by Philip Reeve
‘Soon afterward, the other Moobs discovered me and drove me away. Like some revenant spirit, I found my way back to Wild Will Melville’s ship on pre-historic Mars. And there I found you, Miss Myrtle, and Master Jack and Miss Delphine, and, well, you know the rest.’
Now, as you may imagine, I had been shuffling about like a cat on hot bricks while the Moob told us the last part of this tale, for although he might not know why the other Moobs had made Sir Launcelot install that old machine in the basement of Starcross, I did.
‘They are opening a pathway to the future realm of the Moobs!’ I explained, my words all stumbling over each other in their haste to get out of my mouth and climb into the ears of my listeners. ‘They have the old Larklight gravity engine, but they have made Mother turn it into a time machine, and Moob after horrid Moob is popping out of it! They are loading them into hatboxes. There were hundreds of them aboard that train!’
‘On their way to Modesty?’ said Jack, catching on at once. ‘Then we must hurry there, and stop them before they can spread out across the entire Empire!’
‘No!’ I said. ‘First we must turn back to Starcross! Mother is a prisoner of the Moobs, and at their bidding she is bringing ever so many more of them into our era.’
Jack thought on this a moment. ‘Art,’ he said firmly, ‘Modesty first, then back to Starcross. For the Moobs there can do no harm until the train returns to them, but those who have already left pose a danger to us all!’ He turned to my sister. ‘Myrtle, will you start up the chemical wedding again?’
I could not have been more surprised if he had asked, ‘Myrtle, can you turn yourself into a fish and swim out of the window?’ I had thought that my sister was looking somewhat pleased with herself, and a bit pale, and generally even more like a demented owl than usual, but it had not occurred to me that it was she who had been mixing the elements in the Liberty’s great alembic, nor that it had been she who had driven this old ship through so many leagues of Space and Time to rescue me and Mrs Spinnaker!
‘Myrtle?’ I cried. ‘Have you become an alchemist?’
She looked down her nose at me, haughty-like. ‘It is a talent that some of us possess, Arthur,’ said she. ‘I find that I have inherited a feel for the chemical wedding from Mama. It is somewhat like cookery. Now, if you will excuse me I shall go downstairs and bring the fiery elements to a nice rolling boil, so that we may hasten on and stop that train.’
‘Erm,’ said Delphine, or rather, her Moobish hat.
‘What does it mean, “erm”?’ asked Myrtle, addressing the rest of us rather than the Moob – I suppose she thought it wasn’t ladylike to converse with headgear.
The Moob said, ‘It was not you who set the alembic going, but Wild Will Melville.’
‘Oh, what nonsense!’ cried Myrtle. ‘You saw me, Delphine – I mean, you saw me, Jack. And Wild Will Melville has been dead for ages.’
‘He has,’ said the Moob-Delphine. ‘But some of his memories still linger on in me, and the memory of his alchemical studies are among them. When Delphine asked you to perform the wedding for her I saw that you could not, so I wrapped myself about you and took control of your actions, for a while.’
‘Wrapped yourself about me?’ cried Myrtle, quite appalled. ‘About which part of me did you wrap yourself, pray?’
‘About your hair,’ the Moob confessed. ‘I was the black cloth you used to tie it back.’
Myrtle turned paler still, and put a hand to her hair as if she feared to find a dozen more Moobs lurking there. ‘But I felt nothing!’
‘I hypnotised you into thinking you felt nothing.’
‘And all those things I saw while we were flying along – the Tides of Space, and so forth?’
‘Those were the things I saw. I shared them with you.’
‘Oh,’ said Myrtle. ‘Oh. Well, perhaps it is for the best. I am not certain that Alchemy is a suitable occupation for a young lady.’ But she looked quite downcast about it, as I suppose anyone would who believed they had acquired some superhuman talent, only to find it was not real.
‘Perhaps if you would permit me to perch upon some part of you, we may resume the process?’ asked the Moob politely.
‘Quite definitely not!’ gasped Myrtle. ‘It would be most irregular!’
‘Myrtle,’ I said, ‘we have to reach Modesty somehow. Heaven knows how much damage will be done if that train gets in before us, and starts to disseminate its freight of vampire hats.’
‘Whatever the reason, Art,’ Myrtle retorted, ‘a young lady does not grant permission for the quaint denizens of Futurity to go gambolling about her mind and person. Why cannot one of Delphine’s goblins be this creature’s puppet and perform the alchemical chores, if it is so very important?’
‘Threls,’ I said.
‘Don’t be coarse, Art.’
‘I’m not! That’s what they’re called!’ I said, for of course, being a boy, I had recognised our blue-coated companions at once from the chart of Odd Races of the Empire23 which I kept pinned to my bedroom wall at Larklight (though why they should have joined the French Army I could not then guess, and looked forward very much to learning).
‘Miss Myrtle is quite correct,’ said the Moob. ‘I can perform the chemical wedding just as well in any other body. I shall remain upon Delphine and press on towards Modesty. You know the place, which I do not, so I shall leave it to you to decide how we frustrate my fellow Moobs when we arrive there.’
‘Now hold on!’ called out one of the Threls, a thickset fellow with sergeant’s stripes upon his sleeves. ‘What about us? We obey orders from Miss Beauregard, not some talking hat! And we signed up to fight the British, who don’t sound half so scary as these Moobs you’ve been going on about!’
‘That’s right!’ the others growled mutinously. ‘You tell ’em, Sarge!’, etc., etc. Some of the Threls shook their carbines, some drew their bayonets, and things might have turned quite ugly, I believe. But thanks to Messrs Gargany, Nisbit and Stringg and their informative wallchart I knew what a Threl values above all else.
‘Wool!’ I cried, which soon got their attention. ‘If you help us stop these wicked Moobs, why, Queen Victoria herself will reward you with all the wool you need! Shiploads of wool! Whole fleets full of wool! A flock of fine Merino sheep to call your own, who’ll provide you with wool in endless supply!’
‘You sure?’ asked a Threl, looking sceptical.
‘You have my word as a Briton and a Gentleman,’ I said.
The Threls all looked at one another, and then, as one man (or one Threl, I suppose), they threw their kepis in the air and cried out, ‘Three cheers for Queen Victoria and Confusion to the Moobs!’24
After that, things seemed to go swimmingly. Delphine’s hat marched her down to the wedding chamber, and soon the ship was singing through the aether again. Jack kept to the wheel (his injured leg made it awkward for him to move about the cabin) and I relayed his orders to the Threls, who busied themselves nailing more oiled tarpaulin over the old shot-holes in the Liberty’s sides, cleaning their carbines, sharpening their cutlasses and generally preparing for whatever lay ahead. Mrs Spinnaker, who had been revived with a few sips of brandy, became a great favourite with them, for once she had had the situation explained to her she became as peppery as any of us in her desire to smite the Moobs, and urged the Threls on in their labours by leading us in such rousing old aether-shanties as ‘Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Qrg’ and ‘My Grandfather’s Sqallaxian Bogusoid Was Too Tall for the Shelf ’, etc.
Only Myrtle failed to rise to the spirit of the expedition. She spent her time instead peering at passing space through the leaded windows of the captain’s cabin, and occasionally letting out a heartfelt sigh.
‘You and Jack have not settled your disagreement, then?’ I said when I looked in on her to let her know that Modesty was in sight.
‘It is not a disagreement, exactly,’ said Myrtle dolefully. ‘It is simply that he is a piratical adventurer and I am a young
lady and we have nothing whatever in common. I was foolish ever to think that we had.’
‘Still,’ I said brightly, ‘at least you aren’t an alchemist.’
She threw a candlestick at my head. She is a most peculiar creature.
Chapter Eighteen
We Arrive at Modesty but Find Ourselves Both Out-Paced and Out-Witted by the Dreaded Moobs.
Try as we might, we could not catch up with that train. I have spoken before, I think, about the many floating rocks and reefs which make sailing an aether-ship among the asteroids so trying. Well, not only did we have to creep around those, but we had to be wary of the Liberty herself, for long neglect had left her fragile, and whenever we came close to full speed her old timbers would begin to groan, and her metal bindings squealed like scalded cats, and all sorts of bits and pieces dropped off and were left bobbing in her wake. So we were never able to reach top speed and soar along Sir Isaac Newton’s Golden Roads, and as a result, we could not catch the train.
But we kept on following that shining rail, and at last we reached a hub where a dozen other rails joined it, coming in at all angles from other stations in the asteroid belt, and soon after that we came down to Modesty docks through a blanket of drifting fog.
‘Fog in space?’ I hear you cry. Why, yes. You see Modesty was too small a world to hold on to its own atmosphere until we colonised it and set up patent gravity generators in its centre. Even now, there is a certain amount of seepage, and so the oxygen must be replenished every seven months or so by a delivery of comet ice. And when this fresh, cold oxygen is first unleashed into the Modestine atmosphere, it causes a billowy, swirly, blindfolding fog as dense as any London pea-souper.
Out of that fog we watched the gantries and mooring-pergolas of the aether-dock appear, and the bright pin-point of a swinging lantern guided the Liberty towards a berth. I found a telescope and peered warily at the dockhands as they caught the ropes the Threls threw them and made us fast to the pergola’s bollards. And the dockhands peered back, looking amazed, as well they might, for the Liberty must have been a most curious spectacle. But none of them wore hats, or any other garment which might be a Moob in disguise – at least, none which I could see. And Delphine, propelled by the Moob upon her head, came to my side and said, ‘There are no Moobs there.’
‘Then where?’ asked Myrtle. ‘If there were as many on that train as Art says, what has become of them? What are they planning?’
‘We’ll find out soon enough, I’ll warrant,’ Jack declared, arming himself with some old American’s cutlass and kicking open the Liberty’s hatch. ‘First thing to do is get to the Sophronia and warn Ssil of the danger. Then the Tentacle Twins can help us find those Moobs.’
Before we set off, the Threls disguised themselves once more as Mrs Grinder, for it would hardly do to have a whole band of armed hobgoblins in the uniforms of the Legion D’Outre Espace charging about a British port. Like circus tumblers they jumped and scrambled and somersaulted up on to one another’s shoulders until they had formed a teetering pyramid, whereupon the topmost Threl took from his pack a spare black bombazine dress and, fitting it over his own head, shook the skirts down to cover all his comrades. There was a certain amount of struggling to get arms through sleeve-holes and the like, but it was all accomplished jolly quickly, and once the fellow on the top had put on his black poke bonnet again nobody would have believed that the large, respectable-looking lady who followed us out into the fogs of Modesty was really ten cutthroat Threls.
We explained ourselves as best we could to the puzzled dockhands – luckily I’d thought to send a Threl aloft to haul down that stars-and-bars banner before we docked, or I think they would have taken us for Yankee rebels and roused out the marines. Even so, they eyed us most suspiciously, until they recognised Mrs Spinnaker, at which they quite forgot the rest of us and began asking for autographs and demanding that she give them a chorus or two of ‘My Flat Cat’. Honestly, it was a stroke of luck that we had reached Modesty in the middle of their night, for otherwise I do not doubt but that the whole harbour should soon have been filled with sightseers and admirers of the Cockney Nightingale.
As it was, there seemed almost nobody about. As soon as she could fit a word in edgewise Mrs Spinnaker asked the adoring dockhands whether they had seen ‘some “mates” of ours, what were due in aboard a train from Starcross a few minutes back’?
The honest fellows looked quite blank, until Jack explained that these ‘mates’ would have been travelling with a large number of hatboxes.
‘Hatboxes?’ cried the foreman, hearing that. ‘Why, some folks are loading hatboxes aboard an old aether-ship called Sophronia, over at pergola number nine …’
You may imagine what dismay that caused us! It had been one thing to imagine an abstract threat to the Empire as a whole, quite another to realise that the Moobs might be menacing our own dear friends aboard the Sophronia! Breaking free of the dockworkers as politely as we could, we hastened through the labyrinths of the docks behind Jack Havock, who knew his way between those wooden warehouses and stacks of tarry rope and sap-smelling timber as well as the back of his own hand. It was not long before the familiar, comforting outline of the Sophronia emerged from the fog ahead, looking as colourless and insubstantial as if she had been sketched in watercolours. And, sure enough, a hatch was standing open under the Sophronia’s stern, a wagon was waiting at the foot of her loading ramp – and going up and down that ramp, dimly discernable in the light that spilled from the old ship’s cargo hold, were our beMoobed friends from Starcross, carrying their piles of hatboxes aboard!
‘’Ere! There’s my ’Erbert!’ exclaimed Mrs Spinnaker, but Jack hushed her, bundling her into an empty shed. We all went after her, and peered out through the smeary windows at the work going on in the shadow of the Sophronia’s exhaust-trumpets.
‘They are here already!’ whispered Myrtle. ‘They have enMoobed poor Ssilissa and the others!’
She was right. We could not see Ssilissa, but we could hear the low warbling song of the Sophronia’s alembic, which told us she was busy in the wedding chamber, no doubt at the bidding of a Moob. And on the boarding ramp, helping the others with their hatboxes, we could discern Yarg and Squidley, each with a shining topper clinging to the middle of his stalk (which is where those anemone-folk of Ganymede keep their brains).
‘I see everyone but Munkulus,’ said Jack, watching grimly as his captive crew went about the Moobs’ work. ‘Where is Munkulus?’
‘He was not at Starcross Halt when they were loading the train,’ I remembered. ‘I believe they have kept him behind at the hotel for some reason …’
‘But what are they doing?’ asked Mrs Spinnaker, as her husband and the others went to and fro, carting those heaps of boxes into the Sophronia’s hold.
‘Taking that first batch of hats to England, I’ll be bound!’ Jack said grimly. ‘I’d lay a bet those Moobs’re bound for London, to set themselves upon the head of the Prime Minister and the Chief Alchemist and the First Lord of the Admiralty and a hundred other high-up men in Government. Then their friends can set about snacking on the brains of us lowly types out here in the black, and no ships will ever be dispatched to stop ’em, for the reins of Empire will already be in their little hands!’
‘But why choose the Sophronia?’ I demanded. ‘Of all the aether-ships they could have loaded those hatboxes aboard, why her? It’s awfully rotten luck, isn’t it?’
‘She is the only ship they know,’ said Delphine, turning her blank face to us. ‘Remember, they have ate the thoughts of Munkulus and Grindle and the crab, Nipper. That is how they knew where your Sophronia was moored, and that is why they chose her to take them to England. For I am sure you are right, Jack; those Moobs are bound for London town.’
‘Not if I have anything to do with it!’ declared Jack, reaching for his sword, but Delphine held him back.
‘Not here!’ she said. ‘There are many, many Moobs in those white boxes. If you att
empt to rush the ship, they will catch us all.’
‘Then where?’ demanded Jack, looking fiercely into Delphine’s eyes, and then recalling that it was not she to whom he spoke, and glaring at her hat instead. ‘Those are my crew! My friends! I have to save them!’
‘We must fetch help!’ exclaimed Myrtle.
But we were too late. The last of the hatboxes had been loaded aboard, and the song of the Sophronia’s engines was gathering strength. I saw Yarg and Squidley heave the cargo hatch closed, and the cart horses in the traces of the wagon tossed their heads restlessly as the old ship started to tremble and rise skyward.
Jack stared, and scowled, and said something which made Myrtle go, ‘Jack! Language! Please!’
The Sophronia lifted into the sky, and the curtains of the fog swayed and stirred in the wind from her flapping wings, while her engines trilled like some other-worldly choir.
‘’Erbert!’ wailed Mrs Spinnaker. ‘They’ve gone off with my ’Erbert again!’
Jack, looking grim yet resolute, said, ‘Mrs Spinnaker, you must go directly to the authorities, and tell them what has been happening. Take care to trust no gentleman wearing a top hat.’
‘If he is a real gentleman,’ my sister said, ‘he will remove his hat in Mrs Spinnaker’s presence, and then she will know it is not a Moob. But, Jack, would it not be better if we all went together to the authorities?’
Jack shook his head. ‘No time. We’re going back to the Liberty to chase those thieving Moobs and tackle ’em upon the open aether!’
‘But, Jack, how can we?’ I complained, hurrying behind him with the others as he started running back across the harbour towards the Liberty’s berth. ‘If we go aboard the Sophronia those Moobs will leap upon us and take control of our thoughts!’
Myrtle, agreeing with me for once, said, ‘I for one do not relish the prospect of being a mindless slave for evermore, let alone a mindless slave who wears a gentleman’s top hat with a bathing costume!’
