Philip Jose Farmer (28 page)

Fix said, “Yes, sir,” and he hurried off. He went into the deep and gloomy cellar, which was not as deep or as gloomy as his thoughts. A few minutes later, he emerged with two large cans of oil. There were several step ladders against the cellar wall which Moran could use. In the front room, he put the cans down and went to a sideboard from which he decanted a half-tumbler of brandy. He poured this down, stopping only when he coughed. Tears running down his cheeks, he put the tumbler down. Then, not so pale and shaky, he walked toward the rear of the house. On reaching the main rear door, he looked out into the darkness. Moran was a darker shape among the shadows, crouched by the side of a huge stone urn. Fix opened the door and said, “Captain, come here quickly! I have a message for you.”

Nemo looked at his watch again. Soon, the gentlemen in the Reform Club and the great crowd outside would see the flames rising and would wonder whose house was burning.

Hearing footsteps coming up the staircase, he turned. Fix, a few seconds later, climbed up over the pile with a big can in each hand.

“Put one down there and take the other to Vandeleur’s pile,” Nemo said. “We’ll set his afire first.”

Fix set one of the containers on the floor and walked toward Nemo. Nemo turned away to watch Vandeleur, who was bringing a bundle of curtains to add to the large pile. Fix reached into his coat and brought out his revolver. He held it by the barrel.

Fogg, Aouda, and Passepartout were at a window in a front room on the fourth story. The gaslights below showed an almost deserted street. Four gentlemen were standing talking across the street near the corner light.

“They must be the men Nemo’s stationed to intercept us if we should escape,” Fogg said. “There’s no way of getting away from them. As soon as they see us coming down on this bedsheet rope, they’ll come running. We must drop fast and start shooting as soon as we reach the ground.”

Aouda, sitting in a chair, said, “I still think I should stay here. I can use only one hand, and I’m not strong enough to hang on with it.”

“Nonsense, my dear,” Fogg said. “I told you that we will go down together and that I will have one arm around you. Our gloves will keep us from burning our hands.”

“But...
”

Aouda stopped. Fix’s voice was coming from the end of the hall.

“Mr. Fogg! Believe me, this is no trap! I have knocked out Nemo and the others! I could not let them burn you alive. Please believe me, Mr. Fogg, and come quickly!”

“It might well be a trick to locate us,” Fogg said.

“Mr. Fogg! Nemo said I might be a traitor, and I’m sure he was going to see that I was killed. And God knows what he meant to do to my family. Please believe me. I have a pistol, but it is in my coat, and my hands are in the air. See for yourself. But quickly!”

“It could be true. It’s not entirely unforeseen,” Fogg said. He walked to the door, unlocked it, and opened it a crack. There was Fix, slowly walking down the hall, his hands held high.

Fogg opened the door a little more, stuck the end of his revolver out, and said, “Come on in, Mr. Fix.”

Fix entered. Fogg shut the door and said, “Where are your colleagues?”

“All unconscious, perhaps dead,” Fix said. “I called Moran in and hit him over the head with the butt of my gun. Then I went upstairs and hit Nemo when his back was turned. Osbaldistone was still senseless, so I only had to make Vandeleur stand with his face to the wall and then hit him, too.”

“And you did this for the reasons you stated?”

“Yes, but you’ll have to protect me and my family from now on. You will, won’t you?”

“Consider it done,” Mr. Fogg said.

With Fix ahead of them, for Fogg was not sure that it was not a trap, they went down to the landing. All three of the Capelleans were still unconscious.

“Are you going to kill them?” Fix said.

“Would you want me to do so, Mr. Fix?” Fogg said.

“No. I do not like them, and Nemo would have killed me without mercy,” Fix said. “But to slay them in cold blood...”

Fogg did not reply. He was searching Nemo’s clothing. Within a few seconds, he pulled a small flat leather case from a pocket and took out of it small oblong papers covered with writing and diagrams that could only be seen plainly under a magnifying glass. He said, “I was hoping he’d still be carrying these.”

“What are they?” Aouda said.

“The schematics for the distorter. But how did Nemo get them from Head’s body?”

“Head had them stored inside his glass eye,” Fix said. “Nemo removed it when he helped you throw Head’s body overboard.”

“I should have raised Head’s eyelids and looked at his eyes,” Fogg said. “But where did Head get the schematics?”

“It was an American Eridanean who found out how to manufacture distorters,” Fix said. “Head discovered that he had done so—how, I don’t know—and killed him, burned down his laboratory, and fled with the schematics and the distorter which the American had made. Your chief must have found out about this at once, which is why Head took passage on the 
Mary Celeste
 to avoid the Eridaneans looking for him on the liners.”

Fogg put the schematics in his pocket, looked at Passepartout’s watch, and said, “And those men outside?”

“They are either loungers or Eridaneans waiting to see if Nemo will surrender you to them.” He told Fogg about the telegram from the Eridanean chief.

Fogg looked at his watch again. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Where?” Aouda said.

“To the Reform Club. We have exactly ten minutes to get there if I am to win the bet.”

Verne says that Passepartout dragged Fogg outside by the collar, hailed a cab, and the two drove off at a reckless speed, running over two dogs and overturning five carriages. This is true, except for the dragging by the collar. But Aouda and Fix followed in another carriage at a somewhat slower pace. Aouda’s wound did not permit her to be jostled much, and, moreover, she stopped long enough to inform the gentlemen on the corner, who were indeed Eridaneans, that they were safe and that Fix was now one of them. She also told the gentlemen to pick up the Capelleans in Fogg’s house.

These hastened to do so, but, alas, they were too late to catch Vandeleur, Moran, and Nemo. These had recovered and fled, leaving Sir Hector behind. As the Eridaneans entered the front door, the trio went over the back wall of the garden.

Osbaldistone was carried out as if he were drunk and driven off in a cab. What happened to him thereafter, no one knows.

As everybody does know, Phileas appeared three seconds before his time was up. He collected twenty thousand pounds, though he had spent nineteen thousand during the journey, his last expenditure being a hundred pounds to the cabman who drove to the Reform. The remaining thousand pounds, he split between Fix and Passepartout. Within two days, Fogg and Aouda were married, and Verne ends his narrative on a happy note.

But what of the story behind Verne’s? The other log of Fogg ends on the day he took Aouda as his bride. No other literature on this subject has ever been turned up, so we must reconstruct 
the postlude. Fortunately, we have common sense and some narratives of a few other authors about some of the people Fogg met to help us build a reasonable sequel.

The Eridaneans and Capelleans, with Nemo out of the way, and through Fix’s offices, must have made a truce or perhaps even an alliance. Many on both sides felt, as Fix did, that there was no sense in continuing this secret and gory war which could end only in extermination for one side and near-extermination for the other. Besides, life as a mere Earthling was hard enough without adding to it the perils of Capelleanism and Eridaneanism.

Moran, we know from the writings of a certain Dr. John Watson, went back to India and stayed there for years. After retiring as a colonel, he rejoined his chief in London.

The chief, whom Watson called Professor James Moriarty, seems to have abstained from a criminal career for some years. Probably, the shock of being outwitted by Fogg and of losing the chieftainship of the Capelleans accelerated his illness. Nemo became a teacher for a while, but, after recovering much of his health, went back into business. He formed a vast criminal ring, though he succeeded in keeping his part in it unknown for a long time. Eventually, he experienced a bad fall—and falls—near the little Swiss village of Meiringen. It was symbolically and esthetically appropriate that a man who started his career in the water should end there.

Nemo’s brother, the colonel, had been so injured by the frenzied horse that he retired from the army. However, he did go back to his evil ways when older, though not as his brother’s partner. He appears briefly in a semifictional book by Robert Louis Stevenson, The 
New Arabian Nights.

Vandeleur plays a more important role in the same book.

Fogg retired to Fogg Shaw in rural Derbyshire, where he tinkered around in his laboratory and raised a number of children, all as handsome as he or as beautiful as their mother.

Fix continued to be a detective, though he now served only one master, or mistress in this case, Her Majesty.

Passepartout settled down as manager of Fogg’s estate and married a local girl.

And what of the Grand Plan?

From the situation of the world today, we may assume that it was abandoned.

What about the distorters?

Did the Eridaneans and Capelleans decide to throw the few remaining devices, along with the schematics, into the ocean? Or did some greedy person steal them? That we hear no more of the nine great clangings means nothing. It may be that someone, perhaps Fogg, invented a means for suppressing or canceling these noises. In which case, some of the many mysterious and seemingly impossible disappearances of things and people in this world may be explained.

Whatever happened to the distorters, the important thing is that Fogg and Aouda and Passepartout and Fix lived happily for many years. They may still be living for all anybody knows.

Fogg may even have thought that, after a hundred years, the public could be informed of the true story.

That Phileas Fogg’s initials and your editor’s are the same is, I assure you, only a coincidence.

ADDENDUM

The following article appeared in 
Leaves from The Copper Beeches
, published for The Sons of the Copper Beeches Scion Society of the Baker Street Irregulars by the Livingston Publishing Co., Narberth, Pa., 1959.

A SUBMERSIBLE SUBTERFUGE OR PROOF IMPOSITIVE

BY H. W. STARR

A familiar literary phenomenon is the novel which is actually autobiography, biography, or factual narration disguised as fiction. We see it in the work of Thomas Wolfe, Dickens, Watson, and a score of other writers; and perhaps we may find it also in two novels that we have all read as children: Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. The popular impression of the most interesting character of this saga, an individual using the alias Captain Nemo, is that of an Indian prince, a disillusioned and embittered idealist, sickened by civilization, who gathered a little band of kindred spirits, devoted to him and tenderly cared for by him, and vanished forever into the depths of the sea in a marvellous submarine which he had secretly assembled. Yet if we examine these tales we find certain inexplicable and absolutely irreconcilable inconsistencies appearing in them—for example the dates. According to Twenty Thousand Leagues, the Nautilus is recorded as first being observed by seafarers in 1866 and vanishing in the Maelstrom in 1868, at which time Professor Aronnax and his companions escaped from the vessel. Yet we are surprised at the beginning of The Mysterious Island, when Captain Nemo is a silvery-haired old ruin, the last survivor of a company of at least twenty-four sailors and two officers, living in solitude on Lincoln Island, that the date is given as 1865!

There are other inconsistencies. According to the The Mysterious Island, Nemo is an Indian Prince Dakkar, and presumably at least some of such a man’s followers would be Indians. This could hardly have escaped the observation of Professor Aronnax, who for months watched them fishing and working about the Nautilus. Yet never does it seem to occur to him that any are Orientals. Instead, he says that all are Europeans. No matter how dubious in the eyes of modern science identification of nationality from appearance may be, it is unlikely that a veteran biologist would mistake, after close and repeated observations, some two dozen Hindus for Europeans—especially Irishmen! Furthermore, in The Mysterious Island (p. 460) Captain Nemo defends the sinking of the hostile warship witnessed by Professor Aronnax on the grounds that he “was in a narrow and shallow bay—the frigate barred my way.” Yet the Professor’s account (Twenty Thousand, pp. 473–82) unquestionably proves that for over twenty-four hours Captain Nemo deliberately lured the frigate to follow him until it suited his whim to turn and sink her.