instruments with soot. He then went on to describe each instrument, with its manufacturer, function, limitations, and even, in some cases, its price, in the loving detail which other folk apply to describing their children. Holden, floating down in the depths of the instrument banks, instantly sensed my bafflement, and began to play up; he would indicate each instrument in turn with a flourish like a conjurer’s assistant, and I had to cram my fist into my mouth to avoid bursting into laughter.
Traveler, of course, lectured on oblivious.
There were chronometers, manometers, Eigel Centigrade thermometers. There was a bank of compasses set in a three-dimensional array, so that their faces lay at all angles to each other. Traveller sighed over this arrangement. “I had hoped to use the direction of magnetic flux to navigate through space,” he said, “but I am disappointed to find that the effect fades away more than a few tens of miles from the surface of the Earth.”
“Damned inconvenient!” Holden called drily.
“Instead you rely on a sextant,” I said, indicating a large, intricate brass device consisting of a tube mounted on a toothed wheel. “Surely,” I went on, “the Carthaginians themselves would have recognized such a device… but could never have imagined it placed in such a setting.”
“Carthaginians in space,” Traveller mused. “Now there is an idea for a romance… But, of course, one could never make such a tale plausible enough to convince the modern public. It would be even more controversial than Disraeli’s fashionable fable…” I noticed that Holden looked up from his clowning with interest at that whimsical suggestion. Traveller went on, “You’re quite right, Wickers; between planets, the principles of navigation by the stars are exactly the same as those which guide mariners across the surface of Earth’s seas. But the practice is somewhat more difficult, requiring as it does the determination of the position of a vessel in three co-ordinates.” Traveller went on to explain an elaborate system—using graphs, tables and charts—which he had devised of plotting the locus of a craft which looped like a fly through the emptiness of space. The mathematical calculations involved were facilitated by means of a mechanical device Traveller called an arithmometer. This was a box stuffed with brass gears, cogs and dials; it featured two large cylinders on which were fixed rolls of digits, and Traveller had Holden demonstrate how, by turning various wheels and handles, one could induce the arithmometer to simulate the processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Since he had never before ventured more than a few hundred miles from the surface of the Earth—so that the features of the home world had always been at hand, like a vast, illuminated map—Traveller had never previously been forced to rely on his patent navigation systems. I fancied he rather enjoyed the challenge. “And in any event,” he went on, “navigation by the stars is not our primary means of guidance.”
I asked politely, “And that is?”
For answer he threw aside his waist restraint and launched himself from the throne, coming to rest balanced on his fingertips, upside down over the circular table at the center of the Bridge, his sidewhiskers wafting gently. “This!” he cried. “Here is my mechanical pride and joy.”
I drifted down to join him, and I inspected the surface of the table more carefully. It was, as I had noted earlier, inlaid with a map; now I saw that this map showed the Earth as it might be viewed from a rocket craft far above the North Pole, with the ice-locked north centered in the disc-shaped map, and the equatorial countries of Africa and South America smeared around the rim. Traveller showed us how, by turning a lever, he could invert this disc and display a similar view of the South Polar regions. The map was painted, a little clumsily, with natural colors—shades of blue for the oceans, and brown and green for the land. Traveller explained proudly that the coloring was based on his own observation of the planet from his aerial platform
Holden asked why national boundaries were not shown.
Traveller said, “And of what value would a display of political allegiance be to the aerial voyager? Sir, take a look through the window and inspect Earth—if you can find it in the moonglow. From this height, even our glorious Empire is less dramatic than the shadings of the empty oceans.”
Holden bridled at this. “Sir Josiah, I must take exception. A dominion like His Majesty’s is an enduring monument.”
Traveller’s first word of reply was straight from the threepenny stalls at the music-halls. He went on, “Good God, man; look out of the window! From here, the wanderings of Marco Polo are no more significant than the trail of a fly on the glass; the empires of Caesar, Kublai Khan, Boney—and of the blessed Edward—all rolled up and added together make less difference than the imperfections of a single pane of glass!
“Holden, from our vantage point the affairs of great men are reduced to their true status: to stuff and nonsense; and the pompous fantasies of our deranged and incompetent leaders are revealed for what they are.”
Holden drew himself up to his full height, pulling his barrel-shaped stomach toward his chest; but since he floated in the air above the navigation table like the rest of us, and he was besides upside down compared to me and Traveller, the effect was less impressive than he might have hoped. “Sir Josiah, I suggest you explain to our French saboteur how political affairs are irrelevant in this celestial prison. It was politics that brought us here, remember.”
Traveller shrugged. “Which only serves to prove that there is nothing so small as the imagination of a man.”
“And, like Bourne, sir,” Holden hissed, “you sound like a damned Anarchist.”
I had been seeking ways to defuse this argument, and now I felt compelled to say, “Steady on, Holden; I think you should take that back.”
But Traveller laid a restraining hand on my arm. “Holden, have you actually read the thoughts of such Anarchist luminaries as Proudhon?”
Holden sniffed. “I have read of the actions of such as Bakunin; that is enough for me.”
Traveller laughed, his face lit from above by the electric lights embedded in his navigation table. “If you had studied beyond the end of your nose, sir, you would know that your Anarchist has rather a fine view of his fellow human. The nobility of the free man—”
“Rubbish,” said Holden sternly.
Traveller turned to me. “Ned, the Anarchist does not believe in lawlessness, or outlawed behavior. Rather he believes that man is capable of living in harmony with his brother, without the restraint of law at all!—that all men are essentially decent chaps, no more desirous of destroying each other, on the whole, than the average Englishman is desirous of murdering his wife, child and dog. And in his natural state man lived as an Anarchist in Eden, unlawed and uncaring!”
Holden muttered something about blasphemy, but I pondered these puzzling concepts. “But how would we order ourselves, without laws? How could we run our great industrial concerns? How would we distribute the posts of society? Would not the poor man envy the rich man’s castle, and, without the disincentive of the law, be disposed to break in at once and carry off the furniture?”
“In all probability, such discrepancies would never arise,” said Traveller, “and if they did they would be resolved in an amicable fashion. Each man would know his place, and assume it without comment or complaint for the common good.”
“Pious nonsense,” Holden snapped, by now quite red-faced; and I found myself forced to agree with him for once.
“And,” I went on, “if we once lived in a naturally lawless state, like animals—”
“Not animals, Ned,” Traveller corrected me. “As free men.”
“But if this is so, then why do we have laws now?”
Traveller smiled, and the light of ancient lunar seas shone from his platinum nose. “Perhaps you should be a philosopher, Ned. These, of course, are the questions with which right-thinking men have wrestled for many years. We have laws because there are certain individuals—I would include all politicians and princes—who require laws to subjugate their brothers, in order to achieve their own vainglorious ends.”
I considered these remarkable sentiments. The England I knew was a rational, Christian country, a society informed by industrial principles and confident of its own power and lightness—a confidence fueled largely by the industries to which Traveller’s anti-ice inventions had contributed so significantly.
But here was a man at the very heart of all this technological achievement, espousing the ideas of an idealistic Russian! I wondered, not for the first time, at the power of the experiences—in the Crimea and elsewhere—which had led Traveller to such conclusions. And I wondered how such experiences might have
