"Here's a conundrum!" the leader announced, in the elaborate tone of a man casting pearls of wit before swine. "Just how very lushed, how utterly well-pissed indeed, can four London pigeons be?" He raised his voice. "Can't you smell that dreadful stench down there?"
   "Surely!" Mallory said. "But we want to see the India Docks!"
   "Why?" The word was cold.
   Mallory laughed harshly. "Because it's full of things we want, ain't it? Stands to reason, don't it?"
   "Things like clean linen?" said one of the other men. There was laughter, mixed with grunts and coughing.
   Mallory laughed too, and slapped his naked chest. "Why not! Can you lads help us? Throw us down a rope or the like!"
   The leader's eyes narrowed between his paisley wraps, and he tightened his grip on the pistol-butt. "You're no sailor! A jack-tar never says 'rope.' Rather, he always says line'!"
   "What's it to you, what I am?" Mallory shouted, scowling up at the man. "Throw us a rope! Or a ladder! Or a bleeding balloon! Or else go to hell!"
   "Jolly right!" Tom chimed in, his voice shaking. "Who needs you lot, anyway!"
   The leader turned, his men vanishing with him. "Hurry up!" Mallory bellowed, as a parting shot. "You can't keep all that fancy swag to yourselves, you know!"
   Brian shook his head. "Jesus, Ned," he whispered. "This is a damn tight pinch!"
   "We'll pass as looters," Mallory said quietly. "We'll pose as drunken rascals, primed for any kind of mischief! We'll join their ranks, and make our way to Swing!"
   "What if they ask us questions, Ned?"
   "Act stupid."
   "Halloo!" came a shrill voice from above.
   "What's that?" Mallory cried roughly, looking up. It was a masked and scrawny boy of fifteen years or so, balanced atop the pilings with a rifle in his hands.
   "Lord Byron's dead!" the boy yelled.
   Mallory was dumbstruck.
   Tom shrilled out in the silence. "Who says he is?"
   "It's true! Old bastard's kicked the bucket, he's dead as mutton!" The boy laughed in giddy delight, and capered along the edge of the pilings with his rifle waggling over his head. He vanished with a leap.
   Mallory found his voice. "Surely not."
   "No," Fraser agreed.
   "Not likely, anyway."
   "Wishful thinking on the part of these anarchists," Fraser suggested.
   There was a long, empty silence.
   "Of course," Mallory said, tugging his beard, "if the Great Orator truly is dead, then that means…" Words failed him in a foundering rush of confusion, but the others watched Mallory for guidance, silent and expectant. "Well…," Mallory said, "the death of Byron would mark the end of an age of greatness!"
   "It needn't mean much at all," Fraser objected, his voice under firm control. "There are many men of great talent in the Party. Charles Babbage yet lives! Lord Colgate, Lord Brunel… the Prince Consort for instance. Prince Albert is a sound and thoughtful man."
   "Lord Byron can't be dead!" Brian burst out. "We're standing in stinking mud, believing a stinking lie!"
   "Quiet!" Mallory commanded. "We'll simply have to suspend any judgment on this matter until we have firm evidence!"
   "Ned's right," nodded Tom. "The Prime Minister would have wanted it that way! That's the scientific method. That was what Lord Byron always taught us… "
   A thick, tarred rope, its end knotted in a fat noose, came snaking down the wall. The anarchist lieutenant—the dainty man with the paisley kerchiefs—posed one bent leg atop the wall, with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. "Put your arse in that, my friend," he suggested, "and we'll hoist you up in a trice!"
   "I thank you kindly!" Mallory said. He waved with cheery confidence and stepped into the noose.
   When the tug came, he braced his mud-caked shoes against the slick and nasty timbers, and stamped his way up, and over the top.
   The leader tossed the emptied noose back down, with a kid-gloved hand. "Welcome, sir, to the august company of the vanguard of mankind. Permit me, under the circumstances, to introduce myself. I am the Marquess of Hastings." The self-styled Marquess bowed slightly, then struck a pose, chin cocked, one gloved fist poised on his hip.
   Mallory saw that the fellow was in earnest.
   The title of Marquess was a relic from the years before the Rads, yet here was a young pretender of some sort, a living fossil, alive and in command of this vipers' crew! Mallory could scarcely have been more startled to see a young plesiosaur lift its snaky head from the depths of the stinking Thames.
   "Lads," drawled the young Marquess, "pour some of that Cologne over our pungent friend! If he does anything stupid, you know what to do."
   "Shoot him?" someone blurted, idiotically.
   The Marquess winced elaborately—an actor's gesture indicating a breach of taste. A boy in a stolen copper's helmet and a ripped silk shirt slopped chill Cologne from a cut-glass bottle over Mallory's bare neck and back.
   Brian rose next, at the end of the rope. "Those are soldier's trousers, under that muck," the Marquess observed. "Absent without leave, comrade?"
   Brian shrugged mutely.
   "Enjoying your little holiday in London?" Brian nodded like a fool.
   "Give this filthy personage new trousers," the Marquess commanded. He looked about his little troupe of six, who were once again lowering the line with the clumsy enthusiasm of a May Day tug-o'-war. "Comrade Shillibeer! You're about this man's size—give him your trousers."
   "Aw, but Comrade Markiss—"
   "To each according to his needs. Comrade Shillibeer! Doff the garment at once."
   Shillibeer climbed clumsily out of his trousers and proffered them up. He wore no undergarments, and he tugged nervously at his shirt-tails with one hand.
   "For heaven's sake," the Marquess said quizzically, "must I tell you sheepish dullards every little thing?" He pointed sharply to Mallory. "You! Take Shillibeer's place and haul that line. You, soldier—no longer the oppressor's minion, but a man entirely free!—put on Shillibeer's trousers. Comrade Shillibeer, quit that wriggling. You have nothing of which to be ashamed. You may go at once to the general depot for fresh garments."
   "Thank you, sir!"
   " 'Comrade,' " the Marquess corrected. "Get something nice, Shillibeer. And bring more Cologne."
   Tom came up next. Mallory helping with the heaving. The bandits were badly hampered by their clattering, poorly slung rifles. These were general-issue Victoria carbines, heavy single-shot relics now consigned to native troops in the Colonies. The rioters were rendered yet more clumsy by fearsome kitchen-knives and home-made truncheons, stuffed at random into their looted finery. They wore gaudy scarves, sweaty silks, Army bandoliers, and more resembled Turkish bashi-bazouks than any kind of Briton. Two of them were scarcely more than boys, while another pair were thick-set, lumpish, thievish rascals, sodden with drink. The last, to Mallory's continued surprise, was a slender, silent Negro, in the quiet dress of a gentleman's valet.
   The Marquess of Hastings examined Tom. "What is your name?"
   "Tom, sir."
   The Marquess pointed. "What's his name?"
   "Ned."
   "And him?"
   "Brian," Tom said. "I think…"
   "And what, pray, is the name of that grim-looking cove below, looking so awfully much like a copper?"
   Tom hesitated.
   "Don't you know?"
   "He never gave us any proper name," Mallory broke in. "We just call him the Reverend."
   The Marquess glared at Mallory.
   "We only met the Reverend today, sir," Tom apologized glibly. "We ain't what you'd call bosom pals."
   "Suppose we leave him down there, then," the Marquess suggested.
   "Haul him up," Mallory countered. "He's clever."
   "Oh? And what of you, Comrade Ned? You're not half so stupid as you pretend, it seems. And you're not very drunk."
   "Then give me a drink," Mallory said boldly. "And I could do with one of them carbines too, if you're divvying loot."
   The Marquess took note of Mallory's pistol, then cocked his masked head and winked, as if they were sharing a joke.
   "All things in time, my eager friend," he said. He waved his neat gloved hand. "Very well. Haul him."
   Fraser rose within the noose. "So, 'Reverend,' " said the Marquess, "what, pray, might be your denomination?"
   Fraser shook the rope loose and stepped out. "What do you think, guv'nor? I'm a bleedin' Quaker!"
   There was evil laughter. Fraser, pretending a loutish pleasure at the others' fun, shook his gingham-masked head. "No," he rasped, "no Quaker I, for I'm a Panty-sucker!"
   The laughter stopped short.
   "Panty-sucker," Fraser insisted, "one o' them yellow-back Yankee ranters—"
   The Marquess broke in with chill precision. "A Pantisocrat, do you mean? That is to say, a lay preacher of the Susquehanna Phalanstery?"
   Fraser stared dumbly at the Marquess.
   "I refer to the Utopian doctrines of Professor Coleridge and Reverend Wordsworth," the Marquess persisted, with gentle menace.
   "Right," Fraser grunted, "one o' them."
   "That seems to be a copper's sling and pistol that you carry, my pacifistic Pantisocrat friend."
   "Got it from a copper, didn't I?" He paused. "A dead'un!"
   There was laughter again, broken with coughs and grunts.
   The boy standing next to Mallory elbowed one of the older louts. "This Stink's turning me head, Henry! Can't we hook it?"
   "Ask the Marquess," Henry said.
   "You ask 'im," the boy wheedled, "he always makes such fun o' me… "
   "Harken, now!" said the Marquess. "Jupiter and I shall escort the new recruits to the general depot. The rest of you shall continue shore patrol."
   The remaining four groaned in dissent.
   "Don't deviate," the Marquess chided, "you know that all the comrades get a turn at river-duty, same as you."
   The Marquess, followed closely by the Negro, Jupiter, led the way along the embankment. It astonished Mallory that the fellow would turn his back on four armed strangers, an act of either arrant foolishness or sublimely careless bravery.
   Mallory traded silent glances, full of meaning, with Tom, Brian, and Fraser. All four still bore their weapons, the anarchists having not even troubled to confiscate them. It would be the work of moments to shoot their guide in the back, and perhaps the Negro too, though the black was unarmed. A vile business, though, striking from behind, though perhaps a necessity of war. But the others were shifting itchily as they walked, and Mallory realized that they looked to him to do the deed. This venture had become his, now, and even Fraser had bet his life on the fortunes of Edward Mallory.
   Mallory edged forward, matching his stride with that of the Marquess of Hastings. "What's in this depot of yours, Your Lordship? A deal of fine loot, I should hope."
   "A deal of fine hope, my looting friend! But never you mind that. Tell me this. Comrade Ned—what would you do with loot, if you had it?"
   "I suppose that might depend on what it was," Mallory ventured.
   "You'd carry it back to your rat-warren," the Marquess surmised, "and sell it for a fraction of its worth to a fencing-Jew, and spend the lot of that on drink, to wake, in a day or two, in a filthy station-house, with a copper's foot on your neck."
   Mallory stroked his chin. "What would you do with it, then?"
   "Put it to use, of course! We shall use it in the cause of those who gave it value. By that, I mean the common-folk of London, the masses, the oppressed, the sweated labor, those who produce all the riches of this city."
   "That's a queer sort of talk," Mallory said.
   "The revolution does not loot, Comrade Ned. We sequester, we commandeer, we liberate! You and your friends were drawn here by a few imported gewgaws. You think to carry off what your hands can clutch in a few moments. Are you men, or magpies? Why settle for a pocketful of dirty shillings? You could own London, the modern Babylon herself! You could own futurity!"
   " 'Futurity,' eh?" said Mallory, glancing back at Fraser. Above his gingham mask the policeman's eyes showed unmitigated loathing.
   Mallory shrugged. "How much tin will a quart of 'futurity' fetch, Yer Lordship?"
   "I'll thank you not to call me that," the Marquess said sharply. "You address a veteran of popular revolution, a people's soldier who takes pride in the simple title of 'comrade.' "
   "Begging your pardon, I'm sure."
   "You're not a fool, Ned. You can't mistake me for a Rad Lord. I'm no bourgeois meritocrat! I am a revolutionary, and a mortal enemy by blood and conviction of the Byron tyranny and all its works!"
   Mallory coughed harshly, cleared his throat. "All right then," he said in a new and sharper voice. "What's all this talk about? Seizing London—you can't be serious! That hasn't been done since William the Conqueror."
   "Read your history, friend!" the Marquess retorted. "Wat Tyler did it. Cromwell did it. Byron himself did it!" He laughed. "The People Risen have seized New York City! The working-people rule Manhattan as we walk and speak here! They have liquidated the rich. They have burned Trinity! They have seized the means of information and production. If mere Yankees can do that, then the people of England, far more advanced along the course of historical development, can do it with even greater ease."
   It was clear to Mallory that the man—the lad, rather, for beneath that mask and swagger he was very young—believed this evil madness with a whole heart. "But the Government," Mallory protested, "will send in the Army."
   "Kill their officer-class, and the Army rank-and-file will rise with us," the Marquess said coolly. "Look at your soldier-friend Brian there. He seems happy enough in our company! Aren't you, Comrade Brian?"
   Brian nodded mutely, waving a filth-smeared hand.
   "You don't yet grasp the genius of our Captain's strategy," the Marquess said. "We stand in the heart of the British capital, the one area on Earth that Britain's imperial elite are unwilling to devastate in the pursuit of their evil hegemony. The Rad Lords will not shell and burn their own precious London to quell what they falsely think a period of passing unrest. But!" He raised one gloved forefinger. "When we mount the barricades throughout this city, then they will have to struggle hand-to-hand with an aroused working-class, men nerved to the marrow with the first true freedom they have ever known!"
   The Marquess stopped a moment, wheezing for breath at the foetid air. "Most of the oppressor-class," he continued, coughing, "have already fled London, to escape the Stink! When they attempt to return, the risen masses will meet them with fire and steel! We will fight them from the roof-tops, from doorways, alleyways, sewers, and rookeries!" He paused to dab his nose with a snotty kerchief from his sleeve. "We will sequester every sinew of organized oppression. The newspapers, the telegraph lines and pneumatic tube-ways, the palaces and barracks and bureaux! We will put them all to the great cause of liberation!"
   Mallory waited, but it seemed that the young fanatic had at last run out of steam. "And you want us to help you, eh? Join this people's army of yours?"
   "Of course!"
   "What's in it for us, then?"
   "Everything," the Marquess said. "Forever."
   There were handsome ships moored inside the West India Docks, tangled rigging and steamer-stacks. The water within the Docks, a byway from the sewage-flow of the Thames, did not seem quite so foul to Mallory, until he saw, floating amid thin wads of slime, the bodies of dead men. Murdered sailors, the skeleton crews that shipping-lines left to guard their ships in harbor. The corpses floated like driftwood, a sight to chill the marrow. Mallory counted fifteen bodies, possibly sixteen, as he followed the Marquess along the gantry-shrouded wooden dockway. Perhaps, he theorized, most of the crews had been killed elsewhere, or else recruited to swell the ranks of Swing's piracy. Not all sailors were loyal to order and authority. The Ballester-Molina pistol was a cold weight against Mallory's gut.
   The Marquess and his black led them blithely on. They passed a deserted ship where an ugly vapor, steam or smoke, curled up ominously from the hatches below-decks. A quartet of anarchist guards, their carbines propped in a crude stack, played cards atop a barricade of bales of looted calico.
   Other guards, drunken, whiskered wretches in bad plug-hats and worse trousers, armed derelicts, slept in toppled barrows and loading-sledges, amid a swelling debris of barrels, baskets, hawser-coils and loading-ramps, heaps of black coal for the silenced steam-derricks. From the warehouses across the water, to the south, came a ragged volley of distant popping gunshots. The Marquess showed no interest, did not break stride, did not even look.
   "You overpowered all these ships?" Mallory inquired. "You must have a deal of men. Comrade Marquess!"
   "More by the hour," the Marquess assured him. "Our men are combing Limehouse, rousing every working family. Do you know the term 'exponential growth, ' Comrade Ned?"
   "Why, no," Mallory lied.
   "Mathematical clacking-term," the Marquess lectured absently. "Very interesting field. Engine-clacking, no end of use in the scientific study of socialism… " He seemed distracted now, nervous. "Another day of Stink like this and we'll have more men than the London police-force! You're not the first coves I've recruited, you know! I'm quite an old hand at it, by now. Why, I wager even my man Jupiter could do it!" He slapped the shoulder of the Negro's livery-coat.
   The Negro showed no reaction. Mallory wondered if he were deaf-and-dumb. He wore no breathing-mask. Perhaps he did not need one.
   The Marquess led them to the greatest among a series of warehouses. Even among the stellar names of commerce: Whitby's, Evan-Hare, Aaron's, Madras & Pondicherry Co., this was a very palace of mercantile modernity. Its vast loading-doors had risen on a clever system of jointed counterweights, revealing an interior of steel-frame construction, with translucent plate-glass vaulting a roof that stretched wide and long as a soccer-green. Below this roof grew a maze of steel braces, a fret-work of ratchets and wheeled tracking, where Engine-driven pulley-cans could run along like spiders. Somewhere pistons chugged, with the familiar popping racket of an Engine printing-press.
   But the press was hidden somewhere behind a maze of booty to stupefy a Borgia. Merchandise lay in heaps, haystacks, mountains: brocades, lounge-chairs, carriage-wheels, epergnes and chandeliers, tureens, mattresses, iron lawn-dogs and Parian birdbaths, billiard-tables and liquor-cabinets, bedsteads and stair-newels, rolled rugs and marble mantelpieces…
   " 'Struth!" Tom cried. "How did you do all this?"
   "We've been here for days now," the Marquess said. He tugged the kerchief from his face, revealing a pale visage of almost girlish beauty, with a downy blond mustache. "There are goods in plenty, still, in the other godowns, and you shall all have a chance for a turn at the sledge and barrow. It's grand fun. And it's yours, for it belongs to all of us, equally!"
   "All of us?" Mallory said.
   "Of course. All the comrades."
   Mallory pointed at the Negro. "What about him?"
   "What, my man Jupiter?" The Marquess blinked. "Jupiter belongs to all of us too, of course! He's not my servant alone, but the servant of the common good." The Marquess mopped his dripping nose on a kerchief. "Follow me."
   The heaping of booty had made a monster rat's-nest of the warehouse's scientific storage-plan. Following the Marquess, they picked their way across shoals of broken crystal, puddles of cooking-oil, a crunchy alleyway littered with peanut-hulls.
   "Odd," the Marquess muttered, "when last I was here, the comrades were all about the place… "
   The heaps of goods dwindled toward the rear of the warehouse. They passed the whacking printing-press, hidden from sight in a cul-de-sac of towering bundles of news-print. Someone threw a bundle of wet printing-bills over the barricade, almost striking the Marquess, who hopped deftly over it.
   Mallory became aware of a distant voice, high-pitched and shrill.
   At the very rear of the warehouse, a large section of floor-space had been made into an impromptu lecture-hall. A chalkboard, a table piled with glassware, and a lectern, all sat unsteadily on a stage of close-packed soap-crates. Mismatched sets of cheap dining-chairs, in pressed oak and maple veneer, served as seating for a silent audience of perhaps three score.
   "So here they are," said the Marquess, with an odd quaver in his voice. "You're in luck! Dr. Barton is favoring us with an exposition. Seat yourselves at once, comrades. You will, I assure you, find this well worth your attention!"
   To his vast surprise, Mallory found himself and his companions forced to join the audience, in the final row of chairs. The Negro remained standing, hands clasped behind his back, at the rear of the hall.
   Mallory, seated next to the Marquess, rubbed his smarting eyes in disbelief. "This speaker of yours is wearing a dress!"
   "Hush," the Marquess whispered urgently.

   The female lecturer, brandishing a chalk-tipped ebony pointer, was hectoring the seated crowd in a voice of shrill but closely measured fanaticism. The strange acoustics of the makeshift hall warped her words as if she were speaking through a drumhead. Some kind of queer temperance lecture it seemed, for she was decrying "the poison alcohol" and its threat to the "revolutionary spirit of the working-class." She had flasks, great glass-stoppered carboys, full of liquor on her table. They were labeled with the skull-and-crossbones, amid a truck of distillation-flasks, red rubber-tubing, wire cages, and laboratory gas-rings.
   Tom, at Mallory's right, tapped Mallory's arm and whispered in a voice of near-terror, "Ned! Ned! Is that Lady Ada?"
   "My God, boy," Mallory hissed, the hair prickling in fear all across his arms and neck, "what makes you think that? Of course it isn't she!"
   Tom looked relieved, puzzled, vaguely offended. "Who is it, then?"
   The lecturing female turned to the chalkboard, and wrote, in a ladylike cursive, the words "Neurasthenic Degeneracy." She turned, aimed a false and brilliant smile at the audience over her shoulder, and for the first time Mallory recognized her.
   She was Florence Russell Bartlett.
   Mallory stiffened in his chair with a half-stifled gasp of shock. Something—a fleck of dry cotton from within his mask—lodged like a barb in his throat. He began coughing. And he could not stop. His slimy throat was lacerated. He tried to smile, to whisper a word of apology, but his windpipe seemed pinched in iron bands. Mallory fought the racking spasms with all his strength, hot tears gushing freely, but he could not stop himself, nor even muffle the nightmare hacking. It called a deadly attention to him like a coster-monger's bellow. At last Mallory jerked to his feet, knocking his chair back with a clatter, and staggered away half-bent, half-blinded.
   He tottered, arms outstretched, through the blurry wilderness of booty, his feet tangling in something, some wooden object falling with a clatter. Somehow he found a spot of shelter, and bent there shaking violently, his breath choked now by a loathsome bolus of phlegm and vomit. I could die from this, he thought in desperation, his eyes bulging in their sockets. Something will rupture. My heart will burst.
   Then somehow the clog was gone, the fit defeated. Mallory drew a ragged squeak of air, coughed, found his wind and began to breathe. He wiped foul spittle from his beard with his bare hand, and found himself leaning against a piece of statuary. It was a life-sized Hindu maiden in Coate's patent artificial stone, half-nude, with a water-jug poised on her draperied hip. The jug was solid stone, of course, though every atom in him cried out for a cleansing sip of water.
   Someone clapped him firmly on the back. He turned, expecting Tom or Brian, and found the Marquess there.
   "Are you quite all right?"
   "A passing fit," Mallory croaked. He waved one hand, unable to straighten.
   The Marquess slipped a curved silver flask into his hand. "Here," he said. "This will help."
   Mallory, expecting brandy, tilled the flask to his lips. A treacly concoction, tasting vaguely of licorice and elm, flooded his mouth. He swallowed reluctantly. "What—what is this?"
   "One of Dr. Barton's herbal remedies," the Marquess told him, "a specific against the foetor. Here, let me soak your mask in it; the fumes will clear your lungs."
   "I'd rather you didn't," Mallory rasped.
   "Are you fit then to return to the lecture?"
   "No! No."
   The Marquess looked skeptical. "Dr. Barton is a medical genius! She was the first woman ever to graduate with honors from Heidelberg. If you knew the wonders she's worked among the sick in France, the poor wretches given up for dead by the so-called experts—"
   "I know," Mallory blurted. Something like strength returned to him, and with it a strong urge to throttle the Marquess, shake this damned and dangerous little fool till the nonsense squeezed out of him like paste. He felt a suicidal urge to blurt out the truth, that he knew this Barton to be a poisoner, an adulteress, a vitrioleuse, wanted by police in at least two countries. He could whisper that confession, then kill the Marquess of Hastings and stuff his wretched body under something.
   The fit left him, replaced with a rational cunning cold and brittle as ice. "I should rather talk with you, comrade," said Mallory, "than listen to any lecture."
   "Really?" said Hastings, brightening.
   Mallory nodded earnestly. "I… I find I always profit by listening to a man who truly knows his business."
   "I cannot make you out, comrade," the Marquess said. "Sometimes you seem to me a typical self-seeking fool, but then again you seem a man of quite sophisticated understanding—certainly a cut above those friends of yours!"
   "I've traveled a bit," Mallory said slowly. "I suppose it broadens a man."
   "Traveled where, comrade?"
   Mallory shrugged. "Argentina. Canada. On the Continent, here and there."
   The Marquess glanced about them, as if looking for spies a-lurk in the birdbaths and chandeliers. When none showed, he seemed to relax a bit, then spoke with a renewed but quiet urgency. "Might you know the American South at all? The Confederacy?"
   Mallory shook his head.
   "There's a city called Charleston, in South Carolina. A charming town. It has a large community of well-born British exiles, who fled the Rads. Britain's ruined cavaliers."
   "Very nice," Mallory grunted.
   "Charleston is as refined and cultured a city as any in Britain."
   "And you were born there, eh?" Mallory had blundered to speak this deduction aloud, for Hastings was sensitive about it, and frowned. Mallory hastened on. "You must have prospered in Charleston, to own a Negro."
   "I do hope you are not an anti-slavery bigot," the Marquess said. "So many Britons are. I suppose you would have me pack poor Jupiter off to one of those fever-ridden jungles in Liberia!"
   Mallory restrained his nod of agreement. He was in fact an abolitionist, and a supporter of Negro repatriation.
   "Poor Jupiter wouldn't last a day in the Liberian Empire," the Marquess insisted. "Do you know he can read and write? I myself taught him. He even reads poetry."
   "Your Negro reads verse?"
   "Not 'verse'—poesy. The great poets. John Milton—but you've never heard of him, I wager."
   "One of Cromwell's ministers," Mallory said readily, "author of the 'Areopagitica'."
   The Marquess nodded. He seemed pleased. "John Milton wrote an epic poem, 'Paradise Lost'. It's a Biblical story, in blank verse."
   "I'm an agnostic myself," Mallory said.
   "Do you know the name of William Blake? He wrote and illustrated his own books of poems."
   "Couldn't find a proper publisher, eh?"
   "There are still fine poets in England. Did you ever hear of John Wilson Croker? Winthrop Mackworth Praed? Bryan Waller Procter?"
   "I might have," Mallory said. "I read a bit—penny-dreadfuls, mostly." He was puzzled by the Marquess's strange interest in this arcane topic. And Mallory was worried about Tom and the others—what they must be thinking as they sat and waited for him. They might lose all patience and try something rash, and that wouldn't do.
   "Percy Bysshe Shelley was a poet, before he led the Luddites in the Time of Troubles," the Marquess said. "Know that Percy Shelley lives! Byron exiled him to the island of St. Helena. He remains a prisoner there, in the manse of Napoleon the First. Some say he's since written whole books of plays and sonnets there."
   "Nonsense," Mallory said, "Shelley died in prison ages ago."
   "He lives," the Marquess said. "Not many know that."
   "Next you'll be saying that Charles Babbage wrote poetry," Mallory said, his nerves raw. "What's the point of this?"
   "It's a theory of mine," the Marquess said. "Not so much a proper theory, as a poetic intuition. But since studying the writings of Karl Marx—and of course the great William Collins—it has come to me that some dire violence has been done to the true and natural course of historical development." The Marquess paused, smirked. "But I doubt you can understand me, my poor fellow!"
   Mallory shook his head roughly. "I understand well enough. A Catastrophe, you mean."
   "Yes. You might well call it that."
   "History works by Catastrophe! It's the way of the world, the only way there is, has been, or ever will be. There is no history—there is only contingency!"
   The Marquess's composure shattered. "You're a liar!"
   Mallory felt the foolish insult gall him to the quick. "Your head's full of phantoms, boy! 'History'! You think you should have a title and estates and I should rot in Lewes making hats. There's nothing more to it than that! You little fool, the Rads don't care tuppence for you or Marx or Collins or any of your poetic mummeries! They'll kill the lot of you here like rats in a sawdust pit."
   "You're not what you seem," the Marquess said. He had gone as white as paper. "Who are you? What are you?"
   Mallory tensed.
   The boy's eyes widened. "A spy." He went for his gun.
   Mallory punched him full in the face. As the Marquess reeled back, Mallory caught his arm and clubbed him, once, twice, across the head, with the heavy barrel of the Ballester-Molina. The Marquess fell bleeding.
   Mallory snatched up the second pistol, rose, glanced about him.
   The Negro stood not five yards away.
   "I saw that," Jupiter said quietly.
   Mallory was silent. He leveled both guns at the man.
   "You struck my master. Have you killed him?"
   "I think not," Mallory said.
   The Negro nodded. He spread his open palms, gently, a gesture like a blessing. "You were right, sir, and he was quite wrong. There is nothing to history. No progress, no justice. There is nothing but random horror."
   "That's as may be," Mallory said slowly, "but if you cry out I will have to shoot you."
   "If you had killed him, I should have certainly cried out," the Negro said.
   Mallory glanced back. "He's still breathing."
   There was a long silence. The Negro stood quite still, his posture stiff and perfect, undecided, unmoving, like a Platonic cone balanced perfectly upon its needle tip, waiting for some impetus beyond causality to determine the direction of its fall.
   The Negro sighed. "I'm going back to New York City, " he said. He turned on one polished heel and walked away, unhurried, vanishing into the looming barricades of goods.
   Mallory felt quite certain that the man would not cry out, but he waited a few moments for the evidence that would confirm that belief. The Marquess stirred where he lay, and groaned. Mallory whipped the paisley kerchief from the man's curly head and gagged him with it.
   It was the work of a moment to shove him behind a massive terra-cotta urn.
   The shock of action had left Mallory dry. His throat felt like bloodied sandpaper. There was nothing to drink—except of course that silver flask of quack potion. Mallory dragged it by feel from the Marquess's jacket-pocket, and wet his throat. It left a numbing tingle at the back of his palate, like dry champagne. It was vile, but it seemed to be bracing him, somehow. He helped himself to a number of swallows.
   Mallory returned to the lecture-area and took a seat beside Fraser. The policeman lifted one brow in silent query. Mallory patted the butt of the Marquess's pistol, lodged within his waistband opposite the Ballester-Molina. Fraser nodded, by a fraction.
   Florence Russell Bartlett was continuing her harangue, her stage-manner seeming to afflict her audience with an occult paralysis. Mallory saw to his shock and disgust that Mrs. Bartlett was displaying quack devices intended to avert pregnancy. A disk of flexible rubber, a wad of sponge with a thread attached. Mallory could not avoid the dark imagining of coitus involving these queer objects. The thought made his gut lurch.
   "She killed a rabbit a moment ago," Fraser hissed from the corner of his mouth. "Dipped its nose in essence of cigar."
   "I didn't kill the boy, " Mallory whispered in return. "Concussed, I think… " He watched Bartlett as her rant drifted into queer plans for selective breeding to improve the stock of humanity. In her futurity, it seemed, proper marriage would be abolished. "Universal free love" would replace chastity. Reproduction would be a matter for experts. The concepts swam like dark shadows at the shore of Mallory's mind. It struck him then, for no seeming reason, that this day—this very afternoon in fact—was the time specified for his own triumphant lecture on the Brontosaurus, with kinotrope accompaniment by Mr. Keats. The fearful coincidence sent a queer shiver through him.
   Brian leaned suddenly across Fraser, seizing Mallory's bare wrist in a grip of iron. "Ned!" he hissed. "Let's get out of this damned place!"
   "Not yet," Mallory said. But he was shaken. A mesmeric flow of sheer panic seemed to jolt into him, through Brian's grip. "We don't know yet where Swing is hiding; he could be anywhere in this warren—"
   "Comrades!" Bartlett sang out, in a voice like an iced razor. "Yes, you four, in the back! If you must disturb us—if you have news of such pressing interest—then surely you should share it with the other comrades in the Chautauqua!"
   The four of them froze.
   Bartlett raked them with a Medusa glare. The other listeners, freed somehow from their queer bondage, turned to glare backward with bloodthirsty glee. The eyes of the crowd glowed with a nasty pleasure, the relief of wretches who find their own destined punishment falling elsewhere—
   Tom and Brian spoke both at once, in frenzied whispers.
   "Does she mean us?"
   "My God, what do we do?"
   Mallory felt trapped in nightmare. A word would break it, he thought. "She's just a woman," he said, quite loudly and calmly.
   "Knife it!" Fraser hissed. "Be still!"
   "Nothing to tell us?" Bartlett taunted. "I thought not—"
   Mallory rose to his feet. "I do have something to say!"
   With the speed of jack-in-the-boxes, three men rose from within the audience, their hands raised. "Dr. Barton! Dr. Barton?"
   Bartlett nodded graciously, gestured with the chalk-wand. "Comrade Pye has the floor."
   "Dr. Barton," cried Pye, "I do not recognize these comrades. They are behaving regressively, and I—I think they should be criticized!"
   A fierce silence wrapped the crowd.
   Fraser yanked at Mallory's trouser-leg. "Sit down, you fool! Have you lost your mind?"
   "I do have news!" Mallory shouted, through his gingham mask. "News for Captain Swing!"
   Bartlett seemed shocked; her eyes darted back and forth. "Tell it to all of us, then," she commanded. "We're all of one mind here!"
   "I know where the Modus is, Mrs. Bartlett!" Mallory shouted. "Do you want me to tell that to all these dupes and slaveys?"
   Chairs clattered as men leapt to their feet. Bartlett shrieked something lost in the noise.
   "I want Swing! I must speak to him alone!" As chaos rose, Mallory kicked the empty chair before him into skidding flight, and yanked both pistols from his belt. "Sit down, you bastards!" He leveled his pistols at the audience. "I'll blow daylight through the first coward that stirs!"
   His answer was a fusillade of shots.
   "Run!" Brian screeched. He, Tom, and Fraser fled at once.
   Chairs splintered, toppling, on either side of Mallory. The audience was shooting at him, ragged popping shots. Mallory leveled both his pistols at Bartlett at her podium, and squeezed the triggers.
   Neither gun fired. He had neglected to cock the hammers. The Marquess's gun seemed to have some kind of nickeled safety-switch.
   Someone nearby threw a chair at Mallory; he fended it off, absently, but then something struck him hard in the foot. The blow was sharp enough to numb his leg, and knock him from his stance; he took the opportunity to retreat.
   He could not seem to run properly. Perhaps he had been crippled. Bullets sang past him with a nostalgic drone from far Wyoming.
   Fraser beckoned at him from the mouth of a side-alley. Mallory ran to him, turned, skidded.
   Fraser stepped coolly into the open, raising his copper's pepperbox in a dueling stance, right arm extended, body turned to present a narrow target, head held keen-eyed and level. He fired twice, and there were screams.
   Fraser took Mallory's arm. "This way!" Mallory's heart was jumping like a rabbit, and he could not get his foot to work.
   He limped down the alley. It ended abruptly. Fraser searched frantically for a crawl-way. Tom was boosting Brian atop a great unsteady heap of cartons.
   Mallory stopped beside his brothers, turned, raised both pistols. He glanced down swiftly at his foot. A stray bullet had knocked the heel from his shoe. He looked up an instant later to see half-a-dozen screaming bandits approaching in hot pursuit.
   A vast concussion shook the building. Heaps of tinned goods clattered to the floor in a billow of powder-smoke. Mallory gaped.
   All six of the wretches lay sprawled and blasted in the alley, as if lightning-struck.
   "Ned!" shouted Brian, from atop his heap of cartons. "Get their weapons!" He crouched there on one knee, the Russian pistol gushing smoke from its opened loading-chamber. He loaded a second cartridge of brass and red waxed-paper, as thick as a copper's baton.
   Mallory, ears ringing, lunged forward, then slipped and almost fell headlong in the spreading blood. He grabbed right-handed for support and the Ballester-Molina went off, its bullet whanging from an iron beam overhead. Mallory paused, uncocked it carefully, uncocked the Marquess's pistol as well, stuck them both into his belt, precious seconds ticking as he dithered.
   The alley was awash with blood. The blunderbuss blast of the Russian hand-cannon had lacerated the men hideously. One poor devil was still gurgling as Mallory pried a Victoria carbine from beneath him, its stock dripping red. He struggled with the fellow's bandolier, but gave that up for another's wooden-handled Yankee revolver. Something stung his palm as he snatched up the pistol. Mallory looked stupidly at his wounded hand, then at the pistol-butt. There was a corkscrewed bit of hot shrapnel embedded in the wood, a razored thing like a big metal-shaving.
   Rifles began to crack from a distance, slugs plowing into the bounty around them with odd crunches and a musical tinkling of glass. "Mallory! This way," Fraser shouted.
   Fraser had uncovered a crevice along the warehouse wall. Mallory turned to sling the carbine and look for Brian, seeing the young artilleryman leap across the alley for another vantage-point.

  He followed Fraser into the crevice, grunting and heaving, for several yards along the wall. Bullets began whacking into the brick, before them and behind them, but well above their heads. Ill-aimed shots burst the tin-sheet roof with drum-like metal bangs. Mallory emerged to find Tom working like a demon in an open cul-de-sac, flinging up a barricade of spindle-legged ladies' vanity-tables. The things lay piled in a white-lacquered heap like dead tropical spiders.
   The cracking of rifles, sharper now, made the warehouse a cacophony. From behind them Mallory heard shouts of rage and fear over the dead.
   Tom drove a length of iron bedstead into a heap of crates, put his back into it, and toppled the mess with a crash. "How many?" Tom panted.
   "Six."
   Tom smiled like a madman. "That's more than they'll ever kill of us. Where's Brian now?"
   "I don't know." Mallory unslung the carbine, handed it to Tom. Tom took it by the barrel and held it at arm's-length, surprised by its caking of gore.
   Fraser, maintaining close watch at the crevice, fired his pepperbox. There was an awful, girlish scream and a thrashing, like a poisoned rat in a wall.
   Bullets began to plunge into the rubble around them with somewhat greater accuracy, attracted by the scream. A thumb-sized conical slug fell from nowhere at Mallory's feet and spun like a top on the floor-boards.
   Fraser tapped his shoulder. Mallory turned. Fraser had tugged the mask from his face; his eyes glittered and stubble showed black on his pale chin. "How now, Dr. Mallory? What new inspired maneuver?"
   "That might well have worked, you know," Mallory protested. "She might have taken us straight to Swing if she'd believed me. There's no accounting for women… "
   "Oh, she believed you right-enough," said Fraser, and suddenly he laughed, a strange dry chuckling like the rubbing of resined wood. "Well, what do you have there?"
   "Pistol?" Mallory offered Fraser the salvaged revolver. "Mind that bit of shrapnel in it."
   Fraser scraped the embedded barb free on his boot-heel. "Never saw the like of that lad's barker! I rather doubt it's legal, even for one of your gallant Crimea heroes."
   A rifle-shot knocked a spinning chunk from one of the vanity-tables, narrowly missing Fraser. Mallory looked up, startled. "Damn!" A distant sniper clung monkey-like to one of the iron rafters, fitting another round into his rifle.
   Mallory snatched the Victoria from Tom, braced the bloodied strap around his forearm, and took close aim. He squeezed the trigger. To no effect, for the single-shot had been fired already. But the sniper's mouth opened in an O of terror and he leapt from his perch with a distant crash.
   Mallory yanked the bolt back, flinging the dead cartridge. "I should have taken that damned bandolier—"
   "Ned!" Brian appeared suddenly to their left, crouched at the top of a heap. "Over here—cotton-bales!"
   "Right!" They followed Brian's lead, scrambling and heaving atop the booty in a cascade of whalebone and candlesticks. Bullets whizzed and thwacked around them—more men in the rafters, Mallory thought, too busy to look. Fraser rose once and took a pot-shot, to no apparent effect.
   Dozens of hundred-weight bales of Confederate ginned cotton, wrapped in rope and burlap, had been stacked almost to the rafters.
   Brian gestured wildly, then vanished over the far side of the cotton-stack. Mallory understood him: it was a natural fortress, with a little work.
   He and Tom heaved and toppled one of the bales free from the top of the stack, stepping into the cavity. Bullets thumped with gentle huffs into the cotton as Fraser rose and returned fire.
   They kicked out another bale, and then a third. Fraser joined them in the excavation, with a leap and a stumble. In a frantic, heaving minute they had burrowed their way into the thick of it, like ants amid a box of cube sugar.
   Their position was obvious now; bullets popped and thudded into the cotton fortress, but to no effect. Mallory yanked a great clean wad and wiped sweat and blood from his face and arms. It was dire hard work, hauling cotton-bales; no wonder the Southrons had relegated it to their darkeys.
   Fraser cleared a narrow space between two bales. "Give me another pistol." Mallory handed him the Marquess's long-barreled revolver. Fraser squeezed off a shot, squinted, nodded. "Fine piece…" A volley of futile shots came in reply. Tom, grunting and heaving, cleared more space by lifting and dropping a bale off the back of the heap; it struck something with a crash like a splintering pianola.
   They took inventory. Tom had a derringer with one loaded chamber; useful, perhaps, if the anarchists swarmed in like boarding pirates, but not otherwise. Mallory's Ballester-Molina had three rounds. Fraser's pepperbox had three caps left, and the Marquess's gun five rounds. And they had an empty Victoria carbine, and Fraser's little truncheon.
   There was no sign of Brian.
   There were angry, muffled shouts in the depths of the warehouse—orders. Mallory thought. The gunfire died away quite suddenly, replaced by an ominous silence, broken by rustling and what seemed to be hammering. He peered up over the edge of a forward bale. There was no visible enemy, but the doors of the warehouse had been shut.
   Gloom flew across the warehouse in a sudden wave. Beyond the glazed vaulting of the ceiling, it had grown swiftly and astonishingly dark, as if the Stink had thickened further.
   "Should we make a run for it?" whispered Tom.
   "Not without Brian," Mallory said.
   Fraser shook his head dourly—not speaking his doubt, but it was clear enough.
   They worked in the gloom for a while, clearing space, digging in deeper, heaving up some of the bales to serve as crenellations. At the sound of their activity, more shots came, muzzle-flashes savagely lighting the darkness, bullets screaming off iron braces overhead. Here and there in the heaps of merchandise, the kindled light of lanterns glowed.
   More shouted orders, and the firing ceased. There was a flurry of pattering on the metal roof, swiftly gone.
   "What was that?" Tom asked.
   "Sounded like rats scampering," Mallory said.
   "Rain!" Fraser suggested.
   Mallory said nothing. Another ash-fall seemed far more likely.
   The gloom lightened again, quite suddenly. Mallory peered over the edge. A crowd of the rascals were creeping forward, almost to the foot of the ramparts, barefoot and in hushed silence, some with knives in their teeth. Mallory bellowed in alarm and began firing.
   He was blinded at once by his own muzzle-flashes, but the Ballester-Molina, kicking and pumping, seemed to have a life of its own; in an instant the three remaining rounds were gone. Not wasted, though; at such short range he had not been able to miss. Two men were down, a third crawling, and the rest fleeing in terror.
   Mallory could hear them re-grouping out of sight, milling, cursing each other. Mallory, his gun empty, grasped its hot barrel like a club.
   The building shook with the awful roar of Brian's pistol.
   The silence afterward was broken by agonized screams. A long and harrowing minute passed then, filled with infernal yells from the wounded and dying, with a crashing, a cursing and clattering.
   Suddenly a dark form came catapulting into their midst, stinking of gunpowder.
   Brian.
   "Good job you didn't shoot me," he said. "Damme, it's dark in here, ain't it?"
   "Are ye all right, lad?" Mallory said.
   "Nicks," Brian said, getting to his feet. "Look what I brought ye, Ned."
   He passed the thing into Mallory's hands. The smooth heavy form of stock and barrel fit Mallory's grip like silk. It was a buffalo-rifle.
   "They've a whole crate of such beauties," Brian said. "Out in a pokey little office, across the way. And munitions with it, though I could only carry two boxes."
   Mallory began loading the rifle at once, round after brassy round clicking into the spring-loader with a ticking like fine clockwork.
   "Queer business," Brian said. "Don't think they knew I was loose among them. No proper sense of strategy. Don't seem to be any Army traitors among this rabble, I'll tell you that!"
   "That barker of yours is a marvel, lad," Fraser said.
   Brian grunted. "Not anymore, Mr. Fraser. I'd only two rounds. Wish I'd held back, but when I saw that lovely chance for enfilading-fire. I'd got to take it."
   "Never you mind," Mallory told him, caressing the rifle's walnut stock. "If we'd four of these, we could hold 'em back all week."
   "My apologies!" Brian said. "But I won't be doing much more of a proper reconnaissance-in-force. They winged me a bit."
   A stray bullet had seared across the front of Brian's shin. White bone showed in the shallow wound and his filth-caked boot was full of blood. Fraser and Tom wadded clean cotton against the wound while Mallory kept watch with the rifle.
   "Enough," Brian protested at last, "you fellows carry on to beat Lady Nightingale. D'ye see anything, Ned?"
   "No," Mallory said. "I hear them plotting mischief, though."
   "They're back in three mustering-grounds," Brian said. "They had a rally-point just out of your line-of-fire, but I raked 'em there with the Tsar's slag-shot. I doubt they'll rush us again. They've not got the nerve for it now."
   "What will they do, then?"
   "Some sort of sapper's work. I'd wager," Brian said. "Advancing barricades, perhaps something on wheels." He spat dryly. "Damme, I need a drink. I haven't been this dry since Lucknow."
   "Sorry," Mallory said.
   Brian sighed. "We had a very pukka water-boy with the regiment in India. That bleeding little Hindu was worth any ten of these buggers!"
   "Did you see the woman?" Fraser asked him. "Or Captain Swing?"
   "No," Brian said. "I was staying to cover, creeping about. Looking for a better class of firearm, mostly, something with a range. Queer things I saw, too. Found Ned's game-rifle in a little office-room, not a soul in it but a little clerky chap, writing at a desk. Pair of candles burning, papers all scattered about. Full of crated guns for export, and why they're keeping those fine rifles back with some clerk, and passing out Victorias, is beyond my professional understanding."
   A wave of drowned and greenish light passed into the building—outlining, as it passed, an armed man rising up a pulley-line, seated in a noose. Swift as thought. Mallory centered his bead on the man, exhaled, fired. The man flopped backward, dangled from his knees, hung limp.
   Rifle-fire began to smack into the cotton. Mallory ducked down again.
   "Fine emplacements, cotton-bales," said Brian with satisfaction, patting the burlapped floor. "Hickory Jackson hid behind 'em in New Orleans, and gave us a toweling, too."
   "What happened in the office-room, Brian?" Tom asked.
   "Fellow rolled himself a sort of papirosi," Brian said. "Know those? Turkish baccy-wraps. 'Cept the bugger took an eye-dropper from a little medical vial, dribbled it about on the paper first, then wrapped some queer leaf from a candy jar. I'd a proper look at his face when he lit his smoke from the candle, and he'd a very absent look, deluded you might say, rather like brother Ned here with one of his scholarly problems!" Brian laughed drily, meaning no harm. "Scarcely seemed right to disturb his fancy then, so I took a rifle and a box or two real quiet-like, and left!"
   Tom laughed.
   "You'd a good look, eh?" Mallory asked.
   "Surely."
   "Fellow had a bump on his forehead, right here?"
   "Damme if he didn't!"
   "That was Captain Swing," Mallory said.
   "Then I'm a chuckleheaded fool!" Brian cried. "Didn't seem right to shoot a man in the back, but if I'd knowed it was him I'd have blowed his lumpy headpiece off!"
   "Doctor Edward Mallory!" a voice cried, from the darkened floor below.
   Mallory rose, peered around a bale. The Marquess of Hastings stood below them, his head bandaged and a lantern in one hand. He waved a white kerchief on a stick.
   "Leviathan Mallory, a parley with you!" the Marquess shouted.
   "Speak up then," Mallory said, careful not to show his head.
   "You're trapped here, Dr. Mallory! But we've an offer for you. If you'll tell us where you've hidden a certain object of value, which you stole, then we'll let you and your brothers go free. But your police-spy from the Special Bureau must stay. We have questions for him."
   Mallory laughed him to scorn. "Hear me, Hastings, and all the rest of you! Send us that maniac Swing and his murdering tart, with their hands bound! Then we'll let the rest of you creep out of here before the Army comes!"
   "A show of insolence avails you nothing," the Marquess said. "We shall fire that cotton, and you'll roast like a brace of rabbits!"
   Mallory turned. "Can he do that?"
   "Cotton won't burn worth a hang when it's packed tight as this," Brian theorized.
   "Surely, burn it!" Mallory shouted. "Burn down the whole godown and smother to death in the smoke."
   "You've been very bold. Dr. Mallory, and very lucky. But our choicest men patrol the streets of Limehouse now, liquidating the police! Soon they shall return, hardened soldiers, veterans of Manhattan! They'll take your little hideaway by storm, at the point of the bayonet! Come out now, while you've yet a chance to live!"
   "We fear no Yankee rabble! Bring 'em on, for a taste of grapeshot!"
   "We've made our offer! Reason it through, like a proper savant!"
   "Go to hell," Mallory said. "Send me Swing; I want to talk to Swing! I've had my fill of you, you poncey little traitor."
   The Marquess retreated. After some moments, a desultory firing began. Mallory expended half a box of cartridges, returning fire at the muzzle-flashes.
   The anarchists then commenced the painful work of advancing a siege-engine. It was an improvised phalanx of three heavy dolly-carts, their fronts lashed with a sloping armor of marbled table-tops. The rolling armor was too wide to fit down the crooked alley to the cotton-bales, so the rebels dug their way through the heaps of goods, piling them up by the flanks of the freight-dollies. Mallory wounded two of them at their work, but they grew wiser with experience, and soon had erected a covered walkway behind the advancing siege-works.
   There seemed to be far more men in the warehouse now. It had grown darker yet, but lantern-light showed here and there and the iron beams were full of snipers. There was loud talk—argument it seemed—to add to the groans of the wounded.
   The siege-works crept closer yet. They were now below Mallory's best line-of-fire. If he exposed himself in an attempt to lean over the ramparts, without doubt the snipers would hit him.
   The siege-works reached the base of the cotton-bales. There was a sound of shredding at the base of the wall.
   A warped and muffled voice—assisted perhaps by a megaphone—sounded from within the siege-works. "Dr. Mallory!"
   "Yes?"
   "You asked for me—here I am! We are toppling the wall of your palace, Dr. Mallory. Soon you will be quite exposed."
   "Hard work for a professional gambler. Captain Swing! Don't blister your delicate hands!"
   Tom and Fraser, who had been working in tandem, toppled a heavy cotton-bale onto the siege-works. It bounced off harmlessly. Well-concerted fire raked the fortress, sending the defenders diving for cover.
   "Cease fire!" Swing shouted, and laughed.
   "Have a care, Swing! If you shoot me, you'll never learn where the Modus is hidden."
   "Still the Mustering fool! You stole the Modus from us at the Derby. You might have returned it to us, and spared yourself certain destruction! You stubborn ignoramus, you don't even have a notion of the thing's true purpose!"
   "It belongs by right to the Queen of Engines, and I know that well enough."
   "If you think that, you know nothing."
   "I know it is Ada's, for she told me so. And she knows where it is hidden, for I told her where I keep it!"
   "Liar!" Swing shouted. "If Ada knew, we would have it already. She is one of us!"
   Tom groaned aloud.
   "You are her tormentors. Swing!"
   "I tell you Ada is ours."
   "The daughter of Byron would never betray the realm."
   "Byron's dead!" Swing cried, with the terrible conviction of truth. "And all that he built, all that you believe in, will now be swept away."
   "You're dreaming."
   There was a long silence. Then Swing spoke again, in a new and coaxing voice. "The Army now fires upon the people. Dr. Mallory."
   Mallory said nothing.
   "The British Army, the very bulwark of your so-called civilization, now shoots your fellow citizens dead in the streets. Men and women with stones in their hands are being murdered with rapid-fire weapons. Can you not hear it?"
   Mallory made no reply.
   "You have built on sand, Dr. Mallory. The tree of your prosperity is rooted in dark murder. The masses can endure you no longer. Blood cries out from the seven-cursed streets of Babylondon!"
   "Come out, Swing!" Mallory cried. "Come out of your darkness, let me see your face!"
   "Not likely," Swing said.
   There was another silence.
   "I intended to take you alive. Dr. Mallory," Swing said, in a voice of finality. "But if you have truly confessed your secret to Ada Byron, then I have no more need of you. My trusted comrade, my life's companion—she holds the Queen of Engines in a perfect net! We shall have Lady Ada, and the Modus, and futurity as well. And you shall have the depths of the poisoned Thames for your sepulchre."
   "Kill us then, and stop your damned blather!" Fraser shouted suddenly, stung beyond endurance. "Special Branch will see you kicking at a rope's end if it takes a hundred years."
   "The voice of authority!" Swing taunted. "The almighty British Government! You're fine at mowing down poor wretches in the street, but let us see your bloated plutocrats take this warehouse, when we hold merchandise worth millions hostage here."
   "You must be completely mad," Mallory said.
   "Why do you suppose I chose this place as my headquarters? You are governed by shopkeepers, who value their precious goods more than any number of human lives! They will never fire on their own warehouses, their own shipping. We are impregnable here!"
   Mallory laughed. "You utter jolterhead! If Byron's dead, then the Government is in the hands of Lord Babbage and his emergency committees. Babbage is a master pragmatist! He'll not be stayed by concern for any amount of merchandise."
   "Babbage is the pawn of the capitalists."
   "He's a visionary, you deluded little clown! Once he learns you're in here, he'll blast this place into the heavens without a second thought!"
   Thunder shook the building. There was a pattering against the roof.
   "It's raining!" Tom cried.
   "It's artillery," Brian said.
   "No, listen—it's raining, Brian! The Stink is over! It's blessed rain!"
   An argument had broken out beneath the shelter of the siege-works. Swing was snarling at his men.
   Cool water began dripping through the ragged fret-work of bullet-holes in the roof.
   "It's rain," Mallory said, and licked his hand. "Rain! We've won, lads." Thunder rolled. "Even if they kill us here," Mallory shouted, "it's over for them. When London's air is sweet again, they'll have no place to hide."
   "It may be raining," Brian said, "but those are ten-inch naval guns, off the river… "
   A shell tore through the roof in a torrent of blazing shrapnel.
   "They've got our range now!" Brian shouted. "For God's sake, take cover!" He began to struggle desperately with the cotton-bales.
   Mallory watched in astonishment as shell after shell punched through the roof, the holes as neatly spaced as the stabs of a shoemaker's awl. Whirlwinds of blazing rubbish flew, like the impact of iron comets.

   The glass vaulting burst into a thousand knife-edged shards. Brian was screaming at Mallory, his voice utterly drowned by the cacophony. After a stunned moment, Mallory bent to help his brother, heaving up another cotton-bale and crouching within the trench.
   He sat there, the rifle across his knees. Blasts of light sheeted across the buckling roof. Iron beams began to twist under pressure, their rivets popping like gunshots. The noise was hellish, supernatural. The warehouse shook like a sheet of beaten tin.
   Brian, Tom, and Fraser crouched like praying Bedouins, their hands clamped to their ears. Bits of flaming wood and fabric fell gently onto the bales around them, jumping a bit with each repeated concussion, smoldering into the cotton where they lay. The warehouse billowed with air and heat.
   Mallory absently plucked two wads of cotton and stuffed them into his ears.
   A section of roofing collapsed, quite slowly, like the wing of a dying swan. Rain in torrents fought the fires below.
   Beauty entered Mallory's soul. He stood, the rifle like a wand in his hands. The shelling had stopped, but the noise was incessant, for the building was on fire. Tongues of dirty flame leapt up in a hundred places, twisted fantastically by gusts of wind.
   Mallory stepped to the edge of the cotton parapet. The shelling had knocked the covered walkway into fragments, like a muddy crawl-way of termites, crushed by a boot. Mallory stood, his head filled with the monotone roaring of absolute sublimity, and watched as his enemies fled screaming.
   A man stopped amid the flames, and turned. It was Swing. He gazed up at Mallory where he stood. His face twisted with a desperate awe. He screamed something—screamed it louder still—but he was a little man, far away, and Mallory could not hear him. Mallory slowly shook his head.
   Swing raised his weapon then. Mallory saw, with a glow of pleased surprise, the familiar outlines of a Cutts-Maudslay carbine.
   Swing aimed the weapon, braced himself, and pulled the trigger. Pleasantly tenuous singing sounds surrounded Mallory, with a musical popping from the perforating roof behind him. Mallory, his hands moving with superb and unintentioned grace, raised his rifle, sighted, fired. Swing spun and fell sprawling. The Cutts-Maudslay, still in his grasp, continued its spring-driven jerking and clicking even after its drum of cartridges was empty.
   Mallory watched, with tepid interest, as Fraser, leaping through the wreckage with a spidery agility, approached the fallen anarchist with his pistol drawn. He handcuffed Swing, then lifted him limply over one shoulder.
   Mallory's eyes smarted. Smoke from the flaming warehouse was gathering under the wreckage of its roof. He looked down, blinking, to see Tom lowering a limping Brian to the floor.
   The two joined Fraser, who beckoned sharply. Mallory smiled, descended, followed. The three then fled through the whipping, thickening fires, with Mallory strolling after them.
   Catastrophe had knocked Swing's fortress open in a geyser of shattered brick dominos. Mallory, blissful, the nails of his broken shoe-heel grating, walked into a London reborn.
   Into a tempest of cleansing rain.

   On April 12, 1908, at the age of eighty-three, Edward Mallory died at his house in Cambridge. The exact circumstances of his death are obscured, steps having apparently been taken to preserve the proprieties incumbent on the decease of a former President of the Royal Society. The notes of Dr. George Sandys, Lord Mallory's friend and personal physician, indicate that the great savant died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Sandys also noted, apparently for purposes of his own, that the deceased had seemingly taken to his death-bed while wearing a patent set of elasticated underwear, socks with braces, and fully laced leather dress-shoes.
   The doctor, a thorough man, also noted an item discovered beneath the deceased's flowing white beard. About the great man's neck, on a fine steel chain, was strung an antique lady's signet-ring which bore the crest of the Byron family and the motto CREDE BYRON. The doctor's ciphered note is the only known evidence of this apparent bequest, possibly a token of appreciation. Very probably, Sandys confiscated the ring, though a thorough catalogue of Sandys' possessions, made after his own death in 1940, makes no mention of it.
   There is no mention of any such ring in the Mallory will, a very elaborate document of otherwise impeccable specificity.

   Envision Edward Mallory in the scholarly office of his palatial Cambridge home. It is late. The great paleontologist, his field-days long behind him and his Presidency resigned, now devotes the winter of his life to matters of theory, and to the subtler outreaches of scientific administration.
   Lord Mallory has long since modified the radical Catastrophist doctrines of his youth, gracefully abandoning the discredited notion that the Earth is no more than three hundred thousand years old—radioactive dating having proven otherwise. It is enough, for Mallory, that Catastrophism proved a fortunate road to higher geological truth, leading him to his greatest personal triumph: the discovery, in 1865, of continental drift.
   More than the Brontosaurs, more than the ceratopsian eggs of the Gobi Desert, it is this astonishing leap of reckless insight that has assured his immortal fame.
   Mallory, who sleeps little, seats himself at a curvilinear Japanese desk of artificial ivory. Past the open curtains, incandescent bulbs gleam beyond the polychrome, abstractly patterned windows of his nearest neighbor. The neighbor's house, like Mallory's own, is a meticulously orchestrated riot of organic forms, roofed with iridescent ceramic dragon-scales—England's dominant style of modern architecture, though the mode itself has its turn-of-the-century origins in the thriving Republic of Catalonia.
   Mallory has only recently dismissed a purportedly clandestine meeting of the Society of Light. As the final Hierarch of this dwindling confraternity, tonight he wears the formal robes of office. His woolen chasuble of royal indigo is fringed in scarlet. A floor-length indigo skirt of artificial silk, similarly fringed, is decorated with concentric bands of semiprecious stones. He has set aside a domed crown of beaded gold-plate, with a neck-guard of overlapping gilt scales; this rests now upon a small desk-printer.
   He dons his spectacles, loads a pipe, fires it. His secretary, Cleveland, is a most punctilious and orderly man, and has left him two sets of documents, neatly squared atop the desk in folders of brass-clasped manila. One folder lies to his right, the other to his left, and it cannot be known which he will choose.
   He chooses the folder to his left. It is an Engine-printed report from an elderly officer of the Meirokusha, a famous confraternity of Japanese scholars which serves, not incidentally, as the foremost Oriental chapter of the Society of Light. The precise text of the report cannot be found in England, but is preserved in Nagasaki along with an annotation indicating that it was wired to the Hierarch via standard channels on April 11. The text indicates that the Meirokusha, suffering a grave decline in membership and a growing lack of attendance, have voted to indefinitely postpone further meetings. It is accompanied by an itemized bill for refreshments, and rental fees for a small upstairs room in the Seiyoken, a restaurant in the Tsukiji quarter of Tokyo.
   Lord Mallory, though this news is not unexpected, is filled with a sense of loss and bitterness. His temper, fierce at the best of times, has sharpened with old-age; his indignation swells to helpless rage.
   An artery fails.
   That chain of events does not occur.
   He chooses the folder to his right. It is thicker than the one to his left, and this intrigues him. It contains a detailed field report from a Royal Society paleontological expedition to the Pacific coast of Western Canada. Pleased by an awakened nostalgia for his own expedition days, he studies the report closely.
   The modern labor of science can scarcely be more different from that of his own day. The British scientists have flown to the mainland from the flourishing metropolis of Victoria, and have motored at their ease into the mountains from a luxurious base in the coastal village of Vancouver. Their leader, if he can be given this title, is a young Cambridge graduate named Morris, whom Mallory remembers as a queer, ringleted fellow, given to wearing velvet capes and elaborate Modernist hats.
   The strata under examination are Cambrian, dark shale of a near-lithographic quality. And, it seems, they teem with a variety of intricate forms, the paper-thin and thoroughly crushed remnants of an ancient invertebrate fauna. Mallory, a vertebrate specialist, begins to lose interest; he has seen, he thinks, more trilobites than anyone ever should have to, and in truth he has always found it difficult to conjure up enthusiasm for anything less than two inches in length. Worse yet, the report's prose strikes him as unscientific, marked by a most untoward air of radical enthusiasm.
   He turns to the plates.
   There is a thing in the first plate that possesses five eyes. It has a long clawed nozzle instead of a mouth.
   There is a legless, ray-like thing, all lobes and jelly, with a flat, fanged mouth that does not bite but irises shut.
   There is a thing whose legs are fourteen horny, pointed spikes—a thing which has no head, no eyes, no gut, but does have seven tiny pincered mouths, each at the tip of a flexible tentacle.
   These things bear no relation to any known creature, from any known period whatever.
   A rush of blood and wonder mounts within Mallory's skull. A vortex of implications begins to sort itself within him, mounting step-by-step to a strange and numinous glow, an ecstatic rush toward utter comprehension, ever brighter, ever clearer, ever closer—
   His head strikes the table as he slumps forward. He sprawls upon his back at the foot of the chair, limbs numb and airy, still soaring, wrapped within the light of marvel, the light of an awesome knowledge, pushing, pushing at the borders of the real—a knowledge that is dying to be born.

FIFTH ITERATION
The All-Seeing Eye

   An afternoon in Horseferry Road, twelfth of November, 1855, image recorded by A. G. S. Hullcoop of the Department of Criminal Anthropometry.
   The shutter of Hullcoop's Talbot "Excelsior" has captured eleven men descending the broad steps from the entrance of the Central Statistics Bureau. Triangulation locates Hullcoop, with his powerful lens, concealed atop the roof of a publishers' offices in Holywell Street.
   Foremost among the eleven is Laurence Oliphant. His gaze, beneath the black brim of his top-hat, is mild and ironical.
   The tall, dull-surfaced hats create a repeated vertical motif common to images of the period.
   Like the others, Oliphant wears a dark frock-coat above narrow trousers of a lighter hue. His neck is wrapped in a high choker of dark silk. The effect is dignified and columnar, though something in Oliphant's manner manages to suggest the sportsman's lounging stroll.
   The other men are barristers, Bureau functionaries, a senior representative of the Colgate Works. Behind them, above Horseferry Road, swoop the tarred copper cables of the Bureau's telegraphs.
   Processes of resolution reveal the pale blurs dotting these lines to be pigeons.
   Though the afternoon is unseasonably bright, Oliphant, a frequent visitor to the Bureau, is opening an umbrella.
   The top-hat of the Colgate's representative displays an elongated comma of white pigeon-dung.

   Oliphant sat alone in a small waiting-room, which communicated by a glazed door with a surgery. The buff-colored walls were hung with colored diagrams depicting the ravages of hideous diseases. A bookcase was crammed with dingy medical volumes. There were carved wooden pews that might have come from a wrecked church, and a coal-dyed woolen drugget in the middle of the floor.
   He looked at a mahogany instrument-case and a huge roll of lint occupying places of their own on the bookcase.
   Someone called his name.
   He saw a face through the panes of the surgery door. Pallid, the bulging forehead plastered with drenched strands of dark hair.
   "Collins," he said. " 'Captain Swing.' " And other faces, legion, the faces of the vanished, names suppressed from memory.
   "Mr. Oliphant?"
   Dr. McNeile regarded him from the doorway. Vaguely embarrassed, Oliphant rose from his pew, automatically straightening his coat.
   "Are you entirely well, Mr. Oliphant? Your expression was most extraordinary, just then." McNeile was slender and neatly bearded, with dark brown hair, his grey eyes so pale as to suggest transparency.
   "Yes, thank you, Dr. McNeile. And yourself?"
   "Very well, thank you. Some remarkable symptoms are emerging, Mr. Oliphant, in the wake of recent events. I've one gentleman who was seated atop an omnibus, Regent Street, when that vehicle was struck broadside by a steam-gurney traveling at an estimated twenty miles per hour!"
   "Really? How dreadful…"
   To Oliphant's horror, McNeile actually rubbed his long white hands together. "There was no evident physical trauma as a result of the collision. None. None whatever." He fixed Oliphant with that bright, nearly colorless gaze. "Subsequently, we have observed insomnia, incipient melancholia, minor amnesiac episodes—numerous symptoms customarily associated with latent hysteria." McNeile smiled, a quick rictus of triumph. "We have observed, Mr. Oliphant, a remarkably pure, that is to say, a clinical progression of railway spine!"
   McNeile bowed Oliphant through the doorway, into a handsomely paneled room, which was sparsely furnished with ominous electro-magnetic appliances. Oliphant removed his coat and waistcoat, arranging them upon a mahogany valet-stand.
   "And your… 'spells,' Mr. Oliphant?"
   "None, thank you, since the last treatment." Was this true? It was difficult to say, really.
   "And your sleep has been undisturbed?"
   "I should say so. Yes."
   "Any dreams of note? Waking visions?"
   "No."
   McNeile stared with his pale eyes. "Very well."
   Oliphant, feeling utterly foolish in his braces and starched shirt-front, climbed upon McNeile's "manipulation table," a curiously articulated piece of furniture that in equal parts resembled a chaise-lounge and a torturer's rack. The thing's various segments were upholstered in a stiff. Engine-patterned brocade, smooth and cold to the touch. Oliphant attempted to find a comfortable position; McNeile made this impossible, spinning one or another of several brass wheels. "Do be still," McNeile said.
   Oliphant closed his eyes. "This fellow Pocklington," McNeile said.
   "I beg your pardon?" Oliphant opened his eyes. McNeile stood above him, positioning a coil of iron on an adjustable armature.
   "Pocklington. He's attempting to take credit for the cessation of the Limehouse cholera."
   "The name isn't familiar A medical man?"
   "Hardly. The fellow's a works-engineer. He claims to have ended the cholera by the simple expedient of removing the handle from a municipal water-pump!" McNeile was screwing a braided copper cable in place.
   "I'm afraid I don't follow you."
   "Little wonder, sir! The man's either a fool or the worst sort of charlatan. He's written in the Times that the cholera is nothing more than the result of contaminated water."
   "Is that entirely unreasonable, do you think?"
   "Utterly counter to enlightened medical theory." McNeile set to work with a second length of copper. "This Pocklington, you see, is something of a favorite of Lord Babbage's. He was employed to remedy the ventilation troubles of the pneumatic trains."
   Oliphant, detecting the envy in McNeile's tone, felt a slight and spiteful satisfaction. Babbage, speaking at Byron's state funeral, had regretted the fact that modern medicine remained more an art than a science. The speech, naturally, had been most widely published.
   "Do close your eyes, please, in the event of a spark being discharged." McNeile was pulling on a pair of great, stiff, leather gauntlets.
   McNeile connected the copper cables to a massive voltaic cell. The room filled with the faint eerie odor of electricity.
   "Please try to relax, Mr. Oliphant, so as to facilitate the polar reversal!"

   Half-Moon Street was illuminated by a massive Webb lamp, a fluted Corinthian column fueled by sewer-gas. Like the rest of London's Webbs, it had remained unlit, during the summer's emergency, for fear of leaks and explosions. Indeed, there had been at least a dozen pavement-ripping blasts, most attributed to the same firedamp that powered the Webb. Lord Babbage was an outspoken supporter of the Webb method; as a result, every school-boy knew that the methane potential from a single cow was adequate for an average household's daily heating, lighting, and cooking requirements.
   He glanced up at the lamp as he neared his own Georgian facade. Its light was another apparent token of returning normalcy, but he took little comfort in tokens. The physical and more crudely social cataclysm was past now, certainly, but Byron's death had triggered successive waves of instability; Oliphant imagined them spreading out like ripples in a pond, overlapping with others that spread from more obscure points of impact, creating ominously unpredictable areas of turbulence. One such, certainly, was the business of Charles Egremont and the current Luddite witch-hunt.
   Oliphant knew with absolute professional certainty that the Luddites were defunct; despite the best efforts of a few manic anarchists, the London riots of the past summer had shown no coherent or organized political agenda. All reasonable aspirations of the working-class had been successfully subsumed by the Radicals. Byron, in his vigorous days, had tempered justice with a well-dramatized show of mercy. Those early Luddite leaders who had made their peace with the Rads were now the tidy, comfortably well-to-do leaders of respectable trades-unions and craft-guilds. Some were wealthy industrialists—though their peace of mind was severely perturbed by Egremont's systematic disinterment of old convictions.
   A second wave of Luddism had arisen in the turbulent forties, aimed, this time, directly against the Rads, with a charter of popular rights and a desperate zest for violence. But it had crumbled in a welter of internecine treachery, and its boldest spirits, such as Walter Gerard, had met a distressingly public punishment. Today, such groups as the Manchester Hell-Cats, to which Michael Radley had belonged as a boy, were mere youth-gangs, quite devoid of political purpose. Captain Swing's influence might still be felt occasionally in rural Ireland, or even in Scotland, but Oliphant attributed this to the Rads' agricultural policies, which tended to lag behind their brilliance in industrial management.
   No, he thought, as Bligh opened the door at his approach, the spirit of Ned Ludd was scarcely abroad in the land, but what was one to make of Egremont and his furious campaign?
   "Good evening, sir."
   "Good evening, Bligh." He gave Bligh his top-hat and umbrella.
   "Cook has a cold joint, sir."
   "Very good. I'll dine in the study, thank you."
   "Feeling well, sir?"
   "Yes, thank you." Either McNeile's magnets or the devilishly uncomfortable manipulation table had set his back aching. McNeile had been recommended to him by Lady Brunel, Lord Brunel's spine being assumed to have suffered an inordinate amount of railway-shock in the course of his famous career. Dr. McNeile had recently diagnosed Oliphant's "numinous spells," as he insisted on calling them, as symptoms of railway-spine, a condition in which the magnetic polarity of the patient's vertebrae was assumed to have been reversed by trauma. It was McNeile's thesis that this condition might be corrected by the application of electromagnetism, and to this end Oliphant now paid weekly visits to the Scot's Harley Street premises. McNeile's manipulations reminded Oliphant of his own father's unhealthily keen interest in mesmerism.
   Oliphant senior, having served as Attorney-General of the Cape Colony, had subsequently been appointed Chief Justice of Ceylon. Consequently, Oliphant had received a private and necessarily rather fragmentary education, one to which he owed both his fluency in modern languages and his extraordinary ignorance of Greek and Latin. His parents had been Evangelicals of a markedly eccentric sort, and though he himself retained, however privately, certain aspects of their faith, he recalled with an odd dread his father's experiments: iron wands, spheres of crystal…
   And how, he wondered, climbing the carpeted stairs, would Lady Brunel be adjusting to life as the Prime Minister's wife?
   His Japanese wound began to throb as he gripped the banister.
   Taking out a triple-splined Maudslay key from his waistcoat-pocket, he unlocked the door to his study. Bligh, who held the key's only duplicate, had lit the gas and banked the coals.
   The study, paneled in oak, overlooked the park from a shallow triple-bay. An ancient refectory-table, quite plain, running very nearly the length of the room, served as Oliphant's desk. A very modern office-chair, mounted on glass-wheeled patent casters, regularly migrated around the table as Oliphant's work took him from one stack of folders to the next, then back again. The casters, in the chair's daily peregrinations, had begun to wear away the nap of the blue Axminster.
   Three Colt & Maxwell receiving-telegraphs, domed in glass, dominated the end of the table nearest the window, their tapes coiling into wire baskets arranged on the carpet. There was a spring-driven transmitter as well, and an encrypting tape-cutter of recent Whitehall issue. The various cables for these devices, in tightly woven sleeves of burgundy silk, snaked up to a floral eyebolt suspended from the central lavalier, where they then swung to a polished brass plate, bearing the insignia of the Post Office, which was set into the wainscoting.
   One of the receivers began immediately to hammer away. He walked the length of the table and read the message as it emerged from the machine's mahogany base.

   VERY BUSY WITH PARTICULATE FOULING BUT YES DO VISIT STOP WAKEFIELD ENDIT

   Bligh entered with a tray of sliced mutton and pickle. "I've brought a bottle of ale, sir," he said, setting out linen and silverware on a section of the table kept cleared for this purpose.
   "Thank you, Bligh." Oliphant raised the tape of Wakefield's message with his fingertip, then let it droop back toward its wire basket.
   Bligh poured the ale, then departed with his tray and the empty ceramic bottle. Oliphant trundled the office-chair around the table and sat down to spread his mutton with Branston pickle.
   He was startled from his solitary meal by the clatter of one of his three receivers. He glanced down the table and saw the tape beginning to unspool in the machine to the right. The machine to the left, on which Wakefield's invitation to lunch had arrived, was on his personal number. Right meant police business of some kind, likely Betteredge, or Fraser. Putting down knife and fork, he rose.
   He watched the message emerge from its brass slot.

   RE F B YOU ARE REQUIRED AT ONCE STOP FRASER ENDIT

   He took his father's German hunter from his waistcoat to note the time. Tucking it away, he touched the glass that domed the centermost of the three receiving-telegraphs. There had been no message on that one since the death of the late Prime Minister.

   The address to which the cab earned him was in Brigsome's Terrace, off a thoroughfare of the sort that speculative builders delighted in carving through the ancient and still largely unexplored wilderness that was East London.
   The terrace itself, Oliphant decided as he alighted from his hansom, was as dismal a block of buildings as had ever been composed of brick and mortar. The builder who had speculated on these ten dreary prison-houses, he thought, had likely hung himself behind the parlor door of some adjacent tavern before the hideous things were finished.
   The streets through which the cab had conveyed him had been those one seemed to traverse at times such as these—all those thoroughfares seemingly unknown to day and the ordinary pedestrian. A thin rain was falling now, and Oliphant momentarily regretted not having accepted the water-proof that Bligh had offered at the door. The two men before No. 5 wore long drooping black cape-like articles of waxed Egyptian cotton. A recent innovation from New South Wales, Oliphant knew, much praised in the Crimea and precisely the thing for concealing weapons of the sort that these two most certainly concealed.
   "Special Bureau," Oliphant said, briskly climbing past the guards. Abashed by his accent and manner, they let him pass. It would be necessary to report that to Fraser.
   He entered the house, finding himself in a parlor lit by a powerful carbide-lantern, atop a tripod, its merciless white glare magnified by a concave round of polished tin. The parlor was furnished with scraps salvaged from the ruins of gentility. There was a cottage-piano, and a chiffonier several sizes too large for the room. The latter struck him as pathetically gorgeous, with its tarnished gilt moldings. A threadbare patch of Brussels carpet swarmed with roses and lilies, amid a desert of colorless drugget. Knitted curtains shaded the windows overlooking Brigsome's Terrace. Beside the glass, two hanging wire baskets were festooned with plants of the cactus species, which grew in prickly and spider-like profusion.
   Oliphant noted an acrid stench, more penetrating than the reek of carbide.
   Betteredge emerged from the rear of the house. He wore a high-crowned derby hat that made him seem altogether American, so that he might easily have been mistaken for one of the Pinkerton operatives he shadowed daily. Likely the effect was deliberate, down to the patent boots with their elasticated side-gores. His expression, quite uncharacteristically, was one of grave anxiety. "I'll take full responsibility, sir," he stammered. Something was very wrong. "Mr. Fraser's waiting for you, sir. Nothing's been moved."
   Oliphant allowed himself to be led through the doorway, and up a narrow, perilously steep flight of stairs. They emerged in a barren hallway, illuminated by a second carbide-lantern. Great spreading continents of niter marred the bare plaster walls. The burnt smell was stronger here.
   Through another doorway, into yet brighter glare, and Fraser's dour face looking up from where he knelt beside a sprawled body. Fraser seemed about to speak; Oliphant silenced him with a gesture.
   Here, then, was the source of the reek. Upon an old-fashioned coaching-case stood a compact modern Primus stove of the sort intended for camp, its brass fuel-canister gleaming bright as a mirror. Upon its ring rested a pannikin of black cast-iron. Whatever had been cooking in this vessel was now a charred and bitterly odorous residue.
   He turned his attention to the corpse. The man had been a giant; in the small room, it was necessary to step over his outspread limbs. Oliphant bent to study the contorted features, the death-dulled eyes. He straightened, facing Fraser. "And what do you make of this?"
   "He was warming tinned beans," Fraser said. "Eating them straight out of the pot there. With this." With the toe of his shoe, Fraser indicated a kitchen-spoon of chipped blue enamel. "I'd say he was alone. I'd say he managed to choke down a good third of the tin before the poison felled him."
   "This poison," Oliphant said, taking his cigar-case and sterling cutter from his coat, "what do you suppose it was?" He extracted a cheroot, clipped and pierced it.
   "Something potent," Fraser said, "by the look of him."
   "Yes," Oliphant agreed. "Big chap."
   "Sir," Betteredge said, "you'd best see this." He displayed a very long knife, sheathed in sweat-stained leather. A sort of harness dangled from the sheath. The weapon's handle was of dull horn, its hilt of brass. Betteredge drew the thing from its sheath. It was something on the order of a sailor's dirk, though single-edged, with a peculiar reverse curve at the tip.
   "What is that bit of brass along the top?" Oliphant asked.
   "To parry another man's blade," Fraser said. "Soft stuff. Catches the edge. American business."
   "Maker's mark?"
   "No, sir," Betteredge said. "Hand-forged by a smith, from the look of it."
   "Show him the pistol," Fraser said.
   Betteredge sheathed the knife, set it atop the coaching-case. He produced a heavy revolver from beneath his coat. "Franco-Mexican," he said, sounding remarkably like a salesman, "Ballester-Molina; cocks itself automatically, after the first shot."
   Oliphant raised an eyebrow. "Military issue?" The pistol was somewhat crude in appearance.
   "Cheap stuff," Fraser said, with a glance for Oliphant. "For the American war trade, evidently. The Metropolitans have been confiscating them from sailors. Too many of them about."
   "Sailors?"
   "Confederates, Yanks, Texians… "
   "Texians," Oliphant said, and tasted the end of his unlit cheroot. "I take it we agree in assuming our friend here is of that nationality?"
   "He'd a sort of nest, in the garret, reached by a trapdoor." Betteredge was wrapping the pistol back into its oilcloth.
   "Terribly cold, I imagine?"
   "Well, he'd blankets, sir."
   "The tin."
   "Sir?"
   "The tin that contained the man's last meal, Betteredge."
   "No, sir. No tin."
   "Tidy," Oliphant said to Fraser. "She waited for the poison to do its work, then returned, removing the evidence."
   "The surgeon will have our evidence out for us, never you fear," Fraser said.
   Oliphant was overtaken by an abrupt nausea—at Eraser's manner, at the proximity of the corpse, at the pervading stink of burnt beans. He turned and stepped out into the hallway, where another of Eraser's men was adjusting the carbide-lantern.
   What a foul house this was, in a foul street, harboring the foulest sort of business. A wave of loathing overtook him, a fierce hopeless detestation of the secret world, its midnight journeys, labyrinthine lies, its legions of the damned, the lost.
   His hands were trembling as he struck a lucifer to light his cheroot.
   "Sir, the responsibility—" Betteredge was at his elbow.
   "My friend at the corner of Chancery Lane hasn't given me such a good leaf as usual," Oliphant said, frowning at the tip of his cheroot. "One must be very careful how one chooses one's cigars."
   "We've been over the place top-to-bottom, Mr. Oliphant. If she was living here, there's no trace of her."
   "Really? And to whom does that handsome chiffonier downstairs belong? Who waters the cacti? Does one water cacti? Perhaps they reminded our Texian friend of his homeland… " He puffed resolutely on his cheroot and descended the stairs, with Betteredge on his heels like an anxious young setter.
   A prim-looking sort from Criminal Anthropometry was lost in thought in front of the piano, as though trying to recall a tune. Of the various articles carried in this gentleman's black case, Oliphant knew, the least unpleasant were the calibrated linen tapes employed in taking Bertillon measurements of the skull.
   "Sir," Betteredge said, when the anthropometrist had moved upstairs, "if you feel I was responsible, sir… For losing her, I mean—"
   "I believe, Betteredge, that I dispatched you earlier to a matinee, at the Garrick, to report on the acrobatic ladies of Manhattan, did I not?"
   "Yes, sir… "

   "You saw the Manhattan troupe, then?"
   "Yes, sir."
   "But—do let me suppose—you saw her there, as well?"
   "Yes, sir! And Mackerel and his two as well!"
   Oliphant removed his spectacles and polished them.
   "The acrobats, Betteredge? To attract such an audience they must have been quite remarkable."
   "Lord, sir, they batter one another with brickbats! The women run about in their dirty bare feet, and, well, scarves, sir, bits of gauze, no proper garments to speak of… "
   "And you enjoyed yourself, Betteredge?"
   "Quite honestly, sir, no. Like a panto in Bedlam, it was. And I'd the job of it, with the Pinkers there… "
   "Mackerel" was their name for the senior Pinkerton agent, a side-whiskered Philadelphian who most frequently presented himself as Beaufort Kingsley DeHaven, though sometimes as Beaumont Alexander Stokes. He was Mackerel by virtue of his seemingly invariable choice of breakfast, as reported by Betteredge and the other watchers.
   Mackerel and two subordinates had been regular London fixtures for some eighteen months now, and Oliphant found them remarkably interesting, and a solid pretext for his own Government funding. The Pinkerton organization, while ostensibly a private firm, served as the central intelligence-gathering organ of the embattled United States. With networks in place throughout the Confederate States, as well as in the Republics of Texas and California, the Pinkertons were often privy to information of considerable strategic importance.
   With the arrival in London of Mackerel and his cohorts, certain voices in Special Branch had argued for the various classic modes of coercion. Oliphant had quickly moved to quash this suggestion, arguing that the Americans would be of inestimably greater value if they were allowed to operate freely—under, he made it clear, the constant surveillance of both the Special Branch and his own Special Bureau of the Foreign Office. In practice, of course, the Special Bureau utterly lacked the manpower for any such undertaking, which had resulted in Special Branch assigning Betteredge to the task, along with a steady rota of nondescript Londoners, all of them experienced watchers, personally vetted by Oliphant. Betteredge reported directly to Oliphant, who assessed the raw material before passing it on to Special Branch. Oliphant found the arrangement thoroughly agreeable; Special Branch had so far refrained from comment.
   The movements of the Pinkertons had gradually revealed minor but hitherto unsuspected sub-strata of clandestine activity. The resultant information constituted a rather mixed bag, but this was all the more to Oliphant's liking. The Pinkertons, he had happily declared to Betteredge, would provide the equivalent of geological core-samples. The Pinkertons would plumb the depths, and Britain would reap the benefits.
   Betteredge, almost immediately and to his considerable pride, had discovered that one Mr. Fuller, the Texian legation's sole and woefully overworked clerk, was in Pinkerton pay. In addition, Mackerel had demonstrated a profound curiosity about the affairs of General Sam Houston, going so far as to personally burglarize the country estate of the exiled Texian President. Some months subsequently, the Pinkertons had shadowed Michael Radley, Houston's flack, whose murder in Grand's Hotel had led directly to a number of Oliphant's current lines of inquiry.
   "And you saw our Mrs. Bartlett, attending the Communard performance? You're entirely positive?"
   "No question, sir!"
   "Mackerel and company were aware of her? She of them?"
   "No, sir—they were watching the Communard panto, hooting and jeering. Mrs. Bartlett crept back-stage between acts! She kept well in the rear, afterwards. Applauding, though." Betteredge frowned.
   "The Pinkertons made no attempt to follow Mrs. Bartlett?"
   "No, sir!"
   "But you did."
   "Yes, sir. When the show was done, I left Boots and Becky Dean to ghost our chaps, and set out to dog her alone."
   "You were very foolish, Betteredge." Oliphant's tone was exceptionally mild. "You should rather have dispatched Boots and Becky. They're far more experienced, and a team is invariably more efficient than a single watcher. You might easily have lost her."
   Betteredge winced.
   "Or she might have killed you, Betteredge. She's a murderess. Quite appallingly accomplished. Known to conceal vitriol about her person."
   "Sir, I take full—"
   "No, Betteredge, no. None of it. She'd already killed our Texian Goliath. Highly premeditated, no doubt. She was in a position to provide him food, aiding and abetting him, just as she and her friends did, during that night of terror at Grand's Hotel… She'd bring him round his tinned beans, you see. He depended on her; he'd gone to ground in a garret. Simply a matter of doctoring a tin."
   "But why should she turn on him now, sir?"
   "A question of loyalties, Betteredge. Our Texian was a nationalist zealot. Patriots may league with the very devil in pursuit of a nation's interest, but there are matters at which they balk. Likely she demanded some deadly service from him, and he refused." He knew as much from the confession of Collins; the nameless Texian had been a fractious ally. "The fellow crossed her, spurned her schemes; as did the late Professor Rudwick. So he met the same fate as the man he killed."
   "She must be desperate."
   "Perhaps… But we have no reason to believe you alerted her by following her here."
   Betteredge blinked. "Sir, when you sent me to see the Communards, did you suspect she might be there?"
   "Not at all. I confess, Betteredge, I was indulging a whim. Lord Engels, an acquaintance of mine, is fascinated by this fellow Marx, the Commune's founder… "
   "Engels the textile magnate?"
   "Yes. He's quite eccentric about it, actually."
   "About those Communard women, sir?"
   "About Mr. Marx's theories in general, and the fate of the Manhattan Commune in particular. Friedrich's generosity, in fact, made this current tour possible."
   "The richest man in Manchester, funding that sort of tripe?" Betteredge seemed genuinely disturbed by the revelation.
   "Peculiar, yes. Friedrich is himself the son of a wealthy Rhineland industrialist… In any case, I was curious for your report. And, of course, I did rather expect our Mr. Mackerel to put in an appearance. The United States take the dimmest possible view of the Red revolution in Manhattan."
   "One of the women gave a sort of, well, sermon, sir, before the panto, and ranted like sixty! Some business about 'iron laws'—"
   " 'The iron law of history,' yes. All very doctrinaire. But Marx has borrowed much of his theory from Lord Babbage—so much so, that his doctrine may one day dominate America." Oliphant's nausea had passed. "But consider, Betteredge, that the Commune was founded during city-wide anti-war riots, protesting the Union conscription. Marx and his followers seized power during a period of chaos, somewhat akin to last summer's affliction in London. Here, of course, we've come through in good form, and that in spite of having lost our Great Orator in the very midst of the emergency. Proper succession of power is everything, Betteredge."
   "Yes, sir." Betteredge nodded, distracted from the matter of Lord Engel's Communard sympathies by Oliphant's patriotic sentiments. Oliphant, suppressing a sigh, rather wished that he himself believed them.

   Oliphant nodded and napped, on the journey home. He dreamed, as he often did, of an omniscient Eye in whose infinite perspectives might be sorted every least mystery.
   Upon arrival, he found, to his ill-concealed chagrin, that Bligh had drawn a bath for him in the collapsible rubber tub recently prescribed by Dr. McNeile. In robe and nightshirt, slippered in embroidered moleskin, Oliphant examined the thing with resigned distaste. It stood, steaming, before the perfectly good and perfectly empty tub of white porcelain which dominated his bath-room. It was Swiss, the rubber bath, its slack black trough gone taut and bulbous with the volume of water it presently contained. Supported by an elaborately hinged frame of black-enameled teak, it was connected to the geyser with a worm-like hose and several ceramic petcocks.
   Removing his robe, and then his nightshirt, he stepped from his slippers, then from the chill of octagonal marble tiles, into the soft, warm maw. It very nearly overturned as he struggled to sit. The elastic material, supported on all sides by the frame, gave distressingly beneath one's feet. And was, he discovered, quite horrid in its embrace of one's buttocks. He was, according to McNeile's prescription, to recline for a quarter-hour, his head supported on the small pneumatic pillow of rubberized canvas supplied for this purpose by the manufacturer. McNeile maintained that the cast-iron body of a porcelain tub confused the spine's natural attempts to return to its correct magnetic polarity. Oliphant shifted slightly, grimacing at the obscene sensation of the clinging rubber.
   Bligh had arranged a sponge, pumice, and a fresh bar of French-milled soap in the little bamboo basket attached to the side of the tub. Bamboo, Oliphant supposed, must also lack magnetic properties.
   He groaned, then took up sponge and soap and began to wash himself.
   Released from the pressing business of the day, Oliphant, as he often did, undertook a detailed and systematic act of recollection. He had a natural gift for memory, greatly aided in youth by the educational doctrines of his father, whose ardent interest in mesmerism and the tricks of stage-magic had introduced his son to the arcane disciplines of mnemonics. Such accomplishments had been of great use to Oliphant in later life, and he practiced them now with a regularity he had once devoted to prayer.
   Almost a year had passed since his search through the effects of Michael Radley, in Room 37, Grand's Hotel.
   Radley had owned a modern steamer-trunk of the sort that, upended and opened, served as a compact combination of wardrobe and bureau. This, along with a scuffed leather hat-case and a brass-framed Jacquard satchel, constituted the whole of the publicist's luggage. Oliphant had found the intricacy of the trunk's fittings depressing. All these hinges, runners, hooks, nickeled catches, and leather tabs—they spoke of a dead man's anticipation of journeys that were never to be. Equally pathetic were the three gross of fancily stippled cartes-de-viste, with Radley's Manchester telegraph-number arranged in the French manner, still wrapped in printer's-tissue.
   He began by unpacking each section in turn, laying Radley's clothing out on the hotel bed with a valet's precision. The publicist had entertained a fondness for silk nightshirts. As he worked, Oliphant examined maker's labels and laundry-marks, turning out pockets and running his fingers over seams and linings.
   Radley's toilet articles were secured in a removable envelope of water-proofed silk.
   Oliphant examined the contents, handling each object in turn: a badger shaving-brush, a self-stropping safety-razor, a toothbrush, a tin of tooth-powder, a sponge-bag… He rapped the ivory handle of the brush against the foot of the bedstead. He opened the razor's leatherette case: nickel-plate gleamed against a bed of violet velour. He emptied the toothpowder out on a sheet of Grand's engraved stationery. He looked in the sponge-bag—and found a sponge.
   The glitter of the razor drew his eye. Dumping its various components atop the starched bib of an evening-shirt, he used the penknife on his watch-chain to pry the fitted velour nest from the case. It came away easily, revealing a tightly folded sheet of foolscap.
   Upon this sheet, in pencil, quite smudged with frequent erasure and re-erasure, was written what appeared to be the start of a draft letter. Undated, lacking any term of address, it was unsigned:

   I trust you recall our two Conversations of th past Aug, during and of which you so kindly entrusted me w yr Conjectures. I am pleased to inform you that cert manipulations have yielded a version—a true vers of yr orig—which I feel most confidently can at last be run, thereby demonstrating that Proof so long sought & expected.

   The remainder of the sheet was blank, with the exception of three faintly penciled rectangles, containing the Roman capitals ALG, COMP, and MOD.
   ALG, COMP, and MOD had subsequently become a fabulous three-headed beast, frequent visitor to the higher fields of Oliphant's imagination. His discovery of the probable meaning of this cipher, while examining transcripts of the interrogation of William Collins, had failed to dispel the image; Alg-Comp-Mod was with him still, a serpent-necked chimera, its heads nastily human. Radley's face was there, quite dead, mouth agape, eyes blank as fog, and the cool marble features of Lady Ada Byron, aloof and impassive, framed by curls and ringlets that were proofs of a pure geometry. But the third head, sinuously swaying, evaded Oliphant's gaze. He sometimes imagined its face was Edward Mallory's, resolutely ambitious, hopelessly frank; at other times he took it to be the pretty, poisonous visage of Florence Bartlett, wreathed in fumes of vitriol.
   And sometimes, particularly as now, in the rubber bath's cloying embrace, drifting toward the continent of sleep, the face was his own, its eyes filled with a dread he could not name.

   The following morning, Oliphant slept in, then kept to his bed, Bligh supplying him with files from the study, strong tea, and anchovy toast. He read a Foreign Office dossier on one Wilhelm Stieber, a Prussian agent posing as an emigre newspaper editor named Schmidt. With considerably more interest, he read and annotated a Bow Street file detailing several recent attempts to smuggle munitions, each incident involving cargo destined for Manhattan. The next file consisted of Engine-printed copies of several letters from a Mr. Copeland, of Boston. Mr. Copeland, who traveled in lumber, was in British pay. His letters described the system of forts defending the island of Manhattan, with extensive notes on ordnance. Oliphant's gaze, from long practice, slid lightly over Copeland's account of the south battery on Governor's Island, something of a relic by the sound of it, and quickly arrived at a report of rumors that the Commune had strung a chain of mines from the Romer Shoals to the Narrows.
   Oliphant sighed. He very much doubted that the channel had been mined, but the leaders of the Commune would certainly wish it to be thought to have been mined. As indeed it might soon be, if the gentlemen of the Commission for Free Trade were to have their way.
   Bligh was at the door.
   "You've an appointment with Mr. Wakefield, sir, at the Central Statistics Bureau."
   An hour later, Betteredge greeted him from the open door of a cab. "Good afternoon, Mr. Oliphant." Oliphant climbed in and settled himself. Pleated shades of black-proofed canvas were drawn firmly across either window, shutting out Half-Moon Street and the stark November sun. As the driver urged the cab-horse forward, Betteredge opened a case at his feet, took out a lamp, which he lit in a rapid and dextrous fashion, and fixed, with a brass apparatus of screws and bolts, to the arm of the seat. The interior of the case glittered like a miniature arsenal. He passed Oliphant a crimson file-folder.
   Oliphant opened the file, which detailed the circumstances of the death of Michael Radley.
   He had himself been in the smoking-room with the General and poor doomed Radley, the both of them awash with drink. Of their respective styles of drunkenness, Radley's had been the more presentable, the least predictable, the more dangerous. Houston, in his cups, delighted in playing the barbarous American; red-eyed, perspiring, foul-mouthed, he lounged with one great coarse boot propped muddily atop an ottoman. As Houston spoke, and smoked, and spat, roundly cursing Oliphant and Britain, he sullenly shaved curls from a bit of pine, periodically pausing to strop the jack-knife on the edge of his boot-sole. Radley, in contrast, had positively quivered with the liquor's stimulant effect, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing.
   Oliphant's visit had been intended deliberately to disturb Houston on the eve of his departure to France, but the display of ill-concealed mutual hostility evident between the General and his publicist had been quite unexpected.
   He had hoped to sow seeds of doubt with regard to the French tour; to this end, and primarily for Radley's benefit, he had managed to imply an exaggerated degree of cooperation on the parts of the intelligence services of Britain and France. Oliphant had suggested that Houston already possessed at least one powerful enemy among the Police des Chateaux, the bodyguard and secret personal agency of the Emperor Napoleon. While the Police des Chateaux were few in number, Oliphant insinuated, they were utterly without legal or constitutional restraint; Radley, at least, in spite of his condition, had obviously taken note of the implied threat.
   They had been interrupted by a page, who brought a note for Radley. As the door opened to admit the man, Oliphant had glimpsed the anxious face of a young woman. Radley had stated, as he excused himself, that it was necessary that he speak briefly with a journalistic contact.
   Radley had returned to the smoking-room some ten minutes later. Oliphant then took his leave, having endured an extended and particularly florid tirade from the General, who had consumed the better part of a pint of brandy during Radley's absence.
   Summoned back to Grand's by telegram in the early hours of dawn, Oliphant had immediately sought out the hotel-detective, a retired Metropolitan named McQueen, who had been called to Houston's room, number 24, by the desk clerk, Mr. Parkes.
   While Parkes attempted to calm the hysterical wife of a Lancashire paving-contractor, resident in number 25 at the time of the disturbance, McQueen had tried the knob of Houston's door, discovering it to be unlocked. Snow was blowing in through the demolished window, and the air, already chilled, stank of burnt gunpowder, blood, and, as McQueen delicately put it, "the contents of the late gentleman's bowel." Spying the scarlet ruin that was Radley's corpse, all too visible in the cold light of dawn, McQueen had called to Parkes to telegraph the Metropolitans. He then used his passkey to lock the door, lit a lamp, and blocked the view from the street with the remains of one of the window-curtains.
   The condition of Radley's clothing indicated that the pockets had been gone through. Sundry personal objects lay in the pool of blood and other matter surrounding the corpse: a repeating match, a cigar-case, coins of various denominations. Lamp in hand, the detective surveyed the room, discovering an ivory-handled Leacock & Hutchings pocket-pistol. The weapon's trigger was missing. Three of its five barrels had been discharged—very recently, McQueen judged. Continuing his search, he had discovered the gaudy gilded head of General Houston's stick, awash in splintered glass. Nearby lay a bloodied packet, tightly wrapped in brown paper. It proved to contain a hundred kinotrope-cards, their intricate fretting of punch-holes ruined by the passage of a pair of bullets. The bullets themselves, of soft lead and much distorted, fell into McQueen's palm as he examined the cards.
   Subsequent examination of the room by specialists from Central Statistics—the attention of the Metropolitan Police, at Oliphant's request, having been swiftly deflected from the matter—added little to what the veteran McQueen had observed. The trigger of the Leacock & Hutchings pepperbox was recovered from beneath an armchair. A more peculiar discovery consisted of a square-cut white diamond, of fifteen carats and very high quality, which was found firmly wedged between two floor-boards.
   Two men from Criminal Anthropometry, no more than usually cryptic about their purposes, employed large squares of tissue-thin adhesive grid-paper to capture various hairs and bits of fluff from the carpet; they guarded these specimens jealously, and took them away promptly, and nothing was ever heard of them again.
   "Are you done with that one, sir?"
   He looked up at Betteredge, then down at the file, seeing Radley's blood spread in a tacky pool.
   "We're in Horseferry Road, sir."
   The cab came to a halt.
   "Yes, thank you." He closed the file and handed it to Betteredge. He descended from the cab and mounted the broad stairs.
   Regardless of the circumstances surrounding a given visit, he invariably felt a peculiar quickening upon entering the Central Statistics Bureau. He felt it now, certainly: a sense of being observed, somehow—of being known and numbered. The Eye, yes…
   As he spoke to the uniformed clerk at the visitor's-desk, a gang of journeymen mechanics emerged from a hallway to his left. They wore Engine-cut woolen jackets and polished brogues soled with creped rubber. Each man earned a spotless tool-satchel of thick white duck, cornered with bronze rivets and brown hide. As they moved toward him, conversing among themselves, some drew pipes and cheroots from their pockets in anticipation of a shift's-end smoke.
   Oliphant experienced a sharp pang of tobacco-hunger. He had often had call to regret the Bureau's necessary policy regarding tobacco. He looked after the mechanics as they passed, out between the columns and the bronze sphinxes. Married men, assured of a Bureau pension, they would live in Camden Town, in New Cross, in any respectable suburb, and would furnish their tiny sitting-rooms with papier-mache side-boards and ornate Dutch clocks. Their wives would serve tea on gaudily japanned tin trays.
   Passing an irritatingly banal quasi-biblical bas-relief, he made his way to the lift. As the attendant bowed him in, he was joined by a glum gentleman who was daubing with a handkerchief at a pale streak on the shoulder of his coat.
   The articulated bars of the brass cage rattled shut. The lift ascended. The gentleman with the soiled coat made his exit at the third stop. Oliphant rode on to the fifth, the home of Quantitative Criminology and Non-Linear Analysis. While he found the latter infinitely more compelling than the former, it was Q C he needed today, most particularly in the person of Andrew Wakefield, the departmental Under-Secretary.
   The clerks of Q C were individually walled into neatly cramped cells of rolled-steel, asbestos, and veneer. Wakefield presided over them from a grander version of the same scheme, his sparse sandy head framed by the brass-fitted drawers of a multitude of card-files.
   He glanced up as Oliphant approached, prominent front teeth displayed against his lower lip. "Mr. Oliphant, sir," he said. "A pleasure as ever. Pardon me." He shuffled a number of punch-cards into a sturdy blue envelope lined with tissue-paper, and meticulously wound the little scarlet string about the two halves of the patent-clasp. He set the envelope aside, in an asbestos-lined hutch containing several other envelopes of identical hue.
   Oliphant smiled. "Fancy I can read your punch-holes, Andrew?" He levered a spring-loaded stenographer's-chair up from its ingenious housing and took a seat, his furled umbrella balanced across his knees.
   "Know what a blue envelope's about, do you?" Springs clanged as Wakefield folded his articulated writing-desk into its narrow slot.
   "Not a specific one, no, but I rather imagine that's the trick of it."
   "There are men who can read cards, Oliphant. But even a junior clerk can read the directive primaries as easily as you read the kinos in the underground."
   "I never read the kinos in the underground, Andrew."
   Wakefield snorted. Oliphant knew this to be his equivalent of laughter. "And how are things among the corps diplomatique, Mr. Oliphant? Coping with our 'Luddite conspiracy,' are we?" It would have been impossible to mistake the man's sarcasm, but Oliphant pretended to take him quite literally.
   "It really hasn't had too great an effect, as yet. Not among my own areas of special interest."
   Wakefield nodded, assuming that Oliphant's "areas of special interest" were limited to the activities of foreign nationals on British soil. On Oliphant's request, Wakefield regularly ordered the files spun on groups as diverse as the Carbonari, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Fenian Society, the Texas Rangers, the Greek Hetairai, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and the Confederate Bureau of Scientific Research, all of whom were known to be operative in Britain.
   "I trust that the Texian material we provided has been of some use?" Wakefield inquired, coil-springs creaking behind him as he leaned forward.
   "Quite," Oliphant assured him.
   "You wouldn't know," Wakefield began, taking a gold-plated propelling-pencil from his pocket, "if their legation intends a change of premises?" He tapped the pencil against his front teeth, producing a loud clicking sound that Oliphant found repulsive.
   "From their present location in St. James's? 'Round from Berry's the wine-merchant?"
   "Precisely."
   Oliphant hesitated, seeming to weigh the matter. "I shouldn't think so. They haven't any money. I suppose it would depend upon the good-will of the landlord, finally… "
   Wakefield smiled, his teeth dimpling his lower-lip.
   "Wakefield," Oliphant said, "do tell me—who wishes to know?"
   "Criminal Anthropometry."
   "Really? Are they involved in surveillant activities?"
   "I gather it's technical, actually. Experimental." Wakefield put his pencil away. "Your savant chap—Mallory, was it?"
   "Yes?"
   "Saw a review of his book. Off to China, is he?"
   "Mongolia. Heading up an expedition for the Geographical Society."
   Wakefield pursed his lips and nodded. "Out from underfoot, I should think."
   "Out of harm's way, one should hope. Not a bad sort, really. Seemed to keenly appreciate the technical aspects of your Bureau's work. But I've a technical matter for you myself, Andrew."
   "Really?" Wakefield's springs creaked.
   "Having to do with Post Office procedure."
   Wakefield made a small, entirely noncommittal sound in his throat.
   Oliphant took an envelope from his pocket and passed it to the Under-Secretary. It was unsealed. Wakefield took a pair of white cotton gloves from a wire basket at his elbow, drew them on, extracted a white telegraphic address-card from the envelope, glanced at it, then met Oliphant's gaze.
   "Grand's Hotel," Wakefield said.
   "Quite." The establishment's crest was printed on the card. Oliphant watched as Wakefield automatically ran a gloved fingertip across the lines of punch-holes, checking for indications of wear that might cause mechanical difficulties.
   "You wish to know who sent it?"
   "That information is in my possession, thank you."
   "Name of addressee?"
   "I am aware of that as well."
   The springs creaked—nervously, it seemed to Oliphant. Wakefield rose, with a twanging of steel, and carefully inserted the card in a brass slot set into the face of a glass-fronted instrument which overhung a bank of card-files. With a glance at Oliphant, he reached up a gloved hand and cranked down an ebony-handled lever. On the down-stroke, the device thumped like a shopman's credit-press. As Wakefield released the lever, it began to slowly right itself, humming and clicking like a publican's wagering-machine. Wakefield watched as the whirling character-wheels ticked and slowed. Abruptly, the device was silent.
   "Egremont," Wakefield read aloud, but quietly, " 'The Beeches,' Belgravia."
   "Indeed." Oliphant watched as Wakefield extracted the card from the brass slot. "I require the text of that telegram, Andrew."
   "Egremont," Wakefield said, as though he hadn't heard. He took his seat again, replaced the card in its envelope, and removed his gloves. "He seems to be everywhere, our Right Honorable Charles Egremont. No end of work he's making for us here, Oliphant."
   "The text of the message, Andrew, is here in the Bureau. It exists physically, I believe, as however many inches of telegrapher's tape."
   "Do you know I've fifty-five miles' gear-yardage under me, still fouled from the Stink? Aside from the fact that your request is rather more than usually irregular…"
   " 'Usually irregular'? That's rather good… "
   "And your friends from the Special Branch trooping in hourly, demanding that our brass be spun and spun again, in hope of shaking loose these Luddites alleged to be lodged in the nation's rafters! Who is this bloody man, Oliphant?"
   "A rather junior Rad politician, I understand. Or was, till the Stink and the resulting disorders."
   "Till Byron's death, rather."
   "But we've Lord Brunel now, haven't we?"
   "Indeed, and bloody madness under him in Parliament!"
   Oliphant let the silence lengthen. "If you could obtain the text of the telegram, Andrew," he said at last, very quietly, "I should be very grateful."
   "He's a very ambitious man, Oliphant. With ambitious friends."
   "You are not alone in that assessment."
   Wakefield sighed. "Under the circumstances, extreme discretion—"
   "By all means!"
   "Aside from which our yardage is filthy. Condensed particulate matter. We're working the mechanics on triple-shifts, and having some success with Lord Colgate's aerosol applications, but I sometimes despair of ever having the system properly up and spinning!" He lowered his voice. "Do you know that the finer functions of the Napoleon have been unreliable for months?"
   "The Emperor?" Oliphant pretended to misunderstand.
   "The Napoleon's gear-yardage, in equivalent terms, is very nearly double ours," Wakefield said. "And it simply isn't functioning!" The thought seemed to fill him with a special horror.
   "Had a Stink of their own, have they?"
   Wakefield grimly shook his head.
   "There you are, then," said Oliphant, "most likely the gears are jammed on a bit of onion-skin… "
   Wakefield snorted.
   "Do find me that telegram? At your earliest convenience, of course."
   Wakefield inclined his head, but only very slightly.
   "Good fellow," Oliphant declared. He saluted the Under-Secretary with his furled umbrella and rose, to retrace his steps through Q C's cubbies and the bowed and patient heads of Wakefield's clerks.

   Oliphant had made his professionally circuitous way to Dean Street from the Soho tavern where he had instructed Betteredge to deposit him. Now he entered a soot-streaked house, its door unlatched. Latching it carefully behind him, he climbed two flights of uncarpeted stairs. The chill air smelled of cooked cabbage and stale tobacco.
   He rapped twice at a door, then twice again.
   "Come in, come in, you'll let in the cold… " The heavily bearded Mr. Hermann Kriege, late of the New York Volks Tribune, appeared to be wearing every article of clothing he possessed, as though he had wagered that he could all at once don the entire contents of a ragman's barrow.
   He locked and chained the door behind Oliphant.
   Kriege had two rooms, the one with the view of the street being the drawing-room, and behind it a bedroom. Everything broken and tattered, and in the greatest disorder. A large, old-fashioned table, covered with wax-cloth, stood in the middle of the drawing-room. On it lay manuscripts, books, newspapers, a doll with a Dresden head, bits and pieces of a woman's sewing things, chipped teacups, dirty spoons, pens, knives, candlesticks, an inkpot. Dutch clay pipes, tobacco-ash.
   "Sit, sit, please." More ursine than ever in his bundled attire, Kriege waved vaguely toward a chair with only three legs. Blinking through a haze of coal– and tobacco-smoke, Oliphant made out a chair that seemed whole, though Kriege's daughter had been playing kitchen on it. Choosing to risk a pair of trousers, Oliphant swept jammy crumbs aside and sat, facing Kriege across the sad domestic litter of the crowded table-top.
   "A small gift for your little Traudl," Oliphant said, taking a tissue-wrapped parcel from his coat. The tissue was secured with a self-adhesive rectangle, embossed with the initials of an Oxford Street toy-emporium. "A doll's tea things." He placed the parcel on the table.
   "She calls you 'Uncle Larry.' She shouldn't know your name."
   "Many's the Larry about Soho, I should imagine." Oliphant produced a plain envelope, unsealed, and placed it beside the parcel, precisely aligned with the table's edge. It contained three well-circulated five-pound notes.
   Kriege said nothing. A silence lengthened.
   "The Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe," Oliphant said at last.
   Kriege snorted derisively. "The Bowery's Sapphic best, come to London? I remember them in Purdy's National. They wooed and won the Dead Rabbits to the cause, whose sole previous involvement with politics had consisted of rock-fights and punch-ups in municipal elections. The butcher-boys, the bootblacks, the prostitutes of Chatham Square and the Five Points, that was their audience. Sweaty proletarians, come to see a woman shot out of a gun, flattened against a wall, and peeled off like paper… I tell you, sir, your interest is misplaced."
   Oliphant sighed. "My friend, it is my job to ask questions. You must understand that I cannot tell you my reasons for asking a given question. I know that you have suffered. I know that you suffer now, in exile." Oliphant glanced meaningfully about the tragic room.
   "What then do you wish to know?"
   "It has been suggested that among the various criminal elements, active during the recent civil disruptions, were agents of Manhattan." Oliphant waited.
   "I find that unlikely."
   "On what basis, Mr. Kriege?"

   "To my knowledge, the Commune has no interest in disturbing the British status-quo. Your Rads have shown themselves to be benevolent bystanders, with regard to America's class-struggle. Indeed, your nation has behaved as an ally of sorts." There was much bitterness in Kriege's tone, a curdled cynicism. "One imagines it was in Britain's own interest to see the Northern Union lose its greatest city to the Communards."
   Oliphant shifted cautiously on the uncomfortable chair. "You knew Mr. Marx intimately, I believe." In order to extract a given piece of information from Kriege, he knew, it was necessary to engage the man's dominant passion.
   "Knew him? I was there to greet him off the boat. He embraced me, and not a minute later had borrowed twenty gold dollars, to pay his rent in the Bronx!" Kriege assayed a sort of laugh, strangled with abiding rage. "He'd his Jenny with him, then, though the marriage didn't survive the revolution… But he'd a Brooklyn Irish factory-girl in his bed when he expelled me from the Commune, sir, for preaching 'religionism and free-love'! Free-love indeed!" Kriege's large pale hands, with their unkept nails, plucked abstractedly at a sheaf of papers.
   "You have been badly used, Mr. Kriege." Oliphant thought of his friend. Lord Engels; it did seem extraordinary, that the brilliant textile-manufacturer should involve himself, however distantly, with people of this sort. Kriege had been a member of the Commune's so-called "Central Committee," before Marx had sent him packing. With a price on his head in the Northern Union, he had sailed in steerage from Boston, penniless, under an assumed name, with his wife and child, to join London's thousands of American refugees.
   "These Bowery pantomimes…"
   "Yes?" Oliphant leaned forward.
   "There are factions within the Party…"
   "Do go on."
   "Anarchists disguising themselves as communists; feminists, all manner of incorrect ideologies, you see, covert cells not under Manhattan's control…"
   "I see," Oliphant said, thinking of the reams of yellow fan-fold representing the confession of William Collins.

   Again on foot, Oliphant made his roundabout way through Soho, to Compton Street, where he paused before the entrance of a public house known as the Blue Boar.
   "A SPORTING-GENTLEMAN," he was informed by a large bill, "a Staunch Supporter of the destruction of these Vermin," would give "A GOLD REPEATER-WATCH TO BE KILLED FOR BY DOGS under 13 3/4 pounds weight." Below the smudged bill, a painted wooden placard advertised "Rats always on hand for the accommodation of Gentlemen to try their dogs."
   He entered, and shortly was greeting Fraser in the rank smell of dogs, tobacco-smoke, and hot penny-gin.
   The long bar was crowded with men of every grade of society, many with their animals under their arms. "There were bull-dogs, Skye terriers, small brown English terriers. The room was low-ceilinged and quite unadorned. About the walls were hung clusters of leather collars.
   "You came by cab, sir?" Fraser inquired.
   "On foot, from a previous appointment."
   " 'Ere now," cried the barman, "don't block up the bar!" There was a general movement toward the parlor, where a young waiter now shouted, "Give your orders, gentlemen!" With Fraser at his side, Oliphant followed the crowd of sporting-men and their dogs. Above the parlor fireplace were glass-fronted cases displaying the stuffed heads of animals famous in their day. Oliphant noticed the head of a bullterrier, its glass eyes bulging hugely.
   "Looks as though this one died of strangulation," Oliphant remarked, pointing the thing out to Fraser.
   "They've spoilt her in the stuffing, sir," said the waiter, a fair-haired boy in a greasy striped apron. "Good as any in England, she was. I've seen her kill twenty at a go, though they killed her at the last. Your sewer-rats are dreadful for giving a dog canker, though we'd always rinse her mouth out well with peppermint and water."
   "You're Sayers' boy," Fraser said. "We want a word with him."
   "Why, I know you, sir! You were 'ere about that savantry gent—"
   "Your old dad, Jem, and brisk about it," Fraser interjected, preventing the boy from announcing the arrival of a copper to the assembled sportsmen.
   " 'E's upstairs lighting the pit, sir," the boy said.
   "Good chap," Oliphant said, giving the boy a shilling.
   Oliphant and Fraser mounted a broad wooden staircase, which led to what had once been the drawing-room. Opening a door, Fraser led the way into the rat-killing apartment.
   "Pit's not bloody open," bellowed a fat man with ginger side-whiskers. Oliphant saw that the pit consisted of a wooden circus, some six feet in diameter, fitted with a high rim at elbow-height. Above it branched the arms of an eight-mantle gas-light, brightly illuminating the white-painted floor of the little arena. Mr. Sayers, the Blue Boar's proprietor, in a bulging silk waistcoat, stood with a live rat in his left hand. "But it's you, Mr. Fraser. My apologies, sir!" Having caught the creature somehow by the throat, he deftly prized out its larger teeth with no more implement than his strong thumbnail. "Order for a dozen with their teeth drawed." He dropped the mutilated rat into a rusted wire cage with several others and turned to face his visitors. " 'Ow might we be of service, Mr. Fraser?"
   Fraser took out an Engine-stippled morgue-portrait.
   "Aye, 'e's your man," Sayers said, his brows rising. "Big chap, long in the leg. And a dead'un, by the look of 'im."
   "You're quite positive?" Oliphant could smell the rats now. "This is Professor Rudwick's murderer?"
   "Aye, sir. We gets all sorts 'ere, but none too many Argentine giants. I recall 'im quite plain."
   Fraser had taken out his notebook and was writing in it.
   "Argentine?" Oliphant asked.
   " 'E spoke Spanish," Sayers said, "or so I took it to be. Now mind you, we none o' us saw 'im do the deed, but 'e was on the premises that night, so 'e was."
   "Cap'an's here," Sayers' son called from the doorway.
   " 'Ell! And I've not drawed the teeth of 'alf 'is rats!"
   "Fraser," Oliphant said, "I fancy a warm gin. Let us retire to the bar and allow Mr. Sayers to complete arrangements for the evening's sport." He bent to examine a larger cage, this one of iron bands. It seemed to contain a solid mound of rats.
   "Mind your fingers there," Sayers said. "For believe me, you get a bite and you'll not forget it. These 'ere are none o' the cleanest… "
   In the parlor, a young officer, evidently the Captain, was threatening to leave the place if he were kept waiting any longer.
   "I shouldn't drink that if I were you," Fraser said, looking at Oliphant's noggin of warm gin. "Almost certainly adulterated."
   "Actually it's quite good," Oliphant said. "It has a very faint after-taste, rather like bitter wormwood."
   "An intoxicant poison."
   "Quite. The French use it in the preparation of herbals. What do you make of our good Captain here?" Oliphant gestured with his gin, indicating the man in question, who was pacing about in an agitated fashion, examining the paws of various animals as their owners presented them, all the while shouting that he should depart immediately if the pit weren't opened.
   "Crimea," Fraser said.
   The Captain bent to peer at the claws of a young terrier in the arms of a swarthy, rather portly man whose pomaded spit-curls protruded like wings from beneath his high-crowned derby.
   "Velasco," Fraser said, as if to himself, something nastily akin to pleasure in his tone, and was instantly beside the fellow.
   The Captain started, his handsome young face convulsed with a violent tic, and Oliphant's eye abruptly filled with all the red Crimea—whole cities aflame like bonfires, and shell-churned wastes of jellied filth sprouting white flowers that were men's hands. He shuddered with the intensity of the vision, then forgot it utterly.
   "Do I know you, sir?" the Captain inquired of Fraser, with a brittle murderous jollity.
   "Gentlemen!" Mr. Sayers cried from the stairs. Led by the Captain, the entire company, save only Oliphant, Fraser, the swarthy man, and a fourth man, made for the pit above. The fourth man, perched on the arm of a ragged brocade armchair, began to cough. Oliphant saw Eraser's grip tighten about his prey's upper arm.
   "Shouldn't bloody ought to do that, Fraser," the man on the chair-arm said, unfolding his legs and standing. Oliphant noted a certain calculation evident in his tone. Like the swarthy man, he was newly and nattily kitted out, all in Oxford Street's latest, his coat of Engine-cut gabardine dyed a blue that verged on lavender. Oliphant saw that his lapel, like that of his companion, was decorated with a gleaming cloisonne badge in the shape of the Union Jack.
   " 'Bloody,' Mr. Tate?" Fraser said, a schoolmaster about to deliver a tongue-lashing or worse.
   "Fair warning, Fraser," the swarthy man said, his dark eyes protruding. "We're about Parliamentary business!" The little brown terrier shivered in his arms.
   "Are you, then?" Oliphant inquired mildly, "and what business has Parliament in a rat-pit?"
   "Might ask the same of you, eh?" the taller man said insolently, then coughed. Fraser glared at him.
   "Fraser," Oliphant said, "are these gentlemen the confidential agents you mentioned in regard to Dr. Mallory?"
   "Tate and Velasco," Fraser said grimly.
   "Mr. Tate," Oliphant said, stepping forward, "a pleasure, sir. I am Laurence Oliphant, journalist." Tate blinked, confused by Oliphant's cordiality. Fraser, rather reluctantly taking Oliphant's cue, released Velasco's arm. "Mr. Velasco." Oliphant smiled.
   Velasco's face clouded with suspicion. "Journalist? What sort of journalist?" he demanded, glancing from Oliphant to Fraser and back.
   "Travel pieces, primarily," Oliphant said, "though I'm currently engaged, with Mr. Fraser's able help, in compiling a popular history of the Great Stink."
   Tate peered narrowly at Oliphant. "Mallory, you said. What about 'im?"
   "I interviewed Dr. Mallory prior to his departure for China. His experiences during the Stink were most remarkable, and highly illustrative of the perils that might befall anyone during such a chaotic period."
   " 'Befall anyone'?" Velasco challenged. "Rubbish! Mallory's trouble was savantry trouble and your Mr. Fraser knows it well enough!"
   "Yes, yes, quite," Oliphant agreed. "And that is why I am delighted to have encountered you gentlemen tonight."
   Velasco and Tate glanced uncertainly at one another. "You are?" Tate ventured.
   "Utterly. You see. Dr. Mallory explained to me the unfortunate contretemps with his rival and fellow savant, Peter Foulke. It seems, you see, that even in the most rarified circles, during a period of such unprecedented stress—"
   "You'll not see Peter bloody Foulke moving in your rarified bloody circles now," Velasco interjected, "not for all his gentry posing." He paused for effect. "He was discovered in bed with a girl not twelve years old!"
   "No!" Oliphant feigned shock. "Foulke? But surely—"
   "He was," Tate affirmed, "in Brighton, and those as found him beat the bugger silly and flung him stark-naked into the street!"
   "But it wasn't us did that," Velasco stated flatly, "and you'll not prove it was."
   "There's a new trend of thought about," Tate said, thrusting his shallow chest forward so as to better display his Union Jack insignia, the gin-reddened tip of his button-nose glinting wetly, "such as doesn't tolerate decadence," giving equal stress to the word's three syllables, "be it in the savantry or however high at all. Hidden wickedness ran rife under Byron, all manner of it, and well you know it, Fraser!" Fraser's eyes widened at this effrontery, as Tate turned in his excitement to Oliphant. "That Stink was Ned Ludd's work, mister, and there's your history of it!"
   "Sabotage on a titanic scale," Velasco pronounced darkly, as if quoting from a speech, "abetted by conspirators in the highest ranks of society! But there are true patriots among us, sir, patriots at work to root that evil out!" The terrier growled in Velasco's arms, and Fraser looked on the verge of throttling man and dog alike.
   "We're Parliamentary investigators," Tate said, "about a Member's business, and I'm sure you'd not care to detain us."
   Oliphant put his hand upon Fraser's sleeve.
   With a smirk of triumph, Velasco soothed his little dog and sauntered to the stairs. Tate followed. From overhead came the mad yapping of dogs and the hoarse cries of sportsmen.
   "They're working for Egremont," Oliphant said.
   Fraser's face twisted with disgust. Disgust and something akin to amazement.
   "There seems nothing more to be done here, Fraser. I take it you arranged for a cab?"

   Mr. Mori Arinori, Oliphant's favorite among his young Japanese "pupils," took a fierce delight in all things British. Oliphant, who customarily breakfasted lightly if at all, would sometimes subject himself to massively "English" breakfasts to please Mori, who on this particular occasion wore the burliest of golfing-tweeds and a scarf in the tartan of the Royal Hibernian Order of Steam Engineers.
   There was a certain enjoyably melancholy sense of paradox, Oliphant mused, in watching Mori spread a slice of toast with marmalade, while he himself indulged a nostalgia for his own days in Japan, where he had served as first-secretary under Rutherford Alcock. His stay in Edo had nurtured in him a passionate regard for the muted tones and subtle textures of a world of ritual and shadow. He longed now for the rattle of rain blown against oiled paper, for flowering weeds a-nod down tiny alleys, the glow of rush-lamps, for scents and darknesses, the shadows of the Low City…
   "Oriphant-san, toast is very good, is most excellent! You are sad, Oriphant-san?"
   "No, Mr. Mori, not at all." He helped himself to bacon, though he wasn't hungry in the least. He put aside a sudden intrusive memory of the morning's hideous bath, the black clinging rubber. "I was recalling Edo. That city possessed great charm for me."
   Mori chewed bread and marmalade, regarding Oliphant steadily with his bright dark eyes, then dabbed expertly at his lips with a linen napkin. " 'Charm.' Your word for the old ways. The old ways hinder my nation. Only this week have I posted to Satsuma an argument against the wearing of swords." The bright eyes darted, for a fractional moment, toward the crooked fingers of Oliphant's left hand. As if stung by the pressure of Mori's awareness, the scar beneath Oliphant's cuff began a slow ache.
   "But, Mr. Mori," Oliphant said, setting his silver fork aside to abandon the unwanted bacon, "the sword, in your country, is in many respects the focal symbol of the feudal ethic and the sentiments attaching to it—an object of reverence second only to one's own lord."
   Mori smiled, pleased. "Odious custom of rude and savage age. This is good to be rid of, Oriphant-san. This is modern day!" This latter a favorite and frequent expression.
   Oliphant returned the smile. Mori combined boldness and compassion with a certain problematical brashness that Oliphant found most appealing. More than once, to Bligh's dismay, Mori had paid some cockney cabman, full fare plus tip, and then invited the fellow into Oliphant's kitchen for a meal. "But you must learn to proceed apace, Mr. Mori. While you yourself may regard the wearing of swords as a primitive custom, to openly oppose this minor matter might well provoke resistance to other, more important reforms, the deeper changes you wish to implement in your society."
   Mori nodded gravely. "Your policy no doubt has merit, Oriphant-san. Far better, for example, if all Japanese were taught English. Our meager tongue is of no use in the great world beyond our islands. Soon power of steam and the Engine must pervade our land. English language, following such, must suppress any use of Japanese. Our intelligent race, eager in pursuit of knowledge, cannot depend on weak and uncertain medium of communication. We must grasp principal truths from precious treasury of Western science!"
   Oliphant tilted his head to one side, considering Mori carefully. "Mr. Mori," he said, "pardon me if I misunderstand you, but am I correct in assuming that you are proposing nothing less than the deliberate abolition of the Japanese language?"
   "This is modern day, Oriphant-san, modern day! All reasons support our tongue's disuse."
   Oliphant smiled. "We must arrange to discuss this at length, Mr. Mori, but now I must ask if you are engaged this evening. I propose an entertainment."
   "By all means, Oriphant-san. English social festivities are ever gratifying." Mori beamed.
   "We shall go then, to Whitechapel, to the Garrick Theatre, for what I understand is a most unusual pantomime."

   According to the spottily stippled program, the Clown was known as "Jackdaw Jaculation," though this was perhaps the least peculiar aspect of that evening's performance, by the Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe, of 'Mazulem the Night Owl'. Other characters included "Freedman Bureau Bill, a black boy," "Levy Stickemall, a merchant, offering two segars for five cents," "a Yankee Peddler," "a Lady Shop-Lifter," "a Roast Turkey," and the eponymous "Mazulem."
   All of the players, to judge by the program, were female, though in several cases this would otherwise have been quite impossible to determine. The Clown, ornate with frills, in elaborately spangled satin, boasted an egg-bald shaven pate and the sinister white-face of the Pierrot, touched with color only in the outlined lips.
   The performance had been preceded by a brief, ranting address from one "Helen America," her heaving, apparently unconstrained bosom, through layers of diaphanous scarves, serving to hold the attention of the predominantly masculine audience. Her speech had consisted of slogans Oliphant found rather more cryptic than rousing. What exactly did it mean, for instance, when she declared that "We have nothing to wear but our chains…"?
   Consulting the program, he was informed that Helen America was in fact the authoress of 'Mazulem the Night Owl', as well as 'Harlequin Panattahah' and 'The Genii of the Algonquins'.
   Musical accompaniment was provided by a moon-faced organist—her eyes, it seemed to Oliphant, glinting either with lunacy or laudanum.
   The pantomime had opened in what Oliphant supposed was meant to be taken as a hotel dining-room, with the peripatetic Roast Turkey—apparently played by a dwarf—attacking the diners with a carving-knife. Oliphant had very quickly lost track of the narrative, if indeed there were one, which he doubted. Scenes were punctuated repeatedly by characters firing stuffed bricks at one another's heads. There was kinotropic accompaniment, of a sort, though it consisted of crudely polemical cartoons that seemed to bear little relationship to the action.
   Oliphant stole a glance at Mori, who sat beside him, his treasured topper upright on his lap, his face expressionless. The audience was howlingly rowdy, though less in response to the substance of the pantomime, whatever that might be, than to the whirling, curiously formless dances of the Communard women, their bare shins and ankles plainly visible beneath the ragged hems of their flowing garments.
   Oliphant's back began to ache.
   The choreography accelerated into a sort of balletic assault, the air thick with brickbats, until, quite abruptly, 'Mazulem the Night Owl' was ended.
   The crowd hooted, applauded, jeered. Oliphant noted a hulking, gaunt-jawed man with a stout rattan over his shoulder, lounging beside the entrance to the pit. The fellow was watching the crowd through narrowed eyes.
   "Come then, Mr. Mori. I sense a journalistic opportunity."
   Mori stood, hat and evening-cane in hand. He followed Oliphant toward the pit.
   "Laurence Oliphant, journalist." He presented his card to the hulking man. "If you would be so kind, you might convey this to Miss America with my request for an interview."
   The man took the card, glanced at it, and let it fall to the floor. Oliphant saw the knobby fist tighten around the rattan. Mori emitted a brief hiss, as if of steam; Oliphant turned; Mori, his top-hat jammed firmly forward on his head, had assumed the pose of the samurai warrior, the handle of his evening-cane grasped in both his hands. Immaculate linen and gold links glinted at his supple wrists.
   The untidily coiffed, extravagantly hennaed head of Helen America appeared. Her eyes were ringed with kohl.
   Mori held his pose.
   "Miss Helen America?" Oliphant produced a second card. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Laurence Oliphant, journalist… "
   Helen America performed a rapid manipulation before the stony face of her compatriot, as though she were conjuring something from the air. The man lowered his length of rattan, still glowering fiercely at Mori. The stick, Oliphant saw, was obviously weighted. "Cecil's a deaf mute," she said, pronouncing the name with a case-hardened American e.
   "I'm very sorry. I offered my card—"
   "He can't read. You say you're a newspaper-man?"
   "An occasional journalist. And you, Miss America, are an authoress of the first-water. Allow me to introduce my good friend, Mr. Mori Arinori, an envoy of the Mikado of Japan."
   With a deadly glance at Cecil, Mori reversed his cane with admirable grace, removed his hat, and bowed in the European fashion. Helen America, wide-eyed, regarded him as one might a trained dog. She wore a neatly mended military cloak, threadbare but apparently clean, in the shade of grey the Confederates called butternut, though the original regimental buttons had been replaced with plain round horn.
   "I haven't ever seen a Chinaman dress like that," she said.
   "Mr. Mori is Japanese."
   "And you're a newspaper-man."

   "After a fashion, yes."
   Helen America smiled, revealing a gold tooth. "And did you enjoy our show?"
   "It was extraordinary, quite extraordinary."
   Her smile widened. "Then come to Manhattan, mister, for the People Risen have the old Olympic, east of Broadway, over Houston Street. We're best appreciated in our own venue." Thin bands of silver pierced her ears, amid a tangled cloud of hennaed curls.
   "It would be my great pleasure. As it would be my pleasure to conduct an interview with the authoress of—"
   "I didn't write that," she said, "Fox did."
   "Pardon me?"
   "George Washington Lafayette Fox—the Marxian Grimaldi, the Tamla of socialist pantomime! It was the Troupe's decision to put that I wrote it, though I continue to argue against it."
   "But your prefatory message…"
   "Now I did write that, sir, and am proud of it. But poor Fox… "
   "I hadn't heard," Oliphant submitted, somewhat baffled.
   "It was the terrible pressure of toil," she said. "The great Fox, who'd single-handedly elevated socialist pantomime to its present level of revolutionary importance, was sweated mad by one-night stands, sir; driven to sheer exhaustion at having to contrive sharper tricks and quicker transformations. He slid into dementia then, his grimaces hideous to behold." She had assumed her stage delivery; now she lapsed back into a more confidential tone. "He'd lapse into the crudest indecency, mister, so we kept his dresser in a monkey-suit, to run out and belabor him, if he got too obscene."
   "I'm very sorry—"
   "Manhattan's no place for the mad, sir, sad to say. He's in the asylum in Somerville, Massachusetts, and if you'd care to publish that, be my guest."
   Oliphant found that he was staring at her, entirely at a loss for words. Mori Arinori had retired somewhat, and seemed to be watching the crowd as it made its way out of the Garrick. The deaf-mute Cecil had vanished, taking with him his shot-loaded length of rattan.
   "I could eat a horse," Helen America said cheerfully.
   "Allow me, please, to provide you with a meal. Where do you wish to dine?"
   "There's a place around the corner." As she stepped from the topmost of the steps that ascended the pit, Oliphant saw that she wore a pair of the rubber boots Americans called Chickamaugas, great clumsy things of military origin. With Mori at his side, he followed her out of the Garrick. She had not waited for him to offer his arm.
   She led them down the street, and as she had said, around a corner. Gas-light flared, before a clacking kino-sign that checkered from MOSES & SONS AUTOCAFE into CLEAN MODERN RAPID and back again. Helen America glanced back with an encouraging smile, her callipygian hips swaying beneath the Confederate cloak and the tattered muslin of her remarkable stage-garment.
   The Autocafe was crowded and noisy, packed with Whitechapel locals. Its iron-mullioned windows were opaque with steam. Oliphant had seen nothing like it before.
   Helen America demonstrated how business was conducted here, taking up a rectangular gutta-percha tray from a stack of the things, and pushing it along a ledge of shining zinc. Above the ledge were several dozen miniature windows, trimmed with brass. Oliphant and Mori followed her example. Behind each window, a different dish was displayed. Oliphant, noting the coin-slots, fumbled for his change-purse. Helen America chose a slice of shepherd's pie, a helping of toad-in-the-hole, and fried chips, Oliphant providing the requisite coinage. An additional tuppence produced a copious quantity of very dubious-looking brown gravy, from a spigot. Mori chose a baked potato, a particular favorite of his, but declined the gravy-spigot. Oliphant, disoriented by the oddness of the place, opted for a pint of machine-made ale, from another spigot.
   "Clystra's liable to kill me for this," Helen America remarked, as they arranged their trays on a ridiculously small cast-iron table. The table, like the four chairs around it, was bolted into the concrete floor. "Doesn't hold with us talking to gentlemen of the press." She shrugged, beneath her butternut cloak. She smiled happily and began to sort a small pile of cheap tin-ware, giving Mori a knife and dinner-fork. "Have you been to a town called Brighton, mister?"
   "Yes, actually, I have."
   "What kind of place is that?"
   Mori was examining, with keen interest, the rectangular dish of coarse grey cardboard beneath his potato.
   "It's very pleasant," Oliphant said, "very picturesque. The Hydropathic Pavilion is quite famous—"
   "Is it in England?" Helen America asked, around a mouthful of toad-in-the-hole.
   "It is, yes."
   "Lot of working-folks?"
   "Perhaps not, in the sense I take you to mean, though the various facilities and attractions employ a great many people."
   "Haven't seen a real factory-crowd since we got here. Well—let's eat!" And with that, Helen America bent to the task. Dinner-conversation, Oliphant gathered, was not highly valued in Red Manhattan.
   She left the cardboard "dishes" utterly devoid of scraps or crumbs, contriving to sop up the last dross of gravy with a chip she had carefully retained for this purpose.
   Oliphant took out his notebook. Opening it, he removed a plain white card stippled with Florence Bartlett's Bow Street portrait. "Are you familiar at all with Flora Barnett, the American actress. Miss America? She's enormously popular in Manhattan, or so I was recently told… " Oliphant displayed the card.
   "She's no actress, mister. Nor an American either. She's a Southron, if you can even call her that; next thing to a damn' Frenchie. The People Risen don't need her kind. Hell, we've already hung our share of 'em!"
   "Her kind?"
   Helen America met his gaze with a defiant stare. "In a pig's eye, you're a journalist… "
   "I'm sorry if—"
   "Sorry like the rest of 'em. You give just about that much of a damn… "
   "Miss America, please, I wish only to—"
   "Thanks for the feed, mister, but you can't pump me, understand? And that brontosaur, that's got no damn' business over here in the first place! You got no right to it, and one day it'll sit in the Manhattan Metropolitan, for it belongs to the People Risen! And what makes you limeys think you can come digging up the People's natural treasures?"
   And in through the door, as if on cue, marched the very formidable Clown of the Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe, her bald pate hugely bonneted in polka-dot gingham, and her Chickamauga boots even larger than Helen America's.
   "Coming right this minute, Comrade Clystra," Helen America said.
   The Clown fixed Oliphant with a murderous glare, and then the two were gone.
   Oliphant looked at Mori. "A peculiar evening, Mr. Mori."
   Mori, apparently lost in contemplation of the Autocafe's clatter and bustle, took a moment to respond.
   "We will have places such as this in my country, Oriphant-san! Clean! Modern! Rapid!"

   Bligh, upon Oliphant's return to Half-Moon Street, followed him upstairs to the door of the study. "May I come in for a moment, sir?" Locking the door behind them with his own key, Bligh crossed to a miniature parquet bureau that supported Oliphant's smoking-things; unsealing the top of a humidor, he reached inside and removed a squat little cylinder of black-japanned tin. "This was brought 'round to the kitchen door by a young man, sir. He wouldn't give his name, when asked. I took the liberty of opening it myself, sir, recalling some of the more heathen attempts, abroad… "
   Oliphant took the canister and unscrewed its lid. Perforated telegraph-tape.
   "And the young man?"
   "A junior Engine-clerk, sir, to judge by the state of his shoes. Aside from the fact that he wore a clerk's cotton gloves, which he didn't remove."
   "And there was no message?"
   "There was, sir. 'Tell him,' he said, 'that we can do no more, there is great danger, he mustn't ask again.' "
   "I see. Would you mind bringing up a pot of strong green-tea?"
   Alone, Oliphant set about removing the heavy glass from his personal receiving-telegraph, a matter of loosening four brass wing-screws. Placing the tall vitrine-like dome out of harm's way, he spent some minutes consulting the maker's instructional manual. After rummaging through several drawers, he located the requisite implements: a walnut-handled brass hand-crank and a small gilt screw-driver embossed with the monogram of the Colt & Maxwell Company. He located the knife-switch at the base of the instrument and severed the electrical connection with the Post Office. He then used the screwdriver to make the necessary adjustments, carefully threaded the end of the tape onto the bright steel sprockets, locked the guide-plates into position, and took a deep breath.
   He was all at once aware of the beating of his own heart, and of the night's silence pressing in from the darkness of Green Park, and of the Eye. He took up the crank, thrust its hexagonal tip into the mechanism's socket, and began, steadily but slowly, to turn it clockwise. The character-hammers began to rise and fall, rise and fall, deciphering the punch-code of the Post Office tape. He refused to look at it, as it emerged from the slot.
   It was done. With scissors and paste-pot, he assembled the message on a sheet of foolscap:

   DEAR CHARLES COMMA NINE YEARS AGO YOU PUT ME TO THE WORST DISHONOR THAT A WOMAN CAN KNOW STOP CHARLES COMMA YOU PROMISED ME THAT YOU WOULD SAVE MY POOR FATHER STOP INSTEAD YOU CORRUPTED ME COMMA BODY AND SOUL STOP TODAY I AM LEAVING LONDON COMMA IN THE COMPANY OF POWERFUL FRIENDS STOP THEY KNOW VERY WELL WHAT A TRAITOR YOU WERE TO WALTER GERARD COMMA AND TO ME STOP DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FIND ME COMMA CHARLES STOP IT WOULD BE USELESS STOP I DO HOPE THAT YOU AND MRS EGREMONT WILL SLEEP SOUNDLY TONIGHT STOP SYBIL GERARD ENDIT

   Only barely aware of Bligh arriving with the tea, he sat unmoving for the better part of an hour, the message before him. Then, after pouring himself a cup of luke-warm tea, he gathered stationery, took out his reservoir-pen, and began to compose, in his flawless diplomat's French, a letter to a certain Monsieur Arslau, of Paris.

   Flash-powder still stank in the air.
   The Prince Consort turned, with his full Teutonic gravity, from an elaborate stereoptic camera, of Swiss manufacture, and greeted Oliphant in German. He wore aquamarine spectacles, their circular lenses no larger than florins, and was draped in a photographer's smock of spotless white duck. His fingers were stained with silver nitrate.
   Oliphant bowed, wishing His Highness a good afternoon in what amounted to the Royal Family's language of choice, and pretended to examine the Swiss camera, an intricate creation whose stereoptic lenses, like eyes, stared from beneath a smooth brass brow. Like the eyes of Mr. Cart, the Consort's muscular Swiss valet, they struck Oliphant as being set rather too widely apart.
   "I've brought Affie a little gift, Your Highness," Oliphant said. His German, like the Prince Consort's, had the accent of Saxony—the legacy of a prolonged and delicate mission Oliphant had undertaken there at the behest of the Royal Family. Prince Albert's Coburg relatives, ever ingenious at the ancient craft of marriage-politics, were eager to expand their tiny domain—a delicate matter indeed, when the policy of the British Foreign Office was to keep the German mini-states as fragmented as politically possible. "Has the young Prince concluded his day's lessons?"
   "Affie is ill today," Albert said, peering through his tinted spectacles at one of the camera's lenses. He produced a small brush and lightly whisked at the surface of the lens. He straightened. "Do you think the study of statistics too much a burden for a tender young mind?"
   "My opinion, Your Highness?" Oliphant said. "Statistical analysis is indeed a powerful technique… "
   "His mother and I disagree on the matter," the Prince confided mournfully. "And Alfred's progress in the subject is far from satisfactory. Nevertheless, statistics is the key to the future. Statistics are everything in England."
   "Does he progress well in his other studies?" Oliphant hedged.
   "Anthropometry," the Prince suggested absently. "Eugenics. Powerful fields of learning, but less taxing, perhaps, to the youthful brain."
   "Perhaps I might have a word with him. Your Highness," Oliphant said. "I know the lad means well."
   "He is in his room, no doubt," the Prince said.
   Oliphant made his way through the drafty glamor of the Royal Apartments to Alfred's room, where he was greeted with a whoop of glee, the Prince scrambling in bare-feet from mounded bedclothes and hopping nimbly across the tracks of a most elaborate miniature railway. "Uncle Larry! Uncle Larry! Brilliant! What have you brought for me?"
   "Baron Zorda's latest."
   In Oliphant's pocket, wrapped in green tissue and smelling strongly of cheap fresh ink, was a copy of 'Paternoster the Steam Bandit', by one "Baron Zorda," the third volume in the popular series, young Prince Alfred having expressed his unbridled enthusiasm for the two previous numbers, 'The Skeleton Amy' and 'Wheelmen of the Tsar'. The book's garishly colored cover depicted the daring Paternoster, pistol in hand, climbing from the cabin of a hurtling vehicle one took to be a gurney in the latest style—sheathed in tin, bulbous at the prow, and very narrow in the rear. The frontispiece, which Oliphant had examined in the Piccadilly news-agent's where he had purchased the volume, offered Baron Zorda's raffish highwayman in rather more detail, particularly in regard to his dress, which included a broad belt of studded leather and bell-bottomed trousers with buttoned vents at the cuffs.
   "Super!" The boy eagerly tore the green tissue from Paternoster the Steam Bandit. "Look at his gurney. Uncle Larry! It's line-streamed like sixty!"
   "Nothing but the swiftest for wicked Paternoster, Affie. And see the frontispiece. He's got up like Smashjaw Ned."
   "Look at his narrow-go-wides," Alfred said admiringly. "And his bloody great belt!"
   "And how have you been, Affie," Oliphant asked, ignoring the boy's lapse in language, "since my last visit?"
   "Very well, Uncle Larry"—and a shadow of anxiety crossed the young face—"but I'm afraid I—I'm afraid she—she's broken, you see—" The Prince pointed to where the Japanese tea-doll slumped disconsolately against the foot of the massive four-poster, surrounded by a tumbled sea of lithographed tin and painted lead. A long sharp sliver of some translucent material protruded grotesquely from her gorgeous robe. "It's the spring, you see. I think it was wound too tightly, Uncle Larry. It sprang right out, on the tenth turn."
   "The Japanese power their dolls with springs of baleen, Affie. 'Whale-whiskers,' they call the stuff. They haven't yet learned from us the manufacture of proper springs, but soon they shall. When they do, their dolls shan't break so easily."
   "Father says you're too keen on your Japanese," Alfred said. "He says you think them the equal of Europeans."
   "And I do, Affie! Their mechanical appliances are presently inferior, due to their lack of knowledge in the applied sciences. Some day, in futurity, they may lead civilization to heights yet untold. They, and perhaps the Americans…"
   The boy regarded him dubiously. "Father wouldn't like that at all, what you said."
   "No, I rather doubt he would."
   Oliphant then spent half-an-hour, down on his knees upon the carpet, watching Alfred demonstrate a toy French Engine—operated, as was its cousin the Great Napoleon, by compressed air. The little Engine employed lengths of telegraph-tape, rather than cards, reminding Oliphant of his letter to M. Arslau. Bligh would have taken it 'round to the French Embassy by now; very likely it was already on its way to Paris by diplomatic pouch.
   Alfred was connecting his Engine to a miniature kinotrope. There came a ceremonious rattle at the door-knob; the doors of Buckingham Palace were never knocked. Oliphant rose, and opened the tall white portal, to discover the well-known face of Nash, a palace valet-de-chambre, whose unwise speculations in railway shares had briefly made him the unwilling intimate of the Metropolitan Fraud Bureau. Oliphant's politesse had successfully smoothed the matter—a kindness well-invested, he saw now, by Nash's unfeigned air of respectful attention. "Mr. Oliphant," Nash announced, "a telegram has come, sir. Most urgent."

   The velocity of the Special Branch vehicle contributed in no small part to Oliphant's general sense of unease. Paternoster himself could have asked for nothing faster, or more radically line-streamed.
   They flew past St. James's Park with the speed of dream, the bare black branches of the lime-trees flashing by like wind-driven smoke. The driver wore leather goggles with round lenses, and plainly relished their headlong flight, periodically sounding a deep-throated whistle that sent horses rearing and pedestrians scurrying. The stoker, a burly young Irishman, was grinning maniacally as he shoveled coke into the burner.
   Oliphant had no idea of their destination. Now, as they neared Trafalgar, the traffic caused the driver to yank the whistle-cord continually, steadily, setting up a mournful bellowing ululation, like the grief of some marine behemoth. The traffic, at this sound, parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Helmeted policemen saluted smartly as they sped past. Urchins and crossing-sweepers turned cartwheels of delight, at the sight of a sleek tin fish racketing down the Strand.
   The evening had grown quite dark. As they entered Fleet Street, the driver applied the brake and worked a lever that released a mighty gout of uprushing steam. The line-streamed gurney bumped to a halt.
   "Well, sir," the driver commented, raising his goggles to peer through the fretted glass of the vehicle's prow, "would you look at that."
   Traffic, Oliphant saw, had been halted completely by the erection of wooden barricades hung with lanterns. Behind these stood grim-faced soldiers in combat drab, Cutts-Maudslay carbines unslung and at the ready. Beyond them, he saw sheets of canvas, loosely hung from raw timber uprights, as though someone were attempting to erect stage-scenery in the middle of Fleet Street.
   The stoker swabbed his face with a polka-dot kingsman. "Something here the press aren't meant to see."
   "They've put it in the wrong street, then," the driver said, "haven't they?"
   As Oliphant climbed from the gurney, Fraser came walking quickly toward him. "We've found her," Fraser said glumly.
   "And seem to have attracted considerable publicity in the process. Perhaps a few less infantry would be in order?"
   "It isn't a matter for levity, Mr. Oliphant. You'd best come with me."
   "Is Betteredge here?"
   "Haven't seen him. This way, please." Fraser led the way between a pair of barricades. A soldier curtly nodded them past.
   Oliphant glimpsed a mustachioed gentleman in urgent conversation with two Metropolitans. "That's Halliday," he said, "chief of Criminal Anthropometry."
   "Yes, sir," Fraser said. "They're all over this one. The Museum of Practical Geology has been broken into. The Royal Society is angry as a nest of hornets, and bloody Egremont will be in every first-edition, calling it a Luddite outrage. Our only bit of luck would seem to be that Dr. Mallory is well away in China."
   "Mallory? Why is that?"
   "The Land Leviathan. Mrs. Bartlett and her cohorts attempted to make away with the thing's skull."
   They rounded one of the makeshift barriers, its coarse fabric stamped at intervals with the broad-arrow mark of the Army Ordnance Department.
   A cab-horse lay on its side in a great pool of darkening blood. The cab, a common one-horse fly, was overturned nearby, its dull black-lacquered panels stitched with bullet-holes.
   "She was with two men," Fraser said. "Three if you count a corpse they left behind in the Museum. The hack was driven by a Yankee exile called Russell, a bully-rock bruiser living in Seven Dials. The other man was Henry Dease of Liverpool, quite the accomplished cracksman. I'd our Henry in dock ten times, when I was on the force, but no more. They're laid out there, sir." He pointed. "Russell, the driver, evidently got into a shouting match with a real cabman, over who should give way. A Metropolitan on traffic-duty attempted to intervene, at which point Russell produced a pistol."
   Oliphant was staring at the overturned cab.
   "The traffic officer was unarmed, but a pair of Bow Street detectives happened to be passing… "
   "But this cab, Fraser…"

   "That's the work of an Army-gurney, sir. The last of the temporary garrisons is just by the Holborn viaduct." He paused. "Dease had a Russian shotgun… "
   Oliphant shook his head in disbelief.
   "Eight civilians taken to hospital," Fraser said. "One detective dead. But come along, sir—best we get this done with."
   "What is the meaning of these canvas screens?"
   "Criminal Anthropometry ordered them."
   Oliphant felt as though he were moving through a dream, his limbs numb and without volition. He allowed himself to be led to where three canvas-draped bodies were arranged upon stretchers.
   The face of Florence Bartlett was a hideous ruin.
   "Vitriol," Fraser said. "A bullet shattered whatever container she employed."
   Oliphant turned quickly away, retching into his handkerchief.
   "Sorry, sir," Fraser said. "No point in you seeing the other two."
   "Betteredge, Fraser—have you seen him?"
   "No, sir. Here's the skull, sir, or what remains of it."
   "The skull?"
   Perhaps half-a-dozen massive fragments of petrified bone and ivory-tinted plaster were neatly arranged atop a varnished trestle-table. "There's a Mr. Reeks here, from the Museum, come to take it back," Fraser said. "Says it isn't as badly damaged as we might think. Would you like to sit down, sir? I could find you a folding-stool—"
   "No. Why does there seem to be fully half of Criminal Anthropometry about, Fraser?"
   "Well, sir, you're in a better position to determine that than I," Fraser said, lowering his voice, "though I've heard it said that Mr. Egremont and Lord Galton have recently discovered they've much in common."
   "Lord Galton? The eugenics theorist?"
   "Lord Darwin's cousin, that is. He's Anthropometry's man in the House of Lords. Has a deal of influence in the Royal Society." Fraser brought out his notebook. "You'd best see why I thought it urgent you come here, sir." He led Oliphant back around the ruin of the cab. Glancing about for possible observers, he passed Oliphant a fold of blue flimsy. "I took it from the Bartlett woman's reticule."
   The note was undated, unsigned:

   That which you so persistently desire has been located, albeit in a most peculiar hiding-place. I am informed, by our mutual acquaintance of the Derby, Dr. Mallory, that it has been sealed up within the skull of his Land Leviathan. I would hope that you will consider this crucial intelligence a full repayment of all my debts to you. I am in some peril now, from recent political developments, and certainly I am observed by elements of Government; pray consider that in any further attempt to communicate. I have done all that I can, I swear it.

   The elegant hand, as familiar to Oliphant as it was to Fraser, was Lady Ada Byron's.
   "The two of us alone have seen that," Fraser said.
   Oliphant folded the paper in quarters before putting it away in his cigar-case. "And what exactly was it, Fraser, that was hidden in the skull?"
   "I'll escort you back through the line, sir."
   Reporters surged forward as Fraser and Oliphant emerged from the barricades. Fraser took Oliphant's arm and led him into a cluster of helmeted Metropolitans, some of whom he greeted casually by name. "To answer your question, Mr. Oliphant," Fraser said, the policemen walling off the shouting crowd behind blue serge and brass buttons, "I don't know. But we have it."
   "You do? By whose authority?"
   "None but my own lights," Fraser said. "Harris here, he found it in the cab, before Anthropometry arrived." Fraser very nearly smiled. "The boys on the force aren't too keen on Anthropometry. Bloody-minded amateurs, aye, Harris?"
   "Aye, sir," said a Metropolitan with blond side-whiskers, "they are that."
   "Where is it, then?" Oliphant asked.
   "Here, sir." Harris produced a cheap black satchel. "Just as we found it, in this."
   "Mr. Oliphant, sir, I think you'd best take that straight away," Fraser said.
   "Indeed, Fraser, I agree. Tell the Special Branch chap in the fancy gurney that I won't be needing him. Thank you, Harris. Good evening." The policemen parted smoothly. Oliphant, satchel in hand, strode smartly out through the throng who jostled for a better view of the soldiers and the canvas screens.
   "Pardon, guv, but couldyer spare a copper?"
   Oliphant looked down into the squinting brown eyes of little Boots, every inch the crippled jockey. He was neither. Oliphant threw him a penny. Boots caught it adroitly, then edged forward on his cut-down crutch. He stank of damp fustian and smoked mackerel. "Trouble, guv. Becky'll tell yer." Boots wheeled about on his crutch and hobbled determinedly away, muttering as he went, a beggar intent upon finding a better pitch.
   He was one of Oliphant's two most talented watchers.
   The other, Becky Dean, kept pace beside Oliphant as he neared the corner of Chancery Lane. She was gotten up as a rather successful tart, brass-heeled and brazen.
   "Where has Betteredge got to?" Oliphant asked, as if talking to himself.
   "Taken," Becky Dean said. "Not three hours ago."
   "Taken by whom?"
   "Two men in a hack. They'd been following you. Betteredge got on to them, then set us to watching the watchers."
   "I knew nothing of this."
   "Day before yesterday, he came to us."
   "And who were these men?"
   "One's a greasy little ponce of a private detective. Velasco his name is. The other was Government by the look of him."
   "He was taken in broad daylight? By force?"
   "You know well enough how it's done," Becky Dean said.

   In the soothing reek of his tobacconist's quiet stock-room, at the corner of Chancery Lane and Carey Street, Oliphant held the corner of the blue flimsy above the concise jet of a bronze cigar-lighter in the shape of a turbaned Turk.
   He watched the paper reduce itself to delicate pinkish ash.
   The satchel had contained a Ballester-Molina automatic revolver, a silvered-brass pocket-flask filled with some sickly, sweet-scented decoction, and a wooden case. "This last was plainly the object in question, encrusted as it was with raw white plaster. It held a very large number of Engine-cards in the Napoleon gauge, cut from a novel material, milky and very smooth to the touch.
   "The parcel," he said to Mr. Beadon, the tobacconist, "is to be held for me alone."
   "Certainly, sir."
   "My man Bligh to be the sole exception."
   "As you wish, sir."
   "If any inquiry at all should be made, Beadon, please send a boy 'round to advise Bligh."
   "Our pleasure, sir."
   "Thank you, Beadon. Could you possibly give me forty pounds cash, against my account?"
   "Forty, sir?"
   "Yes."
   "Yes I could, sir. With pleasure, Mr. Oliphant." Mr. Beadon took a ring of keys from his coat and went to unlock an admirably modern-looking safe.
   "And a dozen prime habanas. And Beadon?"
   "Yes, sir?"
   "I think it might be a very good idea if you were to keep the parcel in your safe there."
   "Of course, sir."
   "I believe that the Lambs is nearby, Beadon, the dining-club?"
   "Yes, sir. Holborn, sir. A short walk."

   The year's first snow began to fall, as he made his way up Chancery Lane, a dry gritty stuff that seemed unlikely to adhere to the paving.
   Boots and Becky Dean were nowhere to be seen, which could reliably be taken to mean that they were about their customarily invisible business.
   You know well enough how it's done.
   And didn't he? How many had been made to vanish, vanish utterly, in London alone? How could one sit among friends at pleasant little dinners, sipping Moselle, listening to kind and careless talk, yet carry in one's mind the burden of such knowledge?
   He'd meant Collins to be the last, absolutely the last; now Betteredge had gone, and at the hands of another agency.
   In the beginning, it had made so horribly elegant a sort of sense.
   In the beginning, it had been his idea.
   The Eye. He sensed it now—yes, surely, its all-seeing gaze full upon him as he nodded to the tasseled doorman and entered the marbled vestibule of the Lambs, Andrew Wakefield's dining club.
   Brass letter-boxes, a telegraph-booth, an excess of French-polished veneer, all thoroughly modern. He glanced back, through glass doors, to the street. Opposite the Lambs, beyond twin streams of snow-dusted traffic, he glimpsed a solitary figure in a tall derby hat.
   A page directed him to the grill-room, which was done in dark oak, with an enormous fireplace topped with a mantel of carved Italian stone. "Laurence Oliphant," he told the tightly jacketed head-waiter, "for Mr. Andrew Wakefield."
   A look of unease crossed the man's face. "I'm sorry, sir, but he isn't—"
   "Thank you," Oliphant said, "but I believe I see Mr. Wakefield."
   With the head-waiter at his heels, Oliphant marched between the tables, diners turning as he passed.
   "Andrew," he said, arriving at Wakefield's table, "how very fortunate to find you here."
   Wakefield was dining alone. He seemed to experience a temporary difficulty in swallowing.
   "Mr. Wakefield, sir," the head-waiter began.
   "My friend will be joining me," Wakefield said. "Sit down, please. We're attracting attention."
   "Thank you." Oliphant took a seat.
   "Will you be dining, sir?" the head-waiter asked.
   "No, thank you."
   When they were alone, Wakefield sighed loudly. "Damn it all, Oliphant, but didn't I make my terms clear?"
   "What exactly is it, Andrew, of which you've become so frightened?"
   "It should be fairly obvious."
   "Should it?"
   "Lord Galton's in league with your bloody Mr. Egremont. He's the great patron of Criminal Anthropometry. Always has been. Their virtual founder. He's Charles Darwin's cousin, Oliphant, and he wields great influence in the House of Lords."
   "Yes, and in the Royal Society, and in the Geographical as well. I'm thoroughly familiar with Lord Galton, Andrew. He espouses the systematic breeding of the human species."
   Wakefield put down his knife and fork. "Criminal Anthropometry have effectively taken over the Bureau. For all intents and purposes, the Central Statistics Bureau is now under Egremont's control."
   Oliphant watched as Wakefield's upper teeth began to worry at his lower-lip.
   "I've just come from Fleet Street," Oliphant said. "The level of violence in this society"—and he drew the Ballester-Molina from within his coat—"or rather, I should say, the level of unacknowledged violence, has become remarkable, don't you think, Andrew?" He placed the revolver on the linen between them. "Take this pistol as an example. All too readily obtainable, I'm told. It is of Franco-Mexican manufacture, though the invention of Spaniards. Certain of its internal parts, I am informed, springs and whatnot, are actually British, available on the open market. It becomes rather difficult, then, to say where a weapon like this comes from. Emblematic of something in our current situation, don't you think?"
   Wakefield had gone quite white.
   "But I seem to have upset you, Andrew. I'm sorry."
   "They'll erase us," Wakefield said. "We'll cease to exist. There'll be nothing left, nothing to prove either of us ever lived. Not a check-stub, not a mortgage in a City bank, nothing whatever."
   "Exactly what I'm on about, Andrew."
   "Don't take that moral tone with me, sir," Wakefield said. "Your lot began it, Oliphant—the disappearances, the files gone missing, the names expunged, numbers lost, histories edited to suit specific ends… No, don't take that tone with me. "
   Oliphant could think of nothing to say. He rose, leaving the pistol on the table-cloth, and left the grill-room without looking back.
   "Pardon me," he said, in the marbled vestibule, to a burgundy-jacketed bellman who was sifting cigar-ends from a sand-filled marble um, "but could you please direct me to the office of the club steward?"
   "You bet," the bellman said, or some similar bit of American dialect, and led Oliphant smartly away, down a corridor lined with mirrors and rubber-plants.
   Fifty-five minutes later, having toured the club's premises at some length, having been shown a photographic album of the Lambs' annual "gambols," having applied for membership, and having paid a not inconsiderable initiation fee, nonrefundable, via his own number in the National Credit, Oliphant shook hands with the pomaded steward, gave the man a pound-note, and requested that he be let out by the club's most obscure trade-entrance.
   This proved to be a scullery-door which opened on exactly the sort of dank and narrow passage he had hoped for.
   Within a quarter-of-an-hour, he stood at the public bar of a crowded house in Bedford Road, reviewing the text of the telegram that one Sybil Gerard had once dispatched to Mr. Charles Egremont, M.P., of Belgravia.
   "Lost both me boys o' sickness in the Crimea, squire, an' innit allus the tele-gram comes—innit?"
   Oliphant folded the sheet of foolscap into his cigar-case. He watched his dim reflection in the polished zinc of the bar. He looked at his empty tumbler. He looked up at the woman, a raddled hairidan in rags gone a color that had no name, her cheeks roseate with gin-blossoms under a patina of grime.
   "No," he said, "that tragedy is not mine."
   "Me Roger it was," she said, " 'n' Tommy-lad too. An' not a rag come 'ome, squire—not a bloody rag… "
   He handed her a coin. She thanked him, mumbling, and retreated.
   He seemed to have thoroughly slipped the traces for the moment. He was entirely alone. It was time to find a cab.

   In the dim, high hollow of the great station a thousand voices seemed to mingle, the constituent elements of language reduced to the aural equivalent of fog, homogeneous and impenetrable.
   Oliphant went about his business below at a measured and deliberate pace, purchasing a first-class railway ticket to Dover, reserved, for the ten o'clock evening-express. The ticket-clerk seated Oliphant's National Credit plate in the machine and cranked hard on the lever.
   "There you are, sir. Reserved in your name."
   Thanking the clerk, Oliphant made his way to a second wicket, where he again produced his plate. "I wish to book a cabinette on the morning mail-boat to Ostend." Apparently as an afterthought, as he was putting the boat-tickets and his National Credit plate into his note-case, he requested a second-class ticket on the midnight boat to Calais.
   "Would that be this evening, sir?"
   "Yes."
   "That would be the Bessemer, sir. On National Credit, sir?"
   Oliphant paid for the ticket to Calais with pound-notes from Mr. Beadon's safe.
   Ten till nine, by his father's gold hunter.
   At nine o'clock he boarded a departing train at the last possible moment, paying the first-class fare to Dover directly to the conductor.

   The swinging-saloon ship Bessemer, her twin turtle-decks awash with Dover spray, steamed for Calais sharp on the midnight. Oliphant, having visited the purser with his second-class ticket and his pound-notes, was seated in a brocade armchair in the saloon cabin, sipping mediocre brandy and taking the measure of his fellow passengers. They were, he was pleased to note, a thoroughly unremarkable lot.
   He disliked swinging-saloons, finding the Engine-controlled movements of the cabin, intended to compensate for the vessel's pitch and roll, somehow more unsettling than the ordinary motion of a ship at sea. In addition, the cabin itself was effectively windowless. Swung on gimbals in a central well, the cabin was mounted so deeply in the hull that its windows, such as they were, were located high up along the walls, well above one's line of sight. All in all, as a remedy for mal-de-mer, Oliphant thought it excessive. The public, however, were apparently fascinated by the novel employment of a small Engine, somewhat on the order of a gunnery Engine, whose sole task consisted of maintaining as near a level footing in the cabin as was deemed possible. This was accomplished via something the press referred to, in clacker's argot, as "back-feed." Still, with twin paddles fore and aft, the Bessemer customarily performed the distance of twenty-one miles between Dover and Calais in an hour and thirty minutes.
   He would rather have been above-decks, now, facing into the wind; able then, perhaps, to imagine himself steaming toward some grander, more accessible goal. But the promenade of a swinging-saloon offered no bulwark, only an iron railing, and the Channel wind was damp and cold. And he had, he reminded himself, only the one goal now, and it, in all likelihood, a fool's errand.
   Still: Sybil Gerard. He had decided, upon reading the telegram to Egremont, against having her number spun. He had expected it might attract unwanted attention; with Criminal Anthropometry holding sway at Central Statistics, of course, he had been proven correct. And he rather suspected that Sybil Gerard's file might no longer exist.
   Walter Gerard of Manchester, sworn enemy of progress, agitator for the rights of man. Hanged. And if Walter Gerard had had a daughter, what might have become of her? And if she had been ruined, as she claimed to have been, by Charles Egremont?
   Oliphant's back began to ache. Beneath the chair's stiff brocade, Jacquard-woven with repeated images of the Bessemer, the horsehair stuffing held a chill.
   But if nothing else, he reminded himself, he at least had temporarily escaped the soft black pit of Dr. McNeile's patent Swiss bath-tub.
   Putting his brandy aside unfinished, he nodded then, and napped.
   And dreamed, perhaps, of the Eye.
   The Bessemer docked at Calais at half past one.