September 2: Notices are in!
My lecture — an unparalleled triumph! The Dynamics of an Asteroid — in the dust-bin! Moriarty’s hash — settled for good! I may draw a thick black line through the most prominent name on the List.
Now — on to other things.
Remodelling of Flamsteed House continues. All say it’s not grand enough for my position. Workmen have been in all week, installing electric lamps in every room. In my position, we must have all the modern, scientific devices. Lady Caroline fears electricity will leak from the wiring and strike dead the servants with indoor lightning. I have explained to her why this is impossible, but my dear featherhead continues to worry and has ordered the staff to wear rubber-soled shoes. They squeak about the place like angry mice.
Similarly, the Observatory must expand, keep apace, draw ahead.
At 94 inches, our newly-commissioned optical reflecting telescope shall be the biggest in the world! The ‘scopes at Birr Castle and the Lick Observatory will seem like tadpoles! I almost feel sorry for them. Almost. That’s two more off the List!
Kedgeree for breakfast, light lunch of squab and quail eggs, Dover sole and chipped potatoes for supper. Congress with Lady C. — twice! Must eat more fish.
Reviewing my life and achievements on this, my forty-fifth birthday, I concede myself well-satisfied.
All must admire me.
Looking to the planets and stars, I feel I am surveying my domain. My Queen has her Empire, but she has gifted me the skies for conquest.
Mars is winking at me, redly.
September 6: A curious happening.
Business took me to the lens-grinders’ in Seven Dials. Old Parsons’ work has been indifferent lately, and I made a personal visit to administer a metaphorical boot to the seat of his britches.
After the booting was done, I left Parsons’ shop and happened to notice the premises next door. Above a dingy window was a sign — ‘C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities’. The goods on offer ran to dead birds, elephant tusks, shark-maws, fossils and the like. I’d thought this site occupied by a bakery, but must be misremembering. Cave’s premises had plainly stood for years, gradually decaying and accumulating layers of dust and dirt.
My attention was drawn to the window by a red flash, which I perceived out of the corner of my eye. A stray shaft of light had reflected off an odd object — a mass of crystal worked into the shape of an egg and brilliantly polished. It might do for a paper-weight if I were in need of such a thing, which I was not.
Then, I heard voices raised inside the emporium. One was known to me — that upstart Moriartian Ogilvy. Alone among the fraternity of astronomers, he has written in defence of The Dynamics of an Asteroid. His name was on the List.
I stepped back into the doorway of Parsons’, but kept my ears open. Og. was haggling with an old man — presumably, C. Cave himself — over the crystal lump, for which the proprietor was asking a sum beyond his purse. An opportunity.
Casually, I wandered into the shop.
Cave, a bent little fellow with egg in his stringy beard and a tea-cozy on his head, had the odd mannerism of wobbling his head from side to side like certain snakes. I thought for a moment that I knew him from somewhere, but must have been mistaken. He smelled worse than many of his antiquities. I say, that’s rather good — must save the line for my next refutation.
Og. was going through his pockets, scraping together coins to up his offer.
Upon seeing me, Og. said “Stent, how fortunate that it’s you,” with undue familiarity as if we were the closest of friends. “Could you extend me a small loan?”
“Five pounds,” insisted Cave. “Not a penny less.”
Og. sweated like an opium-addict without funds for his next pipe. Most extraordinary thing. I hadn’t thought he had the imagination to be so desperate.
“Of course, my dear fellow,” I said. His face lifted, and his palm came out. “But first I must conclude my own business. My good man, I should like to purchase that curious crystal in your window.”
Og. looked as if he had been punched in the gut.
“Five pounds,” said Cave.
“Stent, I say, you can’t … well, that is … I mean, dash it…”
“Yes, Ogilvy, was there something?”
I drew out my wallet and handed over five pounds. Cave entered the sale in an ancient register, then fussed about extracting the object from the window.
I looked at Og. He tried unsuccessfully to cover fury and disappointment.
“Now about that loan,” I said, wallet still open.
“Doesn’t matter now,” he said — and left the shop, setting the bell above the door a-jangle.
Another name off the List!
Cave came back with the object, cradled in black velvet. It struck me that I need only say I’d changed my mind to reclaim my outlay. But Og. might creep back and get the blessed thing after all. Couldn’t have that.
Cave held up the crystal and said something about ‘the inner light’. Strange phrase. He meant the refraction, of course, but a lecture on optics would have been out of place in this circumstance. No fee would be forthcoming, and it doesn’t do to cheapen the currency of scholarship by dishing out lectures gratis.
I took the thing away with me. Perhaps I can use it as a paper-weight after all.
Roast boar with apricots at the Lord Mayor’s. Congress with Lady Caroline in the carriage on the way home. Whoosh!
September 7: An odd day.
Luncheon at Simpson’s in the Strand with Jedwood, my publisher. Cream of turbot, hock of ham, peppered pear. An acceptable muscadet, porter, sherry. The Refutation pamphlet is shifting briskly, and J. is eager for more. Pity Moriarty hasn’t fired other literary clay pigeons I could blast to bits. J. proposes a collection of Refutations and suggests I consider expanding the arena of combat, to launch my intellectual ballista against other so-called great minds of the age. J. is a dolt — he doesn’t understand the List, or that it is as important to choose the proper enemies as the proper friends. Nevertheless, I’m tempted. Tom Huxley, Darwin’s old bulldog, could do with having his ears boxed for a change. And I didn’t care for the way George Stokes hovered over Lady Caroline at the last Royal Society formal. Those Navier-Stokes equations have their tiny little cracks.
Most extraordinary thing. As J. and I were leaving the restaurant, a wild-haired, sun-burned fellow accosted us in the street, gabbling “The Martians are coming, the Martians are coming!” Ever since Schiaparelli put about that nonsense about canals, there has been debate about how one should address the notional inhabitants of the planet Mars. I am firmly of the belief that ‘Marsian’ is the only acceptable term. I took the trouble to correct the moonatic on this point, but he was in no condition to listen. He grabbed my lapels with greasy fingers and breathed gin in my face. He called me by name, which was discomforting. “Sir Nevil,” he said, “keep watching the skies! Look to the Red Planet! Look into the Crystal Egg!”
J. summoned a hefty constable, who laid a hand on the madman’s shoulder. The fellow writhed in the grasp of the law, and a look of heightened terror passed over his face. It is no wonder men of his stripe should fear the police, but the extent of his pantomime of fright struck me as excessive even for his situation. Curiously, the constable seemed humpbacked, tailored uniform emphasizing rather than concealing a pronounced lump on one shoulder. I assumed the Metropolitan Police imposed strict physical requirements on their recruits. Perhaps this fellow’s condition has worsened in recent years? Something was not quite right about his hump, which I could swear wobbled like a jelly on a plate. His eyes were glassy and his face pale — indeed, our lawful officer was evidently in as poor a shape as our degenerate semi-assailant.
“Don’t let them take me,” begged the madman, “they wraps round you … and they bites … and they sucks your brains … and you ain’t you no more. I’ve seen it!”
“Let’s … be … ‘avin … you … my … lad,” said the policeman, voice
like a prolonged death rattle, monotonous and expressionless. “You … don’t … want … to … be … a … botherin’… these … gentlemen…”
The madman’s face contorted in a silent scream.
There was something peculiarly hideous about the constable’s voice, as if he were a music hall dummy manipulated by a wicked ventriloquist.
“Mind … ‘ow … you … go … sirs!”
The policeman lifted the madman — not a small individual, by the way — one-handed. He marched off stiff-legged, bearing his whimpering prisoner down the Strand. As he walked, his hump seemed to shift under blue serge, as if it were a separate entity. I had a sense of evil eyes cast at me.
J. asked me if I had any idea who the maniac was.
He had something of a military mien, I thought — though come down in the world, perhaps having frazzled his brains out in some sunstruck corner of Empire. It came to me that I had seen him before — perhaps in the audience at one of my many popular lectures, perhaps skulking on the street waiting for the chance to accost me. J. pointed out that he had known who I was, but — of course — everyone in England knows the Astronomer Royal.
“It should definitely be ‘Marsian’,” I insisted. “The precedents are many and I can recall them in order…”
J. remembered he had forgotten another appointment — with a lesser author — and left, before I could fully convince him. Must send him my monograph on planetary possessives. Some still rail against ‘Mercurial’ and ‘Jupiteric’, though a consensus is nearly reached on ‘Moonian’ and ‘Venutian’. By the end of this century, we shall have definitively colonized the sunnar system for proper naming!
September 7, later.
I had thought to dispel completely the unpleasant memory of this afternoon’s strange encounter … but the words of the madman resounded.
By some happenstance, this was literally true.
The long-necked cabbie who conveyed me back to Greenwich bade me a jovial farewell with “keep watching the skies, sir.” An unusual turn of phrase to hear twice in one day, perhaps — but a sentiment naturally addressed to a famous astronomer in the vicinity of the biggest telescope in the land.
Galvani, the Italian foreman of the gang who have completed — at last! — the electrification of Flamsteed House, handed me a sheaf of wiring diagrams marked ‘for the attention of the householder’ and clearly said “look to the Red Plan, et … es essential for to understan’ the current en the house”. There was, indeed, a red plan in the sheaf, but it seemed to me he had stressed the first part of his sentence, which echoed the words of the madman, and thrown away the second, which conveyed his particular meaning.
Then, before supper, I was passing the kitchens and happened to overhear Mrs. Huddersfield, the new house-keeper, tell the butler to “look into the crystal”, referring to our fresh stock of Waterford glassware, a scant instant before Polly, the new under-maid, exclaimed “egg!” in answer to a question about the secret ingredient of the face-paste which keeps her complexion clear. To my ears, these separate voices melded to produce a single sentence, the madman’s “look into the Crystal Egg”.
Lady Caroline is at her sister’s, and I dined alone, unable to concentrate on supper. Every detail of the business on the Strand resurfaced in my mind.
I was shocked out of my reverie only by the sweetness of dessert — and looked down into a crystal bowl to see a quivering scarlet blancmange, with a curiously eye-like glacé cherry at its summit. In its color, the dish reminded me of the planet Mars, and, in its movement, the somehow-unnatural hump of the strangely-spoken police constable.
Only then did I remember the paperweight snatched out from the grasp of the odious Ogilvy yesterday.
A mass of crystal, in the shape of an egg!
A Crystal Egg! Could the madman of the Strand have been referring to this item of bric-a-brac?
Unable to finish my dessert for thinking.
September 7 — still later: a great discovery!
After supper, I repaired to my study, where I keep my collection of antique and exotic optical and astronomical equipment: telescopes, sextants, orreries and the like. Signor Galvani’s men have disturbed them greatly while seeing to the electrification of the room.
A new reflecting telescope arrived this morning, a bulky cabinet affair on trestles, with an aperture where a separate lens must presumably be attached. It is an unfamiliar design — a presentation, in honor of my achievements in mapping the night skies, from an august body who call themselves the Red Planet League. I have had had my secretary respond with an autographed photograph and a note of thanks. Entering the study, I saw at once that the workmen had mistaken this gift for a species of lamp, and wired it up to the mains. I would be inclined to chide Galvani most severely, had this error not nudged me on the path to discovery.
I unwrapped the supposed paperweight and made close examination of it under the steady illumination of the electric lamps. Cave, the vendor, had mentioned an ‘inner light’ — a phenomenon I soon discovered for myself. It is a trick of the optics, of course — if held up to the light, the interior of the crystal egg coruscates, seeming to hold multiple refractions and reflections.
By accident, when Polly reached into the room and turned off the lights at the wall-switch, I discovered the crystal had the unusual property of retaining luminosity even when the light-source was gone. I did not measure the time of glow-decay, because the undermaid was fussing and apologizing for not seeing I was still in my study when she plunged me into darkness. She whimpered that these new-fangled inventions were not like proper gas. I fear Lady Caroline’s ‘indoor lightning’ theory has infected the servants with irrational terror.
“What’s that egg?” exclaimed the maid, meaning my crystal. “And why’s it lit up?”
I ventured to explain something of the laws of refraction, but saw my learning was wasted on this simple soul. Nevertheless, it is to Polly that I owe my next, most extraordinary discovery. She picked up the crystal egg, rather boldly for a person in her position I might say.
“Doesn’t it go here, sir?” she said, slipping the egg into an aperture of the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope. It was a perfect fit. Before I could chide her, Polly had fiddled with a switch which triggered an incandescent lamp inside the cabinet — projecting a beam through the crystal, which diffracted out into the room. Suddenly, the opposite wall was covered by a swirling, swarming red cloud. Polly yelped, and fled — but I hadn’t the heart to pursue and chastise her.
I was transfixed by the pictures on the wall.
Yes, pictures! Pictures that move! With a faint flicker, accompanied by a definite whirring from inside the reflecting telescope. I had never before seen the like.
At once it came to me that my crystal egg was in fact a crystal lens. When light passed through it just so, the crystal egg — by some means as yet undetermined by science — transmitted images from its interior.
The process was astounding, but I was more overwhelmed by the picture. It was as if I were looking out of a window which floated high over a ruddy desert far from Greenwich. Faintly visible above the horizon were familiar stars, skewed in the sky — as observed not from our home-world, but from a body which must be considered (on a cosmic scale) our near neighbor. I perceived the tiny blue-green circle of Earth, and knew with utter certainty that this window looked out onto the plains of Mars.
The Red Planet.
All the tiny incidents of the last two days impelled me, inch by inch, towards this discovery.
I knew the subject of my next lecture, my next book. Indeed, the remainder of my career could be devoted to this. I am Master of Mars. No other can come close. Og. must have had some inkling, but this is to be Stent’s triumph — not Ogilvy’s. From henceforth, this acreage of red dust will be Stent’s Plain. In the distance, I saw slumped, worn hills, more ancient than the sharper peaked mountains of Earth — the Caroline Range! A deep channel grooves across the landscape, flowi
ng with a thick, red, boiling mud — Polly’s Canal, to commemorate the child whose unknowing hand urged me to this discovery! Nearby, a gaping pit was scraped raw like a bloody gouge in the Marsian soil. I named this Victoria Regina Chasm in honor of the gracious lady who has bestowed so many honors on my name.
Inside V. R. Chasm, something stirred. My heart stopped, I am sure — for long, long seconds. Pads like large leaves, a richer scarlet than the crimson of the desert dirt, flopped over the rim and anchored in the soil. These were the tips of sinewy tentacles, which held fast and contracted as a Marsian being hauled itself out of its hole.
What manner of men might inhabit the Red Planet? Not men at all, it seems — but creatures beyond classification.
I saw its bulging, filmed-over eyes. Its beak-like mouth. Its mess of limbs. Its swelling carapace.
The thinner atmosphere of Mars and a colder, drier climate have shaped that planet’s ruling species differently from us. I had no doubt that I was looking at a Man of Mars, not a brute animal. All around were signs of an intelligent species, a civilization perhaps older than our own.
There were structures — a Marsian factory, perhaps, or a school. The Marsian hauled itself across metal frames, fighting the pull of its planet, and came closer to the window.
I confess to a moment of stark, irrational fear. As I could see the Marsian, could it see me? Did the crystal egg have a twin on Mars?
With no earthly object for comparison, it was difficult to get a sense of scale. The Marsian could be the size of a puppy or an elephant.
It wriggled closer to the ‘window’. Its features grew gigantic on the study wall. I could see the wallpaper, the bookshelves and pictures through its phantasmal image. Then, suddenly, it shut off. There was a flapping sound, and a brief burst of bright, blank light — that died too, along with the incandescent bulb inside the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope.
How ironic that a body named after Mars should provide the device which led me to gain such an unprecedented view of our planetary neighbor!
I turned the switch on and off, and I fiddled with the crystal in its aperture, trying to re-open the line of communication, but the window closed as mysteriously as it had opened.
Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes Page 30