Starcross (26 page)

‘When a man wakes in the morning and reaches for his hat and grasps a Moob instead, he often puts the Moob upon his head without realising. And once we were on, we found that we could control the man’s thoughts, and make him believe he was going about his usual business, when all the time he was just thinking thoughts for us. And it seemed a fair trade, for they were in a sad pickle, those men, marooned so far from their own time, without a hope of rescue. It seemed that we were doing them a favour by taking their thoughts away.

‘Sat on Will Melville’s head, I came to know and cherish him. He was a brave, good man, an enthusiast and an adventurer … None of those words would have any meaning to most Moobs, and I am grateful to Will Melville
for teaching them to me.

‘But alas, the rest of the
Liberty
’s crew were not such paragons. They were rough, angry, thoughtless rogues, who’d signed aboard for deviltry and plunder, with never a care for Will’s republic. And just as, by drinking Will’s thoughts I grew thoughtful, so by drinking theirs my fellow Moobs grew churlish, rough and sullen. And, worse, I began to realise that we were harming our hosts. To take a sip of their dreams from time to time had caused them no ill effect, but to drink up all their thoughts, day in, day out, was horribly harmful. The men turned pale and dusty-coloured; they grew thin and their thoughts took on the taste of porridge made with dirty water. One by one, they started to crumble into dust.

‘I tried to persuade my fellow Moobs to give up their feasting. I quit Will’s head. I hadn’t yet learned how to talk through someone else and so explain to him, as I am doing
now to you, but Will could see what was happening. He was strong enough still to act, and tore the Moobs from the heads of his surviving men.

‘But the Moobs had grown wily, as Moobs will who feast too well upon the thoughts of pirates. They crept back and seized the ship, and when I tried to stop them they had their slaves stuff me in a locker and batten it down. Miserable and alone, I lay trapped in that locker like a forgotten sock. I heard them climb the stairs to Will’s cabin, and the final struggle as they pinioned him and crammed a Moob upon his head. Then nothing more.

‘At last I escaped my captivity and went in search of the other Moobs. I thought to find them on the shore, supping upon the thoughts of starfish or the small dreams of barnacles. But I had underestimated them. They had a taste for human thoughts now, and they had gone whirling off like dust-devils across the sands of Mars to search for more. They found none there, of course, for intelligent life had not yet appeared upon that sphere. But they found something better: another of those rifts in time. It carried them forward to the year seventeen hundred and something, when the part of Mars where Will Melville had landed had been blasted far into space, and had a new name:
Starcross.

‘I followed them there, and found them haunting its deep mines like ghosts, leaping down upon the heads of unsuspecting miners to drink their thoughts. The miners grew fearful, and the mine was abandoned, but not before its owner came to examine it, no doubt to see whether he might make any other sort of profit from that lonely rock. My fellow Moobs, who had grown particularly cunning and crafty, allowed themselves to be discovered and carried away by him. I was left alone.

‘For many years I crept about the crags and glens of Starcross, subsisting on the thoughts of passing icthyomorphs. Then, at last, Sir Launcelot Sprigg returned, with a crew of workmen, and began renovating the old mine manager’s house, extending it, turning it into a hotel. And to my surprise I found that he had brought my fellow Moobs with him, that he was using them to control the actions of other men and that, although he did not know it, one was wrapped about his own neck in the guise of a cravat, controlling him!

‘What their scheme is, I do not know, for they no longer trusted me and would not share their plans with me. All I know is that Sir Launcelot has been installing some manner
of ancient machinery in one of the caverns beneath the hotel, and that when a gentleman from Earth came to investigate, along with a young Martian lady whose dreams taste like nougat, he and those wicked Moobs transformed them into trees!

‘I stayed at the hotel, sick with anxiety as I waited to see what would happen. And what happened was young Art arrived with his family. I could not bear to see them transformed into trees, too, so I crept on to their balcony and tried to warn them of the danger, but of course I was still in Moobish form, and all that I could say was “Moob”.

‘Soon afterward, the other Moobs discovered me and drove me away. Like some revenant spirit, I found my way back to Wild Will Melville’s ship on pre-historic Mars. And there I found you, Miss Myrtle, and Master Jack and Miss Delphine, and, well, you know the rest.’

Now, as you may imagine, I had been shuffling about like a cat on hot bricks while the Moob told us the last part of this tale, for although
he
might not know why the other Moobs had made Sir Launcelot install that old machine in the basement of Starcross,
I
did.

‘They are opening a pathway to the future realm of the Moobs!’ I explained, my words all stumbling over each other in their haste to get out of my mouth and climb into the ears of my listeners. ‘They have the old Larklight gravity engine, but they have made Mother turn it into a time machine, and Moob after horrid Moob is popping out of it! They are loading them into hatboxes. There were hundreds of them aboard that train!’

‘On their way to Modesty?’ said Jack, catching on at once. ‘Then we must hurry there, and stop them before they can spread out across the entire Empire!’

‘No!’ I said. ‘First we must turn back to Starcross! Mother is a prisoner of the Moobs, and at their bidding she is bringing ever so many more of them into our era.’

Jack thought on this a moment. ‘Art,’ he said firmly, ‘Modesty first, then back to Starcross. For the Moobs there can do no harm until the train returns to them, but those who have already left pose a danger to us all!’ He turned to my sister. ‘Myrtle, will you start up the chemical wedding again?’

I could not have been more surprised if he had asked, ‘Myrtle, can you turn yourself into a fish and swim out of the window?’ I had thought that my sister was looking
somewhat pleased with herself, and a bit pale, and generally even more like a demented owl than usual, but it had not occurred to me that it was
she
who had been mixing the elements in the
Liberty
’s great alembic, nor that it had been
she
who had driven this old ship through so many leagues of Space and Time to rescue me and Mrs Spinnaker!

‘Myrtle?’ I cried. ‘Have you become an alchemist?’

She looked down her nose at me, haughty-like. ‘It is a talent that some of us possess, Arthur,’ said she. ‘I find that I have inherited a feel for the chemical wedding from Mama. It is somewhat like cookery. Now, if you will excuse me I shall go downstairs and bring the fiery elements to a nice rolling boil, so that we may hasten on and stop that train.’

‘Erm,’ said Delphine, or rather, her Moobish hat.

‘What does it mean, “erm”?’ asked Myrtle, addressing the rest of us rather than the Moob – I suppose she thought it wasn’t
ladylike to converse with headgear.

The Moob said, ‘It was not you who set the alembic going, but Wild Will Melville.’

‘Oh, what nonsense!’ cried Myrtle. ‘You saw me, Delphine – I mean, you saw me, Jack. And Wild Will Melville has been dead for ages.’

‘He has,’ said the Moob-Delphine. ‘But some of his memories still linger on in me, and the memory of his alchemical studies are among them. When Delphine asked you to perform the wedding for her I saw that you could not, so I wrapped myself about you and took control of your actions, for a while.’

‘Wrapped yourself about me?’ cried Myrtle, quite appalled. ‘About which part of me did you wrap yourself, pray?’

‘About your hair,’ the Moob confessed. ‘I was the black cloth you used to tie it back.’

Myrtle turned paler still, and put a hand to her hair as if she feared to find a dozen more Moobs lurking there. ‘But I felt nothing!’

‘I hypnotised you into
thinking
you felt nothing.’

‘And all those things I saw while we were flying along – the Tides of Space, and so forth?’

‘Those were the things
I
saw. I shared them with you.’

‘Oh,’ said Myrtle. ‘Oh. Well, perhaps it is for the best. I am not certain that Alchemy is a suitable occupation for a young lady.’ But she looked quite downcast about it, as I suppose anyone would who believed they had acquired some superhuman talent, only to find it was not real.

‘Perhaps if you would permit me to perch upon some part of you, we may resume the process?’ asked the Moob politely.

‘Quite definitely not!’ gasped Myrtle. ‘It would be most irregular!’

‘Myrtle,’ I said, ‘we have to reach Modesty somehow. Heaven knows how much damage will be done if that train gets in before us, and starts to disseminate its freight of vampire hats.’

‘Whatever the reason, Art,’ Myrtle retorted, ‘a young lady does not grant permission for the quaint denizens of Futurity to go gambolling about her mind and person. Why cannot one of Delphine’s goblins be this creature’s puppet and perform the alchemical chores, if it is so very important?’

‘Threls,’ I said.

‘Don’t be coarse, Art.’

‘I’m not! That’s what they’re called!’ I said, for of course, being a boy, I had recognised our blue-coated companions at once from the chart of
Odd Races of the Empire
²³
which I kept pinned to my bedroom wall at Larklight (though why they should have joined the French Army I could not then guess, and looked forward very much to learning).

‘Miss Myrtle is quite correct,’ said the Moob. ‘I can perform the chemical wedding just as well in any other body. I shall remain upon Delphine and press on towards Modesty. You know the place, which I do not, so I shall leave it to you to decide how we frustrate my fellow Moobs when we arrive there.’

‘Now hold on!’ called out one of the Threls, a thickset fellow with sergeant’s stripes upon his sleeves. ‘What about us? We obey orders from Miss Beauregard, not some talking hat! And we signed up to fight the British, who don’t sound half so scary as these Moobs you’ve been going on about!’

‘That’s right!’ the others growled mutinously. ‘You tell ’em, Sarge!’, etc., etc. Some of the Threls shook their carbines, some drew their bayonets, and things might have turned quite ugly, I believe. But thanks to Messrs Gargany,
Nisbit and Stringg and their informative wallchart I knew what a Threl values above all else.

‘Wool!’ I cried, which soon got their attention. ‘If you help us stop these wicked Moobs, why, Queen Victoria herself will reward you with all the wool you need! Shiploads of wool! Whole fleets full of wool! A flock of fine Merino sheep to call your own, who’ll provide you with wool in endless supply!’

‘You sure?’ asked a Threl, looking sceptical.