第 42 页

“You must be completely mad,” Mallory said.

“Why do you suppose I chose this place as my headquarters? You are governed by shopkeepers, who value their precious goods more than any number of human lives! They will never fire on their own warehouses, their own shipping. We are impregnable here!”

Mallory laughed. “You utter jolterhead! If Byron’s dead, then the Government is in the hands of Lord Babbage and his emergency committees. Babbage is a master pragmatist! He’ll not be stayed by concern for any amount of merchandise.”

“Babbage is the pawn of the capitalists.”

“He’s a visionary, you deluded little clown! Once he learns you’re in here, he’ll blast this place into the heavens without a second thought!”

Thunder shook the building. There was a pattering against the roof.

“It’s raining!” Tom cried

“It’s artillery,” Brian said.

“No, listen—it’s raining, Brian! The Stink is over! It’s blessed rain!”

An argument had broken out beneath the shelter of the siege-works. Swing was snarling at his men.

Cool water began dripping through the ragged fret-work of bullet-holes in the roof.

“It’s rain,” Mallory said, and licked his hand. “Rain! We’ve won, lads.” Thunder rolled. “Even if they kill us here,” Mallory shouted, “it’s over for them. When London’s air is sweet again, they’ll have no place to hide.”

“It may be raining,” Brian said, “but those are ten-inch naval guns, off the river….”

A shell tore through the roof in a torrent of blazing shrapnel.

“They’ve got our range now!” Brian shouted. “For God’s sake, take cover!” He began to struggle desperately with the cotton-bales.

Mallory watched in astonishment as shell after shell punched through the roof, the holes as neatly spaced as the stabs of a shoemaker’s awl. Whirlwinds of blazing rubbish flew, like the impact of iron comets.

The glass vaulting burst into a thousand knife-edged shards. Brian was screaming at Mallory, his voice utterly drowned by the cacophony. After a stunned moment, Mallory bent to help his brother, heaving up another cotton-bale and crouching within the trench.

He sat there, the rifle across his knees. Blasts of light sheeted across the buckling roof. Iron beams began to twist under pressure, their rivets popping like gunshots. The noise was hellish, supernatural. The warehouse shook like a sheet of beaten tin.

Brian, Tom, and Fraser crouched like praying Bedouins, their hands clamped to their ears. Bits of flaming wood and fabric fell gently onto the bales around them, jumping a bit with each repeated concussion, smoldering into the cotton where they lay. The warehouse billowed with air and heat.

Mallory absently plucked two wads of cotton and stuffed them into his ears.

A section of roofing collapsed, quite slowly, like the wing of a dying swan. Rain in torrents fought the fires below.

Beauty entered Mallory’s soul. He stood, the rifle like a wand in his hands. The shelling had stopped, but the noise was incessant, for the building was on fire. Tongues of dirty flame leapt up in a hundred places, twisted fantastically by gusts of wind.

Mallory stepped to the edge of the cotton parapet. The shelling had knocked the covered walkway into fragments, like a muddy crawl-way of termites, crushed by a boot. Mallory stood, his head filled with the monotone roaring of absolute sublimity, and watched as his enemies fled screaming.

A man stopped amid the flames, and turned. It was Swing. He gazed up at Mallory where he stood. His face twisted with a desperate awe. He screamed something—screamed it louder still—but he was a little man, far away, and Mallory could not hear him. Mallory slowly shook his head.

Swing raised his weapon then. Mallory saw, with a glow of pleased surprise, the familiar outlines of a Cutts-Maudslay carbine.

Swing aimed the weapon, braced himself, and pulled the trigger. Pleasantly tenuous singing sounds surrounded Mallory, with a musical popping from the perforating roof behind him. Mallory, his hands moving with superb and unintentioned grace, raised his rifle, sighted, fired. Swing spun and fell sprawling. The Cutts-Maudslay, still in his grasp, continued its spring-driven jerking and clicking even after its drum of cartridges was empty.

Mallory watched, with tepid interest, as Fraser, leaping through the wreckage with a spidery agility, approached the fallen anarchist with his pistol drawn. He handcuffed Swing, then lifted him limply over one shoulder.

Mallory’s eyes smarted. Smoke from the flaming warehouse was gathering under the wreckage of its roof. He looked down, blinking, to see Tom lowering a limping Brian to the floor.

The two joined Fraser, who beckoned sharply. Mallory smiled, descended, followed. The three then fled through the whipping, thickening fires, with Mallory strolling after them.

Catastrophe had knocked Swing’s fortress open in a geyser of shattered brick dominos. Mallory, blissful, the nails of his broken shoe-heel grating, walked into a London reborn.

Into a tempest of cleansing rain.

On April 12, 1908, at the age of eighty-three, Edward Mallory died at his house in Cambridge. The exact circumstances of his death are obscured, steps having apparently been taken to preserve the proprieties incumbent on the decease of a former President of the Royal Society. The notes of Dr. George Sandys, Lord Mallory’s friend and personal physician, indicate that the great savant died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Sandys also noted, apparently for purposes of his own, that the deceased had seemingly taken to his deathbed while wearing a patent set of elasticated underwear, socks with braces, and fully laced leather dress-shoes.

The doctor, a thorough man, also noted an item discovered beneath the deceased’s flowing white beard. About the great man’s neck, on a fine steel chain, was strung an antique lady’s signet-ring which bore the crest of the Byron family and the motto CREDE BYRON. The doctor’s ciphered note is the only known evidence of this apparent bequest, possibly a token of appreciation. Very probably, Sandys confiscated the ring, though a thorough catalogue of Sandys’ possessions, made after his own death in 1940, makes no mention of it.

There is no mention of any such ring in the Mallory will, a very elaborate document of otherwise impeccable specificity.

Envision Edward Mallory in the scholarly office of his palatial Cambridge home. It is late. The great paleontologist, his field-days long behind him and his Presidency resigned, now devotes the winter of his life to matters of theory, and to the subtler outreaches of scientific administration.

Lord Mallory has long since modified the radical Catastrophist doctrines of his youth, gracefully abandoning the discredited notion that the Earth is no more than three hundred thousand years old—radioactive dating having proven otherwise. It is enough, for Mallory, that Catastrophism proved a fortunate road to higher geological truth, leading him to his greatest personal triumph: the discovery, in 1865, of continental drift.

More than the Brontosaurus, more than the ceratopsian eggs of the Gobi Desert, it is this astonishing leap of reckless insight that has assured his immortal fame.

Mallory, who sleeps little, seats himself at a curvilinear Japanese desk of artificial ivory. Past the open curtains, incandescent bulbs gleam beyond the polychrome, abstractly patterned windows of his nearest neighbor. The neighbor’s house, like Mallory’s own, is a meticulously orchestrated riot of organic forms, roofed with iridescent ceramic dragon-scales—England’s dominant style of modern architecture, though the mode itself has its turn-of-the-century origins in the thriving Republic of Catalonia.

Mallory has only recently dismissed a purportedly clandestine meeting of the Society of Light. As the final Hierarch of this dwindling confraternity, tonight he wears the formal robes of office. His woolen chasuble of royal indigo is fringed in scarlet. A floor-length indigo skirt of artificial silk, similarly fringed, is decorated with concentric bands of semi-precious stones. He has set aside a domed crown of beaded gold-plate, with a neck-guard of overlapping gilt scales; this rests now upon a small desk-printer.

He dons his spectacles, loads a pipe, fires it. His secretary, Cleveland, is a most punctilious and orderly man, and has left him two sets of documents, neatly squared atop the desk in folders of brass-clasped manila. One folder lies to his right, the other to his left, and it cannot be known which he will choose.

He chooses the folder to his left. It is an Engine-printed report from an elderly officer of the Meirokusha, a famous confraternity of Japanese scholars which serves, not incidentally, as the foremost Oriental chapter of the Society of Light. The precise text of the report cannot be found in England, but is preserved in Nagasaki along with an annotation indicating that it was wired to the Hierarch via standard channels on April 11. The text indicates that the Meirokusha, suffering a grave decline in membership and a growing lack of attendance, have voted to indefinitely postpone further meetings. It is accompanied by an itemized bill for refreshments, and rental fees for a small upstairs room in the Seiyoken, a restaurant in the Tsukiji quarter of Tokyo.

Lord Mallory, though this news is not unexpected, is filled with a sense of loss and bitterness. His temper, fierce at the best of times, has sharpened with old-age; his indignation swells to helpless rage.

An artery fails.

That chain of events does not occur.

He chooses the folder to his right. It is thicker than the one to his left, and this intrigues him. It contains a detailed field report from a Royal Society paleontological expedition to the Pacific coast of Western Canada. Pleased by an awakened nostalgia for his own expedition days, he studies the report closely.

The modern labor of science can scarcely be more different from that of his own day. The British scientists have flown to the mainland from the flourishing metropolis of Victoria, and have motored at their ease into the mountains from a luxurious base in the coastal village of Vancouver. Their leader, if he can be given this title, is a young Cambridge graduate named Morris, whom Mallory remembers as a queer, ringleted fellow, given to wearing velvet capes and elaborate Modernist hats.

The strata under examination are Cambrian, dark shale of a near-lithographic quality. And, it seems, they teem with a variety of intricate forms, the paper-thin and thoroughly crushed remnants of an ancient invertebrate fauna. Mallory, a vertebrate specialist, begins to lose interest; he has seen, he thinks, more trilobites than anyone ever should have to, and in truth he has always found it difficult to conjure up enthusiasm for anything less than two inches in length. Worse yet, the report’s prose strikes him as unscientific, marked by a most untoward air of radical enthusiasm.

He turns to the plates.

There is a thing in the first plate that possesses five eyes. It has a long clawed nozzle instead of a mouth.

There is a legless, ray-like thing, all lobes and jelly, with a flat, fanged mouth that does not bite but irises shut.

There is a thing whose legs are fourteen horny, pointed spikes—a thing which has no head, no eyes, no gut, but does have seven tiny pincered mouths, each at the tip of a flexible tentacle.

These things bear no relation to any known creature, from any known period whatever.

A rush of blood and wonder mounts within Mallory’s skull. A vortex of implications begins to sort itself within him, mounting step-by-step to a strange and numinous glow, an ecstatic rush toward utter comprehension, ever brighter, ever clearer, ever closer—

His head strikes the table as he slumps forward. He sprawls upon his back at the foot of the chair, limbs numb and airy, still soaring, wrapped within the light of marvel, the light of an awesome knowledge, pushing, pushing at the borders of the real—a knowledge that is dying to be born.

THE ALL-SEEING EYE

An afternoon in Horseferry Road, twelfth of November, 1855, image recorded by A. G. S. Hullcoop of the Department of Criminal Anthropometry.

The shutter of Hullcoop’s Talbot “Excelsior” has captured eleven men descending the broad steps from the entrance of the Central Statistics Bureau. Triangulation locates Hullcoop, with his powerful lens, concealed atop the roof of a publishers’ offices in Holywell Street.

Foremost among the eleven is Laurence Oliphant. His gaze, beneath the black brim of his top-hat, is mild and ironical.

The tall, dull-surfaced hats create a repeated vertical motif common to images of the period.

Like the others, Oliphant wears a dark frock-coat above narrow trousers of a lighter hue. His neck is wrapped in a high choker of dark silk. The effect is dignified and columnar, though something in Oliphant’s manner manages to suggest the sportsman’s lounging stroll.

The other men are barristers, Bureau functionaries, a senior representative of the Colgate Works. Behind them, above Horseferry Road, swoop the tarred copper cables of the Bureau’s telegraphs.

Processes of resolution reveal the pale blurs dotting these lines to be pigeons.

Though the afternoon is unseasonably bright, Oliphant, a frequent visitor to the Bureau, is opening an umbrella.

The top-hat of the Colgate’s representative displays an elongated comma of white pigeon-dung.

Oliphant sat alone in a small waiting-room, which communicated by a glazed door with a surgery. The buff-colored walls were hung with colored diagrams depicting the ravages of hideous diseases. A bookcase was crammed with dingy medical volumes. There were carved wooden pews that might have come from a wrecked church, and a coal-dyed woolen drugget in the middle of the floor.

He looked at a mahogany instrument-case and a huge roll of lint occupying places of their own on the bookcase.

Someone called his name.

He saw a face through the panes of the surgery door. Pallid, the bulging forehead plastered with drenched strands of dark hair.

“Collins,” he said. “ ‘Captain Swing.’ ” And other faces, legion, the faces of the vanished, names suppressed from memory.

“Mr. Oliphant?”

Dr. McNeile regarded him from the doorway. Vaguely embarrassed, Oliphant rose from his pew, automatically straightening his coat.

“Are you entirely well, Mr. Oliphant? Your expression was most extraordinary, just then.” McNeile was slender and neatly bearded, with dark brown hair, his grey eyes so pale as to suggest transparency.

“Yes, thank you, Dr. McNeile. And yourself?”

“Very well, thank you. Some remarkable symptoms are emerging, Mr. Oliphant, in the wake of recent events. I’ve one gentleman who was seated atop an omnibus, Regent Street, when that vehicle was struck broadside by a steam-gurney traveling at an estimated twenty miles per hour!”

“Really? How dreadful …”

To Oliphant’s horror, McNeile actually rubbed his long white hands together. “There was no evident physical trauma as a result of the collision. None. None whatever.” He fixed Oliphant with that bright, nearly colorless gaze. “Subsequently, we have observed insomnia, incipient melancholia, minor amnesiac episodes—numerous symptoms customarily associated with latent hysteria.” McNeile smiled, a quick rictus of triumph. “We have observed, Mr. Oliphant, a remarkably pure, that is to say, a clinical progression of railway-spine!”