Anti-Ice

12 THE AIR OF ENGLAND

Josiah Traveller brought the Phaeton back to England on 20 September 1870.

The engineer jockeyed his battered craft through the fires of air friction, the globe-circling winds of the upper atmosphere, and finally a quite devastating thunderstorm: still a mile from the ground we cowered in our seats, peering fearfully through the ports at swords of lightning which leapt from cloud to cloud; and we imagined that we had passed through Earth all the way to Hell.

And at last the Phaeton, having all but exhausted its precious lunar water, settled with a bump into the soft, stubble-covered soil of a Kent farm. The rockets died for the last time, and silence settled over the Smoking Cabin which had become our prison. Pocket, Holden and I stared at each other with wild anticipation. Then we heard the soft sigh of the air of England against the outer skin of the craft; and we let out yells as we realized that we were at last home.

The Frenchman, Bourne, wept softly into the palm of his hand. I noticed this and, drawn by an odd sympathy I had acquired for the fellow, might have said some words to give him comfort. But my blood was racing at the thought that I had returned to my home country; a return that had seemed inconceivable through most of our astounding flight beyond the atmosphere. And so I pushed aside my restraints, still yelling like a coot, and stood up—

—and was floored, as fast as by any brawler’s haymaker, by my own astonishing weight!

My legs had crumpled like paper, and I found my face pressed uncomfortably against the deck. With arms which trembled from the strain I pushed myself upright and rested my back against the padded wall. “My word, fellows, this gravity has given us all a pack to wear.”

Holden nodded. “Traveller did warn us of the debilitating consequences of a lack of weight.”

“Yes; and so much for all his wretched exercise regimes. To the Moon with a set of Indian clubs! Well, I’d like to see how the great man himself is bearing up under this once-familiar strain…” But Holden shamed me with his reminder that Traveller was an old man who should not be encouraged to strain his heart. And so it was I who crawled like a weakened child to the large hatchway set in the wall of the Cabin.

After much effort I succeeded in turning the locking wheel, and I kicked open the heavy hatch.

A draft of cool air, the essence of a fresh English autumn afternoon, gushed into the craft. I heard Holden and Pocket sigh over the crisp oxygen, and even Bourne looked up from his introverted weeping. I lay on my back and sucked in that wonderful atmosphere, and felt the blood course through my cheeks at the nip of cold. “How stale the air was in this ship!” I said.

Holden breathed deeply, coughing. “Traveller’s chemical system is a scientific marvel. But I have to agree, Ned; the piped air in this box has become steadily more foul.”

Now I pushed myself upright and slithered forward until my legs were dangling over the ten-foot drop to the dark loam of Kent; I gazed out over fields, hedgerow, threads of smoke from farmhouse fires and copses.

I looked down, wondering how I might reach the ground—and found myself staring into the wide, ruddy face of a farmer. He wore a battered but respectable tweed suit, muddied Wellington boots and a straw hat; and he carried a large pitchfork, held before him as if for defense. As he gazed at our unlikely craft his mouth hung open, showing poor teeth.

I surreptitiously made sure my tie was straight and waved to him. “Good afternoon, sir.”

He stumbled back three paces, held up the pitchfork at me and his jaw dropped further.

I raised my hands and essayed my most diplomatic smile. “Sir, we are Englishmen; you need fear nothing, despite the extraordinary manner of our arrival.” It was time to be modest. “You have no doubt heard of us. I am of the party of Sir Josiah Traveller, and this is the Phaeton.”

I paused, expecting instant recognition—surely we had been the subject of press speculation since our disappearance—but the worthy rustic merely scowled and uttered a syllable I interpreted as: “Who?”

I began to explain, but my words sounded fantastic even to my own ears, and the farmer merely frowned with ever greater suspicion. So at last I gave it up. “Sir, let me emphasize the pertinent fact: which is that we are four Englishmen, and a French, in desperate need of your assistance. Despite my youth and health I cannot even support my own weight, thanks to the astounding experiences to which I have been subject. I therefore ask you, as one Christian to another, if you will forward the help we need.”

The farmer’s face, red as an apple, was a picture of mistrust. But at last, after muttering something about the acres of stubble we’d scorched to a crisp, he lowered his pitchfork and approached the vessel.

The farmer’s name was Clay Lubbock.

It took Lubbock and two of his strongest lads to carry us from the ship. They used slings of rope to lower us from one strong set of arms to another. Then we were loaded on to a bullock cart and, swathed in sheets, hauled off across the broken ground to the farmhouse. Traveller, his voice rendered uneven by the jolting of the cart, remarked on the irony of our rapid descent through the technological strata; but his own appearance—thin, fragile and deathly pale—belied his jocular words, and none of us responded.

The rustics stared in silent fascination at Traveller’s platinum nose.

In the farmhouse we were greeted by Mrs. Lubbock, a bluff, gray woman with massive, hair-coated forearms; without questions or how-do-you-do’s she assessed our condition with the ready eye of a buyer of livestock and despite some protests from Traveller, soon had us wrapped up warmly before a roaring fire and was pouring thick chicken stock into us. Lubbock, meanwhile, set off to town on his fastest horse to spread the word of our return.

Traveller chafed at his confinement, protesting that he was no invalid and that there was work to be done. He was anxious to get to a telegraph station so that the work of transporting the scarred Phaeton to his home in Surrey could begin. Holden calmed him. “I, too, am anxious to return to civilization,” he said. “Remember I am a journalist. My paper, and others, should reward me well if I turn our jaunt into a well-turned narrative. But, Sir Josiah, I recognize my own frailty. As soon as word spreads of our return the world will surely descend on us. I have been through an ordeal without parallel in human history and am left barely capable of supporting a laden soup spoon, and would welcome the chance to recuperate for a few hours under the kind hospitality of Mrs. Lubbock. And so should you, Sir Josiah!”

Traveller did not accept the argument but had little choice but to comply; and so we were put to bed in hard pallets in small bedrooms scattered about the Lubbocks’ home. Holden persuaded the farmer to station one of his lads as a guard outside the room of the wretched Bourne; I thought this was rather sour, as Bourne was hardly in a condition to shin out of the window and race off to freedom across the fields.

I lay in my pallet waiting for sleep, with my window open to admit the bright autumn air, and reflected that, despite the discomforts of this world (the hardness of the mattress under my spine, for instance, was hardly helping my new induction into Earth’s gravity), the compensations—the scent of the trees growing just beyond my window, the distant rustle of a breeze through the hedgerow, the rough caress of the Lubbocks’ sheets against my face—made the thought of ever leaving this Earth again seem an abomination.

In the morning I awoke to bright sunlight, feeling quite refreshed, and was even able to take the few steps to my washbasin unaided. I found Traveller at the Lubbocks’ kitchen table; he was seated in an old bath chair wrapped in his own dressing-gown, brought from the Phaeton, and he was enjoying a hearty meal of bacon and farmhouse eggs. Newspapers were piled up on the table and he was working his way through them as he ate; and, despite the homely warmth of the kitchen, with the morning sunlight slanting across the floor to twinkle from the polished range, Traveller’s expression was as sour and thunderous as ever I had seen it. He looked up as one of Lubbocks willing lads helped me in and said, “Ned, it is no surprise that farmer Lubbock was mystified at our arrival. It was sheer vanity ever to suppose that our disappearance should have remained of interest for any length of time—not while Europe tears itself apart!”

Disturbed by these words, I began to go through the yellowing papers myself. They dated back to a few days before our departure on 8 August: apparently Lubbock stored the old journals to line his chicken coop. In general our disappearance had been overshadowed by its larger context—the sabotage of the Prince Albert on its launching day—and we had generally been assumed dead, lost in some chance explosion, a by-product of the assault on the ship. I was amazed to learn that it had since proven impossible to retake the Albert from the saboteurs, or franc-tireurs, who had stolen it; and, as best I could tell, it still wandered at large about the fields of Belgium or northern France like some escaped beast! The actions of the franc-tireurs had been linked to attacks on other British properties, at home and abroad; I wondered if the attempted sabotage of the Light Rail which Holden and I had witnessed at Dover had been committed by a Frenchman.

And, of course, there was no word of Françoise Michelet or the other trapped passengers of the ill- fated liner; and despite the pleasure of the Kent morning I felt my heart sink as I scanned those yards of barren newsprint.

Traveller remarked on my crestfallen expression, and asked what in particular distressed me. Haltingly—for Josiah Traveller was no sympathetic ear—I described Françoise: our meetings, and the immediate impression she had made on me. As I talked on I felt color steal into my cheeks; for what had seemed, in the privacy of my heart, to be an ethereal passion, became on the telling in this bright farmhouse kitchen a rather foolish infatuation.

Traveller listened to all this without comment. Then he said levelly: “The girl sounds like a franc- tireur herself, Wickers.” I made to protest, shocked, but he went on, “What else, if she was so thick with that wretch Bourne?” He sniffed. “If I’m correct you should waste no more sympathy on her, Ned. She is where she chooses to be.” So saying he turned to his papers again, leaving me devastated.

But, even in that first moment of shock, I perceived the plausibility of what Traveller suggested. The elements about Françoise which Holden, and even I, had noted as odd—her fascination with engineering, her angry absorption in politics—fell into place under Traveller’s hypothesis as components of a far more complex character than the girl I had idealized, and whose sweet face I had projected on to the oceans of Earth.

I wanted to curse Traveller for putting such a suggestion into my head; I cursed myself for a fool even more. But still, I was not sure. And the most galling aspect of the situation was that, with Françoise lost in war-torn France, I might never learn the truth about her.

With my heart in turmoil I turned my attention to the newspapers. Reading rapidly, Traveller and I pieced together the story of the European conflict, as reported in London, since our precipitate departure.

The war with the Prussians had gone badly for the French. Reading the harrowing accounts of battles fought and lost, it was scarcely credible to me that France, with its long military tradition, its proud heritage and its model army, should have collapsed before Bismarck’s aggression in quite such a craven way. French strategy seemed largely to have consisted of the twin Marshals Bazaine and MacMahon lurching about the French countryside in search of defensible positions and each other, while periodically losing skirmishes to the Prussians.

About the time of our enforced departure Napoleon III had left Paris for Chalons, while appointing Bazaine to the command of his Army of the Rhine. A few days later Bazaine, fearing encirclement by the fast-moving Prussians, had withdrawn to the west across the River Moselle. But near Metz he encountered two German corps and had finished up encircled after all; as we sat in our peaceful farmhouse reading about it, Bazaine’s force was still trapped in the town of Metz, invested by no fewer than two hundred thousand Prussian troops.

So much for one half of the glorious French Army. Of the rest, MacMahon’s instinct had been to stay close to Paris and so offer protection to the capital, but popular pressure, brought to bear by Parisians outraged by the violation of their precious patrie, had impelled him to a more aggressive course; and he had set off toward Metz in the hope of combining with Bazaine.

The Germans around Metz, commanded by the wily Moltke, had divided their forces. Bazaine was left trapped while the rest of the Prussians set off to meet the advancing MacMahon. MacMahon’s forces, exhausted by their difficult march, had been encircled by the Prussians at Sedan. MacMahon himself was wounded and French command lines were paralyzed.

The Army was annihilated. The French allowed 100,000 men and no fewer than 400 guns to fall into Prussian hands.

The French Second Empire collapsed in chaos. Napoleon III himself surrendered to the Prussians, and a Government of National Defense under the Governor of Paris, General Trochu, had emerged in the capital. And meanwhile two Prussian armies had advanced on Paris itself.

Even as we had landed in our Kent field, Paris, sixty years earlier Bonaparte’s capital of Europe, lay under a Prussian siege. The only hope appeared to lie with Bazaine, but he remained entrapped in Metz, and the rumors in London were that his supplies were running low. The Prussians, meanwhile, were predictably cock-a-hoop, and there was much wild speculation about plans for Kaiser William to ride in procession through the streets of conquered Paris.

I laid down the last newspaper with hands that trembled. “Dear God, Traveller. What an astonishing few weeks we have missed! Surely this humiliation of France will burn in the mind of every Frenchman for generations to come. They were already an excitable bunch—look at Bourne for an example. Surely nothing but a state of war can exist between the French and their German cousins for all time.”

“Perhaps.” Traveller lay back in his bath chair, his thin hands wrapped together over the robe which covered his belly, and he stared unseeing through the dusty windows of the farmhouse. With the sunlight catching the wisps of white hair which hovered about his skull, he looked as old and frail as I remembered him at that terrible moment when it seemed that even the Moon would not save our lives. “But it is not ‘all time’ that concerns me, Ned; it is the here and now.”

“What troubles you, sir?”

With a trace of his old irritation he snapped, “Think about it, boy; you’re supposed to be a diplomat. The Prussians have felled France. Surely even the wily old fox Bismarck cannot have foreseen such astonishing gains—and these in addition to his primary objective.”

“Which is?”

“Is it not obvious?” He studied me wearily. “Why, the unification of Germany, of course. What better way to bully and cajole the German princelings into a political union than to set up a common foe?—and how much better if that foe is the unlovely France of Robespierre and Bonaparte. I predict that we will see a declaration of a new Germany before this year is out. But of course it will amount to little more than a greater Prussian Empire, for if those petty Bavarian princes think that Bismarck, in his pomp and triumph, will allow them much say in the running of this new entity, they will be sorely disappointed.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “So the Balance of Power is shattered; that Balance which has survived since the Congress of Vienna—”

“A Balance which Britain has fought to maintain ever since.” He drummed his fingers on the table top. “Let us be frank, Ned. The British government could scarcely give two hoots if Prussian guns lay Paris waste; for the French, in British minds, are bedevilled by the twin monsters of revolution and military expansionism. And these absurd franc-tireur attacks on British economic targets, like the dear old Prince Albert, are hardly endearing.

“But the development of a new Germany will be greeted with dread in Whitehall. For it has long been an objective of British foreign policy that there should be no dominant power in central Europe.”

I frowned, and was struck by the cynicism of this view of British goals—for surely the maintenance of a peaceful settlement was to be lauded. “Tell me what you’re afraid of, sir,” I said directly.

His bony fingers drummed more loudly. “Ned, up to now the British have stayed out of this damn war of Bismarck’s; and quite right too. But how long before British interests are so endangered by the emergence of Germany that they feel forced to intervene?”

I thought that over. “But the British Army, while the finest in the world, is not well-equipped for large engagements in central Europe. Nor has it ever been. And besides, many of our troops and officers are scattered around the world in the service of His Majesty in the colonies. Surely Mr. Gladstone would not commit us to a foreign adventure with no chance of success.”

“Gladstone. Old Glad Eyes.” He laughed without humor. “Gladstone, I have always felt, is a pompous oaf, and not a patch on Disraeli for wit or intelligence. Obviously Disraeli’s ‘flood-gate’ suffrage reform of 1867 would have been a disaster for the country… Who knows what damage might have been done? Certainly industry would have been denied its rightful say in affairs—perhaps we would still have the nonsensical situation of London as capital! What a ludicrous thought. So perhaps it’s a good thing that Dizzy retired, bruised, from politics, to concentrate on his bizarre literary adventures… but still, one misses the fellow’s dash.

“Perhaps, though, it is a blessing that we have a Glad Eyes inflicted on us in this hour; for, as you say, he and his gang of milksop Whigs would surely be loth to commit us to an absurd adventure… And if the rumors are true he may be more interested in ventures to Soho than Sedan.”

I guffawed at that disrespectful sally.

Traveller continued, “So perhaps Gladstone would not launch us into war in Europe. But… he has other options.”

“Tell me what you mean, Sir Josiah.”

He leaned forward now, folding his arms on the table. “Ned, you will recall your brother’s experiences in the Crimea.”

For a moment these dark words, uttered sepulchrally in the midst of that bright farmhouse morning, made no sense to me; and then, in a sudden, shocking moment, I understood. “Dear Lord, Traveller.”

He was, of course, suggesting that anti-ice weapons might be deployed once more by the British Army; and this time, not in some distant, oddly-named peninsula of southern Russia—but in the heart of Europe herself.

I searched his face for some sign that I was mistaken in my interpretation; but all I saw in those long, somber features was a terrible fear, coupled with immense anger. He said, “Anti-ice weapons could reduce the Prussian Army in minutes. And Gladstone knows this. Bismarck has surely gambled on the unwillingness of the British to become entangled in European disputes—but the pressure on Gladstone to use this astounding advantage must be growing by the day.”

I watched the fear and anger wrestle in Traveller’s eyes, and imagined this brusque but fundamentally gentle man once more forced to labor over weapons of war. On impulse I grabbed at his sleeve. “Traveler, you have brought us to the Moon and back. You have immense strength; I have every confidence that you will not allow your genius to be employed in any such fashion.”

But his fear lingered; and Traveller pawed at the newspapers once more, as if seeking some glimmer of hope in their fading words.

Our idyll was not to last more than a few minutes beyond the end of that conversation. The first fist to hammer at the Lubbocks’ door was that of the Mayor of the nearest town—whose name we had not even learned yet—and, as I studied this gentleman’s portly, mud-spattered frame and empty smile, I realized, with a sink of the heart which startled me, that I was indeed home.

We were whisked away from our corner of Kent. We were given little time to say goodbye to each other—which is perhaps as well, for I felt a surprisingly strong bond with my fellow voyagers. I would not go so far as to say I experienced a nostalgia for those long weeks trapped in the Phaeton, but I did feel quite exposed without my companions close by.

Traveller soon installed himself in a pleasant inn close to the Lubbocks’ field where his precious Phaeton lay, and threw himself into the restoration of the craft to his laboratory in Surrey. The faithful Pocket begged, and was granted, a few days’ leave to visit his precious grandchildren and reassure them of his continued existence; then, as usual, he returned to work, determining and quietly serving his employer’s needs.

As for Bourne, he was taken without ceremony from Kent under close arrest, and soon disappeared into the complexities of international law. The confusion of the case brought against him as a saboteur by the British, an extradition warrant issued by the Belgians, and protests lodged by the beleaguered French government—not to mention the practical difficulties of communication with that nebulous body—all conspired to threaten the hapless Bourne with a long imprisonment before even he came to trial.

Holden, as soon as he could, made for Manchester, urging us not to disclose details of our adventure to any other journalist. It was amusing to see how his ample form, reduced to the status of a sack of potatoes wheeled about in a bath chair, became filled with agitation as the size of the story he had to tell—and the subsequent fees he would command—grew ever larger in his scribbler’s mind; it was as if one could see his very fingers itching.

Still, Holden’s account, when it appeared in the Manchester press a few days later, did come close to doing justice to our adventure. I read through the rather lurid prose and will admit to some shivers of remembered terror as he evoked my jaunt through the vacuum and (as he overstated it) my battle with the rock monsters of Luna. The piece in the Manchester Guardian was handsomely illustrated by lithographs of various scenes from the account, and was topped off by a reproduction of Holden’s famous photograph of myself and the ill-fated model of Brunel’s ocean liner.

My only disappointment was with Holden’s unsympathetic portrayal of Traveller. The journalist dwelled on Traveller’s near-Anarchist sympathies in a manner which aroused adverse comment about the engineer, even at this moment of his greatest fame. I took the opportunity to read more widely on the various Anarchist thinkers—dismissing the insurrectionist crackpots such as Bakunin, and concentrating on the deeper thinkers like Proudhon, who declared that the desire for property and political power served only to encourage the violent and irrational elements in man.

Surely, I reflected, this present war in Europe was ample evidence for Proudhon’s thesis, and I regretted Holden’s disloyalty.

In any event, thanks to Holden’s account, I became briefly famous.

I returned to the comfort of my parents’ home in Sussex; my family were quite inordinately glad to see me whole and healthy. I suffered a moving reunion with my brother Hedley; his scarred face crumpled with pleasure as I described Josiah Traveller, who had become something of a fascination for Hedley since their one-sided acquaintance in the Crimea. My London friends, several of whom came to visit, urged me to make a dramatic re-entrance into society, the more to capitalize on my heroic status. I looked on their faces, which seemed astonishingly young and fresh, and declined their various invitations—not from any uncharacteristic burst of modesty, for I should quite have enjoyed the admiring attention of the season’s belles as I described how it hadn’t been as bad as all that, really—but more from a lingering feeling of isolation. And besides, my confused feelings about Françoise were a turmoil inside me, incapable of resolution.

I went for long, solitary walks in the woods near my parents’ home, exploring these odd feelings. It was almost as if, having once shaken the dust of Earth from my boots, I felt unfit to return with whole heart to human society. And I found I missed the company of my erstwhile companions more and more.

I watched the colors of autumn spread through the trees, and wondered how such a sight would look from space.

I promised myself that I should immerse myself into the world of men as soon as my moment of fame had faded; and sure enough, fade it did—though not for reasons I would have welcomed. For as the nights of autumn drew in, so the plight of the French grew steadily more desperate.

The Prussians maintained their walls of men and guns around both Paris and Metz. In the Manchester press there were constant tales of famine stalking the streets of the French capital, and some rather more reliable accounts of how the armies of Marshal Bazaine, in Metz, were languishing in the mud, and were growing steadily more incapable even of defending themselves, let alone liberating Paris.

I perused the papers with endless, and morbid, fascination, as the leader writers discussed the choices and dangers facing Gladstone and his government. No civilized man, it was commonly agreed, would again wish to see anti-ice used as a weapon of war. But the Balance of Power was undoubtedly under its severest test, and there seemed a growing mood for some intervention before this precious and venerable guarantor of peace in Europe should be lost for ever.

Against this there were those who, remembering Bonaparte, had no desire to intercede in favor of the beleaguered French. And at the other extreme the Sons of Gascony and their like became ever more vocal in their demands that Britain should exert her evident power, not just to restore peace, but to impose order on the warring factions of Europe. The influence of these stern-minded gentlemen on the debate seemed to be growing; it was even rumored that the King himself sympathized with such views.

Reading this depressing stuff I was reminded of my conversations on the Phaeton with Bourne. No longer did I feel bound into such arguments, as I may have before my adventure; now I saw with a new aloofness how this national debate paralleled the internal ramblings of a deranged mind, which seeks to impose its inward fears and daemons on those around it.

At last, at the end of October, came the news that Bazaine’s forces in Metz—wet, starved and demoralized—had capitulated; this time the rampant Prussians took away 1,400 guns and more than 170,000 men. Although French forces fought on in various parts of the country, it was generally agreed in Manchester that the decisive moment of the war had come; that the Prussians, victorious in the field of combat, would soon be riding through the battered streets of Paris—and that if Britain were ever to intercede in this struggle for the future of Europe, now was the moment.

The clamor of newsprint, demanding action from Gladstone, grew until it seemed a silent shout all around me, and I felt I could bear the tension no longer.

I knew of only one way to resolve these feelings; and I packed a bag, bade a hasty goodbye to my parents, and made my way by Light and steam train to the home of Josiah Traveller.

I walked the last few miles to Traveller’s home. Not far from Farnham, the place was based around a small converted farmhouse, and it would not have attracted the eye—save for a brooding giant some thirty feet high which stood defiant at the rear of the house, its great aluminum shoulders covered by sewn-together tarpaulins. This was of course the Phaeton; and as that magical carriage loomed out of the dull landscape, I felt my heart lift.

I came around a hedgerow to Traveller’s house—and there, standing before his front door, was a rather splendid brougham of rich, polished wood. I realized immediately that I was not Sir Josiah’s only visitor of the day.

Pocket greeted my unheralded arrival with tremendous enthusiasm; he even begged my permission to pump my hand on his own behalf. The manservant was spry and secure now he was on firm ground, and he said, “I am sure that Sir Josiah will be delighted to see you, but at the moment he’s with a visitor. In the meantime, may I offer you tea; and perhaps you would care for a glance around the premises, sir?”

He did not volunteer the identity of this “visitor” and I did not press him.

As I sipped tea I said, “I’ll be honest with you, Pocket. I’m not entirely clear why I’ve come…”

He smiled with surprising wisdom, and said, “You don’t need to explain, sir. In these troubled times, I’m sure I can speak for Sir Josiah in stating that this house is a home to you. Just as the Phaeton was.”

I found myself coloring. “Do you know, Pocket, you’ve hit the nail exactly on the head… Thank you.”

Scarcely trusting myself to speak further I drew on my tea.

The house itself was surprisingly small and dingy. Its main feature was a large conservatory to the south-facing rear which had been converted by Traveller into an extensive laboratory. There was also a barn used for larger-scale construction. Several acres of land surrounded the buildings. Nothing grew in these rough fields, and in several places one could see dramatic scorched scars, where rocket engine tests, launches—and even explosions—had taken place.

The conservatory was quite a grand affair, with a framework of slender, white-painted wrought iron which gave the place a sense of lightness; various tools and machines lay in that gentle light like strange plants. The laboratory was laid out something like a milling shop; a steam lathe attached to the ceiling powered various metal-turning machines by means of leather bands, and fixed to benches around the floor were small lathes, a sheet-metal stamp, presses, acetylene welding sets and vices. The fruits of these tools lay all around, some familiar from my time on the Phaeton. Pocket pointed out a rocket nozzle, for example, which shone in the light of the weak autumn sun, its mouth upturned like the muzzle of some unlikely flower.

“And what of Phaeton herself?” I asked Pocket.

“We had the very devil of a time getting the old girl home from that farmer’s field in Kent. We had to take a steam crane out there to shift her, would you believe; and all the time that wretched man Lubbock protested at the ruts we were planting in his precious fields.”

I laughed. “You can’t blame the poor chap. After all, he didn’t ask to have us drop in on him in that extraordinary fashion.”

“And as for the old girl, Sir Josiah says she’s fared remarkably well, considering the ordeal through which we put her: an ordeal for which she was scarcely designed, of course.”

“Which of us was?” I asked with feeling.

“In the end she suffered surprisingly little damage. A collapsing support leg, a bashed nozzle, a hatful of scars and scorch marks, an overstrained airpump or two—I might say, largely thanks to your own efforts there, sir.”

Now we left the conservatory and walked out into the fresh air, and so started to make our way to the front of the house once more.

“So she could fly again?” I asked.

“Could, but won’t, I think, sir. Sir Josiah has refuelled her, in order to test the workings of the motors, and has spent a deal of time on fixing her up, but I think he feels she’s done her bit. He has a headful of ideas for a second Phaeton, brighter and still more powerful than the first; I think he plans to turn the original into a sort of monument to herself.”

“And so he should,” I said.

Now Pocket drew to a halt and stared straight ahead. “Well,” he went on more quietly, “it’s only to be hoped that he’s allowed to put those ideas into practice.”

Puzzled by his tone, I turned to follow his gaze. Before the front door I saw the familiar figure of Traveller, his stovepipe hat screwed as incongruously and defiantly to his head as ever. He was, I saw, taking leave of his earlier visitor. The other man, now climbing into his brougham, was a wide- framed gentleman of about sixty, whose features were naggingly familiar; I studied the gray hair swept across his head, the rich white sidewhiskers, the rather lifeless eyes, the grim, downturned mouth set in a Moon of a face—

“Dear God,” I whispered to Pocket. “That’s Gladstone himself!”

The Prime Minister took his leave of Traveller; with a snick of the driver’s whip the brougham pulled away. Traveller walked slowly along the side of his home, absently studying the ivy which clung to the brickwork. I would have gone to him, but Pocket held my sleeve firmly, indicating no; and we waited for Sir Josiah to reach us in his own time.

At last he stood before us. He straightened his shoulders, fixed his hat more correctly at the center of his cranium, and held his hands behind his back; his platinum nose glinted in the weak November sunlight. “Well, Ned,” he said, his voice as pale as the Sun. “I heard you arrive. I apologize for my—preoccupation.”

I demanded without preamble: “That was the Prime Minister, wasn’t it?”

“You must drop this habit of restating the obvious, Ned,” he admonished; but his tone was abstracted.

“I have heard of the fall of Bazaine, at Metz.”

“Yes.” He looked at me carefully. “Such was in the journals. But there is also news of the Albert.”

Suddenly my head was filled with thoughts of Françoise; and I shouted, “What news? You must tell me.”

“Ned—” He took my arms. “The Albert has been converted into a vehicle of war. The French saboteurs, the…” He groped for the phrase.

“The franc-tireurs.”

“They have taken it over, installed cannon, and so have converted it into a gigantic mobile castle. And they are driving it toward Paris, where they plan to engage the besieging Prussians. Ned, it is quite insane. The Albert is a passenger ship, not a man-of-war. One accurate shell and it would be done for…”

The images conjured by his words were so fantastic that I found it almost impossible to grasp their thread of meaning. “And the passengers? What of them?”

“There is no word.”

I said, a little harshly, “And what is the import of all this? The Prime Minister of Great Britain does not call in person to deliver news, however dramatic, Sir Josiah.”

“No, of course not.” His eyes slid away from mine, and he adopted that strained, hunted look I had observed in the Lubbocks’ farmhouse. “The news about the Albert was Glad Eyes’ way into my sympathy. I believe he hoped to link, in my mind, the European war with my own endeavors.

“The government have reached their point of decision, you see. Metz has collapsed, yes; but Paris holds out, against all reason, even at the cost of starving its own citizens. Meanwhile the Prussians sound ever more bellicose and grandiose. There seems little prospect of a just settlement to this war; and the government rather regret that the Europeans no longer find it possible to conduct a war like good chaps, finishing according to the rules.” He shook his head. “Gladstone says Europe may collapse into terminal chaos for a generation, if Britain does not intervene. He says that, but of course he believes no such thing. Britain as usual is pursuing its own aims, and Gladstone would say anything to have me cooperate. And yet—and yet, what if there is truth in what he says? What right have I to resist the tide of history?” He clapped his hand to his forehead, shoving back his hat, and shook his head.

I took his arm. “Sir Josiah, has he asked you to bring back your anti-ice weapons of the Crimean campaign?”

“No. No, Ned; they want new weapons… They have such ideas as you would not believe. How can human beings, men like you and me, walk around with their heads full of such thoughts?… And they say that if I do not cooperate, they will withdraw their investment.” He laughed bitterly. “Which was precarious enough anyway. They will turf me out of my home, destroy my access to anti-ice; and a team of lesser men will be set to do their bidding in my place.”

I stared into his long, tortured face, and recalled Holden’s analysis of the man’s poor financial acumen. Was this to be the great engineer’s Achilles’ heel, the flaw that would bring his work at last to ruin—just as it had destroyed, in the end, the plans of his hero Brunel?

I hoped that Traveller would have none of the government’s obscene plan, but there was uncertainty in his face, and his next words discouraged me.

“Gladstone is a fool and a philanderer, no doubt; but he is also a politician, Ned; and he has planted doubts in my mind! For if I construct these devices, perhaps I can indeed make them, as he says, ‘scientific’ in their effectiveness. Whereas if lesser men begin to meddle with this we could face a disaster on a scale never before witnessed.” His face was quite open now and full of pain. “Tell me, Ned. What am I to do?… I fear I must cooperate with them, for fear of the alternative—”

“In God’s name, Traveller, what do they want you to build?”

He dropped his head as if in shame. “Rocket boats. Like smaller versions of the Phaeton. But these would not be driven by a human pilot; instead an adaptation of my navigation table, with its gyroscopic guidance system, could serve to guide the rocket to its landing point.”

I was mystified. “But what would be the purpose of these manless Phaetons? What would emerge after they landed?” I wondered vaguely if they would carry ammunition or food in to the beleaguered Parisians, but Traveller was shaking his head.

“No, Ned; you don’t see it yet. And I don’t blame you, for it takes an imagination of a particular devilishness.

“The rocket boat does not land. It is allowed to crash into the earth, in the manner of artillery shells. When it does so a Dewar of anti-ice shatters; the anti-ice spills out into the heat of the earth, and a monstrous explosion ensues.”

He spread his arms wide and turned about, as if drunk. “You have to admit there is a certain grandeur in the concept,” he said. “From my own garden, here, I would be able to launch a shell which would reach across the Channel, all the way to Paris, and fell the pride of Prussia with one hammer blow—”

“No!”

Traveller and Pocket stared at me.

A thousand emotions coursed through my poor heart. The conflicting images of Françoise warred in me: the sweet face which had become, during our perilous voyage around the Moon, a talisman to me, a symbol of hope and the future, of all to which I would return; but underlying it, as the skull underlies the fairest visage, was the specter of the franc-tireur, a totem of all those who would unleash war and death on the fragile bowl of Earth I had watched from above the air.

How my mind reeled with these perceptions! And how far I’d come from the simple lad who had boarded the Phaeton barely three months earlier!

My course of action, I found, was decided.

Scarcely a second had passed since my single syllable of protest. Without thinking further I turned on my heels and ran toward the covered form of the Phaeton. I heard Traveller’s call after me and his slow footsteps in pursuit, but the craft filled my attention.

I had to reach Paris—I had to confront Françoise, to save her if I could, to deflect the British bombs—and to do that I would travel there by the fastest means possible—at the controls of the Phaeton!