The station smelled of coal smoke, fried food, tobacco, and people--people in swarms almost uncountable. Dr. Watson's clinically trained nose detected at least one case of imminent liver failure and two pelvic infections, but in those shoals of humanity he could not discern which faces belonged to the sufferers.
He and Athelstan Helms bought their tickets to Thetford and back (round trips, they called them here, rather than return tickets) from a green-visored clerk with enough ennui on his wizened face to make even the most jaded Londoner look to his laurels. "Go to Platform Nine," the clerk said. "Have a pleasant trip." His tone implied that he wouldn't care if they fell over dead before they got to the platform. And why should he? He already had their eagles in his cashbox.
Carpetbags in hand, they made their way to the waiting area. "Better signposts here than there would be in an English station," Helms remarked--and, indeed, only a blind man would have had trouble finding the proper platform.
Once there, Helms and Walton had a wait of half an hour before their train was scheduled to depart. A few passengers already stood on the platform when they arrived. More and more came after them, till the waiting area grew unpleasantly crowded. Dr. Walton stuck his free hand in his left front trouser pocket, where his wallet resided, to thwart pickpockets and sneak thieves. He would not have been a bit surprised if the throng contained several. It seemed a typical Atlantean cross section: a large number of people who would not have been out of place in London leavened by the scrapings of every corner of Europe and Terranova and even Asia. Bearded Jews in baggy trousers gabbled in their corrupt German dialect. Two Italian families screamed at each other with almost operatic intensity. A young Mexican man avidly eyed a statuesque blonde from Sweden or Denmark. Walton frowned at the thought of such miscegenation, but Atlantis did not forbid it. A Chinese man in a flowing robe read--he was intrigued to see--the Bible.
Boys selling sausages on sticks and fried potatoes and coffee and beer elbowed through the crowd, loudly shouting their wares. A sausage proved as spicy and greasy as Walton would have expected. He washed it down with a mug of beer, which was surprisingly good. Athelstan Helms, of more ascetic temperament, refrained from partaking of refreshments.
The train bound for Thetford came in half an hour late. Dr. Walton called down curses on the heads of the Atlantean schedulers. "No doubt you have never known an English train to be tardy," Helms said, which elicited a somewhat shamefaced laugh from his traveling companion.
Instead of seating passengers in small compartments, Atlantean cars put them all in what amounted to a common room, with row after row of paired seats on either side of a long central aisle. Dr. Walton also grumbled about that, more because it was different from what he was used to than out of any inherent inferiority in the arrangement.
NO SMOKING! signs declared, and FINE FOR SMOKING, E10! and SMOKING CAR AT REAR OF TRAIN. The good doctor returned his cigar case to his waistcoat. "I wish they'd collect fines for eating garlic, too," he growled; several people in the car were consuming or had recently consumed that odorous, most un-English comestible.
Athelstan Helms pointed to several open windows in the car, which did little to mitigate the raw heat pouring from stoves at either end. "Never fear, Doctor," he said. "I suspect we shall have our fair share of smoke and more in short order."
Sure enough, as soon as the train started out, coal smoke and cinders poured in through those windows. Passengers sitting next to them forced them closed--all but one, which jammed in its track. The conductor, a personage of some importance on an Atlantean train, lent his assistance to the commercial traveler trying to set it right, but in vain. "Guess you're stuck with it," he said. The commercial traveler's reply, while heartfelt, held little literary merit.
Dr. Walton closely eyed the conductor, wondering if he was the mysterious and elusive Preacher in disguise. Reluctantly, he decided it was improbable; the Preacher's career spanned half a century, while the gent in blue serge and gleaming brass buttons could not have been much above forty.
For his part, Helms stared out the window with more interest than the utterly mundane countryside seemed to Walton to warrant. "What's so ruddy fascinating?" the doctor asked when curiosity got the better of him at last.
"Remnants of the old Atlantis amidst the new," his colleague replied. Walton made a questioning noise. Helms condescended to explain: "Stands of Atlantean pines and redwoods and cycads and ginkgoes, with ferns growing around and beneath them. The unique flora that supported your unique avifauna, but is now being supplanted by Eurasian and Terranovan varieties imported for the comfort and convenience of mankind."
"Curious, what, that Atlantis, lying as it does between Europe and the Terranovan mainland, should have native to it plants and creatures so different to those of either," Dr. Walton said.
"Quite." Athelstan Helms nodded. "The most economical explanation, as William of Occam would have used the term, seems to me to be positing some early separation of Atlantis from northeastern Terranova, to which geography argues it must at one time have adhered, thereby allowing--indeed, compelling--Darwinian selection to proceed here from those forms present then, which would not have included the ancestors of what are now Terranova's commonplace varieties. You do reckon yourself a Darwinist, Doctor, do you not?"
"Well, I don't know," Walton said uncomfortably. "His logic is compelling, I must admit, but it flies dead in the face of every religious principle inculcated in me since childhood days."
"Oh, my dear fellow!" Helms exclaimed. "Where reason and childish phantasms collide, which will you choose? In what sort of state would mankind be if it rejected reason?"
"In what sort of state is mankind now?" the good doctor returned.
Helms began to answer, then checked himself; the question held an unpleasant and poignant cogency. At last, he said, "Is mankind in that parlous state because of reason or in despite of it?"
"I don't know," Walton said. "Perhaps you might do better to inquire of Professor Nietzsche, who has published provocative works upon the subject."
Again, Helms found no quick response. This time, a man sitting behind him spoke up before he could say anything at alclass="underline" "Pardon me, gents, but I couldn't help overhearing you, like. You ask me, Darwin is going straight to hell, and everybody who believes his lies'll end up there, too. The Good Book says it, I believe it, and by God that settles it." He spoke in Atlantean accents, and in particularly self-satisfied ones, too.
"Did God tell you this personally, Mr...?" Helms inquired.
"My name is Primrose, sir, Henry David Primrose," the man said, ignoring Helms' irony. "God gave me my head to think with and the Bible to think from, and I don't need anything more. Neither does anyone else, I say, and that goes double for your precious Darwin."
Dr. Walton was at first inclined to listen to Henry David Primrose with unusual attention, being struck by the matching initial consonants of his last name and the word preacher. He did not need long to conclude, however, that Mr. Primrose was not, in fact, their mysterious and elusive quarry. Mr. Primrose was a crazy man, or, in the Atlantean idiom, a nut. He wasn't even a follower of the House of Universal Devotion--he was a Methodist, which, to the Englishmen, made him a boring nut. The way he used the Bible to justify the ignorant views he already held would have converted the Pope to Darwinism. And he would not shut up.