He reached down and traced a shape on the side of the generator. It glowed, crackled and let forth a shower of sparks.
“I’d move back if I was you,” Burton advised.
A bubble swelled out of the suit. Babbage and Speke, standing closest to it, retreated hastily.
“And,” Burton said, “hey presto.”
The time suit vanished, taking half the bench and a chunk of Isambard Kingdom Brunel with it.
“How did you do that?” Isabel demanded. “Bring it back at once!”
Burton turned to face her. “Isabel, know this. I loved you from the very first moment I saw you.”
She snarled at him. “You traitorous hound.”
He saw her finger tighten on the trigger.
There was a loud report.
He felt himself explode out of his body.
Dying was like blinking.
He was sucked back into it.
When he opened his eyes, Burton was facing Babbage again, and the bench and the suit were back.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in human form except for an accordion-like apparatus creaking in and out on his chest, took a cigar from his mouth and said, in a gravelly voice, “Will it work, Charles?”
“Of course it will.”
Brunel looked to Burton’s right. “Should we do it, sir?”
“Yes.”
Burton turned his head to see the man who’d spoken. It was Lord Elgin’s former secretary, Laurence Oliphant. His skin and hair were alabaster white. His features were distorted, resembling those of a panther.
Babbage announced that it was nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860. He went through the identical routine with the identical result.
Burton waited silently while Babbage and Oliphant tied a tourniquet around Brunel’s right arm, the engineer’s hand having been taken by the bursting bubble.
Isabel is alive in at least one branch of history. My enemy, but alive. By God! To see her! To see her!
Grief tightened his chest. He closed his eyes, swayed, and thought he might fall.
Babbage said, “Mr. Lister, note that the experiment commences at nine o’clock, fifteenth of February, 1860.”
Burton opened his eyes. The interior of Battersea Power Station had transformed into what appeared to be a nightmarish surgical ward. Vast pulsating monstrosities of flesh and tubes and organs humped up from the floor around him. Tentacled glowing organisms hung from the high ceiling. Cartilage and throbbing arteries stretched from wall to wall. He was standing in the midst of it, facing a workbench. Babbage and the surgeon Joseph Lister were on the opposite side. Charles Darwin and Francis Galton were whispering together to his left. Damien Burke and Gregory Hare—who in El Yezdi’s history had been allies and in his own enemies—were to his right, both dressed, bizarrely, as Harlequin.
“I must confess, this procedure involves an unusual degree of unpredictability,” Babbage said. “For if there’s a time suit here, then there are time suits in the other realities, too, and if every Charles Babbage simultaneously connects every helmet to every Nimtz generator in every history, what then?”
Ah! Burton thought. Is that it?
Babbage reached toward the suit.
“Stop!” Burton shouted.
The scientist glanced up at him. “Don’t interfere, sir! Know your place!”
He touched the generator.
Pause.
Pop.
Gone.
While Babbage and Lister squabbled, Burton walked over to Damien Burke and said, “Where’s Brunel?”
Burke’s lugubrious features creased into a frown. “Dead. Did you forget killing him, Mr. Burton?”
“Ah. And what about Isabel Arundell?”
“She’s still on her honeymoon, isn’t that right, Mr. Hare?”
“It is, Mr. Burke,” Hare agreed.
“To whom is she married?”
“Why, to Mr. Bendyshe, of course.”
“Bendyshe? Thomas Bendyshe?” Burton threw his head back and gave a bark of laughter. When he looked down, he was in front of the bench yet again, and the power station was an intricate structure of wrought iron and stained glass, like a baroque cathedral.
“Mr. Gooch,” Babbage said, “make a note. It is nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860. We shall begin.”
Burton felt a pistol in his waistband. He yanked it out and pointed it at Babbage.
“No. Step away from the suit. Don’t touch it.”
Babbage glared at him. “There is no time for games, Captain.”
Burton shot him in the head.
As blood sprayed and Babbage fell backward to the floor, Burton yelled, “Everyone remain absolutely still or I swear I’ll kill every one of you.”
“My giddy aunt! Have you lost your mind?” Swinburne screeched from beside him.
“You’ve killed Charles!” Gooch cried out.
Burton heard Richard Monckton Milnes, behind him, say, “You’d better have a damned good explanation for this, Dick.”
The time suit popped out of existence.
Gooch, Swinburne, and Monckton Milnes gaped at the indentation in the floor where the bench had been.
“What happened?” Monckton Milnes muttered.
Gooch said, “Impossible! Charles never touched it.”
Burton lowered his gun. “Now that,” he said, “is very interesting indeed.”
“What is?” Swinburne asked.
Finding himself in mid-stride, the king’s agent stumbled and stopped. There came a tug at his hand. He was holding a lead. Fidget, by his right ankle, looked up.
To his left, Swinburne drew to a halt.
“Algy? I—I—I beg your pardon?”
“I said, what is?” Swinburne replied. “You said something was interesting.”
Burton placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder to steady himself. The world buckled and distorted around him. It shimmered, solidified, and he saw they were in Whitehall Place, close to the Royal Geographical Society. The street’s gutters were piled high with red blossoms, bright beneath an unbroken but thinning grey mantle of cloud.
“Um, the date?”
“The date is interesting?” Swinburne asked. “Why so?”
“No, I mean, what is it?”
The poet stared at him. “The seventeenth, of course. What’s the matter? Surely not another hallucination? When? Just now?”
“It’s Friday?”
“Yes. One o’clock-ish. Good Lord! I didn’t notice a thing!”
“Wait. Tell me, what have we been doing? Where are we going?”
“You summoned me. I pushed your broken velocipede all the way to your place and arrived about an hour ago. You told me about last night’s invasion of Spring Heeled Jacks and your conversation with Krishnamurthy and Bhatti, and then we hopped into a cab. It just dropped us off.”
Burton looked at the RGS building. “We’re here for Richard Spruce.”
“You remember that?”
“No, I presume it. He’s the only botanist we know. I don’t recall a thing since—” He stopped and considered. “Since just after breakfast. The experiment—I keep returning to it. I’ve witnessed so many alternate versions of the bloody event that I’m giddy with it.”
The king’s agent massaged the back of his neck. He could still feel the Saltzmann’s throbbing in his veins, though the sensation was fast fading.
“It was unusually rapid again,” he murmured, referring to the fast onset of the tincture’s effects and their unusual intensity.
Swinburne, mistaking his meaning, said, “Not really, if it lasted from breakfast to lunch. All morning in the grip of a mirage!”