Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

CHAPTER THREE: THE RED PLANET LEAGUE

I

Professor Moriarty excelled in two fields of human endeavour.

Mathematics, for one. Never was such a fellah as the Prof for chalking up sums. Or the rigmarole with more squiggles than numbers. Equations. Did ’em in his head, for fun… damn his eyes.

I would wager several pawn tickets held on the family silver that you lot have little or no interest in fractional calculus or imperfect logarithms. You’d all be best pleased if I yarned up the other field in which James Moriarty was top of the class.

Crime. Just the word gets you tingly, don’t it?

Well, tough titty… as the house captain who tried to roger me when I was a whelp at Eton used to say. Because this story is all about mathematics. I got my penknife to the house capt’s goolies, by the way. Preserved my maidenly virtue, as it were. Blighter is Bishop of Brichester these days. That’s beside the point: maths is the thing!

Get your thinking caps on, because I might put in some sums. Make you show your workings in the margin and write off for the answers. It will cost an extra 3d and a stamp just to find out if you’re as clever as you think you are. Probably, you ain’t. Most fellahs (including — I’m not ashamed to admit it — me) aren’t as clever as they think they are. Moriarty, though, was exactly that clever, a rare bird indeed. More dodos are around than blokes like that. According to Mr Darwin, that’s good joss [18] for the rest of us. Elsewise, we’d have long since been hunted to extinction by the inflated cranium people.

Drifting back to the subject in hand, Professor Moriarty was Number One Heap Big Chief in both his vocations. Which meant there was something he was even better at than complicated number problems or turning a dishonest profit — making enemies.

Over the years and around the world, I’ve run into some prize-winningly antagonistic coves. I recall several of that species of blood-soaked heathen who bridle under the yoke of Empire and declare war on ‘the entire White Christian Race’. Good luck to ’em. Pack off a regiment of curates and missionaries led by Bishop Bum-Banger to meet their savage hordes on the field of carnage and see if I care. In India, some sergeants wear armour beneath the tunic because no soldier serving under them can be trusted with a clear shot at their backs. I’ve also run into confidential police informants, which is to say: grasses. Peaching on one’s fellow crims to escape gaol is guaranteed to get you despised on both sides of the law. Fact is: no bastard born earned as many, as various, and as determined enemies as Moriarty.

First off, other crooks hated him. Get your regular magsman or ponce on the subject of Professor Jimmy Bleedin’ Moriarty, and you’ll expand the old vocabulary by obscenities in several argots. Just being a bigger thief than the rest of them was enough to get their goats. What made it worse was villains were often forced to throw in with him on capers, taking all the risk while he snaffled the lion’s share of the loot. If they complained, he had them killed. That was my job, by the by — so show some bloody respect or there’s a rope, a sack and a stretch of the Thames I could introduce you to. To hear them tell it, every cracksman in the land was just about to work out a foolproof plan to lift the jewels from Princess Alexandra’s knickers or riffle the strongboxes in the sub-basement of the Bank of England when Professor Moriarty happened by some fluke to think of it first. A few more tumblers of gin and their brilliant schemes would have been perfected — and they wouldn’t have to hand on most of the swag to some evil-eyed toff just for sitting at home and drawing diagrams. You might choose to believe these loquacious, larcenous fellahs. Me, I’ll come straight out and say they’re talking through a portion of their anatomy best employed passing wind or, in certain circumstances, concealing a robin’s egg diamond with a minimum of observable discomfort.

Then there were coppers. Moriarty made sure they had no earthly notion who he might be, so they didn’t hate him quite as personally as anyone who ever met him — but they sure as spitting hated the idea of him. By now, you’ve heard the twaddle… vast spider squatting in the centre of an enormous web of vice and villainy… Napoleon of Crime… Nero of Naughtiness… Thucydides of Theft, et cetera, et cetera. Detectives of all stripe loathed the unseen King of Krooks, and blubbed to their mummies whenever they had to flounder around after one of his coups. ‘Scotland Yard Baffled,’ as if that were news. Hah!

One man above all hated Professor Moriarty. And was hated by him.

Throughout his dual career — imagine serpents representing maths and crookery, twining together like a wicked caduceus — the Prof was locked in deadly survival for supremacy — nay, for survival — with a human creature he saw as his arch-enemy, his eternal opposite, his nemesis.

Sir Nevil Airey Stent.

I don’t know how it started. Stent and Moriarty were at each other’s throats well before I became Number Two Big-ish Chief in the Firm. Whenever the Stent issue was raised, Moriarty turned purple and hissed — and was in no condition to elucidate further. I know they first met as master and pupil: Moriarty supervised young Nevil when the lad was cramming for an exam. Maybe the Prof scorned the promising mathematician’s first quadratic equation in front of the class. Maybe Stent gave him an apple with a worm in it. Upshot is: daggers drawn, eyes ablaze, lifelong enmity.

Since this record might be of some academic interest, here are a few facts and dates I’ve looked up in back editions of the Times:

1863 — Boyish twenty-three-year-old Nevil Stent, former pupil of James Moriarty, rocks the world of astronomy with his paper ‘Diffractive Properties of an Object-Glass with Circular Aperture’. Not a good title, to my mind — which runs more to the likes of

Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas

or

My Nine Nights in a Harem

(both, as it happens, written by me — good luck finding the latter: most of the run was burned by order of the crown court and the few extant volumes tend to be found in the collection of the judge who made the ruling).

1869 — Stent appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, succeeding brainboxes like Isaac Newton, Thomas Turton and Charles Babbage. Look ’em up — all gems, so I’m told. If said chair were a literal piece of furniture, it would be hand-carved by Chippendale and covered in a three-inch layer of gold flake. The Lucasian Professorship comes complete with loads of wonga, a free house, all the bowing and scraping students you can eat and high tea with the dean’s sister every Thursday. Stent barely warms the Lucasian with his bottom before skipping on to occupy an even more exalted seat, the Plumian Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy. It’s only officially a chair — everyone in Cambridge calls it the Plumian

Throne.

1872 —The book-length expansion of ‘Diffractive Properties’ lands Stent the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. This is like the VC of science. Wear that little ribbon and lesser astronomers swallow their chalk with envy when you walk by.

1873 — Stent publishes again!

On an Inequality of Long Period in the Motions of the Earth and Venus

so radically revises the Solar Tables set out a generation earlier by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre that the Delambre Formulae are tossed into the bin and replaced by the Stent Formulae. JB is dead or Moriarty would have had to queue up behind him for the job of Nev’s arch-enemy, methinks.

1878 — Stent knighted by Her Majesty, Queen Victoria — who couldn’t even count her own children, let alone calculate an indice of diffraction — and is therefore universally hailed the greatest astronomical mathematician of the age. Rivals choke on their abacus beads. Naturally, Sir Nevil is also appointed Astronomer Royal and allowed to play with all the toys and telescopes in the land. Gets first pick of which bits of the sky to look at. Can name any cosmic bodies he discovers after his cats. The AR position comes with Flamsteed House, an imposing official residence. Greenwich Observatory is tacked onto it, rather like a big garden shed. Lesser mortals have to throw themselves on the ground before Sir Nevil Airey Stent if they want to take so much a shufti at the man in the moon.

Cast your glims over that little lot, and consider the picture of Sir Nevil in the rotogravure. Tall, fair-haired, eyes like a romantic poet, strong arms from working an altazimuth mount, winning little-boy smile. Mrs Sir Nevil is the former Caroline Broughton-Fitzhume, second daughter of the Earl of Stoke Poges, reckoned among the beauties of the age. Tell me you don’t hate the swot right off the bat.

Now… imagine how you’d feel about Stent if you were a skull-faced, reptile-necked, balding astronomical-mathematical genius ten years older than the Golden Youth of Greenwich Observatory. Though recognised as a serious brain, that ‘European vogue’ for your ‘Treatise on the Binomial Theorem’ is but a faded memory. Your career has scarcely stretched beyond being ousted from an indifferent, non-Plumian chair — no more than a stool, they say — at a provincial university few proper dons would toss a mortarboard at. Officially, you’re an army coach — cramming sums into the heads of dimwit subalterns who need to pass exams before haring off to do daring deeds (or die of jungle fever) in far distant quarters of the Empire. No one knows about the coups and triumphs of your other business. And Stent is a hero of the world of science, a veritable comet zooming through the night sky. If you aren’t grinding your teeth with loathing, you probably lost them years ago.

Stent. It’s even a horrible name, isn’t it?

All the Dictionary of National Biography business I found out later. When Professor Moriarty, tense as a coiled cobra and twice as venomous, slithered into the reception room brandishing a copy of The Observatory — trade journal for astronomers, don’t you know — I’d have been proud to say I had never heard of the flash nob who was giving that evening’s lecture to the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House.

My understanding was that my flatmate and I were due to attend an exclusive sporting event in Wapping. Contestants billed as ‘Miss Lilian Russell’ and ‘Miss Ellen Terri’ in the hope punters might take them for their near look-alikes Lillian Russell and Ellen Terry were to face off, stripped to drawers and corsets, and Indian-wrestle in an arena knee-deep in custard. My ten bob was on Ellen to shove Lilian’s face into the yellow three falls out of four. I was scarcely best pleased to be informed that our seats at this cultural event would go unclaimed. We would be skulking — in disguise, yet — at the back of the room while Sir Nevil Stent delivered his latest crowd-pleasing lecture.

His title: ‘The Dynamics of an Asteroid: A Comprehensive Refutation’.

II

‘Has it not been said that The Dynamics of an Asteroid “ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics there is no man in the scientific press capable of criticising it”?’

Sir Nevil Stent smiled and held up a thick volume.

I was familiar with the blasted book. At least a dozen presentation copies were stuffed into the shelves in our study. It was the Professor’s magnum opus, the sum total of his knowledge of and contribution to the Whole Art of Mathematical Astronomy. In rare moments of feeling, Moriarty was wont to claim he was prouder of these 652 pages (with no illustrations, diagrams or tables) than of the Macao-Golukhin Forgery, the Bradford Beneficent Fund Swindle or the Featherstone Tiara Theft.

‘Of course,’ Stent continued, ‘we sometimes have our doubts about “the scientific press”. More sense can be found in Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday.’ [19]

A tide of tittering ran through the audience. Stent raised his eyebrows, and shook the book in humorous fashion, as if hoping something would fall out. Chuckles ensued. Stent tried to read the book upside down. Something which might be diagnosed as a guffaw erupted from an elderly party near us. Moriarty turned to aim a bone-freezing glare at the old gent — but was thwarted by his disguise. He wore opaque black spectacles and held a white cane in order to pass himself off as a blind scholar from Trinity College, Dublin.

Stent slammed the book down on the lectern.

‘No, my friends, it will not do,’ he said. ‘Being beyond understanding is of no use to anyone. Astronomy will never progress from simple stargazing if we allow it to be dominated by such… and I don’t hesitate to use the term… piffling tripe as Professor Moriarty’s pound and a half of waste paper. It would be better titled The Dynamics of a Haemorrhoid, for its contents are piles of nonsense. This copy was taken by me this afternoon from the library of the Greenwich Observatory. As you know, this is the greatest collection of publications and papers in the field. It is open to the finest scholars and minds on the planet. Let us examine this Dynamics of an Asteroid, and see what secrets it has to tell…’

Stent picked up the book again and began to leaf through it. He showed the title page. ‘A first, and indeed only, edition!’ Then, he turned to the opening chapter, and drew his finger down the two-columned text, turned the page, and did the same, then turned the page and…

‘Aha,’ he exclaimed. ‘After twenty pages, we find that the next leaf is uncut. As are all remaining leaves. What can we deduce from that? This book has been in the library for six years. I have a list of academics, students and astronomers who have taken it out. Seventy-two names. Many I see before me this evening. It seems no one has managed to read beyond the first twenty pages of this masterwork. Because I am not averse to suffering for my field, I have read the book, cover to cover, 652 pages. I venture to say I am the only man in the room who can claim such a Herculean achievement. Is there any comrade here, to whom I can extend my condolences, with whom I can share my sufferings? In short, has anyone else managed to finish The Dynamics of an Asteroid? Hands up, don’t be shy. There are worse things to admit to.’

The handle of the Professor’s cane snapped. He’d been gripping it with both knotted fists. The sound was like a gunshot.

‘So you have joined us, James,’ Stent said. ‘I rather thought you might.’

A sibilance escaped Moriarty’s colourless lips.

‘We shall have need of you later,’ Stent said, producing a long thin knife — which he proceeded slip into the book, cutting at last its virgin leaves. ‘You can take off those ridiculous smoked glasses. Though, if you have suffered some onset of blindness which has not been reported in the press, it would explain a great deal. Gentlemen of the Royal Society of Astronomers, it is my contention that no man who has ever looked through a telescope with sighted eyes would ever be able to make the following statement, which I quote from the third paragraph of page one of The Dynamics of an Asteroid…’

Stent proceeded to dissect the book, wielding words like a scalpel, and flicking blood in Professor Moriarty’s face. It was a merciless, good-humoured assassination. Entertaining asides raised healthy laughter throughout the evening.

The sums were well above my head, but I snickered once or twice at the amusing way Stent couched his refutations. I should have kept a stonier face: the next day, Moriarty had Mrs Halifax despatch Véronique, my second favourite French dollymop, to Alaska as a mail-order bride. Fifi, my first choice, was too good an earner to waste, but I’d learned a lesson.

At every point, Stent invited a response from Moriarty. None came. The Professor sat in silence as his theorems were shredded, his calculations unpicked, his conclusions burst like balloons.

Sir Nevil Airey Stent had no idea that the Professor’s interests extended beyond equations. Blithely, the Astronomer Royal continued his lecture. Though I knew only too well what the clot was getting into, I could scarcely blame him for digging his own grave in public.

No one would have believed, in the next-to-last years of the nineteenth century, that his lecture was being watched keenly and closely by an intelligence greater than his own; that as he blathered on and on he was scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a berk with a microscope might scrutinise the tiny wriggly bugs that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, Stent read from his little sheaf of notes, serene in the assurance that he was royalty among astronomers.

Yet, across the gulf of the lecture hall, a mind that was to Stent’s as his was to those of the beasts that perish, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded the podium with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew his plans against him.

‘In brief, sirs,’ Stent said, wrapping things up, ‘this asteroid is off its course. Heavenly bodies being what they are, this cannot be allowed. Stars are inexorable. The laws of attraction, gravity, propulsion and decay are immutable. An asteroid does not behave in the manner our colleague alleges it does. This august body will fall prey to… to men from Mars, with three legs, eyes the size of saucers and paper party hats… before the asteroid will deviate one whit from the course I have charted. I would wager five pounds that Professor Moriarty can say no different. James?’

The pause stretched on. Moriarty said nothing. It was summer, but I felt a chill. So did the rest of the audience.

The silence was broken by Markham, the adenoidal twit who had introduced Sir Nevil. He stood up and called for a round of thunderous applause, then announced that the gist of the speech was now available as a pamphlet at the cost of 6d. There was a rush for the stall outside the lecture room, where a brisk trade was done.

Moriarty remained in his seat as the room emptied.

‘James,’ Stent said cheerfully from the podium as he gathered his notes, ‘it’s pleasant to see you in such evident health. There’s actually some colour in your cheeks. I bid you a respectful good night.’

The Professor nodded to his nemesis. Stent left by a rear door.

Moriarty didn’t move from his chair. I wondered if he even could.

Stent had set out to murder Moriarty the Mathematician. He didn’t suspect his victim had another self. An unmurdered, unmerciful enemy.

‘Moran,’ he said, at last, ‘tomorrow, you will call on The Lord of Strange Deaths in Limehouse. [20] The Lord is out of the country, but Singapore Charlie will act for him. You remember the Si-Fan [21] were able to import the swamp adder we supplied for Dr Grimesby Roylott[22]. I wish to place an order for a dozen vampyroteuthis infernalis. That is not yet an officially recognised genus of coleoidea, but specimens come on the exotica market from time to time.’

‘Vampyro-whatsit?’

‘Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Hellish vampire squid. Often mistaken for an octopus. Don’t let Singapore Charlie palm you off with anything else. They are difficult to keep alive above their spawning depth. Pressurised brass containers will be necessary. Von Herder can manufacture them, reversing the principle of the Maracot Bell. Use the funds from the Hanway Street jeweller’s, then dip into the reserve. Expense is immaterial. I must have my vampyroteuthis infernalis.’

I pictured what a hellish vampire squid might be. And foresaw unpleasant experiences for Sir Nevil.

‘Now,’ the Professor said, ‘there is just time to catch the last falls. Would you be interested in making haste for Wapping?’

‘Rath-er!’

III

The next few weeks were busy.

Moriarty dropped several criminal projects, and devoted himself entirely to Stent. He summoned minions — familiar fellahs from previous exploits, like Italian Joe from the Old Compton Street Café poisonings, and new faces nervous at being plucked from obscurity by the greatest criminal mind of the age. ‘PC Purbright’, a rozzer kicked off the force for not sharing his bribe-takings, was one such small fish. A misleadingly strapping, ferocious-looking bloke and something of a fairy mary, PCP specialised in dressing up in his old uniform and standing lookout for first-floor men. He had a sideline as a human punching bag, accepting a fee from frustrated criminals (and even respectable folk) who relished the prospect of giving a policeman a taste of his own truncheon. If you paid extra, he’d turn up while you were out with your darby girl and pretend to make an arrest — you could beat him off easily and impress the little lady with your fightin’ spirit. Guaranteed a tumble, I’m told. He came out of the Professor’s study with wide eyes, roped into whatever bad business we were about.

I was sent out to make contact with reliable tradesmen, all more impressed by the colour of Moriarty’s gelt than the peculiarity of his requests. Paul A. Robert, a pioneer of praxinoscopes, was paid to prepare materials in his studio in Brighton. According to his ledgers, he was to provide ‘speculative scientific educational illustrations’ in the form of ‘rapidly serialised photograph cells from nature and contrivance’. Von Herder, the blind German engineer, bought himself a weekend cottage in the Bavarian Alps with his earnings from the pressurised squid tanks and something called a burnished copper parabolic mirror. Singapore Charlie, acting for the mad Chinaman who had cornered the market in importing venomous flora and fauna, was delighted to lay his hands — not literally, of course — on as many squid as we could use.

The pets were delivered promptly, by Chinese laundrymen straining to lift heavy wicker hampers. Under the linens were Herder Bells, which looked like big brass barrels with stout glass view-panels and pressure gauges. A mark on the gauge showed what the correct reading should be, and a foot-pump was supplied to maintain the cosy deep-sea foot-poundage the average h.v.s. needs for comfort. If this process was neglected, they blew up like balloons. Snacks could be slipped to the cephalopods through a funnel affair with graduated locks. The Professor favoured live mice, though they presumably weren’t usually on the vampyroteuthis menu.

Mrs Halifax supplied a trembling housemaid — rather, a practiced harlot who dressed up as a trembling housemaid — to see to the feeding and pumping. Pouting Poll said she’d service the entire crew of a Lascar freighter down to the cabin boy’s monkey rather than look at the ungodly vermin, so hatches were battened over the spheres’ windows at feeding time. Not wanting to follow ma belle Véro to Frozen Knackers, Alaska, Polly did her duty without excessive whining. The Prof spotted the doxy and promised her a promotion to ‘undercover operative’ — which the poor tart hadn’t the wit to be further terrified by.

The squid were quite repulsive enough for me, but Moriarty decided their pale purplish cream hides weren’t to his liking and introduced drops of scarlet dye into their water. This turned them into flaming red horrors. The Professor, cock-a-hoop with the fiends, spent hours peering into their windows, watching them turn inside out or waggle their tentacles like angry floor mops.

Remember I said other crooks hated Moriarty? This was one of the reasons. When he was on a thinking jag, he couldn’t be bothered with anything else. Business as usual went out the window. While the Professor was tending his squid and sucking pastilles, John Clay, the noted gold-lifter (another old Etonian, as it happens), popped round to lay out a tasty earner involving the City and Suburban Bank. He wanted to rope in the Professor’s services as consulting criminal and have him take a look-see at his proposed scam, spot any trapfalls which might lead him into police custody and suggest any improvements that would circumvent said unhappy outcome.

For this, no more than five minutes’ work, the Firm could expect a healthy tithe in gold bullion. The Professor said he was too busy. I had thoughts about that, but kept my mouth shut. I’d no desire to wake up with a palpitating hellish vampire squid on the next pillow. Clay went off in a huff, shouting that he’d pull the blag on his lonesome and we’d not see a farthing. ‘Even without your dashed Professor, I shall get away clean, with thirty thousand! I shall laugh at the law, and crow over Moriarty!’

You know how the City and Suburban crack worked out. Clay is now sewing mailbags, demonstrating the finest needlework in all Her Majesty’s prisons. [23] A flash thief, he’d been an asset on several occasions. We’d never have got the Rajah’s Rubies without him. If Moriarty kept this up, we wouldn’t have an organisation left.

One caller the Professor deigned to receive was a shifty-eyed walloper named George Ogilvy. I took him straight off for a back-alley shiv-man, but he turned out to be another bally telescope tosser. First thing he did was whip out a well-worn copy of The Dynamics of an Asteroid (with all its leaves cut) and beg Moriarty for a personal inscription. I think the thing the Professor did with his mouth at that was his stab at a real smile. Trust me, you’d rather a vampyroteuthis infernalis clacked its beak — buccal orifice, properly — at you than see those thin lips part a crack to give a glimpse of teeth.

Moriarty got Ogilvy on the subject of Stent, and the astronomer poured forth a tirade. Seems the Prof wasn’t the only member of the We Hate N.A. Stent Society. I drifted off during the seventh paragraph of bile, but — near as I can recollect — Ogilvy felt passages of On an Inequality of Long Period owed a jot to his own observations, and that credit for same had been perfidiously withheld. It was apparent that, as a breed, mathematician-astronomers were more treacherous, determined and murder-minded than the wounded tigers, Thuggee stranglers, card-sharps and frisky husband-poisoners who formed my usual circle of acquaintance.

Ogilvy happily signed up as the first recruit for the Red Planet League and left, clutching his now-sacred Dynamics.

I ventured a question. ‘I say, Moriarty, what is the Red Planet League?’

His head oscillated, a familiar mannerism when he was pondering something dreadful. He looked out of our window, up into the pinkish-brown evening sky over London.

‘The League is a manufacturer of paper hats,’ he said. ‘Suitable apparel for our cousins from beyond the vast chasm of interplanetary space.’

Then Moriarty laughed.

Pigeons fell dead three streets away. Hitherto-enthusiastic customers in Mrs Halifax’s rooms suddenly lost ardour at the worst possible moment. Vampire squid waved their tentacles. I quelled an urge to bring up my mutton lunch.

Frederick Nietzsche witters on about ‘how terrible is the laughter of the Übermensch’ — yes, I have read a book without pics of naked bints or big game! — and establishes there is blood and ice in the slightest chuckle of these superior beings. If Fathead Fritzi ever heard the laugh of Professor Moriarty, he would have shat blood, ice and sauerkraut into his German drawers.

‘Yes-s-s,’ he hissed. ‘Paper hats-s-s.’

IV

From the Diary of Sir Nevil Airey Stent.

September 2

Notices are in! My lecture — an unparalleled triumph! The Dynamics of an Asteroid — in the dustbin! Moriarty’s hash — settled for good! I may draw a thick black line through the most prominent name on the List.

Now — on to other things.

Remodelling of Flamsteed House continues. All say it’s not grand enough for my position. Workmen have been in all week, installing electric lamps in every room. In my position, we must have all the modern, scientific devices. Lady Caroline fears electricity will leak from the wiring and strike dead the servants with indoor lightning. I have explained to her why this is impossible, but my dear featherhead continues to worry and has ordered the staff to wear rubber-soled shoes. They squeak about the place like angry mice.

Similarly, the Observatory must expand, keep apace, draw ahead.

At ninety-four inches, our newly commissioned optical-reflecting telescope shall be the biggest in the world! The ’scopes at Birr Castle and the Lick Observatory will seem like tadpoles! I almost feel sorry for them. That’s two more off the List!

Kedgeree for breakfast, light lunch of squab and quail eggs, Dover sole and chipped potatoes for supper. Congress with Lady C. — twice! Must eat more fish.

Reviewing my life and achievements on this, my forty-fifth birthday, I concede myself well-satisfied.

All must admire me.

Looking to the planets and stars, I feel I am surveying my domain. My Queen has her Empire, but she has gifted me the skies for conquest.

Mars is winking at me, redly.

September 6: A curious happening.

Business took me to the lens-grinders’ in Seven Dials. Old Parsons’ work has been indifferent lately, and I made a personal visit to administer a metaphorical boot to the seat of his britches.

After the booting was done, I left Parsons’ shop and happened to notice the premises next door. Above a dingy window was a sign — ‘C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities’. The goods on offer ran to dead birds, elephant tusks, shark maws, fossils and the like. I’d thought this site occupied by a bakery, but must be misremembering. Cave’s premises had plainly stood for years, gradually decaying and accumulating layers of dust and dirt.

My attention was drawn to the window by a red flash, which I perceived out of the corner of my eye. A stray shaft of light had reflected off an odd object — a mass of crystal worked into the shape of an egg and brilliantly polished. It might do for a paperweight if I were in need of such a thing, which I was not.

Then, I heard voices raised inside the emporium. One was known to me — that upstart Moriartian Ogilvy. Alone among the fraternity of astronomers, he has written in defence of The Dynamics of an Asteroid. His name was on the List.

I stepped back into the doorway of Parsons’, but kept my ears open. Og was haggling with an old man — presumably, C. Cave himself — over the crystal lump, for which the proprietor was asking a sum beyond his purse. An opportunity.

Casually, I wandered into the shop.

Cave, a bent little fellow with egg in his stringy beard and a tea cosy on his head, had the odd mannerism of wobbling his head from side to side like certain snakes. I thought for a moment that I knew him from somewhere, but must have been mistaken. He smelled worse than many of his antiquities. I say, that’s rather good — must save the line for my next refutation.

Og was going through his pockets, scraping together coins to up his offer.

Upon seeing me, Og said ‘Stent, how fortunate that it’s you,’ with undue familiarity as if we were the closest of friends. ‘Could you extend me a small loan?’

‘Five pounds,’ insisted Cave. ‘Not a penny less.’

Og sweated like an opium addict without funds for his next pipe. Most extraordinary thing. I hadn’t thought he had the imagination to be so desperate.

‘Of course, my dear fellow,’ I said. His face lifted, and his palm came out. ‘But first I must conclude my own business.

My good man, I should like to purchase that curious crystal in your window.’

Og looked as if he had been punched in the gut.

‘Five pounds,’ Cave said.

‘Stent, I say, you can’t… well, that is… I mean, dash it…’

‘Yes, Ogilvy, was there something?’

I drew out my wallet and handed over five pounds. Cave entered the sale in an ancient register, then fussed about extracting the object from the window.

I looked at Og. He tried unsuccessfully to cover fury and disappointment.

‘Now about that loan,’ I said, wallet still open.

‘Doesn’t matter now,’ he said — and left the shop, setting the bell above the door a-jangle.

Another name off the List!

Cave came back with the object, cradled in black velvet. It struck me that I need only say I’d changed my mind to reclaim my outlay. But Og might creep back and get the blessed thing after all. Couldn’t have that.

Cave held up the crystal and said something about ‘the inner light’. Strange phrase. He meant the refraction, of course, but a lecture on optics would have been out of place in this circumstance. No fee would be forthcoming, and it doesn’t do to cheapen the currency of scholarship by dishing out lectures gratis.

I took the thing away with me. Perhaps I can use it as a paperweight after all.

Roast boar with apricots at the Lord Mayor’s. Congress with Lady Caroline in the carriage on the way home. Top-hole!

September 7: An odd day.

Luncheon at Simpson’s in the Strand with Jedwood, my publisher. Cream of turbot, hock of ham, peppered pear. An acceptable Muscadet, porter, sherry. The Refutation pamphlet is shifting briskly, and J. is eager for more. Pity Moriarty hasn’t fired other literary clay pigeons I could blast. J. proposes a collection of Refutations and suggests I consider expanding the arena of combat, to launch my intellectual ballista against other so-called great minds of the age. J. is a dolt — he doesn’t understand the List, or that it is as important to choose the proper enemies as the proper friends. Nevertheless, I’m tempted. Tom Huxley, Darwin’s old bulldog, could do with having his ears boxed for a change. And I didn’t care for the way George Stokes hovered over Lady Caroline at the last Royal Society formal. Those Navier — Stokes equations have their tiny little cracks.

Most extraordinary thing. As J. and I were leaving the restaurant, a wild-haired, sunburned fellow accosted us in the street, gabbling ‘the Martians are coming, the Martians are coming!’ Ever since Schiaparelli put about that nonsense about canals, there has been debate about how one should address the notional inhabitants of the planet Mars. I am firmly of the belief that ‘Marsian’ is the only acceptable term. I took the trouble to correct the moonatic on this point, but he was in no condition to listen. He grabbed my lapels with greasy fingers and breathed gin in my face. He called me by name, which was discomforting. ‘Sir Nevil,’ he said, ‘keep watching the skies! Look to the Red Planet! Look into the crystal egg!’

J. summoned a hefty constable, who laid a hand on the madman’s shoulder. The fellow writhed in the grasp of the law, and a look of heightened terror passed over his face. It is no wonder men of his stripe should fear the police, but the extent of his pantomime of fright struck me as excessive even for his situation. Curiously, the constable seemed humpbacked, tailored uniform emphasising rather than concealing a pronounced lump on one shoulder. I assumed the Metropolitan Police imposed strict physical requirements on their recruits. Perhaps this fellow’s condition has worsened in recent years? Something was not quite right about his hump, which I could swear wobbled like a jelly on a plate. His eyes were glassy and his face pale — indeed, our lawful officer was evidently in as poor a shape as our degenerate semi-assailant.

‘Don’t let them take me,’ begged the madman, ‘they wraps round you… and they bites… and they sucks your brains… and you ain’t you no more. I’ve seen it!’

‘Let’s… be… ’avin… you… my… lad,’ said the policeman, voice like a prolonged death rattle, monotonous and expressionless. ‘You… don’t… want… to… be… a-… botherin’… these… gentlemen…’

The madman’s face contorted in a silent scream.

There was something peculiarly hideous about the constable’s voice, as if he were a music hall dummy manipulated by a wicked ventriloquist.

‘Mind… ’ow… you… go… sirs!’

The policeman lifted the madman — not a small individual, by the way — one-handed. He marched off stiff-legged, bearing his whimpering prisoner down the Strand. As he walked, his hump seemed to shift under blue serge as if it were a separate entity. I had a sense of evil eyes cast at me.

J. asked me if I had any idea who the maniac was.

He had something of a military mien, I thought — though come down in the world, perhaps having frazzled his brains out in some sunstruck corner of the Empire. It came to me that I had seen him before — perhaps in the audience at one of my many popular lectures, perhaps skulking on the street waiting for the chance to accost me. J. pointed out that he had known who I was, but — of course — everyone in England knows the Astronomer Royal.

‘It should definitely be “Marsian”,’ I insisted. ‘The precedents are many and I can recall them in order…’

J. remembered he had forgotten another appointment and left before I could fully convince him. Must send him my monograph on planetary possessives. Some still rail against ‘Mercurial’ and ‘Jupiteric’, though a consensus is nearly reached on ‘Moonian’ and ‘Venutian’. By the end of this century, we shall have definitively colonised the sunnar system for proper naming!

September 7: later.

I had thought to dispel completely the unpleasant memory of this afternoon’s strange encounter… but the words of the madman resounded.

By some happenstance, this was literally true.

The long-necked cabbie who conveyed me back to Greenwich bade me a jovial farewell with ‘keep watching the skies, sir.’ An unusual turn of phrase to hear twice in one day, perhaps — but a sentiment naturally addressed to a famous astronomer in the vicinity of the biggest telescope in the land.

Galvani, the Italian foreman of the gang who have completed — at last! — the electrification of Flamsteed House, handed me a sheaf of wiring diagrams marked ‘for the attention of the householder’ and clearly said ‘look to the Red Plan, et… es essential for to understan’ the current en the house’. There was, indeed, a red plan in the sheaf, but it seemed to me he had stressed the first part of his sentence, which echoed the words of the madman, and thrown away the second, which conveyed his particular meaning.

Then, before supper, I was passing the kitchens and happened to overhear Mrs Huddersfield, the new housekeeper, tell the butler to ‘look into the crystal’, referring to our fresh stock of Waterford glassware, a scant instant before Polly, the new undermaid, exclaimed ‘egg!’ in answer to a question about the secret ingredient of the face paste which keeps her complexion clear. To my ears, these separate voices melded to produce a single sentence, the madman’s ‘look into the crystal egg’.

Lady Caroline is at her sister’s. I dined alone, unable to concentrate on supper. Every detail of the business on the Strand resurfaced in my mind.

I was shocked out of my reverie only by the sweetness of dessert — and looked down into a crystal bowl to see a quivering scarlet blancmange, with a curiously eye-like glacé cherry at its summit. In its colour, the dish reminded me of the planet Mars, and, in its movement, the somehow unnatural hump of the strangely spoken police constable.

Only then did I remember the paperweight snatched out from the grasp of the odious Ogilvy yesterday.

A mass of crystal, in the shape of an egg!

A crystal egg! Could the madman of the Strand have been referring to this item of bric-a-brac?

Unable to finish my dessert for thinking.

September 7: Still later. A great discovery!

After supper, I repaired to my study, where I keep my collection of antique and exotic optical and astronomical equipment: telescopes, sextants, orreries and the like. Signor Galvani’s men have disturbed them greatly while seeing to the electrification of the room.

A new reflecting telescope arrived this morning, a bulky cabinet affair on trestles, with an aperture where a separate lens must presumably be attached. It is an unfamiliar design — a presentation, in honour of my achievements in mapping the night skies, from an august body who call themselves the Red Planet League. I have had my secretary respond with an autographed photograph and a note of thanks. Entering the study, I saw at once that the workmen had mistaken this gift for a species of lamp, and wired it up to the mains. I would be inclined to chide Galvani most severely, had this error not nudged me on the path to discovery.

I unwrapped the supposed paperweight and made close examination of it under the steady illumination of the electric lamps. Cave, the vendor, had mentioned an ‘inner light’ — a phenomenon I soon discovered for myself. It is a trick of the optics, of course — if held up to the light, the interior of the crystal egg coruscates, seeming to hold multiple refractions and reflections.

By accident, when Polly reached into the room and turned off the lights at the wall switch, I discovered the crystal had the unusual property of retaining luminosity even when the light source was gone. I did not measure the time of glow-decay, because the undermaid was fussing and apologising for not seeing I was still in my study when she plunged me into darkness. She whimpered that these newfangled inventions were not like proper gas. I fear Lady Caroline’s ‘indoor lightning’ theory has infected the servants with irrational terror.

‘What’s that egg?’ exclaimed the maid, meaning my crystal. ‘And why’s it lit up?’

I ventured to explain something of the laws of refraction, but saw my learning was wasted on this simple soul. Nevertheless, it is to Polly that I owe my next, most extraordinary discovery. She picked up the crystal egg, rather boldly for a person in her position I might say.

‘Doesn’t it go here, sir?’ she said, slipping the egg into an aperture of the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope. It was a perfect fit. Before I could chide her, Polly had fiddled with a switch which triggered an incandescent lamp inside the cabinet — projecting a beam through the crystal, which diffracted out into the room. Suddenly, the opposite wall was covered by a swirling, swarming red cloud. Polly yelped, and fled — but I hadn’t the heart to pursue and chastise her.

I was transfixed by the pictures on the wall.

Yes, pictures! Pictures that move! With a faint flicker, accompanied by a definite whirring from inside the reflecting telescope. I had never before seen the like.

At once it came to me that my crystal egg was in fact a crystal lens. When light passed through it just so, the crystal egg — by some means as yet undetermined by science — transmitted images from its interior.

The process was astounding, but I was more overwhelmed by the picture. It was as if I were looking out of a window which floated high over a ruddy desert far from Greenwich. Faintly visible above the horizon were familiar stars, skewed in the sky — as observed not from our home world, but from a body which must be considered (on a cosmic scale) our near neighbour. I perceived the tiny blue-green circle of Earth, and knew with utter certainty that this window looked out onto the plains of Mars.

The Red Planet.

All the tiny incidents of the last two days impelled me, inch by inch, towards this discovery.

I knew the subject of my next lecture, my next book. Indeed, the remainder of my career could be devoted to this. I am Master of Mars. No other can come close. Og must have had some inkling, but this is to be Stent’s triumph — not Ogilvy’s. From henceforth, this acreage of red dust will be Stent’s Plain. In the distance, I saw slumped, worn hills, more ancient than the sharper peaked mountains of Earth — the Caroline Range! A deep channel grooves across the landscape, flowing with a thick, red, boiling mud — Polly’s Canal, to commemorate the child whose unknowing hand urged me to this discovery! Nearby, a gaping pit was scraped raw like a bloody gouge in the Marsian soil. I named this Victoria Regina Chasm in honour of the gracious lady who has bestowed so many honours on my name.

Inside VR Chasm, something stirred. My heart stopped, I am sure, for long, long seconds. Pads like large leaves, a richer scarlet than the crimson of the desert dirt, flopped over the rim and anchored in the soil. These were the tips of sinewy tentacles, which held fast and contracted as a Marsian being hauled itself out of its hole.

What manner of men might inhabit the Red Planet? Not men at all, it seems — but creatures beyond classification.

I saw its bulging, filmed-over eyes. Its beak-like mouth. Its mess of limbs. Its swelling carapace.

The thinner atmosphere of Mars and a colder, drier climate have shaped that planet’s ruling species differently from us. I had no doubt that I was looking at a Man of Mars, not a brute animal. All around were signs of an intelligent species, a civilisation perhaps older than our own.

There were structures — a Marsian factory, perhaps, or a school. The Marsian hauled itself across metal frames, fighting the pull of its planet, and came closer to the window.

I confess to a moment of stark, irrational fear. As I could see the Marsian, could it see me? Did the crystal egg have a twin on Mars?

With no earthly object for comparison, it was difficult to get a sense of scale. The Marsian could be the size of a puppy or an elephant.

It wriggled closer to the ‘window’. Its features grew gigantic on the study wall. I could see the wallpaper, the bookshelves and pictures through its phantasmal image. Then, suddenly, it shut off. There was a flapping sound, and a brief burst of bright, blank light — that died too, along with the incandescent bulb inside the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope.

How ironic that a body named after Mars should provide the device which lead me to gain such an unprecedented view of our planetary neighbour!

I turned the switch on and off, and I fiddled with the crystal in its aperture, trying to reopen the line of communication. But the window closed as mysteriously as it had opened.

Still, I am too excited to be frustrated. I am certain that the phenomena shall be repeated.

Otherwise, I fear I have a head cold coming on. It may be the turn in the weather. I took a solution of salts in lemon and barley water. Though especially prepared by Mrs H. from her own curative recipe, this concoction served only to exacerbate my condition. I passed an indifferent night, with frequent recourse to the cp and my handkerchief.

September 8: Invasions!

That confounded cold has set in, in my head and chest. The servants have been lax in tending draught-excluders. Or else Signor Galvani’s foreign crew have imported alien bacteria into the household — for which they will be reprimanded. I am known for my good health. These minor ailments do not normally afflict me.

Breakfast — porridge, honey-glazed gammon, courgettes, preserved pears. More of Mrs H.’s vile (and inefficacious) home remedy. It’ll get worse before it gets better, I am assured — which is scarce comfort. I have instructed the housekeeper to dispense with her brews, and procure proper medicine from the chemist’s.

My digestion was incomplete when Flamsteed was impertinently invaded. In my study, making a start on notes for my Marsian Announcement, I became aware of a great ringing on the bell and knocking at the door. My first thought was that barbarians were at the gates. This proved to be the case — though, a singular barbarian, the opprobrious Ogilvy, rather than a horde.

I ventured out into the hallway and found Mrs Huddersfield in the process of calling the stableboy to throw Og off our front step. Much as it would have pleased me to see the inky git tossed into the gravel and given a good kicking, it occurred to me that he should be consulted. Plainly, he had some dim perception of the importance of the crystal egg. It would be best to find out what he knew.

I instructed Mrs H. to let Og into the house. She stood aside and I had momentary pause about my decision. Having run across a superfluity of madmen in recent days, I saw at once that Og was one of their number. His collar was exploded and his cravat tied carelessly. The skirts of his frock coat bore singe marks as if he had jumped through a bonfire. There was a peculiar burned smell about him. He had no eyebrows left and a serious case of the sun. It had been overcast lately and I doubted Og was freshly returned from some tropical adventure.

‘Brandy,’ he insisted. ‘Brandy, for God’s sake, Stent.’

Mrs H. frowned, but I told her to send Polly to fetch decanter of the third-best brandy. No sense in wasting the good stuff on a hysteric. I’ll need it to fight off this cold.

In my study, Og saw the egg, still fitted into the aperture of the new telescope.

‘So you know what it is?’ he exclaimed.

‘Indeed.’

‘A window — a portal — to the Red Planet. Have you seen the Martians?’

‘Marsians,’ I corrected.

‘Their tripod machines? Their firing pit? Their heat devices? Have you determined their purpose, Stent? Their hideous purpose?’

The fellow was ranting, but I expected as much.

‘I have made notes of my findings,’ I told him. ‘I will reveal my conclusions when I am ready to publish.’

‘Publish! Who will there be to typeset, print and bind your conclusions, Stent? Who to read them? Do you hope to amuse our new masters with your book? They don’t seem the types to be great readers, but I suppose you never know…’

Og was laughing, now — bitterly, insanely, irritatingly. Polly arrived, and Og snatched the decanter from her tray. He drew a mighty quaff, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Never the most savoury of characters, he had apparently decided to become a wild Indian.

‘There were four eggs,’ he said. ‘As far as we can tell.’

‘We? Of whom are you speaking?’

‘The Red Planet League,’ he said. ‘What there is left of it. When you took the final egg, we had this telescope delivered to you. I am loathe to admit it, but you are the greatest astronomical mind of the age…’

‘True, true…’

‘…and if anyone has a chance of cracking the egg’s secrets, it is you.’

‘No doubt.’

I fancied I caught a slight smirk from Polly. I told her she could be about her business. She left.

‘It must have been fate that brought you to Cave’s emporium. Cave is dead, by the way. The police report says “spontaneous combustion”, if you can credit it. There has been a rash of such phenomena. Almost an epidemic. Colonel Moran and I had a brush with the heat weapons, two nights back. We were separated afterwards. His nerve snapped. Terrible thing when a brave man’s nerve goes. He’s faced tigers and native rebels and charging elephants, but that flash from the copper tube boiled away all his heart. You saw Moran yesterday, I believe — before they caught up to him.’

‘I saw no one yesterday.’

‘In the Strand, outside Simpson’s. Moran would have seemed, ah, irrational. Lord knows, we all act like cuckoos. With what we have in our heads. It’s only to be expected. A big man, Moran. Red-complected…’

I remembered. The madman who was taken away by the hump-backed policeman.

‘Moran brought me into the League. He’s a big-game hunter and adventurer. He found the first of the eggs, in a temple in India. It was the eye of an idol worshipped by an obscene cult. When the light fell into the temple on certain days of the year, the portal opened and the cultists saw their “gods”. You know what they really saw, Stent. The men of Mars. Those tentacles, those eyes, those mouth parts! Another crystal was looted from the collection of the Emperor of China, carved into a goblet. I would not drink from that goblet for all the tea in its rightful owner’s dominions, would you? A third was found fresh, among the hot fragments of a new-fallen meteorite in the California desert. All these came to the League, and all have been taken — taken back, one might say.’

Og kept glancing at the crystal. I worried that he would snatch it from the telescope and flee the house.

‘This one was sent here, to England. I don’t know how Cave came by it. Dishonestly, I suppose.’

‘It is mine,’ I reminded him. ‘Paid for and bought.’

He wasn’t listening to me. ‘Stent, have they seen you? The portal opens both ways. That we can see them is incidental, an accident, a flaw in the great plan. From the other side, from Mars, they spy us. Spy on us. It’s what the eggs are for. They are taking our measure, making a study. Drawing plans. At first, the meteorites just brought the eggs. It’s only recently that they have come. Just a few, but enough — for their purpose. Across millions of miles of empty space! What explorers they must be, what conquerors! They ready their armada, Stent, their fleet…’

I concede that Og was alarming me. A great deal of what he said struck me as fanciful drivel. Conquerors, indeed — what nonsense, as if creatures without hands or clothing could hope to stand up to the military might of Great Britain! But I worried there were eggs in other hands. Dangerous hands — other scientists eager to ‘scoop’ the Great Stent. If half of what Og said is true, someone else might publish first.

I cannot let that happen.

The doorbell rang. Mrs H. came into the study, and presented a carte de visite.

Colonel Sebastian Moran, Conduit Street.

‘Your comrade in the League has extricated himself from the police,’ I told Og.

The fellow looked further stricken, which was not what I expected. I got little sense from him. I feared this would also be true of Moran — yesterday, he had been singing from the same hymn book.

‘Don’t let him in,’ said Og, grabbing my lapel. ‘In the name of all that’s…’

‘There’s a policeman with the caller, sir,’ said Mrs H. ‘Constable Purbright.’

I could not have been more relieved. With all the ranting, raving and lapel grabbing, a policeman might be just what the doctor ordered. Clap these madmen in irons, and leave me to conclude my Marsian studies.

‘Show them in,’ I said.

‘Very good, Sir Nevil. Don’t you be straining yourself. Remember you’re not a well man.’

Og threw himself into an armchair, in a pose of stark terror. Under his sunburn, he even went pale.

‘Hullo… Sir… Nevil… Hullo… Ogilvy…’

It was the madman from the Strand, but much changed. His demeanour was more sober, respectable. His voice was uninflected, somehow metallic. And, since yesterday, he had grown a humpback. A long, red scarf wound around his neck, ends trailing down his back.

‘Good… morning… gentlemen,’ said the police constable beside Moran.

They could have been brothers, with the same shifting deformity, the same strange manner of speech.

‘Keep them away from me,’ shrieked Og ‘They’re… them!’

‘Don’t… make… a… fuss… old… chap.’ Moran and Purbright spoke in unison, like a music hall turn. Their voices scraped the nerves. I was overcome by a powerful wish that all my visitors would leave. I could do with a medicinal tot and some peace.

The constable walked, stiff-legged, across the room, to the telescope. He laid a hand on the crystal egg.

‘That’s delicate scientific equipment,’ I warned Purbright.

‘Evidence… sir,’ he said, twisting the egg free.

‘I must protest…’

‘Obey… the… law…’ Colonel Moran said.

Moran was in my way. Beyond him, I saw the constable slipping the crystal egg into his tunic.

‘I paid five pounds for that!’

‘Stolen… goods…’ Moran said.

I tried to strong-arm him out of the way, but he was immovable. My hand fell on his hump, and his long scarf unwound, showing where his jacket seam was split by the swelling. An angry, inhuman eye looked out from the hole! Sinewy, venous scarlet ropes wound around Moran’s exposed neck. A beak-like barb was fixed to his throat, under the ear, blood dribbling from the conjunction.

A cowardly knee met my groin and I doubled over.

When I righted myself, Moran had rearranged his scarf. I knew what I had seen.

Og leaped up from the chair and flew at Moran.

From a pocket, Moran pulled a curious object — a tube with a burnished copper disc at one end. A beam of light seemed to project from this — and fell on Og, whose jacket started smoking. With a scream, Og fled from the room, down the hall, and out of the house. His clothes were on fire.

Moran turned to me. Purbright had also produced one of the heat-casting devices. Both were aimed in my direction.

I was in danger. But if the egg left the house, I would have no proof, no basis for my findings!

Og’s screams still echoed.

‘We… must… be… going…’ Moran said.

‘Not with my crystal egg.’

The copper discs were glinting at me. But I was resolute. No somnambulists, puppeteered by angry-eyed inhuman humps, would stand between me and recognition for my achievements.

‘I am Sir Nevil Airey Stent, the Astronomer Royal,’ I reminded them. ‘I will thank you to return my property. On this world, sirs, I am not to be sneezed at.’

‘Sneezed… at?’ they both said.

At that inopportune moment, my cold struck again — and I had a sneezing fit.

This had the most peculiar effect on my threatening guests. They turned tail, in something like panic, and ran. Purbright dropped the egg which — mercifully — did not shatter. As they ran, they slumped over, arms dangling uselessly, heads lolling — as if they were piloted by their tentacular humps, who could no longer concentrate on even the semblance of normal conduct.

My sheer physical presence, and the dignity of my office, had overwhelmed these creatures.

But I did not doubt they would be back.

I took some brandy, for my chest and sinuses, and reflected over my triumph in this skirmish of the spheres.

Mrs H. called me to the garden. On the gravel driveway lay a human-shaped pile of ashes, already drifting in the wind. I don’t have to worry about Ogilvy horning in on my findings any more…

Feeling much better, despite sniffles, I returned to my study.

In Lady Caroline’s continued absence, attempted congress with Polly — but, for some reason, was thwarted. Have much on my mind.

D-- this cold!

September 8: Later. I capture a Marsian!

Mrs H. is has obtained a supply of a patent medicine, Dr Tirmoary’s Infusion for Coughs, Colds and Wheezes. According to the label, it is mostly diacetylmorphine hydrochloride. The stuff burns in a basin, and is inhaled under a damp towel. I spent ten minutes breathing acrid fumes before supper — dressed Cornish crab, lamprey surpris, calamari, conger mousse, langoustines — and, finally, gained some measure of relief from congestion, sniffles and associated symptoms. Not only am I sneezing less, I am thinking more clearly.

After a fresh, post-prandial infusion of Dr Tirmoary’s, I retired to my study, determined to tinker with the crystal egg until it yielded its secrets. But, light-headed and with a sense of fullness in my stomach and other parts, I fell into a doze in an armchair…

I was awakened by a whirring which I recognised as the sound of the telescope when the egg-portal is open. The room was bathed in a red, flickering light. The window to Mars!

Again, I saw Stent’s Plain, the Victoria Regina Chasm, the Caroline Range. Now, there was great activity. Structures had changed, been erected or expanded. Many Marsian creatures could be seen, crawling about their purpose — which seemed to me to be the construction, within the Chasm, of a great cannon-like device. This could be aimed, I saw at once, at the tiny bluish speck on the Marsian horizon.

I recalled Og’s ravings about a Marsian armada readying for a trip across the gulf of space.

Poppycock and nonsense!

My study door opened, and Polly came in. The possibility of renewed attempt at congress arose and I bound from my chair into the beam of egg-light. For a moment, I was distracted by my own silhouette, cast on the wall as images from Mars played across my body.

Something was amiss. Polly, hunched over, wore a heavy shawl — not suitable for indoors. She carried a wicker basket which I had not asked to be brought to me. Emboldened, I tore away her shawl. A red, wet creature pulsed on her shoulder, tentacles wound around her neck, face buried in her throat.

My maid was host to a Marsian!

I tripped over the carpet and fell back into the armchair. My nerve was resolute, but my limbs betrayed me — some side effect of Dr Tirmoary’s, I’ll be bound, for which the manufacturer will receive a stern letter. I could not stand. The room became a swirling red blur, as much Mars as Greenwich. I fancied the beings I saw working on their cannon could see me across the void and might crawl through the portal.

Polly set down the wicker basket.

She attempted a clumsy curtsey and craned her cheek against her Marsian master, stroking its slimy hide as if she were indulging a kitten. The creature, bereft of its native atmosphere, was in evident difficulty. I’ll wager they can’t last long among us. Susceptible to all manner of Earthly ailments, drowning in our alien air, boiling in what was to us a cool evening.

The lid lifted from the basket, and a curious contraption rose from within — like a brass diving bell, on three mechanical legs. Some sort of clockwork enabled it to ‘stand’, and ‘walk’. A thick window showed the tentacle-fringed, scarlet face of a Marsian. Within the sphere, it was comfortable — sustained by liquid atmosphere, doubtless rich with the nutrients of Mars.

This must be the chief of the Marsians on Earth, leader of the expedition, the planet’s most able diplomat. I looked it — him! — in the eyes, and began to introduce myself.

‘We… know… who… you… are… Mr… Stent…’

The words came from a hooded figure who had slipped into the room. I realised at once that the superior creature in the bell could exert mental control over a human without the need for physical contact. This facility must be developed among the higher castes of the planet. The hooded figure was a meaningless person. His head bobbed from side to side like an imbecile’s as the Marsian Master spoke through him.

‘It strikes me that you have not conducted yourselves in the proper manner,’ I told him. ‘You should have come to me first, not wasted your time with this ragtag Red Planet League.’

Meaningless syllables stuttered from the hooded puppet. The laughter of Mars!

‘Well you may laugh, sir! A serious misunderstanding could have come about between our two great planets, as a result of your involvement with the likes of George Ogilvy. He holds no great office. Now you have come to the proper person, the Astronomer Royal. You are in communication with someone best placed to reveal your presence to the worthies of Great Britain. Treaties can be brokered, as trade agreements are being made in our world’s Orient. If travel between planets is possible, we may send you missionaries, medical staff, advisers. We must form a limited company. Anglo-Marsian Trading. I perceive you get scant use from your famous canals, but a few Scots engineers will have a railway system up and running across your red sands in no time. You have a surfeit of coolies, I see.’

The syllables continued. Not laughter, I think — but song! A native hosanna at the prospect of deliverance from a state of ignorance and depravity.

I looked into the Marsian’s huge, lidless eyes.

The hooded man spoke. ‘I… speak… for… you… would… call… him… Roi… Marty… King… of… Mars.’

I was impressed that such an exalted personage should be my guest.

‘And what service may I do the King of Mars?’

Polly and the hooded figure raised now-familiar copper tubes, which caught the red light from the telescope. I sensed Marsian treachery!

‘You… can… burn…’

Then, things happened swiftly.

A sturdy broom scythed down on Polly’s shoulder, squelching her alien master — which detached from her with a hideous shriek and flew across the room to explode against the mantelpiece, swollen organs bursting through its skin. The redoubtable Mrs Huddersfield was in my study, swinging her broom like a yeoman’s quarterstaff. The hooded figure turned, and fire broke out on the wall where fell the beam from his copper tube. Mrs H. tripped him and he tumbled in a heap.

‘Take that, you fiend from another world, you,’ Mrs H. shouted, with some relish. ‘I’ll not have you botherin’ the Astronomer Royal!’

Polly, bereft of a controlling mind, stood staring, still as a statue, angry weals on her neck and bosom. Mrs H. took to battering and sweeping the King of Mars’ puppet, driving him from the room, and — indeed — out of the house.

The King’s Bell began to move, edging away on its three legs. With all the skill of my days as a varsity three-quarter, I fell on the contraption, pinning it down, preventing its escape.

Robbed of its puppet, the King had no way to converse. Its eyes bulged in mute, frustrated fury.

‘Your highness, you are captured!’ I told it. ‘You will surrender yourself to my authority.’

The spell of the crystal egg was broken. A last unsteady image held for a few moments, then bright red light replaced the vista of Mars. The whirring sped up after the picture was lost. Something flapped loosely inside the telescope before it shut off entirely.

Mrs H. returned, broom over her shoulder, and the puppet’s hood in her grip. She reported that she had seen the puppet — a demented tramp, she believed — hightailing it down the drive. He was unimportant, I knew. No more than a set of vocal chords.

Polly was recovered from her upright faint, but still in a dazed state. She did not relish the memory of communion with the creature which lay dead in a jumble in the fireplace. All she could say was that its touch was slimy and sharp. I suggested a dose of Dr Tirmoary’s, but she turned it down — she has promised her mother not to have truck with such potions, apparently. Mrs H. similarly passed up the opportunity to taste her own medicine, but I felt another dose would be restorative and invigorating. I am becoming quite partial to its effects. A certain gaiety is upon me after each infusion. Of course, I am in a heightened state of excitement just now, in the midst of these great events.

War is over before it is begun! I have captured the Marsian King!

Also, I have one of the copper tubes. A gun of Mars. I must find out how the hot-beam works. The burned patch on my study wall has a chemical smell, as if some reactive compound were smeared on the paper and left to ignite — but I sense the truth of the process is to do with transforming light into heat. I shall experiment with this device in safer, less expensively decorated premises.

The King squirms and writhes in his metal shell. The three legs are wired together, so it may not ‘walk’ free.

I have communicated by telegram with the Royal Society, setting a date three days hence for my Marsian lecture. I shall use the crystal egg and display the terrain and inhabitants of the Red Planet to those who would call themselves my scientific peers. I shall demonstrate the use of the copper tube — maybe singe the trousers of some of my more disbelieving colleagues, to make a point. Then, as the crowning moment, I shall present the King of Mars!

Surely, ennoblement must follow. I shall be Lord Flamsteed of Mars!

Considered congress with Mrs H. and/or Polly, but was persuaded instead to cap off the evening with another infusion of good old Dr Tirmoary’s.

I am Conqueror of Mars!

V

Pah! Ever read such rot, eh? Believe me, those were the interesting pages. The rest of Stent’s journal is fit only to start fires. His entries are stuffed with menus and ‘congresses’ and remarks about how brilliant, acclaimed, well loved and admirable he is. By my count, the Astronomer Royal penned 17,000 heated words about a controversial boot-scraper installed, removed, installed again, relocated by six inches and finally removed from outside the servants’ door at Flamsteed House.

How did I get hold of the journal? Stole it, of course.

By pasting in these pages, I’ve saved myself a deal of penwork, which is all to the good. More time down the pub, rather than filling up an exercise book with this scribble.

Of course, you knew me at once when I turned up in Stent’s narrative — doing my old ‘madman’ act, which has proved persuasive in many a tight spot. When I start frothing and raving, you wouldn’t want to be around. Avoided being fed to crocodiles by throwing a similar wobbly. The queer… halting… voice… took more effort, and Moriarty had to coach us — me, PCP, Polly — in the proper hollow tones. We used Punch and Judy swizzles, as well. That’s the way to do it!

As for the rest of it, the Professor only let us into as much of his grand scheme as he deemed necessary. Like his imaginary Squid King, Moriarty puppeteered his subjects, speaking words through us, chivvying Stent along until the fool fancied himself Conqueror of Mars. Of course, Ogilvy didn’t know how flammable the gunk poured on his jacket really was. The cretin hopped around outside Flamsteed House, on fire from head to foot, until a bucket of merciful water was sloshed over him. By then, he was almost in as poor shape as the ash and cinder outline laid out on the gravel to represent his incinerated remains. Threw a sulk about that, he did. Still, can’t make an omelette and all that. In Ogilvy’s case, it’s true. He lost the use of his hands and so literally can’t make an omelette or perform many other everyday tasks. That’s what you get for volunteering.

I’ve rarely had cause to remark upon Professor Moriarty’s genius for disguise. There’s good reason for that. Anyone less wholly shoved up his own bum than Sir Nevil Stent would have seen through Moriarty’s beards and hoods and skullcaps and spectacles in a trice. That snake-oscillation mannerism always gave him away. He didn’t list card-sharping among his favoured crimes, or he’d have known about ‘tells’ and taken steps to suppress his. On one occasion, I tried to raise the matter in as tactful a fashion as possible, venturing to suggest that the Professor moderate his ‘cobra-neck tell’ when incognito.

‘What are you talking about, Moran? Have you been at the diacetylmorphine hydrochloride again?’

There was no sense in pressing the matter further. Genius or no, Moriarty truly didn’t know about the thing he did with his neck. I wondered if he was unconsciously trying to make it difficult for the hangman. Probably not. It was just a habit. Other men scratch their balls, fiddle with their watch chains or chew their moustaches. That’s when it’s a good time to double up, throw the mortgage into the pot and slide an ace out of your cuff.

Nevertheless, Moriarty acquitted himself adequately in the multiple roles of ‘C., Cave’, filthy shopkeeper, ‘long-necked cabbie’, dispenser of jovially ominous sentiments, and ‘Hooded Man of Mystery’, mouth-piece of Martian Royalty. (Stent never did persuade anyone else to say ‘Marsian’.) As you can tell from the diary, the worthy Mrs Halifax, pouting Polly, Italian Joe (Signor Galvani), PCP and some nobly self-sacrificing specimens of vampyroteuthis infernalis also strutted and fret their weary hours on the stage.

It’s a shame there wasn’t any money in it. The whole palaver cost the Firm a great deal, exhausting the proceeds of five good-sized blags, and sinking Moriarty into debts we had to work hard to pay off. I know we have a reputation as rotters and crooks and all, but it doesn’t do to default on payments owed someone who likes to be called the Lord of Strange Deaths. Hellish vampire squid wouldn’t have been the half of it.

For the Prof, the pay-off came at Stent’s lecture.

VI

This time, the Royal Astronomical Society wasn’t a grand enough platform for Sir Nevil, but we were back in Burlington House. The edifice is also HQ of the Royal Society, a body so sniffily superior it feels it doesn’t even need to give you the full name — which, as it happens, is The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge — when you are expected to prostrate yourself before the hallowed altars of high science and furthermore purchase an illustrated souvenir program booklet to memorialise the hours you spent snoozing through a lecture. Chairman at the time of these occurrences was Thomas Henry Huxley, and you know what the Astronomer Royal thought of him. I don’t doubt Huxley thought the same right back at Stent, who — for reasons which by now must be glaring — was not as popular with the general community of test-tube sniffers and puppy-vivisectors as he was with his home crowd of stargazing toadies.

Again, we took our seats. Sans disguises, on the assumption Stent wouldn’t notice us in the crowd — at least, not until the crucial moment. The hall was packed, as if word had leaked out that Lola Montez would be tightrope-walking nude over the audience while Jenny Lind sang all eighty-six verses of‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’. Every branch of science was represented, for Stent had announced his lecture would radically affect all of them equally. A lot of textbooks would need revising (or burning) after this one, the rumour-mill insisted. To me, the mob looked like an unkempt crowd of smelly schoolmasters on a spree, but the Prof clucked and tutted to himself, listing the great names who had shown up. Besides our home-grown brainboxes, there were yanks, frogs, krauts, eye-ties, dressed-up natives from far-flung lands and an authentic Belgian — all trailing more degrees, honours, doctorates and professorships than you could shake a stick at. It would have been humbling if they weren’t mostly aged and chalk-covered. We had salted the room with a few of our own fellahs, who carried hat boxes or picnic hampers and were a bit fidgety in clean, respectable clothes. A squeaky-voiced draper’s clerk tried to squeeze in on a platform ticket, but was properly ejected for being a lower-class bounder. [24]

This time, Stent went for dramatic effect.

The house lights dimmed, and a spot came up on the lectern. The Conqueror of Mars posed dramatically in a vestment-like long white coat.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘we are not alone…’

He whipped a dust cloth from the ‘reflecting telescope’ which incorporated the ‘crystal egg’. In the end, Polly had been forced to draw him a picture to show how she had ‘accidentally’ made it work. Between shows, someone had to reset or replace the strip of exposures inside the box and put in a new incandescent bulb — which meant getting Stent away from his toy. Fortunately, he’d quite a nose for Dr Tirmoary’s Infusions and was often in a daze.

‘I give you… the Planet Mars!’

Stent toggled a lever and electric current made a motor grind. Red images were cast on a white board erected on the platform. Squid crawled across a sandbox, gagging for water. There were gasps of awe, though a few coughs of scepticism too. A few sequences wound backwards, which gave an eerie, unnatural effect — as if pictures that moved weren’t unnatural enough.

I’d seen some of these views ‘taken’ by Mr Paul A. Robert of Brighton. Urchin assistants had to hand-colour the scenes, picture by picture. Robert has a glass-roofed studio under construction on the Downs. I had to be blindfolded and driven up and around country lanes before visiting it because he fears some Yankee swine is out to poach the process and present it as his own invention. Good luck to him, I say. Apart from making a fool of the Astronomer Royal, all Robert’s whateveroscope is good for is giving anyone who stares too long at the stuttering pictures a blinding headache. There was still that damned whirring and flapping as exposures passed in front of the incandescent. The bloody racket is why Robert’s Box Pictures in Motion will never ‘catch on’, if you ask me. They’ll never replace the stereopticon. [25]

After the images from the crystal egg passed, Stent was assailed by questions. Some were about the creatures, but most were about Robert’s Box — which several in the audience had heard of before. One or two had even seen the thing demonstrated while the inventor was soliciting funds for development of his annoying wonder of the age. When Stent repeated his assertion that the Box was a ‘reflecting telescope’, someone called him a ‘blithering idiot’. He looked displeased. Several helpful souls shouted out the principles on which the Box worked. A couple of young fellahs got into a heated argument about ‘persistence of vision’ and ‘Muybridge strips’. No one cared much about what they had seen (it could have been a chuffing train or a couple snogging, for all they cared) but many were intrigued by the process whereby moving images were cast on a board. Stent had caused a sensation, but not the way he expected.

Moriarty smiled to himself.

Seeing things not going his way, Sir Nevil hastened on to what would have been his grand finale.

‘Sirs, men from Mars are among us! They have been here quite some time!’

Hoots, whistles, laughs.

Stent lifted another dust cloth from an exhibit.

‘This is the King of Mars,’ he announced.

There was sudden hush. The window in the bell had a magnifying effect, and the hideous red face of the creature trapped inside loomed. The buccal orifice clacked angrily.

For a moment, everyone was struck quiet and frozen. Swollen alien eyes, set in angry red facial frills, seemed to range over the assembled scientific multitudes, as if ready to direct a ‘hot beam’ across their ranks and wipe out the great minds of Earth before calling down a sky-fleet of bloodthirsty horrors. Red tentacles writhed, ready to crush human resistance before hauling up the Martian standard on the blackened ruins of Burlington House.

The Robert’s Box was forgotten, and this new horror held the attention.

Stent, seeming to sense he was on the point of winning a few converts, radiated a certain smugness, as his thick hide recovered from the earlier pinpricks. His shirt front puffed out a bit, like a squid rising above its spawning depth, and he allowed himself to look on the audience with his old superior attitude. If this King of Mars could cow the Royal Society, then Stent might transfer his allegiance from the lesser, terrestrial monarch he had hitherto served. If his mighty brain went unappreciated on this poor planet, then perhaps he should look elsewhere for patronage…

Then, just as Stent was on the point of recapturing his audience, the Professor stood up and shouted, ‘Where’s his party hat?’

Stent was horror-struck at the sight of an enemy he’d thought bested. His mood turned. For a moment, I assumed he’d seen through the whole business and understood how he’d been gulled, but it was a passing doubt. The Astronomer Royal remained firm in his convictions. He believed what Moriarty had made him believe.

‘I insist,’ he said, holding up a copper tube, ‘this is a visitor from another world.’

Seconds ago, he had been taken at his word. Now, the sceptics and rationalists — for is this not an age of doubt? — were inclined to get close to the old gift horse and pay close attention to his choppers.

An elderly Frenchman from the front row got up and took a closer look at the bell, squinting through pince-nez.

‘This is a “hot beam” device,’ said Stent, voice cracking. ‘A weapon of Mars!’

He aimed it at the now-bewildered crowd, as if willing it to burst them into flame. Of course, we weren’t smeared with the slow-acting chemical concoction which provided the fire when the pretend guns were used in Flamsteed House.

‘This is a squid,’ announced the Frenchman. ‘Someone has cruelly dyed it red. An uncommon specimen, but not unknown.’

Some laughter was forthcoming. A paper dart, folded from a program, zoomed from the back of the room and sliced past Stent’s head.

‘This is the Marsian King,’ Stent told the onion eater. ‘Roi Marty. You, sir, are an unqualified dolt. You know nothing of alien worlds.’

‘Eh bien, perhaps,’ the Frenchman admitted. ‘But I, monsieur, am Professor Pierre Arronax, greatest living authority on denizens of the deep. In debate about the courses of the stars, I would allow you are far more expert than I. However, in matters of marine biology, you are a child of five and I am an encyclopaedia on legs. This, I repeat, is a squid. An unhealthy squid.’

‘I say, Stent, is that the sick squid you owe me?’ brayed one wit.

‘Here here,’ shouted a vocal clique of Arronax supporters. ‘A squid, a squid!’

Stent’s world was collapsing. He knew not what to say. His mouth opened and closed, but no words issued forth. I saw he was desperate for an infusion of Dr Tirmoary’s — damn fine stuff, let me tell you, though even I would caution against excessive use. The Astronomer Royal pressed his fists to his temples as if to shut out the catcalls and retreat into his own ‘sunnar system’. There, many-limbed things crawled across the sands of Mars, intent on climbing into three-legged suits of armour, hurling themselves at the Earth to subjugate humanity for food and amusement.

Moriarty’s facial tendons were tight as leather drum skin dried in the sun, making his face a skull-mask rictus of glee. His eyes lit up like Chinese lanterns. I’d wager every muscle in the old ascetic’s stringy body was tight with sordid pleasure. He got like that when he had his way. Other fellahs might pop a bottle of fizz or nip down to Mrs H.’s for a turn with a trollop, but the Professor just went into these brain-spasms of evil ecstasy.

Huxley left the hall in disgust, followed by a dignified procession. Some of his colleagues, perhaps pettier, stayed to jeer. The draper’s clerk poked his head in, and asked if he’d missed anything.

‘Wait, don’t leave,’ Stent said, vainly. He viciously pressed a stud on his copper tube. No one caught fire. ‘There’s danger in disbelief. The Marsians are coming! You fools, you must listen. If you don’t support me, you’re next! They’re here! The Marsians are among us!’

At that moment, Moriarty gave a signal.

Our people stood up in their seats — one or two were stationed ‘backstage’ — and lobbed struggling missiles at Stent. Out of water, the squid didn’t last long — but they fought hard, as Polly and I can bear witness, getting tentacles around something convenient and squeezing madly while internal pressure blew them up like balloons. It was a sight to see, but most of the paying customers were gone.

A volley of squid fell upon Stent. He yelled and slipped, knocking over the lectern. Tentacles wound around his legs, his waist, one hand. A squid fixed to his lower face like a mask, beak thrust into his mouth in a ghastly kiss, shutting off his screams. Plastered with vampyroteuthis, he threw a full-on fit, back arching, limbs twitching. Eventually, attendants came and pried burst, dead creatures off him.

Arronax tried to lodge a protest at this mistreatment of rare specimens, but slipped into French to do it and was properly ignored. There are idiot Englishwomen (of both sexes) who would be generally happier to see children whipped, starved, laughed at, shot and mounted in the Moran den than brook any abuse of their ‘furry or feathered friends’ — but it was a rare crank, like Pop-eyed Pierre, who gave two hoots for anything with tentacles and a beak.

With all our wriggling shots fired, the Professor gave the nod — and our picked men melted into the crowds, well paid and frankly little the wiser for tonight’s business. When Moriarty handed over coin and told you to bowl a squid at an astronomer, your wisest course was to ask ‘over-arm or roundarm?’ and get on with play.

As a strait-waistcoat was strapped around him, Stent begged for an infusion of Dr T.’s. He had the shakes, the sweats and the abdabs at the same time. All his strings were cut.

It so happened that the director of Purfleet Asylum — a far less pleasing official residence than Flamsteed — was in the audience, and well positioned to take the babbling madman off Lady Caroline’s hands. I think she had papers already drawn up, assuming control of all Sir Nevil’s estates and monies. Being the second daughter of an Earl doesn’t come with much ready cash, but getting hold of the Stent fortune would do her for a while. I made a note to look her up.

The Astronomer Royal was carried from Burlington House, strapped to a stretcher.

We lingered in the imposing hallway, lined with portraits of past presidents. The attendants paused for a moment. Moriarty leaned over his now-broken nemesis.

Stent’s eyes rolled upwards. His cheeks were striped red and dotted with horribly familiar sucker marks. He tried to focus on the face looming over him, the thin-lipped leering countenance of the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid.

‘I have, I think, made my point,’ said Professor Moriarty. ‘And you, Stent, have finally learned your lesson.’