Not Less Than Gods (6 page)

“Not quite, sir.”

“Oh! Well, that makes all the difference, don’t it? Seriously, Ludbridge, we’ll be the most obvious set of spies imaginable.”

“I know,” said Ludbridge. “We’re going to make it a strength.”

Hobson and Pengrove were also Residentials, it transpired, and so it was possible to occupy the gymnasium fairly late in the evenings for calisthenic work, after the public members had gone home. They discovered it was best they train without an audience; the four of them lined up together in exercise singlets presented an alarming spectacle.

Somewhat less disheartening was target practice, at an indoor range some five floors beneath the club. They were given training in archery as well as in the use of minié rifles, revolvers and revolvers fitted with
a curious canister over the barrel that reduced the report of the shot to a dull
pop
. Bell-Fairfax was discovered to be a crack marksman and so, against all expectation, was Pengrove. Hobson practiced diligently and brought his scores up; with grim satisfaction Ludbridge signed them off, and they began the next phase of their training.

One Mr. Tilbury from the Theatre Royal was brought in, who taught them the art of
becoming someone else
. Subtle effects with a minimal use of greasepaint were his specialty; false beards were all very well for disguises, he explained, but really they suited amateurs best. It was far more effective to invent, and then to inhabit, another being entirely. He strode up and down the room before them, and with a few changes of posture and in to nation became in rapid succession a costermonger, a sailor, an elderly businessman, a young girl, a drunken peer, and a bent old hag.

And one Mr. Moore, a conjuror, was brought in, to teach them sleight-of-hand tricks. Appearance, disappearance, illusion, misdirection, and the patter that accompanied it, all could be made to serve deeper matters than vanishing coins or handkerchiefs. He showed them how.

And one Mr. Dabbs was brought in, in manacles by a stone-faced guard, and meekly taught them the art of picking pockets, with a side course in opening locks and general burglary. He assured them his methods were proof against detection; had he not been so foolish as to venture into counterfeiting, on the advice of his mother-in-law, he would have been at liberty still.

Lastly, after many weeks’ study with the aforementioned gentlemen, they made the acquaintance of one Mr. Jack, who was wheeled into the gymnasium by a grinning Ludbridge.

“Good morning, all,” he said. “This is your next tutor.”

“Good God,” said Hobson. Bell-Fairfax and Pengrove looked on, too surprised for words. “What
is
it?”

“A victim,” explained Ludbridge, unfastening the straps that had held Mr. Jack on his wheeled stand. He was an automaton, the size of a man but not remarkably lifelike in appearance, dressed in a shabby suit and tall hat. Ludbridge lifted him free of the stand, with a grunt of effort,
and set him on his feet. He shifted his balance at once, and stood upright.

“Oh, ha-ha,” said Pengrove. “It’s a chap in a mask.”

“Do you really think so?” Ludbridge busied himself with rolling the stand to one side. “Shame you’ll have to kill him, then, isn’t it?”

“Kill him! How?”

“However you please,” said Ludbridge. He gestured at the cabinet of practice blades. “Stab him, if you like. Get a pistol and shoot the beggar. Kill him with your bare hands.
If
you can.”

“It’s all right,” said Bell-Fairfax, who had tilted his head a little on one side as he stared at the automaton. “He’s not alive. He’s some sort of clockwork, I think.”

“Oh, don’t be absurd,” said Pengrove, circling it cautiously. “Look at him, standing up by himself. He’s the image of Spring-heel’d Jack—”

With a whirr, the figure’s head spun around like an owl’s, to glare at Pengrove. Hobson chuckled and went to the cabinet for a saber.

“Just a glorified practice dummy. I’ll do the honors, shall I?”

“Careful, Hobson,” said Bell-Fairfax, watching the automaton with a puzzled look on his face. Pengrove, meanwhile, was entertaining it with a little dance, two steps to the left, three to the right, gradually completing his transit of the thing. Its head kept turning, following him. Hobson advanced from the opposite direction, raising his saber for a head cut.

Abruptly the head spun back round, and the thing pivoted on its heel to step clear of the blow. Its palm came out, flat, to strike Hobson in the face; at the same moment it emitted a piercing screech. Hobson went over like a fallen tree and lay there groaning, clutching his nose as it fountained blood. Bell-Fairfax and Pengrove clapped their hands over their ears, wincing until the siren scream faded.

“I say!” Pengrove lowered his hands. “It’s damned intelligent, all the same.”

“It is indeed,” said Ludbridge, helping Hobson to his feet. “Either of you chaps care to tell me how you’ll do for him?”

“Shoot the bastard,” said Hobson, muffled through his handkerchief.

“I think I shall.” Pengrove fetched out a pepper-pot pistol. He took careful aim at the automaton, whose head swiveled round. Its eyes were lit as from within by a hellish glare. It seemed to regard Pengrove closely and then, in the instant before he pulled the trigger, it sprang into the air. Pengrove’s shot struck the far wall and broke a vacuum lamp. The automaton came down immediately in front of Pengrove, and but for Pengrove’s presence of mind in throwing himself backward, it had clouted him in the same way it had attacked Hobson.

“It
is
Spring-heel’d Jack!” Pengrove cried. “Bloody hell, the lads in Fabrication must have taken him out to Lime house for a few test runs back in ’38, eh?”

The automaton, meanwhile, turned and walked back to the point from which it had started. Pengrove took aim from the floor and fired again, four rapid shots in succession. The first shot knocked the automaton’s hat off. It spun around, neatly dodging the other shots, and bounded toward Pengrove. Bell-Fairfax leaped into its path and swung with his fist, punching its head, which rang like a gong.

The automaton halted, then staggered backward to its starting point. There it revolved smartly on one heel and stood motionless once more. Bell-Fairfax, meanwhile, fell to his knees, clutching his hand and giving vent to a remarkable stream of profanity.

“In the Navy, were you?” remarked Hobson, wide-eyed.

“Broken your hand?” inquired Ludbridge.

“No,” said Edward, shaking it as he glared at the automaton.

“I rather think you must have, from the sound it made.”

“No, sir, I did not. How does the damned thing work? It’s far more complicated than a clock.”

“It is that,” said Ludbridge. “It contains the latest thing in gyroscopes. The ball-and-socket joints are an improved design, with gutta-percha lining and graphite lubrication. There are lenses in the eyes, opening on a sort of camera obscura in the skull. It can receive an image, analyze it, and respond in one of a number of ways. You can’t hear them, but it’s emitting a series of high-pitched notes, and estimating your location from the echoes—”

“I beg your pardon,” said Edward. “I bloody well
can
hear them. They speed up when one of us moves.”

Ludbridge stared at him a moment. “Then you have an advantage the rest of us haven’t. Find a way to use it, Bell-Fairfax,” he said at last.

“Very well.” Edward got to his feet, clenching and opening his hand. “There; it’s piping again.” He feinted a couple of blows, and the automaton, appearing to watch him closely, swayed from side to side in response.

“I saw a copy of Vaucanson’s Excreting Duck once,” remarked Pengrove, from the floor. “Very lifelike. Wasn’t anything like as dangerous. Though it did excrete rather menacingly.”

“Did it?” said Edward, circling the automaton. His gaze became blank, unsmiling, and he never took his eyes from it. “Hobson, if you’d be so kind—would you walk about it in the opposite direction?”

“Confuse it, eh? Delighted.” Hobson, stuffing his handkerchief in his pocket, proceeded to circle the automaton counterclockwise. It responded by rapidly turning its head back and forth, attempting to watch both men at the same time. Ludbridge folded his arms and observed them in silence.

“Ah; the piping’s getting faster, and irregular. Just like a heartbeat. Now, Pengrove,” said Edward, “if you’d just threaten it with the pistol?”

Pengrove rose on his elbow and waved the weapon. “I say, you! Nasty thing!” As the automaton turned to track Pengrove’s movements, Edward lunged at it. It whirled around, flailing steel fists, but Edward caught it about the knees and toppled it. The automaton fell with a horrendous crash and Edward was on it at once, raining a series of blows on its throat, where a skin of canvas impregnated with gutta-percha seemed to conceal vital pipes and tubing.

The automaton’s siren howled, it thrashed and spat blue flame from its mouth, and at last a shower of sparks shot out. Ignoring all these, Edward struck at it relentlessly, until its head parted company with its neck and rolled drunkenly across the floor. The light in its eyes died.

“That’s quite enough,” said Ludbridge, stepping forward. “Fabrication
will weep when they see him. Was it really necessary to tear his head off?”

“How could we be certain we’d killed him otherwise, sir?” Edward got to his feet. He lifted his skinned knuckles to his mouth.

“Yes, but you’ve effectively halted your course of study until they can repair him. Note that it required all three of you to dispatch him! Even if Bell-Fairfax delivered the actual coup de grace. Let’s see that hand, man.”

“It isn’t broken, sir, I promise you.” Edward held it out. Ludbridge inspected it briefly.

“Hm! We’ll let the medicos decide that. You’ll come along with me to the infirmary. Pengrove, Hobson, take our headless friend down to Fabrication. You might want to join us in the hospital afterward, Hobson; get your nose seen to.”

Warily the others lifted Spring-heel’d Jack’s body and strapped it to the wheeled stand. The thing made no protest. Bell-Fairfax followed Ludbridge to the ascending room and they rode it down to the floor on which the hospital was located.

“There’s no need to act the stoic, Bell-Fairfax,” said Ludbridge. “It’s a damned foolish vanity to conceal an injury. You’re not the Spartan lad with the fox.”

“No, sir,” said Bell-Fairfax. The door before them slid open and they emerged into a room furnished with chairs, at the opposite end of which was a counter and window. Several heavily bandaged gentlemen occupied the chairs, placidly engaged in reading copies of
The Times
,
Punch
or
The Illustrated London News
. A young lady in a coif, clearly a nursing sister, was seated beyond the window, engaged in some task or other.

“Hallo, Atkinson,” said Ludbridge to the nearest of the men, who raised his bandaged face. “Trouble with the eye?”

“Broke the damned infrared lens,” said Atkinson glumly.

“Line of duty?”

“No. Went night-shooting in Scotland and the fool bird flew straight into my face. I shall have to be fitted with a new eye.”

“Oh, hard luck! This would be, er, what? Your third?”

“Fifth,” said Atkinson.

“May I be of assistance, Mr. Ludbridge?” inquired the young lady, looking up from her work.

“Yes, thank you, sister.” Ludbridge took Bell-Fairfax’s elbow and steered him to the window. “My friend here requires a radiograph of his right hand.”

“Certainly, Mr. Ludbridge.” The young lady gazed intently into a roundel of blue glass mounted in a cabinet in a brass frame, rather like a ship’s porthole. Her hands moved swiftly over something like a spinet’s keyboard, but with a great many more keys; instead of music being produced, glowing letters appeared and floated in the blue depths of the glass.

“The radiography room is presently unoccupied. I shall send a notice to the technician. What is the gentleman’s name, please?”

“Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax,” said he, with a musical quality to his voice Ludbridge hadn’t noticed before. The sister looked around as if startled. Bell-Fairfax smiled at her. She returned his smile, blushing prettily, and turned back to her keyboard to cover her confusion; but the corner of the smile could still be glimpsed, just beyond the snow-white edge of her coif.

“The hand has not been fractured,” announced the radiography technician. His voice came hollowly from the tiny dark room without which Ludbridge sat with Bell-Fairfax, who had thrust his arm through an aperture in the wall into a box mounted on the other side. Beyond a thick pane of glass they beheld the technician, armored in long coat quilted with lead and a goggled helmet, and a lit image on the opposite wall: an immense dark skeletal hand, rendered somewhat less fearsome by the commonplace detail of a shirt button on the wrist.

“Are you certain?” Ludbridge was incredulous. “He smashed his hand into steel.”

“Quite certain,” said the technician, gesturing at the image. “Bruising,
yes, and minor abrasions, but no fractures. Observe the abnormally dense structure of the bones.” Edward, who had been smirking rather, looked up.

“What d’you mean by
abnormal
?” he demanded. The hand in the image clenched into a skeletal fist.

“Precisely what I said,” said the technician. He turned his head to regard them, with the skeletal image reflected in his goggled optics. “Note, further, the superior attachment of the lumbrical musculature. I should very much like an opportunity to study your skeleton, young man.”

“I regret, sir, that I am unable to oblige you at this time,” said Edward, narrowing his eyes.

“Clean bill of health, then, Deane?” Ludbridge got to his feet. “Thank you. Come along, Bell-Fairfax. We’ll just have the sister apply an ointment to those knuckles, shall we? And then, I think, upstairs for a brandy.”

He watched Bell-Fairfax as they rode up together in the ascending room, and thought:
He knows he differs from other men, and he doesn’t like it—not for all his arrogance. Could be useful, I suppose.

“I believe you’re ready for a challenge, gentlemen,” said Ludbridge. Bell-Fairfax, who had been pounding away at a leather punching bag, lowered his fists; Hobson and Pengrove stood back and removed their fencing masks.