"I'm fine," mumbled Oliphant. He spoke awkwardly through split lips and broken teeth.
"Thank you, Nurse," came the horrible voice from below. "Darwin, what progress?"
"We have so far treated nineteen chimney sweeps. Nine were rejected and destroyed on the basis of their height. The rest have been liberated."
"Will they remember?" interrupted the voice.
"No. Mr. Oliphant used mesmeric influence to dominate their minds and block all memory of what occurred to them while in our hands. We will continue the programme until a hundred boys have received the treatment. As you know, we have revised our theory of pangenesis and have incorporated into it the work of the German monk Gregor Mendel. We shall see, in the children of our sweeps, and their grandchildren and subsequent generations, the new theory-which we have named Genetic Inheritance-in action. The male offspring will become smaller until an average height of just three feet is established. With each generation, the descendants will also grow thick bristly hair-spines, almost-over their entire body. Thus they will become ideally suited to their vocation; able to fit into any flue, scraping off the soot with their bristles. Living brushes!
"If the experiment succeeds with this group of workers-which we selected due to their relative unimportance in social terms-then we will expand it to create specialists in all fields of society. Of course, our ability to monitor the future generations is dependent upon you."
"You need not worry about that," snapped the voice. "I will uphold my part of the deal. The time is drawing near."
"Then tell us!" demanded Darwin. "It is time we knew the truth about Spring Heeled Jack!"
A figure shuffled into view. Burton stifled a gasp. It was an orangutan, a large red-haired ape! Like Galton, the top of its head was missing, but rather than machinery, it had been replaced by a bell jar filled with a yellowish liquid in which the creature's brain was immersed.
The mysterious Mr. Belljar.! thought Burton.
The primate, walking with its knuckles to the floor, circled the table.
"I brought you here for that very purpose," it grated. "Though I warn you, the story is unbelievable and contains references to things you will not understand; things that I don't understand! Parts of it I shall tell from my own experience. Other parts were told to me by a man who spoke in a strange accent, who used the English language in a way I have never heard it spoken before, and who said a great deal that was incomprehensible."
Burton tensed. His two cases had become one, and had led him to this group of rogue scientists. Now, finally, he was going to learn who-or what -Spring Heeled Jack was, and how the stilt-man fitted into the picture.
"Gentlemen, dear lady, for me the story began in 1837, shortly after I gained notoriety for a childish prank in Melton Mowbray a month after I purchased and moved into this estate."
Bismillah! thought the king's agent. Henry Beresford didn't die two years ago! That ape is the Mad Marquess of Waterford!
"But the true beginning of the tale begins a great many years from now. It begins, my friends, far into the future!"
BEING THE TRUE HISTORY OF SPRING HEELED JACK
Who you think you are is who you ARE.
But what if you think you are nobody?
What if you banish all the limits that define YOU?
What then?
WHO ARE YOU?
PREVENTION
Every time we are faced with a choice, and we are faced with them every minute of every day, we make a decision and follow its coarse into the future. But what of the abandoned options? Are they like unopened doors? Do alternative futures lie beyond them? How far would we wander from the coarse we have steered were we to go back and, just once, open Door A instead of Door B?
His name was Edward John Oxford, and he was born in the year 2162. He was a physicist, engineer, historian, and philosopher. At the age of thirty, he invented the fish-scale battery, a flake of material no bigger than a fingernail, which soaked up solar energy on one side and stored it in vast amounts on the other. The battery transformed technology and technology transformed the world.
A journalist asked, "How does it feel to single-handedly change history?"
"I haven't changed history," he replied. "History is the past."
He chuckled, as if enjoying a private joke, for though he was a genius, he was also an eccentric and obsessive, and the past was his primary fixation; specifically, the year 1840, which was when his ancestor, also named Edward Oxford, had fired two pistols at Queen Victoria.
Both shots had missed, and the original Oxford had been acquitted on grounds of insanity and committed to Bedlam. Years later, he was released and emigrated to Australia, where he met and married the granddaughter of a couple he'd known back in London, prior to his crime. History didn't record her name, just that she was far younger than he, which wasn't unusual for the period. They began a family whose descendants wound through the generations to the Edward John Oxford of 2162.
The fish-scale battery couldn't change the past. It was, however, an element of a far grander project that could, for its inventor had created it to power time-travel technology.
Edward John Oxford had a plan: he was going to visit 1840 to clean the stain from his family name.
There were, of course, numerous technical challenges, the relationship between time and space being the most awkward of them. He solved this by "tethering" his device to gravitational constants: the Earth's core and distant galaxies whose position remained comparatively static. This enabled him to select an exit point in the past relative to his terrestrial position in the present; and if that exit point was already occupied by something, his device was programmed to shift him to a safe place nearby.
It was an essential function, but it caused an immense drain on his batteries, so, retaining it as an emergency measure, he found another way to minimise his chances of materialising inside a solid object.
There can be no doubt that the insanity of his ancestor had resurfaced in the inventor, for his solution was bizarre to say the least. Oxford wove his miniaturised time-travel technology into a suit, the boots of which he mounted on two-foot-high spring-loaded stilts. With these, he could leap twenty feet into the air, vanish from his current time, and appear in the past twenty feet above the ground in nothing more solid than air molecules.
It was crazy, but it usually worked, and when it didn't, the programming took over and moved him out of danger.