Anti-Ice

After much effort I succeeded in turning the locking wheel, and I kicked open the heavy hatch.

A draft of cool air, the essence of a fresh English autumn afternoon, gushed into the craft. I heard Holden and Pocket sigh over the crisp oxygen, and even Bourne looked up from his introverted weeping. I lay on my back and sucked in that wonderful atmosphere, and felt the blood course through my cheeks at the nip of cold. “How stale the air was in this ship!” I said.

Holden breathed deeply, coughing. “Traveller’s chemical system is a scientific marvel. But I have to agree, Ned; the piped air in this box has become steadily more foul.”

Now I pushed myself upright and slithered forward until my legs were dangling over the ten-foot drop to the dark loam of Kent; I gazed out over fields, hedgerow, threads of smoke from farmhouse fires and copses.

I looked down, wondering how I might reach the ground—and found myself staring into the wide, ruddy face of a farmer. He wore a battered but respectable tweed suit, muddied Wellington boots and a straw hat; and he carried a large pitchfork, held before him as if for defense. As he gazed at our unlikely craft his mouth hung open, showing poor teeth.

I surreptitiously made sure my tie was straight and waved to him. “Good afternoon, sir.”

He stumbled back three paces, held up the pitchfork at me and his jaw dropped further.

I raised my hands and essayed my most diplomatic smile. “Sir, we are Englishmen; you need fear nothing, despite the extraordinary manner of our arrival.” It was time to be modest. “You have no doubt heard of us. I am of the party of Sir Josiah Traveller, and this is the Phaeton.”

I paused, expecting instant recognition—surely we had been the subject of press speculation since our disappearance—but the worthy rustic merely scowled and uttered a syllable I interpreted as: “Who?”

I began to explain, but my words sounded fantastic even to my own ears, and the farmer merely frowned with ever greater suspicion. So at last I gave it up. “Sir, let me emphasize the pertinent fact: which is that we are four Englishmen, and a French, in desperate need of your assistance. Despite my youth and health I cannot even support my own weight, thanks to the astounding experiences to which I have been subject. I therefore ask you, as one Christian to another, if you will forward the help we need.”

The farmer’s face, red as an apple, was a picture of mistrust. But at last, after muttering something about the acres of stubble we’d scorched to a crisp, he lowered his pitchfork and approached the vessel.

The farmer’s name was Clay Lubbock.

It took Lubbock and two of his strongest lads to carry us from the ship. They used slings of rope to lower us from one strong set of arms to another. Then we were loaded on to a bullock cart and, swathed in sheets, hauled off across the broken ground to the farmhouse. Traveller, his voice rendered uneven by the jolting of the cart, remarked on the irony of our rapid descent through the technological strata; but his own appearance—thin, fragile and deathly pale—belied his jocular words, and none of us responded.

The rustics stared in silent fascination at Traveller’s platinum nose.

In the farmhouse we were greeted by Mrs. Lubbock, a bluff, gray woman with massive, hair-coated forearms; without questions or how-do-you-do’s she assessed our condition with the ready eye of a buyer of livestock and despite some protests from Traveller, soon had us wrapped up warmly before a roaring fire and was pouring thick chicken stock into us. Lubbock, meanwhile, set off to town on his fastest horse to spread the word of our return.

Traveller chafed at his confinement, protesting that he was no invalid and that there was work to be done. He was anxious to get to a telegraph station so that the work of transporting the scarred Phaeton to his home in Surrey could begin. Holden calmed him. “I, too, am anxious to return to civilization,” he said. “Remember I am a journalist. My paper, and others, should reward me well if I turn our jaunt into a well-turned narrative. But, Sir Josiah, I recognize my own frailty. As soon as word spreads of our return the world will surely descend on us. I have been through an ordeal without parallel in human history and am left barely capable of supporting a laden soup spoon, and would welcome the chance to recuperate for a few hours under the kind hospitality of Mrs. Lubbock. And so should you, Sir Josiah!”

Traveller did not accept the argument but had little choice but to comply; and so we were put to bed in hard pallets in small bedrooms scattered about the Lubbocks’ home. Holden persuaded the farmer to station one of his lads as a guard outside the room of the wretched Bourne; I thought this was rather sour, as Bourne was hardly in a condition to shin out of the window and race off to freedom across the fields.

I lay in my pallet waiting for sleep, with my window open to admit the bright autumn air, and reflected that, despite the discomforts of this world (the hardness of the mattress under my spine, for instance, was hardly helping my new induction into Earth’s gravity), the compensations—the scent of the trees growing just beyond my window, the distant rustle of a breeze through the hedgerow, the rough caress of the Lubbocks’ sheets against my face—made the thought of ever leaving this Earth again seem an abomination.

In the morning I awoke to bright sunlight, feeling quite refreshed, and was even able to take the few steps to my washbasin unaided. I found Traveller at the Lubbocks’ kitchen table; he was seated in an old bath chair wrapped in his own dressing-gown, brought from the Phaeton, and he was enjoying a hearty meal of bacon and farmhouse eggs. Newspapers were piled up on the table and he was working his way through them as he ate; and, despite the homely warmth of the kitchen, with the morning sunlight slanting across the floor to twinkle from the polished range, Traveller’s expression was as sour and thunderous as ever I had seen it. He looked up as one of Lubbocks willing lads helped me in and said, “Ned, it is no surprise that farmer Lubbock was mystified at our arrival. It was sheer vanity ever to suppose that our disappearance should have remained of interest for any length of time—not while Europe tears itself apart!”

Disturbed by these words, I began to go through the yellowing papers myself. They dated back to a few days before our departure on 8 August: apparently Lubbock stored the old journals to line his chicken coop. In general our disappearance had been overshadowed by its larger context—the sabotage of the Prince Albert on its launching day—and we had generally been assumed dead, lost in some chance explosion, a by-product of the assault on the ship. I was amazed to learn that it had since proven impossible to retake the Albert from the saboteurs, or franc-tireurs, who had stolen it; and, as best I could tell, it still wandered at large about the fields of Belgium or northern France like some escaped beast! The actions of the franc-tireurs had been linked to attacks on other British properties, at home and abroad; I wondered if the attempted sabotage of the Light Rail which Holden and I had witnessed at Dover had been committed by a Frenchman.

And, of course, there was no word of Francoise Michelet or the other trapped passengers of the ill- fated liner; and despite the pleasure of the Kent morning I felt my heart sink as I scanned those yards of barren newsprint.

Traveller remarked on my crestfallen expression, and asked what in particular distressed me. Haltingly—for Josiah Traveller was no sympathetic ear—I described Francoise: our meetings, and the immediate impression she had made on me. As I talked on I felt color steal into my cheeks; for what had seemed, in the privacy of my heart, to be an ethereal passion, became on the telling in this bright farmhouse kitchen a rather foolish infatuation.

Traveller listened to all this without comment. Then he said levelly: “The girl sounds like a franc- tireur herself, Wickers.” I made to protest, shocked, but he went on, “What else, if she was so thick with that wretch Bourne?” He sniffed. “If I’m correct you should waste no more sympathy on her, Ned. She is where she chooses to be.” So saying he turned to his papers again, leaving me devastated.

But, even in that first moment of shock, I perceived the plausibility of what Traveller suggested. The elements about Francoise which Holden, and even I, had noted as odd—her fascination with engineering, her angry absorption in politics—fell into place under Traveller’s hypothesis as components of a far more complex character than the girl I had idealized, and whose sweet face I had projected on to the oceans of Earth.

I wanted to curse Traveller for putting such a suggestion into my head; I cursed myself for a fool even more. But still, I was not sure. And the most galling aspect of the situation was that, with Francoise lost in war- torn France, I might never learn the truth about her.

With my heart in turmoil I turned my attention to the newspapers. Reading rapidly, Traveller and I pieced together the story of the European conflict, as reported in London, since our precipitate departure.

The war with the Prussians had gone badly for the French. Reading the harrowing accounts of battles fought and lost, it was scarcely credible to me that France, with its long military tradition, its proud heritage and its model army, should have collapsed before Bismarck’s aggression in quite such a craven way. French strategy seemed largely to have consisted of the twin Marshals Bazaine and MacMahon lurching about the French countryside in