He made room for Wren and Tom on his own couch, and invited them to help themselves to some of his breakfast while he introduced his friends. Wren was not used to meeting so many new people so quickly. She managed to grasp that the bespectacled man in civilian robes was Sampford Spiney, Murnau correspondent of a journal called The Speculum, who was writing a profile of Pennyroyal, and the quiet, bespectacled young woman clutching an enormous camera was his photographer, Miss Kropotkin. The rest of the introductions passed in a blur of ranks and names. The only person whom Wren was really interested in—a tall, lean young man who stood on his own by the stove—Pennyroyal seemed not to know, which was a pity. He wasn’t as handsome as some of the other young officers, and his old blue greatcoat was shabby and travel stained, but there was something magnetic about him that kept pulling her eyes back to his wry, watchful face.
Pennyroyal poured coffee for his guests, and there was some polite chat about the truce, the weather, and the handsome advance that Pennyroyal had been paid by his new publishers. Then he asked Tom, “How is the good old Arctic Roll? And what has caused you to bring her here?”
“She is the Jenny Haniver again now,” said Tom, “and we have come looking for someone. A lady.”
“Indeed?” Pennyroyal narrowed his eyes thoughtfully; he considered himself a bit of an expert on the fairer sex. “Anyone I might know?”
“I think so,” said Tom. “Her name is Cruwys Morchard.”
“Cruwys!” cried Pennyroyal. “Yes, by Poskitt, I know her well. Great Gods, but it must be twenty years since I first ran into her.” (The journalist Spiney scribbled in his notebook with a stub of pencil.) “She called on me at Cloud 9 a couple of times,” Pennyroyal went on. “Still flying that Archaeopteryx of hers, and still as big a mystery as ever…”
“Why a mystery, sir?” asked one of the Murnauers.
“Why, because nobody knows where she comes from,” said Pennyroyal. “Shall I tell you what I know of her? It is an extraordinary tale…”
“Oh, please do, Professor,” cried Wren. “And tell us just the truth, with no alteration of the facts or added color…”
“Oh, yes, please!” cried half of Pennyroyal’s audience, and “Bitte!” agreed the rest, when their Anglish-speaking friends had translated for them.
“Very well,” said Pennyroyal, but Wren’s request had made him nervous. “Perhaps I should say it is a fairly extraordinary tale. I believe I have heard stranger in my time. But Cruwys Morchard stays in my mind anyway, because of her extraordinary personal charms, and because of the way I met her.”
“It was in Helsinki, some nineteen years ago,” said Pennyroyal. “The city was hunting for semistats out near the Altai Shan. I was down in the Gut, paying a call on a very charming young salvage supervisor named Nutella Eisberg, when Ms. Morchard came aboard with a couple of companions— rough-looking coves, but touchingly devoted to her. Walked right in off the tundra, they did—the city’s jaws being open at the time so that the maintenance crews could clean its teeth—and asked the foreman of the Gut for sanctuary.
“It caused a bit of a stir, I can assure you! This was the year after London was destroyed. There had already been a few atrocities by Green Storm fanatics, and the cities of the eastern Hunting Ground were getting edgy. I think the Helsinki folk would have kicked Ms. Morchard and her friends straight back into the Out-Country, for fear they might be saboteurs or spies, but luckily I happened to be passing at the time, and I said I’d vouch for her. Her beauty touched me, d’you see? And her youth, of course, for at that time she was not much older than Wren is today.”
Everyone turned to stare at Wren, who blushed.
“I took Ms. Morchard to the city’s upper tier with me,” Pennyroyal continued, “and I even offered to let her come and stay in my own suite at the Uusimaa Hotel, if we could find suitable accommodations for her hairy friends. But she said, ‘I have no need of charity, sir. I have a great deal of money, and I have come to this city to buy an airship. If you wish to help me, perhaps you might introduce me to an honest secondhand airship dealer.’ Well I took her straight to old man Unthank. And do you know, she did have money! Wrapped up in a secret belt and concealed about that charming person were dozens of gold coins, and each of her companions was similarly burdened. I got a look at the stuff while she was bargaining with Unthank, and I recognized it at once; London gold, each piece stamped with the portrait of Quirke, the god of that unlucky city!
“You may imagine my astonishment! London was gone. Had I not seen with my own eyes the baleful flash of its explosion? ‘How did you come by all these Quirkes, my dear?’ I asked, and Ms. Morchard, after a moment’s confusion, confessed that she was an archaeologist, and that she had been hunting for salvage among the ruins of London!”
A ripple of excitement spread among Pennyroyal’s listeners. People whispered eagerly to one another in New German (a handsome language; the words had corners). Tom leaned forward eagerly in his chair. A young lady in a frock decorated with hundreds of blue eyes said, “But Herr Professor, London’s wreck is haunted!”
“Indeed,” replied Pennyroyal. “In the months that followed London’s destruction, a dozen different scavenger suburbs went hastening east to devour its twisted and blackened remains. None of them ever returned.”
“Because the air fleets of the old Anti-Traction League caught them as they neared the debris field and bombed them to bits,” said a clear, faintly mocking voice. The young man whom Wren had noticed earlier had come to the edge of the circle of Pennyroyal’s friends and was standing there with his hands in his coat pockets, listening intently. His eyes twinkled. His long mouth widened sideways in something that was almost a sneer.
“So we are told, sir,” Pennyroyal agreed, glaring at him. “So we are told. But have we not all heard eerier rumors?”
The Murnauers nodded and muttered. It seemed they all had.
“Cruwys Morchard was a rational, scientific sort, like our friend here,” Pennyroyal went on. “She paid no heed to talk of ghosts. But she had seen things inside London that had turned her hair gray! No sooner had her party landed among the ruins than a fork of mysterious lightning came crackling out of the debris and destroyed their airship! More lightning followed, leaping upward from the dead metal and striking all around the explorers, as if it were drawn to the warmth of the blazing ship—or perhaps to the warm bodies of Ms. Morchard and her comrades! One of her party was burned to ashes. The others panicked and fled, but the ruins seemed to shift and twist about them, so that they could not find their way out of the debris fields. A dozen of them died during the week it took them to struggle back to the Out-Country. And it was not just the lightning that killed them. There were … other things. Things that made even the valiant Ms. Morchard grow pale as she spoke of them. Things that drove men mad, so that they flung themselves from high places in the wreckage rather than face them.”
“What sort of things?” asked the young lady with the eyes on her dress, all agog.
“Ghosts!” whispered Pennyroyal. “I know, Fräulein Hinblick, you will tell me there is no such thing; you will say that nobody returns from the Sunless Country. But Ms. Morchard swore to me that she had met with phantoms in the ruined streets of London. And since Ms. Morchard is the only person who has ever walked those streets and lived to tell the tale, I think we should take her word for it.”