Anti-Ice

8 A DEBATE

The days that followed were a blur. My perambulation through space had left my systems drained. And the strange environment of the Phaeton—the floating conditions, the rhythm of day and night marked only by the habitual routines of Pocket and Holden (Traveller, buried in his Bridge, was never to be seen now in the Smoking Cabin), the smoky, still air that made one long to hurl open a window—all of this combined to immerse me in a dreamlike state. Perhaps our isolation from the natural conditions of Earth had something to do with my distracted mental state; perhaps our human bodies are more bound than we know to the diurnal rhythms of our mother world.

I was disturbed several times, however, by a roaring sound, a gentle pressure that pushed me deeper into my cot. At such times I vaguely wondered if I had traveled through time as well as through the vacuum and had somehow been returned to those nightmare moments of the launch of the Phaeton into space. But each disturbance faded after a few seconds; and each time I relapsed into my unnatural slumber. I learned later that my connection of these events with the launch was not unfounded, for the sound I heard was indeed that of the vessel’s main rockets. Traveller, installed in his pilot’s couch, worked his motors so that we blazed through space; once more—however briefly—we were masters of our own destiny.

But this time we were not simply hauling away from Earth; this time Traveller was guiding us to a destination far stranger…

Apart from gentle washings, feedings of soup and warm tea, and other ministrations performed by the gentle Pocket, the others made no attempt to wake me, believing that it was better to let Nature take her course. And I had no wish to emerge rapidly from this womblike half-sleep; for what should I find on awakening?—only the same grisly parade of doom-laden alternatives which had driven me to my desperate jaunt through vacuum.

But at last my strange sac of sleep dissolved, and I was expelled, as reluctantly as any mewling infant, into a hostile world.

Finding myself loosely bound up in a blanket cocoon, and too weak even to extricate myself, I called feebly for Pocket.

The manservant was able to lift me from my bed as if I were an infant… although the rather mysterious Law of Equal and Opposite Reactions, as expounded by the great Sir Isaac Newton, caused him to lurch adversely through the air. He dressed me in a gown belonging to Traveller, fed me once more, and even shaved me.

The face I saw in the shaving mirror was gaunt-cheeked, with eyes red and rimmed with darkness. I was, I feared, scarcely recognizable as the young man who had joined the launch of the Prince Albert in such fine humor only days before. “Good Lord, Pocket, I should hardly sweep la belle Françoise from her feet in this condition.”

The good chap rested a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you bother with any such considerations, sir. Once I’ve fed you up you’ll be in as fine fettle as you ever were.”

His cheery, homely voice, with its base of genuine warmth, was immensely comforting. “Thank you for your care, Pocket.”

“It’s you who wants thanking, Mr. Vicars.”

Now George Holden hove into view from the Bridge; with a kind of featherlight clumsiness he lowered his girth through the famous ceiling hatch—now jammed open—and floated across the air. “My dear Ned,” he said. “How are you?”

“Quite well,” I said, rather embarrassed by his effusiveness.

“You may have saved all our lives, thanks to your extraordinary courage—I could never have faced that stroll in the dark! Even the thought of immersing my head in that copper cage causes me to shudder—”

I shivered. “Don’t remind me. In any event, I have scarcely rescued us; we are still lost in space, are we not, dependent for salvation on Traveller’s eccentric plans?”

“Perhaps, but at least we can now put such plans into operation; without your courage we would still be trapped, falling out of control into the darkness, our lives maintained at the whim of a French swine. As you lay unconscious for so long, we began to fear that the carbonic acid in that suit had done for you after all, lad; and I could have broken the throat of the Frenchie with my own hands, these hands which have held nothing more cruel than a pen for thirty years.”

I frowned, a little taken aback by this torrent of anger. “Holden, how long have I been asleep? What is today’s date?”

“According to Traveller’s instruments today is the twenty-second of August. You have slept, therefore, for a full seven days.”

“I… Good Lord.” In my still rather dazed state I tried vainly to work out how much further I had traveled from the Earth in that time, but—unable, in my fuddled condition, to recall if there were twenty-four or sixty hours in a day—I abandoned the project. “And the saboteur, Holden; the man Bourne. What of him? Has he recovered consciousness?”

Holden snorted. “Yes. Would that he had been killed. In fact he emerged from his airlessness- induced torpor rather more rapidly than you.” He turned and pointed to the bunk folded out from the wall opposite me, and I made out a shapeless bundle of rather soiled blankets. “There the wretch still lies,” Holden said bitterly, “surviving in a ship he would have turned into an aluminum coffin for us all.”

Holden kept me company for a while, but then tiredness crept over me once more and, with apologies to the journalist, I had Pocket assist me to a prone position in my bunk and closed my eyes for some hours.

When I awoke the Smoking Cabin was empty, save for Pocket, myself—and the shapeless bundle in the far bunk. I asked Pocket for some tea; then, refreshed, I emerged from my bunk. After so long in bed I feared that my legs would buckle under me, and had we been on Earth perhaps they would have; but here in the comfortable floating conditions of space I felt as strong as I had ever done, and I pulled my way confidently across the Cabin.

I hovered over Bourne. The Frenchman lay facing the wall—I could see his eyes were open—and when my shadow touched him he turned and stared up at me. He was scarcely recognizable as Françoise Michelet’s haughty, even arrogant companion of a few days earlier. His face, always thin, had been reduced to the skeletal—his cheekbones jutted like shelves—and his lower chin was coated with a tangle of unruly beard. The remains of his masher’s costume—the red jacket and checked waistcoat—were now stained and crumpled, their gaudy colors only adding to the fellow’s pathetic aspect.

We stared at each other for several seconds. Then he said, “I suppose now you will finish the job you started, Monsieur Vicars.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you intend to kill me.” He said this quite without emotion, as one will describe the state of the weather, and continued to regard me.

I frowned and probed at my feelings. Here, I reminded myself, was a man who had stolen Traveller’s prototype craft; who had imprisoned myself and my three companions and hurled us into interplanetary space, quite probably to our deaths; who had directly caused the deaths of many innocent spectators at the launch of the Phaeton; and who had, no doubt, also been implicated in the plot to sabotage the Prince Albert itself, thereby taking the lives of perhaps hundreds more—including, possibly, that of Françoise Michelet, the girl on whom my foolish heart had fastened. I said quietly, “I have every reason to kill you. I have every reason to hate you.”

He regarded me quite without fear. “And do you?”

I looked within my heart, and at Bourne’s thin, suffering face. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I need to think about it.”

He nodded. “Well,” he said drily, “I suspect your companion does not share your calmness.

“Which one? Traveller?”

“The engineer? No. The other; the fat one.”

“Holden? He has threatened you?”

Bourne laughed and turned his face to the wall; when next he spoke his voice was muffled. “Since the engineer restrained him from strangling me in my weakened condition your Monsieur Holden has decided to starve me to death; or perhaps to dry me out like a leaf in autumn.”

“What do you mean?” I turned to the manservant, who had been watching us circumspectly. “Pocket? Is this true?”

Pocket nodded, but tapped his thin nose. “He was already half-starved after all those days on the Bridge without food or water, sir. But I wasn’t going to let anybody starve to death; I’ve been feeding him scraps and leavings when no one’s looking.”

I felt a great relief that Holden’s systematic cruelty had been subverted. “Good for you, Pocket; you were quite right. What did Sir Josiah have to say about all this?”

Pocket shrugged philosophically. “After he calmed Mr. Holden down, the day when you did your great deed—well, sir, you know how Sir Josiah is. I expect he’s forgotten all about this Frenchie; he’s scarcely been down here since.”

I smiled. “That I can well imagine.”

“I did not ask for the charity of a servant,” Bourne said coldly.

“And charity you’re not receiving, my lad,” said Pocket. “But if you think I’m about to spend my last few days sharing a tin box with the body of a Frenchie you’ve another think coming.” He spoke sternly, but rather in the manner of a parent admonishing a child; and I realized then that there was no malice in any corner of this remarkable chap’s character.

I turned once more to the Frenchman. “Why, Bourne?”

He twisted his head, his face distorted by the movement. “Why what?”

“Why did you steal this craft, cause so much damage and suffering?”

He turned his head away without reply.

With a strength that surprised me I grabbed his shoulder and twisted him around. “I think you owe me an answer,” I hissed at him.

“There is no point. You British would never understand.”

I pressed my lips together, suppressing my anger. “Tell me anyway.”

“Because of the tricolore,” he snapped. “The tricolore!”

He twisted out of my grasp and, no matter how I persisted, refused to say any more.

I found, to my horror, that Bourne had been held in restraints improvised from trouser-belts and fragments of air-hose; at my insistence—and on the proviso that he remain in his couch, and that one of us watch him at all times—the next day he was released and sat up gingerly, rubbing at wrists and ankles which were quite blue.

Feeling stronger, I climbed, with Holden, up through the ceiling hatchway.

When I had forced entry to the Bridge several days earlier my impressions had been blurred and fragmentary, after the manner of a nightmare; now, though, I saw that the place in flight was a basin of mechanical marvels. Devices whirred and clicked incessantly, so that one had the impression of a veritable artificial mind conducting operations aboard the craft; and the whole was lidded over by the glass latticework of the Phaeton’s nose. This dome now admitted a flood of silver light from a Moon which hung huge—ominously huge—at the crown of the ship.

“Ah, Wickers!” The voice boomed from somewhere above me; I turned and made out, in sharp moonlight shadows, the great throne fastened against one wall of the chamber. The throne, which was of purple, plumply stuffed damask finished with ropes of velvet, loomed over the Bridge like the couch of a Caesar. Traveller settled back in this throne; he sat with feet up, a loose restraint about his waist, lacking only a servant girl peeling grapes to complete the picture of the potentate at ease. “Rather an easier entry to the Bridge than last time, eh?”

“Indeed.”

I pushed off from the deck and floated up into the glass-lined dome, grasped one white-painted strut and hovered there, quite comfortably. Holden stayed close to the deck, among the clusters of instruments. From my new vantage point I saw how a pair of levers, connected to pivots fixed to the adjacent wall, were fixed to either side of Traveller’s couch; to the top of each lever was affixed a smaller steel handle which could be squeezed by the pilot’s fist. Later I was to learn how the smaller handles controlled the thrust of the Phaeton’s rockets while the levers themselves directed the swivelling of the nozzles, so steering the ship through space.

This couch, no doubt, was where the wretched Bourne had sat on a hot August afternoon, his forehead slick with a terrified sweat, in order to rip the craft from Earth.

Above Traveller’s head was suspended a long, black-painted tube which terminated in an angled eyepiece. I saw how this device could be pushed through seals beyond the hull, affording the pilot a wide angle of vision. Thus, thanks to this periscope and the optical glass of the dome, Traveller had a panoramic view of the universe beyond the walls of his ship—as well as of the metal landscape formed by his banks of devices. The centerpiece of this array of instruments was a table-like affair I recalled from my earlier visit, a wooden disc five feet across with a circular map inlaid in its center. Smaller instruments were gathered around this table, the dial-face of each illuminated by a small, steady light; the lights formed little yellow islands of illumination in a sea of moonshadow darkness. These dials, I saw now, were turned to face the throne (as I thought of it); the intention was clearly to allow the pilot from his couch to form an instant assessment of the state of the Phaeton—but the effect was rather of a crowd of mechanical pilgrims, each bearing a steady candle before his chest, faces turned in supplication to their lord.

I complimented Traveller on the admirable clarity of his design, but added that much of the detail left me baffled.

To my dismay Traveller took that as a cue for a lecture.

“Where to start—where to start… To begin with you will no doubt recognize the Ruhmkorff devices.”

“…I beg your pardon?”

“The electrical coils which provide light for the instruments.” These coils, Traveller explained, provided a steadier and more secure light than that afforded by acetylene lamps, and were less prone to coat the dials of the instruments with soot. He then went on to describe each instrument, with its manufacturer, function, limitations, and even, in some cases, its price, in the loving detail which other folk apply to describing their children. Holden, floating down in the depths of the instrument banks, instantly sensed my bafflement, and began to play up; he would indicate each instrument in turn with a flourish like a conjurer’s assistant, and I had to cram my fist into my mouth to avoid bursting into laughter.

Traveler, of course, lectured on oblivious.

There were chronometers, manometers, Eigel Centigrade thermometers. There was a bank of compasses set in a three-dimensional array, so that their faces lay at all angles to each other. Traveller sighed over this arrangement. “I had hoped to use the direction of magnetic flux to navigate through space,” he said, “but I am disappointed to find that the effect fades away more than a few tens of miles from the surface of the Earth.”

“Damned inconvenient!” Holden called drily.

“Instead you rely on a sextant,” I said, indicating a large, intricate brass device consisting of a tube mounted on a toothed wheel. “Surely,” I went on, “the Carthaginians themselves would have recognized such a device… but could never have imagined it placed in such a setting.”

“Carthaginians in space,” Traveller mused. “Now there is an idea for a romance… But, of course, one could never make such a tale plausible enough to convince the modern public. It would be even more controversial than Disraeli’s fashionable fable…” I noticed that Holden looked up from his clowning with interest at that whimsical suggestion. Traveller went on, “You’re quite right, Wickers; between planets, the principles of navigation by the stars are exactly the same as those which guide mariners across the surface of Earth’s seas. But the practice is somewhat more difficult, requiring as it does the determination of the position of a vessel in three co-ordinates.” Traveller went on to explain an elaborate system—using graphs, tables and charts—which he had devised of plotting the locus of a craft which looped like a fly through the emptiness of space. The mathematical calculations involved were facilitated by means of a mechanical device Traveller called an arithmometer. This was a box stuffed with brass gears, cogs and dials; it featured two large cylinders on which were fixed rolls of digits, and Traveller had Holden demonstrate how, by turning various wheels and handles, one could induce the arithmometer to simulate the processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Since he had never before ventured more than a few hundred miles from the surface of the Earth—so that the features of the home world had always been at hand, like a vast, illuminated map—Traveller had never previously been forced to rely on his patent navigation systems. I fancied he rather enjoyed the challenge. “And in any event,” he went on, “navigation by the stars is not our primary means of guidance.”

I asked politely, “And that is?”

For answer he threw aside his waist restraint and launched himself from the throne, coming to rest balanced on his fingertips, upside down over the circular table at the center of the Bridge, his sidewhiskers wafting gently. “This!” he cried. “Here is my mechanical pride and joy.”

I drifted down to join him, and I inspected the surface of the table more carefully. It was, as I had noted earlier, inlaid with a map; now I saw that this map showed the Earth as it might be viewed from a rocket craft far above the North Pole, with the ice-locked north centered in the disc-shaped map, and the equatorial countries of Africa and South America smeared around the rim. Traveller showed us how, by turning a lever, he could invert this disc and display a similar view of the South Polar regions. The map was painted, a little clumsily, with natural colors—shades of blue for the oceans, and brown and green for the land. Traveller explained proudly that the coloring was based on his own observation of the planet from his aerial platform Phaeton.

Holden asked why national boundaries were not shown.

Traveller said, “And of what value would a display of political allegiance be to the aerial voyager? Sir, take a look through the window and inspect Earth—if you can find it in the moonglow. From this height, even our glorious Empire is less dramatic than the shadings of the empty oceans.”

Holden bridled at this. “Sir Josiah, I must take exception. A dominion like His Majesty’s is an enduring monument.”

Traveller’s first word of reply was straight from the threepenny stalls at the music-halls. He went on, “Good God, man; look out of the window! From here, the wanderings of Marco Polo are no more significant than the trail of a fly on the glass; the empires of Caesar, Kublai Khan, Boney—and of the blessed Edward—all rolled up and added together make less difference than the imperfections of a single pane of glass!

“Holden, from our vantage point the affairs of great men are reduced to their true status: to stuff and nonsense; and the pompous fantasies of our deranged and incompetent leaders are revealed for what they are.”

Holden drew himself up to his full height, pulling his barrel-shaped stomach toward his chest; but since he floated in the air above the navigation table like the rest of us, and he was besides upside down compared to me and Traveller, the effect was less impressive than he might have hoped. “Sir Josiah, I suggest you explain to our French saboteur how political affairs are irrelevant in this celestial prison. It was politics that brought us here, remember.”

Traveller shrugged. “Which only serves to prove that there is nothing so small as the imagination of a man.”

“And, like Bourne, sir,” Holden hissed, “you sound like a damned Anarchist.”

I had been seeking ways to defuse this argument, and now I felt compelled to say, “Steady on, Holden; I think you should take that back.”

But Traveller laid a restraining hand on my arm. “Holden, have you actually read the thoughts of such Anarchist luminaries as Proudhon?”

Holden sniffed. “I have read of the actions of such as Bakunin; that is enough for me.”

Traveller laughed, his face lit from above by the electric lights embedded in his navigation table. “If you had studied beyond the end of your nose, sir, you would know that your Anarchist has rather a fine view of his fellow human. The nobility of the free man—”

“Rubbish,” said Holden sternly.

Traveller turned to me. “Ned, the Anarchist does not believe in lawlessness, or outlawed behavior. Rather he believes that man is capable of living in harmony with his brother, without the restraint of law at all!—that all men are essentially decent chaps, no more desirous of destroying each other, on the whole, than the average Englishman is desirous of murdering his wife, child and dog. And in his natural state man lived as an Anarchist in Eden, unlawed and uncaring!”

Holden muttered something about blasphemy, but I pondered these puzzling concepts. “But how would we order ourselves, without laws? How could we run our great industrial concerns? How would we distribute the posts of society? Would not the poor man envy the rich man’s castle, and, without the disincentive of the law, be disposed to break in at once and carry off the furniture?”

“In all probability, such discrepancies would never arise,” said Traveller, “and if they did they would be resolved in an amicable fashion. Each man would know his place, and assume it without comment or complaint for the common good.”

“Pious nonsense,” Holden snapped, by now quite red-faced; and I found myself forced to agree with him for once.

“And,” I went on, “if we once lived in a naturally lawless state, like animals—”

“Not animals, Ned,” Traveller corrected me. “As free men.”

“But if this is so, then why do we have laws now?”

Traveller smiled, and the light of ancient lunar seas shone from his platinum nose. “Perhaps you should be a philosopher, Ned. These, of course, are the questions with which right-thinking men have wrestled for many years. We have laws because there are certain individuals—I would include all politicians and princes—who require laws to subjugate their brothers, in order to achieve their own vainglorious ends.”

I considered these remarkable sentiments. The England I knew was a rational, Christian country, a society informed by industrial principles and confident of its own power and lightness—a confidence fueled largely by the industries to which Traveller’s anti-ice inventions had contributed so significantly.

But here was a man at the very heart of all this technological achievement, espousing the ideas of an idealistic Russian! I wondered, not for the first time, at the power of the experiences—in the Crimea and elsewhere—which had led Traveller to such conclusions. And I wondered how such experiences might have modulated the views of one such as George Holden…

Meanwhile Holden had pulled himself closer to us. His fury showed in the beetroot color of his round face, and in the way his chest strained against the buttons of his waistcoat. “You sail close to treason, sir.”

Again I urged him to apologize; again Traveller waved me down. He said calmly, “I will forget you said that, Holden.”

Holden’s fleshy jowls trembled. “And have you forgotten the bombs thrown by your Anarchist companions? Only the rule of law stands between the freedoms enjoyed by a British gentleman and the actions of one such as Bourne, who would kill for a flag, a piece of colored cloth!”

“Perhaps,” Traveller said—and then he shouted back, “But so would you, sir, murder for such a reason!—For it was you who had to be physically restrained from throwing the poor chap straight out through the air cupboard—”

“Is everything all right, gentlemen?”

The cool, rational voice of Pocket, who had pushed his head and shoulders through the open hatch- way, caused us to stop. Suddenly we became selfconscious; Traveller and Holden were arranged like two tin soldiers in a box, upside down compared to each other and roaring abuse at each other’s toecaps; while I hung in the air at an indeterminate angle between them, ineffectually trying to calm the situation.

We moved away from each other, pulling down our waistcoats and harumphing selfconsciously. Traveller reassured Pocket that everything was in order, and suggested that perhaps some tea might knit together our troubled community. Pocket, imperturbable, said he would proceed with this straightaway, and popped his head back through the hatch. Holden was still purple with rage, but he was making a visible effort to control himself; Traveller was quite unmoved. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “a fine impression we have given of the Island Race to our Gallic friend below. Perhaps we should stick to uncontroversial subjects in future?”

“I think that would be a very good idea, sir,” I said fervently.

“Now then, Ned,” Traveller said, turning once more to his navigation device, “where were we?”

I studied the map of Earth once more. “You were saying that this is a navigation table.”

“Exactly.”

Now I pressed my nose close to the tabletop. Around the central map, I saw, the table was perforated by an array of small holes, so that the surface was like a coarse wooden sieve. A line of tiny metal flags, gaily colored, protruded from some of the holes; the trail they marked emerged from the surface of the Earth and swept off along a graceful curve. The meaning of this was not hard to deduce; it was a representation, on a flat surface, of our path through space. “But how is this maintained?” I asked Traveller. “From your maps and charts?”

Traveller smiled. “Watch for a few minutes.”

We hovered over the table—Holden included, his breathing still rapid but his color fading fast—and were at last rewarded with the sight of a new flag popping spontaneously through a hole. At the same time, I became aware that the disc-map was also turning, slower than the hour-hand of a clock. “So,” I said, “the table maintains itself automatically. The map turns with the Earth—once every day, I should judge—and the flags emerge from the surface as we surge forward into space.”

“Correct,” Traveller said briskly.

“But how is it done?”

“There is a clockwork mechanism to drive the orrery—the turning Earth. In fact the whole device was constructed, to great precision, by the younger Boisonnas, clockmaker of Geneva. But the secret of the navigation tracking device is an arrangement of gyroscopes, suspended within the body of the table.”

As usual I was baffled. “Gyroscopes?”

Traveller sighed. “Little spinning tops, Ned. Spinning objects retain their orientation in space, as you may know—that is another reason the rocket engines are designed to impart a spin to the whole of the Phaeton—and so the table is able to ‘sense’ the turnings of the ship’s path. This, coupled with springloaded devices to measure acceleration, is sufficient to determine the position of the ship at any time, without reference to the stars at all; one could black out the windows of this Bridge and still be confident of one’s navigation to within a few miles, thanks to my ingenious arrangement.”

Holden was tapping the table with a forefinger, close to the surface of the model Earth; he was indicating, I saw, the representation of England, and in particular a heavy black line which passed from the central Pole, through London, and on beyond the boundary of the world by several thousand miles. “And this?”

“The Greenwich Meridian, of course,” Traveller said impatiently.

Holden nodded, calmly enough, but caught my eye; and we both pondered the unconscious symbolism provided by this surprising gentleman-Anarchist: for here was the worldwide symbol of British rationality and science, sweeping beyond the surface of the Earth and on to the stars.

I traced the line of position flags as it swept depressingly far from Earth’s surface; soon, I saw, we would leave the boundary of the navigation table altogether. I mentioned this to Traveller. “I admit I had not envisaged traveling quite so far in this untried craft,” he said. “But the table will not be without its uses.” So saying he popped his head below the table and rummaged through a cupboard set into the deck; he emerged holding rolls of paper some four feet wide, which he proceeded to unroll and lay flat against the table. He revealed a map designed in four sheets and marked with the imprint of Beer and Moedler. “From this rather fine Mappa Selenographica,” Traveller said, “which I carry to facilitate telescopic observations from above the atmosphere, I intend to improvise an analogue of the table’s polar-view Earth maps. A little adjustment of the gearings and the table should serve us in as good stead as we arrive at our destination…”

Traveller beamed at this further exhibition of his own inventiveness, his eyes fixed on the chart; but Holden and I exchanged despairing glances, and then looked down at the chart in silence. At that moment the cares and struggles of Earth did indeed seem distant and remote; for this “Mappa” showed the dead seas and airless mountains of the world to which we were, it seemed, irrevocably headed: it was a map of the Moon.