The Hole in Space

title: <b>Купить книгу "The Hole in Space":</b> feed_id: 5296 pattern_id: 2266 book_author: Blaylock James book_name: The Hole in Space

By now you’ve heard of the doings at Chingford-by-the-Tower and of the great orange cataract of flame that the Watford-Enfield scouts saw over Chingford Common on the evening of October 24. You also know that the whole affair blew over in a fortnight, was laughed down as a prank played on the scouts by a gang of local toughs, those same toughs who, during the Baden Powell Jamboree in St. James Park, pitched the four scoutmasters into the duck pond. The burnt tents and rampaging scouts of the Chingford Common incident, however, had a run-in with something other than local bullies: vastly other, I believe I can say with complete truth. Virtually no one knows what actually occurred on that wild night — no one but me, Jack Owlesby, and, I pray, Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro. Had I not returned miraculously Sunday last, worn but serviceable, the Watford-Enfield boys would remain known as the Chingford Cuckoos and the Scout’s Rest on Jermyn Street would fold its tent shamefacedly and slink away.

But I haven’t crossed and recrossed a million miles of deep space simply to explain away the Chingford fracas, nor to stand witness for the Enfield toughs, nor to help eradicate the blot that this pall of suspected lunacy has dropped over the Scout’s Rest, although this last task I would undertake cheerfully, for the old Rest has been my succor and my hearth rug, as I believe they say, since the good years of my youth.

My rooms, in fact, are above the Rest there on Jermyn Street, about halfway between Charing Cross Road and the Dunhill shop — the corner of Regent and Jermyn to be precise. It was but eight short weeks ago, if I remember aright, that an oddly uniformed boy nipped round with a telegram of what appeared to be the urgent sort. I had returned to the digs about thirty minutes past from lunch at the Old Shades on Whitehall; you know, off Trafalgar Square: Cornish pasty and mash and a pint of the best a shilling. Can’t be beat, I say. Anyway, here came a fearful pounding on the door and I opened it to find a small stout chap got up in joke clothes, in a Fauntleroy suit and with a sort of greenish wiggy thing atop his head. There was something of the jolly porcine about him, like a pig on holiday. He handed me a note, uttering something made senseless by a foreign accent, and I tipped him twopence for the effort. He tripped off down the stairs looking altogether pleased. The telegram ran as follows:

Another person might have been stupefied by such a telegram, but I wasn’t. I was out and hoofing it up Charing Cross in a nonce to secure, as St. Ives had requested, the Birdlip volume from Dr. Lester. I’ll admit that this part of the instructions was a puzzler. The rest was clear as a lark among peahens, but this plant book threw me. One doesn’t diddle about, however, when Langdon St. Ives calls; one hops to in the manner of the famous rickshaw boy in the fable, and sets about his mission. So, as I say, I set out at a brisk pace and returned with the book in hand — something more of a manuscript than a book — in a matter of an hour. By five o’clock I was packed and rattling away out of King’s Cross Station toward Chingford, the book propped open on my knee and the compartment cheerful with the reek of a merry pipe and the steam from a thermos of coffee and a pair of hotcross buns bought smoking from a car at the station. The illustrated volume was otherworldly, the Latin incomprehensible, and I could only marvel at the foreign climes that produced the strange fauna that peopled the pages of the book.

It was storming outside and the dusk was lit with flashes of lightning that illuminated raindrops the size of goose eggs. The wind was blowing in fits and gusts out of the east, a chill wind off the North Sea, and I was ruminating on the jolly atmosphere of the warm compartment and was congratulating myself for having the upper hand over what have been referred to as the inclemencies of climate, and that in spades, when into the compartment burst a red faced sweating chap with a heavy, fat face and, oddly, with what might be called a family relationship to the man who had delivered the Professor’s telegram — the same swinish features, the small eyes, the stout build.

I was on the brink of suggesting that he had stumbled by accident into the first class car, when what he wanted was either the third class down back, or, more likely, the coal car, when he lunged across and whisked the window down with a twirl of his coarse wrist.

“Quite a night, what?” I said, leading into the whole thing delicately. The wind, however, came howling through at about that time carrying this goose-egg rain upon it like a flood tide, and my words were lost in the deluge. I felt like old Lear, the king in the play who made the crazy speech out on the blasted heath to his knave, poor Tom Foolery, who was wrapped in a winding sheet.

“Quite a filthy night!” I repeated, cupping my hands over my mouth.

He turned and gave me a look, as if I had shouted a madness. Then he squinted along over his nose and said something like, “aaargh,” and pointed out the window toward the east and the lights of Stoke Newington. Anxious not to offend, and supposing that some visual treat was looming out there somewhere, I bent down and thrust my head out into the storm.

In a trice shrivel-face had me by the seat of the trousers and the collar of my mack and I found myself hurtling like the Hesperus toward a blur of rock and gravel along the tracks. The fates, however, have always kept a judicious eye on Jack Owlesby, and apparently they cast a quick vote and decided to play out a bit of slack. I landed tumbling and whooping in a stand of gorse.

I lay still for a moment, taking stock, as they say, and letting the rain, which by now was falling in sheets instead of drops, wash the wildness from my eyes and clear away the muddle. Leave it to being pitched out the window of a moving train to create a muddle. Two things appeared certain as I lay there plucking at gorse spines. The first was that bugs of one sort or another inhabited the bush. The second was that foul play had stuck its beak into the affair and had begun to prod about and stir things up filthily.

This was just the sort of thing, however, that spurs we Owlesbies into action. Dies Infustus, I think they call it — the day of unfavorable omen. Such a day might send the average man scurrying, but it simply propels Jack Owlesby deeper into the grim fray. The bugs, once I clamped my eye on them, also played a part in spurring me on, and I, sans book, pipe, tea, and hot-cross buns, wandered away up Forest Road toward Woodford. In Woodford I managed to dry out a bit and to secure a noggin or two of hot punch before hitching a ride with a lorry driver returning that night to Buckhurst Hill. He dropped me at Epping Gate and I trudged the last half mile to Chingford-by-the-Tower on foot. The storm had broken by this time but enough clouds were scudding about to obscure the moon and make the night fearfully black and stark. The wind, although it had lessened considerably down below, was lashing things about with a vengeance upstairs, and the clouds and stars were bobbing and shooting through the night sky in a sort of mad cosmic dance.

It was the sort of night that prompts one to muse on the infinite and to consider what might be out there, beyond the scattering of stars that we egotistically consider our own. I used to think, when I was a lad, that there was likely a big stone wall that one would encounter should one run one’s space galleon far enough out into the void. I chose a wall, I believe, simply to provide a boundary. The idea of the endlessness of anything was something I was unprepared to grapple with. I even dreamed about it — of just such a night — blasting away beyond the planets through a heaven alive with stars whirling like pinwheels, only to run headlong, finally, into a wall painted up with strange and leering lunatic faces. I remember that old Sidcup Catford, the Dean of Lewisham Boys Academy, was along in the ship, and that he blamed me for having drawn comic faces on the walls of heaven. It ruined the dream, old Catford showing up like that. Funny to discover these long years later that the walls exist after all, even if they’re not made of stone.

Anyway, here I was feeling fearfully bucked by the rum and the pint of stout I chased it with, and musing, as I’ve already said, on the infinite, when I sighted Chingford Tower, strangely aglow in the distance. The vision was heartening, because St. Ives Manor would soon pop up from behind the rows of yew trees on the left. And up it popped like a shot, smoke from the chimney and St. Ives’ man Hasbro visible within the bright interior, brewing up the late afternoon tea.

I drained a cup or two before the fire, and had warmed up considerably, when through the door strode Professor Langdon St. Ives with a strength of purpose that was admirable. He always displayed that same strength of purpose whether tying into a bowl of soup or preparing to save the world from an alien threat. It’s the sort of thing that I might muster for an hour or so on a good day, but which would drain me entirely before midafternoon. Those sorts of purposeful, hie-on-into-the-fray chaps seem always to stride about for some reason, mere walking or strolling being foreign to their very being. Carlyle, I think it was, pointed that out in his treatise on heroes and great men, although it might have been Newman. Either one of them were up to it.

So there I was, firmly ensconced at Chingford-by-the-Tower, slurping away at a cup of what appeared to be some oriental notion of tea, Malay Oolong, if I’m any judge, and here was the greatest physicist since what-was-his-name, gazing at me through slit lids, as they say, with as businesslike an eye as has ever seen daylight.

“Did you bring it, Jack?” he asked.

“Bring it?”

“The book. Birdlip’s succulents. Telegram.”

“Oh, ah,” I replied weakly. “Yes, and then again, no.”

“Hah!” cried the Professor, rising up out of his seat. “Did they pinch it?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, mystified by his enthusiasm. “They pinched it. Or rather, he did, whoever he was. I hadn’t time to inquire, and he wasn’t inclined to chat. He took the book and flung me out the window.”

“Capital!” shouted the Professor, accepting these odd goings-on in the jolliest of spirits. I wasn’t half so sanguine, in fact I was more or less hipped, but this fell into the line-of-duty category, and like a good soldier I awaited further orders.

Hasbro cleared away the tea apparatus and, in a wink, slid round with a tray of essentials: small cakes and glasses and a bottle of Spanish sherry — none of your French vinegar fattened up with cheap brandy. Tea, I’ve always said, is your man for the pick-me-up, the restorative. But it doesn’t stick with you, if you follow me; it’s gone as soon as it clears your gums. It takes the real fuel oil to keep the fire lit, and I can tell you that it slipped down the throat like a healing zephyr, giving me what the ancients referred to as the will to live.

St. Ives sat nodding, his mind running on before him, his lips pursed in a knowing and thoughtful way. “Say on, Jack,” he said suddenly. “Was it an obese man in a Chinese mandarin jacket and a Leibnitz hat? A beady-eyed man with a face screwed up like a prune? A face like a peccary?”

“That’s the bird,” I said. “Only without the Chinese clothes. And now that you mention it, no hat either. But he had the warthog face and a flat nose like a whacking great beacon.”

St. Ives nodded with apparent satisfaction. “You see, Jacky,” he said, “there are those roundabout us who would rather we didn’t make this little…voyage. You’ve met one of their chiefs, I’m afraid.”

“Saboteurs is it?”

“Just so. But I’ve been onto them now for a month. I suspected them after the first voyage, after we’d successfully charted the hole. It’s the crowd that Birdlip hinted at in his last letters.”

I was thunderstruck. “The same crowd that planted the bomb under Birdlip’s laboratory?”

“Just so. And they wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to blow us all to Kingdom Come, Jack.” He slumped now, and tugged at his chin in the fashion of a man treading the mental pathways, a man who didn’t entirely like the look of the landscape. “And now they’ve gotten off with the book! Or at least its facsimile. They’ve played their hand. I know them now.”

“So it was a ruse, the succulent book?”

“Clever, eh?”

“Indeed,” I said, although I wasn’t feeling it. I was hipped again. “Quite a gag. I laughed myself into a ditch full of gorse, lost my pipe, my thermos bottle, and my dinner into the bargain, and then I walked from Stoke Newington to Woodford.”

“Your thermos bottle do you say?”

“Absolutely.”

“Keeble’s device for the maintenance of temperature within an enclosed space?”

“That’s it exactly. Very nearly irreplaceable, too.”

“Do you know that it was the invention of the thermos bottle that excluded Keeble from the Royal Academy?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. (William Keeble, I’ll reveal here, is my protector and benefactor, a toy maker and inventor extraordinaire.) “Why on earth would they exclude him?”

“He explained his device to the members, do you see? — telling them that it kept hot things hot and cold things cold.”

“Ah.” I nodded.

“But they were skeptical. It sounded like gibberish to them, hot things hot and cold things cold. It was a conundrum, a contradiction in terms. They held the device in their hands, peered inside, sniffed it, handed it round. It was Lord Kelvin himself who asked the decisive, ruinous question. The question for which there was no answer.”

“Ah,” I said, waiting.

“Kelvin looked at him over the top of his spectacles in that way he has, and asked, quite simply, and with great finality, ‘how does it know?”

I stared at St. Ives, blinking once or twice, waiting for his words to convey some meaning to my mind. It had been a long and trying day.

“The question baffled poor Keeble. He didn’t expect it. But they were adamant. It’s the scientific method or nothing with them, you know, and too often nothing comes of it. Far too often. Do you follow me?”

I poured myself another glass of sherry and nodded. “The succulents and begonias book — I take it you don’t rue the loss. And yet your telegram seemed to hint that the volume was of a vital nature.”

“And perhaps it was, in its roundabout way. Tell me, do you read the work of Mr. Poe?”

“Too morbid for my taste.”

“He’s a master of the crime story. Pioneered the device of the false clue, the red herring, the specious oddity that throws your man off the track.”

“Or onto the track, in my case,” I said, cramming a cake into my mouth, a very delicate seeded cake tasting of anise, and I nodded my appreciation at Hasbro as he reentered the room bearing what appeared to be manuscript pages.

“Quite so. But you see, I knew that these — these pig men, I suppose we can call them, would purloin that telegram and then deliver it themselves. They’re keen on the manuscript, you see. As a ruse de guerre, I deposited the false volume, the mockup, with Dr. Lester, then gave the missive to Bill Kraken and had him dash down to London to deliver it.”

“Bill Kraken!” I was aghast. Of all the unreliable drunkards! “You can’t mean old Cuttle Kraken’s mad brother?”

“The same.” The Professor uttered a sort of sigh and drained his glass, helping himself to one of the cakes. He took the manuscript from Hasbro. “Pour yourself a glass of this sherry,” he said, smiling at the man. “We’re a company now.”

“Yes, sir,” Hasbro said, pouring himself an unconvincing dribble.

“Unfortunately poor Bill was knocked on the head in a tavern in Limehouse. He’ll recover, thank God, but they weren’t kind to him. They took the message around to your digs themselves, delivered it to you, and then accosted you on the train in order to steal the book after old Lester had entrusted it to you.”

I was dumbstruck. “And so the book is gone! I still don’t fathom…”

“This is the Kraken-Birdlip manuscript,” St. Ives said, winking at me and handing me the loose pages that he’d taken from Hasbro. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was indeed reading Birdlip’s treatise on succulents and begonias. I gave St. Ives the searching stare and awaited a further explanation. I had been practiced upon, and I wasn’t smiling and winking, although he was, apparently tremendously pleased with himself.

“Another ruse?” I asked him.

“Indeed. Ruse upon ruse. This, of course, is the treatise on alien botanicals prepared by Cuttle Kraken and Dr. Birdlip after their first venture through the hole. After Cuttle’s death in the explosion, Birdlip spirited it away, consigning it to me before he went into hiding. It constitutes evidence, of course, which ought to have been destroyed in the conflagration in Birdlip’s laboratory. But as you can see, it wasn’t destroyed. How the pig men divined the truth is hard to say, but I became certain that they had.” He laughed now, out of high spirits. “I had almost said ‘deveined’ as if the truth were a shrimp.”

“And so you fabricated this, this red herring de guerre, this shrimp de mer, just in order to confound them?”

“Just so.”

St. Ives was triumphant, proof positive that my little contribution to his scheme was well worth a few gorse spines, but before I could utter a word there was a tremendous explosion that brought me catapulting out of my chair, dumping a half glass of sherry down the front of my trousers. I saw that Hasbro stood at the open French window, his hair whisking about on the wind and a regular torrent of rain from a renewed storm sluicing into the room. In his hands was a long smoking rifle of monstrous proportions — a death-dealer from the look of it.

“What-ho Hasbro?” St. Ives stood up unflustered, peering out into the night.

“Prowlers, sir.”

“Did you bring any down?”

“Yes, sir. I seem to have dropped one, as the white hunter would say. He’s lying on the lawn, apparently immobilized.”

The Professor had a lantern in hand in a nonce, and we were out the door and into the rain, warily approaching the creature, Hasbro brandishing his weapon, ready to blow the interloper to Kingdom Come. The fallen man, if a man he was, apparently now trod on more hallowed ground than had been available in the environs of Chingford-by-the-Tower.

I’ll admit that I’d had a sip or two that evening, but I was sober enough to see with relative clarity, and, I might add, I’m a man who prides himself in his straightforward veracity. Ask any of the lads at the old Scout’s Rest, and they’ll back me to a man. Jack Owlesby, they’ll say, is solid as the Rock. And it took that sort of solidity, I can assure you: when St. Ives held the lantern over the wound, it ran with green blood — a murky and fibrous green, as if spun into tangled clumps of dirty Irish cobweb. St. Ives was grim, but was not particularly taken aback. He reached down and popped the corpse’s shoe off, and, with a wide gesture, as if introducing a fairly so-so pianist, waved at the thing’s cloven hoof, the ghastliest bit of anatomical peculiarity I’d hitherto had the pleasure to encounter. The beast had the foreleg of a pig, and, indeed, appeared to be the very gentleman, if gentleman I can call him, who had propelled me through the open train window that very afternoon. He was dead as a Yorkshire ham, and already he had begun to stink.

Another thing Jack Owlesby isn’t is a coward. I mean to say, I was pitched from the window of a moving train, an incident that would discourage the stoutest heart, and yet I trudged like a trooper through the night to a rendezvous with a scientist — not mad, strictly speaking, but eccentric, given to flights of fancy — whose intention it was to shoot me into outer space in an utterly unlikely machine. Mere pluck isn’t in it, from my point of view. But when I caught sight of that hoof, attached to the end of a pinkish but rather human-looking leg, I let fly a “Yoicks!” that might have been heard as far away as Stoke Newington, and took off, as my old mother would say, like a dirty shirt toward St. Ives Manor, where I finished off the sherry bottle and opened a second without invitation.

Later, St. Ives and Hasbro slid back in, having deposited the corpus delecti with the local vivisectionist. I was storming the gates of fear with another scupper of Spanish sherry, but I was sober as a judge, much to my dismay. The whole rum puncheon ran contrary to what one might call my better judgment — a dead man, after all, or some facsimile of one — but the Professor had a different way of seeing things. Langdon St. Ives has always seen things in his own light, although the wavelength is off the visible spectrum, a sublunar light, if you follow me, but, admittedly, the light of rare genius. He assured me that if we all kept a judicious eye peeled for scalawags, we’d last out the night in good health. Consider for a moment how cheered I was by this observation.

And it was a vigil that we kept: Hasbro with his elephant rifle scouring the grounds; Professor St. Ives at the lookout, first at one window, then at the next; and I holding sway before the fireplace, guarding the chimney flue and the sherry bottle lest the hoofed men try to slip in from above. A roaring fire, I’ve heard, fends off even the most fearsome night denizens, and by God I kept the fire hot. And in the long night I learned several bits of information that served merely to increase the general rumminess. First, I caught on that these cloven-hoofed pig men were not at all human, a fact I had rather suspected, and that they were intent upon putting the damper on our mission into space. It seems that these aliens, these Citronites (Birdlip and the elder Kraken had, apparently, dubbed their planet Citrona after finding vast tangerine orchards in evidence) had been slipping in through what Birdlip and St. Ives have dubbed “black holes” — a single black hole, actually.

In fact I don’t have an earthly idea, but I picture the mouth of a train tunnel, seen from a distance and cut through solid rock. But these holes, these tunnels if you will, are apparently cut through solid space — something that meant worlds to a man like St. Ives, but meant nothing to a man like me. They were garden gates, if you will, from…elsewhere, and they led, as it was explained to me, from one place to another. A chap might be capering along through the void when a bloody great hole opens up next door, and, if the chap isn’t ready for it, sucks him in like water through a pump hose. The puzzler, at least to me, is that a hole can appear in the void. The Professor cleared that up effortlessly. It seems as if this hole isn’t a hole, not really, not in the sense of its having dimension, or at least measurable dimension. It’s like the thingummy that is all things to all men, apparently, the hole that is both the alpha and the omega, the window that is at once a hiatus and a hindrance. Kraken and Birdlip, suffice it to say, navigated the avenues of this aperture, popping down into the jungle groves of Citrona where they meddled with their botanicals for a week or so before whizzing back through. The real rat’s nest, however, is this: they were pursued on their return by these pig-faced men, an indeterminate number of them, who blew Birdlip’s laboratory to dust, murdering Cuttle Kraken. Their misuse of Cuttle’s brother drove the poor man to drink and madness.

I awoke on the chair by the fireplace, stiff as a post, and was greeted immediately by the steadfast Hasbro who bore in a pot of mocha java. I sugared it twice, once for taste and once to recapitulate with the depleted blood sugars, and after the coffee and an ablation was ready for all the pig men in Essex. The pig men, however, didn’t show, and neither did Langdon St. Ives who, I found, was off on some mysterious errand.

When I went out at last onto the veranda, the sun was halfway up the morning sky chivvying for position with a single cloud that hightailed it toward the horizon in the wake of its passel of erstwhile companions. It was one of those clean autumn mornings that makes a chap throw back both arms and suck in a lung full of air, then let it out in a hearty wheeze, and that was entirely my ambition when I was interrupted by Hasbro, who stepped out into the open air and said, “The Professor desires our company in the tower, sir.”

We crossed the meadow, finding St. Ives within the confines of the stone tower, a circular vaulted room with a polished stone floor and high windows radiating sunlight. A veritable scourge of sucking noises proceeded from a great conical device raised on an iron platform in the center of the floor, and it didn’t take more than a moment to deduce the fact that this device, a gothic assemblage of metal and glass, was the Professor’s spacecraft. I had been expecting a saucer, perhaps ringed with porthole windows and with a whirring combine beneath. This ship, however, had the appearance of a ruddy great bullet that had been decorated in the style of Chartes Cathedral.

St. Ives puttered about, tugging on one thing and another and grappling with levers and switches. Hasbro took up a position outside the tower door, armed with his weapon. Unbeknownst to me, the hour of our departure was approaching, and the Professor and Hasbro knew that the pig men had to act if they were going to squelch things for good and all. St. Ives fully expected a cutting out expedition, and we were all of us on our guard. I was put to work, I can tell you, and I sweated like a banshee all afternoon over a complexity of whatnots and doodads. There were gyros to ameliorate and fluxion sponges to douse, and all of it accomplished within the space of thirty-eight seconds, with no margin of error, lest, as Shakespeare himself was wont to say, we tread untimely the fields of Elysium, pig men be damned. It was an unforgiving machine that could dash out our brains on the instant, and so my earthbound familiarity with the controls was vital if I were to be midshipman among the stars.

Late in the afternoon I was tolerably familiar with endless buttons and dials and switches, and I moved about the cork floor in my stocking feet with something like confidence. The cork that made up the immense undercarriage of the ship, and which must have cost Spain half her annual production, was apparently the key to mass and buoyancy, the two great levelers of an air-going craft just as they were at sea. Stone ships, as the Professor put it, sink like the popular phrase. Long past noon, and with a growing peckishness, I found myself quite alone, left to batten down the hatches before popping over to the manor for a meat pie and a pint. The Professor and Hasbro had gone thither a half hour past. I stood now on the small iron quarterdeck, I guess you would call it, and spied through the tower window a man on the meadow, a stout man, with a suspicious creeping gait, who must have been hidden from view of the manor by the tower itself.

I had the uncanny notion that I had seen the man before, and of course I had, for he could have been a twin of the man who had stopped on the lawn last night to parlay with Hasbro’s bullet. But that man by now had almost certainly been reduced to the sum of his parts. This one, like his fellows, possessed an uncannily rolled up face and tiny eyes, and he walked along on the tips of his toes like a chap might walk over hot sand. He was dressed in lederhosen in the manner of a comical German, and he carried a bamboo whangee, as if this unlikely stick would lend him the innocent air of a man on a walking tour. On his head was an oversized hat of the variety commonly called a poma, with a rounded point at its crown and with a turned up brim. Smoke seemed to rise from his ears.

I shouted at him through the tower window: “What ho the masquerade!” I called out wittily, at which the man leapt into the air, looking around with a caught-in-the-act countenance. In a nonce he had pulled off his cap, removing from the smoking interior a black fizz bomb the size of a twelve pounder cannonball. Even in the afternoon sunlight the fuse was visibly sparking. He turned and ran even as he pitched the bomb at the tower, fleeing away in mincing steps toward Epping Forest. He had a tolerably good aim, I’ll give him that, for the black orb shattered the glass of one of the lower windows and clunked down onto the floor.

“Here’s a jolly filthy mess,” I said to myself, clambering downwards. I’ll admit that my mind contemplated the open door, through which I was tempted to flee, but there’s something in a man that doesn’t love a bomb, and it was that which inclined me to risk everything on the chance of pinching out the fuse. I went for it like billy-o, scooping the thing up and, casting danger to Aeolus and his kin, attempted to smother the sputtering flame. It was no go. The fuse would stay lit despite my antics. And a fine fool I must have looked, juggling the bomb like a hot potato, dancing about on my toes, when I heard a voice shout, “Throw it away, sir! Out the door with it!” And without a second thought I did just that — pitched it through the open door, out onto the meadow, where it rolled like a game of nine-pins down the hill toward the forest, gathering speed, bouncing and hopping toward the very place where the pig man had taken shelter.

Hasbro entered the tower. “I trust you’re unharmed, sir?” he asked.

“Quite,” I told him, although in truth my fingertips were singed from my unsuccessful efforts with the flaming wick.

“Then I suggest that we ascend to the upper reaches, sir, so that we might have the advantage of elevation.”

Bounding up the stairs again was the work of a moment, and we had no sooner poked our heads through the porthole on the second balcony when a whopping great bang, a puff of black soot, and a regular bingo of fine orange spark and flame whooshed up from the forest. A cascade of tree limbs, leaves, and dirt rained roundabout for a time until the air over the wood was empty but for suspended dust, a bit of curling smoke, and the pig man’s hat turning end over end, buoyed for a moment on the recently charged atmosphere before falling groundward.

We watched for movement in the fringe of the trees, but there was nothing, only the still-settling dust. The Professor appeared on the veranda and waved to us. We made our way down the stairs again and out onto the meadow, joining him. “Jolly stupid chaps, aliens,” I muttered as the three of us approached the woods.

“Their powers of observation are singularly weak,” said the Professor. “If only their explosive devices were equally inadequate, we might almost find the creatures amusing.”

“That chap with the bomb might have been the dead man on the lawn. Absolute likeness. Why do they all look so frightfully piggish?”

“It has been observed,” said Hasbro, “that to the Asian gentleman all white Europeans look quite moderately alike. This is a similar phenomenon, I believe.”

“Perhaps even more so,” I said, “these being space aliens.”

“Entirely within the sphere of the possible, sir.”

“We’re dealing with an entire race of pig men.”

“So it would seem,” the Professor said. “Pig men down to the ground.”

Just inside the line of trees we found a fine crater blown into the earth, but there was no sign of the alien, no hooves or sow’s ears or soused pig’s face. The singed hat lay in the crater, as if perhaps he had lost it as he fled.

“I have a hunch,” St. Ives said, “that these aliens have a base right here in Epping Forest, perhaps even a spacecraft, hidden in the woods.”

“Let’s flush the buggers out,” I said. “Ferret them out like stoats. Stoat them out like ferrets. They seem a stupid enough bunch.”

“Perhaps too stupid.” The Professor looked thoughtful. “Rather like dealing with a dozen escaped loonies from Chigwell Hatch. Impossible to read them.”

“You’ve got a point there,” I said. In the heat of the recent victory, however, I was fired up, and determined to be on the offensive for once. “But we can’t simply allow them to storm in waving fizz bombs whenever they feel up to it. After all, there might be dozens of them.”

“I doubt it, sir, if you’ll pardon a word or two,” Hasbro put in. “If there were a quantity of them, they could have overpowered us easily. They are wary, I believe, because there are so few of them.”

“Quite so,” responded St. Ives. “And, more to the point, we’ve really little to fear from the handful we suppose are in the woods, as long, that is, as we stay alert. I believe it was Addison who said something about leaping over single foes to attack entire armies, and that, in fact, is just the point. When one’s roof leaks, one doesn’t merely place a bucket beneath the drip. One climbs atop the roof and jolly well plugs the hole. Do you follow me?”

I said that I did, and we left Hasbro standing guard with his elephant gun and a brass bell to ring if he needed reinforcements. The Professor and I returned to the manor. We were to sail at dusk — blast off, I should say — and we spent the remainder of the afternoon loading supplies and closing up shop. Birdlip’s manuscript caught my eye as I was hauling beakers of water, and I realized that the succulents and begonias were still a mystery to me. I picked the thing up and waved it at St. Ives. “About the manuscript,” I began, but the Professor interrupted me with his inscrutable smile.

“Ah, yes,” said he. “The false clue.”

“Quite,” said I, “but why? Why slip the pig men a worthless book?”

“Birdlip’s manuscript, my dear Owlesby, refers to certain plants — begonias, if you will, of outstanding girth, large as a man’s head, veritable trees. They shimmered, according to Birdlip and Kraken, and were surrounded by a halo, an aura of roseate darkness that suggested the black hole through which the two scientists had made an entrance into the universe where they had very much found themselves. These begonias appeared to be parasitical, attached as they were to the immense tangerine trees of which I have already spoken.”

“Immense?”

“Quite. Fully as large as the greater Norwegian alder, which, I needn’t add, is quite the largest tree on the globe, although it’s worthless for anything but firewood and the carving of figureheads. But do you know what the corker was?”

“I’m ashamed to say I do not.”

“Tangerines were sprouting and growing on the trees like…”

The Professor groped for a word.

“Like banshees,” I said helpfully.

“I don’t follow you,” said he. “The simile conveys no meaning to my mind.”

“It’s a general purpose word that I use for comparison. Works virtually anywhere.”

“Yes,” said he. “Well. Kraken advanced the hypothesis that these begonias were somehow connected to the black hole, and that energy, or something quite like it, was jolly well sailing through the hole from our universe into theirs.”

“A bleed-off, would you call it?”

“Exactly.”

“And that’s why the trees are big as legends and growing fruit like popping corn.” It only has to snow once before Jack Owlesby gets the drift, as my old mother used to say, and I could see in an instant what these filthy alien interlopers were up to and why they’d handed me a fizz bomb for my troubles.

“There you have it,” said St. Ives, shaking snuff onto the edge of his thumb.

“These aliens are drawing off the essential humors,” said I, by way of clarification.

“Filching our essences,” agreed the Professor. “And to bring up their plans with a round turn, I slipped an expurgated edition into the Museum and told old Dr. Lester that he was to release it only to you. The aliens, I found, tried to obtain the thing no less than eight times. Lester supposed it was the same whey-faced man dressed like lunacy each time. In his final attempt he was dressed as a red Indian, feathers protruding from his hat at a dozen angles and painted up like a grandee and wearing a pair of golden Arab slippers with the toes curled back in a point. Lester threatened to set the constable on him, and he fled through a rear exit and never made another attempt.”

“Who first put them on to Birdlip?”

“Kraken’s son, mad Bill.”

“Their agent?”

“I’m afraid so, poor devil. No fault of his own, though. They worked on his mind, what there was of it.”

“Ah,” I said sadly. “That explains the Fauntleroy suit and the wig. It was their idea.”

“Apparently so, though Lord knows why. The note was my own. I knew that you’d fetch the book from Lester, that the aliens would steal it and discover the false clue: that we blast off tomorrow, on the 24th.”

“The night of the full moon.”

“Just so. Actually,” he said, grinning like a grampus, “we blast off tonight.” He checked his pocket watch. “In an hour and a half exactly.”

With that the Professor tucked the unexpurgated copy of Birdlip’s manuscript into his coat and busied himself with a crate of tinned foods and a cask of ship’s biscuit. When we returned to the tower we found Hasbro watering yew sproutlets in the greenhouse on the second level. I was sharp enough from the outset to realize that these shrubs and ferns and such would provide us with the necessary oxygen. St. Ives’s craft was turned out like a ship of the line.

This is the part of the adventure where the minutes drag past like starfish, which, if you follow me, have enough legs to hie along like anything, but instead can do nothing but creep. Night had fallen an hour before, and the weather was exceptional — nothing between us and the hovering stars but vacant space, not even a cloud.

We popped right to it, sealing hatches, zipping up atmosphere bulwarks, setting gyros and elasto-turbans, battening hatches, and all that sort of thing. I was smitten by a sense of adventure, and had there been a bowline or a capstan bar I would have hauled upon it with the heartiest sort of heave-ho, the consummate deckhand. By half past eight we were strapped into cushioned loungettes in the prow. Hasbro unshipped the deadlights and found his way back to his own loungette, all of us silent as we gazed out through the thick glass of the portholes through the top of Chingford Tower, which was unlidded, roofless, open to the elements so as to reveal a circle of sky as through the lens of a telescope.

The Professor jabbed buttons, nodded meaningfully to Hasbro and I, and then reached across and heaved on a bloody great anti-something-or-other crank with silver wires sprouting from it like tentacles. There was a wild crash and clatter and a cacophonous whir reminiscent of a scourge of locusts setting up for a concert. In that moment there was a muffled explosion that brought the Professor up short. “What…?” he began to ask, but the entire tower quivered like a column of aspic, and we jolly well ripped out through the roofless roof like a comet trailing a universe of sparks.

I’ll admit that I myself was smug in my ignorance, and not only about our having given the pig men the slip. I had a hand, you see, in making earth safe from their depredations: we were more than a match for a gaggle of ill-dressed loonies. I could visualize them leaping to their feet about now, from where they were hunkered down in Chingford Forest, punching each other on the shoulder, leaping up and running hatless onto the meadow. Imagine my surprise when that’s precisely what I did see, not forty feet below us.

Odd thing, spaceships, they have these gyro gizmos that make a chap feel right side up in spite of the fact that he’s not — saves him a good deal of uneasiness, I suppose. It took a moment, then, for me to understand what had happened. The aliens, apparently, had chucked in one of their fizz bombs just as we launched our craft, and the concussion in the base of the tower had cannoned us upward, setting the bloody ship mad. Dials were spinning like whirligigs, and St. Ives was a veritable octopus, arms flailing hither and yon in an effort to stabilize our madcap flight.

The ship capered along haywire above the green, and the pig men, dressed for a masquerade, ran in a wild rout in our wake, carrying lighted torches. St. Ives and Hasbro enlivened the necessary retros and stabilizers, and we banked into one last side-crushing loop before bowling off westward toward the common. Pig men gave way to costumed Boy Scouts about then, several hundred of the blighters on the evening march, who broke and ran like mice as we flew overhead, all shot up with flame and whizzing a universe of parti-colored sparks. We were out of sight quickly enough after setting aflame several score of tents, and (here I only speculate from newspaper accounts) the Scouts were regrouping when from over the rise, led by a gigantic alien dressed as a cartoon devil, came the pig men, shouting unfathomable drivel and brandishing torches.

The rest of the Chingford Common fracas is history, and a dozen wild and equally unlikely stories have been offered by unfortunate witnesses, so I won’t say more about it except that none of those stories holds a candle to the truth, which, the philosopher tells us, is often the case. As for the ship, we managed to yank it up into the proper trajectory and, through the skills of science and the will of God, raced outward through the void toward the black hole that yawned like a tunnel of infamy off the port side of Mars.

* * *

In truth, there’s not much more to say — not yet anyway. We whizzed along for six days before it occurred to me to ask the Professor just how long we’d be engaged in our modest heroics. He was evasive. That is to say, he hinted that the mission might be a protracted one indeed, and that the business of shutting a door sometimes requires stepping through that door and slamming it firmly shut behind one — a notion that in my weakness I understood to have been revealed to me in what might be called an untimely fashion, if you follow me.

On the thirteenth day, late in the long and lightless afternoon, with Earth in our wake reduced to a speck of flame in the vast heavens, we saw the orbicular shadow of what a futuristic poet might, in his paroxysms of language, call something slightly more grand than a simple black hole: an ebony hiatus, perhaps, the looming mouth of a dark destiny encircled by a whirling vaporous darkness and shot through with rainbow lights as if a thousand twirling prisms danced above the abyss.

“There she blows,” Hasbro muttered helpfully, mixing grog in a chemical beaker.

“Still a good way off,” I responded, awestruck by the sight and helping myself to the contents of the beaker.

“Its appearance is deceptive,” said the Professor, winking at me. “It looks as if it’s a thousand miles across from this distant perspective, when actually it’s a tiny thing, not much broader, shall we say, than the base of this ship, although all talk of breadth is purely conceptual. You see, Jack, there are walls.”

“I was sure there were!” I shouted, slightly illuminated by the grog. And I told him about the dream and old Sidcup Catford and the rock wall. The Professor saw more merit in my metaphoric dreaming than I had anticipated. Space, it turns out, is just that: a void peopled by an occasional star or a family or two of meteorites or a misanthropic comet. Our mistake is to suppose that life exists out among the stars that we discern in the night sky. It’s out there, all right, but behind a wall, through a door, as it were, a door through which Birdlip and Kraken had plunged in their own star vehicle, unwittingly leaving it open behind them not unlike the door of the proverbial barn.

“A glass of grog with you, sir,” Hasbro said, handing across the beaker for what might have been the sixth time. I filled my glass and drank it off, realizing as it settled its fiery weight in the pit of my stomach that I was drunk as a lord and with none of the wealth to go with it.

“If we fail, Jacky, don’t expect to see either of us this side of Paradise,” the Professor said. “We’ll be strangers in a filthy strange land.”

“I say,” I said, trying to rise. “What’s this we and you? We’re a company!” My legs, apparently, had turned to jelly, for I remained helplessly in my seat. Hasbro and the Professor donned lead shoes and strode to the hatch, which led below to the ’tween deck, as it were. I tried to throw myself from the loungette, for I saw their intention as clear as rainwater, and I would have damn well followed them but for the physics of leaden rum and leadless shoes.

“Take heart, Jacky boy,” the Professor said. “Let the craft bear you home. Watch for us when the moon is one day past full and Mars rises above the horizon in the early evening.” With that utterance they disappeared through the hatch, and that’s the last I’ve seen of Professor St. Ives and his man Hasbro. I sat like a pudding, stupefied in my chair, listening for a time to a banging and clattering from below. Abruptly there came a lurch and crash and the whirl and swoosh of a great flaming exhalation through the scuttle that bespoke the jettisoning of the forward section. I and my capsule arced away in a trajectory that would ultimately point my prow toward home and the long plunging fall.

Through the glass, as my ship came around on a broad tack, I could see the double aft section hurtling toward the lee shore of Mars, carrying in it two of England’s — aye, of the world’s — greatest men: heroes to the core. I could do nothing but watch in mute wonder as they plunged toward the dark and whirling vortex of the hole. Their ship, now a cone with the top shorn off, broke again in two, the massive lower section towing, if that’s the word, on the end of what appeared to be a long chain of highly polished droplets of metal. The sides of that aft section fell away and tumbled slowly off into the emptiness, baring the massive cork that I had occasion to comment upon previously.

And so, the heavens revolving around her, her conical bowsprit pointed into that gullet of dark mystery, she sailed into temporary oblivion, hauling behind her an incredible cork etched with an equally incredible and, I must say, vastly inspiring legend: “Fitzall Sizes” — a legend that might as easily define the vast capacities of those two forthright and intrepid adventurers.