Starcross (8 page)
Authors: Philip Reeve
I would have pointed out this strange coincidence, but
there was no need. The Honourable Ignatius Flint chose that moment to sweep off his hat and make a very low bow to Miss Beauregard, who offered him her perfect hand to kiss. And Myrtle, watching this, cried out in an indignant voice, ‘Why, that is not an Indian prince at all! That is
Jack Havock
!’
Now, I don’t claim to be any sort of authority upon matters of the heart, but it seems to me that if a young lady has formed a Sentimental Attachment to a young gentleman, and that young gentleman not only fails to answer any of her letters, but then turns up at a resort hotel under an assumed name, making himself
agreeable to beautiful young French women in bath chairs, then the young lady may be somewhat vexed. Myrtle turned bright red, and then stark white, and while I was waiting to see what other interesting colours she could go, Mother took her by the elbow and said, ‘Excuse us, everyone; Myrtle is unwell. I think we should return to our suite of rooms.’
I started to protest, for I would far rather have run outside to greet my old friends Mr Munkulus and Mr Grindle, and Jack himself, once he had finished exchanging good-mornings with the fair Miss B. But Mother gave me a Commanding Look, and believe me, when you are on the receiving end of a Commanding Look from someone 4,499,999,989 years your senior, you tend to take notice.
Back in our suite, Myrtle closeted herself in her room with Mother, and a great deal of sobbing and consoling went on, while I kicked about in the sitting room, casting wistful looks at the sunshine outside and wishing I could be down on the beach, running in and out of the plashy billows, building sandcastles, etc., etc.
At last Mother and Myrtle emerged. Myrtle collapsed at once upon the sofa, looking pale but not particularly interesting. She must have been crying, because her nose
was red and her eyeglasses had steamed up.
Mother came to me, and, putting her arm about my shoulders, said softly, ‘Art, do you think you could go and seek out Jack? Let him know that we are here, and see if there is some innocent explanation for his strange behaviour?’
‘Oh, the explanation is quite clear,’ said Myrtle, in a hollow sort of way. ‘He prefers that French creature to me. It really does not matter. Let us go bathing.’
‘Are you sure, Myrtle?’ asked Mother.
‘Oh, quite sure,’ said Myrtle, with a sigh. ‘Just because all the Hopes and Dreams of my Young Life lie in Ashes, it does not mean that you and Art should not be able to enjoy your holiday. Come, let us go down …’
And she picked up her patent bathing costume, which had been left draped over the sofa arm in its mothproof
carrying bag, and led the way downstairs.
I still felt faintly troubled by the mysterious appearance of the ocean, and by my encounter earlier with that slinking shadow on the balcony. As Mother and I followed Myrtle out into the sunlight on the prom, I asked her, ‘Mother, do you not think there is something queer about Mr Titfer and his hotel?’
‘Of course there isn’t,’ snapped Myrtle, before Mother could reply. ‘There isn’t, is there, Mother? Art just sees mysteries and adventures everywhere. It is due to all those penny dreadfuls he reads, and the unsettling influence of our misfortunes in the springtime.’
Mother smiled, stopping on a landing to look fondly down at us. ‘Well, my dears,’ she said, ‘there
is
something queer about Starcross, to be sure, and Mr Titfer certainly appears to be a most singular gentleman. But as far as one may tell it does not seem to be a dangerous sort of queerness. The Solar System is a very large place, after all, and there is room in it for all manner of oddities, I’m sure. So I propose that the best way of dealing with this one is to take an invigorating dip. However it comes to be here, the sea looks most inviting.’
I quite agreed with her, and yet part of me remained
wary. Perhaps Myrtle was right for once, and I had been unsettled by our adventure with the First Ones. At any rate, some sixth sense kept warning me that danger lurked near by.
But it’s jolly hard to maintain a sense of lurking menace when the Sun is shining, and there are sand and sea to be enjoyed. There was no sign of Jack Havock and his friends, nor of Miss Beauregard, and as we walked down the ramp from the promenade I felt my spirits soar like a hot-air balloon. We each took one of the bathing machines which waited on the sand in front of the hotel, like a line of gaily-painted sentry boxes on wheels. As I stripped off inside mine, and hung the sailor suit I had been wearing on the hooks provided, a clockwork motor whirred into action and carried the machine gently down the strand and into the sea, so that when I emerged, resplendent in a wool serge bathing costume with red-and-white hoops, I had only to descend the three steps to find myself shoulder deep in the warm, gentle swell.
Soon Mother and Myrtle emerged from neighbouring machines to join me. Mother wore a simple bathing dress of blue worsted, while Myrtle modelled her new patent bathing costume, the Nereid, a quite remarkable garment which
combined all the latest advances in dress-making and hydrodynamics (see Mr Wyatt’s illustration). Myrtle was so proud of it that she cut a neat little curtsey on the top step of her machine and called out across the water, ‘What do you think, Art?’
Well, I thought that any Nereid who was silly enough to go sporting in the briny dressed up in all that clobber would sink straight to the bottom in a twinkling, and good riddance. But I have learned that it is sometimes best to varnish the truth slightly when Myrtle asks for my opinion (my shins are quite black and blue with the indentations of
her beastly boots). So I said, ‘Very pretty’, or words to that effect, and indeed there
was
something quite pretty about the way her over-skirts flowered out around her as she came smiling down the steps.
Oh, what fun we had that morning, there in the seas of Starcross! Even Myrtle soon forgot that her heart was broken. We both sploshed and frolicked and swam about, doing the doggy paddle just as Father had taught us in the main water tank at Larklight, and Mother circled us, gliding through the water as gracefully as any dolphin or Ganymedian aqua bat (she has been both in her time, of course).
When Myrtle and I grew weary we paused awhile upon a
tethered raft, where we sat in the shade of a parasol and ate ice creams, which were brought out to us by a mechanical mermaid with a waterproof ice box. We applauded Colonel Quivering as he sped past us in his regimental water-wings, a shark-like dorsal fin jutting jauntily from the back of his regulation army-issue swimming costume. We watched Herbert Spinnaker ascend the tall diving platform on the pier and perform a graceful swallow-dive. He fell in a slow, dreamlike way, turning over once, twice, thrice! before he splashed into the water. The gravity here, outside the influence of the hotel’s generators, was gentle, and made us all feel light and buoyant. But it was still stronger than the one eighth or one tenth of British Standard that one would expect on a small asteroid like Starcross.
I pondered on this a bit, and then said, ‘Myrtle, I believe
we are on the planet Mars.’
Myrtle gave me one of those Looks, over the tops of her spectacles, as if wondering whether it might not be kinder to have me confined in some form of Asylum.
‘I have thought quite hard about it,’ I explained. ‘Starcross used to be part of Mars; Mother told me that. I think that Mr Titfer has some sort of machine in his hotel which transports the whole place back a few thousand centuries to a time when these hills and cliffs were still part of the Red Planet.’
‘But there are no seas on Mars!’ objected Myrtle. ‘There is hardly any water at all on Mars! That is why they have had to build so many canals all over it!’
‘That is true,’ I agreed. ‘But in pre-history, Mars had rolling oceans much like this.’
Myrtle considered this, and began to look alarmed. ‘Mother!’ she cried, and when our maternal relative surfaced alongside she complained, ‘Art says we are on pre-historic Mars!’