The Difference Engine

Clutching his new valise with one hand, the overhead straps with another, Mallory inched his way along the crowded aisle of the omnibus to the rattling exit-platform. When the driver slowed for a filthy tarmac-wagon. Mallory jumped for the curb.

Despite his best efforts, Mallory had boarded the wrong 'bus. Or perhaps he had ridden too far on the correct vehicle, well past his destination, while engrossed in the latest number of the Westminster Review. He'd purchased the magazine because it carried an article of Oliphant's, a witty post-mortem on the conduct of the Crimean War. Oliphant, it developed, was something of an expert on the Crimean region, having published his The Russian Shores of the Black Sea a full year prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The book detailed a jolly but quite extensive Crimean holiday which Oliphant had undertaken. To Mallory's newly alerted eye, Oliphant's latest article bristled with sly insinuation.

A street-arab whipped with a broom of twigs at the pavement before Mallory's feet. The boy glanced up, puzzled. "Pardon, guv?" Mallory realized with an unhappy start that he had been talking to himself, standing there in rapt abstraction, muttering aloud over Oliphant's deviousness. The boy, grasping at Mallory's attention, did a back-somersault. Mallory tossed him tuppence, turned at random, and walked away, shortly discovering himself in Leicester Square, its gravel walks and formal gardens an excellent place to be robbed or ambushed. Especially at night, for the streets about featured theatres, pantos, and magic-lantern houses.

Crossing Whitcomb, then Oxenden, he found himself in Haymarket, strange in the broad summer daylight, its raucous whores absent now and sleeping. He walked the length of it, for curiosity's sake. It looked very different by day, shabby and tired of itself. At length, noting Mallory's pace, a pimp approached him, offering a packet of French-letters, sure armor against the lady's-fever.

Mallory bought them, dropping the packet into his valise.

Turning left, he marched into the chuffing racket of busy Pall Mall, the wide macadam lined by the black iron palings of exclusive clubs, their marbled fronts set well back from the street-jostle. Off Pall Mall, at the far end of Waterloo Place, stood the Duke of York's memorial. The Grand Old Duke of York, Who Had Ten Thousand Men, was a distant soot-blackened effigy now, his rotund column dwarfed by the steel-spired headquarters of the Royal Society.

Mallory had his bearings now. He tramped the elevated pedestrian-bridge, over Pall Mall, while below him sweating kerchief-headed navvies ripped at the intersection with a banging steel-armed excavator. They were preparing the foundation of a new monument, he saw, doubtless to the glory of the Crimean victory. He strode up Regent Street to the Circus, where the crowd poured endlessly forth from the underground's sooty marble exits. He allowed himself to be swept into swift currents of humanity.

There was a potent stench here, a cloacal reek, like burning vinegar, and for a moment Mallory imagined that this miasma emanated from the crowd itself, from the flapping cra

It was an imposing, sturdy, fortress-like edifice; Mallory thought it much like the mind of its Curator. He trotted up the steps into a welcome stony chill. Signing the leather-bound visitor's book with a flourish, he strode on, into the vast central hall, its walls lined with shining glass-fronted cabinets of rich mahogany. Light poured down from the great cupola of steel and glass, where a lone cleaner dangled now in his shackled harness, polishing one pane after another in what Mallory supposed would amount to an unending rota.

On the Museum's ground floor were displayed the Vertebrata, along with various pertinent illustrations of the marvels of stratigraphical geology. Above, in a railed and pillared gallery, were a series of smaller cabinets containing the Invertebrata. The day's crowd was of gratifying size, with surprising numbers of women and children, including an entire uniformed class of scruffy, working-class school-boys from some Government academy. They studied the cabinets with grave attention, aided by red-jacketed guides.

Mallory ducked through a tall, unmarked door and down a hall flanked by locked storerooms. At the hall's end, a single magisterial voice was audible through the closed door of the Curator's office. Mallory knocked, then listened, smiling, as the voice completed a particularly orotund rhetorical period. "Enter," rang the voice of the Curator. Mallory stepped inside as Thomas Henry Huxley rose to greet him. They shook hands. Huxley had been dictating to his secretary, a bespectacled young man with the look of an ambitious graduate student. "That will be all for now, Harris," Huxley said. "Send in Mr. Reeks, please, with his sketches of the Brontosaurus."

The secretary tucked his penciled notes into a leather folio and left, with a bow to Mallory.

"How've you been, Ned?" Huxley looked Mallory up and down, with the narrow-set, pitilessly observant eyes that had discovered "Huxley's Layer" in the root of the human hair. "You look very well indeed. One might even say splendid."

"Had a bit of luck," Mallory said gruffly.

To Mallory's surprise, he saw a small, fair-haired boy, neatly dressed in a flat-collared suit and knee-breeches, emerge from behind Huxley's heaped desk. "And who is this?" Mallory said.

"Futurity," Huxley quipped, bending to pick up the child. "My son, Noel, come to help his father today. Say how-do-you-do to Dr. Mallory, son."

"How do you do, Mr. Mellowy?" the boy piped.

"Doctor Mallory," Huxley corrected gently.

Noel's eyes widened. "Are you a medical doctor, Mr. Mellowy?" The thought clearly alarmed him.

"Why, you could scarcely walk when last we met. Master Noel," Mallory boomed heartily. "And here you are today, quite the little gentleman." He knew that Huxley doted on the child. "How's your baby brother, then?"

"He has a sister now as well," Huxley a

"You must be happy at that, Master Noel!"

The little boy smiled briefly, with guarded politeness. He hopped up into his father's chair. Mallory set his valise atop a bookcase, which contained a morocco-bound set of the works of Cuvier in the original. "I have an item that may interest you, Thomas," he said, opening his valise. "A gift for you from the Cheye

"I hope this isn't one of those ethnographical curios," Huxley said, smiling, as he parted the string neatly with a paper-knife. "I can't abide those wretched beads and what-not… "

The paper held six shriveled brown wafers, the size of half-crowns.

"A helpful bequest to you from a Cheye

"Rather like our Anglican bishops, are they?" Huxley smiled, holding one of the leathery objects to the light. "Dried vegetable matter. A cactus?"

"I would think so."

"Joseph Hooker of Kew could tell us."

"This witch-doctor chap had a fair grasp of the purpose of our expedition. He fancied that we meant to re-vivify the dead monster, here in England. He said that these wafers would enable you to journey far, Thomas, and fetch back the creature's soul."