There were gyros to ameliorate and fluxion sponges to douse, and all of it accomplished within the space of thirty- eight seconds, with no margin of error, lest, as Shakespeare himself was wont to say, we tread untimely the fields of Elysium, pig men be damned. It was an unforgiving machine that could dash out our brains on the instant, and so my earthbound familiarity with the controls was vital if I were to be midshipman among the stars.
Late in the afternoon I was tolerably familiar with endless buttons and dials and switches, and I moved about the cork floor in my stocking feet with something like confidence. The cork that made up the immense undercarriage of the ship, and which must have cost Spain half her annual production, was apparently the key to mass and buoyancy, the two great levelers of an air-going craft just as they were at sea. Stone ships, as the Professor put it, sink like the popular phrase. Long past noon, and with a growing peckishness, I found myself quite alone, left to batten down the hatches before popping over to the manor for a meat pie and a pint. The Professor and Hasbro had gone thither a half hour past. I stood now on the small iron quarterdeck, I guess you would call it, and spied through the tower window a man on the meadow, a stout man, with a suspicious creeping gait, who must have been hidden from view of the manor by the tower itself.
I had the uncanny notion that I had seen the man before, and of course I had, for he could have been a twin of the man who had stopped on the lawn last night to parlay with Hasbro’s bullet. But that man by now had almost certainly been reduced to the sum of his parts. This one, like his fellows, possessed an uncannily rolled up face and tiny eyes, and he walked along on the tips of his toes like a chap might walk over hot sand. He was dressed in lederhosen in the manner of a comical German, and he carried a bamboo whangee, as if this unlikely stick would lend him the innocent air of a man on a walking tour. On his head was an oversized hat of the variety commonly called a poma, with a rounded point at its crown and with a turned up brim. Smoke seemed to rise from his ears.
I shouted at him through the tower window: “What ho the masquerade!” I called out wittily, at which the man leapt into the air, looking around with a caught-in-the-act countenance. In a nonce he had pulled off his cap, removing from the smoking interior a black fizz bomb the size of a twelve pounder cannonball. Even in the afternoon sunlight the fuse was visibly sparking. He turned and ran even as he pitched the bomb at the tower, fleeing away in mincing steps toward Epping Forest. He had a tolerably good aim, I’ll give him that, for the black orb shattered the glass of one of the lower windows and clunked down onto the floor.
“Here’s a jolly filthy mess,” I said to myself, clambering downwards. I’ll admit that my mind contemplated the open door, through which I was tempted to flee, but there’s something in a man that doesn’t love a bomb, and it was that which inclined me to risk everything on the chance of pinching out the fuse. I went for it like billy-o, scooping the thing up and, casting danger to Aeolus and his kin, attempted to smother the sputtering flame. It was no go. The fuse would stay lit despite my antics. And a fine fool I must have looked, juggling the bomb like a hot potato, dancing about on my toes, when I heard a voice shout, “Throw it away, sir! Out the door with it!” And without a second thought I did just that — pitched it through the open door, out onto the meadow, where it rolled like a game of nine-pins down the hill toward the forest, gathering speed, bouncing and hopping toward the very place where the pig man had taken shelter.
Hasbro entered the tower. “I trust you’re unharmed, sir?” he asked.
“Quite,” I told him, although in truth my fingertips were singed from my unsuccessful efforts with the flaming wick.
“Then I suggest that we ascend to the upper reaches, sir, so that we might have the advantage of elevation.”
Bounding up the stairs again was the work of a moment, and we had no sooner poked our heads through the porthole on the second balcony when a whopping great bang, a puff of black soot, and a regular bingo of fine orange spark and flame whooshed up from the forest. A cascade of tree limbs, leaves, and dirt rained roundabout for a time until the air over the wood was empty but for suspended dust, a bit of curling smoke, and the pig man’s hat turning end over end, buoyed for a moment on the recently charged atmosphere before falling groundward.
We watched for movement in the fringe of the trees, but there was nothing, only the still-settling dust. The Professor appeared on the veranda and waved to us. We made our way down the stairs again and out onto the meadow, joining him. “Jolly stupid chaps, aliens,” I muttered as the three of us approached the woods.
“Their powers of observation are singularly weak,” said the Professor. “If only their explosive devices were equally inadequate, we might almost find the creatures amusing.”
“That chap with the bomb might have been the dead man on the lawn. Absolute likeness. Why do they all look so frightfully piggish?”
“It has been observed,” said Hasbro, “that to the Asian gentleman all white Europeans look quite moderately alike. This is a similar phenomenon, I believe.”
“Perhaps even more so,” I said, “these being space aliens.”
“Entirely within the sphere of the possible, sir.”
“We’re dealing with an entire race of pig men.”
“So it would seem,” the Professor said. “Pig men down to the ground.”
Just inside the line of trees we found a fine crater blown into the earth, but there was no sign of the alien, no hooves or sow’s ears or soused pig’s face. The singed hat lay in the crater, as if perhaps he had lost it as he fled.
“I have a hunch,” St. Ives said, “that these aliens have a base right here in Epping Forest, perhaps even a spacecraft, hidden in the woods.”
“Let’s flush the buggers out,” I said. “Ferret them out like stoats. Stoat them out like ferrets. They seem a stupid enough bunch.”
“Perhaps too stupid.” The Professor looked thoughtful. “Rather like dealing with a dozen escaped loonies from Chigwell Hatch. Impossible to read them.”
“You’ve got a point there,” I said. In the heat of the recent victory, however, I was fired up, and determined to be on the offensive for once. “But we can’t simply allow them to storm in waving fizz bombs whenever they feel up to it. After all, there might be dozens of them.”
“I doubt it, sir, if you’ll pardon a word or two,” Hasbro put in. “If there were a quantity of them, they could have overpowered us easily. They are wary, I believe, because there are so few of them.”
“Quite so,” responded St. Ives. “And, more to the point, we’ve really little to fear from the handful we suppose are in the woods, as long, that is, as we stay alert. I believe it was Addison who said something about leaping over single foes to attack entire armies, and that, in fact, is just the point. When one’s roof leaks, one doesn’t merely place a bucket beneath the drip. One climbs atop the roof and jolly well plugs the hole. Do you follow me?”
I said that I did, and we left Hasbro standing guard with his elephant gun and a brass bell to ring if he needed reinforcements. The Professor and I returned to the manor. We were to sail at dusk — blast off, I should say — and we spent the remainder of the afternoon loading supplies and closing up shop. Birdlip’s manuscript caught my eye as I was hauling beakers of water, and I realized that the succulents and begonias were still a mystery to me. I picked the thing up and waved it at St. Ives. “About the manuscript,” I began, but the Professor interrupted me with his inscrutable smile.
“Ah, yes,” said he. “The false clue.”
“Quite,” said I, “but why? Why slip the pig men a worthless book?”
“Birdlip’s manuscript, my dear Owlesby, refers to certain plants — begonias, if you will, of outstanding girth, large as a man’s head, veritable trees. They shimmered, according to Birdlip and Kraken, and were surrounded by a halo, an aura of roseate darkness that suggested the black hole through which the two scientists had made an entrance into the universe where they had very much found themselves. These begonias appeared to be parasitical, attached as they were to the immense tangerine trees of which I have already spoken.”
“Immense?”
“Quite. Fully as large as the greater Norwegian alder, which, I needn’t add, is quite the largest tree on the globe, although it’s worthless for anything but firewood and the carving of figureheads. But do you know what the corker was?”
“I’m ashamed to say I do not.”
“Tangerines were sprouting and growing on the trees like…”
The Professor groped for a word.
“Like banshees,” I said helpfully.
