He knew, in a sudden rush, what bullet it was imbedded in the book. It was a miracle, the unmistakable finger of God. His peapot was gone along with his livelihood. He was sick of peapots anyway. He’d rather go back to hawking squids. If you were beaten in the head with a squid it didn’t amount to so very much.
He was startled by a noise from somewhere else in the house. Through a half-open door he could see a second room, aglow with gaslight. A shadow appeared and disappeared on the wall, as if someone had stood up, perhaps from a chair, had gestured widely, and had sat back down or moved away from the lamp. The shadow belonged to a woman. There was her voice. Kraken had little interest in the woman’s concerns, beyond a curiosity about the identity of his benefactors. A man spoke. Another shadow appeared, shrinking against the whitewashed wall, sharpening. A shoulder thrust into view, followed by a head — the head of Captain Powers. That explained the clay pipes, tobacco pouch, and matches next to the volume of Ashbless. The darkness beyond his window was Jermyn Street. He’d been saved by Captain Powers. And, of course, by the collected London Philosophers.
There was a sobbing in the room beyond. “I cannot!” the woman cried. The sobbing resumed. Captain Powers said nothing for moments. Then the weeping fell off, and his voice interrupted the silence. “The Indies.” Kraken heard only a fragment. “St. Ives is all right.” Mumbling ensued. Then, in a sudden, impassioned tone, almost shouted, came the words, “Let them try!” The woman’s shadow reappeared and embraced the shadow of the Captain. Kraken picked up Ashbless and leafed through it idly, peeking up over the top of the spine.
Again the Captain hove into view, following his shadow, stumping along on his wooden leg. He fiddled with the latch of a sea chest that lay against the wall, then swung the chest open and began to haul out odds and ends: a brass spyglass, a sextant, a pair of sabers bound together with leather thongs, a carved rosewood idol, the ivory head of a pig. Then out came a false bottom built of oak plank, as if it were a piece of the floor that lay below the chest. Kraken started. Perhaps it
“Is it safe here?” asked the woman.
“I’ve kept it these long years, haven’t I?” said the Captain staunchly. “No one knows of its existence but you, now, do they? A few days, a week — and Jack will have it.” The Captain bent over the chest once again, hiding the box and replacing the oak plank. He very methodically slipped the odds and ends in atop it.
Kraken goggled in wonder. He felt like crying out, but doing so would be a dangerous business. There were vast secrets afloat. He was a small fish in very deep waters — almost a dead small fish. He lay Ashbless back onto the table, pulled the bedclothes up around his chin, and closed his eyes. He was tired, and his head ached awfully. When he awoke, sun played in through the sheer curtains beside his head, and the Captain sat beside him, quietly smoking a pipe.
Wind whistled beyond the casement while St. Ives squinted into the little cheval glass atop his nightstand. The previous day’s sun had, apparently, been blown out of sight, and the wind whipped the branch of a Chinese elm against the window as if the branch were rushing at him, enraged that it couldn’t get into the room and warm itself at the fire. It was a disgraceful way to treat the scattering of green leaves that had just that week poked out in search of spring, only to find themselves flayed to bits by unfriendly weather.
St. Ives dabbed more glue onto the back of the mustache. It wouldn’t do to have it blow off in a sudden gust. He worked his hair into a sort of willowy peak, and brushed his eyebrows upward to give himself the look of a disheveled simian, the same he’d worn the day before. Lord knew what the wind would do to it — heighten the effect, perhaps. He arose, pulled on a greatcoat, slipped Owlesby’s manuscript under the carpet, picked up the newly repaired clock, and stepped out into the hall. He paused, thinking, and went back into the room. There was no use calling attention to the manuscript — better to make it seem trivial. He yanked it out from under the rug and set it atop the nightstand, shuffling the papers and laying his book and pipe atop them for good measure.
He trudged along in a foul humor with the repaired clock under his arm. It seemed as if precious little were being accomplished. He’d been almost a month in London, and still he hadn’t glimpsed the fabled ship of the alien visitor. And he wasn’t at all certain what he’d do if his mission to Wardour Street were successful. The ship, by all accounts, might be prodigiously old. It might be nothing but the rusted shell of the thing’s craft — nothing but the decayed shadow of a starship, good for little beyond its value as a curiosity, turned, quite likely, into some loathsome article of bodily gratification. His own ship, after all, was almost spaceworthy. The oxygenator would be done any day. Perhaps that very night Keeble would bring it to the Trismegistus meeting. If so, St. Ives would be gone in the morning. He wouldn’t suffer another fog. His efforts with the clock would either be satisfactory or they wouldn’t be. He was bound for home either way.
It was true that odd things were in the wind — the business with Narbondo and Kelso Drake and poor Keeble. But St. Ives was a man of science first, an amateur detective second. The Trismegistus Club would get along without him. They could always summon him from Harrogate, after all, if his assistance were required to eradicate a menace.
He walked around to the rear of the house on Wardour Street and rang the bell. The half-timbered structure gave onto a small court in which languished a granite fountain, little more than a scummed pool with a rustling, water-spitting fish in the center. From the edge of the fountain a cobbled walk led out to a muddy alley. Some few windows stared blindly out onto the court curtained with blood-red fabric. The house must be dark as a tomb inside, thought St. Ives, an odd thing on such a day, blustery and clear as it was. He rang the bell again.
The alley seemed from St. Ives’ vantage point to run along for a hundred feet or so before emptying onto a thoroughfare — Broadwick, perhaps. In the other direction it dead-ended into a stone wall, the top of which was studded with broken bottles. He heard a scuffling of feet. The door opened a crack and a meaty-looking woman peered out, white as a bled corpse. St. Ives jumped involuntarily, shaded his eyes, and realized that her face was covered in baking flour. Her nose was monumental and was somehow clean of flour, perched there like a mountaintop above a layer of cloud. She stared at him through fleshy slits, silent.
“Clock repair,” said St. Ives, grinning widely at her. If there was one thing that gave him the absolute pip, it was perpetually frowning people who had no business being such. Stupidity explained it — the sort of stupidity that almost demanded a poke in the eye. The woman grunted. “I’ve repaired your clock,” St. Ives assured her, displaying the item in question. She ran the back of her hand across her cheek, smearing the flour, then emitted a wet sniff. She reached for the clock, but St. Ives dragged it to safety. “There’s the matter of the bill,” he said, grinning even more widely.
She disappeared into the dark house, leaving the door ajar. It wasn’t an invitation, certainly, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. He stepped in, prepared to have a look about, but stopped abruptly, shutting the door behind him. There at a table, messing with a score of dominoes, sat a fierce-looking man, his beetling forehead spanned by a single unbroken stretch of eyebrow. There was something malevolent about him, something unwholesome, almost idiotic. A chimney pipe hat, dented and stained, sat on the table beside the dominoes. The man looked up at him slowly. St. Ives smiled woodenly, and the smile seemed to infuriate the domino player, who half rose to his feet. He was interrupted by the issuance of the mule-faced butler from whom St. Ives had received the clock. Roundabout him, filling the kitchen, hovered an atmosphere heavy with indefinable threat — a sort of pall of it that floated like a flammable gas, waiting to he set off.
“How much?” asked the butler, counting a handful of change.
St. Ives gave him a cheerful look. “Two pounds six,” he said, holding onto the clock.
The man widened his eyes. “I’m sorry?”
“Two pounds six.”
“A new clock wouldn’t have been as much.”
“The lens,” said St. Ives, lying, “had to be pressed in a kiln. They aren’t generally available. It’s a complex process. Very complex. Involves tremendous heat and pressure. The damned things explode, often as not, and blow
