"I don't know anything about them. Nor do I know how to reach the Preacher." Praeger held up a hand before either Englishman could speak. "I shall talk to certain colleagues of mine. If, through them or their associates, word of your desire reaches him, I am confident that he will in turn be able to reach you." His shrug seemed genuinely regretful. "I can do no more."
"Thank you for doing that much," Helms said. "Tell me one thing more, if you would: what do the symbols flanking the cross to either side signify to you?"
"Why, the truth, of course," Henry Praeger answered.
Dr. Walton was happy enough to play tourist in Hanover. Even if the city was young--almost infantile by Old World standards--there was a good deal to see, from the Curb Exchange Building to the Navy Yard to the cancan houses that were the scandal of Atlantis, and of much of Terranova and Europe as well (France, by all accounts, took them in stride). Walton returned from his visit happily scandalized.
Athelstan Helms went to no cancan houses. He set up a laboratory of sorts in their rooms, and paid the chambermaids not to clean it. When he wasn't fussing there with the daggers that had greeted him or the good doctor, he was poring over files of the Hanover Herald he had prevailed upon Inspector La Strada to prevail upon the newspaper to let him see.
From sources unknown to Walton, Helms procured a violin, upon which he practiced at all hours until guests in the adjoining chambers pounded on the walls. Then, reluctantly, he was persuaded to desist.
"Some people," he said with the faintest trace of petulance, "have no appreciation for--"
"Good music," Dr. Walton said loyally.
"Well, actually, that is not what I was going to say," Helms told him. "They have no appreciation for the fact that any musician, good, bad, or indifferent, must regularly play his instrument if he is not to become worse. In the absence of any communication from the Preacher, what shall I do with my time?"
"You might tour the city," Walton suggested. "There is, I must admit, more to it than I would have expected."
"It is not London," Athelstan Helms said, as if that were all that required saying. In case it wasn't, he added a still more devastating sidebar: "It is not even Paris."
"Well, no," Walton said, "but have you seen the museum? Astonishing relics of the honkers. Not just skeletons and eggshells, mind you, but skins with feathers still on 'em. The birds might almost be alive."
"So might the men the House of Universal Devotion murdered," Helms replied, still in that tart mood. "They might almost be, but they are not."
"Also a fine selection of Atlantean plants," the good doctor said. "Those are as distinctive as the avifauna, if not more so. Some merely decorative, some ingeniously insectivorous, some from which we draw spices, and also some formidably poisonous."
That drew his particular friend's interest; Dr. Walton had thought it might. "I have made a certain study of the noxious alkaloids to be derived from plants," Helms admitted. "That one from southern Terranova, though a stimulant, has deleterious side effects if used for extended periods. Perhaps I should take advantage of the opportunity to observe the specimens from which the poisons are drawn."
"Perhaps you should, Helms," Walton said, and so it was decided.
The Atlantean Museum could not match its British counterpart in exterior grandeur. Indeed, but for the generosity of a Briton earlier in the century, there might not have been any Atlantean Museum. Living in the present and looking toward the future as they did, the inhabitants of Atlantis cared little for the past. The museum was almost deserted when Walton brought Helms back to it.
Helms sniffed at the exhibit of extinct honkers that had so pleased his associate. Nor did a close-up view of the formidable beak and talons of a stuffed red-crested eagle much impress him. What purported to be a cucumber slug climbing up a redwood got him to lean forward to examine it more closely. He drew back a moment later, shaking his head. "It's made of plaster of Paris, and its trail is mucilage."
"This is a museum, not a zoological garden," Dr. Walton said reasonably. "You can hardly expect a live slug here. Suppose it crawled off to the other side of the trunk, where no one but its keeper could see it?" Helms only grunted, which went some way toward showing the cogency of Walton's point.
Helms could not lean close to examine the poisonous plants; glass separated them from overzealous observers. The detective nodded approvingly, saying, "That is as it should be. It protects not only the plants but those who scrutinize them--assuming they are real. With mushrooms of the genus Amanita, even inhaling their spores is toxic."
A folded piece of foolscap was wedged in the narrow gap between a pane of glass and the wooden framing that held it in place. "What's that, Helms?" Dr. Walton asked, pointing to it.
"Probably nothing." But Athelstan Helms plucked it away with long, slim fingers--a violist's fingers, sure enough--and opened it. "I say!" he murmured.
"What?"
Wordlessly, Helms held the paper out to Walton. The doctor donned his reading glasses. "'Be on the 4:27 train to Thetford tomorrow afternoon. It would be unfortunate for all concerned if you were to inform Inspector La Strada of your intentions.'" He read slowly; the script, though precise, was quite small. Refolding the sheet of foolscap, he glanced over to Helms. "Extraordinary! What do you make of it?"
"I would say you were probably observed on your previous visit here. Someone familiar with your habits--and with mine; and with mine!--must have deduced that we would return here together, and that I was likely, on coming to the museum, to repair to the section of most interest to me," Helms replied. "Thus ... the note, and its placement."
Dr. Walton slowly nodded. "Interesting. Persuasive. It does seem to account for the facts as we know them."
"As we know them, yes. As we are intended to know them." Athelstan Helms took the note from his companion and reread it. "Interesting, indeed. And anyone capable of deducing our probable future actions from those just past is an opponent who bears watching."
"I should say so." Walton took off the spectacles and replaced them in their leather case. "I wonder what we shall find upon arriving in Thetford. The town is, I believe, a stronghold of the House of Universal Devotion."
"I wonder if we shall find anything there," Helms said. Walton raised a bushy eyebrow in surprise. The detective explained: "The missive instructs us to board the train. It does not say we shall be enlightened after disembarking. For all we know now, the Preacher may greet us in the uniform of a porter as soon as we take our seats."
"Why, so he may!" Walton exclaimed gaily. "I'd pay good money to see it if he did, though, devil take me if I wouldn't. The porters on these Atlantean trains are just about all of them colored fellows."
"Well, you're right about that." Helms seemed to yield the point, but then returned to it, saying, "He might black his face for the occasion." He shook his head, arguing more with himself than with Dr. Walton. "But no; that would not do. The Atlantean passengers would notice the imposture, being more casually familiar with Negroes than we are. And the dialect these blacks employ is easier for a white man to burlesque than to imitate with precision. I therefore agree with you: whatever disguise the Preacher should choose--if he should choose any--he is unlikely to appear in forma porteris."
"Er--quite," the doctor said. "You intend to follow the strictures of the note, then?"
"In every particular, as if it were Holy Writ," Helms replied. "And in the reckoning of the chap who placed it here, so it may be."
Above the entrance to Radcliff Station was the inscription, THE CLAN, NOT THE MAN. Radcliffs (in early days, the name was sometimes spelled with a final e) were among the first English settlers of Atlantis. That meant those earliest Radcliff(e)s were nothing but fishermen blown astray, an unfortunate fact the family did its best to forget over the next four centuries. Its subsequent successes excused, if they did not altogether justify, such convenient amnesia.