The Difference Engine

"Yes, sir?"

"I think it might be a very good idea if you were to keep the parcel in your safe there."

"Of course, sir."

"I believe that the Lambs is nearby, Beadon, the dining-club?"

"Yes, sir. Holborn, sir. A short walk."

The year's first snow began to fall, as he made his way up Chancery Lane, a dry gritty stuff that seemed unlikely to adhere to the paving.

Boots and Becky Dean were nowhere to be seen, which could reliably be taken to mean that they were about their customarily invisible business.

You know well enough how it's done.

And didn't he? How many had been made to vanish, vanish utterly, in London alone? How could one sit among friends at pleasant little di

He'd meant Collins to be the last, absolutely the last; now Betteredge had gone, and at the hands of another agency.

In the begi

In the begi

The Eye. He sensed it now—yes, surely, its all-seeing gaze full upon him as he nodded to the tasseled doorman and entered the marbled vestibule of the Lambs, Andrew Wakefield's dining club.

Brass letter-boxes, a telegraph-booth, an excess of French-polished veneer, all thoroughly modern. He glanced back, through glass doors, to the street. Opposite the Lambs, beyond twin streams of snow-dusted traffic, he glimpsed a solitary figure in a tall derby hat.

A page directed him to the grill-room, which was done in dark oak, with an enormous fireplace topped with a mantel of carved Italian stone. "Laurence Oliphant," he told the tightly jacketed head-waiter, "for Mr. Andrew Wakefield."

A look of unease crossed the man's face. "I'm sorry, sir, but he isn't—"

"Thank you," Oliphant said, "but I believe I see Mr. Wakefield."

With the head-waiter at his heels, Oliphant marched between the tables, diners turning as he passed.

"Andrew," he said, arriving at Wakefield's table, "how very fortunate to find you here."

Wakefield was dining alone. He seemed to experience a temporary difficulty in swallowing.

"Mr. Wakefield, sir," the head-waiter began.

"My friend will be joining me," Wakefield said. "Sit down, please. We're attracting attention."

"Thank you." Oliphant took a seat.

"Will you be dining, sir?" the head-waiter asked.

"No, thank you."

When they were alone, Wakefield sighed loudly. "Damn it all, Oliphant, but didn't I make my terms clear?"

"What exactly is it, Andrew, of which you've become so frightened?"

"It should be fairly obvious."

"Should it?"

"Lord Galton's in league with your bloody Mr. Egremont. He's the great patron of Criminal Anthropometry. Always has been. Their virtual founder. He's Charles Darwin's cousin, Oliphant, and he wields great influence in the House of Lords."

"Yes, and in the Royal Society, and in the Geographical as well. I'm thoroughly familiar with Lord Galton, Andrew. He espouses the systematic breeding of the human species."

Wakefield put down his knife and fork. "Criminal Anthropometry have effectively taken over the Bureau. For all intents and purposes, the Central Statistics Bureau is now under Egremont's control."

Oliphant watched as Wakefield's upper teeth began to worry at his lower-lip.

"I've just come from Fleet Street," Oliphant said. "The level of violence in this society"—and he drew the Ballester-Molina from within his coat—"or rather, I should say, the level of unacknowledged violence, has become remarkable, don't you think, Andrew?" He placed the revolver on the linen between them. "Take this pistol as an example. All too readily obtainable, I'm told. It is of Franco-Mexican manufacture, though the invention of Spaniards. Certain of its internal parts, I am informed, springs and whatnot, are actually British, available on the open market. It becomes rather difficult, then, to say where a weapon like this comes from. Emblematic of something in our current situation, don't you think?"

Wakefield had gone quite white.

"But I seem to have upset you, Andrew. I'm sorry."

"They'll erase us," Wakefield said. "We'll cease to exist. There'll be nothing left, nothing to prove either of us ever lived. Not a check-stub, not a mortgage in a City bank, nothing whatever."

"Exactly what I'm on about, Andrew."

"Don't take that moral tone with me, sir," Wakefield said. "Your lot began it, Oliphant—the disappearances, the files gone missing, the names expunged, numbers lost, histories edited to suit specific ends… No, don't take that tone with me. "

Oliphant could think of nothing to say. He rose, leaving the pistol on the table-cloth, and left the grill-room without looking back.

"Pardon me," he said, in the marbled vestibule, to a burgundy-jacketed bellman who was sifting cigar-ends from a sand-filled marble um, "but could you please direct me to the office of the club steward?"

"You bet," the bellman said, or some similar bit of American dialect, and led Oliphant smartly away, down a corridor lined with mirrors and rubber-plants.

Fifty-five minutes later, having toured the club's premises at some length, having been shown a photographic album of the Lambs' a

This proved to be a scullery-door which opened on exactly the sort of dank and narrow passage he had hoped for.

Within a quarter-of-an-hour, he stood at the public bar of a crowded house in Bedford Road, reviewing the text of the telegram that one Sybil Gerard had once dispatched to Mr. Charles Egremont, M.P., of Belgravia.

"Lost both me boys o' sickness in the Crimea, squire, an' i

Oliphant folded the sheet of foolscap into his cigar-case. He watched his dim reflection in the polished zinc of the bar. He looked at his empty tumbler. He looked up at the woman, a raddled hairidan in rags gone a color that had no name, her cheeks roseate with gin-blossoms under a patina of grime.

"No," he said, "that tragedy is not mine."

"Me Roger it was," she said, " 'n' Tommy-lad too. An' not a rag come 'ome, squire—not a bloody rag… "

He handed her a coin. She thanked him, mumbling, and retreated.

He seemed to have thoroughly slipped the traces for the moment. He was entirely alone. It was time to find a cab.

In the dim, high hollow of the great station a thousand voices seemed to mingle, the constituent elements of language reduced to the aural equivalent of fog, homogeneous and impenetrable.

Oliphant went about his business below at a measured and deliberate pace, purchasing a first-class railway ticket to Dover, reserved, for the ten o'clock evening-express. The ticket-clerk seated Oliphant's National Credit plate in the machine and cranked hard on the lever.

"There you are, sir. Reserved in your name."

Thanking the clerk, Oliphant made his way to a second wicket, where he again produced his plate. "I wish to book a cabinette on the morning mail-boat to Ostend." Apparently as an afterthought, as he was putting the boat-tickets and his National Credit plate into his note-case, he requested a second-class ticket on the midnight boat to Calais.

"Would that be this evening, sir?"

"Yes."

"That would be the Bessemer, sir. On National Credit, sir?"

Oliphant paid for the ticket to Calais with pound-notes from Mr. Beadon's safe.

Ten till nine, by his father's gold hunter.