The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (33 page)

No one, however, seemed to be eating save he and old Parsons, whose fellow Academist Lord Kelvin owned a barn in Harrogate alongside his summer house, a barn that, since the debacle of the alien starship, hadn’t any roof. He also, according to Hasbro, owned two dead cows, which had suffered the misfortune of having strayed into the barn minutes before the ship caved in the roof.

And now St. Ives would pay the price. He was in a foul humor—he realized that. First the launching of the craft, then the escape of Willis Pule from the train. The man must have been desperate. It was entirely conceivable that he had leaped to his death in the ditch, an unsatisfying thought altogether. Villains, St. Ives considered, ought to be made to account for themselves. Their demise should be both spectacular and humiliating.

“And the molars of a horse can reduce the most surprising weeds to fortifying pulp in moments,” his host intoned, working at a mouthful of his own surprising foodstuffs. “Now, like a human being, a horse has only a single stomach, but his intestine is phenomenally elongated, adapted to the digestion of coarse forages. This is all a fascinating subject, this business of eating. I’ve spent a lifetime studying it. And I’ve found few things more interesting in the eating line than a workhorse—and of the right sort, mind you. Some sorts of hay are superior due to their effects on the bowel.” He waved his fork proudly, as if to illustrate this last statement, and speared up a row of peas.

St. Ives took advantage of the man’s pausing to yank out his pocketwatch, widening his eyes in alarm, as if he’d just now become conscious of the prodigious passage of time. But his intended attempt to hurry the end of the engagement disappeared into a lecture on the bacterial manifestations of intestinal debris. The man paused some few minutes later to drain a great tumbler of distilled water before him, the cleansing effects of which would “leach away poisons,” not at all unlike the exemplary workings of a well-constructed sewage system. He smacked his lips over the water. “Staff of life,” he said.

St. Ives nodded, performing his pocketwatch activity all over again, putting on the same face filled with surprise and haste. His companion, however, wasn’t so easily put off. He removed his spectacles, causing his eyes to undergo a remarkable and instantaneous shrinkage, and he wiped his face thoroughly with his napkin. “Close in here, what?”

St. Ives nodded, humoring the man. Such men, he told himself, must be humored. One had to nod continually in agreement until, when an opening presented itself, one could nod to one’s feet and nod one’s way down the stairs, leaving the zealot with the curious mingling of satisfaction in having been so thoroughly agreed with and wonder at being abandoned. But there was no such opportunity here.

“Dr. Birdlip, then,” said Parsons suddenly. “You were a friend of his.”

St. Ives steeled himself for the inevitable conversation, the same that had occurred weeks earlier, the afternoon of the night he’d been surprised by Kraken in the rain. The Royal Academy was vastly interested in Dr. Birdlip’s flight and its implications in terms of technologic advance and were prevailing upon St. Ives to help elucidate the nature of the doctor’s wonderful flight. Birdlip, of course, was not the real genius behind the perpetually propelled craft. They knew that. He was a sort of mystic—wasn’t he?—a man who fancied himself a philosopher. More than that, he was a seeker after mysteries. He’d published, to his credit, a strange paper entitled, “The Myth of the Foggy London Night,” followed by a paper speculating on the construction of spectacles through which one could see successive layers of passing time like translucent doors opening and shutting along a corridor. What was that one titled? “Time Considered as a Succession of Semi-closed Doors.” Yes, said Parsons, it was all terribly—how should he put it—“theoretical,” wasn’t it? Poetic, almost. Perhaps he’d missed his true calling. The titles alone betrayed the peculiar bent of his mind. Genius it might he, said Parsons, but genius of a speculative and, mightn’t we say, of a non-productive nature. Certainly not the sort of thing that would produce an engine such as the one that drives the dirigible. Parsons smiled up at St. Ives ingratiatingly, prodding a pea across his plate with the end of his fork, driving it into a little pool of dried sauce.

“Are you aware,” he asked, squinting at St. Ives, “of the religious cult that has sprung up around the sporadic appearances of this blimp? It’s rumored that there is some connection between Dr. Birdlip and this self-styled holy man who calls himself Shiloh. There’s nothing more dangerous, mind you, than a religious fanatic. They presume to define morality, and their definitions are made at the expense of everyone but themselves.”

“I can assure you,” said St. Ives, looking first at Parsons, then glancing out the window at activities transpiring three floors below, “that Dr. Birdlip is unacquainted with the mystic. He…”

But Parsons cut him off, his spectacles dropping of their own accord to the tip of his nose. “Rumor has it, my good fellow, that Dr. Birdlip’s craft carries aboard it a talisman of some sort, perhaps a device, that the cultists find sacred—a god, as they have it, that resides in a curious box. Scotland Yard has, of course, infiltrated their organization. They’re a dangerous lot, and they’ve got an eye on the dirigible. It’s generally unknown whether they wish to destroy it or make a temple of it, but I can assure you that the Academy intends to allow neither.”

On the street, wading out of Kensington Gardens through Lancaster Gate, came a tremendous milling throng of people, shouting something in unison—hosannas, St. Ives decided—pushing up toward Sussex Gardens, choking the street below the club. There could be no doubt about it—at the head of the throng strode the old, robed missionary, the nemesis of the Royal Academy.

Parsons recognized him at the same time, and struck his fist upon the tabletop, the sudden appearance of the evangelist having driven home his point. “What I mean to say,” he whispered, gesturing at the street, “is that this is no time for foolish misconceptions about friendships, or whatever you’d call it, to interfere with vital scientific study. You’re a scientist yourself, man. The projectile that you launched into Lord Kelvin’s barn was a remarkable example of heavier than air flight. Your purposes haven’t been fully understood, perhaps, by the Academy, but I assure you that if you could prevail upon this toy-maker on Jermyn Street to cooperate with us…that’s right,” he said, holding up his hand to silence St. Ives, “I told you we were certain that Birdlip himself could not have built the engine. If you could prevail upon this man Keeble to communicate with us, I think you’d find us inclined to consider this last imbroglio with the spirit of scientific inquiry. Reputations are at stake here—you can see that—and much more besides. Religious lunatics gibber in the streets; rumors of blood sacrifices performed in squalid Limehouse taverns filter up from the underworld. Tales of pseudo-scientific horror, of alchemy and vivisection, are daily on the increase. And sailing into it all, like some long awaited sign, some apocalyptic generator, comes the blimp of Dr. Birdlip.

“Two men in a balloon tracked it over the Sandwich Islands weeks ago. There can be no doubt that it is steadily losing altitude at a rate that will soon put an end to its journey. Our mathematicians have it touching down within Greater London. But what will it do? Will it smash through the suburbs, causing great ruin, exploding in an inferno of igniting gases, ending all efforts to establish an understanding of its motivation? Will it drop into the Atlantic to be reduced by storms to sinking debris?”

Parsons grimaced through his spectacles, giving St. Ives ample opportunity to imagine the wrack and ruin the fated return of the blimp would cause if he—that is to say, if Keeble—would not turn out and share with them his knowledge of the workings of Birdlip’s craft. The glory of the sciences, said Parsons, was its cold rationality, the absence of the illogical fervor that drove the crowd in the street at this very instant to inexplicable passions. Why did St. Ives hesitate? The toymaker would listen to him. What was the nature of his hesitation if not the same sort of illogical manifestations that fueled the crowds in the street? It was reason, scientific philosophy, practical reality, that must prevail at times such as these. Surely St. Ives…

But St. Ives couldn’t quite see it that way. The entire subject was tedious. Keeble would do as he pleased. Birdlip’s blimp would do as it pleased. St. Ives would do the same—that is to say, not the same thing as Birdlip and Keeble—what he would do was find Willis Pule and beat the dust out of him. After that, he’d hunt up the spacecraft of the homunculus. He’d find this last or find evidence that put an end to the legends of its existence. But, he said to Parsons, he would talk to Keeble, mention it all to him, feel him out. If the toymaker balked, there would be an end to it.

Parsons was delighted. Such an attitude was reason personified. And why on earth
had
St. Ives launched the projectile through the roof of Lord Kelvin’s barn? The scientific community had been once again mystified.

St. Ives shrugged. It had been set off accidentally, without adjustment, without being properly motivated. Parsons nodded, understanding now, able to take the long view. He held out a limp hand, which St. Ives understood to be a signal that the lunch was at an end. There was no further need of talk, not until Keeble had been broached on the subject of his engine.

They want the engine and nothing more, thought St. Ives as he left the room. If Keeble handed it to them tomorrow they’d abandon any interest in Birdlip, about whom they were absolutely correct. Birdlip was engaged in a mission which couldn’t be charted and graphed. His pursuit of truth, such as it was, had taken him on a course that paralleled, figuratively speaking, the wind-blown, haphazard course of his blimp. But by God, it
had
led him home again, hadn’t it? Its means were unfathomable, inexplicable, but the ends weren’t entirely so, not if you looked at it through the right pair of spectacles—which Parsons, of course, didn’t own.

St. Ives trotted down the last half-dozen carpeted steps and out the entry hall into the street, where wind had blown the fog away and where a milling crowd strained to hear something. Scores of them sat in trees; some sat astride the shoulders of others; carriages were parked along the street, and atop the carriages stood what seemed to St. Ives to be a moderate portion of the citizenry of London, all of them listening, their ears cocked, to the wind that blew along the silent afternoon street.

There was a brief chattering, like a woodpecker, perhaps, striking a particularly brittle tree. A roar arose from the crowd. Silence followed, then another clacking and a fresh roar. St. Ives pushed his way toward the front, toward where he could see the head of the evangelist above the horizon of the masses. The old man stood, clearly, atop a crate.

He held something before him with both hands. St. Ives couldn’t quite make out what it was—a transparent box of some sort. The sea of onlookers parted in front of him. He was struck with the pervasive religious atmosphere that lay heavily over the street. How many people were there? Enough to constitute a multitude, certainly. And here was the Red Sea, parting before him, a miraculous narrow avenue opening up for some few feet. St. Ives edged down it. A man trod on his toe. Another jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow. The wall of people behind him pressed forward suddenly, shoving him nose first into the greasy hair of a woman in what appeared to be a nightshirt. His apology went unheard. “Beg your pardon,” he said, twisting through a gap an inch or so wide. Not far ahead of him stood the evangelist, peering at the sky, muttering indecipherably, perhaps speaking in tongues.

A moment later, the victim of hard looks and a pair of rapid-fire curses, St. Ives stood at the front of the crowd—no one before him but a man so short as to be negligible. The old missionary exhorted a glass cube in which sat, St. Ives was horrified to see, a partially mummified head, dusty and brown from the grave.

The thing’s teeth were huge—Parsons would have admired them. What the evangelist intended to do with the head wasn’t at all clear. St. Ives looked about him at the expectant faces, which seemed to betray that they, too, weren’t sure of the nature of the spectacle they were about to witness.

Catcalls erupted from a gang of toughs slouching in the limbs of a great, drooping oak. “Make ’er sing!” came the shout. “Make ’er eat somethin,” came another. “A bug!” shouted someone else, close on. “Ave ’er eat bugs!” After that came a roar of laughter from the tree, followed by the screaming fall of one of the toughs, who had come unseated. More laughter erupted from the tree as well as from the crowd, which seemed to be fast losing its patience with the holy man and his posturing. A handful of people passed out tracts, some of the supplicants horribly mutilated and wasted, as if from loathsome disease. Their very presence seemed to lend an air of authenticity to Shiloh’s performance. It was hard to argue with people who were so obviously what they claimed to be.

Just as the laughter fell away, the woodpecker chattering resumed, very rapid, from the direction of the old man. St. Ives started. The head in the glass cube had suddenly become animated. Its jaw clacked as if they were driven by an engine. What was this but a clever bit of parlor magic? The skull hopped and bumped with the force of its clacking, stringy hair flopping in time.

“Speak, Mother!” shouted the old man. “What is it that you hear! That you see! Lift the veil that obscures the future, the scales of filth and degradation that stifle and blind us! Speak, we implore thee!” And with this last falsetto petition a hoarse voice squeaked out, as if it were carried on the breeze that whirled leaves up Bayswater Road, as if it were part of that breeze, of the natural turnings of the universe. The crowd fell instantly silent, leaning forward as one, straining to hear the words of the oracle. Silence followed. Then, shattering the silence, the cry: “Get thee to a nunnery! Go!” rang out amid screams of wild laughter, the product of a particularly educated lad in the oak tree.