‘What is going on?’ he cried. ‘Do you know who I am? I demand to see a representative of the British Crown!’
‘It’s all right, Sir Waverley,’ I promised. (He was being jolly rude, I thought, but I was patient with him because I remembered how startled I’d been myself when I tumbled out of that moth-pot and found myself surrounded by all Jack’s crew.) ‘You were a prisoner of the spiders, but we’ve rescued you and …’
I was just wondering whether it would be polite to mention that some sort of reward was probably in order when a look of ghastly horror dawned upon Sir Waverley’s phiz. ‘The spiders!’ he cried, gripping me rather painfully by both arms. ‘That traitor Ptarmigan! The Queen! The Empire! We must warn them at once!’
‘Have no fear, Sir Waverley,’ said my mother. ‘The spiders’ plan has failed. Larklight is safe.’
‘Larklight?’ said Sir Waverley. ‘What the D——is Larklight? Who said anything about Larklight? It is my Crystal Palace you need to be worried about! Don’t you know what that unspeakable tergiversator Ptarmigan intends? He means to turn the whole building into some sort of dangerous automaton! Quickly, we must hasten to my manufactory on Phobos and stop the work at once.’
‘Of course!’ Mother said brightly, taking this latest instance of the spiders’ villainy quite in her stride. ‘We were about to depart for Mars in any case.’
I shook my head. Mother and Sir Waverley had been senseless prisoners of the First Ones for so long that they had rather lost track of time. I said, ‘But Mother, it’s too late! We cannot hope to stop the Crystal Palace being built! It has already been assembled, and stands in Hyde Park. There is to be a grand opening ceremony on the first of … Oh, golly! Today!’
Chapter Twenty-One
In Which a Great Many Sensational Things Occur.
I will say this for my mother; she is not easily disheartened. Most people, upon learning that an evil automaton may be stomping about London, laying waste the heart of Britain’s Empire, would have been inclined to fret, or even dither. Not Mother. I suppose when you are billions of years old and have helped bring the Solar System into being and watched whole species rise and vanish, you learn to view these little setbacks philosophically.
‘Jack, dear,’ she said, turning to him, ‘how long would it take us to reach London aboard that ship of yours?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Can’t be done,’ he said. ‘That broadside from the spiders knocked out our wedding chamber. It’ll take weeks to repair it, and only Ssil knows how.’
‘Very well,’ said Mother, as if this were no more than a minor annoyance. ‘I had hoped,’ she sighed, ‘to keep Larklight a secret, but I see there is no other way of bringing this affair to its conclusion. Have your people make the Sophronia fast to the outside of Larklight. Arthur, might I trouble for you for the key again?’
I fished inside my shirt, and drew out Myrtle’s locket, which I passed to her. Then, with Jack at our side, and Sir Waverley following, we all went back down the long stairs, careful to avoid the hoverhogs, who were swimming laboriously about at ankle height, weighed down by the gravity.
Upon reaching the boiler room, Mother opened a panel which I had never noticed on the flank of the old gravity generator, revealing a heart-shaped hole, into which she fitted the locket. At once that blue glow began to shine from it. The gravity engine shuddered, and its sound changed, rising from a hum to a deep, rumbling, musical note, like the voice of a huge church organ. I pushed a little closer to Jack, who was standing next to me. I knew Mother would let none of us come to any harm, but I was scared all the same. I could not help it; it was as if every nerve in my body sensed that there was something ancient and powerful and unearthly about that sound.
And away in the dark recesses of the boiler room, bits of the gravity engine which had never moved, and which I’d thought long since rusted up, began to turn, and twirl, and tremble, and glow with light, and add their own notes to the rising song. The room was huge, I realised; far bigger than I’d ever guessed. It was no wonder the air currents seemed strange there. Breezes were blowing at me down aisles of singing enginery that looked a hundred miles long. And on the floor beneath our feet those curious tiles began to change their patterns faster and faster, and I started to imagine that they might be numbers, written out according to some system that was not of Earth, and that their movements were the working-out of some enormous, complicated sum. So this is how the Shapers travel about the Universe … I thought.
I had a sudden sense of falling, and clutched Jack’s hand.
Then, all at once, the song of Larklight began to die away, fading by degrees to a murmur, a sigh, an echo. The light of the strange machines died too, and we were standing in the same old, cramped, draughty boiler room, looking at the same old, dusty gravity engine.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ asked Jack.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ said Mother, taking the locket from the keyhole and replacing it about her neck.
‘But it didn’t do anything!’ I complained.
‘Indeed it did,’ said Mother.
‘Coloured lights and foolish tootlings,’ said Sir Waverley Rain crossly. ‘I have seen better stage effects at Drury Lane. Really, my good woman, we do not have time for these diversions. The Empire is in peril.’
‘Come and see,’ said Mother.
We started up the stairs, and as we went I noticed that something had changed after all. Larklight’s gravity was no longer pressing down upon me like a lead-lined quilt, but had returned to something like British Standard. In the hall, Mr Munkulus and the Tentacle Twins were busy tying the legs of the surviving spiders in case they took advantage of the reduction to try and fight again. But I hardly noticed them. What I saw, as we came up the stairs, was that the webs which had screened the windows had been torn away, and that a soft, pale yellow light was streaming in through the dusty glass.
I ran down the hall and pulled the front door open. I could hardly believe the vista which stretched before me as I brushed aside a few torn-off, flapping strands of web and stepped out on to the platform outside. The sky above was blue, streaked with feathery white clouds. The Sun, filtered by this kindly atmosphere, gave out a light as gentle and golden as elderflower wine. Below me the green Earth curved away into a haze, and a silver river which I guessed at once was the Thames snaked its way through the heart of an immense city.
Looking back, it’s a bit of a bore in some ways that I was stuck down in the boiler room all through that miraculous journey, and didn’t get a chance to peep out of a window as we sped across thirty thousand miles in the space of a few seconds. A pity too, that I wasn’t down on the ground to witness the sudden appearance of Larklight over London. It came with a flash of light, they say, and a huge thunderclap, much to the surprise of people on the ground.14
But even if I missed the journey, the arriving was glorious. Opening that door and stepping out, and finding England underneath me … Well, I wouldn’t have swapped that for anything!
Of course, it didn’t take long for the others to join me: Mr Munkulus and Jack and Mother and the Tentacle Twins, Sir Waverley, Grindle and Nipper. Even Father emerged to tell us that Ssillissa was out of danger and sleeping peacefully and could we please tell him what in all the worlds was going on? His face was a study when he looked over the rail and saw London below.
By then the rest of us had already noticed that all was not well in the capital of Empire. Over to the west, dense pillars of smoke were climbing into the sky. The bells of St Paul’s Cathedral and all the other churches were ringing out, and it did not sound like peals of joy, but rather as if they were warning all London of some terrible danger, and perhaps asking for God to intervene. The streets beneath us looked like rivers in spate, but instead of water pouring through them it was crowds of frightened people, all hoping to escape the stricken city!
And there! Oh, look! Westward, among that stand of green trees, where the smoke coils thickest! –
; A crooked metal leg glinted in the sunlight; then another.
I had not stopped to think till then what Sir Waverley’s Crystal Palace might look like if it got up and started ambling about. But there it was in all its horrid glory – a spider the size of St Paul’s. I pointed it out to the others, and as we watched it reached up and knocked a passing aether-ship out of the air.
‘I believe we must do something about that,’ said Mother calmly.
‘But what, Emily? What can we do?’ cried Father, staring in horror at the thing as it demolished a tall building in Mayfair.
‘Nothing, that’s what,’ said Jack Havock darkly. ‘I ain’t risking my skin in a fight with that thing, and I won’t ask my crew to risk theirs, neither.’
‘But the Empire!’ cried Sir Waverley.
‘I don’t care twopence for your empire,’ said Jack. ‘It’s Myrtle I’m worried about. Instead of standing here staring at that machine, we should be making for Mars, and finding her.’
‘Then I shall have to see what may be done without you, Jack,’ said Mother.
In St James’s Park, little puffballs of smoke were rising from a battery of field-guns. Larklight drifted towards them, soaring over Coram’s Fields and the rooftops of Bloomsbury like an immense hot-air balloon. We passed over the Royal Xenological Institute, low enough that if Jack had wished he might have dropped a pebble down the chimneys of his old home, but he was sulking, so I did not suggest it. I had no idea what was powering our house on its strange flight, but later, looking back, I remembered seeing Mother frowning to herself, and fingering Myrtle’s locket, which she was wearing around her own throat, and I wondered if she was somehow controlling Larklight remotely through that strange key.
The auto-spider did not see Larklight coming, or, if it did, it did not care. It was busy kicking down Buckingham Palace, much as a rough boy at the seaside might kick down the sandcastles built by smaller children. Larklight came to a halt above the battery in St James’s Park, and Mother ran back inside and emerged soon afterwards with a bundle of ropes and wooden bars which turned out to be a rope ladder. She tied one end to the balcony rail and let the other drop, down and down until it was brushing the lawns. People gathered behind the guns looked up and gawped at us as we descended, Mother going first, then Father, then myself, and then, to my surprise, Mr Munkulus and the rest of the crew. Jack shouted at them to climb back up, but they shook their heads, or pretended not to hear, all save Mr Munkulus, who said, ‘There’s work to be done here, Captain Jack, and we shall help if we can.’
Jack stared down at him, startled and a little hurt, I think, by his disobedience. Then he said, ‘I’m going to check on Ssil,’ and went back inside.
How that ladder jerked and jerked about as we climbed down out of the sunlight into the gritty haze of gunsmoke! And how the guns boomed, and how the falling masonry crashed and rattled as the auto-spider ignored the shells that burst about it and trampled down No. 1, London, the Duke of Wellington’s house at Hyde Park Corner!
The first person I saw when I jumped down on to the grass was the aged Duke himself, whom I recognised by his big beaky nose. He was standing behind the barking guns and looking very cross indeed about having his house trod on. He shook his cane at us new arrivals and accused us of being all sorts of dreadful things – anarchists and aliens and French spies and I don’t know what else. Luckily, although he kept on shouting for the soldiers to clap us in irons, they were all too busy aiming and firing their guns and trying to control their horses, which I’m afraid had been rather badly spooked by the sudden appearance of a large house a few feet above the treetops.
While my mother was trying to calm the Duke, another chap came limping out of the smoke at the western end of the park. This one wore civilian clothes and a curious moustache and his right leg was bandaged in tatty lengths of blood-soaked calico. He was leaning on the arm of a pretty Martian lady. ‘It’s quite all right, Your Worship,’ he said, approaching the Duke. ‘I’m Burton, of the Secret Service, and these people are known to me.’
The Duke subsided, muttering.
Next, to my amazement, the stranger turned to me and said, ‘Art Mumby, I presume?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said I. ‘And this is my father and mother.’
The stranger tried to make his bow to us, but almost collapsed, and his companion made him settle himself on the grass while she fussed with his makeshift bandages. His leg was in a very poor way, I think, but he bore the pain manfully and said, ‘I am dashed pleased to find you still alive. Your daughter, Myrtle, gave me to understand that you had all perished horribly through the machinations of these beastly spiders.’
‘You have seen Myrtle?’ asked Father.
‘She travelled with us from the planet Mars,’ said Mr Burton. ‘We were separated when all this hullabaloo began. But I am sure she is all right.’
‘How can you be sure?’ I cried. ‘How can you be sure of anything, upon this battlefield? Where is she? Where did you see her last?’
Mother caught my arm and said, ‘Never fear, Art. If Myrtle has any sense15 she will be hiding somewhere; we must put a stop to that automaton’s tricks, and then begin to search for her.’
Meanwhile, Mr Burton shielded his eyes against the smoky sunlight and peered up at the house which hung above him. ‘I take it this is Larklight? I guessed that there was something special about it when Myrtle told me what lengths our arthropod friends had gone to to try to secure the key to it. I should dearly love to know how you managed to bring it here with such admirable dispatch.’
‘It has an engine of unearthly origin,’ said Mother cautiously, though I could tell by the glint in her eye that she liked this gentleman, and felt inclined to trust him. ‘I believe it works by an arrangement of shaped gravitational fields.’
Mr Burton nodded thoughtfully, glanced behind him as the rampaging palace crushed Marble Arch ’neath one foot, and said, ‘I wonder if these shaped gravitational fields might not be used to put an end to the Crystal Palace’s games? It appears annoyingly impervious to all our shells and bullets.’
‘Alas,’ said Mother, ‘it would be far too dangerous. Larklight’s machineries are designed for manoeuvring planets and moons about, not squashing spiders. I risked ripping the dear old Moon in half when I used them to bring us here. To unleash them upon Hyde Park might lead to a most terrible disaster.’
Mr Burton looked grave. My father wrung his hands and asked if anyone had tried to reason with the Crystal Palace and whether that might not be better than all this rowdy gunfire.
Grindle looked up, cocked his head on one side, twitched a leathery ear and asked, ‘What’s that?’
A moment later we all heard it too: the whine of alchemical engines. Over the rooftops an aether-ship came tearing. It was a ship we all knew; spiky as a chestnut and black as sin, still smoking with the heat of its over-hasty descent through Earth’s atmosphere.
The men at the guns stopped firing and looked up as the ship descended on to the grass nearby. The crowd behind them had thinned out a bit, because some of the spectators had noticed how little effect the guns were having and had decided to leave before the Crystal Palace came and stamped on them, but the few who remained all pointed and cooed as the unearthly ship came to rest upon a patch of singed lawn not far off, and a hatch yawned open in its flank.
I had expected spiders, but instead a human form emerged, nattily dressed in cobweb clothes. I’d half forgotten Dr Ptarmigan. He raised his hands to signal a truce, and came walking across the grass towards us.
‘Good afternoon, all!’ he called, and bowing to Mother, added, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Mumby. I was up in high orbit, watching the fun, when I saw your house arrive. What a surprise! I’d almost given up hope of getting hold of it after you overcame Mr Webster and his friends this morning, but now you have brought it right to me, like a homecoming present! Sweetly kind!’
‘You’ll never have Larklight,’ said Mother, soft but very fierce.
/> ‘We shall see what all these gentlemen have to say about that,’ chuckled Dr Ptarmigan. He raised his voice, addressing the men at the guns, and the Duke and his staff, who still lingered behind them. ‘I am Dr Ptarmigan, late of the Royal Xenological Institute. I built the automaton now trampling your city. I can stop it. I could stop it in an instant, if you wish. But there is a price to pay. I want that.’
He pointed with one skinny hand straight up, to where Larklight hung above the smoke. Some of the gunners looked up too, but the Duke leaned on his cane and watched Dr Ptarmigan intently.
‘Don’t listen to him!’ I shouted. ‘He’s in league with the spiders who built that automaton! He wants to smash up the Solar System, and he’ll use Larklight to do it if you let him!’
Dr Ptarmigan laughed. ‘Oh, what stuff,’ he said. ‘Dear Art, that sob story I told you among Saturn’s Rings was mostly for Mr Webster’s benefit. I let the First Ones think I was on their side, but I’ve really no more time for their empire than for yours. I just needed them to help me set my plan in motion. What other race could provide me with an aether-ship, and willing warriors, and the help I needed to bring all these things to pass? No, I don’t want to smash the worlds apart; simply to rule them. With Larklight at my command, and devices like this to do my bidding’ (he flung his hand out to indicate the Crystal Palace, which had sidled closer while he spoke and now towered silently over the ruins of Buckingham Palace, as if listening to him) ‘there will be nothing I cannot achieve! Spiders and humans alike shall be my slaves!’
‘The poor fellow’s as mad as a bucket of eels,’ said the Duke of Wellington gruffly.
‘So be it!’ cried Ptarmigan.
Then – it all happened so fast that I am not sure how he managed it, but somehow he lunged out and caught me by the collar and dragged me close to him, and reached into his cobwebby pocket and took out a pistol, and poked the cold, hard muzzle in beneath my chin, and held me like that while he said, ‘Give me the key, Mrs Mumby! Give me the key, you Shaper witch, or the boy will die!’