The Return of the Discontinued Man

by Mark Hodder

  The tincture had never acted with such rapidity.

  He was thankful for it.

  “Better,” he said after a minute had passed. “Let’s get out of this snow.”

  They trudged onward, Swinburne glaring angrily at the explorer, and came to the power station’s big double gate, in which was set a smaller door. Burton rapped his stick against it and, within a minute, it swung inward and one of Brunel’s engineers greeted them. “You got here quickly!”

  “What do you mean?” Burton asked, stepping through into the courtyard.

  “Weren’t you called for?”

  “No. Why? Has something happened?”

  “I’ll say! You’d better go straight through to the central work area. Mr. Babbage will explain. Or more likely Mr. Gooch. Babbage—Mr. Babbage—is rather—um—upset.”

  Puzzled, Burton and Swinburne crossed to the tall inner doors, which were standing slightly open, and entered the station’s vast cathedral-like interior. It was filled with machines whose function could only be guessed at. They pumped and hammered and sizzled and buzzed while, overhead, in glass spheres suspended from the distant ceiling, lightning flashed without surcease, casting a harsh light over the scene.

  The two men followed a passage through the various contraptions until they came to an area that was filled with workbenches. Normally, this part of the station was crowded with engineers and scientists, all labouring night and day over their creations, but now it was empty but for a small group of men and women among whom Burton spotted Babbage, Gooch, and Brunel. The latter was so utterly motionless that he resembled a statue.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a remarkable figure. No longer human, he stood there, a hulking man-shaped contraption, comprised of armour-like brass plating, rods, springs, pistons, and cogwheels, and etched all over with intricate decorative designs. He had six arms—one with a big Gatling gun bolted to it—and a mask-like face fashioned into a likeness of the human features he’d possessed until his death last year. The electrical fields of his conscious mind were stored in fragments of a Nāga diamond and were articulated through one of Babbage’s famous probability calculators housed in his metal skull.

  As they came closer, Burton saw that one of the great engineer’s hands had been cleanly shorn off at the wrist. He also saw a workbench upon which the pristine time suit—the one Abdu El Yezdi had taken from Edward Oxford in 1840—had been laid out. Beside it, an oblong box-like contraption was hanging by long chains from the ceiling. Constructed from dark wood and polished brass, it somewhat resembled a curve-topped sea chest. Its upper surface was inset with dials, switches, and gauges. On the other side of this box, in an area that looked as if it should have been occupied by another workbench, there was a circular smooth-sided bowl-shaped depression in the floor. Though considerably smaller, it exactly resembled the one left in the paving at Leicester Square after Spring Heeled Jack had vanished.

  Burton felt his skin prickling with a disconcerting presentiment.

  “By God, what happened to you?” Daniel Gooch exclaimed upon spotting the king’s agent. “You look like you lost an argument with an omnibus.”

  “Something like that,” Burton said. He looked at Brunel. “Isambard?”

  Gooch, a short, plumpish, sandy-haired man who, as usual, was wearing a harness to which was attached a pair of mechanical arms supplementing his own, extended all four limbs in a wide shrug. “You’ll not get anything out of him, I’m afraid. I think his babbage calculator has been knocked out of whack. He’s completely paralysed. We’ve had an—er—incident.” He turned and called to Charles Babbage. The aged scientist, though stooped and liver spotted, had about him an air of zealous energy that belied his years. That energy was currently being expended in frenetic pacing. He was also tapping the fingers of both hands against his forehead, as if pressing imaginary buttons.

  “Charles! Charles!” Gooch repeated. “Sir Richard and Mr. Swinburne are here.”

  “Irrelevant!” Babbage snapped.

  “I hardly think so, sir. The suit belonged to Sir Richard, after all.”

  “Belonged?” Burton queried.

  “The damaged one,” Swinburne said. “Where is it?”

  “Ah,” Gooch answered. “That’s the question.”

  “Not one we should be required to ask,” Babbage shouted in a querulous tone. “It shouldn’t be possible. Even if it had become functional, there was no one inside the blasted thing to command it. What could have instigated it to jump?”

  Burton struggled to clarify his thoughts. The Saltzmann’s was sending wave after wave of heat through him, flushing out the pain of his wounds, but also causing his mind to apprehend a plethora of variations, so that when Babbage turned to face him, he was also dimly aware of the old man not turning to face him, and when Babbage raised his right hand with his forefinger pointing upward, Burton imagined or vaguely perceived—he wasn’t certain which—the scientist raising the left instead.

  “Nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860,” Babbage announced. “Does that moment mean anything to you?”

  “I’m aware that it is today’s date,” Burton responded. “And the hour of nine has made itself significant.”

  “Ah! So you recognise the anniversary?”

  Burton removed his top hat, shook snow from it, and placed it on a worktop. He put his cane beside it and started to unbutton his coat. “I don’t, Charles. Enlighten me.”

  Babbage slapped his right fist into his left palm. “Edward Oxford! It is at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February in the year 2202—his fortieth birthday—that he’ll make his first foray into the past; departing his native time period at that precise moment, exactly three hundred and forty-two years from now.”

  Stepping to a wooden stool, Burton lowered himself onto it, feeling his injured arm complaining but experiencing the pain as a somehow disassociated flare of light that didn’t properly belong to him.

  Swinburne, who’d also divested himself of his outer garments, said, “What of it, Charles?”

  “Have you not read the reports Abdu El Yezdi left for us? Did he not always insist that coincidences are of crucial importance? He referred to time as having echoes and rhythms, ripples and interconnected moments. In truth, what he was clumsily expressing are matters of algorithmic probability. They cannot be ignored.”

  “An anniversary strikes me as more a matter of sentiment than of mathematics,” Swinburne said.

  “You are a poet, sir!” Babbage spat the word as if it were the worst insult in the world.

  Burton addressed Gooch. “Have you a cigar, old fellow? I appear to have smoked my last.”

  Gooch dug mechanical fingers into his pocket and passed a Flor de Dindigul to the king’s agent.

  “Thank you.” After putting a flame to his smoke, Burton returned his attention to Babbage. “I take it you marked the occasion in some manner.” He gestured toward the indentation in the floor. “And perhaps that is the result?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  Babbage started tapping his head again. “Nothing to provide the impulse, you see,” he muttered. “No one in it.”

  “I don’t see.” Burton turned to Gooch. “In plain English and to the point, please, Daniel.”

  The engineer grunted and said, “I’ll try.” He folded his four arms. “It concerns the multitude of histories. They must all contain Edward Oxford’s burned and malfunctioning time suit because they all originated either from the moment he caused the first division in time or from events that occurred subsequent to it. However, our iteration of history is absolutely unique in that Abdu El Yezdi brought to it a second version of the outfit.” He nodded toward the nearby bench. “The undamaged one. That’s what made Charles’s experiment possible.”

  “Two suits. Where is the other?”

  “We don’t know. Charles was attempting to repair it.” Gooch strode over to the bench. “The suit is comprised
of four principal components.” He put a metal hand against the white fabric. “Its material absorbs light and converts it to power.” He touched the flat disk on the suit’s chest. “The Nimtz generator stores that power and converts it to what we might refer to as chronostatic energy.” He moved to the end of the worktable. “Immediately prior to the suit’s transference from one moment in history to another, the generator extends around it a pocket of the aforesaid energy. Were this to intersect with anything possessing more density than air, the object would be sliced through and part of it carried with the traveller through time. The boots, with their spring-loaded stilts, were therefore designed to thrust Oxford high above the ground so only the atmosphere surrounded him.” He waved a fleshy hand toward the other end of the bench. “Finally, the helmet contains microscopic semi-biological machinery that calculates, initiates, and directs all aspects of the journey. The crucial constituent of this machinery is called a BioProc. One word, capital B, capital P. There are thousands of BioProcs in the helmet, and every one of them contains a granule of powdered black diamond. Larger shards of the stone are also present in the generator. We are all aware of the peculiar qualities of the gem, yes?”

  He received sounds of confirmation from Burton and Swinburne.

  “The immense calculating power of the helmets,” Gooch went on, “is made possible by an inconceivably complex electromagnetic pattern existing within the diamond dust; a pattern that employed Edward Oxford’s mind as its template. When he was killed by El Yezdi in 1840, his terminal emanation—a powerful burst of energy from the brain—instantly overwrote it, but since this matched what was already there, there was no untoward effect.” He stood back. “The damaged suit didn’t fare so well. Its electrical composition was already badly impaired by prolonged exposure to the madness of the Oxford who’d become known as Spring Heeled Jack, and when he died, whatever vestiges of sanity that remained in it were erased by his last mental gasp.”

  Passing back along the side of the bench, Gooch reached out and picked up the helmet. “This is a truly remarkable machine. It can enter a state called ‘self-repair mode,’ which allows its internal components to alter their function in order to carry out whatever maintenance is necessary. Had we, like the other histories, only the one ruined suit, we would have rerouted what power remained in its Nimtz generator to the headpiece, hoping that somehow, in its insanity, there was retained sufficient an instinct for self-preservation to instigate repairs. Perhaps it would have somehow reordered its synthetic intelligence.” He turned the helmet in his hands. “But we were lucky. We had this pristine version, which is why Mr. Babbage created that—” He jerked his chin toward the box-like affair. “A Field Amplifier.”

  Burton swayed slightly, in the grip of a synaesthesia that suddenly made the sound of Gooch’s voice a floral scent, turned the scene before him into a symphony of visceral sensations, and transformed the oily odour of the workshop into a melodious purring. He glanced at the glowing tip of his cigar. It was a miniature sun.

  “With it,” Gooch went on, “we intended to record the electrical pattern present in this helmet and copy it across to the defective one, replacing the insanity therein.”

  “Marvellous!” Swinburne exclaimed. “What went wrong?”

  “Charles has a curious sense of occasion. To him, every event is a mathematical formula and its every possible outcome an elaboration of the calculation. Applying this hypothesis to the suits, he proposes that they manipulate a single great equation—a stupendous envisioning of time’s structures and processes—and that by observing coincidences and sequences, he might one day comprehend it. This is why today’s anniversary was significant, and why he initiated the experiment at exactly nine o’clock.”

  Charles Babbage suddenly came out of his self-absorption, stepped forward, and slapped a hand down onto the worktop. “The synthetic intelligence is responsive, not active. I could not have issued the command independently.”

  A particularly violent bolt of lightning whipped through one of the overhanging globes. The crackling detonations echoed around the massive hall, and the white light momentarily illuminated the normally shadowed sockets of the scientist’s eyes, revealing a fanatical glint within.

  Burton felt the inexplicable suspicion that, rather than being present in Battersea Power Station, he was somewhere entirely different.

  From afar, he heard Swinburne cry out, “Command? What command? My hat! In all the many histories, is there a single Charles Babbage who can get to the confounded point?”

  As the king’s agent splintered into innumerable renditions of himself, Gooch said, “At the exact moment the Field Amplifier accessed the ruined headpiece, a bubble of chronostatic energy formed around the damaged time suit. It sliced through Isambard’s wrist, popped, and the suit, along with our friend’s hand, vanished.”

  “It travelled into time,” Babbage snarled. “Of its own accord.”

  From amid the complex of jointed metal limbs that hung from the centre of the ceiling like angular jungle lianas, one emerged with a sword clutched in its mechanical digits. Gently, it tapped the blade first against Captain Richard Francis Burton’s right shoulder, then against his left.

  The king’s agent stood, now a Knight of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.

  Due to the damage done to the monarch’s vocal apparatus during the attack on Buckingham Palace, a white-stockinged royal equerry had spoken the words of the ceremony. Burton felt relieved by this. King Ernest Augustus I was demented at the best of times, and the past three months had been far from the best. Had he been able to express himself, he’d no doubt have ranted endlessly about the violence done to him—for the palace was, in effect, his own body; his limbs were built into every part of it, all controlled from the Crown Room, where his brain floated in a tank of vital fluids. The destruction of the western wing had been the equivalent of having an arm blown off. His Majesty was nettled, to say the least.

  Burton took three steps back, bowed, and returned to his seat.

  “Did your leg fall asleep?” whispered Monckton Milnes, who was sitting to his left.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “You were limping.”

  Burton made a sound of puzzlement. “Was I? By Allah’s beard, I do feel a little strange. My mind was wandering all over the place. I imagined myself to be at Battersea Power Station.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t just the leg, then,” his friend suggested, sotto voce. “Perhaps all of you fell asleep. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, despite the occasion. Not after what you’ve been through.”

  “I was daydreaming, that’s all. You know I have no patience for these official functions. When can we get out of this asylum?”

  “Shhh! The walls have ears.”

  Burton mentally kicked himself. “I mean no disrespect to the king, but I was probably thinking of Battersea Power Station because I have to be there by nine o’clock. Babbage is activating Oxford’s suit.”

  An abstruse thought intruded. What? Again?

  “These ceremonies don’t usually occur so late in the day,” Monckton Milnes observed, “but His Majesty spent all morning with his architects, and the meeting went past its allotted hours. It’s rumoured that he wants the palace rebuilt and made the tallest edifice in the city. I expect he’s eager to get back to his plans and sketches, which is why, believe it or not, formalities are proceeding at such a rapid pace.”

  “This is rapid?”

  “By comparison to the norm. Be patient, there are only three more to be knighted, then we’ll depart.”

  One of the palace footmen gave them an uncompromising glare. They stopped their whispering.

  Burton ran his forefinger around his collar. It was too tight. He’d forgotten how uncomfortable a freshly laundered army uniform could be.

  Wearily, he endured the pomp and protocols.

  Forty minutes later, in the reception hall, the foppishly attired Lord Palmerston approac
hed him and drawled, “My dear Sir Richard, may I be the first to congratulate you.”

  “On what, sir?”

  “Your title, man! Your title!”

  “Ah. Thank you, Prime Minister.”

  “I’ve read your report. The Mystery of the Malevolent Mediums. Do you intend to give all your accounts such lurid titles?”

  “I felt it appropriate. It was a dramatic affair.”

  “I can’t disagree with that. Is it really over?”

  “Nietzsche is dead, sir—in our time, in his own, and across all the other versions of history.”

  Burton couldn’t shake a curious sensation of unfamiliarity. The environment felt unutterably askew. Even the words that came out of his mouth felt wrong.

  “And the future war?” Palmerston asked.

  “That rests with you. Now we know it’s coming, you have the opportunity to develop policies that will steer us along another course. There’s no need for the conflict to erupt in 1914. We have fifty-four years in which to prevent it.”

  Palmerston rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hmm. Or fifty-four years in which to prepare. Perhaps it would be better to spend that time undermining Prussia and the Germanic states rather than indulging them.”

  “That might send us into battle earlier.”

  “Nietzsche told you the conflict is inevitable. If that’s the case, better we strike hard and when least expected than not at all.”

  Burton shrugged and murmured, “As the premier, it’s your choice to make. I don’t envy you.”

  Palmerston hemmed and hawed.

  “I have to go,” Burton said. “There’s business to take care of at the Department of Guided Science.”

  “The what?”

  “The—the—I’m sorry, I meant to say, at the Federation of Mechanics.”

  “A rather unusual slip of the tongue.”

  “It’s this uniform. It’s too tight. I’m hot and uncomfortable. Can’t think straight.”