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“Such as the approaching A-Bomb, for instance?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Ah-ha! That's got it!”
Wilde had been fiddling with something behind the big wooden unit. Now the whole thing slid smoothly aside, revealing the entrance to a passage. He turned and gri
“I remember him very clearly, and I agree.”
“After you wangled me the job on the poor old Orpheus, Lawless would never settle for another cabin boy. He sponsored my training, helped me rise through the ranks, and, before you know it, I was given captaincy of HMA Audacious.A lovely vessel, so she was, but the war had broken out by then and she was put to fiendish use. I soon found that I was losing myself in the mesmeric brutality of battle. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it's looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. It took me a few years, I must confess, to realise that vulgarity.”
He indicated that Burton should follow and disappeared into the secret passage.
“So I had myself drummed out of the Air Force.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Through what they call ‘conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman.’ I inspired the wrath of a certain Colonel Queensberry, and he rather gleefully put his proverbial boot to my backside. It caused a bit of a stir at the time, I can tell you.”
“And afterward you became a newspaper man?”
“Aye, I did that-going back to my roots, as you might say-and I wound up in Tabora.”
The passage made a sharp turn to the right. As they continued on, Burton looked at the small lights that, strung along a long wire, gave illumination. “How do these work?” he asked, pointing at one.
“Electricity.”
“Ah! Like I saw on the Brita
“Good Lord!” Wilde cried out. “Brunel! I haven't thought of him in years! What a genius he was!”
“And for all his faults, loved by the public,” Burton noted.
“To be sure! To be sure! Ah, what a delight it must be to be a Technologist! So much more romantic than being the editor of a newspaper! I can assure you that popularity is the one insult I have never suffered. But to answer your question: yes, he mastered electricity-in 1863, as it happens.”
They hurried on, with Wilde panting and puffing as he propelled his bulk forward.
“Where are we going, Quips?”
“All in good time, Captain.”
Burton began to wonder if the tu
“So the mediums,” he said. “They were killed when London fell?”
“So they were. And we had no more of them until 1907, when Crowley came to the fore. In recent years he's focused his talents on defending this city, which is why the Germans have never managed to conquer it.”
“Surely, then, he should be regarded as a hero? Why is it that no one seems to have a good word to say of him?”
Wilde shrugged. “That's a difficult one. There's just something about him. He's sinister. People suspect that he has some sort of hidden agenda. Here we are.”
They'd reached a door. Wilde knocked on it, the same arrhythmic sequence Wells had used earlier. It was opened by a seven-foot-tall Askari-obviously of the Masai race-who whispered, “You'll have to be quick. There's some sort of flap on. They're going to move the prisoner.”
Wilde muttered an acknowledgement. He and Burton stepped into what appeared to be a records room, followed the soldier out of it into a brightly lit corridor, and ran a short distance along it until they came to a cell door. However, when it was unlocked and opened, the room behind it proved to be not a cell at all but a very large and luxurious chamber, decorated in the English style, with Jacobean furniture and paintings on its papered walls.
In its middle, there was a metal frame with a wizened little man-naked but for a cloth wrapped around his loins-suspended upright inside it. He was held in place by thin metal cables that appeared to have been bolted straight through his parchment-like skin into the bones beneath. His flesh was a network of long surgical scars and he was horribly contorted, his arms and legs twisted out of shape, their joints swollen and gnarled, and his spine curved u
Large glass bulbs also hung from the frame, and were co
Burton saw all this in a single glance, then his eyes rested on the man's face and he couldn't look away.
It was Palmerston.
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, was bald, and the skin of his face was stretched so tightly that it rendered him almost featureless. But despite the eyes being mere slits, the nose a jagged hole, and the mouth a horribly wide frog-like gash; despite that the ears had been replaced by two brass forward-pointing hearing trumpets, riveted directly into the sides of his skull; despite all this, it was plainly Palmerston.
The old man's eyes glittered as he watched his visitors enter.
Wilde closed the door and stepped to one side of it. He gently pushed Burton forward. The king's agent approached and stopped in front of the man who'd once been prime minister. He tried to think of something to say, but all that came out was: “Hello.”
Just above Palmerston's head, an accordion-like apparatus suddenly jerked then expanded with a wheeze. It gave a number of rapid clicks, expelled a puff of steam, then contracted and emitted a sound like a gurgling drain. Words bubbled out of it.
“You filthy traitorous bastard!”
Burton recoiled in shock. “What?”
“You backstabbing quisling!”
The explorer turned to Wilde. “Did you bring me here to be maligned?”
“Please allow him a moment to get it out of his system, Captain. It's been pent up for half a century.”
“Prussian spy! Treasonous snake! You dirty collaborator!”
“I have no idea what he's talking about. Is he sane?”
“In a ma
“How old is he?
“A hundred and thirty-four.”
“You never bloody told me!” Palmerston gurgled.
“Have you finally run out of insults, Pam?” Burton asked.
“Lord Palmerston, you insolent cur! You never told me!”
“Told you what?”
The misshapen figure squirmed and stretched spasmodically.
Wilde said, “Calm yourself, please, Lord Palmerston. We don't have time for tantrums.”
The ex-prime minister went limp. He glared at Burton with sulphurous hatred. The accordion-thing shook and rattled and groaned, expanded, blew out more steam, and squeezed shut.
“I sent you to Africa to find the Eye of Naga. You succeeded in your mission but you neglected to report that, in the course of retrieving it, you'd visited the future!”
“Sir,” Burton replied. “You must understand: you're berating me for something that, from my point of view, I haven't done yet.”
“You saw this damned war. You saw that the Germans were ru
“No, I was not.”
“Then why?”
“How can I possibly account for decisions I haven't yet made?”
“Traitor!”
Burton looked at Oscar Wilde and gave a helpless shrug.
Wilde stepped forward. “Gentlemen, let us get straight to the point. Captain, if I might explain-Lord Palmerston is blamed by the majority of Britishers for the woeful position we find ourselves in.”