“I don’t follow you,” said he. “The simile conveys no meaning to my mind.”
“It’s a general purpose word that I use for comparison. Works virtually anywhere.”
“Yes,” said he. “Well. Kraken advanced the hypothesis that these begonias were somehow connected to the black hole, and that energy, or something quite like it, was jolly well sailing through the hole from our universe into theirs.”
“A bleed-off, would you call it?”
“Exactly.”
“And that’s why the trees are big as legends and growing fruit like popping corn.” It only has to snow once before Jack Owlesby gets the drift, as my old mother used to say, and I could see in an instant what these filthy alien interlopers were up to and why they’d handed me a fizz bomb for my troubles.
“There you have it,” said St. Ives, shaking snuff onto the edge of his thumb.
“These aliens are drawing off the essential humors,” said I, by way of clarification.
“Filching our essences,” agreed the Professor. “And to bring up their plans with a round turn, I slipped an expurgated edition into the Museum and told old Dr. Lester that he was to release it only to you. The aliens, I found, tried to obtain the thing no less than eight times. Lester supposed it was the same whey-faced man dressed like lunacy each time. In his final attempt he was dressed as a red Indian, feathers protruding from his hat at a dozen angles and painted up like a grandee and wearing a pair of golden Arab slippers with the toes curled back in a point. Lester threatened to set the constable on him, and he fled through a rear exit and never made another attempt.”
“Who first put them on to Birdlip?”
“Kraken’s son, mad Bill.”
“Their agent?”
“I’m afraid so, poor devil. No fault of his own, though. They worked on his mind, what there was of it.”
“Ah,” I said sadly. “That explains the Fauntleroy suit and the wig. It was their idea.”
“Apparently so, though Lord knows why. The note was my own. I knew that you’d fetch the book from Lester, that the aliens would steal it and discover the false clue: that we blast off tomorrow, on the 24th.”
“The night of the full moon.”
“Just so. Actually,” he said, grinning like a grampus, “we blast off tonight.” He checked his pocket watch. “In an hour and a half exactly.”
With that the Professor tucked the unexpurgated copy of Birdlip’s manuscript into his coat and busied himself with a crate of tinned foods and a cask of ship’s biscuit. When we returned to the tower we found Hasbro watering yew sproutlets in the greenhouse on the second level. I was sharp enough from the outset to realize that these shrubs and ferns and such would provide us with the necessary oxygen. St. Ives’s craft was turned out like a ship of the line.
This is the part of the adventure where the minutes drag past like starfish, which, if you follow me, have enough legs to hie along like anything, but instead can do nothing but creep. Night had fallen an hour before, and the weather was exceptional — nothing between us and the hovering stars but vacant space, not even a cloud.
We popped right to it, sealing hatches, zipping up atmosphere bulwarks, setting gyros and elasto-turbans, battening hatches, and all that sort of thing. I was smitten by a sense of adventure, and had there been a bowline or a capstan bar I would have hauled upon it with the heartiest sort of heave-ho, the consummate deckhand. By half past eight we were strapped into cushioned loungettes in the prow. Hasbro unshipped the deadlights and found his way back to his own loungette, all of us silent as we gazed out through the thick glass of the portholes through the top of Chingford Tower, which was unlidded, roofless, open to the elements so as to reveal a circle of sky as through the lens of a telescope.
The Professor jabbed buttons, nodded meaningfully to Hasbro and I, and then reached across and heaved on a bloody great anti-something-or-other crank with silver wires sprouting from it like tentacles. There was a wild crash and clatter and a cacophonous whir reminiscent of a scourge of locusts setting up for a concert. In that moment there was a muffled explosion that brought the Professor up short. “What…?” he began to ask, but the entire tower quivered like a column of aspic, and we jolly well ripped out through the roofless roof like a comet trailing a universe of sparks.
I’ll admit that I myself was smug in my ignorance, and not only about our having given the pig men the slip. I had a hand, you see, in making earth safe from their depredations: we were more than a match for a gaggle of ill- dressed loonies. I could visualize them leaping to their feet about now, from where they were hunkered down in Chingford Forest, punching each other on the shoulder, leaping up and running hatless onto the meadow. Imagine my surprise when that’s precisely what I
Odd thing, spaceships, they have these gyro gizmos that make a chap feel right side up in spite of the fact that he’s not — saves him a good deal of uneasiness, I suppose. It took a moment, then, for me to understand what had happened. The aliens, apparently, had chucked in one of their fizz bombs just as we launched our craft, and the concussion in the base of the tower had cannoned us upward, setting the bloody ship mad. Dials were spinning like whirligigs, and St. Ives was a veritable octopus, arms flailing hither and yon in an effort to stabilize our madcap flight.
The ship capered along haywire above the green, and the pig men, dressed for a masquerade, ran in a wild rout in our wake, carrying lighted torches. St. Ives and Hasbro enlivened the necessary retros and stabilizers, and we banked into one last side-crushing loop before bowling off westward toward the common. Pig men gave way to costumed Boy Scouts about then, several hundred of the blighters on the evening march, who broke and ran like mice as we flew overhead, all shot up with flame and whizzing a universe of parti-colored sparks. We were out of sight quickly enough after setting aflame several score of tents, and (here I only speculate from newspaper accounts) the Scouts were regrouping when from over the rise, led by a gigantic alien dressed as a cartoon devil, came the pig men, shouting unfathomable drivel and brandishing torches.
The rest of the Chingford Common fracas is history, and a dozen wild and equally unlikely stories have been offered by unfortunate witnesses, so I won’t say more about it except that none of those stories holds a candle to the truth, which, the philosopher tells us, is often the case. As for the ship, we managed to yank it up into the proper trajectory and, through the skills of science and the will of God, raced outward through the void toward the black hole that yawned like a tunnel of infamy off the port side of Mars.
In truth, there’s not much more to say — not yet anyway. We whizzed along for six days before it occurred to me to ask the Professor just how long we’d be engaged in our modest heroics. He was evasive. That is to say, he hinted that the mission might be a protracted one indeed, and that the business of shutting a door sometimes requires stepping through that door and slamming it firmly shut behind one — a notion that in my weakness I understood to have been revealed to me in what might be called an untimely fashion, if you follow me.
On the thirteenth day, late in the long and lightless afternoon, with Earth in our wake reduced to a speck of flame in the vast heavens, we saw the orbicular shadow of what a futuristic poet might, in his paroxysms of language, call something slightly more grand than a simple black hole: an ebony hiatus, perhaps, the looming mouth of a dark destiny encircled by a whirling vaporous darkness and shot through with rainbow lights as if a thousand twirling prisms danced above the abyss.
“There she blows,” Hasbro muttered helpfully, mixing grog in a chemical beaker.
“Still a good way off,” I responded, awestruck by the sight and helping myself to the contents of the beaker.
“Its appearance is deceptive,” said the Professor, winking at me. “It looks as if it’s a thousand miles across from this distant perspective, when actually it’s a tiny thing, not much broader, shall we say, than the base of this ship, although all talk of breadth is purely conceptual. You see, Jack, there are walls.”
“I was sure there were!” I shouted, slightly illuminated by the grog. And I told him about the dream and old Sidcup Catford and the rock wall. The Professor saw more merit in my metaphoric dreaming than I had anticipated. Space, it turns out, is just that: a void peopled by an occasional star or a family or two of meteorites or a misanthropic comet. Our mistake is to suppose that life exists out among the stars that we discern in the night sky. It’s out there, all right, but behind a wall, through a door, as it were, a door through which Birdlip and Kraken had plunged in their own star vehicle, unwittingly leaving it open behind them not unlike the door of the proverbial barn.
