Starcross Read online

  Maybe it was by some strange influence of Mother’s time engine, or maybe it was just my own impression, but everything seemed to happen with an awful slowness. I saw Delphine turn as Jack hurtled towards her; I saw Sir Launcelot grin as he swung his pistol at Jack, and the way that it jumped in his fat fist when he pulled the trigger. I saw the muzzle spew smoke and sparks and smouldery lumps of wadding. And I saw Jack arrested in mid-leap, bowled backwards head over heels like a woeful acrobat, with a red buttonhole of blood blooming on his jacket!

  He crashed to the floor. Myrtle swooned. Ssilissa ran to him, crying, ‘Jack! Jack!’ Delphine shouted for Sir Launcelot to hold his fire, and stood trembling, with her own pistol still in her hand and her Threls all scowling and tut-tutting and pointing their carbines from one to another of us, as if to assure their mistress that they would certainly have shot Jack down themselves had not Sir Launcelot Sprigg beaten them to it.

  ‘Ow,’ said Jack Havock, lying helpless on the floor while Ssil tore his shirt open and tried to staunch the blood that flowed so redly from the wound beneath his collar bone. Poor Jack – he had already been a snack for a pre-historic sand clam, and now he had been shot as well! I suppose that type of thing is all in a day’s work for a bold young adventurer, but it still seemed awfully bad luck.

  ‘Silence!’ cried Delphine again. ‘Now do as I say, Mrs Mumby, or I shall destroy a few more of your pets!’

  Mother, with a look of infinite sadness, turned back to her machine, made a few last adjustments, then stepped away. ‘The time engine is set to return to 1801,’ she said. ‘But I will not be the one who takes you there. It can only lead you into danger and disaster, and if you wish that upon yourself, Delphine, then it must be by your own hand.’ She pointed to one of the levers on the machine.

  ‘What sort of danger?’ asked Sir Launcelot warily. ‘What sort of disaster, eh? It’s a trick, Miss Beauregard! You can’t trust her, you know! She ain’t human!’

  ‘It’s a trick, all right,’ said Delphine, with a sneer. ‘She hopes to scare us with these prophecies of doom, and stop me from doing what I came here for!’

  She ran to the machine, and Sir Launcelot went with her, probably hoping that he might trick her himself and gain control of it at last. Delphine smiled as her slender hand grasped the lever which would launch her on to the Seas of Time again. ‘Into Posterity!’ she cried.

  She pulled the lever, and once more that awful dizziness swept over us. And yet it felt different somehow. There was no sense this time of motion, nothing but a fan or cone of bluish light which spilled from some high nubbin of the old machine and illuminated Delphine and Sir Launcelot where they stood at the controls. I saw them exchange surprised glances, and make as if to step out of that shaft of brightness, but the light was changing, hardening, growing silvery and opaque, until it hid them from us, like a cone of mercury, or the bell of some enormous trumpet placed mouth downwards on the floor.

  ‘Mother! What is happening to them?’ Myrtle cried.

  Mother was helping Ssil to bandage Jack’s wound. In the light of that silvery apparition her face looked old and chilly as some ancient statue’s. She said, ‘I made a minor alteration to the machine. I believe it is what vulgar people would call “a booby trap”. It is working splendidly, don’t you think?’

  ‘But what is it doing to them?’ cried Colonel Quivering.

  The surface of the silver cone swirled with stormy patterns, and began to grow transparent again. It took on a reddish tinge, then, no longer a cone, just a shaft of light, fading quickly, withdrawing into whatever secret projector had created it. Where Delphine and Sir Launcelot had stood, only their clothes remained: Delphine’s dress, blue-black as space, with the necklace of amber beads about its collar, and Sir Launcelot’s evening suit, with yellowish sweat stains visible inside the stiff round of his empty collar. The villains’ weapons clattered to the floor, and the clothes crumpled on top of them with crisp, starchy, settling sounds.

  ‘Oh Lord!’ murmured Mr Spinnaker.

  ‘Sssss!’ exclaimed Ssil.

  ‘Long live the Queen!’ declared the Threls, sensing which way the wind was blowing and hastily changing sides again.

  ‘Moob!’ said the Moob.

  ‘Mother!’ I gasped. I was deeply shocked at her coldbloodedness, for I felt certain that Delphine and her accomplice were no more, and that Mother in her infinite power had crushed them as carelessly as you or I might crush an ant. ‘You have vaporised them!’ I declared.

  ‘Oh, Art, what nonsense!’ she replied, tying Jack’s bandages. ‘As if I would do such a thing! Go and help them, while I look to Jack and your sister.’

  I went cautiously towards those heaps of clothes, and Nipper and Grindle came with me. The heaps stirred faintly as we drew near. A strange noise came from within the collapsed tent of Delphine’s dress. Sir Launcelot’s tail coat moved clumsily across the floor. Something was alive inside those garments, and we all drew back, recalling tales of witches who turned their enemies into toads …

  And then another little sound came from Delphine’s dress, and Ssil, standing behind us, said suddenly, ‘Oh, you sssillies!’ She pushed us aside and stooped over the dress, and pulled out from within it a tiny, pink, blue-eyed, perfectly human baby girl, which lay in her arms, waving its chubby hands and feet about in the jolliest manner and gurgling up at Ssil’s blue face. And Mr Munkulus pulled open Sir Launcelot’s shirt (sending studs flying everywhere in his haste) and fetched out a boy baby, just as tiny, who seemed to think his four strong arms a most excellent cradle, and who, after blowing a few bubbles and saying, ‘Boogle woggle wiggle,’ fell fast asleep.

  Myrtle sneezed loudly, which was a result of Mother having raised her up, and waved a pinch of Mr Grindle’s snuff under her nose. Her eyes opened. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Babies! Where did they come from?’

  ‘We ain’t entirely sure,’ Mr Grindle confessed.

  ‘They are Delphine Beauregard and Sir Launcelot Sprigg,’ Mother said. ‘Or rather, they will be. They would insist on being beastly, so rather than setting the machine as Miss Beauregard demanded, I set the time-greenhouse mechanism we used upon the ideospores, only reversing it and taking Delphine and Sir Launcelot back to the age of six months, give or take a day.’

  ‘Aren’t they sssweet?’ said Ssil, and the Threls gathered round to tickle the babies’ feet and say, ‘Oo’s got pwetty little toesy-woeses, then? Eh?’ before remembering where they were, and doing their best to look like fearsome space mercenaries again.

  ‘And Jack?’ asked Myrtle anxiously. ‘Can we place Jack in this machine, Mother, and let it revert him to a time before that horrid person shot him?’

  Mother shook her head. ‘Jack’s wound will heal well enough in the natural way, given the proper care. Time reversion is a somewhat dangerous procedure. We would not wish to turn Jack into a baby, would we? Or to send him back so far that he vanished altogether?’

  ‘No,’ we all said; we would none of us want such a terrible thing, not even Jack, who had a nasty hole in him and would bear the scar of it for ever. Mother gave Nipper strict instructions on how he was to be cared for, placing great emphasis upon cleanliness, and then re-revived Myrtle, who had insisted that she should be the one who nursed Jack back to health, but promptly fainted again when she saw all the blood.

  Then, returning for one last time to her machine, Mother made a few more adjustments to its controls. ‘Stand well back, everybody, please,’ she warned us.

  We all did as she asked, Nipper carrying Jack with great solicitude, Ssil and Mr Munkulus cradling the sleeping infants. That dizziness came over us all again, so that I had to lean on Nipper for support. Mother hurried over to join us, and we stood and watched as the old Shaper machine performed its uncanny dances.

  And then it vanished. One moment it was there, humming and singing and glowing and shifting as gamely as ever a mysterious engine of extraterrestrial design can, and the next it simply wasn’t. There was
a mild thunderclap, as air rushed in to fill the empty space it had left in the middle of the boiler room. The lace cuffs of Delphine’s abandoned dress fluttered in a momentary breeze.

  ‘Where has it gone?’ asked Myrtle.

  ‘It is still travelling, back and back through time, to a hundred-million-year-old beach on Mars.’

  ‘And what will it do when it gets there?’ I wondered.

  ‘It will destroy itself,’ said Mother. ‘All Sir Launcelot’s tinkerings have left it most unstable, so it was an easy thing to induce a runaway alchemical reaction. It will destroy itself, and the section of Mars on which it stands will be blasted into fragments which will fly far, far out into the aether until one of them becomes part of the asteroid belt. An object known as –’

  ‘– Starcross!’ I said.

  ‘Quite so. And with the machine gone, those rifts and frayings in Time’s fabric which have troubled this portion of space should all cease.’

  I frowned. ‘But, Mother,’ I observed, ‘if the machine is destroyed in the year 100,000,000 BC on Mars, how can it ever have been here? Or at Larklight, in our own time? Will it mean that all our adventures never happened?’

  Mother frowned, as if she hadn’t thought of that. Myrtle said, ‘Some people are too clever by half.’ Jack groaned faintly as he shifted in Nipper’s claws and his wound pained him.

  ‘Come,’ said Mother, leading the way upstairs. ‘I do not usually approve of intoxicating fluids, but I believe poor Jack would benefit from a good, stiff brandy. And we must mash up some bread and milk for Delphine and Sir Launcelot.’

  On a lonely stretch of Martian beach, ever so many centuries before the birth of Christ, a number of ugly, transparent animals were squabbling over the carcass of a giant land starfish, which had been lately exploded by a maritime distress flare. A sudden vibration made them pause, tasting the air with their horrible feelers. They had no eyes, and so could not see the curious old machine which had appeared quite suddenly a little further along the curve of the bay. They had no ears, so could not hear the sound that came from within those massive galleries of ducts and whirligigs:

  The explosion, according to learned gents who wander the Red Planet in sennet hats and gaiters, studying rocks and fossil sand clams, tore a crater the size of several asteroids in Mars’s flank, and ripped a swathe of the planet’s atmosphere out into the aether, so ending the age of the great starfish in a most dreadful cataclysm.

  But Mother says the great starfish were on their way out anyway and would never have amounted to very much. She says the explosion merely cleared the way for other forms of life to thrive and flourish, including some which would grow eventually into the Martians we know today. She says ’tis an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

  And, let’s face it, she should know.

  Chapter the Last

  A few days later we were sitting outside the beach cafe on Starcross promenade, well wrapped up against the chills of space, watching the starlight play upon the Sophronia’s rigging and upon the hulk of the USSS Liberty. Our friend the Moob had just settled for a spell on Mother’s head, and was using her voice to explain that it was not unhappy at being left behind when the other Moobs returned to their own time, as it had conceived an affection for the modern era and looked forward to exploring it more thoroughly. And Mr Spinnaker was suggesting that it might like to accompany himself and Mrs S. on their forthcoming tour of the music halls of Mercury, for it had occurred to him that if it did not mind disguising itself as a top hat again they might work up together quite a nice act in the Conjuring and Mind-Reading line.

  ‘Listen!’ said Mr Grindle suddenly, pricking up his ears. ‘A train! A train!’

  It took a few seconds more till we could hear it, but he was right. With a long Whoo-Whooooo! a train came thundering across the heavens and swept down the long incline to Starcross Halt. Not just any old train, either, but an armoured train of the British Space Grenadiers, its engine sheathed in a steel cowl like the helmet of a mediaeval knight, its steel-cased carriages fairly bristling with guns and phlogiston agitators, and the Union flag fluttering from its guard’s van.

  It screeched into the station amid spreading clouds of steam, and out from hatches all along its length came pouring brave British soldiers, stomping along in their fighting machines, or perched on the saddles of mechanised cannon. They surged towards us in a veritable tide of shining gun-metal and scarlet cotton drill, and when they had quite surrounded the tables where we sat their ranks opened and a large figure wearing a fanciful military costume of her own design burst through, crying, ‘Oh, my dears! We are so ’appy to find you safe and well, and not a top ’at in sight!’

  ‘Your ordeal is over!’ announced a splendid major, appearing behind Mrs Spinnaker, mounted on a roan thoroughbred. ‘Now, where are those accursed Moobs?’

  ‘How sweetly kind of you to come!’ said Mother. ‘And so well turned out! But I’m afraid you are too late.’

  ‘Eh?’ said the splendid major, looking on in alarm as the Moob slipped from her head and arranged itself around her shoulders as a stole. ‘Well, it’s no simple matter to prepare an armoured space train; there are orders to write, requisition forms to be sent in, dockets and suchlike …’

  ‘Major,’ said Colonel Quivering, his brisk military tones causing the splendid fellow to spring to attention and salute. ‘There is not a single Moob in Starcross, with the exception of that fellow wrapped around Mrs Mumby, who is a friend of ours and has done great service to the Empire. All other Moobs live many millions of centuries from now, and they are very happy there.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the major, looking crestfallen. ‘Oh. Well. Better give the place a look-over, just in case … Come along, chaps!’

  He set off towards the hotel, with his troops behind him, moving with a speed and discipline which did credit to the British Army.

  Mrs Spinnaker had been busy meanwhile enjoying a most touching reunion with Mr Spinnaker, but she extricated herself at last and sat down to ask us all, ‘So what’s been happening? The tide’s out, I see.’

  ‘I’m afraid the tide’s gone out for good,’ said Mother. ‘Starcross no longer jumps to and fro in time.’

  ‘That’ll be bad for the hotel business,’ observed Mrs Spinnaker. ‘Pity, for it’s a nice old place. What do you say we make old Sir Launcelot an offer for it, ’Erbert, my angel?’

  ‘I say that’s a capital idea, Rosie, my petal,’ replied her husband. ‘It’ll make a pleasant sort of weekend-home, for when we’re not performing.’

  ‘I’m afraid Sir Launcelot is not here to accept your offer,’ said Mother. ‘He has Mysteriously Vanished, along with Miss Beauregard. It is rather a tragedy, but at least neither of them left any family behind to mourn them. Indeed, I suspect they were both widely disliked, and will not be missed at all.’

  She was about to say more, but at that moment a wail from the far side of the table drew Mrs Spinnaker’s attention to Mr Munkulus, who was cradling a baby in each pair of arms.

  ‘Oh, what perfect angels!’ she cried, clapping her hands together. ‘Ain’t they perfect angels, ’Erbert?’ (And Mr Spinnaker muttered, yes, indeed, they were very charming little monkeys.)

  ‘There’s some as might call ’em angelic,’ said Mr Grindle wearily, ‘but there’s others as have been kept up nights listening to their bellyaching and complaining, and wonders as whether they won’t turn out just as bad this time around as last.’

  ‘Oh, what a dreadful thing to sssay!’ Ssil chided him. ‘I’m quite sure that with a proper upbringing, in a loving home …’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ said Grindle, beating his hand upon the table for emphasis. ‘A home’s what they need. An old aether-ship like the Sophronia’s no place for babies.’

  Yarg and Squidley, very tired of having their tentacles tugged by tiny hands, whistled their agreement.

  ‘They are orphans, you see,’ said Nipper, looking nervously at our guests.

  �
�Foundlings,’ Mr Munkulus agreed.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Mrs Spinnaker. ‘Oh, ’Erbert, don’t you think … ? Might we – ? Mayn’t we – ?’

  ‘What Mrs Spinnaker is trying to express,’ said her husband gruffly, ‘is that if these infants are in need of a home, then we should be very honoured, and indeed chuffed, was they to come and live with us. For despite Rosie’s triumphs upon the stage, it has long been a source of regret to us that we have no children of our own.’

  ‘That sounds a most sensible idea,’ said Mother, helping to support the infants as Mr Munkulus, looking somewhat relieved, handed them into the care of their new foster parents. ‘I am sure you will make a much better job of bringing them up than their own families did – I mean, would have done.’

  ‘What are their names?’ asked Mrs S., looking with a most rapt expression from one tiny, gurgling face to the other.

  ‘Delphine and Sir L—’ Nipper started to say, but the Tentacle Twins wrapped their arms about his shell and muffled the rest.

  ‘Their names?’ said Mother thoughtfully. ‘Their names, of course, are Modesty and Decorum.’

  And while all this is discussed, and the conversation turns to cribs and perambulators and nannies, and the contrite Threls present the proud new parents with the tiny booties and bonnets which they have been knitting by way of practice as they wait for the Sophronia’s captain to be well enough to carry them back to Threlfall, where they may get on with their World Cosy; while all this is happening, Jack Havock is sitting with my sister on the sand below the promenade, at a point where, one hundred million years ago, the sea might have lapped in gentle waves.