The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (12 page)

“The power station is our next stop,” Krishnamurthy said. He gulped his coffee and clattered the cup back onto its saucer. “We’d better push on. Will you accompany us?”

“No. I’m sick of the sight of the place. Besides, I have another line of inquiry to pursue.”

“There’s another?”

“The flora.”

“The flowers? Because they and our hopping maniac arrived in unison?”

“Yes,” Burton replied, “and Swinburne responded oddly to them. You know how I’ve come to trust his instincts.”

“Phew!” Krishnamurthy exclaimed. “What extraordinary times we inhabit!”

Burton saw them out of the house then rang for Stoker. “Will you tell Mrs. Angell I’m ready for breakfast? Then I want you to get a message to Mr. Swinburne. Ask him to get here by noon.”

“Right you are, sir.”

The boy headed down to the kitchen while Burton entered the dining room. After a short wait, his housekeeper entered bearing a tray and served him bacon, sausages, eggs, grilled tomatoes, fried mushrooms, and buttered toast. He ate with uncharacteristic gusto, yelled his thanks from the hallway, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, there to dress.

He was frustrated by his aches and pains and had to remind himself that only thirty-six hours or so had passed since he’d been thrown through a plate glass window. Sadhvi’s lotions did nothing to soothe his impatience. Tiredness, weakness—there was no place for them in Burton’s philosophy.

With his lip curled in self-disdain, he tugged open a bedside drawer and pulled from it a bottle of Saltzmann’s Tincture.

“Blast you, Algy,” he muttered. “I’ll not spend the day hobbling about like a confounded invalid.”

He twisted out the cork and drank.

“And to hell with all objections!”

He sat on the bed, leaned forward with his head hanging, and waited for the tincture to enter his circulation.

It hit him like an exploding sun.

He gave a quavering cry and toppled to the floor, holding himself up with his hands and knees.

He felt a cold gun barrel press into the back of his neck.

He heard Isabel Arundell’s voice.

“If you move, I swear to God I’ll put a bullet through your brain.”

Dick Burton, spy, traitor to his native country, and Otto von Bismarck’s strongest piece in the deadly chess game currently being played across Europe, was defeated.

He’d come so close. He’d discovered the existence of Spring Heeled Jack. He’d learned the truth about the apparition’s identity and origin. He’d found where the British government’s secretive Society of Science was keeping the time suit. And he’d almost snatched it from them.

The accursed king’s agent! She’d been on his heels ever since he’d killed Krishnamurthy and Bhatti, and now, just as his victory seemed assured, she’d caught up with him.

Still dazed from the knock to his head, on his hands and knees, with pain searing through his skull, he tried desperately to gather his thoughts.

“Stay down,” she advised. “Try anything and I’ll not hesitate.”

“Miss Arundell,” he rasped. “Your sense of timing is immaculate—and exasperating.”

He tried to push himself up, but her weapon jabbed into his neck again.

“Last chance. Believe me, I’m itching to pull this trigger.”

Perhaps his attempt to move so soon after being clouted was a mistake anyway; it sent his senses spinning, and, for a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was. In his bedroom, surely? No, else there’d be a carpet beneath his hands and knees. There was only one place he knew that possessed this harsh, unnatural illumination. Battersea Power Station.

As if to confirm it, he heard Babbage’s characteristic rasp. “Have you quite finished, Madam? Am I to suffer these interruptions every time I’m on the verge of an important experiment?”

“Had I not interrupted, Charles,” Isabel responded, “you’d have nothing to experiment with. He was about to steal the time suit.”

Isabel. Alive. She’s alive.

“Please,” Burton croaked. “Let me stand. Let me look at you.”

“Keep him in your sights, Algernon,” she said.

“Rightie ho.”

Swinburne. So he was here, too.

Burton put a hand to his face. It was clean-shaven.

He had thoughts overlaying thoughts, memories upon memories.

One stratum clarified, the rest blurred.

He recognised himself.

Another side step.

“All right,” Isabel said. “Get to your feet. Slowly. Any sudden movement and I’ll shoot you dead.”

Another voice, male: “Be careful. I know to my cost how dangerous the swine can be.”

Burton raised his head and saw John Hanning Speke. The man had been killed in Berbera four years ago, but here he was, in nearly every respect as Burton remembered him, tall, thin, with a long, mousy brown beard and a weak, indecisive sort of face. The sole difference was that this Speke’s left eye was missing, along with much of the skull above it, and had been replaced with a mechanism of glass and brass. Burton very slowly climbed to his feet, and the man’s artificial eye whirred as the metal rings surrounding the black lens adjusted its focus.

“Run to earth, at last,” Speke said. “You’ll not escape this time, Dick. It’s the noose for you.”

Burton didn’t respond. Very gradually, he turned. He saw Babbage, standing by a workbench with the damaged suit on it. He saw a hulking contraption of jointed legs and tool-bearing limbs, which he guessed was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He saw Algernon Swinburne, short-haired, scar-faced, and despite his diminutive and somewhat effeminate form, looking surprisingly brutal. And he saw Isabel Arundell.

She was slender, elegant, beautiful, and aiming her pistol straight between his eyes.

“Isabel,” he whispered, hardly able to resist rushing forward to take her into his arms.

“Shut up,” she snapped. “Charles, please proceed. We’ll allow our uninvited guest to witness the activation of the suit. I want him to go to the gallows knowing we have it, knowing it works, and knowing we’ll use it to defeat his master’s filthy empire.” She flicked the end of the gun slightly and said to Burton, “Watch. This marks the end of all Bismarck’s schemes.”

Burton looked back at Babbage. The elderly scientist clapped his hands together. “Have you all quite finished? Interruption after interruption! Unacceptable! This is a place for science and the advancement of understanding, not for your ridiculous games of politics and one-upmanship. Now, be quiet and observe.” He tapped the suit’s helmet. “This, as I have already told you, has the ability to repair itself but currently lacks sufficient energy to do so. By reestablishing its connection to this,” he pointed at the Nimtz generator, “I believe power enough will be transferred.” He took a pocket watch from his waistcoat. “Isambard, please record that the experiment commences at nine o’clock on the evening of the fifteenth of February, 1860.”

He reached down and traced a shape on the side of the generator. It glowed, crackled and let forth a shower of sparks.

“I’d move back if I was you,” Burton advised.

A bubble swelled out of the suit. Babbage and Speke, standing closest to it, retreated hastily.

“And,” Burton said, “hey presto.”

The time suit vanished, taking half the bench and a chunk of Isambard Kingdom Brunel with it.

“How did you do that?” Isabel demanded. “Bring it back at once!”

Burton turned to face her. “Isabel, know this. I loved you from the very first moment I saw you.”

She snarled at him. “You traitorous hound.”

He saw her finger tighten on the trigger.

There was a loud report.

He felt himself explode out of his body.

Dying was like blinking.

He was sucked back into it.

When he opened his eyes, Burton was facing Babbage again, and the bench and the suit were back.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in human form except for an accordion-like apparatus creaking in and out on his chest, took a cigar from his mouth and said, in a gravelly voice, “Will it work, Charles?”

“Of course it will.”

Brunel looked to Burton’s right. “Should we do it, sir?”

“Yes.”

Burton turned his head to see the man who’d spoken. It was Lord Elgin’s former secretary, Laurence Oliphant. His skin and hair were alabaster white. His features were distorted, resembling those of a panther.

Babbage announced that it was nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860. He went through the identical routine with the identical result.

Burton waited silently while Babbage and Oliphant tied a tourniquet around Brunel’s right arm, the engineer’s hand having been taken by the bursting bubble.

Isabel is alive in at least one branch of history. My enemy, but alive. By God! To see her! To see her!

Grief tightened his chest. He closed his eyes, swayed, and thought he might fall.

Babbage said, “Mr. Lister, note that the experiment commences at nine o’clock, fifteenth of February, 1860.”

Burton opened his eyes. The interior of Battersea Power Station had transformed into what appeared to be a nightmarish surgical ward. Vast pulsating monstrosities of flesh and tubes and organs humped up from the floor around him. Tentacled glowing organisms hung from the high ceiling. Cartilage and throbbing arteries stretched from wall to wall. He was standing in the midst of it, facing a workbench. Babbage and the surgeon Joseph Lister were on the opposite side. Charles Darwin and Francis Galton were whispering together to his left. Damien Burke and Gregory Hare—who in El Yezdi’s history had been allies and in his own enemies—were to his right, both dressed, bizarrely, as Harlequin.

“I must confess, this procedure involves an unusual degree of unpredictability,” Babbage said. “For if there’s a time suit here, then there are time suits in the other realities, too, and if every Charles Babbage simultaneously connects every helmet to every Nimtz generator in every history, what then?”

Ah!
Burton thought.
Is that it?

Babbage reached toward the suit.

“Stop!” Burton shouted.

The scientist glanced up at him. “Don’t interfere, sir! Know your place!”

He touched the generator.

Pause.

Pop.

Gone.

While Babbage and Lister squabbled, Burton walked over to Damien Burke and said, “Where’s Brunel?”

Burke’s lugubrious features creased into a frown. “Dead. Did you forget killing him, Mr. Burton?”

“Ah. And what about Isabel Arundell?”

“She’s still on her honeymoon, isn’t that right, Mr. Hare?”

“It is, Mr. Burke,” Hare agreed.

“To whom is she married?”

“Why, to Mr. Bendyshe, of course.”

“Bendyshe? Thomas Bendyshe?” Burton threw his head back and gave a bark of laughter. When he looked down, he was in front of the bench yet again, and the power station was an intricate structure of wrought iron and stained glass, like a baroque cathedral.

“Mr. Gooch,” Babbage said, “make a note. It is nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860. We shall begin.”

Burton felt a pistol in his waistband. He yanked it out and pointed it at Babbage.

“No. Step away from the suit. Don’t touch it.”

Babbage glared at him. “There is no time for games, Captain.”

Burton shot him in the head.

As blood sprayed and Babbage fell backward to the floor, Burton yelled, “Everyone remain absolutely still or I swear I’ll kill every one of you.”

“My giddy aunt! Have you lost your mind?” Swinburne screeched from beside him.

“You’ve killed Charles!” Gooch cried out.

Burton heard Richard Monckton Milnes, behind him, say, “You’d better have a damned good explanation for this, Dick.”

The time suit popped out of existence.

Gooch, Swinburne, and Monckton Milnes gaped at the indentation in the floor where the bench had been.

“What happened?” Monckton Milnes muttered.

Gooch said, “Impossible! Charles never touched it.”

Burton lowered his gun. “Now
that
,” he said, “is very interesting indeed.”

“What is?” Swinburne asked.

Finding himself in mid-stride, the king’s agent stumbled and stopped. There came a tug at his hand. He was holding a lead. Fidget, by his right ankle, looked up.

To his left, Swinburne drew to a halt.

“Algy? I—I—I beg your pardon?”

“I said, what is?” Swinburne replied. “You said something was interesting.”

Burton placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder to steady himself. The world buckled and distorted around him. It shimmered, solidified, and he saw they were in Whitehall Place, close to the Royal Geographical Society. The street’s gutters were piled high with red blossoms, bright beneath an unbroken but thinning grey mantle of cloud.

“Um, the date?”

“The date is interesting?” Swinburne asked. “Why so?”

“No, I mean, what is it?”

The poet stared at him. “The seventeenth, of course. What’s the matter? Surely not another hallucination? When? Just now?”

“It’s Friday?”

“Yes. One o’clock-ish. Good Lord! I didn’t notice a thing!”

“Wait. Tell me, what have we been doing? Where are we going?”

“You summoned me. I pushed your broken velocipede all the way to your place and arrived about an hour ago. You told me about last night’s invasion of Spring Heeled Jacks and your conversation with Krishnamurthy and Bhatti, and then we hopped into a cab. It just dropped us off.”