Steam City Pirates (20 page)

“I shall now disappear. Good luck with your intrigue, gentlemen,” said Becky, and she opened the door to the hotel suite.

“Once we get her anesthetized, we can take her over to the Mount Sinai Hospital laboratory so that Seth the
mazikeen
can duplicate her person. We can then store her in a safe place until we can carry out our mission under Central Park,” I said, and I stepped into the closet.

“Good day, Miss Charming. I am very happy to have met you. Perhaps we can socialize under more pleasant circumstances in the near future?” Franklin smiled. He enjoyed the fact that Becky treated him as an equal. I could hear it in the tone of his voice when he addressed her. He had a great deal of respect for her attitude towards him.

“Good day, Doctor. Good luck with your intrigue!” she said, and she exited the suite, closing the door behind her.

It was fifteen minutes into the hour when I heard the knock on the door of the hotel room. I could also hear Doctor Franklin’s steps as he walked over to answer it. I then heard the conversation between Hester Haskins and my compatriot. I held in my hand my Colt pocket revolver in case the little man had trouble injecting the drug into Jane the Grabber.

“Miss Haskins! You were supposed to come alone. Who is this man?” I could hear the panic in little Franklin’s voice, and I held my pistol more tightly. I placed my finger over the trigger.

I heard the door shut. I held my breath, waiting for what came next.

“We have had a change of plans, Doctor Biggs-Pemberton. John will be escorting you to our place of business. You didn’t think we were going to miss out on a golden opportunity to have our very own inventor, did you? Yes, I work for others, but my main preoccupation is to advance my own profits. Take him, John!” I could hear the scuffling taking place outside the closet. This was my only chance to save my little friend, so I took it. I drew back the curtain to the closet.

Haskins’ bartender and enforcer, John Allen, stood near the bed holding the doctor in his big arms. Franklin was squirming frantically in his grasp, but his struggle was in vain. Allen was at least a foot taller than when we had last met in the basement of the Palace Theater, and there were unexplainable bulges beneath his red overcoat and green frock coat. He wore a green top hat, and when his gaze met mine, I had the distinct feeling he was not the same John Allen.

“O’Malley! I should have known you’d be in the mix. You can drop that silly weapon. The Society has improved our evolutionary status much better than your preposterous panspermia elixir ever could.”

Jane Haskins wore a black and gray outfit. Her dress was short, with vertical stripes of alternating black and gray, and she wore long, sheer silk stockings with black vertical stripes. Her squash-shaped hat had black netting and was gray in color with black spots around the brim. Her brief coat was black leather with knives in holders going down the sleeves, and the gold time-travel clock was there directly below her bosom. Her hair was silver gray and long, and her lips were maroon. She stared at me with conviction in her brown eyes.

“Drop the doctor or I shall shoot!” I said.

“Go ahead,” said Allen. “Bullets are quite expensive in these post-war times,” he added.

The bullet from my pistol traveled in its usual lethal trajectory that I had seen rip open the chest of many Confederate soldiers during the war. Instead of flaying the flesh with deadly accuracy, however, I heard a sizzle, and then I saw a puff of powder and smoke when it hit Allen’s head. This was not metal on his head, as the bullet did not ricochet. Instead, his skin had been treated with some kind of covering that was resistant to any foreign projectile intended to pierce the skin.

“Good shot, marksman!” Allen said. “Sorry your ammunition cannot match your obviously perfect aim.”

“We need to leave, John. Take care of O’Malley,” said Haskins.

As I stood there, my revolver limp in my hand, I watched Allen as he set down the doctor onto the carpeted floor of the hotel room. “Watch our little one, Madame, if you will,” he said, and he turned toward me. His eyes began to bulge, and soon they were glowing bright green. From under his coats there escaped six snake-like appendages. These appendages were writhing like serpents, and I had no time to duck for cover, as all six of them struck out at once, faster than King Cobras, and my entire body was instantly engulfed by these constricting demons.

As I thrashed about the room, I could not escape the hold of these emerald-green snakes. The more I struggled, the more tightly I felt them squeezing the life from me. The room began to float before my eyes, and everything grew hazy: John Allen and his long snakes became a dull, moss-covered Frankenstein’s monster. Jane the Grabber’s body melted into a gray ooze, and I finally passed out from lack of oxygen.

Chapter 9: Containing a Journey with Our Hero into the Belly of the Beast

“I am afraid you’ll have to help me with these two.”

The voice was coming from somewhere, but I had no conscious awareness of time or place. I gradually began to feel my limbs, and as I opened my eyes, the dull blur of light slowly dissolved into a focused view of the Palace Hotel room. I sat up, shook my head to get the cobwebs out, and stared at little Doctor Biggs-Pemberton. He was standing between the supine bodies of Hester Jane Haskins and John Allen. They were obviously unconscious, and my surprise at this fact superseded my own discomfort.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

Franklin smiled over at me as if he were talking to a child. “I believe you might call it my Napoleonic Complex. Whenever I must face danger, I always manage to carry an equalizer. In this case, I have an injection blowgun. I was able to formulate a little drug very easily from opium and mandrake root,” he said, holding up what appeared to be a short hollow skewer made of bamboo. With his right hand, he took out of his pocket a small hypodermic needle with a feather on the end. “The drugs are readily available in your liberal society. I simply place this dart inside the blowgun and ‘phhht!’ Two large ogres are felled by one small Homunculus David. It’s rather ancient medicine, but it is very functional. I also knew the chemical that could penetrate the protective covering of their skin. I worked for Manette as an inventor for a year.”

“I would have appreciated it more if you had given me a clue that you were a pygmy warrior from the Amazon rain forest,” I said. “How long will these two be unconscious?”

“I say, did you realize pygmies are from Africa, and not the Amazon? These rapscallions should be in dreamland for more than three hours. I wish I had my equipment with me. The use of the mandrake root reminded me of the ancient folklore concerning this drug. It was believed that the sperm from hanged men fell upon this root and caused it to grow into a miniature man. The root itself is often shaped into human form. In my job in the future, I was contracted by Her Majesty’s Prison Service to genetically dwarf or miniaturize what I privately called ‘banzai prisoners’ in order to reduce the cost to the government of warehousing felons. If needed, I can also enlarge organisms. Of course, once they had served their terms, I could bring them back to normal size. It’s rather ironic that I was given the same miniaturization treatment by the Society, don’t you think?”

“We really don’t have time to discuss your karmic justice. We can leave this snake-man here. Help me carry Haskins down to the street where I can hail a hackney. She’s still breathing, so we can say we need to take her to Mount Sinai Hospital. Bessie can keep her sedated until Seth can make his duplication of her.” I lifted her upper torso from under her arms, and I nodded to Franklin to take her feet. He did so, and we walked her out of the hotel suite and down the stairs. We got a few stares from passing pedestrians, but we were able to get her inside a cab and on the way to the hospital.

On the ride over to the hospital, I noticed that the city was becoming more active. Men were standing on street corners selling a variety of steam inventions. Most of the vehicles, including bicycles, were now steam-powered. Every building along the streets in the more affluent neighborhoods had the telltale stream of vapor flowing from its innards like a sleeping dragon.

Bessie was able to placed Hester Jane Haskins into a private room inside the hospital. She also gave instructions to continue administering ether to the woman to keep her unconscious. Seth was already waiting inside a private lab to do his magic. I changed into a formal black suit from the late Twentieth Century. Doctor Biggs-Pemberton had personally supervised its tailoring.

I would be portraying Doctor Anthony Rondel-Goodwin from England. Doctor Goodwin was from the year 1899, and he lived on the tiny Japanese island of Hashima, better known as “Battleship Island” because of its unique shape and its business of coal mining. It was located nine miles from Nagasaki, the city that Franklin told us was later destroyed by an American nuclear bomb called “Fat Man” to end the Second World War. Doctor Franklin would also be giving me a genetically altering injection that changed my appearance to that of a much older and distinguished-looking gentleman.

“Rondel-Goodwin’s image comes from the newspapers of the time. I have concocted the perfect morphing DNA cocktail in the laboratory of your temple’s sanctuary. Take a look at how you shall appear,” said the little genetic engineer, and he handed me the portrait of the inventor.

Rondel-Goodwin had gray-streaked, curly-brown hair, and his face was thin, with a sparse goatee on his pointed chin. He also had enormous kidney-shaped ears that stuck out from his head. This Rondel-Goodwin had perfected steam robotics on the island to such a high degree that his variety of “steam men” could work as coal miners, butlers, and even soldiers on the island, and he was seen as its industrial emperor. We came up with such a ruse because Franklin told us he could devise such robots, and we would be able to provide the Steam City Pirates’ leader with an excellent steam man warrior in his quest to have a “test battle” between the best steam men warriors.

Doctor Biggs-Pemberton said he would draw some detailed blue prints of some of these robots for me to show Manette to get him interested. Once he decided to partake in the little fight for money, then I would tell him I could spread the word about this battle all over the world. Men and women of royalty and distinction would travel to America to see such a confrontation, and the profits would all go to the Society and its objectives.

We believed it was quite a clever plan, and I was anxious to get started on it. When Seth Mergenthaler arrived, I almost grabbed him bodily to take him over to where Hester Haskins was sleeping. Instead, I told him about whom I was going to portray, and I asked him whether or not he could reverse-engineer the time travel clock inside Haskins’ bosom to see how it worked.

“If you are going to imitate an inventor, Detective O’Malley, then you must be aware of the fact that we engineers think in terms of how things work together to perform a specific function. It’s as if we can envision the different parts just by looking at the working device and seeing how each of the parts fits together into a complete object of mechanical genius. I would assume you do the same with the cases you work on, correct?” Seth asked, his eyes twinkling under the hospital’s steam-powered gas lights. Bessie had recently bought an entire heating system that also served as a power source for the lighting.

“I think I understand, Seth. Please come with me. You must duplicate this woman now. We have to begin our plan and visit the pirates beneath Central Park,” I said, and took the boy’s hand and led him down the hall and into the private room of Jane the Grabber Haskins.

While I was taking my painful genetic cocktail from Doctor Biggs-Pemberton by injection into my spinal column, it took Seth fifteen minutes to duplicate the body of Hester Haskins. Unlike the drugged woman lying upon the bed, however, this copy of her was our little
mazikeen
, and he was not asleep. He was fiddling with the time-travel clock inside his bosom.

“Oh, I see. It’s already set to take her immediately back to the caverns beneath the park! When they created this device, the engineers wanted to control this woman. She is completely manipulated by a remote control and has no freedom to wander about. We can go directly to the caverns, Detective. We should have no problem.”

It was quite discombobulating to hear little Seth’s brain emitting the sounds of Jane the Grabber. She was quite attractive, in a dark way, and I wondered if she had once been a moral woman in her youth.

Bessie came up to the Hester Jane Haskins duplicate and gave her a big hug. “Seth, I want you to be careful! Listen to Patrick. He’s been involved in these kinds of investigations before. He’ll get you back safely,” she said, and I could see tears welling in her eyes.

“How will we return from the caverns? We obviously won’t be able to use the time machine,” I said, and I could see that my new appearance was causing some consternation in the others, as they were all staring at me.

Seth finally said, “Good question. I suppose I never informed you, Detective, but my powers do not disappear when I have shifted my form into that of another. Therefore, I shall be able to whisk us both back home by flight. Won’t that be fun?” Seth clapped his female hands together and did a little hop off the floor.

“I should think we should save that method of transportation for emergency situations,” I said. “The
Flying Dutchman
was a ghost ship of legend, but a flying Irishman could become a ghost if he is shot down,” I added.

“Don’t worry, Detective. I shall take care of you,” said Seth.

“Also, I am worried about Doctor Adler. Ever since we have been associated with Doctor Biggs-Pemberton, he has pulled back from our group. I hope he still believes in our objectives,” I said. As the group’s leader, I felt it was time I called for unity.

“I am sorry, Patrick, but Doctor Adler has not been completely honest with you. You see, as a young man, back in Germany, he was an inventor. In fact, he became so obsessed with his mechanical devices that he believed only science held the promise for humanity. He was, like his father, an atheist. When the government began using his inventions for war, however, he had his spiritual conversion into the rabbinical service. I don’t believe he has ever quite relinquished his love for invention,” said Bessie. “That is why he works with Seth on the time machine and other such activities. He still loves being around his first love. Doctor Adler is, most likely, secretly jealous that you chose Doctor Biggs-Pemberton to create the steam man.”