsed.
“You really reckon this Particle whatsit can put paid to them Black Shirts?” Edith asked after I had finished telling her why we had come.
“Only if I can get into the British Museum and from what I’ve seen today that might be harder than I thought.”
“Let me get hold of our Percy. He’s got a better head for these things than me.”