The Scarlet Band by Harry Turtledove
* * * *
Some people seek Truth over all else. But in dealing with human beings, facts may matter less than beliefs--though not always in the way they think.
* * * *
A stormy November on the North Atlantic. Even a great liner like the Victoria Augusta rolled and pitched in the swells sweeping down from the direction of Iceland. The motion of her deck was not dissimilar to that of a restive horse, though the most restive horse rested at last, while the Victoria Augusta seemed likely to go on jouncing on the sea forever.
Most of the big ship's passengers stayed in their cabins. Nor was that sure proof against seasickness; the sharp stink of vomit filled the passageways, and was liable to nauseate even passengers who might have withstood the motion alone.
A pair of men, though, paced the promenade deck as if it were July on the Mediterranean. Passing sailors sent them curious looks. "'Ere, now," one of the men in blue said, touching a deferential forefinger to his cap. "Shouldn't you toffs go below? It'll be easier to take, like, if you do."
"I find the weather salubrious enough, thank you," the taller and leaner of the pair replied. "I am glad to discern that we shall soon come into port."
"Good heavens, Helms--how can you know that?" his companion ejaculated in surprise.
Athelstan Helms puffed on his pipe. "Nothing simpler, Doctor. Have you not noted that the waves discommoding our motion are sharper and more closely spaced than they were when we sailed the broad bosom of the Atlantic? That can only mean a shallow bottom beneath us, and a shallow bottom surely presages the coastline of Atlantis."
"Right you are, sir. Sure as can be, you've got your sea legs under you, to feel something like that." The sailor's voice held real respect now. "Wasn't more than fifteen minutes ago I 'eard the chief engineer say we was two, maybe three, hours out of 'Anover."
"Upon my soul," Dr. James Walton murmured. "It all seems plain enough when you set it out, Helms."
"I'm glad you think so," Helms replied. "You do commonly seem to."
Walton chuckled, a little self-consciously. "By now I ought not to be surprised at your constantly surprising me, what?" He laughed again, louder this time. "A bit of a paradox, that, don't you think?"
"A bit," Athelstan Helms agreed, an unaccustomed note of indulgence in his voice.
The sailor stared at him, then aimed a stubby forefinger in the general direction of his sternum. "I know who you are, sir," he said. "You're that detective feller!"
"Only an amateur," Helms replied.
He might as well have left the words unsaid. As if he had, the sailor rounded on Dr. Walton. "And you must be the bloke 'oo writes up 'is adventures. I've read a great plenty of 'em, I 'ave."
"You're far too kind, my good man." Walton, delighted to trumpet Athelstan Helms' achievements to the skies, was modest about his own.
"But what brings the two of you to Atlantis?" the sailor asked. "I thought you stayed in England, where it's civilized, like."
"As a matter of fact--" Dr. Walton began.
Helms smoothly cut in: "As a matter of fact, that is a matter we really should not discuss before conferring with the authorities in Hanover."
"I get you, sir." The sailor winked and laid a finger by the side of his nose. "Mum's the word. Not a soul will hear from me." Away he went, almost bursting with self-importance.
"It will be all over the ship before we dock," Dr. Walton said dolefully.
Athelstan Helms nodded. "Of course it will. But it can't get off the ship before we dock, so that is a matter of small consequence."
"Why didn't you want me to mention the House of Universal Devotion, then?" Dr. Walton asked. "For I saw that you prevented my doing so."
"Indeed." Helms nodded. "I believe the sailor may well be a member of that curious sect."
"Him? Good heavens, Helms! He's as English as Yorkshire pudding."
"No doubt. And yet the House, though Atlantean in origin, has its devotees in our land as well, and in the Terranovan republics and principalities. If the case with which we shall be concerned in the United States of Atlantis did not have ties to our England, you may rest assured I should not have embarked on the Victoria Augusta, excellent though she may be." Helms paused as another sailor walked past. When the man was out of earshot, the detective continued, "Did you note nothing unusual about the manner in which our recent acquaintance expressed himself?"
"Unusual? Not really." Dr. Walton shook his head. "A Londoner from the East End, I make him out to be. Not an educated man, even if he has his letters. Has scant respect for his aitches, but not quite a Cockney."
Although Helms' pinched features seemed to have little room for a smile, when one did find a home it illuminated his whole face. "Capital, Walton!" he said, and made as if to clap his hands. "I agree completely. You analysis is impeccable--well, nearly so, anyhow."
"'Nearly'? How have I gone astray?" By the way Walton said it, he did not believe he'd strayed at all.
"As you are such a cunning linguist, Doctor, I am confident the answer will suggest itself to you in a matter of moments." Athelstan Helms waited. When Walton shook his head, Helms shrugged and said, "Did you not hear the intrusive 'like' he used twice? Most un-English, but a common enough Atlantean locution. Begun by an actor--one of the Succot brothers, I believe--a generation ago, and adopted by the generality. I conjecture this fellow may have acquired it in meetings with his fellow worshipers."
"It could be." Dr. Walton stroked his salt-and-pepper chin whiskers. "Yes, it could be. But not all Atlanteans belong to the House of Universal Devotion. Far from it, in fact. He could have learned that interjection innocently enough."
"Certainly. That is why I said no more than that he might well be a member of the sect," Helms replied. "But I do find it likely, as the close and continuous intercourse amongst members of the House while engaged in worship seems calculated to foster such accretions. And he knew who we were. Members of the House, familiar with the difficulties the Atlantean constabulary is having with this case, may also be on the lookout for assistance from a foreign clime."
"Hmm," Walton said, and then, "Hmm," again. "How could they know the chief inspector in Hanover--"
"Chief of police, they call him," Helms noted.
"Chief of police, then," Walton said impatiently. "How could they know he sought your aid and not that of, say, Scotland Yard?"
"The easiest way to effect that would be to secret someone belonging to the House of Universal Devotion within the Hanoverian police department, something which strikes me as not implausible," Athelstan Helms said. "Other possible methodologies are bound to suggest themselves upon reflection."
By the unhappy expression spreading over Dr. Walton's fleshy countenance, such methodologies did indeed suggest themselves. But before he could mention any of them, a shout from the bow drew his attention, and Athelstan Helms' as well: "Hanover Light! Hanover Light ahead!"
Helms all but quivered with anticipation. "Before long, Doctor, we shall see what we shall see."
"So we shall." Walton seemed less enthusiastic.
* * * *
Hanover Light was one of the engineering marvels of the age. Situated on a wave-washed rock several miles east of the Atlantean coast, the lighthouse reached more than 300 feet into the air. The lamps in the upper story guided ships in from far out to sea.
Hanover itself cupped a small enclosed bay that formed the finest harbor on the east coast of Atlantis--a better harbor, even, than Avalon in the more lightly settled Atlantean west. Steam tugs with heavy rope fenders nudged the Victoria Augusta to her berth. Sailors tossed lines to waiting longshoremen, who made the ship fast to the pier. The liner's engines sighed into silence.
Dr. Walton sighed, too. "Well, we're here."
Athelstan Helms nodded. "I could not have deduced it more precisely myself," he said. "The red-crested eagle on the flag flying from yonder pole, the longshoremen shouting in what passes for English in the United States of Atlantis, the fact that we have just completed an ocean voyage ... Everything does indeed point to our being here."
Walton blinked. Was Helms having him on? He dismissed the notion from his mind, as being unworthy of a great detective. Lighting a cigar, he said, "I wonder if anyone will be here to meet us."
"Assuredly," Helms replied. "The customs men will take their usual interest--I generously refrain from saying, their customary interest--in our belongings." Walton began to speak; Helms forestalled him. "But you were about to say, anyone in an official capacity. Unless I am very much mistaken, that excitable-looking gentleman on the planking there will be Captain La Strada of the Hanover police."
The individual in question certainly did seem excitable. He wore tight trousers, a five-button jacket with tiny lapels, and one of the most appalling cravats in the history of haberdashery. His broad-brimmed hat would have raised eyebrows in London, too. Nor did his face have a great deal to recommend it: he looked like a ferret, with narrow, close-set eyes, a beak of a nose, and a wildly disorderly mustache.
And he was looking for the two Englishmen. "Helms!" he shouted, jumping up and down. "Walton!" He waved and pointed--unfortunately, at two other men halfway along the Victoria Augusta's deck.
"Here we are!" Walton called. Under his breath, he added, "Shocking they let a dago climb so high, bloody shocking."
Inspector La Strada jumped even higher. As if impelled by some galvanic current, his arm swung toward the detective and his medical companion. "Helms! Walton!" he bawled, for all the world as if he hadn't been yelling at those other chaps a moment before. Perhaps he hoped Helms and Walton hadn't noticed him doing it.
He pumped their hands when they came down the gangplank, and undertook to push their trunks to the customs house on one of the low-slung wheeled carts provided for the purpose. "Very kind of you," Walton murmured, reflecting that no true gentleman in London would lower himself to playing the navvy.
As if reading his mind, La Strada said, "Here in Atlantis, we roll up our sleeves and set our hands to whatever wants doing. This is a land for men of action, not sissies who sit around drinking port and playing the fiddle."
"Shall I take my return passage now, in that case?" Helms inquired in a voice rather cooler than the wind off the Greenland ice.
"By no means." La Strada seemed cheerfully unaware he'd given offense. "There's work to be done here, and you are--we hope you are--the man to do it."
Some of the first work to be done would be explaining the pistols in the travelers' baggage: so Dr. Walton anticipated, at any rate. But the customs inspectors took the firearms in stride. They seemed more interested in the reagents Helms carried in a cleverly padded case inside his trunk. At La Strada's voluble insistence that these were essential to the business for which the detective had been summoned to Atlantis, the inspectors grudgingly stamped Helms' passport, and Walton's as well.
La Strada had a coach waiting outside the customs house. "Shall I take you gents to the hotel first, to freshen up after your voyage, or would you rather come to the station and take your first look at what you'll be dealing with?" he asked.
Dr. Walton would have plumped for the manifold virtues of a good hotel, assuming Hanover boasted such a marvelous sanctuary, but Helms forestalled him, saying, "The station, Inspector, by all means. Well begun is half done, as they say, and the sooner we finish our business here, the sooner we can go home again."
"Once you spend a while in Atlantis, Mr. Helms, you may decide you don't care to go home after all," La Strada said.
"I doubt it." Athelstan Helms' reply would have silenced an Englishman and very likely crushed him. Inspector La Strada was made of sterner, or, more likely, coarser stuff. He let out a merry peal of laughter and lit a cheroot much nastier than the fragrant cigar Walton enjoyed.
Lamplighters with long poles went through the cobblestoned and bricked streets with long poles, setting the gas jets alight. The buttery glow of the street lights went some way toward mitigating the deepening twilight. Hanover wasn't London--what city was, or could be?--but it did not put its head in its shell with the coming of night, either. The streets and taverns and music halls and even many of the shops remained crowded.
London boasted inhabitants from every corner of the far-flung British Empire. Hanover, the largest urban center in a republic fueled by immigration, had residents from all over the world: Englishmen, Scots, Irish, the French and Spaniards who'd originally settled southern Atlantis, Negro freemen and freedmen and--women, swarthy Italians like La Strada, Scandinavians, stolid Germans, Jews from Eastern Europe, copper-skinned Terranovan aboriginals, Chinese running eateries and laundries advertised in their incomprehensible script, and every possible intermingling of them.
"Pack of mongrels," Dr. Walton muttered.
"What do you say, Doctor?" the inspector inquired. "With the rattle and clatter of the wheels, I fear I did not hear you."
"Oh, nothing. Nothing, really." Walton puffed on his cigar, both to blot out the stench of La Strada's and, perhaps, to send up a defensive smoke screen.
Unlike London, whose streets wandered where they would and changed names when they would, Hanover was built on a right-angled gridwork. People proclaimed it made navigation easier and more efficient. And it likely did, but Dr. Walton could not escape the notion that a city needed to be learned, that making it too easy to get around in reduced it to a habitation for children, not men.
He had the same low opinion of Atlantis' coinage. A hundred cents to an eagle--well, where was the challenge in that? Four farthings to a penny, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings the pound (or, if you were an aristo, twenty-one in a guinea) ... Foreigners always whined about how complicated English currency was. To Walton's way of thinking, that was all to the good. Whining helped mark out the foreigners and let you keep a proper eye on them.
And as for architecture, did Hanover really have any? A few Georgian buildings, Greek Revival more pretentious than otherwise, and endless modern utilitarian boxes of smoke-smudged brick that might once have been red or brown or yellow or even purple for all anyone could tell nowadays. Some--many--of these brick boxes were blocks of flats that outdid even London's for sheer squalidity. The odors of cheap cooking and bad plumbing wafted from them.
In such slums, the brass-buttoned policemen traveled in pairs. They wore low caps with patent-leather brims, and carried revolvers on their belts along with their billy clubs. They didn't look much like bobbies, and they didn't act much like bobbies, either.
"Do you find, then, that you need to intimidate your citizenry to maintain order?" Dr. Walton asked.
Inspector La Strada stared at him, eyes shiny under a gas lamp. "Intimidate our citizenry?" he said, as if the words were Chinese or Quechua. Then, much more slowly than he might have, he grasped what the Englishman was driving at. "God bless you, Doctor!" he exclaimed, no doubt in lieu of some more pungent comment. "Our policemen don't carry guns to intimidate the citizenry."
"Why, then?" Walton asked in genuine bewilderment.
Athelstan Helms spoke before the Atlantean inspector could: "They wear guns to keep the citizenry from murdering them in its criminal pursuits."
"Couldn't have put it better myself," La Strada said. "This isn't London, you know."
"Yes, I'd noticed that," Dr. Walton observed tartly.
La Strada either missed or ignored the sarcasm. "Though you might, like," he said. "Anyone but a convicted felon can legally carry a gun here. And the convicted felons do it, too--what have they got to lose? A tavern brawl here isn't one fellow breaking a mug over the other one's head. He pulls out a snub-nosed .42 and puts a pill in the bastard's brisket. And if getting away means plugging a policeman, he doesn't stick at that, either."
"Charming people," the physician murmured.
"In many ways, they are," Helms said. "But, having won freedom through a bloody uprising against the British crown, they labor under the delusion that they must be ready--nay, eager--to shed more blood at any moment to defend it."
"We don't happen to think that is a delusion, sir," La Strada said stiffly.
"No doubt," Athelstan Helms replied. "That does not mean it isn't one. I draw your notice to the Dominion of Ontario, in northeastern Terranova. Ontario declined revolution--despite your buccaneers, I might add, or perhaps because of them--yet can you deny that its people are as free as your own, and possessed of virtually identical rights?"
"Of course I can. They still have a Queen--your Queen." La Strada wrinkled up his nose as if to show he could smell the stench of monarchism across the thousand miles of Hesperian Gulf separating the USA and Ontario.
"We do not find it unduly discommodes us," Helms said.
"The more fools you," La Strada told him. There was remarkably little conversation in the coach after that until it pulled up in front of Hanover's police headquarters.
* * * *
Dr. Walton had not looked for the headquarters to be lovely. But neither had he looked for the building to be as ugly as it was. A gas lamp on either side of the steps leading up to the entrance showed the brickwork to be of a jaundiced, despairing yellow. The steps themselves were of poured concrete: utilitarian, no doubt, but unequivocally unlovely. The edifice was squat and sturdy, with small rectangular windows; it put Walton in mind of a fortress. The stout iron bars on the windows of the bottom two stories reinforced the impression--and the windows.
After gazing at those, Helms remarked, "They will use this place to house criminals as well as constables." There, for once, the detective's companion had not the slightest difficult comprehending how his friend made the deduction.
"Come along, gents, come along." La Strada hopped down to the ground, spry as a cricket. Helms and Walton followed. The policeman who drove the carriage, who'd said not a word on the journey from the customs house, remained behind to ensure that their luggage did not decide to tour the city on its own.
The odors greeting the newcomers when they went inside would have told them what sort of place they were finding. Dante might have had such smells in mind when he wrote, All hope abandon, ye who enter here. Dampness and mold, bad tobacco, stale sweat infused with the aftereffects of rum and whiskey, sour vomit, chamber pots that wanted emptying, the sharp smell of fear and the less definable odor of despair ... Dr. Walton sighed. They were no different from what he would have smelled at the Old Bailey.
And, walking past cells on the way to the stairs, Walton and Athelstan Helms saw scenes straight out of Hogarth engravings, and others that, again, might have come straight from the Inferno. "Here we go," Inspector La Strada said, politely holding the door open for the two Englishmen. When he closed the stout redwood panel (anywhere but Atlantis, it would have been oak) behind them, he might have put a mile of distance between them and the hellish din behind it.
Another door, equally sturdy, guarded each of the upper floors. Even if, through catastrophe or conspiracy, a swarm of prisoners escaped, the constables could fortify their position and defend themselves for a long time. "You have firing ports, I see," Helms murmured. Dr. Walton, who'd fought in Afghanistan and was one of the lucky few to have escaped that hellhole, slapped at his thigh, annoyed at himself for missing the telling detail.
Inspector La Strada opened one of those fortified portals. A rotund constabulary sergeant with a large-caliber revolver sat just beyond it, ready for any eventuality. Not far away, a technician had a dissipated-looking young man in a special chair, and was measuring his skull and ear and left middle finger and ring finger with calipers and ruler. A clerk wrote down the numbers he called out.
"You still use the Bertillon system for identifying your miscreants, then?" Athelstan Helms inquired.
"We do," La Strada replied. "It's not perfect, but far better than any other method we've found." He thrust out his receding chin as far as it would go. "And I haven't heard that Scotland Yard's got anything better, either."
"Scotland Yard? No." Helms sounded faintly dismissive. "But I am personally convinced that one day--and perhaps one day quite soon--the ridges and crenelations on a man's fingertips will prove more efficacious yet, and with far less labor and less likelihood of error and mistaken identity."
"Well, I'll believe that when I see it, sir, and not a moment before." La Strada picked his way through chaos not much quieter and not much less odorous than that downstairs. He finally halted at a plain--indeed, battered--pine desk. "My home from home, you might say," he remarked, and purloined a couple of cheap, unpadded chairs nearby. "Have a seat, gents, and I'll tell you what's what, like."
Before sitting, Dr. Walton tried to brush something off his chair. Whatever it was, it proved sticky and resistant to brushing. He perched gingerly, on one buttock, rather like the old woman in Candide. Either Helms' chair was clean or he was indifferent to any dirt it might have accumulated.
La Strada reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a brown glass bottle and, after some rummaging, three none too clean tumblers. "A restorative, gentlemen?" he said, and started to pour before the Englishmen could say yea or nay.
It wasn't scotch. It was maize whiskey--corn liquor, they called it in Atlantis--and it might have been aged a week, or perhaps even two. "Gives one the sensation of having swallowed a lighted gas lamp, what?" Dr. Walton wheezed when more or less capable of intelligible speech once more.
"It intoxicates. Past that, what more is truly required?" Helms drank his off with an aplomb suggesting long experience--and perhaps a galvanized gullet.
"This here is legal whiskey, gents. You should taste what the homecookers make." La Strada shuddered ... and refilled his glass. "Shall we get down to business?"
"May we talk freely here?" Helms asked. "Are you certain none of your colleagues within earshot belongs to the House of Universal Devotion?"
"Certain? Mr. Helms, I'm not certain of a damned thing," La Strada. "If you told me a giant honker would walk up those stairs and come through that doorway there, I couldn't say I was certain you were wrong."
"Aren't honkers as extinct as the dodo?" Dr. Walton asked, sudden sharp interest in his voice: he fancied himself an amateur ornithologist. "Didn't that Audubon chap paint some of the last of them before your slave uprising?"
"The Servile Insurrection, we call it." La Strada's face clouded. Like most Atlanteans his age, he would have served in the fight. "I've got a scar on my leg on account of it.... But you don't care about that. Yes, they say honkers are gone, but the backwoods of Atlantis are a mighty big place, so who knows for sure, like? ... But you don't care about that, either, not really. The House of Universal Devotion."
"Yes. The House of Universal Devotion." Helms leaned forward on his hard, uncomfortable seat.
"Well, you'll know they're killing important men. If you attended to my letter, you'll know they're doing it for no good reason any man who doesn't belong to the House can see. And you'll know they're damned hard to stop, because their murderers don't care if they live or die," La Strada said. "They figure they go straight to heaven if they're killed."
"Like the Hashishin," murmured Walton, who, from his service in the East, was steeped in Oriental lore.
La Strada looked blank. "The Assassins," Athelstan Helms glossed.
"They're assassins, all right," the inspector said, missing most of the point. Neither Englishman seemed to reckon it worthwhile to enlighten him. La Strada went on, "We aim to find a way to make them stop without outlawing them altogether. We have religious freedom here in Atlantis, we do. We don't establish any one church and disadvantage the rest."
"Er, well, despite that, we have it in England as well," Walton said. "But we don't construe it to mean freedom to slaughter your fellow man in the name of your creed."
"Nor do we," La Strada said. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be trying to stop it, now would we?" He seemed to feel he'd proved some sort of point.
"Perhaps the best way to go about it would be to arrange for a suitable divine revelation from the Preacher," Helms suggested.
"Yes, that would be the best way--if the Preacher could be persuaded to announce that kind of revelation," La Strada agreed. "If, indeed, the Preacher could be found by anyone not a votary of the House of Universal Devotion."
"Do I correctly infer you have it in mind for me to seek him out and discuss with him the possibility and practicability of such a revelation?" Helms asked.
"You are indeed a formidable detective, Mr. Helms," La Strada said. "Your fee will be formidable, too, should you succeed."
"Do you imagine the magnificent Athelstan Helms can fail?" Dr. Walton inquired indignantly.
"Several here have made the attempt. None has reached the Preacher. None, in fact, has survived," Inspector La Strada answered. "So yes, I can imagine your comrade failing. I do not wish it, but I can imagine it."
"Quite right. Quite right," Helms said. "Imagining all that might go wrong is the best preventive. Now, then--can you tell me where the Preacher is likeliest to be found?"
"Wellll..." La Strada stretched the word out to an annoying length. "He's in Atlantis. We're pretty sure of that."
"Capital," Helms said without the least trace of irony. "All that remains, then, is to track him down, eh?"
"I'm sure you'll manage in the next few days." La Strada, by contrast...
* * * *
The Golden Burgher, the hotel into which La Strada had booked Helms and Walton, lay only a few blocks from police headquarters, but might have come from a different world. It would not have seemed out of place in London, though the atmosphere put Dr. Walton more in mind of vulgar ostentation than of the genteel luxury more ideally British. And few British hotels would have had so many spittoons--cuspidors, they seemed to call them here--so prominently placed. The brown stains on the white marble squares of the checkerboard flooring (and, presumably though less prominently, on the black as well) argued that there might have been even more.
The room was unexceptionable. And, when the traders went down to the restaurant, they found nothing wrong with the saddle of mutton. Walton did bristle when the waiter inquired whether he preferred his meat with mint jelly or with garlic. "Garlic!" he exploded. "D'you take me for an Italian?"
"No, sir," said the waiter, who might have been of that extraction himself. "But some Atlanteans are fond of it."
"I shouldn't wonder," the physician replied, a devastating retort that somehow failed to devastate. His amour-propre ruffled, he added, "I'm not an Atlantean, either, for which I give thanks to the Almighty."
"So does Atlantis, sir." The waiter hurried off.
Walton at first took that to mean Atlantis also thanked God. Only after noticing a certain gleam in Athelstan Helms' eye did he wonder if the man meant Atlantis thanked God that he was not an Atlantean. "The cheek of the fellow!" he growled. "Have I been given the glove?"
"A finger from it, at any rate, I should say," Helms told him.
The good doctor intended to speak sharply to the waiter. But he soon made a discovery others had found before him: it was difficult--indeed, next to impossible--to stay angry at a man who was feeding you so well. The mutton, flavorful without being gamy, matched any in England. The mint jelly complemented it marvelously. Potatoes and peas were likewise tasty and well prepared.
"For dessert," the waiter said as a busboy took away dirty plates, "we have several flavors of ice cream made on the premises, we have a plum pudding of which many of our English guests are quite fond, and we also have a local confection: candied heart of cycad with rum sauce." He waited expectantly.
"Plum pudding, by all means," Dr. Walton said.
"I'll try the cycad dessert," Helms said. "Something I'm not likely to find elsewhere." ("And a good thing, too," Walton muttered, his voce not quite sotto enough.)
The physician had to admit that his plum pudding, like the mutton, lived up to all reasonable expectations. Athelstan Helms consumed the strange, chewy-looking object on his plate with every sign of enjoyment. When he was nearly finished, he offered Walton a bite.
"Thanks, but no," the physician said. "Stuffed. Quite stuffed. I do believe I'd burst if I picked up the fork again."
"However you please." Helms finished the dessert himself. "Not bad at all. I shouldn't be surprised if what they call rum is also distilled from the cycad, although they do grow considerable sugar down in the south."
He left a meticulous gratuity for the waiter; Walton would have been less generous. They went back up to their room. Dr. Walton struck a match against the sole of his boot and lit the gas lamp.
"I say!" Helms exclaimed. "The plot thickens--so it does. I deduce that someone is not desirous of our company here."
Again, he did not need his richly deserved reputation for detection to arrive at his conclusion. Someone had driven a dagger hilt-deep into the pillow on each bed.
* * * *
"No, I'm not surprised," Inspector La Strada said. "The House of Universal Devotion casts its web widely here."
"Someone should step on the spider, then, by Jove!" Dr. Walton said.
"Freedom of religion again, I'm afraid," Dr. Walton said. "Our Basic Law guarantees the right to worship as one pleases and the right not to worship if one pleases. We find that a more just policy than yours." Yes, he enjoyed scoring points off the mother country.
Dr. Walton was in a high temper, and in a high color as well, his cheeks approaching the hue of red-hot iron. "Where in the Good Book does it say assassinating two innocent pillows amounts to a religious observance?"
"What the good doctor means, I believe, is that any faith can use the excuse of acting in God's cause to perpetrate deeds those more impartial might deem unrighteous," Athelstan Helms said. Walton nodded emphatically enough to set two or three chins wobbling.
"Any liberty can become license--any policeman who's been on the job longer than a week knows as much," La Strada said. "But the Preacher has been going up and down in Atlantis for more than fifty years now. He may have forgotten."
"Going up and down like Satan in the Book of Job," Walton growled. "We need to find the rascal so we can give him a piece of our mind."
The Atlantean police officer shifted from foot to foot. "Well, sir, like I told you last night, finding him's a problem we haven't ciphered out ourselves."
"What then?" Dr. Walton was still in a challenging mood. "Shall we walk into the nearest House of Universal Devotion and ask the hemidemisemipagans pretending to be priests where the devil their precious Preacher is? The Devil ought to know, all right." No, he was not a happy man.
Athelstan Helms, by contrast, suddenly looked as happy as his saturnine features would allow. "A capital idea, Doctor! Capital, I say. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we shall do that very thing. Beard the blighters in their den, like." He used the Atlanteanism with what struck Walton as malice, or at least mischief, aforethought.
"You're not serious, Helms?" the doctor burst out.
"I am, sir--serious to the point of solemnity," Helms replied. "What better way to come to know our quarry's henchmen?"
"What better way to end up in an alley with our throats cut?" Dr. Walton said. "I'd lay long odds the blackguards have more knives than the two they wasted on goosedown."
Helms paused long enough to light his pipe, then rounded on La Strada. "What is your view of this, Inspector?"
"I wouldn't recommend it," the policeman said. "I doubt you'd be murdered, not two such famous fellows as you are. They have to know we'd haul their Houses down on top of 'em if they worked that kind of outrage. But I don't reckon you'd learn very much from 'em, either."
"There! D'you see, Helms?" Walton said. "Inspector La Strada's a man of sense."
"By which you mean nothing except that he agrees with you," Helms said placidly. "To the nearest House we shall go."
* * * *
Hanover had several Houses of Universal Devotion, all of them in poor, even rough, neighborhoods. Devotion was not a faith that appealed to the wealthy, though more than a few Devotees had, through skill and hard work, succeeded in becoming prosperous. "Nothing but a heresy," Dr. Walton grumbled as he and Helms approached a House. "Blacker than Pelagianism. Blacker than Arianism, by God, and who would have dreamt it possible?"
"Your intimate acquaintance with creeds outworn no doubt does you credit, Doctor," Helms said. "Here, however, we face a creed emphatically not outworn, and we would do well to remember as much."
The House of Universal Devotion seemed unprepossessing enough, without even a spire to mark it as a church. On the lintel were carved a sun, a crescent moon, several stars, and other, more obscure symbols. "Astrology?" Dr. Walton asked.
"Freemasonry," Helms answered. "There are those who claim the two are one and inseparable, but I cannot agree." His long legs scissored up the stairs two at a time. Walton followed more sedately.
"What do we do if they won't let us in?" Walton inquired.
"Create a disturbance as a ruse, then effect an entrance will they or nill they." Athelstan Helms rather seemed to look forward to the prospect. But when he worked the latch the door swung inward on silent, well-oiled hinges. With a small, half-rueful shrug, he stepped across the threshold, Dr. Walton again at his heels.
Inside, the House of Universal Devotion looked more like a church. There were rows of plain pine pews. There was an altar, with a cross on the wall behind it. If the cross was flanked by the symbols also placed above the entryway, that seemed not so remarkable. I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE was written on the south wall, EVERY MAN HATH GOD WITHIN AND MUST LEARN TO SET HIM FREE on the north, both in the same large block capitals.
"I don't recognize that Scriptural quotation," Walton said, nodding toward the slogan on the north wall. In spite of himself, he spoke in the hushed tones suitable for a place of worship.
"From the Preacher's Book of Devotions," Helms said. "If you are a Devotee, you will believe the Lord inspired him to set down chapter and verse through the agency of automatic writing. If you are not, you may conceivably hold some other opinion." Walton's scornful sniff gave some hint as to his views of the matter.
Before he could put them into words--if, indeed, that had been his intention--a man in a somber black suit (not clerical garb in any formal sense of the word, but distinctive all the same) came out from a room off to the left of the altar. "I thought I heard voices here," he said. "May I help you, gentlemen?"
"Yes," Athelstan Helms said. "I should like to meet the Preacher, and as expeditiously as may be practicable."
"As who would not?" returned the man in the black suit.
"You are the priest here?" Walton asked.
"I have the honor to be the rector, yes." The man stressed the proper word. Bowling slightly, he continued, "Henry Praeger, sir, at your service. And you would be--?" He broke off, sudden insight lighting his features. "Are you by any chance Helms and Walton?"
"How the devil did you know that?" Walton demanded.
"I daresay he read of our arrival in this morning's Hanover Herald," Athelstan Helms said. "By now, half the capital will have done so. I did myself, at breakfast. Good to know I came here safely, what?"
Dr. Walton spluttered in embarrassment. He had glanced at the newspaper while eating a not quite tender enough beefsteak and three eggs fried hard, but had missed the story in question.
Henry Praeger nodded eagerly. "I did, Mr. Helms, and wondered if you might call at a House, not really expecting mine to be the one you chose, of course. But I am honored to make your acquaintance--and yours, too, Dr. Walton." He could be charming when he chose.
Dr. Walton remained uncharmed. He murmured something muffled to unintelligibility by the luxuriant growth of hair above his upper lip.
"You can convey my desire to the Preacher?" Helms pressed. "His views on the present unfortunate situation are bound to be of considerable importance. If he believes that killing off his opponents and doubters will enhance his position or that of the House of Universal Devotion, I must tell you that I shall essay to disabuse him of this erroneous impression."
"That has never been the policy of the House of Universal Devotion, Mr. Helms, nor of the Preacher," Henry Praeger said earnestly. "Those who claim otherwise seek to defame our church and discredit our leader."
"What about the men who assuredly are deceased, and as assuredly did not die of natural causes?" Dr. Walton inquired.
"What about them, sir?" Praeger returned. "Men die by violence all over the world, like. You will not claim the House of Universal Devotion is to blame for all of those unfortunate passings, I hope?"
"Er--no," Walton said, though his tone suggested he might like to.
"When the men in question have either criticized the House or attempted to leave the embrace of its creed, I trust you will not marvel overmuch, Mr. Praeger, if some suspicion falls on the institutions you represent," Athelstan Helms said.
"But I do marvel. I marvel very much," Praeger said. "That suspicion may fall on individuals ... that is one thing. That is should fall on the House of Universal Devotion is something else again. The House is renowned throughout Atlantis, and in Terranova, and indeed in England, for its charity and generosity toward the poor and downtrodden, of whom there are in this sorry world far too many."
"The house is also renowned for its clannishness, its secrecy, and its curious, shall we say, beliefs, as well as for the vehemence with which its adherents cling to them," Helms said.
"Jews are renowned for the same thing," Henry Praeger retorted. "Do you believe the tales of ritual murder that come out of Russia?"
"No, for they are fabrications. I have looked into this matter, and know whereof I speak," Helms answered. "Here in Hanover, however, and elsewhere in this republic, men are unquestionably dead, as Dr. Walton reminded you a moment before. Also, the Jews have the justification of following custom immemorial, which you do not."
"You are right--we do not follow ancient usages," Praeger said proudly. "We take for ourselves the beliefs we require, and reshape them ourselves to our hearts' desire. That is the modern way. That is the Atlantean way. We are loyal to our country, sir, even if misguided officials persist in failing to understand us."
"You don't say anything about the dead 'uns," Walton remarked.
"I don't know anything about them. Nor do I know how to reach the Preacher." Praeger held up a hand before either Englishman could speak. "I shall talk to certain colleagues of mine. If, through them or their associates, word of your desire reaches him, I am confident that he will in turn be able to reach you." His shrug seemed genuinely regretful. "I can do no more."
"Thank you for doing that much," Helms said. "Tell me one thing more, if you would: what do the symbols flanking the cross to either side signify to you?"
"Why, the truth, of course," Henry Praeger answered.
* * * *
Dr. Walton was happy enough to play tourist in Hanover. Even if the city was young--almost infantile by Old World standards--there was a good deal to see, from the Curb Exchange Building to the Navy Yard to the cancan houses that were the scandal of Atlantis, and of much of Terranova and Europe as well (France, by all accounts, took them in stride). Walton returned from his visit happily scandalized.
Athelstan Helms went to no cancan houses. He set up a laboratory of sorts in their rooms, and paid the chambermaids not to clean it. When he wasn't fussing there with the daggers that had greeted him or the good doctor, he was poring over files of the Hanover Herald he had prevailed upon Inspector La Strada to prevail upon the newspaper to let him see.
From sources unknown to Walton, Helms procured a violin, upon which he practiced at all hours until guests in the adjoining chambers pounded on the walls. Then, reluctantly, he was persuaded to desist.
"Some people," he said with the faintest trace of petulance, "have no appreciation for--"
"Good music," Dr. Walton said loyally.
"Well, actually, that is not what I was going to say," Helms told him. "They have no appreciation for the fact that any musician, good, bad, or indifferent, must regularly play his instrument if he is not to become worse. In the absence of any communication from the Preacher, what shall I do with my time?"
"You might tour the city," Walton suggested. "There is, I must admit, more to it than I would have expected."
"It is not London," Athelstan Helms said, as if that were all that required saying. In case it wasn't, he added a still more devastating sidebar: "It is not even Paris."
"Well, no," Walton said, "but have you seen the museum? Astonishing relics of the honkers. Not just skeletons and eggshells, mind you, but skins with feathers still on 'em. The birds might almost be alive."
"So might the men the House of Universal Devotion murdered," Helms replied, still in that tart mood. "They might almost be, but they are not."
"Also a fine selection of Atlantean plants," the good doctor said. "Those are as distinctive as the avifauna, if not more so. Some merely decorative, some ingeniously insectivorous, some from which we draw spices, and also some formidably poisonous."
That drew his particular friend's interest; Dr. Walton had thought it might. "I have made a certain study of the noxious alkaloids to be derived from plants," Helms admitted. "That one from southern Terranova, though a stimulant, has deleterious side effects if used for extended periods. Perhaps I should take advantage of the opportunity to observe the specimens from which the poisons are drawn."
"Perhaps you should, Helms," Walton said, and so it was decided.
The Atlantean Museum could not match its British counterpart in exterior grandeur. Indeed, but for the generosity of a Briton earlier in the century, there might not have been any Atlantean Museum. Living in the present and looking toward the future as they did, the inhabitants of Atlantis cared little for the past. The museum was almost deserted when Walton brought Helms back to it.
Helms sniffed at the exhibit of extinct honkers that had so pleased his associate. Nor did a close-up view of the formidable beak and talons of a stuffed red-crested eagle much impress him. What purported to be a cucumber slug climbing up a redwood got him to lean forward to examine it more closely. He drew back a moment later, shaking his head. "It's made of plaster of Paris, and its trail is mucilage."
"This is a museum, not a zoological garden," Dr. Walton said reasonably. "You can hardly expect a live slug here. Suppose it crawled off to the other side of the trunk, where no one but its keeper could see it?" Helms only grunted, which went some way toward showing the cogency of Walton's point.
Helms could not lean close to examine the poisonous plants; glass separated them from overzealous observers. The detective nodded approvingly, saying, "That is as it should be. It protects not only the plants but those who scrutinize them--assuming they are real. With mushrooms of the genus Amanita, even inhaling their spores is toxic."
A folded piece of foolscap was wedged in the narrow gap between a pane of glass and the wooden framing that held it in place. "What's that, Helms?" Dr. Walton asked, pointing to it.
"Probably nothing." But Athelstan Helms plucked it away with long, slim fingers--a violist's fingers, sure enough--and opened it. "I say!" he murmured.
"What?"
Wordlessly, Helms held the paper out to Walton. The doctor donned his reading glasses. "'Be on the 4:27 train to Thetford tomorrow afternoon. It would be unfortunate for all concerned if you were to inform Inspector La Strada of your intentions.'" He read slowly; the script, though precise, was quite small. Refolding the sheet of foolscap, he glanced over to Helms. "Extraordinary! What do you make of it?"
"I would say you were probably observed on your previous visit here. Someone familiar with your habits--and with mine; and with mine!--must have deduced that we would return here together, and that I was likely, on coming to the museum, to repair to the section of most interest to me," Helms replied. "Thus ... the note, and its placement."
Dr. Walton slowly nodded. "Interesting. Persuasive. It does seem to account for the facts as we know them."
"As we know them, yes. As we are intended to know them." Athelstan Helms took the note from his companion and reread it. "Interesting, indeed. And anyone capable of deducing our probable future actions from those just past is an opponent who bears watching."
"I should say so." Walton took off the spectacles and replaced them in their leather case. "I wonder what we shall find upon arriving in Thetford. The town is, I believe, a stronghold of the House of Universal Devotion."
"I wonder if we shall find anything there," Helms said. Walton raised a bushy eyebrow in surprise. The detective explained: "The missive instructs us to board the train. It does not say we shall be enlightened after disembarking. For all we know now, the Preacher may greet us in the uniform of a porter as soon as we take our seats."
"Why, so he may!" Walton exclaimed gaily. "I'd pay good money to see it if he did, though, devil take me if I wouldn't. The porters on these Atlantean trains are just about all of them colored fellows."
"Well, you're right about that." Helms seemed to yield the point, but then returned to it, saying, "He might black his face for the occasion." He shook his head, arguing more with himself than with Dr. Walton. "But no; that would not do. The Atlantean passengers would notice the imposture, being more casually familiar with Negroes than we are. And the dialect these blacks employ is easier for a white man to burlesque than to imitate with precision. I therefore agree with you: whatever disguise the Preacher should choose--if he should choose any--he is unlikely to appear in forma porteris."
"Er--quite," the doctor said. "You intend to follow the strictures of the note, then?"
"In every particular, as if it were Holy Writ," Helms replied. "And in the reckoning of the chap who placed it here, so it may be."
* * * *
Above the entrance to Radcliff Station was the inscription, THE CLAN, NOT THE MAN. Radcliffs (in early days, the name was sometimes spelled with a final e) were among the first English settlers of Atlantis. That meant those earliest Radcliff(e)s were nothing but fishermen blown astray, an unfortunate fact the family did its best to forget over the next four centuries. Its subsequent successes excused, if they did not altogether justify, such convenient amnesia.
The station smelled of coal smoke, fried food, tobacco, and people--people in swarms almost uncountable. Dr. Watson's clinically trained nose detected at least one case of imminent liver failure and two pelvic infections, but in those shoals of humanity he could not discern which faces belonged to the sufferers.
He and Athelstan Helms bought their tickets to Thetford and back (round trips, they called them here, rather than return tickets) from a green-visored clerk with enough ennui on his wizened face to make even the most jaded Londoner look to his laurels. "Go to Platform Nine," the clerk said. "Have a pleasant trip." His tone implied that he wouldn't care if they fell over dead before they got to the platform. And why should he? He already had their eagles in his cashbox.
Carpetbags in hand, they made their way to the waiting area. "Better signposts here than there would be in an English station," Helms remarked--and, indeed, only a blind man would have had trouble finding the proper platform.
Once there, Helms and Walton had a wait of half an hour before their train was scheduled to depart. A few passengers already stood on the platform when they arrived. More and more came after them, till the waiting area grew unpleasantly crowded. Dr. Walton stuck his free hand in his left front trouser pocket, where his wallet resided, to thwart pickpockets and sneak thieves. He would not have been a bit surprised if the throng contained several. It seemed a typical Atlantean cross section: a large number of people who would not have been out of place in London leavened by the scrapings of every corner of Europe and Terranova and even Asia. Bearded Jews in baggy trousers gabbled in their corrupt German dialect. Two Italian families screamed at each other with almost operatic intensity. A young Mexican man avidly eyed a statuesque blonde from Sweden or Denmark. Walton frowned at the thought of such miscegenation, but Atlantis did not forbid it. A Chinese man in a flowing robe read--he was intrigued to see--the Bible.
Boys selling sausages on sticks and fried potatoes and coffee and beer elbowed through the crowd, loudly shouting their wares. A sausage proved as spicy and greasy as Walton would have expected. He washed it down with a mug of beer, which was surprisingly good. Athelstan Helms, of more ascetic temperament, refrained from partaking of refreshments.
The train bound for Thetford came in half an hour late. Dr. Walton called down curses on the heads of the Atlantean schedulers. "No doubt you have never known an English train to be tardy," Helms said, which elicited a somewhat shamefaced laugh from his traveling companion.
Instead of seating passengers in small compartments, Atlantean cars put them all in what amounted to a common room, with row after row of paired seats on either side of a long central aisle. Dr. Walton also grumbled about that, more because it was different from what he was used to than out of any inherent inferiority in the arrangement.
NO SMOKING! signs declared, and FINE FOR SMOKING, E10! and SMOKING CAR AT REAR OF TRAIN. The good doctor returned his cigar case to his waistcoat. "I wish they'd collect fines for eating garlic, too," he growled; several people in the car were consuming or had recently consumed that odorous, most un-English comestible.
Athelstan Helms pointed to several open windows in the car, which did little to mitigate the raw heat pouring from stoves at either end. "Never fear, Doctor," he said. "I suspect we shall have our fair share of smoke and more in short order."
Sure enough, as soon as the train started out, coal smoke and cinders poured in through those windows. Passengers sitting next to them forced them closed--all but one, which jammed in its track. The conductor, a personage of some importance on an Atlantean train, lent his assistance to the commercial traveler trying to set it right, but in vain. "Guess you're stuck with it," he said. The commercial traveler's reply, while heartfelt, held little literary merit.
Dr. Walton closely eyed the conductor, wondering if he was the mysterious and elusive Preacher in disguise. Reluctantly, he decided it was improbable; the Preacher's career spanned half a century, while the gent in blue serge and gleaming brass buttons could not have been much above forty.
For his part, Helms stared out the window with more interest than the utterly mundane countryside seemed to Walton to warrant. "What's so ruddy fascinating?" the doctor asked when curiosity got the better of him at last.
"Remnants of the old Atlantis amidst the new," his colleague replied. Walton made a questioning noise. Helms condescended to explain: "Stands of Atlantean pines and redwoods and cycads and ginkgoes, with ferns growing around and beneath them. The unique flora that supported your unique avifauna, but is now being supplanted by Eurasian and Terranovan varieties imported for the comfort and convenience of mankind."
"Curious, what, that Atlantis, lying as it does between Europe and the Terranovan mainland, should have native to it plants and creatures so different to those of either," Dr. Walton said.
"Quite." Athelstan Helms nodded. "The most economical explanation, as William of Occam would have used the term, seems to me to be positing some early separation of Atlantis from northeastern Terranova, to which geography argues it must at one time have adhered, thereby allowing--indeed, compelling--Darwinian selection to proceed here from those forms present then, which would not have included the ancestors of what are now Terranova's commonplace varieties. You do reckon yourself a Darwinist, Doctor, do you not?"
"Well, I don't know," Walton said uncomfortably. "His logic is compelling, I must admit, but it flies dead in the face of every religious principle inculcated in me since childhood days."
"Oh, my dear fellow!" Helms exclaimed. "Where reason and childish phantasms collide, which will you choose? In what sort of state would mankind be if it rejected reason?"
"In what sort of state is mankind now?" the good doctor returned.
Helms began to answer, then checked himself; the question held an unpleasant and poignant cogency. At last, he said, "Is mankind in that parlous state because of reason or in despite of it?"
"I don't know," Walton said. "Perhaps you might do better to inquire of Professor Nietzsche, who has published provocative works upon the subject."
Again, Helms found no quick response. This time, a man sitting behind him spoke up before he could say anything at all: "Pardon me, gents, but I couldn't help overhearing you, like. You ask me, Darwin is going straight to hell, and everybody who believes his lies'll end up there, too. The Good Book says it, I believe it, and by God that settles it." He spoke in Atlantean accents, and in particularly self-satisfied ones, too.
"Did God tell you this personally, Mr...?" Helms inquired.
"My name is Primrose, sir, Henry David Primrose," the man said, ignoring Helms' irony. "God gave me my head to think with and the Bible to think from, and I don't need anything more. Neither does anyone else, I say, and that goes double for your precious Darwin."
Dr. Walton was at first inclined to listen to Henry David Primrose with unusual attention, being struck by the matching initial consonants of his last name and the word preacher. He did not need long to conclude, however, that Mr. Primrose was not, in fact, their mysterious and elusive quarry. Mr. Primrose was a crazy man, or, in the Atlantean idiom, a nut. He wasn't even a follower of the House of Universal Devotion--he was a Methodist, which, to the Englishmen, made him a boring nut. The way he used the Bible to justify the ignorant views he already held would have converted the Pope to Darwinism. And he would not shut up.
"I will write a check for a million eagles to either one of you gentlemen if you can show me a single place where the Good Book is mistaken--even a single place, mind you," he said, much too loudly.
Athelstan Helms stirred. He and Walton had had this discussion; both men knew there were such places. Walton, however, was seized by the strong conviction that this was not the occasion to enumerate them. "What say we visit the smoking car, eh, Helms?" he said with patently false joviality.
"Very well," Helms replied. "I am sure Mr. Primrose does not indulge, tobacco being unmentioned in the Holy Scriptures--if not an actual error, surely a grievous omission."
That set Mr. Primrose spluttering anew, but he did not pursue the two Englishmen as they rose and walked down the central aisle. Dr. Walton had accomplished his purpose. "I dread our return," Walton said. "He'll serenade us some more."
"Ah, well," Helms said. "Perhaps he will leave us at peace if we avoid topics zoological and theological."
"And if he doesn't, we can always kill him." Dr. Walton was not inclined to feel charitable.
Despite the thickness of the atmosphere, the smoking car proved more salubrious than the ordinary passenger coach. It boasted couches bolted to the floor rather than the row upon row of hard seats in the other car. Walton lit a cigar, while Athelstan Helms puffed on his pipe. They improved the aroma of the smoke in the car, as most of the gentlemen there smoked harsh, nasty cigarettes.
A stag and a doe watched the train rattle past. They must have been used to the noisy mechanical monsters, for they did not bound off in terror. "More immigrants," Helms remarked.
"I beg your pardon?" his traveling companion said.
"The deer," Helms replied. "But for a few bats--many of them peculiar even by the standards of the Chiroptera--Atlantis was devoid of mammalia before those fishermen chanced upon its shores. In the absence of predators other than men with rifles, the deer have flourished mightily."
"Not an unhandsome country, even if it is foreign," Dr. Walton said--as much praise as any non-English locale this side of heaven was likely to get from him.
"Hard winters on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains, I'm given to understand," Helms said. "We would notice it more if the majority of the trees were deciduous rather than coniferous--bare branches do speak to the seasons of the year."
"That's so," Walton agreed. "I suppose most of the ancestors of the deciduous plants had not yet, ah, evolved when some geological catastrophe first caused Atlantis to separate from Terranova."
"It seems very likely," Helms said. "Mr. Primrose might tell us it was Noah's flood."
Dr. Walton expressed an opinion of Mr. Primrose's intimate personal habits on which he was unlikely to have any exact knowledge from such a brief acquaintance. Athelstan Helms' pipe sent up a couple of unusually large plumes of smoke. Had the great detective not been smoking it, one could almost suspect that he might have chuckled.
Day faded fast. A conductor came through and lit the lamps in the car. Walton's eyes began to sting; his lungs felt as if he were inhaling shagreen or emery paper. Nevertheless, he said, "I don't really care to go back."
"Shall we repair to the dining car, then?" Helms suggested.
"Capital idea," Walton said, and so they did.
Eating an excellent--or at least a tolerable--supper whilst rolling along at upwards of twenty miles an hour was not the least of train travel's attractions. Dr. Walton chose a capon, while Helms ordered beefsteak: both simple repasts unlikely to be spoiled by the vagaries of cooking on wheels. The wines from the west coast of Atlantis they ordered to accompany their suppers were a pleasant surprise, easily matching their French equivalents in quality while costing only half as much.
Halfway through the meal, the train shunted onto a siding and stopped: a less pleasant surprise. When Helms asked a waiter what had happened, the man only shrugged. "I do not know, sir," he replied in a gluey Teutonic accent, "but I would guess an accident is in front of us."
"Damnation!" Walton said. "We shall be late to Thetford."
"We are already late to Thetford. We shall be later," Helms corrected. To the waiter, he added, "Another bottle of this admirable red, if you would be so kind."
* * * *
They sat on the siding most of the night. Word filtered through the train that there had been a derailment ahead. Mr. Primrose was snoring when Helms and Walton returned to their seats. Both Englishmen soon joined him in slumber; sleep came easier when the train stood still. Dr. Walton might have wished for the comfort of a Throckmorton car, with a sofa that made up into a bed and another bunk that swung down from the wall above it, but he did not stay awake to wish for long.
Morning twilight had begun edging night's black certainty with the ambiguity of gray when the train jerked into motion once more. Athelstan Helms' eyes opened at once, and with reason in them. He seemed as refreshed as if he had passed the night in a Throckmorton car--or, for that matter, in his hotel room back in Hanover. Walton seemed confused when he first woke. At last realizing his circumstances and surroundings, he sent Helms a faintly accusing stare. "You're not a beautiful woman," he said.
"I can scarcely deny it," Helms replied equably. "Why you should think I might be is, perhaps, a more interesting question."
If it was, it was one that his friend, now fully returned to the mundane world, had no intention of answering.
Behind them, Mr. Primrose might have been an apprentice sawmill. They took care not to wake him when they went back to the dining car for breakfast. Walton would have preferred bloaters or bangers, but Atlantean cuisine did not run to such English delicacies. He had to make do with fried eggs and a small beefsteak, as he had back in the capital. Helms' choice matched his. They both drank coffee; Atlantean tea had proved shockingly bad even when available.
They were still eating when the train rolled past the scene of the crash that had delayed it. Passenger and freight cars and a locomotive lay on their side not far from the track. Workmen swarmed over them, salvaging what they could. "A bad accident, very bad," Walton murmured.
"Do you know how an Atlantean sage once defined an accident?" Helms inquired. When the good doctor shook his head, Helms continued with obvious relish: "As 'an inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.' Mr. Bierce, I believe his name is, is a clearsighted man."
"Quite," Walton said. "Could you pass me another roll, Helms? I find I'm a peckish man myself this morning."
Little by little, the terrain grew steeper. Stands of forest became more frequent in the distance, though most trees had been cut down closer to the railroad line. Being primarily composed of evergreen conifers, the woods bore a more somber aspect than those of England. Their timbers helped bridge several rivers rushing east out of the Green Ridge Mountains. Other rivers, the larger ones, were spanned with iron and even steel.
"Those streams helped power Atlantis' early factories, even before she was initiated into the mysteries of the steam engine," Helms remarked.
"Helped make her into a competitor, you mean," Dr. Walton said. "The old-time mercantilists weren't such fools as people make them out to be, seems to me."
"As their policies are as dead as they are, it's rather too late to make a fuss over either," Helms said, a sentiment with which his colleague could scarcely quarrel regardless of his personal inclinations.
When Helms and Walton returned to their seats in the passenger car, they passed Henry David Primrose heading for the diner. "Ah, we get a bit more peace and quiet, anyhow," Walton said, and Helms nodded.
By the time Mr. Primrose came back, the train was well up into the mountains. The peaks of the Green Ridge were neither inordinately tall nor inordinately steep, but had formed a considerable barrier to westward expansion across Atlantis because of the thick forest that had cloaked them. Even now, the slopes remained shrouded in dark, mournful green. Only the pass through which the railroad line went had been logged off.
The locomotive labored and wheezed, hauling its cars up after it to what the Atlanteans called the Great Divide. Then, descending once more, it picked up speed. Ferns and shrubs seemed more abundant on the western side of the mountains, and the weather, though still cool, no longer reminded the Englishmen of November in their homeland--or, worse, of November on the Continent.
"I have read that the Bay Stream, flowing up along Atlantis' western coast, has a remarkable moderating effect on the climate on this side of the mountains," Helms said. "That does indeed appear to be the case."
A couple of hours later, the train pulled into Thetford, which had something of the look of an industrial town in the English Midlands. After a sigh of disappointment, Dr. Walton displayed his own reading: "Forty years ago, Audubon says, this was a bucolic village. No more."
"Mais oÃ¹ sont les neiges d'antan?" Helms replied.
As he and Walton rose to disembark, Henry David Primrose said, "Enjoyed chatting with you gents, that I did." Helms let the remark pass in dignified, even chilly, silence; the good doctor muttered a polite unpleasantry and went on his way.
A few other people got out with them. Friends and relatives waited on the platform for some of them. Others went off to the baggage office to reclaim their chattels. A gray-bearded sweeper in overalls pottered about, pushing bits of dust about with his broom. A stalwart policeman came up to the Englishmen. Tipping his cap, he said, "You will be Dr. Helms and Mr. Walton. Hanover wired me to expect you, though I didn't know your train would be so very late. I am Sergeant Karpinski; I am instructed to render you every possible assistance."
"Very kind of you," Walton said, and proceeded to enlighten the sergeant as to which title went with which man.
Athelstan Helms, meanwhile, walked over to the sweeper and extended his right hand. "Good day, sir," he said. "Unless I am very much in error, you will be the gentleman who has attained a certain amount of worldly fame under the sobriquet of the Preacher."
* * * *
"Oh, good heavens!" Dr. Walton exclaimed to Sergeant Karpinski. "Please excuse me. Helms doesn't make mistakes very often, but when he does he doesn't make small ones." He hurried over to his friend. "For God's sake, Helms, can't you see he's nothing but a cleaning man?"
The sweeper turned his mild gray eyes on Walton, who suddenly realized that if anyone had made a mistake, it was he. "I am a cleaning man, sir," he said, and his voice put the good doctor in mind of an organ played very softly: not only was it musical in the extreme, but it also gave the strong impression of having much more power behind it than was presently being used. The man continued, "While cleaning train-station platforms is a worthy enough occupation, in my small way I also seek to cleanse men's souls. For your friend is correct: I am sometimes called the Preacher." He eyed Athelstan Helms with a lively curiosity. "How did you deduce my identity, sir?"
"In the police station in Hanover, I got a look at your photograph," the detective replied. "Armed with a knowledge of your physiognomy, it was not difficult."
"Well done! Well done!" The Preacher had a merry laugh. "And here is Sergeant Karpinski," he went on as the policeman trudged over. "Will you clap me in irons for what you call my crimes, Sergeant?"
"Not today, thanks," Karpinski said in stolid tones. "I don't much fancy touching off a new round of riots here, like. But your day will come, and you can mark my words on that."
"Every man's day will come," the Preacher said, almost gaily, "but I do not think mine is destined to come at your large and capable hands." He turned back to Helms and Walton. "You will want to recover your baggage. After that, shall we repair to someplace rather more comfortable than this drafty platform? You can tell me what brought you to the wilds of Atlantis in pursuit of a desperate character like me."
"Murder is a good start," Walton said.
"No, murder is a bad stop," the Preacher said. "I shall pray for you. I shall ask that your soul be baptized in the spirit of devotion to the universal Lord, that you may be reborn a god."
"I've already been baptized, thank you very much," the doctor said stiffly.
"That is only the baptism of the body," the Preacher replied with an indifferent wave. "The baptism of the spirit is a different and highly superior manifestation."
"Why don't you see to our trunks, Walton?" Helms said. "Their contents will clothe only our bodies, but without them Sergeant Karpinksi would be compelled to take a dim view of us in his professional capacity."
Braced by such satire, Dr. Walton hurried off to reclaim the luggage. Karpinski laughed and then did his best to pretend he hadn't. Even the Preacher smiled. After Dr. Walton returned, the Preacher led them out of the station. The spectacle of two well-dressed Englishmen and a uniformed sergeant of police following a sweeper in faded denim overalls might have seemed outlandish but for the dignity with which the Preacher carried himself: he acted the role of a man who deserved to be followed, and acted it so well that he certainly seemed to believe it himself.
So did the inhabitants of Thetford who witnessed the small procession. None of them appeared to be in the least doubt as to the Preacher's identity. "God bless you!" one man called, lifting his derby. "Holy sir!" another said. A woman dropped a curtsy. Another rushed up, kissed the Preacher's hand, and then hurried away again, her face aglow. Sergeant Karpinski had not been mistaken when he alluded to the devotion the older man inspired.
The Preacher did not lead them to a House of Universal Devotion, as Dr. Walton had expected he would. In fact, he walked past not one but two such houses, halting instead at the walk leading up to what seemed an ordinary home in Thetford: one-story clapboard, painted white. "I doubt we shall be disturbed here," he murmured.
Several large, hard-looking individuals materialized as if from nowhere, no doubt to make sure the Preacher and his companions were not disturbed. None was visibly armed; the way Sergeant Karpinski's mouth tightened suggested that a lack of appearances might be deceiving.
Inside, the home proved comfortably furnished; it might have been a model of middle-class Victorian respectability. A smiling and attractive young woman brought a tray of food into the parlor, stayed long enough to light the gas lamps and dispel the gloom, and then withdrew once more. "A handmaiden of the Spirit?" Athelstan Helms inquired.
"As a matter of fact, yes," the Preacher said. "Those who impute any degree of licentiousness to the relationship have no personal knowledge of it."
Dr. Walton was halfway through a roast-beef sandwich made piquant with mustard and an Atlantean spice he could not name before realizing that was not necessarily a denial of the imputation. "Why, the randy old devil!" he muttered, fortunately with his mouth full.
Helms finished his own sandwich and a glass of lager before asking, "And what of those who impute to you the instigation of a campaign of homicides against backsliders from the House of Universal Devotion and critics of its doctrine and policies?" Sergeant Karpinski raised a tawny eyebrow, perhaps in surprise at the detective's frankness.
That frankness did not faze the Preacher. "Well, what of them?" he said. "We lack the barristers and solicitors to pursue every slanderous loudmouth and every libeler who grinds out his hate-filled broadsheets or spreads his prejudice in some weekly rag."
"You deny any connection, then?" Helms persisted.
"I am a man of God," the Preacher said simply.
"So was the Hebrew king who exulted, 'Moab is my washpot,'" Helms said. "So was the Prophet Mohammed. So were the Crusaders who cried, 'God wills it!' as they killed. Regretfully, I must point out that being a man of God does not preclude violence--on the contrary, in fact."
"Let me make myself plainer, then: I have never murdered anyone, nor did any of the murders to which you refer take place at my instigation," the preacher said. "Is that clear enough to let us proceed from there?"
"Clear? Without a doubt. It is admirably clear," Helms said, though Dr. Walton noted--and thought it likely his friend did as well--that the Preacher had not denied instigating all murders, only those the detective had mentioned. Helms continued, "You will acknowledge a distinction between clarity and truth?"
"Generally, yes. In this instance, no," the Preacher said.
"Oh, come off it," Sergeant Karpinski said, which came close to expressing Dr. Walton's opinion. "Everybody knows those fellows wouldn't be dead if you'd even lifted a finger to keep 'em breathing."
"By which you mean you find me responsible for my followers' excessive zeal," the Preacher said.
"Damned right I do," the sergeant said forthrightly.
Turning to Athelstan Helms, the Preacher said, "Surely, sir, you must find this attitude unreasonable. You spoke of previous religious episodes. Can you imagine blaming all the excesses of Jesus' followers on Him?" He spread his hands, as if to show by gesture how absurd the notion was. Both his voice and his motions showed he was accustomed to swaying crowds and individuals.
"If you will forgive me, I also cannot imagine you rising on the third day," Helms said.
"To be frank, Mr. Helms, neither can I," the Preacher replied. "But the Atlantean authorities seem so intent on crucifying me, they may afford me the opportunity to make the attempt."
"Well, if you had nothing to do with killing those blokes, how come they're dead?" Dr. Walton demanded. "Who did for 'em?" His indignation increased his vehemence while playing hob with his diction.
"Oh, his little chums put lilies in their fists--no doubt of that," Sergeant Karpinski said. "Proving it's a different story, or he'd've swung a long time ago."
"Perhaps the Preacher will answer for himself," Helms said.
"Yes, perhaps he will," the Preacher agreed, speaking of himself in the third person. "Perhaps he will say that it is far more likely the authorities have eliminated these persons for reasons of their own than that his own followers should have had any hand in it. Perhaps he will also say that he does not believe two distinguished English gentlemen hired by those authorities will take him seriously."
"And why the devil should they, when you spew lies the way a broken sewer pipe spews filth?" Righteous indignation filled Karpinski's voice.
"Gently, Sergeant, gently," Helms said, and then, to the Preacher, "Such inflammatory statements are all the better for proof, or even evidence."
"Which I will supply when the time is ripe," the Preacher said. "For now, though, you will want to settle in after your journey here. I understand you have reserved rooms at the Thetford Belvedere?"
"And how do you come to understand that?" Dr. Walton thundered.
"Sergeant Karpinski mentioned it as we came over here," the Preacher answered. Thinking back on it, Walton realized he was right. The Preacher continued, "I might have recommended the Crested Eagle myself, but the Belvedere will do. I hope to see you gentlemen again soon. Unless the sergeant objects, my driver will take you to the hotel."
* * * *
In England, the Belvedere would have been a normal enough provincial hotel, better than most, not as good as some. So it also seemed in Thetford, which made Dr. Walton decide Atlantis might be rather more civilized than he had previously believed. If the Preacher's favored Crested Eagle was superior, then it was. The Belvedere would definitely do.
The menu in the dining room showed that he and Helms were not in England any more. "What on earth is an oil thrush?" he inquired.
"A blackbird far too large to be baked in a pie," Athelstan Helms replied. "A large, flightless thrush, in other words. I have read that they are good eating, and intend making the experiment. Will you join me?"
"I don't know." Walton sounded dubious. "Seems as though it'd be swimming in grease, what?"
"I think not. It is roasted, after all," Helms said. "And do you see? We have the choice of orange sauce or cranberry or starberry, which I take to be something local and tart. They use such accompaniments with duck and goose, which can also be oleaginous, so they should prove effective amelioratives here, too."
With a sigh, the good doctor yielded. "Since you seem set on it, I'll go along. Whatever the bird turns out to be, I'm sure I ate worse in Afghanistan, and I was bl--er, mighty glad to have it."
Lying on a pewter tray, the roasted oil thrush smelled more than appetizing enough and looked brown and handsome, though the wings were absurdly small: to Dr. Walton's mind, enough so to damage the appearance of the bird. The waiter spooned hot starberry sauce--of a bilious green--over the bird. "Enjoy your supper, gentlemen," he said, and withdrew.
To Walton's surprise, he did, very much. The oil thrush tasted more like a gamebird than a capon. And starberries, tangy and sweet at the same time, complemented the rich flesh well. "You could make a formidable wine from those berries, I do believe," Walton said. "Nothing to send the froggies running for cover, maybe, but more than good enough for the countryside."
"In the countryside, I'm sure they do," Helms said. "How much of it comes into the city--how much of it comes to the tax collector's notice--is liable to be a different tale."
"Aha! I get you." Walton laid a finger by the side of his nose and looked sly.
Only a few people shared the dining room with the Englishmen. Not many tourists came to Thetford, while the Belvedere was on the grand side for housing commercial travelers. The stout, prosperous-looking gentleman who came in when Helms and Walton were well on their way to demolishing the bird in front of them could have had his pick of tables. Instead, he made a beeline for theirs. One of Dr. Walton's eyebrows rose, as if to say, I might have known.
"Can I do something for you, sir?" Athelstan Helms asked, polite as usual but with a touch--just a touch, but unmistakable nonetheless--of asperity in his voice.
"You will be the detectives come to give the Preacher the comeuppance he deserves," the man said. "Good for you, by God! High time the House of Universal Depravity has to close up shop once and for all."
Dr. Walton ate another bite of moist, tender, flavorsome flesh from the oil thrush's thigh--the breast, without large flight muscles, was something of a disappointment. Then, resignedly, he said, "I am afraid you have the advantage of us, Mister...?"
"My name is Morris, Benjamin Joshua Morris. I practice law here in Thetford, and for some time my avocation has been chronicling the multifarious malfeasances and debaucheries of the House of Universal Disgust and the so-called Preacher. About time the authorities stop trembling in fear of his accursed secret society and root it out of the soil from which it has sprouted like some rank and poisonous mushroom."
"Perhaps you will do us the honor of sitting down and telling us more about it," Helms said.
"Perhaps you will also order a bite for yourself so we don't have to go on eating in front of you." Dr. Walton didn't intend to stop, but could--with some effort--stay mannerly.
"Well, perhaps I will." Morris waved for the waiter and ordered a beefsteak, blood rare. To the Englishmen, he said, "I see you are dining off the productions of the wilderness. Myself, I would sooner eat as if civilization had come to the backwoods here." He sighed. "The case of Samuel Jones, however, inclines me to skepticism."
"Samuel Jones?" Walton said. "The name is not familiar."
"You will know him better as the Preacher, founder and propagator--propagator, forsooth!--of the House of Universal Deviation." Benjamin Morris seemed intent on finding as many disparaging names for the Preacher's foundation as he could. "How many members of the House his member has sired I am not prepared to say, but the number is not small."
"He embraces his mistresses as they embrace his principles," Athelstan Helms suggested.
Morris laughed, but quickly sobered. "That is excellent repartee, sir, but falls short in regard of truthfulness. For the Preacher has no principles, but ever professes that which is momentarily expedient. No wonder his theology, so-called, is such an extraordinary tissue of lies and jumble of whatever half-baked texts he chances to have recently read. That men can become as gods! Tell me, gentlemen: has mankind seemed more godly than usual lately? It is to laugh!" Like a lot of lawyers, he often answered his own questions.
His beefsteak appeared then, and proved sanguinary enough to satisfy a surgeon, let alone an attorney. He attacked it with excellent appetite, and also did full justice to an Atlantean red with a nose closely approximating that of a hearty Burgundy. After a bit, Helms said, "Few faiths are entirely logical and self-consistent. The early Christian controversies pertaining to the relation of the Son and the Father and to the relation between the divine and the human within Jesus Christ demonstrate this all too well, as does the blood spilled over them."
"No doubt, no doubt," Benjamin Morris said. "But our Lord was not a louche debauchee, and did not compose the Scriptures with an eye toward giving himself as wide a latitude for misbehavior as he could find." He told several salacious stories about the Preacher's earlier days. They seemed more suitable to the smoking car of a long-haul train than to this placid provincial dining room.
Even Walton, who did not love the Preacher, felt compelled to remark, "Such unsavory assertions would be all the better for proof."
"I have documentary proof at my offices, sir," Morris said. "As I told you, I have been following this rogue and his antics for years, like. After supper, I shall go there and bring you what I trust will suffice to satisfy the most determined skeptic."
Having made that announcement, he hurried through the rest of his meal, drained a last glass of wine, and, slapping a couple of golden Atlantean eagles on the table, arose and hastened from the dining room.
Less than a minute later, several sharp pops rang out. "Fireworks?" Walton said.
"Firearms," Athelstan Helms replied, his voice suddenly grim. "A large-bore revolver, unless I am much mistaken." In such matters, Walton knew his friend was unlikely to be.
Sure enough, someone shouted, "Is a doctor close by? A man's been shot!"
* * * *
Still masticating a last savory bite of oil thrush, Walton dashed out into the street to do what he could for the fallen man. Helms, though no physician, followed hard on his heels to learn what he could from the scene of this latest crime. "I hope it isn't that Morris fellow," the good doctor said.
"Well, so do I, but not to any great degree, for it is likely a hope wasted," Helms said.
And sure enough, there lay Benjamin Joshua Morris, with three bullet wounds in his chest. "Good heavens," Walton said. "Beggar's dead as a stone. Hardly had the chance to know what hit him, I daresay."
Sergeant Karpinski popped up out of nowhere like a jack-in-the-box, pistol in hand. Athelstan Helms' nostrils twitched, as if in surprise. "I heard gunshots," Karpinski said, and then, looking down, "Great God, it's Morris!"
"He was just speaking to us of the perfidies of the House of Universal Devotion." Dr. Walton stared at the corpse, and at the blood puddling beneath it on the cobbles. "Here, I should say, we find the said perfidies demonstrated upon his person."
"So it would seem." Sergeant Karpinski scowled at the body, and then in the direction of the house where he and the Englishmen had conversed with the Preacher. "I should have jugged that no-good son of a.... Well, I should have jugged him when I had the chance. A better man might still be alive if I'd done it."
Dr. Walton also looked back toward that house. "You could still drop on him, you know."
Gloomily, the policeman shook his head. "Not a chance he'll still be there. He'll lie low for a while now, pop up here and there to preach a sermon, and then disappear again. Oh, I'll send some men over, but they won't find him. I know the man. I know him too well."
Athelstan Helms coughed. "I should point out that we have no proof the House of Universal Devotion murdered the late Mr. Morris, nor that the Preacher ordered his slaying if some member of the House was in fact responsible for it."
Both his particular friend and the police sergeant eyed him as if he'd taken leave of his senses. "I say, Helms, if we haven't got cause and effect here, what have we got?" Walton asked.
"A dead man," the detective replied. "By all appearances, a paucity of witnesses to the slaying. Past that, only untested hypotheses."
"Call them whatever you want," Karpinski said. "As for me, I'm going to try to run the Preacher to earth. I know some of his hidey-holes--maybe more than he thinks I do. With a little luck ... And I'll send my men back here to take charge of the body." He paused. "Good lord, I'll have to tell Lucy Morris her husband's been murdered. I don't relish that."
"There will be a post-mortem examination on the deceased, I assume?" Helms said. When Sergeant Karpinski nodded, Helms continued, "Would you be kind enough to send a copy of the results to me here at the hotel?"
"I can do that," Karpinski said.
"He also spoke of papers in his office, papers with information damaging to the House of Universal Devotion," Walton said. "Any chance we might get an idea of what they contain?"
Now the police sergeant frowned. "A lawyer's private papers after his death? That won't be so easy to arrange, I'm afraid. I'll speak to his widow about it, though. If she's in a vengeful mood and thinks showing them to you would help make the House fall, she might give you leave to see them. I make no promises, of course. And now, if you'll pardon me..." He tipped his derby and hurried away.
Athelstan Helms stared after him, a cold light flickering in his pale eyes. "I dislike homicide, Walton," the detective said. "I especially dislike it when perpetrated for the purpose of furthering a cause. Ideological homicide, to use the word that seems all the rage on the Continent these days, makes the crime of passion and even murder for the sake of wealth seem clean by comparison."
"And in furtherance of a religious ideology!" Walton exclaimed. "Of all the outmoded things! Seems as if it ought to belong in Crusader days, as you told that so-called Preacher yourself."
"Those who have the most to lose are aptest to strike to preserve what they still have," Helms observed.
"Just so." Dr. Walton nodded vigorously. "When Mr. Samuel Jones found out that poor Morris here was conferring with us in aid of his assorted sordid iniquities"--he chuckled, fancying his own turn of phrase--"he must have decided he couldn't afford it, and sent his assassins after the man."
Two policemen, both large and rotund, huffed up. Each wore on his hip in a patent-leather holster a stout brute of a pistol, of the same model as Sergeant Karpinski's--no doubt the standard weapon for the police in Thetford, if not in all of Atlantis. "That's Morris, all right," one of them said, eyeing the body. "There'll be hell to pay when word of this gets out."
"Yes, and the Preacher to pay it," the other man said with a certain grim anticipation.
The first policeman eyed Helms and Walton. "And who the devil are you two, and where were you when this poor bastard got cooled?"
"This is the famous Athelstan Helms," Dr. Walton said indignantly.
"We were dining in the Belvedere when Mr. Morris was shot," Helms continued. "We have witnesses to that effect. We were conversing with him shortly before his death, however."
"If Mr. What's-his-name Helms is so famous, how come I never heard of him?" the local policeman said.
Because you are an ignorant, back-country lout, went through Dr. Walton's mind. Saying that to the back-country lout's face when said lout was armed and also armored in authority struck him as inexpedient. What he did say was, "Inspector La Strada of Hanover brought us from England to assist in the investigation of the House of Universal Devotion."
"About time they give those maniacs their just deserts," the second policeman said.
"Which reminds me, Helms," the good doctor said. "We were interrupted before we could attend to ours."
"I dare hope ours would require another 's,'" Helms said. He nodded to the policemen. "If you will be kind enough to excuse us...?" The blue-uniformed Atlanteans did not say no. With another polite nod, Helms walked back toward the Belvedere, Dr. Walton at first at his heels and then bustling on ahead of him.
* * * *
After finishing their desserts--which proved not to come up to the hopes Walton had lavished on them--the Englishmen went up to their rooms. "What puzzles me," Walton said, "is how the Preacher could have known Morris would speak to us then, and had a gunman waiting for him as he emerged."
"He would have done better to dispose of the man before we conversed," Helms replied. "If he had a pistoleer waiting for him, why not anticipate and set the blackguard in place ahead of time?"
"Maybe someone in the dining room belongs to the House and hotfooted away to let him know what was toward," Dr. Walton suggested.
"It could be," Helms said. "I wonder what the post-mortem will show."
"Cause of death is obvious enough," Walton said. "Poor devil got in the way of at least three rounds to the chest."
"Quite," Helms said. "But, as always, the devil is in the details."
"Do you suppose the devil is in Mr. Jones?" Walton asked.
"Well, if we were required to dispose of every man who ever made a sport of, ah, sporting with a number of pretty young women, the world would be a duller and a much emptier place," Athelstan Helms said judiciously. "Indeed, given the Prince of Wales' predilections, even the succession might be jeopardized. Murder, however, is a far more serious business, whether motivated by religious zeal or some reason considerably more secular."
"What would you say if the Preacher appeared on our doorstep proclaiming his innocence?" Dr. Walton asked.
"At this hour of the evening? I do believe I'd say, 'Fascinating, old chap. Do you suppose you could elaborate at breakfast tomorrow?'"
The good doctor pulled his watch from a waistcoat pocket. "It is late, isn't it? And I know I didn't get much sleep on that wretched train last night. You, though.... Sometimes I think you are powered by steel springs and steam, not flesh and blood."
"A misapprehension, I assure you. I have never cared for the taste of coal," Helms said gravely.
"Er--I suppose not," Walton said. "Shall we knit up the raveled sleeve of care, then?"
"A capital notion," the detective replied. "And while we're about it, we should also sleep." Walton started to say something in response to that, then seemed to give it up as a bad job. Whether that had been his particular friend's intention did not appear to cross his mind, which, under the circumstances, might have been just as well.
A reasonably restful night, a hearty breakfast, and strong coffee might have put some distance between the Englishmen and Benjamin Morris' murder--had the waiter in the dining room not seated them at the table where they'd spoken with him at supper. Dr. Walton kept looking around as if expecting the attorney to walk in again. Barring an unanticipated Judgment Trump, that seemed unlikely.
"How do you suppose we could reach the Preacher now?" Walton asked. "He surely won't be at that house any more."
"I'll inquire at the closest House of Universal Devotion," Helms answered. "Whether unofficially and informally or not, the preacher there should be able to reach him."
Before the detective and his companion could leave the hotel, a policeman handed Helms an envelope. "The post-mortem on Mr. Morris, sir," he said.
"I thank you." Athelstan Helms broke the seal on the envelope. "Let's see.... Two jacketed slugs through the heart, and another through the right lung. Death by rapid exsanginuation."
"Rapid? Upon my word, yes! I should say so!" Dr. Walton shook his head. "With wounds like those, he'd go down like Bob's your uncle. With two in the heart and one in the lung, an elephant would."
"Jacketed bullets..." Helms turned as if to ask something of the policeman who'd brought the report, but that worthy had already departed.
"Even so, Helms," Walton said. "Granted, they don't mushroom like your ordinary slug of soft lead, but they'll do the job more than well enough, especially in vital spots like that. And they foul the bore much less than a soft slug would."
"I am not ignorant of the advantages," Helms said with a touch of asperity. "I merely wished to enquire ... Well, never mind." He gathered himself and set his cap on his head. "To the House of Universal Devotion."
* * * *
The preacher looked at Helms and Walton in something approaching astonishment. "How extraordinary!" he said. "In the past half hour, I've heard from the Preacher, the police, and now you gentlemen."
"What did the Preacher want?" Helms asked.
"Why, I didn't see him. But I have a message from him to you if you came to call."
"And the police?" Walton inquired.
"They wanted to know if I'd heard from the Preacher." The young man in charge of the local House sniffed. "I denied it, of course. None of their business."
"They might have roughed you up a bit," Walton said. They might have done a good deal worse than that. Whatever one thought of the House of Universal Devotion's theology, the loyalty it evoked could not be ignored.
This particular preacher was thin and pale, certainly none too prepossessing. Nevertheless, when he gathered himself and said, "The tree of faith is nourished by the blood of martyrs, which is its natural manure," he made the good doctor believe him.
"And the message from the Preacher was...?" Athelstan Helms prompted.
"That he is innocent in every particular of this latest horrific crime. That it is but another example of the sort of thing of which he spoke to you in person--you will know what that means, no doubt. That an investigation is bound to establish the facts. That those facts, once established, will rock not only Atlantis but the world."
"He doesn't think small!" Walton exclaimed. "Not half, he doesn't."
"If he thought small, he would not have achieved the success that has already been his," Helms said, and then, to the preacher, "Do you know his current whereabouts?"
"No, sir. What I don't know, they can't interrogate out of me, like. And I never saw the fellow who gave me the message before, either. But it's a true message, isn't it?"
"I believe so, yes," Helms replied.
"I believe the Preacher would make a first-rate spymaster had he chosen to try his hand that instead of founding a religion," Dr. Walton said. "He has the principles down pat."
"Do you believe him?" the young preacher asked anxiously.
"Well, that remains to be seen," Helms said. "Such assertions as he has made are all the better for proof, but I can see how he is in a poor position to offer any. My investigations continue, and in the end, I trust, they will be crowned with success."
"They commonly are," Walton added with more than a hint of smugness.
Athelstan Helms allowed himself the barest hint of a smile. "Those who fail are seldom chronicled--the mobile vulgus clamors after success, and nothing less will do. A pity, that, when failure so often proves more instructive."
"My failure to publish accounts of your failures has been more instructive than I wish it were," Walton said feelingly.
"Let us hope that will not be the case here, then," Helms said. "Onward!--the plot thickens."
Dr. Walton was not particularly surprised to discover Sergeant Karpinski standing on the sidewalk outside the House of Universal Devotion. "We went in there, too," Karpinski said. "We didn't find anything worth knowing. You?"
"Our investigation continues." Helms' voice was bland. "When we have conclusions to impart, you may rest assured that you will be among the first to hear them."
"And what exactly does that mean?" the sergeant asked.
"What it says," the detective replied. "Not a word more; not a word less."
"If you think you can go poking your nose into our affairs, sir, without so much as a by-your-leave--"
"If Mr. Helms believes that, Sergeant, he's bloody well right," Dr. Walton broke in. "He--and I--are in your hole of a town, in your hole of a country, at the express invitation of Inspector La Strada. Without it, believe me, we should never have come. But we will thank you not to interfere with our performing our duties in the manner we see fit. Good day."
Sergeant Karpinski's countenance was eloquent of discontent. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then, shaking his head, walked off with whatever answer he might have given still suppressed.
"Pigheaded Polack," Walton muttered.
"You did not endear yourself to him," Helms said. "The unvarnished truth is seldom palatable--though I doubt whether any varnish would have made your comments appetizing."
"Too bad," the good doctor said, and, if an intensifying participle found its way into his diction, it need not be recorded here.
"I wonder what la Strada will say when word of this gets back to him, as it surely will," Helms remarked.
"The worst he can do is expel us, in which case I shall say, 'Thank you,'" Dr. Watson answered.
"I hope that is the worst he can do to us," Helms said.
"He cannot claim we shot Benjamin Morris: we have witnesses to the contrary," Walton said. "Neither can he claim we shot any of the others whom he alleges the House of Universal Devotion slew: we were safely back in England then. And the sooner we are safely back in England once more, the happier I shall be. Of that you may rest assured."
"I begin to feel the same way," Helms replied. "Nevertheless, we are here, and we must persevere. Onward, I say!"
Their course intersected with that of the police on several more occasions. Thetford's self-declared finest eyed them as if they were vultures at a feast. "I do believe we shall be hard pressed to come by any further information from official sources," Helms said.
"Brilliant deduction!" Dr. Walton said. One of Athelstan Helms' elegant eyebrows rose. Surely the good doctor could not be displaying an ironical side? Surely not...
Gun shops flourished in Thetford. They sold all manner of shotguns and rifles for hunting. That made a certain amount of sense to Walton; the countryside surrounding the city was far wilder than any English woods. Despite the almost certain extinction of honkers, other native birds still thrived there, as did turkeys imported from Terranova and deer and wild boar and foxes brought across the sea from the British Isles and Europe.
The gun shops also sold an even greater profusion of pistols: everything from a derringer small enough to be concealed in a fancy belt buckle to pistols that Dr. Walton, a large, solidly made man, would not have cared to fire two-handed, let alone with only one. "Something like that," he said, pointing to one in the window, "you're better off clouting the other bloke in the head with it. That'd put the quietus on him, by Jove!"
"I daresay," Helms replied, and then surprised his friend by going into the shop.
"Help you with something?" asked the proprietor, a wizened little man in a green eyeshade who looked more like a pawnbroker than the bluff, hearty sort one might expect to run such an establishment.
"If you would be so kind," Helms said. "I'd like to see a police pistol, if you please."
"A .465 Manstopper?" the proprietor said. Walton thought the pistol had an alarmingly forthright name. The man produced one: a sturdy revolver, if not quite so gargantuan as some of the weapons civilians here seemed to carry.
Athelstan Helms broke it down and reassembled it with a practiced ease that made the proprietor eye him with more respect than he'd shown hitherto. "A well-made weapon, sure enough," Helms said. "The action seems a bit stiff, but only a bit. And the ammunition?"
"How keen on getting rid of fouling are you?" the gunshop owner asked.
"When necessary, of course," Helms replied. "I am not averse to reducing the necessity as much as possible."
"Sensible fellow." The proprietor produced a gaudily printed cardboard box holding twenty-five rounds. "These are the cartridges the police use. Sell you this and the pistol for thirteen eagles twenty-five cents."
Dr. Walton expected Helms to decline, perhaps with scorn. Instead, the detective took from his pocket a medium-sized gold coin, three large silver ones, and one medium-sized silver one. "Here you are, and I thank you very much."
"Thank you." The proprietor stowed the money in a cash box. "You'll get good use from that pistol, if you ever need it."
"Oh, I expect I shall," Athelstan Helms replied. "Yes, I expect I shall."
* * * *
"I say, Helms--this is extraordinary. Most extraordinary. Not your usual way of doing business at all," Dr. Walton said, more than a little disapproval in his voice.
"Really?" Helms said. "How is it different?"
Walton opened his mouth for a blistering reply, then shut it again. When he did speak, it was in accusing tones: "You're having me on."
"Am I?" Helms might have been innocence personified but for the hint of a twinkle in his eye and but for the setting: a large lecture hall at Bronvard University, the oldest in Atlantis, a few miles outside of Hanover. The hall was packed with reporters from the capital and from other Atlantean towns with newspapers that maintained bureaus there. Rain poured down outside. The air smelled of wool from the reporters' suits and of the cheap tobacco they smoked in extravagant quantities.
In the middle of the mob of newspapermen sat Inspector La Strada. He stared ruefully at the remains of his bumbershoot, which had blown inside out. Water dripped from the end of his nose; he resembled nothing so much as a drowned ferret.
"Shall we get on with it?" Walton inquired. At Helms' nod, the good doctor took his place behind the lectern more commonly used for disquisitions on chemistry, perhaps, or on the uses of the ablative absolute in Latin. "Gentlemen of the press, I have the high honor and distinct privilege of presenting to you the greatest detective of the modern age, my colleague and, I am lucky enough to say, my particular friend, Mr. Athelstan Helms. He will discuss with you the results of his investigations into the murders of certain opponents of the House of Universal Devotion and of Mr. Samuel Jones, otherwise known as the Preacher, and especially of his investigation into the untimely demise of Mr. Benjamin Morris in Thetford not long ago. Helms?"
"Thank you, Dr. Walton." Helms replaced his fellow Englishman behind the lectern. "I should like to make some prefatory remarks before explicating the solution I believe to be true. First and foremost, I should like to state for the record that I am not now a member of the House of Universal Devotion, nor have I ever been. I consider the House's theology to be erroneous, improbable, and misguided in every particular. Only in a land where democracy flourishes to the point of making every man's judgment as good as another's, wisdom, knowledge, and experience notwithstanding, could such an abortion of a cult come into being and, worse, thrive."
The reporters scribbled furiously. Some of them seemed to gather that he had cast aspersions on the United States of Atlantis. Despite any aspersions, Inspector La Strada sat there smiling as he dripped. Several hands flew into the air. Other reporters neglected even that minimal politeness, bawling out Helms' name and their questions.
"Gentlemen, please," Helms said several times. When that failed, he shouted, "Enough!" in a voice of startling volume. By chance or by design, the acoustics of the hall favored him over the reporters. Having won something resembling silence except for being rather louder, he went on, "I shall respond to your queries in due course, I promise. For now, please let me proceed. Perhaps more questions will occur to you as I do."
Dr. Walton knew he would have been ruder than that. To the good doctor, the reporters were nothing but a yapping pack of provincial pests. To Athelstan Helms, almost all of mankind fell into that category, Atlanteans hardly more than Englishmen.
"It seemed obvious from the beginning that the House of Universal Devotion was behind the recent campaign of extermination against its critics," Helms said. "There can be no doubt that the House has responded strongly in the past to any and all efforts to call it to account for its doctrinal and social peculiarities. Thus a simple, obvious solution presented itself--one obvious enough to draw the notice of police officials in Hanover and other Atlantean cities."
He got a small laugh from the assembled gentlemen of the press. Inspector La Strada laughed, too. Why not? Despite sarcasm, Helms had declared the solution the police favored to be the simple and obvious one. Was that not the same as saying it was true?
It was not, as Helms proceeded to make clear: "Almost every puzzle has a solution that is simple and obvious--simple and obvious and, unfortunately, altogether wrong. Such appears to me to be the case here. As best I have been able to determine, there is no large-scale conspiracy on the part of the House of Universal Devotion to rid the world of its critics--and a good thing, too, or the world would soon become an empty and echoing place."
"Well, how come those bastards are dead, then?" a reporter shouted, careless of anything resembling rules of procedure. Inspector La Strada, Dr. Walton noted, was no longer smiling or laughing.
"Please note that I did not say there was no conspiracy," Athelstan Helms replied. "I merely said there was none on the part of the House of Universal Devotion. Whether there was one against the said House is, I regret to report, an altogether different question, with an altogether different answer."
Walton saw that keeping the proceedings orderly would be anything but easy. Some of the reporters still seemed eager and attentive, but others looked angry, even hostile. As for La Strada, his countenance would have had to lighten considerably for either of those adjectives to apply. As a medical man, Dr. Walton feared the police official was on the point of suffering an apoplexy.
Impassive as if he were being greeted with enthusiasm and applause, Athelstan Helms continued, "To take the particular case of Mr. Benjamin Morris, his killer was in fact not an outraged member of the House of Universal Devotion, but rather one Sergeant Casimir Karpinski of the Thetford Police Department."
Pandemonium. Chaos. Shouted questions and raised hands. A fistfight in the back rows. One question came often enough to stay clear through the din: "How the devil d'you know that?"
"My suspicions were kindled," Helms said--several times, each louder than the last, until his voice finally prevailed, "My suspicions were kindled, I say, when Karpinski repaired to the scene of the crime with astounding celerity, and also smelling strongly of black-powder smoke, such being the propellant with which the caliber .465 Manstopper is charged. The Manstopper is the Thetford Police Department's preferred arm, and the late Mr. Morris was slain with copper-jacketed bullets, which the police department also uses. But the odor of powder was what truly made me begin to contemplate this unfortunate possibility. The nose is sadly underestimated in detection." He tapped his own bladelike proboscis.
"Sounds pretty goddamn thin to me!" a reporter called. Others shouted agreement. "You have any real evidence besides the big nose you're sticking into our affairs?" The gentlemen of the press and Inspector La Strada nodded vigorously.
"I do," Holmes said, calmly still. "Dr. Walton, if you would be so kind...?"
"Certainly." Walton hurried over to the door through which he and his colleague had entered the hall and said, "Bring him in now, if you please."
In came Sergeant Karpinski, a glum expression on his unshaven face, his hands chained together behind him. His escorts were two men even larger and burlier than he was himself: not police officers, but men who styled themselves detectives, though what they did for a living was considerably different from Athelstan Helms' definition of the art.
"Here is Casimir Karpinski," Helms said. "He will tell you for himself whether my deductions have merit."
"I killed Benjamin Morris," Karpinski said. "I'm damned if I'd tell you so unless this bastard had the goods on me, but he does, worse luck. I did it, and I'm not real sorry, either. The House of Universal Devotion needs taking down, and this was a way to do it. Or it would have been, if he hadn't started poking around."
A hush settled over the lecture hall as the reporters slowly realized this was no humbug. They scribbled furiously. "Why do you think the House needs taking down?" Helms asked.
"It's as plain as the nose on my face. It's as plain as the nose on your face, by God," Karpinski replied, which drew a nervous laugh from his audience. "They're a state within a state. They have their own rules, their own laws, their own morals. People are loyal to the Preacher, not to the United States of Atlantis. Time--past time--to bring 'em into line."
"Are these your opinions alone?" the detective inquired.
Karpinski laughed in his face. "I should hope not! Any decent Atlantean would tell you the same."
"The decency of framing the Preacher and his sect for a crime they did not commit I leave to others to expatiate upon," Athelstan Helms said. "But did you act alone, Sergeant, or upon the urging of other 'decent Atlanteans' of higher rank in society?"
"I got my orders from Hanover," Sergeant Karpinski answered. "I got them straight from Inspector La Strada, as a matter of fact."
"That's a lie!" La Strada roared.
"It is not." Helms pulled from an inside jacket pocket a folded square of pale yellow paper. "I have here a telegram found in Sergeant Karpinski's flat--"
Inspector La Strada, his face flushed a deep, liverish red suggestive of extreme choler, pulled from a shoulder holster a large, stout pistol that would have been better carried elsewhere upon his person; even in that moment of extreme tension, Dr. Walton noted that the weapon in question was a Manstopper .465: a recommendation for the model, if one the good doctor would as gladly have forgone. La Strada leveled, or attempted to level, the revolver not at either of the two Englishmen who had uncovered his nefarious machinations, but rather at Sergeant Karpinski, whose testimony could do him so much harm.
He was foiled not by Helms or Walton, but by the reporter sitting to his right. That worthy, possessed of quick wits and quicker reflexes, seized Inspector La Strada's wrist and jerked his hand upward just as the Manstopper discharged. The roar of the piece was astoundingly loud in the enclosed space. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling, followed a moment later by several drops of water; the pistol had proved its potency by penetrating ceiling and roof alike.
Another shot ricocheted from the marble floor several feet to Dr. Walton's left and shattered a window as it left the lecture hall. After that, the gentlemen of the press swarmed over the police inspector and forcibly separated him from his revolver; had they been but a little more forceful, they would have separated him from his right index finger as well. The Atlantean policemen in the hall, chagrin and dismay writ large upon their faces, descended to take charge of their erstwhile superior.
"Sequester all documents in Inspector La Strada's office," Athelstan Helms enjoined them. "Let nothing be removed; let nothing be destroyed. The conspiracy against the House of Universal Devotion is unlikely to have sprung full-grown from his forehead, as Pallas Athena is said to have sprung from that of cloud-gathering Zeus."
"Never you fear, Mr. Helms," a reporter called to him. "Now that we know something's rotten in the state of Denmark, like, we'll be able to run it down ourselves." His allusion, if not Homeric, was at least Shakespearean.
"God, what this'll do to the elections next summer!" another reported said. Then he blinked and looked amazed. "Who can guess now what it'll do? All depends on where La Strada got his orders from." Although he casually violated the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition, his remarks remained cogent.
"Why would anybody need to try to take down the House like that?" yet another man said. "Its members have sinned a boatload of genuine sins. What point to inventing more in the hope that they'll provoke people against the sect?"
"Such questions as those are not so easily solved by detection," Helms replied. "Any remarks I offer are speculative, and based solely on my understanding, such as it is, of human nature. First, the Preacher and his faith continue to attract large numbers of new devotees nearly half a century after he founded the House. His sect, as you rightly term it, is not only a religious force in Atlantis but also a political and an economic force. Those representing other such forces--I name no names--would naturally be concerned about his growing influence in affairs. And a trumped-up killing--or, more likely, a series of them--allows the opposing forces to choose their timing and their presentation of the case against the House, which any possible natural incidents would not. Some of you will perhaps grasp exactly what I mean: those whose papers have been loudest in the cry against the Preacher."
Several reporters looked uncomfortable; one or two might even have looked guilty. One of those who seemed most uncomfortable asked, "If all these charges against the House of Universal Devotion are false, why would Inspector La Strada have brought you over from London? Wasn't he contributing to his own undoing?"
"Why? I'll tell you why, by Jove!" That was the good doctor, not the detective. "Because he underestimated Mr. Athelstan Helms, that's why! He thought Helms would see what he wanted him to see, and damn all else. He thought Helms would give his seal of approval, you might say, to whatever he wanted to do to the House of Universal Devotion. He thought Helms would make it all ... What's the word the sheenies use?"
"Kosher?" Helms suggested, murmuring, "Under the circumstances, an infelicitous analogy."
Dr. Walton ignored the aside. "Kosher!" he echoed triumphantly. "That's it. He thought Helms' seal of approval would make it all kosher! But he reckoned without my friend's--my particular friend's--brilliance, he did. Athelstan Helms doesn't let the wool get pulled over his eyes. Athelstan Helms doesn't see what other blokes want him to see or mean for him to see. Athelstan Helms, by God, sees what's there!"
Athelstan Helms saw the reporters staring at him as if he were an extinct honker somehow magically restored to life--as if he were a specimen rather than a man. He coughed modestly. "The good doctor does me too much honor, I fear. In this case, I count myself uncommonly fortunate."
"Well, what if you are?" a reporter shouted at him, face and voice full of fury. "What if you are, God damn you? What have you just gone and done to Atlantis? Do you count us uncommonly fortunate on account of it? You've gone and given that bearded maniac of a Preacher free rein for the rest of his worthless life!"
Another man stood up and yelled, "Hold your blasphemous tongue! God speaks through the Preacher, not through the likes of you!"
Someone else punched the Preacher's partisan in the nose. In an instant, fresh pandemonium filled the lecture hall. "I think perhaps we should make our exit now," the detective said.
"Brilliant deduction, Helms!" Walton said, and they did.
* * * *
Boarding the Crown of India for the return voyage came as a distinct relief to Helms and Walton. Behind them, the United States of Atlantis heaved with political passions more French, or even Spanish, than British. The Atlantean authorities also refused to pay the sizable fee La Strada had promised them, and laughed at the signed contract Dr. Walton displayed. Under the circumstances, that was perhaps understandable, but it did not contribute to Walton's regard for the republic they were quitting.
"A bloody good job you insisted on return tickets paid in advance," he told Helms. "Otherwise they'd boot us off the pier and let us swim home--and take pot shots at us whilst we were in the water, too."
"I shouldn't wonder," Helms said. "Well, let's repair to our cabin. If the ocean was rough coming here, it's unlikely to be smoother now."
Walton sighed. "True enough. I have a tolerably strong stomach, but even so.... Where have they put us?"
Helms looked at his ticket. "Suite 27, it says. Well, that sounds moderately promising, anyhow."
When they opened the door to Suite 27, however, they found it already occupied by two strikingly attractive young women, one a blonde, the other a brunette. "Oh, dear," Walton said. "Let me summon a steward. There must be some sort of mistake."
The young women shook their heads, curls swinging in unison. "You are Mr. Helms and Dr. Walton, aren't you?" the golden-haired one said.
"Yes, of course they are," the brunette said. "I'm Polly, and she's Kate," she added, as if that explained everything.
Seeing that perhaps it didn't, Kate said, "We're staying in Suite 27, too, you see. The Preacher made sure we would."
"I beg your pardon?" Walton spluttered. "The Preacher, you say?"
"You are handmaidens of the Spirit, I presume?" Helms showed more aplomb.
That's right." Polly smiled. "He is a clever fellow," she said to Kate.
"But...!" Walton remained nonplused. "What are you doing here?"
Polly's expression said he wasn't such a clever fellow. It vexed him; he'd seen that expression aimed his way too often while in Athelstan Helms' company. "Well," Polly said, "the Preacher believes--heavens, everyone knows--the spirit and body are linked. We wouldn't be people if they weren't."
"Quite right," Helms murmured.
"And"--Kate took up the tale again--"the Preacher's mighty grateful to the two of you for all you did for him. And he thought we might show you how grateful he is, like."
"He's mighty grateful," Polly affirmed. "All the way to London grateful, he is. We are."
"Is he? Are you? I say!" Dr. Walton was sometimes slow on the uptake, but he'd definitely caught on now. "This could be a jolly interesting voyage home, what?"
Athelstan Helms was hanging the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the suite's outer door. "Brilliant deduction, Walton," he said.
* * * *
Copyright © 2006 Harry Turtledove