Mother clapped her hands. ‘Jolly good!’ she said. ‘We’re here! It is rather cheerless, isn’t it? No wonder those naughty Moobs are so keen to come and live upon our nice, warm Nineteenth-Century heads.’
And now those clouds of darkness swirled up like thunderheads, billowing, spreading, growing ever larger.
‘Mother!’ I cried, for I realised of a sudden that I was watching vast aetherborne flocks of Moobs swirling towards Starcross, drawn, no doubt, by the tantalising scent of our thoughts and memories and dreams …
‘Don’t worry,’ Mother said merrily. ‘Mr Munkulus, would you take us aloft, please?’
‘All hands to the guns!’ roared Mr Munkulus, running up to the helm. We all rushed to obey him. Ports creaked open, gun carriages rumbled, tackle creaked and ramrods rattled as the cannon were run out. And nimble Ssil was already in her wedding chamber, stoking the alembic, so that the decks beneath us trembled and the flapping of the aether-wings sent drifts of the ash of dead suns whirling across the promenades of Starcross.
‘They are almost upon us!’ cried Mr Spinnaker, peeking out of a porthole. And from outside we could hear a sound like a distant storm: a mumbling, confused, many-throated roaring of ‘Mooob! Moooob! Mooob!’
The Sophronia rose precipitately from the promenade, giving me the feeling that my stomach had been left behind. At once, with a soft pitter-puttering, the Moobs began to rain against her hull. Tiny hands reached in through gaps in her timbers. I saw a Moob curl in through an open gunport and settle itself on Mr Grindle’s head, only to be wrenched off again by Squidley. Other Moobs swirled through the cabin, struggling to find a way to our thoughts through tarpaulin hats and woolly turbans.
Then Grindle and the other gun captains tugged their lanyards, and the cannon went off with a crash that made the whole ship shudder.
Of course those balls, being only made of compressed ideospores, did not fly out like cannonballs in a battle. As each gun fired the shock of the explosion blasted the ball it held back into spores, which flew from its muzzle in an expanding cloud. Spores spread among the close-pressed bodies of the Moobs, who surrounded the Sophronia like clouds of animalculae about a whale. For a moment, a grey-green mist enwrapped them all, and some blew back through the gunports to dim the lanterns in the cabin.
A few Moobs which had got aboard earlier and had been circling frantically, looking for a head to land upon, now ceased their movements and hung thoughtfully in mid-air, their small hands twitching faintly as the ideospores went to work upon their Moobish brains. And the gun crews reloaded with fresh spores, and ran out their guns to fire again …
I went to where Mother stood beside a porthole. Beyond the glass, strange gyres and currents were sweeping through the legions of the Moobs. Eyes shone and hands wavered, but at least they showed no more sign of wishing to overwhelm us.
‘What is happening to them, Mother?’ I asked. ‘What are the spores doing?’
Mother smiled. ‘Their heads are filling with ideas, dear.’
‘But are there really enough spores to affect them all?’
‘Oh no, but those whom the spores do not reach will eat up the thoughts of those they do, and so the ideas will spread among them.’
‘It is as if you are giving them all an education!’ I cried. ‘I say, could you not have Mr Munkulus knock up an ideospore which would fill my head with an understanding of long division and Latin grammar?’
‘No, Art, dear; that would be cheating.’
The Moobs formed fancy knots and twirls and mandalas. Some, who had not yet tasted of the new spores, came zooming in as if to steal our thoughts from us, but were distracted by those who had, and became docile, too.
‘They have no more need to eat up other people’s thoughts and dreams,’ said Mother. ‘They are having thoughts and dreams of their own now, thanks to Art’s topping plan.’
You may imagine how I swelled with pride at such praise! I should have liked to hear her say more upon the subject, but she was still delightedly watching those happy Moobs and, after a moment, she went on, ‘Some of them are dreaming up stories, or pieces of music. Some are beginning to ponder upon ways of making the dying stars last longer. A few are planning journeys of discovery and exploration, far out among the cinders of the island galaxies. One or two are wondering whether there might be other universes into which they may find their way …’
It all seemed rather a lot for a simple advertising spore to have achieved. I could not help wondering whether Mother had perhaps used this method before, during her colourful past, as a way to light the flame of consciousness among the brute ancestors of other races. Had she, long ago, alighted beside some hairy primitive on the pre-historic Earth and blown into his face a few spores of similar design? But no; surely that would have been cheating … wouldn’t it?
Before I could ask her, she pushed herself away from the porthole and sailed through the cabin, seizing a marlinspike on her way. Landing beside the hatchway which Nipper and I had earlier nailed shut, she quickly prised it open with the spike, bent nails pirouetting into the air all around her as she worked. And as the hatch came open, out came sliding all the Moobs we’d trapped there – changed Moobs now, amiable Moobs, their small heads stuffed with wonderful ideas by the spores which had showered down upon them through gaps in the Sophronia’s planking. To see the way they rolled and tumbled and somersaulted in mid-air almost made me wish that Mr Munkulus’s spores did affect the human brain, so that I could understand the wild thoughts they’d seeded in those happy Moobs.
The cannon fire had ceased. My shipmates all stood by their silent guns, watching that black rainbow of Moobs arch up from the opened hold and out of a handy porthole which Yarg and Squidley threw open for them near the prow. And as they swept from the ship to join the Moobtides which swirled all about us, Mr Munkulus turned the ship, and Ssilissa cooked up some element in her alembic that made a rosy glow come from her exhaust-trumpets and steered her slow enough among those dancing garlands of Moobs that she did no harm to them. Five minutes more and we were settling safely on to the promenade at Starcross.
‘And now,’ said Mother, ‘we must find Myrtle, and dear Jack.’
Back in the hotel, she asked the kitchen automata to toast us some muffins and scramble us some eggs, for it is hungry work, all this plunging through the Veils of Time. Professor Ferny excused himself, and went to stand a while in a pot of fortifying compost in the greenhouse. Colonel Quivering and Mr Munkulus hurried off to see if the larders of Starcross contained any First Mate Navy Rum, and the rest of us returned to the cavern, where Sir Launcelot was still bound to his chair. (I noticed that Yarg and Squidley each gave him a surreptitious kick as they passed, but I felt a little sorry for him. After all, he had missed all the fun.)
‘Should we untie him, Mother?’ I asked. ‘He must be getting most awfully stiff.’
‘Just leave him a little longer, dear,’ said Mother, going to her machine, pulling levers, turning switches. ‘As soon as we are back in our own time …’
That dizzy, spinning sensation that I had come to know so well swept over me again as Starcross commenced its voyage back across the centuries. I knew that outside, the sky would be starting to fill with stars again, the great Catherine Wheel of the Milky Way turning once more above the rooftops of the hotel. Deciding to take a look, I turned towards the stairs – and saw that Sir Launcelot was gone!
‘But he was there a moment ago!’ said Mother, vexed, when I drew this to her attention.
‘Well, he is not there now,’ was all that I could say. Nor was he. His chair was there, and the cords which had bound him lay draped about it like cold spaghetti, but the man himself had slipped away while we were busy watching Mother work her miracles at the control bench. At the top of the iron stairs, the door into the hotel hung half open.
Nipper’s eye-stalks drooped in shame. ‘It is my fault,’ he confessed. ‘I did not like to see him bound up so tightly, so I just loosened t
he knots a tad to preserve him from the pins-and-needles …’
‘And he has repaid your kindness by sneaking off,’ said Mother, patting the good crab’s shell.
‘We must find him!’ I said. ‘Who knows what mischief he may be planning?’
Mother looked doubtful. ‘Very well, Art,’ she said, ‘but do be careful …’
I ran back upstairs with Nipper and Ssil and the Twins. Mother stayed behind, for she dared not leave the Shaper machine unattended when it was operating. Mr Spinnaker stayed with her in case Sir Launcelot should return.
I suppose Sir Launcelot had had plenty of time to think while we were busy dealing with the Moobs, and he had realised that as soon as we returned to the year 1851 he would be handed over to the authorities, who would probably hang him for a traitor. At any rate, he must have decided to make a dash for the railway station, in the hope that he might leave Starcross as soon as Mother restored it to our own time. He was haring across the lobby when we sighted him, blundering into potted palms and side-tables as he struggled against the giddying sensations of our Chronic journey.
‘Stop!’ I shouted, stumbling a little myself.
Sir Launcelot glanced back at me, and threw himself at the glass front doors, which opened before him so that he went tumbling down the steps.
‘What’s afoot?’ cried Colonel Quivering, appearing from the direction of the wine cellars clutching several bottles of fine vintage port.
‘It’s Sir Launcelot!’ I explained.
‘He’s essscaping!’ added Ssil.
All together we rushed out on to the steps. Sir Launcelot’s tumble had done him no harm, and he sat on the promenade with the contents of his coat pockets scattered all about him, looking up at the stars. I looked up, too. The whirl of the Milky Way was slowing, and I realised with a start that our journey was ending – though why the return trip was so much faster than the outward one, I cannot say. The familiar stars and asteroids hung above Starcross’s bone-dry beaches again, and with one last wave of dizziness we were back in 1851.
‘Now then, Sprigg,’ said Colonel Quivering, taking charge. ‘You come with us!’
Sir Launcelot stood up shakily, looking jolly cross that his escape attempt had failed. But as he was about to start back up the steps to us, we all became aware of a strange sound coming from the sky above the railway terminus. A star moved there, and grew bigger, and was not a star at all, but a glitter of starlight on space-frosted planking and ancient iron. With a whoosh, a rush, a rising rumble the ship soared over us, circling the hotel once before crashing down upon the promenade not far from where the Sophronia lay. She landed with such a wallop that whole sections of her battered hull were burst asunder, and all of us who stood watching ducked and shielded our faces from a shower of splintered planks and rusty nails which came raining down upon the steps and on the striped canopy above the hotel entrance.
When the sound of falling debris had faded and we dared to look again, the ancient ship lay still, careened over on her larboard gunports in a pall of alchemical steams. Shattered though she was, there was no mistaking her.
‘It’s the Liberty!’ I shouted. ‘It’s Jack! Huzzah!’
We all went running down the steps, as from holes and hatches in the Liberty’s hull her crew came scrambling. Sir Launcelot stood looking most pitifully perplexed as we dashed past him to greet our friends. For there was Jack, limping on his injured leg, but looking otherwise unharmed, and reaching back to lend a hand to Myrtle, who looked perfectly appalling, of course, in the ruins of her patent Nereid, but whom I felt jolly pleased to see anyway. Can you imagine the relief we felt as we realised that the Liberty had not been destroyed after all by that shot from Grindle’s gun, and that far from being lost upon the aether Jack and Myrtle had managed somehow to steer her here to find us?
And yet, as we drew close, I could not help noticing that Jack and Myrtle wore worried and preoccupied expressions, and that even our friendly Moob, which fluttered in the air above my sister like a black banner, seemed ill at ease and kept writhing its little hands together in a most troubled way. And as we came closer still, and Myrtle called out my name and ran to embrace me, I saw the reason for their unhappiness. For those Threls, whose services I had purchased for Britain with the promise of wool, had clearly switched sides again after I was dragged from the Liberty’s hull, and now had their toy-like carbines pointed at Jack and Myrtle, and at the rest of us!
And last to emerge from the old ship, looking quite radiant in the moment of her triumph, and armed with two revolvers, was Delphine Beauregard!
Chapter Twenty-Two
In Which We Confront an Adversary Every Bit as Beastly as the Moobs, Though Somewhat Less Like a Hat.
I shall say this for the French; they do not give up easily. When that broadside from the Sophronia sent the Liberty tumbling, Jack Havock had been stunned by a flying splinter, and Delphine had seen her chance. Leaping to the helm, she steadied the stricken ship, and helped Myrtle and the Moob to repair the damaged wedding chamber. Then she addressed her Threls, pointing out that since there was now no hope of catching up with the Sophronia, and the British authorities at Modesty had been alerted to the danger, there was no more cause for them to worry about the Moobs. ‘So return with me to Starcross,’ she had told them. ‘There, I shall insist that Mrs Mumby gives me control over her machine, which I shall use to utterly undo the British Empire!’
‘But what about all that nice wool young Master Mumby promised us?’ asked one of the Threls suspiciously.
‘Master Mumby is lost in space,’ retorted Delphine, ‘and his promise perished with him. Not that the promise of an Englishman is worth much anyway.30 Join with me again and I shall see to it that you have all the wool you need. Not only will France give you flocks of sheep – infinitely superior breeds to the threadbare British varieties, incidentally – but I shall use the Starcross machine to go back in time, and establish those flocks on pre-historic Threlfall. Think how your history will be altered then! What a fine, thick World Cosy will warm the toes of all Threls! What a fortune your woollen stuffs will make for you, and how widely your knitting skills will be praised among all the worlds of the Sun!’
Well, you can hardly blame the poor Threls, I suppose, for letting themselves be swayed by such an offer. By the time Jack regained consciousness the Liberty was back under Delphine’s command, and Myrtle and her Moob were driving her towards Starcross as fast as her battered engines would carry her.31
‘And now we are here!’ said Delphine brightly, jumping from the Liberty’s hatchway and marching towards the hotel, her Threllish hirelings at her heel, herding the rest of us ahead of them like sheep. ‘I was alarmed when we first arrived, for I could see no sign of the hotel, the pier or anything, but then it popped back into being … You have been visiting the past again, I take it?’
‘We have been in the future,’ I said, ‘where we sorted out all our difficulties with the Moobs.’
‘Excellent!’ cried Delphine. ‘I had wondered what we should do about those creatures. Now I shall not have to worry. Nothing stands between me and the machine!’
‘Mother does,’ I objected. ‘She will never let you control it, any more than she would let Sir Launcelot.’
Sir Launcelot, who had been gathered up by the Threls along with all the rest of us, snorted dismissively. ‘The Mumby woman would do anything to protect her brats,’ he told Delphine. ‘And you have both of them!’
So there I was, back to being a hostage or bargaining chip again, after all! Delphine smiled at the nefarious knight and said, ‘Thank you, Sir Sprigg. May I take it that you are on my side in this matter?’
‘I’m against the Mumby woman and that black hooligan Havock and all their unearthly pets and hangers-on, if that’s what you mean,’ huffed Sir Launcelot.
‘Not quite,’ said Delphine, ‘but I think we may be able to form a useful alliance …’ And she signalled for one of the Threls to pass the beastly fellow
a gun before they herded us all back through the hotel and down into the boiler room.
‘Good Lord!’ cried Mr Spinnaker, looking up at us all as we trooped down the iron stairs. He reached out to tug at the sleeve of Mother, who was busy at the control desk with her back to us.
‘Silence!’ shouted Delphine. ‘This hotel is now under the control of the French Empire!’ And she had her Threls thrust us all into the middle of the cavern, and stand watch over us with their carbines.
‘Hello, Delphine,’ said Mother, turning from her work. ‘Oh, Myrtle, Jack; I am so pleased to see you well!’
‘You may save your pleasantries for later,’ snapped the young Frenchwoman. ‘I understand that you have just conveyed this hotel into the distant future, and restored her safely to the present. So I don’t imagine it will cause you too much trouble to take us on another little journey. I wish to be conveyed to the year 1801.’
‘Why?’ asked several of us, but I could guess. 1801 – the year that Wild Will Melville first launched his USSS Liberty to prey on innocent British shipping! I could imagine the plot that had formed itself in Delphine’s beastly brain. She meant to travel back so that she could join forces with her Yankee grandfather. Starcross would become his base; the Sophronia would be added to his rebel navy, and perhaps, with Mother’s time engine at his disposal, he would finally achieve what he had set out to all those years ago: the overthrow of the British Empire!
‘You absolute …’ I started to say, but I could not think of any term of abuse one may properly hurl at a young lady, so I stopped.32
‘I imagine there may be all sorts of complications and paradoxes involved in meeting one’s own grandfather,’ said Mother cautiously.
Delphine paused a moment to consider this. Jack saw his chance. He knew those Threls well enough to understand that, for all their talk of favouring France, they were good fellows really and would hesitate to shoot him. So he flung himself at Delphine, reaching out to wrest the pistol from her hand. And he would have done it, too, except that his injured leg slowed him, and that he had forgotten Sir Launcelot.