Part I
In The Days Of The Comet

The Peruvian Andes, One Year later

Langdon St. Ives, scientist and explorer, clutched a heavy alpaca blanket about his shoulders and stared out over countless miles of rocky plateaus and jagged volcanic peaks. The tight weave of ivory-colored wool clipped off a dry, chill wind that blew across the fifty miles of Antarctic-spawned Peruvian Current, up from the Gulf of Guayaquil and across the Pacific slope of the Peruvian Andes. A wide and sluggish river, gray-green beneath the lowering sky, crept through broad grasslands behind and below him. Moored like an alien vessel amid the bunch grasses and tola bush was a tiny dirigible, silver in the afternoon sun and flying the Union Jack from a jury-rigged mast.

At St. Ives’s feet the scree-strewn rim of a volcanic cone, Mount Cotopaxi, fell two thousand feet toward steamy open fissures, the crater glowing like the bowl of an enormous pipe. St. Ives waved ponderously to his companion Hasbro, who crouched some hundred yards down the slope on the interior of the cone, working the compression mechanism of a Rawls-Hibbing Mechanical Bladder. Coils of India-rubber hose snaked away from the pulsating device, disappearing into cracks in the igneous skin of the mountainside.

A cloud of fierce sulphur-laced steam whirled suddenly up and out of the crater in a wild sighing rush, and the red glow of the twisted fissures dwindled and winked, here and there dying away into cold and misty darkness. St. Ives nodded and consulted a pocket watch. His left shoulder, recently grazed by a bullet, throbbed tiredly. It was late afternoon. The shadows cast by distant peaks obscured the hillsides around him. On the heels of the shadows would come nightfall.

The man below ceased his furious manipulations of the contrivance and signaled to St. Ives, whereupon the scientist turned and repeated the signal—a broad windmill gesture, visible to the several thousand Indians massed on the plain below. “Sharp’s the word, Jacky,” muttered St. Ives under his breath. And straightaway, thin and sailing on the knife-edged wind, came a half-dozen faint syllables, first in English, then repeated in Quechua, then giving way to the resonant cadence of almost five thousand people marching in step. He could feel the rhythmic reverberations beneath his feet. He turned, bent over, and, mouthing a quick silent prayer, depressed the plunger of a tubular detonator.

He threw himself flat and pressed an ear to the cold ground. The rumble of marching feet rolled through the hillsides like the rushing cataract of a subterranean river. Then, abruptly, a deep and vast explosion, muffled by the crust of the earth itself, heaved at the ground in a tumultuous wave, and it appeared to St. Ives from his aerie atop the volcano as if the grassland below were a giant carpet and that the gods were shaking the dust from it. The marching horde pitched higgledy-piggledy into one another, strewn over the ground like dominoes. The stars in the eastern sky seemed to dance briefly, as if the earth had been jiggled from her course. Then, slowly, the ground ceased to shake.

St. Ives smiled for the first time in nearly a week, although it was the bitter smile of a man who had won a war, perhaps, but had lost far too many battles. It was over for the moment, though, and he could rest. He very nearly thought of Alice, who had been gone these twelve months now, but he screamed any such thoughts out of his mind before he became lost among them and couldn’t find his way back. He couldn’t let that happen to him again, ever—not if he valued his sanity.

Hasbro labored up the hillside toward him carrying the Rawls-Hibbing apparatus, and together they watched the sky deepen from blue to purple, cut by the pale radiance of the Milky Way. On the horizon glowed a misty semicircle of light, like a lantern hooded with muslin—the first faint glimmer of an ascending comet.

Dover, Long Weeks Earlier

The tumbled rocks of Castle Jetty loomed black and wet in the fog. Below, where the gray tide of the North Sea fell inch by inch away, green tufts of waterweed danced and then collapsed across barnacled stone, where brown penny-crabs scuttled through dark crevices as if their sidewise scramble would render them invisible to the men who stood above. Langdon St. Ives, wrapped in a greatcoat and shod in hip boots, cocked a spyglass to his eye and squinted north toward the Eastern Docks.

Heavy mist swirled and flew in the wind off the ocean, nearly obscuring the sea and sky like a gray muslin curtain. Just visible through the murk some hundred-fifty yards distant, the steamer H.M.S. Ramsgate heaved on the ground swell, its handful of paying passengers having hours since wended their way shoreward toward one of the inns along Castle Hill Road—all the passengers, that is, but one. St. Ives felt as if he’d stood atop the rocks for a lifetime, watching nothing at all but an empty ship.

He lowered the glass and gazed into the sea. It took an act of will to believe that beyond the Strait lay Belgium and that behind him, a bowshot distant, lay the city of Dover. He was overcome suddenly with the uncanny certainty that the jetty was moving, that he stood on the bow of a sailing vessel plying the waters of a phantom sea. The rushing tide below him bent and swirled around the edges of thrusting rocks, and for a perilous second he felt himself falling forward.

A firm hand grasped his shoulder. He caught himself, straightened, and wiped beaded moisture from his forehead with the sleeve of his coat. “Thank you.” He shook his head to clear it. “I’m tired out.”

“Certainly, sir. Steady on, sir.”

“I’ve reached the limits of my patience, Hasbro,” said St. Ives to the man beside him. “I’m convinced we’re watching an empty ship. Our man has given us the slip, and I’d sooner have a look at the inside of a glass of ale than another look at that damned steamer.”

“Patience is its own reward, sir,” replied St. Ives’s manservant.

St. Ives gave him a look. “My patience must be thinner than yours.” He pulled a pouch from the pocket of his greatcoat, extracting a bent bulldog pipe and a quantity of tobacco. “Do you suppose Kraken has given up?” He pressed curly black tobacco into the pipe bowl with his thumb and struck a match, the flame hissing and sputtering in the misty evening air.

“Not Kraken, sir, if I’m any judge. If our man went ashore along the docks, then Kraken followed him. A disguise wouldn’t answer, not with that hump. And it’s an even bet that Narbondo wouldn’t be away to London, not this late in the evening. For my money he’s in a public house and Kraken’s in the street outside. If he made away north, then Jack’s got him, and the outcome is the same. The best…”

“Hark!”

Silence fell, interrupted only by the sighing of wavelets splashing against the stones of the jetty and by the hushed clatter of distant activity along the docks. The two men stood barely breathing, smoke from St. Ives’s pipe rising invisibly into the fog. “There!” whispered St. Ives, holding up his left hand.

Softly, too rhythmically to be mistaken for the natural cadence of the ocean, came the muted dipping of oars and the creak of shafts in oarlocks. St. Ives stepped gingerly across to an adjacent rock and clambered down into a little crab-infested grotto. He could just discern, through a sort of triangular window, the thin gray line where the sky met the sea. And there, pulling into view, was a long rowboat in which sat two men, one plying the oars and the other crouched on a thwart and wrapped in a dark blanket. A frazzle of black hair drooped in moist curls around his shoulders.

“It’s him,” whispered Hasbro into St. Ives’s ear.

“That it is. And up to no good at all. He’s bound for Hargreaves’s, or I’m a fool. We were right about this one. That eruption in Narvik was no eruption at all. It was a detonation. And now the task is unspeakably complicated. I’m half inclined to let the monster have a go at it, Hasbro. I’m altogether weary of this world. Why not let him blow it to smithereens?”

St. Ives stood up tiredly, the rowboat having disappeared into the fog. He found that he was shocked by what he had said—not only because Narbondo was very nearly capable of doing just that, but also because St. Ives had meant it. He didn’t care. He put one foot in front of the other these days out of what?—duty? revenge?

“There’s the matter of the ale glass,” said Hasbro wisely, grasping St. Ives by the elbow. “That and a kidney pie, unless I’m mistaken, would answer most questions on the subject of futility. We’ll fetch in Bill Kraken and Jack on the way. We’ve time enough to stroll round to Hargreaves’s after supper.”

St. Ives squinted at Hasbro. “Of course we do,” he said. “I might send you lads out tonight alone, though. I need about ten hours’ sleep to bring me around. These damned dreams…In the morning I’ll wrestle with these demons again.”

“There’s the ticket, sir,” said the stalwart Hasbro, and through the gathering gloom the two men picked their way from rock to rock toward the warm lights of Dover.

***

“I can’t imagine I’ve ever been this hungry before,” said Jack Owlesby, spearing up a pair of rashers from a passing platter. His features were set in a hearty smile, as if he were making a strong effort to efface having revealed himself too thoroughly the night before. “Any more eggs?”

“Heaps,” said Bill Kraken through a mouthful of cold toast, and he reached for another platter at his elbow. “Full of the right sorts of humors, sir, is eggs. It’s the unctuous secretions of the yolk that fetches the home stake, if you follow me. Loaded up with all manners of fluids.”

Owlesby paused, a forkful of egg halfway to his mouth. He gave Kraken a look that seemed to suggest he was unhappy with talk of fluids and secretions.

“Sorry, lad. There’s no stopping me when I’m swept off by the scientific. I’ve forgot that you ain’t partial to the talk of fluids over breakfast. Not that it matters a bit about fluids or any of the rest of it, what with that comet sailing in to smash us to flinders…”

St. Ives coughed, seeming to choke, his fit drowning the last few words of Kraken’s observation. “Lower your voice, man!”

“Sorry, Professor. I don’t think sometimes. You know me. This coffee tastes like rat poison, don’t it? And not high-toned rat poison either, but something mixed up by your man with the hump.”

“I haven’t tasted it,” said St. Ives, raising his cup. He peered into the depths of the dark stuff and was reminded instantly of the murky water in the night-shrouded tide pool he’d slipped into on his way back from the tip of the jetty last night. He didn’t need to taste the coffee; the thin mineral-spirits smell of it was enough. “Any of the tablets?” he asked Hasbro.

“I brought several of each, sir. It doesn’t pay to go abroad without them. One would think that the art of brewing coffee would have traveled the few miles from the Normandy coast to the British Isles, sir, but we all know it hasn’t.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a little vial of jellybean-like pills. “Mocha Java, sir?”

“If you would,” said St. Ives. “‘All ye men drink java,’ as the saying goes.”

Hasbro dropped one into the upheld cup, and in an instant the room was filled with the astonishing heavy aroma of real coffee, the chemical smell of the pallid facsimile in the rest of their cups retreating before it. St. Ives seemed to reel with the smell of it, as if for the moment he was revitalized.

“By God!” whispered Kraken. “What else have you got there?”

“A tolerable Wiener Melange, sir, and a Brazilian brew that I can vouch for. There’s an espresso too, but it’s untried as yet.”

“Then I’m your man to test it!” cried the enthusiastic Kraken, and he held out his hand for the little pill. “There’s money in these,” he said, plopping it into his full cup and watching the result as if mystified. “Millions of pounds.”

“Art for art’s sake,” said St. Ives, dipping the end of a white kerchief into his cup and studying the stained corner of it in the sunlight shining through the casement. He nodded, satisfied, then tasted the coffee, nodding again. Over the previous year, since the episode in the Seven Dials, he had worked on nothing but these tiny white pills, all of his scientific instincts and skills given over to the business of coffee. It was a frivolous expenditure of energy and intellect, but until last week he could see nothing in the wide world that was any more compelling.

He bent over his plate and addressed Bill Kraken, although his words, clearly, were intended for the assembled company. “We mustn’t, Bill, give in to fears about this…this…heavenly visitation, to lapse into metaphysical language. I woke up fresh this morning. A new man. And the solution, I discovered, was in front of my face. I had been given it by the very villain we pursue. Our only real enemy now is time, gentlemen, time and the excesses of our own fears.”

St. Ives paused to have another go at the coffee, then stared into his cup for a moment before resuming his speech. “The single greatest catastrophe now would be for the news to leak to the general public. The man in the street would dissolve into chaos if he knew what confronted him. He couldn’t face the idea of the earth smashed to atoms. It would be too much for him. We can’t afford to underestimate his susceptibility to panic, his capacity for running amok and tearing his hair whenever it would pay him in dividends not to.”

St. Ives stroked his chin, staring at the debris on his plate. He bent forward, and in a low voice he said, “I’m certain that science will save us this time, gentlemen, if it doesn’t kill us first. The thing will be close, though, and if the public gets wind of the threat from this comet, great damage will come of it.” He smiled into the befuddled faces of his three companions. Kraken wiped a dribble of egg from the edge of his mouth. Jack pursed his lips.

“I’ll need to know about Hargreaves,” continued St. Ives, “and you’ll want to know what I’m blathering about. But this isn’t the place. Let’s adjourn to the street, shall we?” And with that the men arose, Kraken tossing off the last of his coffee. Then, seeing that Jack was leaving half a cup, he drank Jack’s off too and mumbled something about waste and starvation as he followed the rest of them toward the hotel door.

***

Dr. Ignacio Narbondo grinned over his tea. He watched the back of Hargreaves’s head as it nodded above a great sheet of paper covered with lines, numbers, and notations. Why oxygen allowed itself to flow in and out of Hargreaves’s lungs Narbondo couldn’t at all say; the man seemed to be animated by a living hatred, an indiscriminate loathing for the most innocent things. He gladly built bombs for idiotic anarchist deviltry, not out of any particular regard for causes, but simply to create mayhem, to blow things to bits. If he could have built a device sufficiently large to obliterate the Dover cliffs and the sun rising beyond them, there would have been no satisfying him until it was done. He loathed tea. He loathed eggs. He loathed brandy. He loathed the daylight, and he loathed the nighttime. He loathed the very art of constructing infernal devices.

Narbondo looked round him at the barren room, the lumpy pallet on the ground where Hargreaves allowed himself a few hours’ miserable sleep, as often as not to lurch awake at night, a shriek half uttered in his throat, as if he had peered into a mirror and seen the face of a beetle staring back. Narbondo whistled merrily all of a sudden, watching Hargreaves stiffen, loathing the melody that had broken in upon the discordant mumblings of his brain.

Hargreaves turned, his bearded face set in a rictus of twisted rage, his dark eyes blank as eclipsed moons. He breathed heavily. Narbondo waited with raised eyebrows, as if surprised at the man’s reaction. “Damn a man that whistles,” said Hargreaves slowly, running the back of his hand across his mouth. He looked at his hand, expecting to find heaven knew what, and turned slowly back to his bench top. Narbondo grinned and poured himself another cup of tea. All in all it was a glorious day. Hargreaves had agreed to help him destroy the earth without so much as a second thought. He had agreed with uncharacteristic relish, as if it was the first really useful task he had undertaken in years. Why he didn’t just slit his own throat and be done with life for good and all was one of the great mysteries.

He wouldn’t have been half so agreeable if he knew that Narbondo had no intention of destroying anything, that his motivation was greed—greed and revenge. His threat to cast the earth forcibly into the path of the approaching comet wouldn’t be taken lightly. There were those in the Royal Academy who knew he could do it, who supposed, no doubt, that he might quite likely do it. They were as shortsighted as Hargreaves and every bit as useful. Narbondo had worked devilishly hard over the years at making himself feared, loathed, and, ultimately, respected.

The surprising internal eruption of Mount Hjarstaad would throw the fear into them. They’d be quaking over their breakfasts at that very moment, the lot of them wondering and gaping. Beards would be wagging. Dark suspicions would be mouthed. Where was Narbondo? Had he been seen in London? Not for months. He had threatened this very thing, hadn’t he?—an eruption above the Arctic Circle, just to demonstrate the seriousness of his intent, the degree to which he held the fate of the world in his hands.

Very soon—within days—the comet would pass close enough to the earth to provide a spectacular display for the masses—foolish creatures. The iron core of the thing might easily be pulled so solidly by the earth’s magnetic field that the comet would hurtle groundward, slamming the poor old earth into atoms and all the gaping multitudes with it. What if, Narbondo had suggested, what if a man were to give the earth a push, to propel it even closer to the approaching star and so turn a long shot into a dead cert, as a blade of the turf might put it? And with that, the art of extortion had been elevated to a new plane.

Well, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo was that man. Could he do it? Narbondo grinned. His advertisement of two weeks past had drawn a sneer from the Royal Academy, but Mount Hjarstaad would wipe the sneers from their faces. They would wax grave. Their grins would set like plaster of Paris. What had the poet said about that sort of thing? “Gravity was a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.” That was it. Gravity would answer for a day or two, but when it faded into futility they would pay, and pay well. Narbondo set in to whistle again, this time out of the innocence of good cheer, but the effect on Hargreaves was so immediately consumptive and maddening that Narbondo gave it off abruptly. There was no use baiting the man into ruination before the job was done.

He thought suddenly of Langdon St. Ives. St. Ives was nearly unavoidable. For the fiftieth time Narbondo regretted killing the woman on that rainy London morning one year past. He hadn’t meant to. He had meant to bargain with her life. It was desperation had made him sloppy and wild. It seemed to him that he could count his mistakes on the fingers of one hand. When he made them, though, they weren’t subtle mistakes. The best he could hope for was that St. Ives had sensed the desperation in him, that St. Ives lived day-to-day with the knowledge that if he had only eased up, if he hadn’t pushed Narbondo so closely, hadn’t forced his hand, the woman might be alive today, and the two of them, St. Ives and her, living blissfully together, pottering in the turnip garden. Narbondo watched the back of Hargreaves’s head. If it was a just world, then St. Ives would blame himself. He was precisely the man for such a job as that—a martyr of the suffering type.

The very thought of St. Ives made him scowl, though. Narbondo had been careful, but somehow the Dover air seemed to whisper “St. Ives” to him at every turning. He pushed his suspicions out of his mind, reached for his coat, and stepped silently from the room, carrying his teacup with him. On the morning street outside he smiled grimly at the orange sun that burned through the evaporating fog, then he threw the dregs of his tea, cup and all, over a vine-draped stone wall and strode away east up Archcliffe Road, composing in his mind a letter to the Royal Academy.

***

“Damn me!” mumbled Bill Kraken through the fingers mashed against his mouth. He wiped away furiously at the tea leaves and tea that ran down his neck and collar. The cup that had hit him on the ear had fallen and broken on the stones of the garden. He peered up over the wall at Narbondo’s diminishing figure and added this last unintended insult to the list of villainies he had suffered over the years at Narbondo’s hands.

He would have his turn yet. Why St. Ives hadn’t given him leave merely to beat the stuffing out of this devil Hargreaves Kraken couldn’t at all fathom. The man was a monster; there was no gainsaying it. They could easily set off one of his own devices—hoist him on his own filthy petard, so to speak. His remains would be found amid the wreckage of infernal machines, built with his own hands. The world would have owed Bill Kraken a debt.

But Narbondo, St. Ives had insisted, would have found another willing accomplice. Hargreaves was only a pawn, and pawns could be dealt with easily enough when the time came. St. Ives couldn’t afford to tip his hand, nor would he settle for anything less than fair play and lawful justice. That was the crux of it. St. Ives had developed a passion for keeping the blinders on his motivations. He would be driven by law and reason and not fuddle things up with the odd emotion. Sometimes the man was scarcely human.

Kraken crouched out from behind the wall and slipped away in Narbondo’s wake, keeping to the other side of the road when the hunchback entered a stationer’s, then circling round to the back when Narbondo went in at the post office door. Kraken stepped through a dark, arched rear entry, a ready lie on his lips in case he was confronted. He found himself in a small deserted room, where he slid behind a convenient heap of crates, peeping through slats at an enormously fat, stooped man who lumbered in and tossed Narbondo’s letter into a wooden bin before lumbering back out. Kraken snatched up the letter, tucked it into his coat, and in a moment was back in the sunlight, prying at the sealing wax with his index finger. Ten minutes later he was at the front door of the post office, grinning into the wide face of the postman and mailing Narbondo’s missive for the second time that morning.

***

“Surely it’s a bluff,” said Jack Owlesby, scowling at Langdon St. Ives. The four of them sat on lawn chairs in the Gardens, listening with half an ear to the lackluster tootings of a tired orchestra. “What would it profit him to alert the Times? There’d be mayhem. If it’s extortion he’s up to, this won’t further his aim by an inch.”

“The threat of it might,” replied St. Ives. “If his promise to pitch the earth into the path of the comet weren’t taken seriously, the mere suggestion that the public be apprised of the magnetic affinity of the comet and the earth might be. Extortion on top of extortion. The one is pale alongside the other one. I grant you that. But there could be a panic if an ably stated message were to reach the right sort of journalist—or the wrong sort, rather.” St. Ives paused and shook his head, as if such panic wasn’t to be contemplated. “What was the name of that scoundrel who leaked the news of the threatened epidemic four years ago?”

“Beezer, sir,” said Hasbro. “He’s still in the employ of the Times, and, we must suppose, no less likely to be in communication with the doctor today than he was then. He would be your man, sir, if you wanted to wave the bloody shirt.”

“I rather believe,” said St. Ives, grimacing at the raucous climax of an unidentifiable bit of orchestration, “that we should pay this man Beezer a visit. We can’t do a thing sitting around Dover. Narbondo has agreed to wait four days for a reply from the Academy. There’s no reason to believe that he won’t keep his word—he’s got nothing to gain by haste. The comet, after all, is ten days off. We’ve got to suppose that he means just what he claims. Evil begets idiocy, gentlemen, and there is no earthly way to tell how far down the path into degeneration our doctor has trod. The next train to London, Hasbro?”

“Two-forty-five, sir.”

“We’ll be aboard her.”

London and Harrogate

The Bayswater Club, owned by the Royal Academy of Sciences, sat across from Kensington Gardens, commanding a view of trimmed lawns and roses and cleverly pruned trees. St. Ives peered out the window on the second floor of the club, satisfied with what he saw. The sun loomed like an immense orange just below the zenith, and the radiant heat glancing through the geminate windows of the club felt almost alive. The April weather was so altogether pleasant that it came near to making up for the fearful lunch that would at any moment arrive to stare at St. Ives from a china plate. He had attempted a bit of cheerful banter with the stony-faced waiter, ordering dirt cutlets and beer as a joke, but the man hadn’t seen the humor in it. What he had seen had been evident on his face.

St. Ives sighed and wished heartily that he was taking the sun along with the multitudes in the park, but the thought that a week hence there mightn’t be any park at all—or any multitudes, either—sobered him, and he drained the bottom half of a glass of claret. He regarded the man seated across from him. Parsons, the ancient secretary of the Royal Academy, spooned up broth with an enthusiasm that left St. Ives tired. Floating on the surface of the broth were what appeared to be twisted little bugs, but must have been some sort of Oriental mushroom, sprinkled on by a chef with a sense of humor. Parsons chased them with his spoon.

“So you’ve nothing at all to fear,” said Parsons, dabbing at his chin with a napkin. He grimaced at St. Ives in a satisfied way, like a proud doggy who had fetched in the slippers without tearing holes in them. “The greatest minds in the scientific world are at work on the problem. The comet will sail past us with no commotion whatsoever. It’s a matter of electromagnetic forces, really. The comet might easily be drawn to the earth, as you say, with disastrous consequences. Unless, let’s imagine, if we can push ourselves so far, the earth’s magnetic field were to be forcibly suspended.”

“Suspended?”

“Shut off. Current interruptus.” Parsons winked.

“Shut off? Lunacy,” St. Ives said. “Sheer lunacy.”

“It’s not unknown to have happened. Common knowledge has it that the magnetic poles have reversed themselves any number of times, and that during the interim between the establishing of new poles, the earth was blessedly free of any electromagnetic field whatsoever. I’m surprised that a physicist such as yourself has to be informed of such a thing.” Parsons peered at St. Ives over the top of his pince-nez, then fished up out of his broth a tendril of vegetable. St. Ives gaped at it. “Kelp,” said the secretary, slathering the dripping weed into his mouth.

St. Ives nodded, a shiver running up along his spine. The pink chicken breast that lay beneath wilted lettuce on his plate began, suddenly, to fill him with a curious sort of dread. His lunches with Parsons at the Bayswater Club invariably went so. The secretary was always one up on him, simply because of the food. “So what, exactly, do you intend? To hope such an event into existence?”

“Not at all,” said Parsons smugly. “We’re building a device.”

“A device?”

“To reverse the polarity of the earth, thereby negating any natural affinity the earth might have for the comet and vice versa.”

“Impossible,” said St. Ives, a kernel of doubt and fear beginning to sprout within him.

“Hardly.” Parsons waved his fork with an air of gaiety, then scratched the end of his nose with it. “No less a personage than Lord Kelvin himself is at work on it, although the theoretical basis of the thing was entirely a product of James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell’s sixteen equations in tensor calculus demonstrated a good bit beyond the idea that gravity is merely a form of electromagnetism. But his conclusions, taken altogether, had such terrible and far-reaching side implications hat they were never published. Lord Kelvin, of course, has access to them. And I think that we have little to fear that in such benevolent hands, Maxwell’s discoveries will lead to nothing but scientific advancement. To more, actually—to the temporary reversal of the poles, as I said, and the switching off, as it were, of any currents that would attract our comet. Trust us, sir. This threat, as you call it, is a threat no more. You’re entirely free to apply your manifold talents to more pressing matters.”

St. Ives sat silently for a moment, wondering if any objections would penetrate Parsons’s head past the crunching of vegetation. Quite likely not, but St. Ives hadn’t any choice but try. Two days earlier, when he had assured his friends in Dover that they would easily thwart Ignacio Narbondo, he hadn’t bargained on this. Was it possible that the clever contrivances of Lord Kelvin and the Royal Academy would constitute a graver threat than that posed by the doctor? It wasn’t to be thought of. Yet here was Parsons, full of talk about reversing the polarity of the earth. St. Ives was duty-bound to speak. He seemed to find himself continually at odds with his peers.

“This…device,” St. Ives said. “This is something that’s been cobbled together in the past few weeks, is it?”

Parsons looked stupefied. “It’s not something that’s been cobbled together at all. But since you ask, no. I think I can safely tell you that it is the culmination of Lord Kelvin’s lifelong work. All the rest of his forays into electricity are elementary, pranks, gewgaws. It’s this engine, sir, on which his genius has been expended.”

“So he’s had the lifelong ambition of reversing the polarity of the earth? To what end? Or are you telling me that he’s anticipated the comet for the past forty years?”

“I’m not telling you either of those, am I? If I chose to tell you the truth about the matter, which I clearly don’t choose to do, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. It would confound you. Suffice it to say that the man is willing to sacrifice ambition for the good of humanity.”

St. Ives nodded, giving his chicken a desultory poke with the end of his finger. It might easily have been some sort of pale tide-pool creature shifting in a saline broth on the plate. Ambition…He had his own share of ambition. He had long suspected the nature of the device that Lord Kelvin tinkered with in his barn in Harrogate. Parsons was telling him the truth, or at least part of it. And what the truth meant was that St. Ives, somehow, must possess himself of this fabulous machine.

Except that the idea of doing so was contemptible. There were winds in this world that blew a man into uncharted seas. But while they changed the course of his action, they ought not to change the course of his soul. Take a lesson from Robinson Crusoe, he told himself. He thought about Alice then, and of the brief time they had spent together. Suddenly he determined to hack the weeds out of her vegetable garden, and the thought buoyed him up. Then, just as suddenly, he was depressed beyond words, and he found himself staring at the mess on his plate. Parsons was looking contentedly out the window, picking at his teeth with a fingernail.

First things first, St. Ives said to himself. Reverse the polarity of the earth! “Have you read the works of young Rutherford?” he asked Parsons.

“Pinwinnie Rutherford of Edinburgh?”

“Ernest Rutherford. Of New Zealand. I ran across him in Canada. He’s done some interesting work in the area of light rays, if you can call them that.” St. Ives wiggled loose a thread of chicken, carried the morsel halfway to his mouth, looked at and changed his mind. “There’s some indication that alpha and beta rays from the sun slide away along the earth’s magnetic field, arriving harmlessly at the poles. It seems likely, at a hasty glance, that without the field they’d sail in straightaway—we’d be bathed in radioactivity. The most frightful mutations might occur. It has been my pet theory, in fact, that the dinosaurs were laid low in precisely that same fashion—that their demise was a consequence of the reversal of the poles and the inherent cessation of the magnetic field.”

Parsons shrugged. “All of this is theory, of course. But the comet is eight days away, and that’s not at all theory. It’s not a brontosaurus, my dear fellow, it’s an enormous chunk of iron that threatens to smash us into jelly. From your chair across the able it’s easy enough to fly in the face of the science of mechanics, but I’m afraid, sir, that Lord Kelvin will get along very well without you—he has in the past.”

“There’s a better way,” said St. Ives simply. It was useless to lose his temper over Parsons’s practiced stubbornness.

“Oh?” said the secretary.

“Ignacio Narbondo, I believe, has showed it to us.”

Parsons dropped his spoon onto his lap and launched into a choking fit. St. Ives held up a constraining hand. “I’m very much aware of his threats, I assure you. And they’re not idle threats, either. Do you propose to pay him?”

“I’m constrained from discussing it.”

“He’ll do what he claims. He’s taken the first steps already.”

“I realize, my dear fellow, that you and the doctor are sworn enemies. He ought to have danced his last jig on the gallows a long time ago. If it were in my power to bring him to justice, I would, but I have no earthly idea where he is, quite frankly, and I’ll warn you, with no beating about the bush, that this business of the comet must not become a personal matter with you. I believe you take my meaning. Lord Kelvin sets us all an example.”

St. Ives counted to ten very slowly. Somewhere between seven and eight, he discovered that Parsons was very nearly right. What he said was beside the point, though. “Let me repeat,” St. Ives said evenly, “that I believe there’s a better way.”

“And what does a lunatic like Narbondo have to do with this ‘better way’?”

“He intends, if I read him aright, to effect the stoppage of certain very active volcanoes in arctic Scandinavia via the introduction of petrifactive catalysts into open fissures and dykes. The subsequent detonation of an explosive charge would lead to the eruption of a chain of volcanic mountains that rise above the jungles of Amazonian Peru. The entrapped energy expended by such an upheaval would, he hopes, cast us like a Chinese rocket into the course of the comet.”

“Given the structure of the interior of the earth,” said Parsons, grinning into his mineral water, “it seems a dubious undertaking at best. Perhaps…”

“Are you familiar with hollow-earth theory?”

Parsons blinked at St. Ives. The corners of his mouth twitched.

“Specifically with that of McClung-Jones of the Quebec Geological Mechanics Institute? The ‘thin-crust phenomenon’?”

Parsons shook his head tiredly.

“It’s possible,” said St. Ives, “that Narbondo’s detonation will effect a series of eruptions in volcanoes residing in the hollow core of the earth. The stupendous inner-earth pressures would themselves trigger an eruption at Jones’s thin-crust point.”

“Thin-crust point?” asked Parsons in a plonking tone.

“The very Peruvian mountains toward which our man Narbondo has cast the glad eye!”

“That’s an interesting notion,” muttered Parsons, coughing into his napkin. “Turn the earth into a Chinese rocket.” He stared out the window, blinking his eyes ponderously, as if satisfied that St. Ives had concluded his speech.

“What I propose,” said St. Ives, pressing on, “is to thwart Narbondo, and then effect the same thing, only in reverse—to propel the earth temporarily out of her orbit in a long arc that would put the comet beyond her grasp. If the calculations were fined down sufficiently—and I can assure you that they have been—we’d simply slide back into orbit some few thousand miles farther along our ellipse, a pittance in the eyes of the incalculable distances of our journeying through the void.”

St. Ives sat back and fished in his coat for a cigar. Here was the Royal Academy, unutterably fearful of the machinations of Ignacio Narbondo—certain, that is, that the doctor was not merely talking through his hat. If they could trust to Narbondo to destroy the earth through volcanic manipulation, then they could quite clearly trust St. Ives to save it by the same means. What was good for the goose, after all. St. Ives took a breath and continued. “There’s been some study of the disastrous effects of in-step marching on bridges and platforms—military study mostly. My own theory, which abets Narbondo’s, would make use of such study, of the resonant energy expended by a troop of synchronized marchers…”

Parsons grimaced and shook his head slowly. He wasn’t prepared to admit anything about the doings of the nefarious doctor. And St. Ives’s theories, although fascinating, were of little use to them here. What St. Ives wanted, perhaps, was to speak to the minister of parades…

Then there was this man Jones. Hadn’t McClung-Jones been involved in certain ghastly lizard experiments in the forests of New Hampshire? “Very ugly incident, that one,” Parsons muttered sadly. “One of your hollow-earth men, wasn’t he? Had a lot of Mesozoic reptiles dummied up at a waxworks in Boston, as I recall, and insisted he’d found them sporting in some bottomless cavern or another.” Parsons squinted shrewdly at St. Ives. It was real science that they would order up here. Humanity cried out for it, didn’t they? Wasn’t Lord Kelvin at that very moment riveting together the carcass of the device that Parsons had described? Hadn’t St. Ives been listening? Parsons shrugged. Discussions with St. Ives were always—how should one put it?—revealing. But St. Ives had gotten in out of his depth this time, and Parsons’s advice was to strike out at once for shore—a hearty breaststroke so as not to tire himself unduly. He patted St. Ives on the sleeve, waving the wine decanter at him.

St. Ives nodded and watched the secretary fill his glass nearly to the top. There was no arguing with the man. And it wasn’t argument that was wanted now, anyway. It was action, and that was a commodity, apparently, that he would have to take with his own hands.

***

St. Ives’s manor house and laboratory sat some three quarters of a mile from the summerhouse of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. The River Nidd ran placid and slow between, slicing neatly in two the broad meadow that separated the grounds of the manor from the grounds of the summerhouse. The willows that lined the banks of the Nidd effected a rolling green cloudbank that almost obscured each house from the view of the other, but from St. Ives’s attic window, Lord Kelvin’s broad low barn was just visible atop a grassy knoll. Into and out of that barn trooped a platoon of white-coated scientists and grimed machinists. Covered wagons scoured along the High Road from Kirk Hammerton, bearing enigmatic mechanical apparatus, and were met at the gates by an ever-suspicious man in a military uniform.

St. Ives watched their comings and goings through his spyglass. He turned a grim eye on Hasbro, who stood silently behind him. “I’ve come to a difficult decision, Hasbro.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve decided that we must play the role of saboteur, and nothing less. I shrink from such deviltry, but far more is at stake here than honor. We must ruin, somehow, Lord Kelvin’s machine.”

“Very good, sir.”

“The mystifying thing is that I thought it was something else that he was constructing in that barn. But Parsons couldn’t have lied so utterly well. He isn’t capable of it. We’ve got to suppose that Lord Kelvin will do just what he says he will do.”

“No one will deny it, sir.”

“Our sabotaging his machine, of course, necessitates not only carrying out the plan to manipulate the volcanoes, but implies utter faith in that plan. Here we are setting in to thwart the effort of one of the greatest living practical scientists and to substitute our own feeble designs in its stead—an act of monumental egotism.”

“As you say, sir.”

“But the stakes are high, Hasbro. We must have our hand in. It’s nothing more nor less than the salvation of the earth, secularly speaking, that we engage in.”

“Shall we want lunch first, sir?”

“Kippers and gherkins, thank you. And bring up two bottles of Double Diamond to go along with it—and a bottle or two for yourself, of course.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hasbro said. “You’re most generous, sir.”

“Very well,” mumbled St. Ives, striding back and forth beneath the exposed roof rafters. He paused and squinted out into the sunlight, watching another wagon rattle along into the open door of Lord Kelvin’s barn. Disguise would avail them nothing. It would be an easy thing to fill a wagon with unidentifiable scientific trash—heaven knew he had any amount of it lying about—and to dress up in threadbare pants and coat and merely drive the stuff in at the gate. The guard would have no inkling of who he was. But Lord Kelvin, of course, would. A putty nose and false chin whiskers would be dangerous things. If any members of the Academy saw through them they’d clap him in irons, accuse him very rightly of intended sabotage.

He could argue his case well enough in the courts, to be sure. He could depend on Rutherford, at least, to support him. But in the meantime the earth would have been beat to pieces. That wouldn’t answer. And if Lord Kelvin’s machine was put into operation and was successful, then he’d quite possibly face a jury of mutants—two-headed men and a judge with a third eye. They’d be sympathetic, under the circumstances, but still…

***

The vast interior of Lord Kelvin’s barn was awash with activity—a sort of carnival of strange debris, of coiled copper and tubs of bubbling fluids and rubber-wrapped cable thick as a man’s wrist hanging from overhead joists like jungle creepers. At the heart of it all lay a plain brass box, studded with rivets and with a halo of wires running out of the top. This, then, was the machine itself, the culmination of Lord Kelvin’s life’s work, the boon that he was giving over to the salvation of mankind.

The machine was compact, to be sure—small enough to motivate a dogcart, if a man wanted to use it for such a frivolous end. St. Ives turned the notion over in his mind, wondering where a man might travel in such a dogcart and thinking that he would gladly give up his entire fortune to be left alone with the machine for an hour and a half. First things first, he reminded himself, just as three men began to piece together over the top of it a copper pyramid the size of a large doghouse. Lord Kelvin himself, talking through his beard and clad in a white smock and Leibnitz cap, pointed and shouted and squinted with a calculating eye at the device that piece by piece took shape in the lamplight. Parsons stood beside him, leaning on a brass-shod cane.

At the sight of Langdon St. Ives standing outside the open door, Parsons’s chin dropped. St. Ives glanced at Jack Owlesby and Hasbro. Bill Kraken had disappeared. Parsons raised an exhorting finger, widening his eyes with the curious effect of making the bulk of his forehead disappear into his thin gray hair.

“Dr. Parsons!” cried St. Ives, getting in before him. “Your man at the gate is a disgrace. We sauntered in past him mumbling nonsense about the Atlantic cable and showed him a worthless letter signed by the Prince of Wales. He tried to shake our hands. You’ve got to do better than that, Parsons. We might have been anyone, mightn’t we?—any class of villain. And here we are, trooping in like so many ants. It’s the great good fortune of the Commonwealth that we’re friendly ants. In a word, we’ve come to offer our skills, such as they are.”

St. Ives paused for breath when he saw that Parsons had begun to sputter like the burning fuse of a fizz bomb, and for one dangerous moment St. Ives was fearful that the old man would explode, would pitch over from apoplexy and that the sum of their efforts would turn out to be merely the murder of poor Parsons. But the fit passed. The secretary snatched his quivering face back into shape and gave the three of them an appraising look, stepping across so as to stand between St. Ives and the machine, as if his gaunt frame, pinched by years of a weedy vegetarian diet, would somehow hide the thing from view.

“Persona non grata, is it?” asked St. Ives, giving Parsons a look in return, then instantly regretting the action. There was nothing to be gained by being antagonistic.

“I haven’t any idea how you swindled the officer at the gate,” said Parsons evenly, holding his ground, “but this operation has been commissioned by Her Majesty the Queen and is undertaken by the collected members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, an organization, if I remember aright, which does not count you among its members. In short, we thank you for your kind offer of assistance and very humbly ask you to leave, along with your ruffians.”

He turned to solicit Lord Kelvin’s agreement, but the great man was sighting down the length of a brass tube, tugging on it in order, apparently, to align it with an identical tube that hung suspended from the ceiling fifteen feet away. “My lord,” said Parsons, clearing his throat meaningfully, but he got no response at all, and gave off his efforts when St. Ives seemed intent on strolling around to the opposite side of the machine.

“Must we make an issue of this?” Parsons demanded of St. Ives, stepping across in an effort to cut him off and casting worried looks at Hasbro and Jack Owlesby, as if fearful that the two of them might produce some heinous device of their own with which to blow up the barn and exterminate the lot of them.

St. Ives stopped and shrugged when he saw Bill Kraken, grimed with oil and wearing the clothes of a workman, step out from behind a heap of broken crates and straw stuffing. Without so much as a sideways glance at his employer, Kraken hurried to where Lord Kelvin fiddled with the brass tube. Kraken grasped the opposite end of it and in a moment was wrestling with the thing, hauling it this way and that to the apparent approval of his lordship, and managing to tip St. Ives a broad wink in the process.

“Well, well,” said St. Ives in a defeated tone, “I’m saddened by this, Parsons. Saddened. I’d hoped to lend a hand.”

Parsons seemed mightily relieved all of a sudden. He cast St. Ives a wide smile. “We thank you, sir,” he said, limping toward the scientist, his hand outstretched. “If this project were in the developmental stages, I assure you we’d welcome your expertise. But it’s really a matter of nuts and bolts now, isn’t it? And your genius, I’m afraid, would be wasted.” He ushered the three of them out into the sunlight, smiling hospitably now and watching until he was certain the threat had passed and the three were beyond the gate. Then he called round to have the gate guard relieved. He couldn’t, he supposed, have the man flogged, but he could see to it that he spent an enterprising year patrolling the thoroughfares of Dublin.

London and Harrogate Again

It was late evening along Fleet Street, and the London night was clear and unseasonably warm, as if the moon that swam in the purple sky beyond the dome of St. Paul’s were radiating a thin white heat. The very luminosity of the moon paled the surrounding stars, but as the night deepened farther away into space, the stars were bright and thick enough to remind St. Ives that the universe wasn’t an empty place after all. And out there among the planets, hurtling toward earth, was the vast comet, its curved tail comprising a hundred million miles of showering ice, blown by solar wind along the uncharted byways of the void. Tomorrow or the next day the man in the street, peering skyward to admire the stars, would see it there. Would it be a thing of startling beauty, a wash of fire across the canvas of heaven? Or would it send a thrill of fear through a populace still veined with the superstitious dread of the medieval church?

The shuffle of footsteps behind him brought St. Ives to himself. He wrinkled hisface up, feeling the gluey pull of the horsehair eyebrows and beard, which, along with a putty nose and monk’s wig, made up a very suitable disguise. Coming along toward him was Beezer the journalist, talking animatedly to a man in shirtsleeves. Beezer chewed the end of a tiny cigar and waved his arms to illustrate a story that he told with particular venom. He seemed unnaturally excited, although St. Ives had to remind himself that he was almost entirely unfamiliar with the man—perhaps he always gestured and railed so.

St. Ives fell in behind the two, making no effort to conceal himself. Hasbro and Jack Owlesby stood in the shadows two blocks farther along, in an alley past Whitefriars. There was precious little time to waste. Occasional strollers passed; the abduction would have to be quick and subtle. “Excuse me,” St. Ives said at the man’s back. “Mr. Beezer is it, the journalist?”

The two men stopped, looking back at St. Ives. Beezer’s hands fell to his side. “At’s right, Pappy,” came the reply. Beezer squinted at him, as if ready to doubt the existence of such a wild figure on the evening street.

“My name, actually, is Penrod,” said St. Ives. “Jules Penrod. You’ve apparently mistaken me for someone else. I have one of the twelve common faces.”

Beezer’s companion burst into abrupt laughter at the idea. Beezer, however, seemed impatient at the interruption. “Face like yours is a pity,” he said, nudging his companion in the abdomen with his elbow. “Suits a beggar, though. I haven’t got a thing for you, Pappy. Go scrub yourself with a sponge.” And with that the two of them turned and made away, the second man laughing again and Beezer gesturing.

“One moment, sir!” cried St. Ives, pursuing the pair. “We’ve got a mutual friend.”

Beezer turned and scowled, chewing his cigar slowly and thoughtfully now. He stared carefully at St. Ives’s unlikely visage and shook his head. “No, we don’t,” he said, “unless it’s the devil. Any other friend of yours would’ve hung himself by now out of regret. Why don’t you disappear into the night, Pappy, before I show you the shine on my boot?”

“You’re right, as far as it goes,” said St. Ives, grinning inwardly.

“I’m a friend of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, in fact. He’s sent me round with another communication.” 

Beezer squinted at him. The word another hadn’t jarred him.

“Is that right?” he said.

St. Ives bowed, clapping a hand hastily onto the top of his head to hold his wig on.

“Bugger off, will you, Clyde?” Beezer said to his friend.

“That drink…” came the reply.

“Stow your drink. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll drink two. Now get along.”

The man turned away regretfully, despondent over the lost drink perhaps, and St. Ives waited to speak until he had crossed Whitefriars and his footsteps faded. Then he nodded to the still-scowling Beezer and set out on the sidewalk again, looking up and down the street as if to discern anything suspicious or threatening. Beezer fell in beside him. “It’s about the money,” said St. Ives.

“The money?”

“Narbondo fears that he promised you too much of it.”

“He’s a filthy cheat!” cried Beezer, eliminating any doubts that St. Ives might have had about Beezer’s having received Narbondo’s message, mailed days past from Dover.

“He’s discovered,” continued St. Ives, “that there are any of a number of journalists who will sell out the people of London for half the sum. Peabody at the Herald, for instance, has agreed to cooperate.”

“The filthy scum-sucking cheat!” Beezer shouted, waving a fist at St. Ives’s nose. “Peabody!”

“Tut, tut,” admonished St. Ives, noting with a surge of anxious anticipation the darkened mouth of the alley some thirty feet distant. “We haven’t contracted with Peabody yet. It was merely a matter of feeling out the temperature of the water, so to speak. You understand. You’re a businessman yourself in a way.” St. Ives gestured broadly with his left hand as if to signify that a man like Beezer could be expected to take the long view. With his right he reached across and snatched the lapels of Beezer’s coat, yanking him sideways. Simultaneously he whipped his left hand around and slammed the startled journalist square in the back, catapulting him into the ill-lit alley.

“Hey!” shouted Beezer, tripping forward into the waiting arms of Jack Owlesby, who leaped in to pinion the man’s wrists. Hasbro, waving an enormous burlap bag, appeared from the shadows and flung the bag like a gill net over Beezer’s head, St. Ives yanking it down across the man’s back and pushing him forward off his feet. Hasbro snatched at the drawrope, grasped Beezer’s shoulders, and hissed through the canvas, “Cry out and you’re a dead man!”

The struggling Beezer collapsed like a sprung balloon, having an antipathy, apparently, to being a dead man. Jack clambered up onto the bed of a wagon, hauled open the lid of a steamer trunk, and, along with St. Ives and Hasbro, yanked and shoved and grappled the feebly struggling journalist into the wood and leather prison. He banged ineffectively a half-dozen times at the sides of the trunk, mewling miserably, then fell silent as the wagon rattled and bounced along the alley, exiting on Salisbury Court and making away south toward the Thames.

A half hour later the wagon had doubled back through Soho, St. Ives having set such a course toward Chingford that Beezer couldn’t begin to guess it out from within his trunk. Hasbro, always prepared, had uncorked a bottle of whiskey, and each of the three men held a glass, lost in his own thoughts about the warm April night and the dangers of their mission. “Sorry to bring you in on this, Jack,” said St. Ives. “There might quite likely be the devil to pay before we’re through. No telling what sort of a row our man Beezer might set up.”

“I’m not complaining,” Jack said.

“It was Dorothy I was thinking about, actually. We’re only weeks finished with the pig incident, and I’ve hauled you away again. There she sits in Kensington wondering what sort of nonsense I’ve drummed up now. She’s a stout woman, if you don’t mistake my meaning.”

Jack nodded, glancing sideways at St. Ives, whose voice had gotten heavy with the sound of regret. St. Ives seemed always to be on the edge of a precipice, standing with his back to it and pretending he couldn’t see that it was there, waiting for him to take an innocent step backward. Work furiously—that had become the byword for St. Ives, and it was a better thing, perhaps, than to go to pieces, except that there was something overwound about St. Ives sometimes that made Jack wonder if it wouldn’t be better for him to try to see into the depths of that pit that stretched out behind him, to let his eyes adjust to the darkness so that he might make out the shadows down there.

But then Jack was settled in Kensington with Dorothy, living out what must look to St. Ives like a sort of storybook existence. The professor couldn’t help but see that Dorothy and Alice had been a lot alike, and Jack’s happiness must have magnified St. Ives’s sorrow. If Dorothy knew, in fact, what sort of business they pursued this time, she probably would have insisted on coming along. Jack thought of her fondly. “Do you know…,” he began, reminiscing, but the sound of Beezer pummeling the sides of the trunk cut him off.

“Tell the hunchback!” shrieked a muffled voice, “that I’ll have him horsewhipped! He’ll be sulking in Newgate Prison again by the end of the week, by God! There’s nothing about him I don’t know!”

St. Ives shrugged at Hasbro. Here, perhaps, was a stroke of luck. If Beezer could be convinced that they actually were agents of Narbondo, it would go no little way toward throwing the man off their scent when the affair was over, especially if he went to the authorities with his tale. Beezer hadn’t, after all, committed any crime, nor did he contemplate one—no crime, that is, beyond the crime against humanity, against human decency. “Narbondo has authorized us to eliminate you if we see fit,” said St. Ives, hunching over the trunk. “If you play along here you’ll be well paid; if you struggle, you’ll find yourself counting fishes in the rocks off Southend Pier.” The journalist fell silent.

Early in the predawn morning the wagon rattled into Chingford and made for the hills beyond, where lay the cottage of Sam Langley, son of St. Ives’s longtime cook. The cottage was dark, but a lamp burned through the slats in the locked shutters of a low window in an unused silo fifty yards off. St. Ives reined in the horses, clambering out of the wagon at once, and with the help of his two companions, hauled the steamer trunk off the tailgate and into the unfastened door of the silo. Jack Owlesby and Hasbro hastened back out into the night, and for a moment through the briefly open door, St. Ives could see Sam Langley stepping off his kitchen porch, pulling on a coat. The door shut, and St. Ives was alone in the feebly lit room with the trunk and scattered pieces of furniture.

“I’m going to unlock the trunk…,” St. Ives began.

“You sons of…,” Beezer started to shout, but St. Ives rapped against the lid with his knuckles to silence him.

“I’m either going to unlock the trunk or set it afire,” said St. Ives with great deliberation. “The choice is yours.” The trunk was silent. “Once the trunk is unlocked, you can quite easily extricate yourself. The bag isn’t knotted. You’ve probably already discovered that. My advice to you is to stay absolutely still for ten minutes. Then you can thrash and shriek and stamp about until you collapse. No one will hear you. You’ll be happy to know that a sum of money will be advanced to your account, and that you’ll have a far easier time spending it if you’re not shot full of holes. Don’t, then, get impatient. You’ve ridden out the night in the trunk; you can stand ten minutes more.” Beezer, it seemed, had seen reason, for as St. Ives crouched out into the night, shook hands hastily with Langley, leaped into the wagon, and took up the reins, nothing but silence emanated from the stones of the silo.

***

Two evenings earlier, on the night that St. Ives had waylaid Beezer the journalist, the comet had appeared in the eastern sky, ghostly and round like the moon reflected on a frosty window—just a circular patch of faint luminous cloud. But now it seemed fearfully close, as if it would drop out of the heavens toward the earth like a plumb bob toward a melon. St. Ives’s telescope, with its mirror of speculum metal, had been a gift from Lord Rosse himself, and he peered into the eyepiece now, tracking the flight of the comet for no other reason, really, than to while away the dawn hours. He slept only fitfully these days, and his dreams weren’t pleasant.

There was nothing to calculate; work of that nature had been accomplished weeks past by astronomers whose knowledge of astral mathematics was sufficient to satisfy both the Royal Academy and Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives wouldn’t dispute their figures. That the comet would spin dangerously close to the earth was the single point that all of them agreed upon. His desire in watching the icy planetoid, beyond a simple fascination with the mystery and wonder of the thing, was to have a look at the face of what might easily be his last great nemesis, a vast leviathan swimming toward them through a dark sea. He wondered if it was oblivion that was revealed by the turning earth.

Hasbro packed their bags in the manor. Their train left Kirk Hammerton Station at six. Dr. Narbondo, St. Ives had to assume, would discover that same morning that he had been foiled, that Beezer, somehow, had failed him. The morning Times would rattle in on the Dover train, ignorant of pending doom. The doctor would try to contact the nefarious Beezer, but Beezer wouldn’t be found. He’s taken ill, they would say on Fleet Street, repeating the substance of the letter St. Ives had sent off to Beezer’s employers. Beezer, they’d assure Narbondo, had been ordered south on holiday—to the coast of Spain. Narbondo’s forehead would wrinkle with suspicion, and the wrinkling would engender horrible curses and the gnashing of teeth. St. Ives almost smiled. The doctor would know who had thwarted him.

But the result would be, quite likely, the immediate removal of Narbondo and Hargreaves to the environs of northwestern Scandinavia. The chase, thought St. Ives tiredly, would be on. The comet loomed only a few days away, barely enough time for them to accomplish their task.

A door slammed in the manor. St. Ives slipped from his stool and looked out through the west-facing window of his observatory, waving to Hasbro who, in the roseate light of an early dawn, dangled a pocket watch from a chain and nodded to his employer. In a half hour they were away, scouring along the highroad toward the station in Kirk Hammerton, where St. Ives, Hasbro, and Jack Owlesby would leave for Ramsgate and the dirigible that would transport them to the ice and tundra of arctic Norway. If the labors of Bill Kraken were unsuccessful, if he couldn’t sabotage Lord Kelvin’s frightful machine, they would all know about it, along with the rest of suffering humanity, two days hence.

***

Bill Kraken crouched in the willows along the River Nidd, watching through the lacey tendrils the dark bulk of Lord Kelvin’s barn. The device had been finished two days earlier, the ironic result, to a degree, of his own labor—labor he wouldn’t be paid for. But money wasn’t of particular consequence anymore, not like it had been in the days of his squid merchanting or when he’d been rescued from the life of a lowly peapod man by the charitable Langdon St. Ives.

Kraken sighed. Poor St. Ives. There was suffering and there was suffering. Kraken had never found a wife, had never fathered children. He had been cracked on the head more often than he could remember, but so what? That kind of damage could be borne. The sort of blow that had struck St. Ives, though—that was a different thing, and Kraken feared sometimes that it would take a heavy toll on the great man before they all won through. Kraken wanted for nothing now, not really, beyond seeing St. Ives put right again.

In a cloth bag beside him wriggled a dozen snakes, collected from the high grass beyond the manor house. In a wire-screen cage beneath the snakes was a score of mice, hungry, as were the snakes, from days of neglect. A leather bellows dangled from his belt, and a hooded lantern from his right hand. No one else was on the meadow.

The Royal Academy had been glad to be quit of Ignacio Narbondo, who had taken ship for Oslo to effect his preposterous machinations. That was the rumor around Lord Kelvin’s barn. The Academy would reduce his threats to drivel now that the machine was built. Why Narbondo hadn’t followed through with his plan to alert the press no one could say, but it seemed to Secretary Parsons to be evidence that his threats were mere bluff. And that crackpot St. Ives had given up, too, thank God. All this had lightened the atmosphere considerably. A sort of holiday air had sprung up around what had been a business fraught with suspicion and doubt. Now the Academy was free to act without impediment

Kraken bent out from under the willows and set out across the meadow carrying his bundles. It would do no good to run. He was too old to be cutting capers on a meadow in the dead of night, and if he tripped and dropped his mice or knocked his lantern against a stone, his plan would be foiled utterly. In an hour both the moon and the comet would have appeared on the horizon and the meadow would be bathed in light. If he was sensible, he’d be asleep in his bed by then.

The dark bulk of the barn loomed before him, the pale stones of its foundation contrasting with the weathered oak battens above. Kraken ducked along the wall toward a tiny mullioned window beneath which extended the last six inches of the final section of brass pipe—the very pipe that Kraken himself had wrestled through a hole augered into the barn wall on that first day he’d helped Lord Kelvin align the things.

What, exactly, the pipe was intended to accomplish, Kraken couldn’t say, but somehow it was the focal point of the workings of the device. Beyond, some twenty feet from the barn and elevated on a stone slab, sat a black monolith, smooth as polished marble. Kraken had been amazed when, late the previous afternoon, Lord Kelvin had flung a ball peen hammer end over end at the monolith, and the collected workmen and scientists had gasped in wonder when the hammer had been soundlessly reflected with such force that it had sailed out of sight in the general direction of York. That the hammer had fallen to earth again, not a man of them could say. The reversal of the poles was to be accomplished, then, by emanating toward this monolith the collected magnetic rays developed in Lord Kelvin’s machine, thus both exciting and deflecting them in a circuitous pattern, and sending them off, as it were, astride a penny whirligig. It was too much for Kraken to fathom, but Lord Kelvin and his peers were the giants of electricity and mechanics. A job like this had been child’s play to them. Their heads weren’t like the heads of other men.

Kraken squinted through the darkness at the monolith, doubly black against the purple of the starry night sky, and wondered at the remarkable perspicacity of great scientists. Here sat the impossible machine, primed for acceleration on the morrow. Could Kraken, a man of admittedly low intellect, scuttle the marvelous device? Kraken shook his head, suddenly full of doubt. He had been entrusted with little else than the material salvation of humanity…Well, Kraken was just a small man with a small way of doing things. He had seen low times in his life, had mucked through sewers with murderers, and so he would have to trust to low means here. That was the best he could do.

He quit breathing and cocked an ear. Nothing but silence and the distant hooting of an owl greeted him on the night air. He untied the bellows from his belt and shook them by his ear. Grain and broken biscuits rattled within. He shoved the mouth of the bellows into the end of the brass tube and pumped furiously, listening to the debris clatter away, down the tilted pipe. Long after the last of the grain had been blown clear of the bellows, Kraken continued to manipulate his instrument, desperate to send the bulk of it deep into the bowels of the apparatus. Haste would avail him nothing here.

Finally satisfied, he tied the bellows once again to his belt and picked up the mouse cage. The beasts were tumultuous with excitement, stimulated, perhaps, by the evening constitutional, or sensing somehow that they were on the brink of an adventure of powerful magnitude. Kraken pressed the cage front against the end of the tube and pulled open its little door. The mice scurried around in apparent amazement, casting wild glances here and there, curious about a heap of shredded newspaper or the pink ear of a neighbor. Then, one by one, they filed away down the tube like cattle down a hill, sniffing the air, intent suddenly on biscuits and grain.

The snakes were a comparatively easy case. A round dozen of the beasts slithered away down the tube in the wake of the mice, anxious to be quit of their sack. Kraken wondered if he hadn’t ought to wad the sack up and shove it into the tube, too, in order to make absolutely sure that the beasts remained trapped inside. But the dangers of doing that were manifold. Lord Kelvin or some particularly watchful guard might easily discover the stopper before Kraken had a chance to remove it. They mustn’t, said St. Ives, discover that the sabotage had been the work of men—thus the mice and snakes. It might easily seem that the natural residents of the barn had merely taken up lodgings there, and thus the hand of Langdon St. Ives would go undetected.

It was very nearly within the hour that Bill Kraken climbed into bed. But his dreams were filled that night with visions of mice and snakes dribbling from the end of the tube and racing away into the darkness, having consumed the grain and leaving nothing behind sufficient to foul the workings of the dread machine. What could he do, though, save trust to providence? The shame of his failure—if failure it should be—would likely be as nothing next to the horrors that would beset them after Lord Kelvin’s success. God bless the man, thought Kraken philosophically. He pictured the aging lord, laboring night and day to complete his engine, certain that he was contributing his greatest gift yet to humankind. His disappointment would be monumental. It seemed almost worth the promised trouble to let the poor man have a try at it. But that, sadly, wouldn’t do. The world was certainly a sorrowful and contradictory place.

Norway

The bright April weather had turned stormy and dark by the time St. Ives and Hasbro had chuffed into Dover, and the North Sea was a tumult of wind-tossed waves and driving rain. St. Ives huddled now aboard the Ostende ferry, out of the rain beneath an overhanging deck ledge and wrapped in an oilcloth, legs spread to counter the heaving swell. His pipe burned like a chimney, and as he peered out at the roiling black of the heavens, equally cloudy thoughts drew his eyes into a squint and made him oblivious to the cold and wet. Had this sudden turn of arctic weather anything to do with the experimentation of the Royal Academy? Had they effected the reversal of the poles prematurely and driven the weather suddenly mad? Had Kraken failed? He watched a gray swell loom overhead, threatening to slam the ferry apart, only to sink suddenly into nothing as if having changed its mind, and then tower up once again overhead, sheets of flying foam torn from its crest and rendered into spindrift by the wind.

His plans seemed to be fast going wrong. The dirigible he had counted upon for transport had been “inoperable.” The fate of the earth itself hung in the balance, and the filthy dirigible was “inoperable.” They would all be inoperable by the end of the week. Jack Owlesby had stayed on in Ramsgate where a crew of nitwits fiddled with the craft, and so yet another variable, as the mathematician would say, had been cast into the muddled stew. Could the dirigible be made operable in time? Would Jack, along with the flea-brained pilot, find them in the cold wastes of arctic Norway? It didn’t bear thinking about. One thing at a time, St. Ives reminded himself. They had left Jack with a handshake and a compass and had raced south intending to follow Narbondo overland, trusting to Jack to take care of himself.

But where was Ignacio Narbondo? He must have set sail from Dover with Hargreaves hours earlier, apparently under a false name—except that the ticket agent could find no record of his having boarded the Ostende ferry. St. Ives had described him vividly: the hump, the tangle of oily hair, the cloak. No one could remember having seen him board. He might have got on unseen in the early morning, of course.

It was conceivable, just barely, that St. Ives had made a monumental error, or that Narbondo had tricked the lot of them, had been one up on them all along. He might at that moment be bound, say, for Reykjavik, intent on working his deviltry on the volcanic wastes of the interior of Iceland. He might be sitting in a comfortable chair in London, laughing into his hat. What would St. Ives do then? Keep going, like a windup tin soldier on the march. He could imagine himself simply ambling away into Scandinavian forests, circling aimlessly through the trees like a dying reindeer.

But then in Ostende the rain let up and the wind fell off, and the solid ground beneath his feet once again lent him a steadiness of purpose. In the cold station, a woman stirred a caldron of mussels, dumping in handfuls of shallots and lumps of butter. Aromatic steam swirled out of the iron pot in such a way as to make St. Ives lightheaded. “Mussels and beer,” he said to Hasbro, “would revive a body.”

“That they would, sir. And a loaf of bread, I might add, to provide bulk.”

“A sound suggestion,” said St. Ives, striding toward the woman and removing his hat. He liked the look of her immediately. She was stooped and heavy and wore a dress like a tent, and it seemed as if all the comets in the starry heavens couldn’t knock her off her pins. She dumped mussels, black and dripping, into a cleverly folded newspaper basket, heaping up the shells until they threatened to cascade to the floor. She winked at St. Ives, fished an enormous mussel from the pot, slid her thumbs into the hiatus of its open shell, and in a single swift movement pulled the mollusk open, shoved one of her thumbs under the orange flesh, and flipped the morsel into her open mouth. “Some don’t chew them,” she said, speaking English, “but I do. What’s the use of eating at all if you don’t chew them? Might as well swallow a toad.”

“Indubitably,” said St. Ives, happy enough to make small talk. “It’s the same way with oysters. I never could stand simply to allow the creatures to slide down my throat. I fly in the face of custom there.”

“Aye,” she said. “Can you imagine a man’s stomach, full of beasts such as these, whole, mind you, and sloshin’ like smelts in a bucket?” She dipped again into the caldron, picked out another mussel, and ate it with relish, then grimaced and rooted in her mouth with a finger. “Mussel pearl,” she said, holding up between thumb and forefinger a tiny opalescent sphere twice the size of a pinhead. She slid open a little drawer in the cart on which sat the caldron of mussels, and dropped the pearl in among what must have been thousands of the tiny orbs. “Can’t stand debris,” she said, grimacing.

The entire display rather took the edge off St. Ives’s appetite, and the heap of mussels in his basket, reclining beneath a coating of congealing butter and bits of garlic and shallot, began to remind him of certain unfortunate suppers he’d consumed at the Bayswater Club. He grinned weakly at the woman and looked around at the hurrying crowds, wondering if he and Hasbro hadn’t ought to join them.

“Man in here this afternoon ate one shell and all,” she said, shaking her head. “Imagine the debris involved. Must have given his throat bones some trouble, I daresay.”

“Shell and all?” asked St. Ives.

“That’s the exact case. Crunched away at the thing like it was a marzipan crust, didn’t he? Then he took another, chewed it up about halfway, saw what he was about, and spit the filthy thing against the wall there. You can see bits of it still, can’t you, despite the birds swarming round. There’s the smear of it against the stones. Do you see it there?—bit of brown paste is all it amounts to now.”

St. Ives stared at the woman. “Big man?”

“Who?”

“This fellow who ate the shells. Big, was he, and with a beard? Seemed ready to fly into a rage?”

“That’s your man, gents. Cursed vilely, he did, but not at the shells. It was at the poor birds, wasn’t it, when they come round to eat up what your man spit onto the wall there. You can see it there, can’t you? I never…”

“Was he in the company of a hunchback?”

“Aye,” said the woman, giving her pot a perfunctory stirring. “Greasy little man with a grin. Seemed to think the world is a lark. But it ain’t no lark, gentlemen. Here you’ve been, wasting my time this quarter hour, and not another living soul has bought a shell. You’ve frightened the lot of them off, is what I think, and you haven’t paid me a penny.” She glowered at St. Ives, then glowered at Hasbro.

“What time this afternoon?” asked St. Ives.

“Three hours past, say, or four. Might have been five. Or less.”

“Thank you.” St. Ives reached into his pocket for a coin. He dumped a half crown into her outstretched hand and left her blinking, he and Hasbro racing through the terminal toward the distant exit, each of them clutching a bag in one hand and a paper satchel of mussels in the other. The streets were wet outside, but the clouds were broken overhead and taking flight in the gray dusk, and the wind had simmered down to a billowy breeze. A bent man shambled past in trousers meant for a behemoth, clutching at a buttonless coat. St. Ives thrust his mussels at the man, meaning to do him a good turn, but his gesture was mistaken. The man cast him a look of mingled surprise and loathing, fetching the basket a swipe with his hand that sent the entire affair into the gutter. St. Ives hurried on without a word, marveling at misunderstood humanity and at how little space existed between apparent madness and the best of intentions.

In a half hour they were aboard a train once again, in a sleeping car bound for Amsterdam, Hamburg, and finally, to Hjørring, where on the Denmark ferry they’d once again set sail across the North Sea, up the Oslofjord into Norway.

St. Ives was determined to remain awake, to have a look at the comet when it sailed in over the horizon sometime after midnight. But the sleepless nights he had spent in the observatory and the long hours of travel since had worn him thin, and after a tolerable meal in the dining car, and what might likely turn out to be, on the morrow, a regrettable lot of brandy, he dropped away at once into a deep sleep, and the comet rose in the sky and fell again without him, slanting past the captive earth.

In Oslo Hargreaves had beaten a man half senseless with the man’s own cane. In Trondheim, two hours before the arrival of St. Ives and Hasbro on the express, he had run mad and threatened to explode a greengrocer’s cart, kicking the spokes out of one of the wheels before Narbondo had hauled him away and explained to the authorities that his companion was a lunatic bound for a sanitorium in Narvik.

St. Ives itched to be after them, but here he sat, becalmed in a small brick railway station. He stared impatiently out the window at the nearly empty station. A delay of a minute seemed an eternity, and each sighing release of steam from the waiting train carried upon it the suggestion of the final, fateful explosion. Hasbro, St. Ives could see, was equally uneasy at their motionless state, for he sat hunched forward on his seat as if trying to compel the train into flight. Finally, amid tooting and whooshing and three false starts, they were away again, St. Ives praying that the engineer had understood his translated request that they make an unscheduled stop on the deserted tundra adjacent to Mount Hjarstaad. Surely he would; he had accepted the little bag of assorted coffee tablets readily enough. What could he have understood them to be but payment?

Darkness had long since fallen, and with it had fled the last of the scattered rain showers. Ragged clouds pursued by arctic wind capered across the sky, and the stars shone thick and bright between. The train developed steam after puffing along lazily up a steepening grade, and within a score of minutes was hurtling through the mountainous countryside.

St. Ives was gripped once more with the excitement and peril of the chase. He removed his pocket watch at intervals, putting it back without so much as glancing at it, then loosening his already-loosened collar, peering out across the rocky landscape at the distant swerve of track ahead when the train lurched into a curve, as if the engine they pursued must surely be visible a half mile farther on.

The slow labored climb of steep hills was almost instantly maddening and filled him again with the fear that their efforts would prove futile, that from the vantage point of the next peak they would witness the detonation of half of Scandinavia: crumbling mountainsides, hurtling rocks. But then they would creep, finally, to another summit void of trees, where the track was wafered onto ledges along unimaginable precipices. And the train would plunge away again in a startling rush of steam and clatter.

They thundered through shrieking tunnels, the starry sky going momentarily black and then reappearing in an instant only to be dashed again into darkness. And when the train burst each time into the cold Norwegian night, both St. Ives and Hasbro were pressed against the window, peering skyward, relieved to see the last scattered clouds fleeing before the wind. Then all at once, as if waved into existence by a magic wand, the lights of the aurora borealis swept across the sky in lacey showers of green and red and blue, like a semitransparent Christmas tapestry hung across the wash of stars.

“Yes!” cried St. Ives, leaping to his feet and nearly pitching into the aisle as they rushed howling into another tunnel. “He’s done it! Kraken has done it!”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Absolutely,” said St. Ives, his voice animated. “Without the shadow of a doubt. The northern lights, my good fellow, are a consequence of the earth’s electromagnetic field. It’s a simple matter—no field, no lights. Had Lord Kelvin’s machine done its work, the display you see before us would have been postponed for heaven knows how many woeful years. But here it is, isn’t it? Good old Bill!” And on this last cheerful note, they emerged once again into the aurora-lit night, hurtling along beside a broad cataract that tumbled down through a boulder-strewn gorge.

Another hour’s worth of tunnels, however, began to make it seem finally as if there were no end to their journey, as if, perhaps, their train labored around and around a clever circular track, that they had been monumentally hoaxed one last fateful time by Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. Then, in an effort of steam, the train crested yet another treeless summit, and away to the west, far below them, moonlight shimmered on the rippled surface of a fjord, stretching out to the distant Norwegian Sea. Tumbling down out of the rocky precipices to their right rushed the wild river they had followed for what seemed an age, the torrent wrapping round the edge of Mount Hjarstaad and disappearing into shadow where it cascaded, finally, into the vast emptiness of an abyss. A trestle spanned the cataract and gave out onto a tundra-covered plain, scattered with the angular moon shadows of tilted stones.

Ahead of them, some ten yards from the track and clearly visible in the moonlight, lay a strange and alien object—an empty steamer trunk, its lid thrown back and its contents removed. Beyond that, a hundred yards farther along, lay another, also empty and yanked over onto its side. The train raced past both before howling to a steam-shrieking stop that made St. Ives wince. So much for subtlety, he thought, as Hasbro pitched their bags onto the icy plain and the two leaped out after them, the train almost immediately setting forth again, north, toward Hammerfest, leaving the world and the two marooned men to their collective fate.

St. Ives hurried across the plain toward the slope of Mount Hjarstaad. A footpath wound upward along the edge of the precipice through which the river thundered and roiled. The air was full of cold mist and the booming of water. “I’m afraid we’ve announced our arrival through a megaphone,” St. Ives shouted over his shoulder.

“Perhaps the roar of the falls…,” said Hasbro at St. Ives’s back. But the rest of his words was lost in the watery tumult as the two men hurried up the steepening hill, keeping to the edge of the trail and the deep shadows of the steep rocky cliffs.

St. Ives patted his coat, feeling beneath it the hard foreign outline of his revolver. He realized that he was cold, almost numbed, but that the cold wasn’t only a result of the wet arctic air. He was struck with the overwhelming feeling that he was replaying his most common and fearful nightmare, and the misty water of the falls seemed to him suddenly to be the rain out of a London sky. He could hear in the echoing crash the sound of horse’s hooves on paving stones and the crack of pistols fired in deadly haste.

The revolver in his waistband suddenly was almost repulsive to him, as if it were a poisonous reptile and not a thing built of brass and steel. The notion of shooting it at any living human being seemed both an utter impossibility and an utter necessity. His faith in the rational and the logical had been replaced by a mass of writhing contradictions and half-understood notions of revenge and salvation that were as confused as the unfathomable roar of the maelstrom in the chasm.

There was a shout behind him. A crack like a pistol shot followed, and St. Ives was pushed from behind. He rolled against a carriage-sized boulder, throwing his hands over his head as a hail of stones showered down around him, and an enormous rock, big as a cartwheel, bounded over his head, soaring away into the misty depths of the abyss.

He pushed himself to his knees, feeling Hasbro’s grip on his elbow, and he peered up into the shadowy gloom above. There, leaping from perch to rocky perch, was a man with wild hair and beard—Hargreaves, there could be little doubt. Hasbro drew his revolver, steadied his forearm along the top of a rock, and fired twice at the retreating figure. His bullets pinged off rocks twenty feet short of their mark, but the effect on the anarchist was startling—as if he had been turned suddenly into a mountain sheep. He disappeared on the instant, hidden by boulders.

St. Ives forced himself to his feet, pressing himself against the stony wall of the path. Hasbro tapped his shoulder and gestured first at himself and then at the mountainside. St. Ives nodded as his friend angled away up a rocky defile, climbing slowly and solidly upward. He watched Hasbro disappear among the granite boulders, and for a moment he felt the urge to sit down right there in the dirt and wait for him.

He couldn’t do that, though. There was too much at stake. And there was Alice to think of. Always there was Alice to think of. If revenge was the compelling motive for him now, so what? He had to call upon something to move him up the path; it might as well be raw hatred.

He sidled along carefully, grimly imagining himself following the course of the rock that had plummeted over his head moments ago. Icy dirt crunched underfoot, and the hillside opened up briefly on his right to reveal a wide, steep depression in the rock—a sort of conical hole at the bottom of which lay a black, silent tarn. The water of the tarn brimmed with reflected stars that were washed with the blue-red light of the aurora. It was a scene of unearthly beauty, and it reminded him of the alluring darkness of pure sleep.

Abruptly he jerked himself away and climbed farther up the trail, rounding a sharp bend. He could see high above him the mouth of the smoking crater. Perched on the rim and hauling on the coils of a mechanical bladder was the venomous Dr. Narbondo, the steamy reek of boiling mud swirling about his head and shoulders. Hargreaves capered like a lunatic beside him, dancing from one foot to the other like a man treading on hot pavement.

They were too distant to shoot at, but St. Ives compelled himself to take the pistol out of his waistband anyway. Calmly and with a will, he began to sing “God Save the Queen” in a low voice. It didn’t matter what song—what he needed was a melody and a set of verses with which to sweep his mind clear of rubble. Narbondo worked furiously, looking back over his shoulder, scanning the rocky mountainside. There was nothing for St. Ives to do but step out into the open and rush up the path toward the two of them. It might be futile, exposing himself like that…He sang louder, but the thought that Hargreaves would simply kill him caused him to scramble the words, and for a moment he considered going back down to where Hasbro had cut off into the rocks, maybe following his friend’s trail. But that would be a retreat, and he couldn’t allow that.

He cocked his pistol and stepped forward in a crouch. Hargreaves grappled now with a carpetbag, pulling out unidentifiable bits and pieces of mechanical debris, which he fumbled with, trying to assemble them. His curses reached St. Ives on the wind. Narbondo raged beside him, turning once again to survey the rocks behind and below him. He looked straight down into St. Ives’s face. Despite the distance, his expression was clear in the moonlight; hatred and fear and passion played across his features, and for a moment he stood stock-still, as if he had seen his fate standing there below him.

A pistol shot rang out, echoing away somewhere among the rocks, and Narbondo spun half around, grabbing his shoulder and shouting a curse. He worked his arm up and down as if testing it, and then pushed Hargreaves aside, tearing at the contents of the bag himself and shouting orders. Hargreaves immediately disappeared behind a tumble of rocks, and St. Ives scrambled for cover as the anarchist popped up almost at once to shoot wildly down at him. Another shot followed close on, and for an instant St. Ives saw Hasbro leaping across a granite slope, only to disappear again when Hargreaves spun around and fired at him.

St. Ives stood and darted up the path, breathing heavily in the thin air. There was the sound of another gunshot just as a spatter of granite chips sprayed into his face, nearly blinding him. He blinked and spit, creeping along until he could see Hargreaves above him, looking down. Hargreaves dropped like a stone, then stood up at once and fired again twice, the bullets pinging off the rocks beside St. Ives’s head.

St. Ives yanked himself down, the smell of powdered granite in his nose. He smiled grimly, wiping at his watering eyes, the sudden danger surging over him like a sea wave, washing away his muddled doubts. He stood up to draw Hargreaves’s fire, ducking immediately and hearing two shots, one after another, from Hargreaves and Hasbro both. He stood again, resting his forearm across the cold stone and setting up to fire carefully now. Hargreaves set out at a run, down and across the rocks. But he was too far away and moving too fast, and St. Ives was no kind of marksman. He waited too long, and his man again disappeared.

St. Ives stepped at once out onto the path, half expecting a bullet and half expecting Hasbro to provide covering fire. There sounded two more shots, from roughly the same direction, but St. Ives forced himself to ignore them, intent now on Narbondo, who worked madly, casting futile glances down at him and bellowing for Hargreaves, the roar of the falls drowning his words before they reached St. Ives, who ran straight up the path, leveling his pistol. He hadn’t bothered to reload after the last couple of shots, but somehow it didn’t matter to him. What he wanted now was to put his hands on Narbondo’s throat. He had failed once before; he wouldn’t fail again.

There was a warning shout, though—Hasbro’s voice—and St. Ives turned to see Hargreaves scrambling toward him, ignoring Hasbro, who stood like a statue, his pistol raised and pointed at Hargreaves’s back. Narbondo was oblivious to them all, as if he would cheerfully die rather than give up his loathsome dream. He peered suddenly skyward, though, his forearm thrown across his brow as if to shade his eyes from moonlight. St. Ives followed Narbondo’s gaze, and there, below the moon, dropping past the pale blue wash of the aurora, drifted the dark ovoid silhouette of a descending dirigible.

St. Ives bolted forward, as if the sight of it had brought the world to him once again, had reminded him that he wasn’t a solitary man facing a solitary villain, but that there was such a thing as duty and honor…He heard the crack of Hargreaves’s pistol almost at the same time that the bullet struck him in the shoulder. He cried out and dropped to his knees, his revolver spinning away into the void on the opposite side of the path as he scuttled like a crab down again into the shelter of the rocks.

A shriek followed, and St. Ives looked up to see Hargreaves dancing next to Narbondo now, the two of them shouting and cursing. Hasbro stepped determinedly toward them as Narbondo furiously worked a mechanical detonator. It was too late for him, though, and he knew it. He hadn’t had enough time. St. Ives was full of something like happiness, although it was cold and cheerless, and he stepped out onto the path again, gripping his bleeding shoulder.

Hargreaves raised his hand to shoot at Hasbro. But there was no sound at all, even though the man continued to pull the trigger. He pitched the gun away from him in disgust, picking up the carpetbag as if he would fling it into Hasbro’s face. He turned with it, though, and slammed Narbondo in the back, roaring nonsense at him. Hasbro stood still twenty feet below them, his arm upraised, and shot Hargreaves carefully and steadily.

The anarchist lurched round, teetered for a moment on the edge of the crater, and then toppled off, disappearing into the mouth of the volcano as Narbondo made one last futile grab at the bag clutched in Hargreaves’s flailing hand.

There was an instant when no one moved, all of them waiting, and then a thunderous explosion that rocked the mountainside—the volatile contents of the bag having been detonated by the fires of Mount Hjarstaad. The three men pitched to the ground as the explosion echoed away, replaced by the low roar of rocks tumbling toward the plain below. Hasbro was up at once, stepping toward the crater’s edge, leveling his pistol at Narbondo, who stood still now, hangdog, his head bowed like that of a man defeated at the very moment of success. He raised his hands in resignation.

Then, without so much as a backward glance, he bolted down the footpath toward St. Ives, gathering momentum, running headlong at the surprised scientist. Hasbro spun around and tracked him with the pistol.

“Shoot!” St. Ives shouted, but a shot was out of the question unless he himself backed away, out of the line of fire. He scrambled back down the path toward the bend in the trail as Narbondo leaped along in great springing strides behind him, wild to escape, his face contorted now with fear and wonderment as he hurtled uncontrollably toward St. Ives. The scientist stopped to face him, but saw at once that Narbondo would run him down like an express train.

St. Ives turned and hurried downward, hearing Narbondo’s footsteps slamming along and knowing he would be overtaken in seconds. The path widened just then, but turned sharply at the edge of the cliff, and St. Ives saw below him the waters of the starlit tarn, deadly still in the moonlight. In an instant he took it all in—Narbondo was moving too quickly. He would plummet off the edge of the path where it turned, hurtling into the abyss below. There was no hope for him.

And good riddance, St. Ives thought. But then, almost instinctively, he braced himself against two rocks, and as Narbondo raged past, St. Ives reached out to pull him down. He bulled past like a runaway express, though, and St. Ives, meaning to grab him by the arm, was slammed sideways instead, back into the rocks, managing only to knock Narbondo off-balance. His feet stuttered as he tried to stop himself, and then with a shriek he catapulted forward, away from the abyss, head over heels, caroming against a rock and then somersaulting like a circus acrobat across the steep scree-slippery slope until he plunged into the black waters of the tarn. The reflection of the moon and stars on the surface of the water disintegrated, the bits and pieces dancing wildly. But by the time Hasbro had made his way down to where St. Ives stood staring into the depths of the pool, the surface was lapping itself placid once again.

“He’s gone,” said St. Ives simply.

“Will he float surfaceward, sir?”

“Not necessarily,” replied the scientist. “The fall must have knocked the wind from him. It might have killed him outright. He’ll stay down until he bloats with gasses—until he begins to rot. And the water, I fear, is cold enough to slow the process substantially, perhaps indefinitely. We could wait a bit, just to be certain, but I very much fear that I’ve done too much waiting in my life.”

Hasbro was silent.

“I might have saved him, there at the last,” St. Ives said.

“Very doubtful, sir. I would cheerfully have shot him. And there’d be no use in saving him for the gallows. He wouldn’t escape Newgate Prison a second time.”

“What I wanted was to grab his arm, pull him down. But it seems I gave him a shove instead.”

“And a very propitious shove, to my mind.”

St. Ives looked at him tiredly. “I’m not sure I understand any of it,” he said. “But it’s over now. This part is.” And with that St. Ives nodded at the horizon where glowed a great arc of white fire. As the two men watched, the flaming orb of the comet crept skyward, enormous now, as if it were soaring in to swallow the puny earth at a gulp.

Hasbro nodded quietly. “Shall we fetch their equipment, sir?”

“We’ll want the lot of it,” said St. Ives. “And to all appearances, we’ll want it quickly. We’ve a long and wearisome journey ahead of us before we see the mountains of Peru.” He sighed deeply. His shoulder began suddenly to ache. He turned one last time toward the tarn in which Narbondo had found an icy grave. His confrontation with Narbondo had rushed upon him, the work of a confused second, and had found him utterly unprepared, his actions futile. It almost seemed choreographed by some chaotic higher authority who meant to show him a thing or two about confusion and regret and what most often happened to man’s best-laid plans.

Hasbro stood in silence, waiting, perhaps, for St. Ives to come once again to life. Finally he set off up the path toward the summit, to fetch Narbondo’s apparatus and leaving St. Ives to welcome Jack Owlesby, whose hurried footfalls scuffed up the trail behind them.

London

Bill Kraken leaned against the parapet on Waterloo Bridge and grinned into the Thames. Four pints of Bass Ale had banked and stoked the fires of good cheer within him. Tomorrow would see the return of his companions; tonight would see the ascent of the diminishing comet. It was nearing midnight as he finished reading the last half paragraph in his ruined copy of Ashbless’s Account of London Scientists, happy to note that although the Royal Academy had never publicly recognized the genius of his benefactor, Ashbless had devoted the better half of his book to accounts of St. Ives’s successes and adventures.

Kraken closed and pocketed the book. The adventure of Lord Kelvin’s machine had ended nicely, if strangely, three afternoons past. The mice and snakes that had rained on Leeds like a Biblical plague had mystified the populace, from the unbelieving Lord Kelvin to the man in the street, taking flight in wondering speculation. The newspapers had been full of it. Every reporter with, perhaps, the exception of Beezer had set out to investigate the incident, but the Royal Academy had put the cap on it—had hushed it up, had hauled away the clogged machine in the night to dismantle it in secret.

Poor Lord Kelvin, thought Kraken, shaking his head. The odd sight of the rocketing beasts had rather unnerved him—perhaps more so even than the ruination of his device. And the muck clogging the tube just before the explosion…Kraken giggled. But his success wasn’t entirely a cause for celebration. There were questions of a philosophic nature to be asked, for sure—questions concerning his lordship’s manufactured failure and the sleepless nights of vain speculation that failure would engender, questions of the expendability of dumb animals for the sake of saving mankind. Kraken wasn’t sure he liked either notion, but he liked the idea of a mutant future even less.

These scientists, thought Kraken, there was no telling what sorts of tricks they’d get up to, scampering like so many grinning devils astride an engine, laboring to turn the old earth inside out like a pair of trousers, one of them yanking at a pant leg with a calipers while another filled the pockets with numbers and gunpowder. And here on the horizon, slipping as if by magic into the sky, rose the comet, the stars paling roundabout like lanterns enfeebled by sudden daylight.

Kraken tipped his hat at the sky and set out. He trudged past Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament and climbed into a waiting dogcart, pausing just a moment to look once again over his shoulder at the ascending comet. He took up the reins and shrugged, then reached out to pat the flank of his horse. Success, he thought to himself as he set out at a leisurely canter toward Chingford, is a relative business at best.