“Blimey.”
“You’ll spread the word? You understand who the true enemy is?”
“I does. We all does. We always ’ave done, ain’t we? But I’ll—won’t I?—I’ll not—”
“You won’t be detected.”
Grub made an indecisive movement, checked himself, then stiffened and saluted. “I’ll do me bit, sir!”
“Good man.”
Trounce returned the salute and led the chrononauts away.
“What the blazes was that all about?” Burton asked.
“You’ll soon see,” Trounce replied. He stepped out into the road. The traffic jerked to a stop. A few vehicles away, a boiler detonated and a cloud of white steam expanded from it.
They crossed Gloucester Place and moved into Dorset Street. Tenements leaned precariously over them, almost forming a tunnel. The shadows felt dirty and dangerous.
From behind came a further bellow, “Hot taters! Hot taters! Hot taters! As personally recommended by the Uppers! Come and buy and hear the word! Hear the word! Hot taters an’ hear the word!”
“A Grub,” Burton said to Swinburne. “Still there, on the same corner!”
“It’s perfectly marvellous,” the poet enthused. “Time has a little consistency, after all.” He shrieked and jumped back as a mountainous cyclopean individual lumbered past, his huge leathery hands dragging along the pavement.
Behind the beast, two constables came click-clacking on their stilts. The crowd recoiled away from them. The policemen passed the chrononauts without giving them any attention. Burton saw that, as Trounce had noted, they were exactly the same as those that attacked him in 1860.
“Sent back through history,” he whispered to himself. “And who could do that but Edward Oxford?”
Sadhvi Raghavendra stopped and knocked something unspeakable from the heel of her left boot. “Are there no street-crabs in the twenty-third century, William?”
“The nanomechs are supposed to consume waste material and use it for fuel,” Trounce responded. “Unfortunately, down here it accrues faster than even they can manage.”
“I suspect,” Swinburne added, “that Spring Heeled Jack purposely allows a measure of waste matter to accumulate. Having the inhabitants of the Underground wallow in their own detritus gives them a constant reminder of their status.”
They rounded the corner and entered Baker Street.
IT IS UP TO YOU TO RESCUE HUMANITY! TOIL FOR THE ANGLO-SAXON EMPIRE! WE MUST MARCH FORTH AND LIBERATE THE WORLD FROM THE SAVAGERY OF SOCIALISM!
“Was the world similar to this in the original 2202, Richard?” Herbert Wells asked. “In the single history that existed before time bifurcated?”
“As shown to me by the sane fragment of Oxford?” Burton responded. “No, it wasn’t like this at all. Certainly, London had greatly expanded and was filled with tall towers, but I received no impression of such an atrocious divide, no sense of this inequality.”
“Hmm. Curious. Insanity aside, if the Spring Heeled Jack intelligence has its origins in a considerably more pleasant future than this, why has he created such a dreadful alternative? Whence this twisted vision?”
“Perhaps it has its roots in my time,” Burton answered. “It was in the nineteenth century that he lost his mind. He appears to have taken what he saw there and developed it along such abhorrent lines that this,” he gestured around them, “is the result.”
“Did our world really have such evil potential in it?” Raghavendra asked. “I thought us enlightened.”
“You believed what you were told,” Burton said, “but consider the Cauldron. Was it not an aspect of London that could easily be the progenitor of this?” He glanced at a thin ten-foot-tall, six-armed, four-legged figure that came tottering by like a tumbling stack of broom handles. It was wearing Army reds and an officer’s hat, which it doffed flamboyantly to him, murmuring, “My lord.”
Burton pulled his hood more tightly over his head. From its depths, he examined the crowd as it parted in front of his group, trudging past to his left and right. He saw dull, suffering eyes and gaunt faces. A great many of the Lowlies bobbed their heads or touched their foreheads in respect. All appeared disconcerted by the presence of these “Uppers.”
Stilted figures prowled among them. The crowd shied away from the constables as they approached and cast hard looks at their backs after they’d passed. The Underground, Burton felt, was a pressure cooker, ready to explode.
“William!” he said.
Trounce halted. “What is it?”
Burton pointed across to the middle of Baker Street where a tall plinth divided the thoroughfare. It bore a large statue of a young woman. A plaque, attached to the base, declared, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, of the United Kingdoms of Europe, Africa and Australia, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India.
“Yes,” Trounce said. “That’s her. She took the throne five years ago, our first monarch since the death of King George the Fifth in 1905.”
“I know who she is,” Burton said. “I’ve seen her before. She appeared before me when I donned the time suit’s helmet.”
“I say!” Swinburne exclaimed. “Really?”
“She is—was—Edward Oxford’s wife.” Burton rubbed the sides of his head, his brow furrowing. “I should know her name. I’m positive it isn’t Victoria, but it escapes me.”
“Whatever it is,” Trounce said, “Spring Heeled Jack obviously sought her out.”
“And has literally put her on a pedestal,” Swinburne quipped. “Would she have known what—who—he was?”
“No,” Burton said. “Remember, Oxford wiped himself out of history. From her perspective, he has never existed.”
“It must have come as quite a shock to her when she ascended to the throne, then.”
“Shhh!” Trounce hissed. With his eyes, he indicated a group of constables who’d just rounded the corner from Blandford Street.
Following the former detective inspector’s lead, the chrononauts stood casually and listened while he explained to them that “the Lowlies are the workhorses of the Empire. They take pride in their practicality, in their uncompromising ability to get a job done, and benefit from the spiritual cleansing that comes with hard toil.” He continued in this vein until the stilt men had passed, then chuckled and said, “Trounce of the Yard, deceiving the police. Who’d have thought?”
“And indulging in pure fantasy, too,” Swinburne added. “Spiritual cleansing, my foot!”
“Let’s push on,” Trounce said.
“Workhorses,” Raghavendra echoed, as they resumed walking, “but why so many in military uniform?”
“The Empire is mobilising,” Swinburne answered. “We are soon to move against what used to be the United States of America and the United Republics of Eurasia.”
“War?”
“My hat! Hardly that, Sadhvi! The U.S.A. and U.R.E. are in no condition to resist. They battled each other for so long, with us supplying the munitions, that their various countries are utterly ruined. Their populations are decimated, and the old borders have gone.”
“Are they still fighting each other?”
“If you believe the propaganda.”
“Which you shouldn’t,” Trounce put in. “The Cannibal Club has infiltrated our government’s records, which offer a story far different to that given the public.”
Burton looked up at a billboard. SOCIALISM IS THE DEATH OF CIVILISATION.
Trounce followed his eyes. “There’s no socialism. There’s no longer any conflict. There hasn’t been for a long time. Those vast regions of the Earth are now occupied by countless small communities, which somehow manage to survive in unutterably harsh conditions. They function under a self-regulating anarchism somewhat similar to that which existed in Africa before the Europeans and Arabs destroyed it.”
“Why the lies?” Raghavendra asked. “Why is the Anglo-Saxon Empire telling its people that the rest of the world is filled with—with—”