“I’m sure he’s genuine,” I insisted, though I could feel the fault lines already widening in my belief. “He was changed.”
“Nonsense,” Charlotte said briskly. “He’ll betray you. You’ve not sent out a Baptist but a new Judas.” It was an interesting side effect, I noticed, that those faithful who had encountered the Chairman seemed in the wake of the experience to become far wordier and more verbose.
“You’re sure?”
“Indubitably.”
For a moment I was lost. “What do we do?”
“Bring the plan forward. Forget the fourteen days. Do it now.”
“We’re not ready.”
“You’ve been planning this for years. Of course we’re ready. In fact, I’ve already dispatched a crew to stop the trains.”
“Without my permission?”
“Forgive me. I thought it best. Time is short. The Underground trains that shan’t trouble us today.” She glanced at my companion. “There’s something else. The Somnambulist. My brother will come back for him. He may prove useful as… leverage.”
It took twenty men to restrain the Somnambulist once he realized what we were planning, but eventually we succeeded in herding the giant into the main hall, forcing him onto the ground and staking him down. He was practically invulnerable, of course, and we knew that ropes and chains alone would not bind him. In the end it was Mr. Speight who came up with the solution.
We skewered the Somnambulist twenty-four times over; passed two dozen swords through his body, pressing them deep into the floor below. Stoically, without making a sound, he withstood these multiple lacerations and I wondered again precisely what he was, what nature of being could withstand such torture without shedding the merest drop of blood. As I watched, I found myself reminded of Gulliver staked out on the beach by the Lilliputians, of Galileo’s portrait of man, perverted, pinioned, reduced to the status of a lepidopterist’s specimen.
Love gathered about the giant, curious and not a little afraid. I called them to order — all nine hundred and ninety-nine of them, the infantry of the Summer Kingdom, my troops of Pantisocracy. I knew these might be the most important words I would ever speak, the culmination of a decade’s dreaming.
I began by apologizing. “I confess,” I cried, “that I have been misled — betrayed by a man I thought had become one of us. And because of my short-sightedness he has gone to warn our enemies. Thank the Chairman, then, for Love nine hundred and ninety-nine, who opened my eyes before it was too late.” A gratifying cheer at this.
“But something wonderful has come even out of treachery. Our plans have changed. Pantisocracy begins today. The Summer Kingdom is upon us sooner than we dared to hope.” More whoops and cheers. “Go forth,” I said, my voice rising to a crescendo. “Reclaim the city, eradicate the symbols of impurity and evil. Wreak havoc — but a pure and holy havoc. Use the sword — but sparingly, not as a weapon but as a surgeon’s tool to remove sickness and disease, for we walk amidst a new Eden. I have faith in you.” I looked down at almost a thousand lonely faces, the detritus, the dispossessed of our society, and I felt a great surge of power and affection.
“I love you all,” I said, before adding mischievously: “God be with you.”
And with a great roar they ran from the hall, through the tunnels and out onto the streets, antibodies ready to do battle with the city’s cancer.
Alone, I walked back to the Chairman of the Board and observed him silently through the glass of his womb until the excitement became too much to bear.
Then I finally did it. I pulled the red lever.
A shower of sparks flew from the machinery, firecracking across the room. The sphere filled with bubbles and a terrible light shone out from its innards, so piercingly bright that not mere stars but whole galaxies seemed to dance before my eyes.
The old man’s head jerked upward, his body shuddered and flailed and his hands reached out to claw the inner surface of the sphere. I could hardly credit it that I should be there to see such a sight, akin to witnessing the first birth, Eve’s bewildering heaving and writhing as Cain crawled forth from her womb.
The old man’s face was mere inches from my own when his eyes flicked open, and it seemed that when he saw me, he smiled.
The dreamer had awoken.
Overwhelmed with joy, I unscrewed the portholes of the sphere. Waves of fluid crashed about me and I screamed in triumph as the old man lurched forward. I caught him before he fell and he leant against me, struggling for breath. I clapped him hard on the back, he coughed, then breathed in great lungfuls of air. He said nothing but only gurgled and hissed like a leaky pair of bellows, spumes of liquid dribbling from his mouth as I held him in a tight embrace.
Moon would not defeat me. I had transformed failure into triumph. The dreamer had awoken, the Chairman walked amongst us and Love was loose at last upon the streets of London.
Chapter 19
Maurice Trotman was eating breakfast when destiny came knocking at his door. Mr. Trotman, you will recall, was the man from the Ministry, the Civil Servant who had succeeded, where so many others before him had failed, in closing down the Directorate. He was a precise, punctilious man, typical of his breed — those passionless, blank-faced automata who tirelessly maintain the grim machinery of state. His ambitions were limited, his vistas modest and he saw life prosaically, as a ladder, a career, a comfortingly regular sequence of promotions and preferments.
He was midway through a poached egg when he heard a determined rap at his front door. Still a bachelor, despite his half-hearted wooing of a colleague’s daughter, he had no servants and lived and ate alone. Consequently, still clad in his fawn-colored dressing gown, it was Maurice himself who opened the door onto death.
“What do you want?” he asked sharply. Like any proper gentleman, he was rarely at his best before eight o’clock.
His visitors made an outre pair. Grown men, one burly, the other slight, both clad in flannel shorts, their legs knobbly and ridiculous.
“Morning,” said Boon.
“What ho,” said Hawker.
“Awfully sorry to bother you so early.”
“Couldn’t be helped.”
“I’m afraid we’re something of a deus ex machina.”
“Don’t chatter on in Latin, old man. You know it’s all Greek to me.”
Boon chortled dutifully. “Hawker’s got a wizard new penknife. Corkscrews and bottle-openers and a how-do-ye-do to get stones out of horses’ hooves. Would you like to see it?”
In the course of their unfeasibly long and bloodstained career, the Prefects had rarely been surprised by much. Strange, then, that they should have been so easily outwitted by a glorified clerk.
Maurice Trotman had not clambered so far up the Service ladder without learning a good deal of guile along the way. He had recognized the Prefects from the first, and as they stood there trolling through their usual blather, their carefully scripted cross-talk and banter, he was formulating a plan of escape. No good fleeing back into the house, of course. There they’d have him cornered, track him down and finish him off in moments. But out in the open he might still have a chance.
While Hawker and Boon talked on (something about conkers), Trotman carefully snaked his left arm around the door and toward the umbrella stand where he skillfully extracted a family heirloom — a slender black umbrella three generations old, passed down from father to son through sixty proud years of Civil Service.
He looked back at the Prefects. Hawker had drawn his knife and was advancing noiselessly upon him when, with surprising dexterity, Trotman produced the umbrella from behind his back and struck the knife from the creature’s hand. Taking advantage of their momentary surprise, he thrust past the Prefects and out into the street where, barely believing his luck, he ran frantically into the center of the city, toward what he mistakenly believed to be safety.