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“-You'll find a way-”
“-Is there shooting to be done? — ”
“-I rather suppose there is! — ”
“-Pull the trigger! — ”
“-The source! — ”
The bands of light joined into one blazing expanse. It shot upward in front of him. Burton gazed at it and became aware that it was falling water. He looked up and saw a rainbow.
The hansom cab jerked over a pothole, shaking his senses back into him.
He cried out: “Step back! The source needs pruning, hard against the stem! Pull the trigger!”
And, all of a sudden, he knew exactly what had to be done.
The hatch in the roof of the cab opened and the driver looked in.
“Did you say somethin', sir?”
“Yes. Make a detour to the nearest post office, would you?”
“Certainly, sir. We're just comin' up on Broad Street. There's one there.”
A few minutes later, Burton paid for two parakeet messages. He sent the first bird to Commander Krishnamurthy: “Maneesh, hurry to my place and pick up the rifle next to the fireplace in my study. Bring it to Battersea Power Station. Utmost emergency. Great haste, please.”
The second parakeet was sent to Mrs. Angell to alert her to the commander's mission. It went on: “Mrs. Angell, I have an unusual job for you. You must do it at once, without hesitation or protest. Please remove from my study all my casebooks, journals, reports, and personal papers. Take them from the desks, from the drawers, and from the shelves nearest the window. Carry them into the backyard and make a bonfire of them. Do not leave a single one unburned. This is of crucial importance. Destroy them all, and do it at once.”
The king's agent returned to the cab and, thirty minutes later, it delivered him to his destination.
The glaring lights of the Technologist headquarters were turning the thick fog around it into a swirling soup of glowing particles, here a sickening yellow, there a putrid orange, in many places a deep hellish red. Burton picked his way through the murk to the front entrance, hailed a guard, and was escorted to the main hall.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel appeared from amid buzzing machinery and clanked over to greet him.
“An unexpected pleasure, Sir Richard. It's been more than a year.”
“You've corrected your speech defect, Isambard.”
“Some considerable time ago. I'm afraid young Swinburne will be disappointed.”
“Swinburne is dead,” Burton said flatly.
“Dead?”
“Yes. Well, in a ma
“I'm not sure what you mean, but I am truly sorry. What happened?”
Burton glanced at a nearby workbench around which a group of Technologists was gathered.
“May we speak in private?”
Brunel expelled a puff of vapour. The piston-like device on the shoulder of his barrel-shaped body paused in its pumping, then continued. The bellows on the other side creaked up and down insistently.
“Follow,” he piped.
Burton trailed after the Steam Man, across the vast floor to where two of the huge Worm machines were parked. The explorer marvelled at the size of the burrowing vehicles-and, right there, the main area of difficulty in the scheme that had formed in the back of his mind found its solution.
Brunel reached out with a mechanical arm and opened a big hatch in the side of one of the Worms. He stepped in, gestured for Burton to follow, and pulled the doorway down behind the explorer. Lights came on automatically. The steam man hissed into a squat.
Burton pulled Speke's letter from his pocked and, wordlessly, handed it to the engineer. Brunel held it up with a metal pincer. It wasn't evident what part of his life-maintaining contraption functioned as eyes but something obviously did, and moments later he lowered the paper and said: “What does the alteration of your appearance signify? Does Algernon Swinburne's death relate to it?”
“I was sent through time to the year 1914, Isambard. What for John Speke was a split second lasted four years for me. Algy was killed in Africa last year, but was present, albeit in a different form, in the future I visited.”
“A different form?”
Burton sat on a leather-upholstered chair and, for the final time, told the full story.
When he finished, the Steam Man raised the letter again.
“Hmm,” he said. “This pyramid construction appears to have the elements of a battery. You say there were other structures of alternating layers in the temple?”
“Yes.”
“And a great deal of quartz?”
“Along with other crystals and gemstones, yes-an almost inconceivable amount.”
“Intriguing. My hypothesis, then, is that the entire temple was constructed to generate and store piezoelectricity.”
“Piezoelectricity?”
“A very recent discovery, Sir Richard. Or so I thought. I now learn that it was, in fact, employed in ancient times!”
“But what is it?”
“Put simply, it is electrical power generated by certain substances, crystals especially, when they are distorted by pressure.”
“Ah. And the temple-”
“Has the weight of a fractured mountain on top of it. That, Sir Richard, is a lot of power. Having it hit you in the head should have been enough to burn you to a cinder in an instant. Yet, instead, it projected you through time.”
“It passed through Herbert Spencer-or rather through the priest K'k'thyima-first.”
“It did. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it passed through the seven stones of the Cambodian Eye. It seems to me that the intelligence in those stones was somehow able to control the force, and, I should think, set the coordinates for your destination in time.”
“Good,” Burton responded.
“Good, Sir Richard?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you've confirmed my own suspicions on the matter. If we are correct, my plan has, perhaps, some small chance of succeeding.”
“You have a plan?”
“Of sorts.”
“Then I think perhaps I had better hear it.”
At four-thirty in the morning, a strong vibration shook the floor of the rooms beneath the Tower of London. It rapidly increased in intensity and a loud rumbling shocked the secret institution's staff out of their beds.
People, wrapped in dressing gowns, ran into the main hallway.
“Earthquake!” someone shouted.
Damien Burke, in a long nightshirt, nightcap, and slippers, yelled: “Up the stairs! Now! Everybody out!”
A guard unlocked the entrance door and the staff quickly filed out.
The floor cracked. A siren started to wail.
Gregory Hare, also in his sleeping clothes, pointed to a lone figure at the other end of the hallway-a woman, white-haired and fully dressed.
“Mr. Burke!” he called.
Burke followed his companion's pointing finger and saw the woman.
“Countess Sabina!” he shouted. “You must leave at once!”
The rumbling grew into a roar.
“I think not!” she mouthed, her voice lost in the din.
The floor in the middle of the hallway bulged and heaved. Dust erupted and filled the air as a spi
“Mr. Burke! Mr. Burke!” Hare bellowed, but the other man could hear nothing but the cacophonous machine.
The drill buried itself deeper and deeper into the roof, and, as it did so, the main body of the tu
Burke groped for Hare's arm, clutched it, put his mouth against the other man's ear, and yelled: “Find your way to the armoury. Bring weapons!”