Herbert Spencer said, “Yer mean t’ say, you could build another of the bloomin’ things?”
“If that is what I meant to say, I’d have said it,” Babbage responded. “No. The techniques available in the year 2202 are beyond even my understanding. Without them, we cannot create microscopic systems. I might, however, be capable of constructing a macroscopic equivalent. It would perhaps, be the size of a room or, more significantly, of a large vehicle.” He looked meaningfully at Burton. “One that might carry the core of our rebel group three years back through history.”
Swinburne squawked, swiped a fist through the air, and hollered, “By crikey! We’ll be able to go back and nip that blighter Gladstone in the bud!”
Burton shook his head and muttered, “There’s a problem.”
He knew the plan wouldn’t work. In travelling back to alter the past, the rebels would simply create a new strand of history. This one, in which he now found himself, would remain unchanged.
Babbage misinterpreted the comment as a question. “There is. The helmet is almost drained of power. If you give me permission, I can transfer energy to it from the Nimtz generator. The process might possibly allow the intelligence to regain some measure of sanity, enabling it to repair itself and provide me with further information.”
“Permission?”
“The suit is yours.”
Burton sighed. He indicated his consent.
Babbage consulted his pocket watch and declared it to be nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February.
The king’s agent suddenly knew exactly who, where, and when he was.
The wrong Burton.
In the wrong place.
On the wrong day.
Another repeat performance. Why?
Babbage ran his finger around the side of the Nimtz generator. The disk crackled and threw out a fountain of sparks. The old man recoiled with a cry of alarm.
Burton reached to either side, took Swinburne and Spencer by their arms, and started to pull them away from the bench.
Babbage stepped backward. “I hadn’t anticipated—”
A bubble formed around the helmet, suit and boots. With a thunderous bang, it popped, and the time suit, most of the workbench, and a large chunk of Isambard Kingdom Brunel vanished. The engineer slumped and became motionless.
Spencer cried out, “Blimey! Where’s it gone?”
“No! No! No!” Babbage wailed. “This is a disaster! We can’t have lost it! It’s impossible!” He stamped his feet and clapped his hands to his face. “How? How?”
Burton closed his eyes and massaged the sides of his head. “I’ve had enough of mysteries, and the light in this place always gives me a headache. I’m leaving.”
Swinburne and Spencer joined him. They walked back across the workshop and out through its doors. Snow was falling from a pitch-black sky. It was white. The courtyard, swathed in it, glared brilliantly under the spotlights.
The men left the power station and approached the armadillidium. Burton ordered, “Open.” It unrolled its considerable bulk. He climbed aboard, and his companions followed him up.
“The chaps are waiting for us at the Hog in the Pound,” Swinburne said. “Let’s see what plan Trounce and Slaughter have come up with. A means to rescue Miss Mayson from Gladstone’s lustful groping, I hope.”
Taking hold of the reins, Burton guided the woodlouse back through the gardens and out onto Nine Elms Lane.
He looked down at his hands. The scar on the left was no longer there. Brightness swept in from the corners of his eyes. He saw his fingers curled around the reins of his armadillidium; around the reins of a clockwork horse; around the handlebars of a velocipede.
In an instant, the snow stopped falling and it was daylight.
He lost control of his vehicle, hit the back of a hansom cab, careened into the kerb, and crashed to the ground. The penny-farthing’s crankshaft snapped and went spinning high into the branches of the trees lining the riverside.
He lay sprawled on the ground.
The cab driver yelled, “You blithering idiot!” but didn’t stop his vehicle.
A raggedly dressed match seller—a woman who lacked teeth but possessed an overabundance of facial hair—shuffled over and squinted down at the king’s agent. “Is ye hurt, ducky?”
For a moment, he couldn’t reply, then he managed to croak, “No. I’m all right.”
“You look all battered. Better get yerself up off the pavemint afore the snow soaks into ’em smart togs o’ yourn. Stain ’em scarlit, so it will. Would ye like t’ buy a box o’ lucifers?”
Burton pushed himself up. He thanked the woman for her concern and exchanged a few coins for a matchbook.
After dragging his broken velocipede out of the road, picking up his hat, and brushing himself down, he stood for a minute, utterly perplexed. He touched his head and found that his hair was short. There were scars on his scalp, a painful lump at the back of his skull, and a scabby cut on his chin. His left elbow hurt. In fact, all of him hurt.
Gradually, it dawned on him that he was on Cheyne Walk. He could see Battersea Power Station on the other side of the river. Fumbling for his chronometer, he flipped its lid. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.
Of what day?
He retrieved a cheroot from his pocket and smoked it while watching a creaking and clanking litter crab lumber past. The humped contraption was dragging itself along, its eight thick mechanical legs thumping against the impacted pink slush that covered the road, the twenty-four thin arms on its belly snatching this way and that, digging rubbish out of the mushy layer and throwing it through the machine’s maw into the furnace.
Burton’s hands were shaking.
He scraped at the ground with his heel and revealed a layer of bright red beneath. It appeared oddly fibrous, and he vaguely registered that the seeds had extended long hair-like roots.
Home?
The carriages and wagons that passed him were drawn either by real horses or by their steam-powered equivalents—small wheel-mounted engines that somewhat resembled the famous Stephenson’s Rocket. People crowded the thoroughfare just as they always did, a mélange of the well-to-do and poverty-stricken, of the mannered and the uncouth.
A rotorchair chopped through the leaden sky. A hawker sang, “Hot chestnuts, hot chestnuts, penny a bag!” Three urchins raced past laughing and shouting and flinging snowballs at each other.
The final vestigial glow of Saltzmann’s Tincture faded.
He looked back the way he’d come. The distant, blackened and ragged stump of Parliament’s clock tower was visible over the rooftops.
All was as it should be, but he could sense on the inside of his legs, just above the knees, where the woodlouse’s saddle had pressed against his legs, and when he closed his eyes he could hear the resentful tones of the mechanical horse.
Those experiences had been real.
He finished his cigar, flicked it away, and wheeled his clanking penny-farthing along the thoroughfare to Number 16. Just as he reached the house, its front door opened and Algernon Swinburne stepped out, dressed in a wide-brimmed floppy hat, overcoat, and an absurdly long striped scarf.
“What ho! What ho! What ho!” the poet shrilled. “Fancy finding you on my doorstep. I thought you’d be out for the count. Did you come to talk me into taking an afternoon tipple? I mustn’t. I mustn’t. Oh all right. Consider me persuaded. Have you slept? I say! Look at the state of your boneshaker. Surely you didn’t ride it in this weather?”