Homunculus (4 page)

Darkened roof rafters angled sharply away overhead, stabilized by several great joists that spanned the twenty-foot width of the shop and provided avenues along which tramped any number of mice, hauling bits of debris and working among the timbers like elves. Hanging from the joists were no end of marvels: winged beasts, carved dinosaurs, papier-mâché masks, odd paper kites and wooden rockets, the amazed and lopsided head of a rubber ape, an enormous glass orb filled with countless tiny carven people. The kites, painted with the visages of birds and deep-water fish, had hung among the rafters for years, and were half obscured by cobweb and dust amid the brown stains of dirty rainwater. Great shreds had been chewed away by mice and bugs to build homes among the hanging debris.

The red pine floor, however, was swept clean, and innumerable tools hung over two work benches, unordered but neat, brass and iron glinting dully in the light of a half-dozen wood and glass sconces. Coughing into his sleeve, Keeble cleared a score of mauve seashells and a kaleidoscope from the benchtop, then swept it clean with a horsehair brush, the handle of which was elegantly carved into the form of an elongated frog.

St. Ives admired it aloud.

“Like that do you?” asked Keeble.

“Quite,” admitted St. Ives, an admirer of William Morris’s philosophy concerning beauty and utility.

“Press its nose”

“Pardon me?”

“Its nose,” said Keeble. “Press it. Give it a shove with your fingertip.”

St. Ives dubiously obeyed, and the top of the frog’s head, from nose to mid-spine, slid back into its body, revealing a long, silver tube. Keeble pulled it out, unscrewed a cap at the end, found two glasses wedged in behind a heap of wooden planes, and from the tube poured an equal share of liquor into each. St. Ives was astonished.

“So what have you got?” asked Keeble, draining his glass and hiding it away once again.

“The oxygenator. Finished, I believe. I’m counting on you for the rest. It’s the last of the lot. The rest of the ship is ready. We’ll launch it in May if the weather clears up.” St. Ives unrolled his drawing onto the benchtop, and Keeble leaned over it, peering intently at the lines and figures through startlingly thick glasses.

“Helium, is it?”

“And chlorophyll. Powdered. There’s an intake here and a spray mechanism and filter there. The clockworks sit in the base -a seven-day works should do it, at least for the first flight.” St. Ives sipped at his glass and looked up at Keeble. “Birdlip’s engine: could it be duplicated on this scale?”

Keeble pulled off his glasses and wiped them on a handkerchief. He shrugged. “Perpetual motion is a tricky business, you know -rather like separating an egg from its shell without altering the shape of either, and then suspending the two there, one a quivering, translucent ovoid, the other a seeming solid, side by side. It’s not done in a day. And the whole thing is relative, isn’t it? True perpetual motion is a dream, although a sage named Gustatorius claimed to have produced it alchemically in 1410 in the Balkans, for the purpose of continually turning the back lens of a kaleidoscope. A wonderful idea, but alchemists tend to be frivolous, taken on the whole. Birdlip’s engine, though, is running down. I’m afraid his appearance this spring may be his last.”

St. Ives glanced up sharply. “Are you?”

“Yes indeed. When it passed five years ago it was low, fearfully so, and far to the north of its passing in ’65. So I’ve a suspicion that the engine is declining. The blimp may well drop into the sea, but I rather think it’s tending toward Hampstead where it was launched. There’s a homing element in the engine; that’s what I think. A chance product of its design, not anything I intended”

St. Ives rubbed his chin, unwilling to let Keeble’s revelation push him off his original course. “But can it be miniaturized? Birdlip has been up for fifteen years. In that time I can easily reach Mars, Saturn even, and return.”

“Yes, in a word. Look at this.” Keeble slid open a drawer and pulled out a wooden box. The joints were clearly visible, and the box was painted with symbols that appeared to be Egyptian hieroglyphs - walking birds and amphibians, eyeballs peering out of pyramids - but there was no sign of a hinge or a latch.

It immediately occurred to St. Ives that the box was a tamperproof bottle of some sort, perhaps a tiny, self-contained still, and that he would be asked to poke the nose of a painted beast in order to reveal an amber pool of Scotch whisky. But Keeble set the box squarely atop the bench, spun it round forty-five degrees or so, and the lid of the box opened on its own.

St. Ives watched as the lid rose and then fell back. From out of the depths of the box rose a strangely authentic-looking miniature cayman alligator, its long, toothed snout opening and shutting rhythmically. Four little birds followed, one at each corner, and the cayman snapped up and devoured the birds one by one, then grinned, rolled its eyes, made a sound like a rusty hinge, and sank into its den. After a ten-second pause, up it rose again, followed by miraculously restored birds, fated to be devoured over and over again into infinity. Keeble shut the lid, rotated the box a few degrees farther along, and smiled at St. Ives. “It’s taken me twelve years to perfect that, but it’s quite as workable now as is Birdlip’s engine. It’s for Jack’s birthday. He’ll be eighteen soon - fifteen years he’s been with us - and he’s the only one, I fear, who sees these things with the right sort of eye.”

“Twelve years it took?” St. Ives was disappointed.

“It could be done more quickly now,” said Keeble, “but it’s fearsomely expensive.” He was silent for a moment while he put the box away in its drawer. “I’ve been approached, in fact, about the device - about the patent, actually.”

“Approached?”

“By Kelso Drake. He seems to have dreams of propelling entire factories with perpetual motion devices. I haven’t any idea how he got onto them in the first place.”

“Kelso Drake!” cried St. Ives. He almost shouted, “Again!” but hesitated at the melodramatic sound of it and the moment passed. It was an odd coincidence, though, to be sure. First Kraken’s suspicion of Drake’s possessing the alien craft, and now this. But there could hardly be a connection. St. Ives pointed at the plans lying on the bench. “How long then, a month?”

“I should think so,” said Keeble. “That should do nicely. How long are you in London?”

“Until this is accomplished. Hasbro stayed on in Harrogate. I’ve got rooms at the Bertasso in Pimlico.”

Keeble, winking at St. Ives, began unscrewing the handle of a heavy chisel with an iron two inches wide. There was a bang at the casement overhead, as if it had been suddenly blown closed in the wind. Keeble dropped the chisel in surprise, the inevitable liquor within the handle flowing out over the drawing of the oxygenator device.

“Wind,” said St. Ives, himself shaking from the sudden start. But just as he mouthed the word, a bolt of lightning lit the night sky, illuminating a shadowy face that peered in over the sill, and precipitating a wash of sudden, heavy rain.

Keeble cried out in horror and surprise. St. Ives jumped across to the tilted stepladder that led to the boxy little gable. There was a shout from above - a cry actually - and the sound of something scraping across the slates. St. Ives flung open the window in the face of the rain, and climbed out into the night, just as a head and shoulders disappeared over the edge of the roof.

“I’ve got him!” came a shout from below, the voice of Jack Owlesby, and St. Ives started toward it, thinking to follow the man down. But the slick roof would almost certainly land him in the road, and he could just as easily use the stairs as Keeble had done. As he clambered back in at the casement there was another shout and a creaking and snapping, followed by curses and the swish of tearing vegetation.

St. Ives bolted for the stairs, taking them two at a time, passing a bewildered Winnifred Keeble on the second-floor landing. Further cries drew him on toward the gaping front door and into the street where Keeble wrestled with the marauder, the two of them slogging through an ankle-deep puddle.

Lights flared on in Powers’ shop, then abruptly winked out again, then back on. Windows slammed open along the street, and cries of “Pipe down!” and “Shut yer gob!” rang out, but none of them louder than Keeble’s shouts of pain. He held his assailant round the chest, having grappled the man from behind as he attempted to flee, and the man stamped the toymaker’s toe with the heel of his boot, unable to shake Keeble off.

St. Ives rushed at the pair through the rain, hollering for his friend to hold on, as the criminal - a garret thief, likely - pulled the both of them down the road. Captain Powers, just then, erupted from the mouth of the tobacco shop, stumping along on his peg leg and waving a pistol.

Just as St. Ives drew near, thinking to throw his coat over the thief’s head, Keeble set him free and reeled away, hopping on one foot toward the curb. St. Ives’ coat, flung like a gill net, fluttered into the mud of the roadway, and the man was gone, loping up Spode Street into the night. Captain Powers aimed his pistol at the man, but the range was too great for any but a chance hit, and the Captain wasn’t one to be cavalier with his shooting. St. Ives dashed after the retreating figure, leaping onto the pavement in front of the pipe shop, then nearly colliding with a cloaked woman who appeared out of an adjacent alley, as if, perhaps, she’d come along the short cut from Piccadilly. St. Ives dodged into a wall, and his chase was at an end, the criminal disappearing utterly, his footfalls dying away. St. Ives turned to apologize to the woman, but there was nothing to see but the dark tweed of her cloak and hood, receding into the gloom along Jermyn. A gust of wind whistled along after her, rippling the surface of puddles beneath gaslamps. And on it, unseasonably cold, came the last quick scatter of predawn raindrops.

TWO

THE TRISMEGISTUS CLUB

S
t. Ives had always felt at home in Captain Powers’ shop, although he would have been in a hard way to say just how. His own home - the home of his childhood - hadn’t resembled it in the slightest. His parents had prided themselves in being modern, and would brook no tobacco or liquor. His father had written a treatise on palsy, linking the disease to the consumption of meat, and for three years no meat crossed the threshold. It was a poison, an abomination, carrion - like eating broiled dirt, said his father. And tobacco: his father would shudder at the mention of the word. St. Ives could remember him standing atop a crate beneath a leafless oak, he couldn’t say just where - St. James’ Park, perhaps - shouting at an indifferent crowd about the evils of general intemperance.

His theories had declined from the scientific to the mystical and then into gibberish, and now he wrote papers still, sometimes in verse, from the confines of a comfortable, barred cellar in north Kent. St. Ives had decided by the time he was twelve that intemperance in the pleasures of the senses was, in the main, less ruinous than was intemperance along more abstract lines. Nothing, it seemed to him, was worth losing your sense of proportion and humor over, least of all a steak pie, a pint of ale, and a pipe of latakia.

All of which explained, perhaps, why the Captain’s shop struck him so absolutely agreeably. From one angle it was admittedly close and dim, and there was no profit examining the upholstery on the several stuffed chairs and settee that were wedged together toward the rear of the shop. The springs which here and there protruded from rents in the upholstery and which carried on them tufts of horsehair and cotton wadding had, in their day, quite possibly been crowning examples of their type. And the Oriental carpets scattered about might have been worthy of a temple floor fifty or sixty years earlier.

Great pots of tobacco stood atop groaning shelves, now and then separated by a row of books, all tilted and stacked and quite apparently having nothing at all to do with tobacco, but being, it seemed to St. Ives, their own excuse - a very satisfactory thing. Everything worth anything, he told himself, was its own excuse. Three or four lids were askew on the tobacco canisters, which leaked an almost steamy perfume into the still air of the room.