It stood atop a raised dais, accessed by a wrought iron staircase, and ringed by a bank of Babbage engines. Like some bizarre optical illusion, it looked like a sphere even though it was actually made up from the concentric, yet broken, rings of a giant gyroscope.
The last time he had seen the Sphere had been in the cellar of Hardewick Hall in Warwickshire, eight months ago and a quarter of a million miles away.
And yet, impossible as it might seem, here it sat, squatting upon its claw-footed stand, as tall as a man and half that again, the esoteric machinery limned in a corposant of its own making. But where the device Ulysses had last seen vanish from the bowels of Alexander Oddfellow’s house had been gleaming polished metal, the strange artefact in front of him now appeared much older, its surface crazed with a patina of age, the brass pitted and stained with verdigris.
He stared at it, mouth agape, his mind full of questions once again. How had it got here? Was it even the same device? And if the sphere was here...
Ulysses slowly came to realise that there were a number of other people already busy inside the chamber, employed in various different tasks concerning, no doubt, the operation of the Sphere.
Standing before the banks of equipment at the foot of the dais, monitoring the activity of the device, were two men, their backs to the party that had just entered their laboratory.
“Look who we found nosing around,” Verse announced proudly, causing both men to turn in startled surprise. “Only Ulysses bloody Quicksilver!”
“Quicksilver!” the taller of the two gasped.
There was something strangely familiar about the man. Ulysses peered at him more closely. He was horribly emaciated and there was something not quite right, it seemed, about the set of his features. He had lost much of his hair and yet Ulysses still recognised him. The pinched face, the round wire-framed spectacles were still the same.
“It’s Smythe, isn’t it?” Ulysses turned to the other man – an ugly, stooping individual, sporting rodent-like whiskers, with liver-spotted skin stretched taut over a seemingly elongated skull. “Which would make you Wentworth. Am I right?”
The rat-faced man sneered, his top lip pulling back to reveal the blunt points of peg-like yellow teeth. “Quicksilver,” he snarled.
“Oh, so you know each other,” Verse said, sounding surprised.
Ulysses looked from Smythe to Wentworth and back again, unable to reconcile their warped and aged appearances when he had only seen them eight months ago, looking ten years younger.
“But how can this be?” he said. “What happened to you?”
“You happened!” Smythe snapped, taking a limping step towards Ulysses. Whatever had warped his face had twisted his body as well. “You did this to us!”
A persistent humming that Ulysses had been aware of ever since entering the room – only one of a myriad sounds generated by the whirring banks of machinery – began to intensify. At the same time, the chamber began to shake, a spanner rattling from a console to land with a clang on the grilled plates of the walkway, the glow-globes flickering in response.
“Smythe!” Wentworth hissed. “That bastard can keep. We have work to do.”
Reluctantly Smythe turned back to the bank of Babbage engines.
“What’s the flux capacitance?” Wentworth demanded.
“Flux capacitance at fifty percent,” Smythe replied, “and rising.”
“Keep it steady! What’s the state of the transmat’s containment field?”
“Containment field is stable,” another voice replied.
Recognising this one too, Ulysses turned towards its source and was distressed to see Alexander Oddfellow sitting in front of a console on the raised walkway, monitoring a fluctuating oscilloscope.
The expression on the old man’s face was one of abject resignation.
“Oddfellow? What’s going on?”
Whatever Smythe and Wentworth had over him, Ulysses realised, for the eccentric scientist to be working alongside the very people who had tricked him into perverting his own creation to help them achieve their own dark ends, it must have been something very bad.
So he wasn’t surprised when, glimpsing movement, he turned to see Emilia, gagged and bound to a chair in front of another bank of the logic engines with a gun pointed at her head.
With so many unpleasant revelations coming in such quick succession, Ulysses barely even raised an eyebrow when he saw that the man holding the gun was already somebody who he had supposed to be dead.
“Jared Shurin,” he said with a sigh. With the industrialist’s sudden miraculous resurrection, everything began to make sense at last.
“I suppose that after maniac robots, teleportation devices and building your own secret base on the dark side of the Moon, faking your own death must have been relatively straight forward.”
“It would certainly seem that when one has enough money and influence, one can quite literally get away with murder,” the smiling industrialist said with a chuckle. “Even one’s own.”
Ulysses stared at the smug Shurin, a look of unadulterated disdain in his flint-hard gaze.
“I have one question for you, Shurin,” he said. “Why?”
Shurin laughed. “It was the easiest way to put myself beyond suspicion when it came to the suspicious deaths of the others, if – as proved to be the case – the police suspected foul play rather than buying the line that all of the deaths were unfortunate industrial accidents.”
“No,” Ulysses said, shaking his head. “I mean what are you doing mixed up in all this? Why risk everything you’ve worked for, for,” Ulysses gestured at the chamber, “this... whatever it is you’re up to here?”
“Watch the hands!” Veronica Verse snapped and the stub nose of the pistol was thrust into the back of his neck this time.
Ulysses found his gaze returning to the bound Emilia and felt the heat of his rage cool, in an instant, to become the cold chill of dread.
Back at the Nebuchadnezzar he had honestly believed that Emilia would be safer the further she was away from him, and yet he couldn’t have been more wrong. He had set off in search of the mysterious ‘fourth man’ Selene had mentioned, only to discover now that the first of the dead industrialists wasn’t dead at all and Emilia – along with her father – was in mortal danger.
“Emilia,” he said. “I am so sorry.”
Emilia said nothing – could say nothing – but simply stared at him with glistening eyes.
He could hear the echo of mocking laughter even over the humming of the weird machinery filling the chamber. Ulysses turned, the chill flash-boiling to furious anger once more.
“Why, Shurin?” he demanded, taking another step towards the laughing man.
“Stay where you are!” the woman shouted at him but Ulysses ignored her.
“Why? Why have the others murdered? Why have my brother killed? Why kidnap Emilia and her father? Answer me!”
The explosion of lightning took everyone by surprise – all except Smythe and Wentworth. Emilia gave a muffled cry. Veronica Verse squealed, a sadomasochistic mixture of shock and excitement.
Ulysses heard Nimrod give voice to an earthy oath as he threw up a hand to shield his eyes against the searing flare of actinic light.
The lights in the chamber dimmed, and almost went out, as another juddering tremor rattled the dome to its foundations.
Then the gyroscopic scream of the Sphere became a dull descending whine, before becoming a steady buzzing hum once more. The lights brightened again.
Peering at the dying of the light at the heart of the Sphere, Ulysses could make out the indistinct silhouette of a man, standing proudly at the centre of the whirling device.
As the scintillating glow faded, the dark outline of the figure became clearer until the broken coils of the Sphere slowed and the man stepped clear of the teleportation device.
From his position at the foot of the dais, Ulysses gazed up into the man’s face and gave a silent gasp of horror and
recognition.
“Does that answer your question?” asked Daniel Dashwood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Frequently Asked Questions
About Time Travel
T MINUS 18 MINUTES, 36 SECONDS
IT WAS DANIEL Dashwood, the Nazi agent and Emilia’s cousin. Ulysses knew it was – it sounded like him for a start – but it didn’t look like him. In his adventures all around the world and beyond, he had never seen such disfigurement as that suffered by this man.
He had once been handsome but now that striking, classical beauty, and his devil-may-care swagger, was gone, replaced by a grinning death’s-head.
It looked as if the skin had been burned from his face, leaving seared muscle beneath. His hair was gone too, as were his eyelids. He gazed upon the world with bulging, bloodshot eyes that could never again be closed.
He must be in agony, Ulysses thought, his horror turning to pity. But there was only so much pity he could offer the man. After all, this was also the man who had tried to kill him and who had planned to steal Oddfellow’s experimental teleportation device to aid the underground Nazi cause.
Behind him he heard Miss Verse stifle an appalled moan as Mr Chapter swallowed hard to keep his gorge from rising. Dashwood’s appearance was too revolting even for a pair of hardened killers like them.
The man’s nose was debrided of all flesh and his lips were gone, exposing the yellow enamel of his teeth, set within gums that were bloody and withdrawn. It made him look as though he was permanently smiling when, truth was, he must be in perpetual torment.
And what must the rest of the poor wretch’s body be like? Ulysses found himself wondering, appalled.
But as he continued to stare at the Nazi agent, he saw that there was something else. It was as if Ulysses were viewing badly-spliced newsreel footage. Parts of Dashwood’s face appeared to flicker and change, or even blink in and out of existence. One minute the dandy was looking at a skinless skull, the next one side of Dashwood’s face appeared almost exactly as it had been when Ulysses had last encountered him. Then the skull would return, and a moment later the man’s mouth was back, or some of his hair, or he would be looking at Ulysses with half-closed eyes. But always the skull-face would return.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Ulysses looked from the hideously disfigured Dashwood to the withered Smythe, and deformed Wentworth, and back again.
The thing that had once been Daniel Dashwood strode across the raised platform of the dais, never once taking his unblinking eyes from the dandy.
He descended the wrought iron staircase, his breath whistling between the cords of muscle securing his jaw to his skull. He looked like he was wearing what was left of a dinner jacket and matching trousers, although the black suit was in a pitiful state of repair.
Ulysses heard Verse stifle another pitiful moan behind him and felt the pressure of the cold metal against his neck lessen fractionally.
Dashwood came to stand right in front of Ulysses, so close that he could have reached out and touched him. He raised his right hand, and Ulysses saw that he was wearing black leather gloves.
“You did,” he hissed in a venomous whisper.
He lashed out with startling speed, striking Ulysses across the face. The dandy turned with the blow and a moment later pain bloomed. He put a hand to his cheek.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nimrod tense, but stilled him with a gesture. Chapter and Verse didn’t look like they’d need much provocation to pull the triggers of the pistols they were wielding. And Nimrod getting himself gunned down certainly wasn’t going to improve their situation.
Ulysses raised his head and looked past the disfigured Dashwood at the device that was spinning slowly to a standstill.
Only he wasn’t looking at the tarnished, age-worn device now squatting on top of the platform like some malignant fiend. He was seeing the gleaming golden machine as it had been in the cellar of Hardewick Hall, whirling like a gyroscope, actinic light rippling from it as the air hummed in sympathetic vibration. And he saw himself pulling the bundle of cables free, the sundered wires bleeding sparks.
And then he turned to regard the disfigured Dashwood once more and his face hardened as he recalled what the villain had been prepared to do to old man Oddfellow, Emilia and himself in his pursuit of his fascist schemes.
“What do you want,” he simmered, “an apology?”
Dashwood struck him again, harder this time.
“Very well. I’m sorry I didn’t kill you properly the last time we met.”
This time Dashwood hit him so hard blood flew in a fine spray from his bruised lips. It ran freely from his mouth and he spat a great gobbet of it onto the polished mooncrete floor of the chamber.
And then it all came pouring out of Dashwood, as if he had been waiting a long time to let Ulysses know precisely how he felt about what the dandy had done to him, by causing the Sphere to malfunction when he tore out its power supply.
“Ten years!” he shrieked, his voice suddenly transforming from a whisper to a banshee wail. “Ten years of waiting! Ten years of agony! Ten years with a hatred burning in my heart that was hotter than the pain burning in my eyes! Ten years of harbouring my desire for revenge!”
“Ten years?” Ulysses murmured, incredulously.
“Yes! Ten years!”
“But we first met only eight months ago,” Ulysses said.
“You might have seen me only eight months ago,” the warped wretch went on, sounding like some screeching harpy, “but for me, for Wentworth and for Smythe, it’s been ten long years of suffering. Although time has done nothing to quell my hatred of you!”
“I don’t understand.”
“What is he blathering on about, sir?” Nimrod whispered at his side.
“What happened when the three of you vanished, along with the device?”
Dashwood leaned in close, his features appearing to run and melt before Ulysses’ eyes.
“You couldn’t begin to imagine what we went through, what we suffered. I’ve seen things that would break a lesser man’s sanity, that would have fractured your feeble mind.”
“But where did you go?”
Ulysses looked from the monstrous Dashwood to the haggard face of Alexander Oddfellow, seated on the other side of the room, as if hoping the old man might be able to give him the answer he sought. But it was Dashwood who responded.
“That machine,” he said, pointing at the Sphere, his tone mid-way between abject awe and disgust, “does not only displace objects in three dimensions. Oh no; nothing so simple. It can also move objects through time.”
Ulysses’ mouth hung open as he stared at the machine. He looked from Dashwood to his unnaturally aged assistants, then back to the uneasy Oddfellow and the tear-streaked, hysterical expression on the face of the bound Emilia, and lastly the glowering grimace of the man holding a gun to her head in order to ensure her father’s compliance.
A curious expression entered Dashwood’s lidless eyes, as if he was gazing into the depths of space and time at a place only he could visualise.
“I still don’t know where we went to begin with, or for how long we travelled, as the Sphere jumped from one place and time to another at random. All I know is that when it eventually powered down – the energy it had absorbed from the lightning strike finally drained from its power cells – we came to, to find ourselves in the slums of Luna Prime.”
“What did you do?” Ulysses said.
“We went into hiding – I mean, what else could we do?”
“If I was you, I wouldn’t want to go showing my face in public looking like that.”
Dashwood struck him again for that.
“If you think I looked like this then, you are sadly mistaken. Oh, our journey through time and space changed us, there’s no denying that – changed us in ways we could never have imagined. But it was ten years of experimentation, struggling to repair and perfect the device – ten years of sel
f-experimentation, using myself as a guinea-pig test subject – that did this!
“But ten years of waiting – waiting for the old man to even invent the machine in the first place – gave me time to think and to plan.”
It seemed that now he had himself a captive audience there was no stopping the deranged Dashwood, as he revealed the scale of his audacious and sinister scheme.
“It was a relatively simple thing to get the industrialists on board, with the help of our first convert here.” At this Dashwood nodded towards Shurin, who smiled back at Ulysses. “I have always found it more effective to appeal to a man’s greed for power and riches than to focus on pandering to his better nature.”
“So they set about building you your secret moonbase here, hidden on the dark side, away from prying eyes. What was your price, Shurin?”
“Oh, you know, the usual.”
“Money? Power?”
“The others were lured by the promise of greater riches to come, but for me – I have to confess – it was the power.” Shurin smirked.
“You disgust me.” Ulysses turned his attention back to Dashwood. “While you waited for Oddfellow to carry out his experiments into teleportation back on Earth – and for me to rescue him from limbo, so that...” Ulysses took a moment to order his thoughts as he pieced together the final pieces of the puzzle. Dashwood had most definitely been playing the long game. “So that he could then help you finish your repairs to the Sphere at this point in time.”
Something like a smile stretched Dashwood’s death’s-head leer even further. “Very good.”
“The competition they won. That was you.”
“Exactly. A mere fiction to get them where I needed them to be. That Alexander Oddfellow might complete his masterwork.”
Ulysses dared to turn and look over his shoulder at the noticeably nervous and nauseous Chapter and Verse.
“And then you set about covering your tracks, removing the weak links from the chain.”
“Precisely.”
Dark Side Page 21
