It was past three o'clock by the time the king's agent left the tower. He whistled for a hansom cab and ordered the driver to take him to Battersea.
“Bless me, sir! That's a relief!” the man said, climbing down from his seat. He took a couple of lumps of Formby coal from the scuttle at the back of the vehicle's steam-horse and put them into the furnace.
“Why so?” Burton asked.
“South of the river, ain't it! A lot less traffic south of the river! Can't move for love nor money on the main roads north o' the Thames, but south-we'll have you on your merry way, no trouble at all, sir. In you go. There's a blanket under the seat if you feel the chill.”
The driver climbed back up to his seat, waited for Burton to settle, then-with an unnecessary “Gee up!”- squeezed the velocity lever and got the hansom moving.
As the cab rattled along Lower Thames Street and turned left onto London Bridge, the king's agent sat back, tied Gregory Hare's perfumed handkerchief around the lower half of his face, and focused on his breathing. Keeping it slow and steady, he imagined each breath entering first his left lung, then his right. He matched his respiration to the rhythm of a Sufi chant:
He started to complicate the exercise, altering the tempo, establishing a cycle of four breaths, visualising oxygen saturating different parts of his body.
At the same time, he listened only to the chugging of the hansom's steam-horse, allowing it to block out all other noises.
By the time the vehicle reached the junction of Bankside and Blackfriars Road, Burton had slipped into a Sufi trance.
His mind drifted.
He saw formless light and colour; heard water and snatches of conversation:
The lights coalesced into a single bright ribbon, broad, snaking away through darkness, disappearing into the distance. He flew over it, following its course upstream.
From far off to either side, he saw more ribbons of light. The farther upstream he flew, the closer they came.
Shining intensely, as if reflecting the sun, the ribbons began to converge around him.
The bands of light joined into one blazing expanse. It shot upward in front of him. Burton gazed at it and became aware that it was falling water. He looked up and saw a rainbow.
The hansom cab jerked over a pothole, shaking his senses back into him.
He cried out: “Step back! The source needs pruning, hard against the stem! Pull the trigger!”
And, all of a sudden, he knew exactly what had to be done.
The hatch in the roof of the cab opened and the driver looked in.
“Did you say somethin', sir?”
“Yes. Make a detour to the nearest post office, would you?”
“Certainly, sir. We're just comin' up on Broad Street. There's one there.”
A few minutes later, Burton paid for two parakeet messages. He sent the first bird to Commander Krishnamurthy: “Maneesh, hurry to my place and pick up the rifle next to the fireplace in my study. Bring it to Battersea Power Station. Utmost emergency. Great haste, please.”
The second parakeet was sent to Mrs. Angell to alert her to the commander's mission. It went on: “Mrs. Angell, I have an unusual job for you. You must do it at once, without hesitation or protest. Please remove from my study all my casebooks, journals, reports, and personal papers. Take them from the desks, from the drawers, and from the shelves nearest the window. Carry them into the backyard and make a bonfire of them. Do not leave a single one unburned. This is of crucial importance. Destroy them all, and do it at once.”
The king's agent returned to the cab and, thirty minutes later, it delivered him to his destination.
The glaring lights of the Technologist headquarters were turning the thick fog around it into a swirling soup of glowing particles, here a sickening yellow, there a putrid orange, in many places a deep hellish red. Burton picked his way through the murk to the front entrance, hailed a guard, and was escorted to the main hall.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel appeared from amid buzzing machinery and clanked over to greet him.
“An unexpected pleasure, Sir Richard. It's been more than a year.”
“You've corrected your speech defect, Isambard.”
“Some considerable time ago. I'm afraid young Swinburne will be disappointed.”
“Swinburne is dead,” Burton said flatly.
“Dead?”
“Yes. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway.”
“I'm not sure what you mean, but I am truly sorry. What happened?”
Burton glanced at a nearby workbench around which a group of Technologists was gathered.
“May we speak in private?”
Brunel expelled a puff of vapour. The piston-like device on the shoulder of his barrel-shaped body paused in its pumping, then continued. The bellows on the other side creaked up and down insistently.
“Follow,” he piped.
Burton trailed after the Steam Man, across the vast floor to where two of the huge Worm machines were parked. The explorer marvelled at the size of the burrowing vehicles-and, right there, the main area of difficulty in the scheme that had formed in the back of his mind found its solution.
Brunel reached out with a mechanical arm and opened a big hatch in the side of one of the Worms. He stepped in, gestured for Burton to follow, and pulled the doorway down behind the explorer. Lights came on automatically. The steam man hissed into a squat.
Burton pulled Speke's letter from his pocked and, wordlessly, handed it to the engineer. Brunel held it up with a metal pincer. It wasn't evident what part of his life-maintaining contraption functioned as eyes but something obviously did, and moments later he lowered the paper and said: “What does the alteration of your appearance signify? Does Algernon Swinburne's death relate to it?”
“I was sent through time to the year 1914, Isambard. What for John Speke was a split second lasted four years for me. Algy was killed in Africa last year, but was present, albeit in a different form, in the future I visited.”
