Starcross Read online

  ‘I’m sure Myrtle will understand once Art explains it,’ said Nipper, that ever-hopeful crustacean. ‘Myrtle is not one to cause a scene.’

  But no sooner had the words emerged from his shell than we all heard my sister’s voice, raised in a most piercing and unsettling shriek. We looked about – Jack sprung to his feet and put a hand to his hip, where, in his piratical days, his revolving pistol had been wont to hang – and out upon that island in the sea we saw Myrtle and Mother. As we watched, they both plunged in and struck out for the beach.

  We hurried down on to the sand, and were joined there by the Spinnakers, Prof. Ferny and Colonel Quivering, and even by Mr Titfer, who came running from some study or office in the upper regions of his hotel, in his shirt sleeves, with a clerical automaton hurrying behind him, making notes of everything he said.

  ‘What the deuce is going on here?’ he demanded.

  Mother rose from the waves, looking like Aphrodite,11 only better dressed, with Myrtle coughing and spluttering behind her.

  ‘Myrtle?’ cried Jack, running to her.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you,’ retorted Myrtle, folding her arms, turning her face away from him and elevating her chin to a steep angle. ‘What was that dreadful scream?’ asked Mrs Spinnaker, looking very flustered and tying nervous knots in her bonnet ribbons.

  Myrtle forgot her anger at Jack and remembered what had caused her alarm. ‘Oh, those trees!’ she cried.

  ‘What trees?’ demanded Mr Titfer.

  ‘On the island there,’ said Mother, her brow creased by a worried frown. ‘On that island, among the flowering shrubs, there are two trees growing …’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed them several times,’ said Colonel Quivering, squinting into the dazzle of the sunlit waves. ‘They look rather like two people standing there.’

  ‘Colonel,’ said my mother, ‘they are two people standing there. I am certain that those are Venusian Changeling Trees, and that until quite recently they were human beings.’

  Chapter Six

  In Which One of Our Number Discerns the Hand of an Enemy at Work, and Is Struck Down by It!

  There were gasps and cries of alarm from all about me, and I believe I gave a yelp, too. If you’ve been following my adventures you will recall the dreaded Venusian Changeling Trees, whose invisible spores wiped out our colonies on Venus by transforming the colonists into more Changeling Trees. Mother’s words made me remember my own meeting with Jack Havock’s family, who stood in a little spinney upon a headland there, with the sea wind sighing through their leaves, and when I looked at Jack I saw Horror etched on his face. The thought that Changeling spores might be drifting even now in the balmy airs of Starcross, and that Mother, Myrtle and the rest of us might soon be trees as well, was almost indescribably dreadful!

  ‘Changeling Trees?’ cried Professor Ferny, rustling his fronds in agitation. ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Are you sure, Ferny?’ asked Mr Titfer. His eyes were wide behind those tinted spectacles he wore. ‘You have imported many species of Venusian plant life. Is it possible that a Changeling spore was carried here along with them?’

  ‘But that is not the worst of it,’ said Mother. ‘They’re young trees, and wrapped about a branch of one of them, I discovered this.’

  She held up for our inspection a small bronze tile, from which trailed two ends of a broken chain, as if it had once hung around someone’s neck.

  ‘Why,’ cried Colonel Quivering, taking it and turning it over in his hands, ‘that was Sir Richard’s! An antique Martian piece! He told me that his wife gave it him, and that he wore it always, beneath his shirt!’

  ‘Sir Richard?’ exclaimed Myrtle. ‘Sir Richard Burton was at Starcross?’

  ‘Sir Richard stayed here a few weeks ago,’ said Mr Titfer. ‘A very good, handsome gentleman too,’ said Mrs Spinnaker. ‘He was here with his wife …’

  ‘A d——d fine young woman,’ said Colonel Quivering. ‘Put me in mind of a lassie I knew when I was stationed on the Equatorial Canal back in ’26 …’ He looked wistful for a moment, then recalled himself and went on, ‘I thought there was something odd about the way the Burtons left us so suddenly, in the middle of the night, without goodbyes.’

  ‘Mrs Burton said goodbye to me,’ insisted Mr Titfer. ‘She told me that she and Sir Richard had been recalled to London. I remember it distinctly.’

  ‘I heard shots that night!’ cried Mrs Spinnaker, and, as her husband tried to calm her, ‘No, no, ’Erbert, let me speak! I ’eard them most distinctly! Six pistol shots!’

  ‘And yet you haven’t mentioned them till now?’ asked Mother.

  ‘I mentioned them to ’Erbert,’ said the Cockney Nightingale, glaring at her husband. ‘And to Mr Titfer, and both of them said I must have been dreaming, and like a fool I supposed they must be right. But I did hear shots! And now Sir Richard has been turned into a tree, and so has his charming wife!’

  ‘Nobody has been turned into a tree!’ cried poor Professor Ferny, overcoming his natural diffidence and shouting loudly to make himself heard above the worried chatter of the other guests. ‘It is quite impossible that a Changeling Tree should be growing here. I am confident that Mrs Mumby is mistaken.’

  ‘Then let us go and look,’ said Mr Titfer, starting towards the shoreline, where a rowing boat was drawn up.

  ‘No, sir!’ warned Colonel Quivering, catching him by the arm. ‘If there is a Changeling Tree out there, you must not risk inhaling its spores.’

  ‘Neither of the trees is in flower,’ said Mother, ‘so there should be no danger.’

  ‘Nevertheless, dear Mrs Mumby, we cannot be too cautious. Tell me, Titfer, do we have any respirator masks about the place? Those elephant-nosed contraptions one wears when visiting a gas-moon?’

  Mr Titfer shook his head. ‘There is nothing like that on Starcross. No call for ’em.’

  Professor Ferny stepped forward. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to investigate. I am a vegetable already, and Changeling Trees can do me no harm. Wait for me on the terrace, and when I have got to the bottom of this puzzle I shall come and tell you my conclusions.’

  And so saying, the noble shrub went rustling down to where the row boat lay, climbed in, and, wrapping a root about the handle of each oar, rowed himself out through the surf towards the island.

  We watched him go, and did not look away from the dwindling shape of his boat until the squeak, squeak, squeak of turning wheels alerted us to the arrival of Miss Beauregard, who was approaching along the promenade. She had shielded herself from the Sun beneath a vast white parasol, and the wheels of her chair and the skirts of her nurse’s black bombazine dress were brushed with reddish dust. I remembered what Jack had said about the two of them taking mysterious constitutionals among the unappealing bluffs inland. I could not help wondering, pretty and innocent though she appeared, whether Miss Beauregard was the author of whatever misfortune had overtaken Sir Richard Burton and his wife, and whether it was through her doing that those dreadful trees came to be sprouting upon the island.

  But though I backed away from her, and Myrtle positively glared, the young woman in the bath chair seemed not to notice our reactions. She smiled delightfully upon us, and said, ‘You must be the Mumbys; dear Mrs Spinnaker has been telling me all about you. Oh, but why does everybody look so wan? Ignatius, dear, do pray tell me! Whatever has occurred?’

  We returned to our bathing machines, which had rolled themselves back up the beach in our absence. ‘Try not to worry, children,’ said Mother, as she climbed the steps to hers, and her smile was so gentle and reassuring that I was almost able to obey her.

  As soon as we had dressed we hurried to the dining room to rejoin the others. There, Mother and Myrtle greeted Grindle and Mr M., tho’ Myrtle still refused to speak to Jack. ‘You should talk to Miss Beauregard instead,’ she told him tartly. ‘I am sure her conversation is far more accomplished than mine.’

  Miss Beauregard, meanwhile, who had been inform
ed of the discovery upon the island, was busy telling the rest of us about other strokes of ill fortune which had occurred at Starcross. ‘This asteroid is haunted!’ she assured us, in her melodious French accent.

  ‘Really, Mademoiselle? You astonish me!’ said Mother, who was sat near to her. ‘I simply adore ghost stories, and find that there is nearly always some truth at the bottom of them. Pray tell me what Starcross is supposed to be haunted by?’

  Miss Beauregard shuddered, as if the room had taken on a sudden chill, and her nurse leaned over and tucked her plaid blankets in around her. ‘It’s simply haunted,’ she said. ‘I made a study of it before I came. It seems there was once a mining camp here, owned by some rich English family named Sprigg. They built the railway and had Cornish miners brought in to extract copper and Newtonium, but it was always an unhappy place. The miners suffered from strange dreams, or found themselves of a sudden in other parts of the asteroid, with not a notion of how they came to be there. Some vanished altogether, and nothing was found of them but their empty clothes.’

  ‘How horrible!’ exclaimed Mother. ‘But it must have been a lonely spot. Do you think the miners may have imagined those occurrences?’

  ‘I believe not,’ said Miss Beauregard darkly. ‘Something is wrong here. The way the sea comes and goes. It is not natural.’

  ‘Sprigg, did you say?’ asked Jack. He looked thoughtful, and I knew why. Sir Launcelot Sprigg was the name of the former Head of the Royal Xenological Institute, the man who had planned to have Jack and his friends dissected.

  ‘That’s right,’ put in Mr Titfer, overhearing. ‘I … ah … bought this place from Sir Launcelot a few years back. It wasn’t profitable as a mine. Couldn’t persuade the miners to stay here, superstitious Cornish savages.’

  ‘And yet you thought rich holidaymakers might be so persuaded,’ mused Mother. ‘How very interesting …’

  Just then there came a murmur from those guests nearest to the door, and we saw Professor Ferny enter. The autowaiters who had been trundling among us with glasses and decanters of lemonade and sillery put them down and fetched out a bowl of nutrient broth for the intellectual shrub, who stepped in gratefully and stood a moment in silence, as if savouring the flavour. Naturally, some of our number began to pester him for his opinion on Mother’s Changeling Trees, but he held up a frond for quiet, and they fell silent.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I do not believe you are in any immediate danger.’

  There was a sigh of relief at that, but only a brief one, for we could tell by his sombre tone that he had further news to impart, and that it was not good.

  ‘Those trees which Mrs Mumby and her daughter saw are indeed Changelings,’ he announced. ‘Yet they are not quite like the Changeling Trees of Venus. I suspect they are some form of hybrid. I shall need to make further studies, and I shall require the use of my microscope and Mr Titfer’s library.’

  ‘Hybrids?’ exclaimed Colonel Quivering. ‘But how did they come here?’

  Prof. Ferny rustled his fronds dolefully. ‘When I say “hybrid”, I do not mean a natural hybrid. I believe that some cunning person, well versed in botanical science, may have contrived a fast-acting Changeling spore, and inflicted it upon Sir Richard and his wife with malice aforethought.’

  ‘You mean he is murdered!’ gasped Myrtle.

  ‘Oh, poor Sir Richard!’ cried Mrs Spinnaker, and promptly fainted into the arms of her husband, who was unable to support her weight and had to call upon Colonel Quivering to help him.

  ‘Then the same fate may yet befall us all!’ wailed Myrtle.

  ‘But what scoundrel would commit such an outrage?’ demanded the colonel, somewhat breathlessly, as he manoeuvred the insensate Cockney Nightingale into an armchair.

  ‘Please, please!’ called Prof. Ferny, above the hubbub of anxious voices. ‘All may not be lost. While there’s life, there’s hope, and though Sir Richard and Mrs Burton are indisputably trees, they are still alive. If a mortal mind devised the spore which caused their transformation, then another mortal mind may yet undo its wicked work. Once I discern the nature of the spore which effected the change, I shall do my utmost to create another which may reverse it.’

  ‘But, look here, everyone knows the Tree Sickness can’t be cured!’ shouted Mr Spinnaker.

  Professor Ferny did not reply. Indeed, Professor Ferny seemed suddenly incapable of speech at all. His fronds made helpless flapping motions, stiffened briefly and then wilted. A brownish tinge spread over him, replacing his former healthful green. His brain-bole bowed on its thick stem, and he made muddy, unintelligible noises.

  ‘The broth!’ cried Mother suddenly. ‘Fetch him out of it! It’s poisoned!’

  Mr Titfer and the colonel leapt forward at once and drew the wilting professor from his bowl. His roots were blackened and limp, and a greenish vapour rose from them, filling the dining room with a scent like that of damp socks.

  ‘Oh Gawd! Is he done for?’ asked Mrs Spinnaker, who had recovered from her faint but looked ready to fall into another at any instant.

  ‘No, he’s alive …’ said the colonel doubtfully, as if he were about to add, but for how long?

  ‘We must all pray for him!’ said Myrtle earnestly.

  ‘A nice tub of potting compost might be of more use,’ suggested Mother.

  ‘A sound notion!’ agreed Colonel Quivering. ‘I had a few of these shrub chappies serving as scouts with my regiment in the Callistan Swamp War of ’39. Tough as old boots, they are. Good rich compost and regular feeding will revive him, God willing.’

  ‘The plant nursery behind the greenhouse,’ cried Mr Spinnaker. ‘We will find all he needs there!’

  And so they laid the poor shrub upon a table and bore him away, leaving the rest of us to wonder what evil was loose in this pleasant place, and which of us might fall victim to it next!

  Chapter Seven

  In Which the Mystery Deepens Yet Further!

  As you may imagine, we none of us ate well that night. Mr Titfer assured us that he would send an aethergram to the Chief Constable of Modesty and Decorum as soon as the hotel was restored to the Nineteenth Century. Indeed, when that happy event occurred (at about a half past six the next morning, according to his forecast) we should all be welcome to board the train and depart for safer asteroids if we wished. But half past six seemed a long way off, and for the moment Starcross seemed suddenly to have become a lonely and dangerous place, very far removed from chief constables and railways and all the other comforts of our own era. Who poisoned Professor Ferny? we were all wondering, as we sniffed suspiciously at the soup the auto-waiters set before us. Who had transformed Sir Richard and Ulla into trees?

  ‘I cannot believe that it was any one of us,’ said Miss Beauregard at some point in the fish course. ‘There is no one here who looks like a murderer to me.’

  ‘Where is Mr Titfer?’ asked Mother, contemplating the empty seat at the head of the long dining table. ‘Does he not join his guests for dinner?’

  ‘Not usually,’ said Colonel Quivering. ‘He is busy in his office. Or in the boiler room …’ He frowned as he said this last part, as though the idea was one that he had stumbled upon, and it had surprised him to find it.

  ‘The boiler room?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Yes, yes, it is below the hotel; there is a door to it in the corridor near the kitchens. I believe it houses the gravity generators … I have never been down there, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mother. ‘I cannot imagine what a gentleman would find to do in a boiler room. That is why it surprises me to hear of Mr Titfer spending time down there. Surely he has automata to tend to his gravity generators and other such oily and bothersome bits of enginery?’ She removed a few bones from her salmon and laid them neatly on a side plate. ‘Does anyone know how Mr Titfer came by all the money to build this wonderful hotel?’ she asked innocently. ‘I have never heard the name of Titfer. All Titfer means to me is the Cockney slang, “T
it for Tat”, meaning “Hat”.’

  ‘Aha!’ cried Colonel Quivering, as if the word ‘hat’ had opened some floodgate in his mind. ‘Well, of course, Mortimer Titfer is the maker of most excellent hats!’

  ‘That’s how he came by all his money, I daresay,’ ventured Mr Spinnaker.

  ‘The finest top hats in Known Space,’ said Jack Havock, surprisingly, for he had been silent until now and anyway, I should not have thought him the sort of fellow who would care much about hats.

  ‘I own one of his hats!’ said Mr Spinnaker.

  ‘So do I!’ cried Colonel Quivering.

  ‘Every gentleman in the Solar System should own one of Titfer’s Toppers!’ declared Mrs Spinnaker.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother, in the same light yet thoughtful way. ‘I recall seeing a large advertisement hoarding at Modesty, proclaiming their fine qualities. And yet, I am not sure that I recall ever hearing about Mr Titfer’s hats before we came here. How odd.’

  Jack looked at her curiously. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I had a dream about hats last night … Or was it a dream?’ And he rubbed at his hair, with a most thoughtful expression.

  Colonel Quivering said, ‘No doubt there is a fascinating debate to be had about fashions in gentlemen’s headgear, dear Mrs Mumby, but I would prefer to think about which of us attacked poor Ferny and turned the Burtons into trees. For despite what dear Miss Beauregard says, I believe it must have been one of us.’