Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (11 page)

 
          
 
"He's gone," said St. Ives simply.

 
          
 
"Will he float surface ward, sir?"

 
          
 
"Not necessarily," replied the
scientist. "The fall must have knocked the wind from him. It might have
killed him outright. He'll stay down until he bloats with gasses—until he
begins to rot. And the water, I fear, is cold enough to slow the process
substantially, perhaps indefinitely. We could wait a bit, just to be certain,
but I very much fear that I've done too much waiting in my life."

 
          
 
Hasbro was silent.

 
          
 
"I might have saved him, there at the
last," St. Ives said.

 
          
 
"Very doubtful, sir.
I would cheerfully have shot him. And there'd be no use in saving him for the
gallows. He wouldn't escape Newgate Prison a second time."

 
          
 
"What I wanted was to grab his arm, pull
him down. But it seems I gave him a shove instead."

 
          
 
"And a very propitious
shove
,
to my mind."

 
          
 
St. Ives looked at him tiredly. "I'm not
sure I understand any of it," he said. '' But it's over now. This part is."
And with that St. Ives nodded at the horizon where
glowed a
great arc of white fire
. As the two men watched, the flaming orb of the
comet crept skyward, enormous now, as if it were soaring in to swallow the puny
earth at a gulp.

 
          
 
Hasbro nodded quietly. "Shall we fetch
their equipment, sir?"

 
          
 
"We'll want the lot of it," said St.
Ives. "And to all appearances, we'll want it quickly. We've a long and
wearisome journey ahead of us before we see the mountains of
Peru
." He sighed deeply. His shoulder began
suddenly to ache. He turned one last time toward the tarn in which Narbondo had
found an icy grave. His confrontation with Narbondo had rushed upon him, the
work of a confused second, and had found him utterly unprepared, his actions
futile. It almost seemed choreographed by some chaotic higher authority who
meant to show him a thing or two about confusion and regret and what most often
happened to man's best-laid plans.

 
          
 
Hasbro stood in silence, waiting, perhaps, for
St. Ives to come once again to life. Finally he set off up the path toward the
summit, to fetch Narbondo's apparatus and leaving St. Ives to welcome Jack
Owlesby, whose hurried footfalls scuffed up the trail behind them.

 
          
 
BILL KRAKEN LEANED against the parapet on
Waterloo
Bridge
and grinned into the
Thames
. Four pints of Bass Ale had banked and stoked
the fires of good cheer within him. Tomorrow would see the return of his
companions; tonight would see the ascent of the diminishing comet. It was
nearing
midnight
as
he finished reading the last half paragraph in his ruined copy of Ashbless's
Account of London Scientists, happy to note that although the
Royal
Academy
had never publicly recognized the genius of
his benefactor, Ashbless had devoted the better half of his book to accounts of
St. Ives's successes and adventures.

 
          
 
Kraken closed and pocketed the book. The
adventure of Lord Kelvin's machine had ended nicely, if strangely, three
afternoons past. The mice and snakes that had rained on
Leeds
like a Biblical plague had mystified the
populace, from the unbelieving Lord Kelvin to the man in the street, taking
flight in wondering speculation. The newspapers had been full of it. Every
reporter with, perhaps, the exception of Beezer had set out to investigate the
incident, but the Royal Academy had put the cap on it—had hushed it up, had
hauled away the clogged machine in the night to dismantle it in secret.

 
          
 
Poor Lord Kelvin, thought Kraken, shaking his
head. The odd sight of the rocketing beasts had rather unnerved him— perhaps
more so even than the ruination of his device. And the muck clogging the tube
just before the explosion . . . Kraken giggled. But his success wasn't entirely
a cause for celebration. There were questions of a philosophic nature to be
asked, for sure—questions concerning his lordship's manufactured failure and
the sleepless nights of vain speculation that failure would
engender,
questions of the expendability of dumb animals for the sake of saving mankind.
Kraken wasn't sure he liked either notion, but he liked the idea of a mutant
future even less.

 
          
 
These scientists, thought Kraken, there was no
telling what sorts of tricks they'd get up to, scampering like so many grinning
devils astride an engine, laboring to turn the old earth inside out like a pair
of trousers, one of them yanking at a pant leg with a calipers while another
filled the pockets with numbers and gunpowder. And here on the horizon,
slipping as if by magic into the
sky,
rose the comet,
the stars paling roundabout like lanterns enfeebled by sudden daylight.

 
          
 
Kraken tipped his hat at the sky and set out.
He trudged past Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament and climbed into
a waiting dogcart, pausing just a moment to look once again over his shoulder
at the ascending comet. He took up the reins and shrugged, then reached out to
pat the flank of his horse. Success, he thought to himself as he set out at a
leisurely canter toward Chingford, is a relative business at best.

 
 
The Hansom Cab Itanatie

 
          
 
I WAS COMING along down Holborn Hill in
December, beneath a lowering sky and carrying a tin of biscuits and a pound of
Brazilian coffee, when a warehouse exploded behind Perkins Inn. Smoke and
lumber and a twisted sheet of iron, torn nearly in half from the blast, blew
out of the mouth of the alley between Kingsway and Newton Street and scattered
the half-dozen pedestrians like autumn leaves.

 
          
 
I was clear of it, thank God, but even so the
concussion threw me into the gutter, and I dropped the biscuits and coffee and
found myself on the seat of my pants, watching a man stagger away from the
explosion, out of the mouth of the alley to collapse bloody on the pavement.

 
          
 
I jumped up and ran for the man on the ground,
thinking to help but really not thinking at all, when a second blast ripped
through and slammed me against a bakery storefront. Glass shattered where my
elbow went through the window, and then the rest of me followed, snapping the
mullions and tumbling through in an avalanche of buns.

 
          
 
Directly there was another roar—not an
explosion this time, but a roof caving in, and then a billow of black smoke
pouring out of the alley and a fire that reminded you of the Gordon Riots. I
could walk, if you call it that, and between the two of us, the baker and I, we
pulled the bloody man across to where my coffee lay spilled out in the gutter.
We needn't have bothered; he was dead, and we could both see it straight off,
but you don't leave even a dead man to burn, not if you can help it.

 
          
 
I couldn't see worth anything all at once,
because of the reek. It was a paper company gone up—a common enough tragedy,
except that there was an element or two that made it markedly less common: Mr.
Theophilus Godall was there, for one. Maybe you don't know what that means yet;
maybe you do. And the paper company wasn't just any paper company; it was next
door but one to an empty sort of machine works overseen by the
Royal
Academy
, specifically as a sort of
closed-to-the-public museum used to house the contrivances built by the great
Lord Kelvin and the other inventive geniuses of the Academy.

 
          
 
MY NAME IS Jack Owlcsby, and I'm a friend of
Professor Langdon St. Ives, who is perhaps the greatest, mostly unsung,
scientist and explorer in the
Western Hemisphere
. Mr. Oscar Wilde said something recently along the following lines:
"Show me a hero," he said, "and I will write you a
tragedy." He might have taken St. Ives as a case in point. I'm rather more
inclined to enlarge upon the heroism, which is easier, and of which you have a
remarkable surplus when you tackle a subject like Langdon St. Ives. You
yourself might have read about some few of his exploits; and if you have, then
I'll go as far as to tell you that this business of the exploding paper company
won't turn out in the end to be altogether foreign to you.

 
          
 
As for Theophilus Godall, he owns the Bohemian
Cigar Divan in
Rupert Street
,
Soho
; but there's more to the man than that.

 
          
 
LUCKILY THERE WAS a sharp wind blowing down
Kingsway toward the
Thames
, which scoured the smoke skyward almost as
soon as it flooded out of the alley, so that the street was clear enough in
between billows. The blast brought a crowd, and they didn't stand and gawk, as
crowds have got a reputation for. Two men even tried to get up the alley toward
the fire, thinking that there might have been people trapped there or
insensible, but the baker stopped them—and a good thing, too, as you'll
see—pointing out quick that this being a Sunday the paper company was closed,
as was everything else in that direction except Perkins Inn, which was safe
enough for the moment. He had been out for a look, the baker had, not a minute
before the explosion, and could tell us that aside from the dead man there
hadn't been a soul dawdling in the alley except a tall gentleman of upright
carriage in a greatcoat and top hat.

 
          
 
All of us looked as one down that grim black
alley, all of us thinking the same thing—that the man in the coat, if he had in
fact been dawdling there, was dead as a nailhead. The two men who had a minute
earlier been making a rush in that direction were happy enough that they had
held up, for the flames licked across at the brick fag
:ade
opposite the paper company, and a wide section of wall crumbled outward in a
roar of collapsing rubble.

 
          
 
The baker, as if coming to, clapped a hand
onto the top of his baldhead and sprinted for his own shop—thinking to get some
few of his things clear before it went up too. The heat drove him back, though,
and I can picture him clearly in my mind today, wringing his hands and scuffing
his feet in the spilled coffee next to the dead man, and waiting for his shop
to burn.

 
          
 
It didn't, though; thank heaven. It began to
rain, is what it did, with such a crashing of thunder that, with the first
bolt, we thought another roof had caved in. The drops fell thick and steady, as
if someone were pouring it out of a bucket, and the baker fell to his knees
right there in the street and clasped his hands together with the rainwater
streaming down his face. I hope he said a word for the dead man behind him—although
if he did, it was a brief one, for he stood up just as quick as he had knelt,
and pointed across at a man in a greatcoat and hat, walking away in the
direction of the river.