TEN

TROUBLE AT HARROGATE

Langdon St. Ives marveled at the sunny skies over Harrogate. The clouds that shaded London were invisible beyond the horizon, and the pall that overhung Leeds could only dimly be seen, blown away west and south by chill winds off green Scottish hillsides. The weather was brisk - sunny and brisk - and it fitted St. Ives to a tee.

He’d collected the oxygenator from Keeble at King’s Cross Station, the toymaker fearful that he’d been followed, perhaps by his nemesis in the chimney pipe hat - the man Kraken had referred to as Billy Deener. But no such villain showed himself. Nothing at all suspicious occurred until the train was an hour north of London. And that little business, thought St. Ives with a certain amount of satisfaction, he’d dealt with handily enough.

He poured another cup of tea and sank his teeth into a scone. A hammering at a closet door behind him and the muffled grunts of someone apparently locked inside gave him no pause. Hasbro walked in just then, nodding to St. Ives. “Shall I just clear these away, sir?”

“By all means.”

“He’s still thumping, sir.”

“And the other one?”

“Quiet, sir, these last two hours.”

St. Ives nodded, satisfied, but saddened in spite of himself. “Dead, do you suppose?”

“From his countenance - as well as I can perceive it through the peephole - I would answer in the affirmative. Dead as a herring, I’d say, sir, to quote the populace.”

St. Ives arose, walked into his laboratory, and peered in through a door fixed with a porthole window. On the floor of a tiny room beyond lay a man who appeared to have been dead for a week. On a plate beside him was a quantity of fruit. A pitcher of water stood on a window sill behind. His moldery clothes fit loosely, as if he’d worn the same suit for a month or two of a starvation diet, and his face was the face of a ghoul. The long, open scar of a bullet wound mutilated his cheek, and through it showed three yellowed teeth.

“Didn’t touch the food?”

“Not a bite, sir.”

“And dead in a day’s time. Very interesting. We’ll bury him on the grounds, poor sod. This is a sad business, Hasbro, a sad business. But he was a dead man before we starved him. I could see that when they sat down behind me on the express. They had the odor of death and dust on them. What they were up to I can’t say, or even whether they belong to Narbondo or to the old man. Filthy pity, really. Let’s have a look at the other.”

Back into the library they went, where Hasbro stacked a cup and plate onto a tea tray, dusting with a little horsehair brush the table crumbs onto a tray. St. Ives peered in at the second prisoner. The blood pudding they’d left in the closet was gone, the plate, apparently, licked clean. The prisoner thumped morosely at the door, as if the pounding were something he were doing out of necessity but had no real interest in.

“What does a zombie care about lodgings?” asked St. Ives over his shoulder. “A closet or a hillside, it must be immaterial.”

“I rather suppose, sir,” said Hasbro, “that the animated dead man might fancy a closet more than a hillside. A closet, if you follow me, is something more like home to him.”

“Perhaps he’s thumping for another pan of pudding,” said St. Ives. “I’m half inclined to give it to him. Reminds me of Mr. Dick - do you recall? - up at Bingley. He built that clever device for trapping roaches and then hadn’t the heart to do them in. Fed a small family of them for a week until the cat ate them and destroyed the device. Do you remember that?”

“Very well, sir.”

“Damned curious cat, if you ask me. But we won’t feed this roach. Not a drop of blood, not a slice of pudding. We’ll give him back to the infinite.”

The next morning, when St. Ives peered in at the window once again, the second ghoul was dead. Shards of the crockery bowl that had contained the pudding protruded from his mouth like teeth.

St. Ives spent the day testing the aerating device and readying his ship, a spherical iron shell crosshatched with lines of rivets, atop what would appear to the untutored eye to be an enormous Chinese rocket, pointed toward the domed roof of the silo in which it sat. A series of pulleys and chains allowed for the drawing-back of the dome and, St. Ives prayed, for the issuance of the craft. Along either side of the vehicle were arched wings, batlike and close to the hull. And from the base of the wings protruded exhaust and motivator tubes. Windows, heavy with glass, encircled the craft beneath the conical locking mechanism of the hatch. The sight of the ship satisfied St. Ives entirely. He climbed the wooden stairway that spiraled up and around to the hatch, rapping the iron skin of the ship, peering in at the little cluster of potted orchids and begonias that would aid Keeble’s box in supplying oxygen. He puffed a lungful of air onto the sensing device that would record prevailing levels of gases in the cabin. It was a frightful risk, sending the craft into the heavens unmanned. He might quite easily lose it in the sea, or watch horror-struck as it smashed down into the suburbs. But it was preferable, all in all, to being aboard an untested craft that suffered such a fate. The needle on the gas detection gauge swung briefly beneath its crystal.

The Keeble box was anchored firmly, the ridiculous hippos and apes carved into the rosewood top grinning out at St. Ives, absolute Keeble trademarks. He pushed the tester button with his finger and a little spray of green chlorophyll dust shot out, carried on a mixture of helium and oxygen. The gauge once again gave a brief leap, then settled as the oxygen dissipated in the general atmosphere of the cabin. St. Ives nodded.

As he clumped back down the stairs, he noted with satisfaction that there wasn’t a single compelling reason to return to London. No word had come regarding the endeavors of the Trismegistus Club. Certainly they could carry on without him for a week. It was entirely likely that the wayward Kraken had been found, that Kelso Drake had heeded the Captain’s warning and scuttled like a beetle into his dark satanic mills. Godall was a marvel - inscrutable, capable. Captain Powers was a rock. The two alone could defend London against a siege of zombies and millionaires. What were they all fooling about with, anyway? What dreary machinations were worth St. Ives’ abandoning the spacecraft, which would, early next morning, angle out through the heavens above West Yorkshire, above the astonished populace of Wetherby and Leeds, to describe its flaming halo in the thin air of the twilit sky and plummet homeward that same evening, already the stuff of legend, to its berth on the moor beyond Robb’s Head?

London could wait for him. They’d have him soon enough. But for the moment they’d play second fiddle. It was the consequence of the scientific fates, and - he thought to himself while regarding from the open doorway of the silo the finny sweep of the wings and the brass and silver of the polished hull - of the scientific muses. He set out across the lawn. It was three in the afternoon by his pocketwatch. Late enough by any reckoning for a glass of Double Diamond. Two, perhaps.

But he wasn’t halfway to the house when, from the direction of the River Nidd, two shots rang out, echoing against the afternoon stillness. St. Ives began to run, redoubling his pace at the sight of Hasbro, a rifle smoking in his hands, standing among the willows. Hasbro threw the rifle to his shoulder, and settled his cheek against the stock. He jerked just a bit with the recoil, then crouched and peered away east into the foliage along the river.

“What the devil!” cried St. Ives, racing up. He could see nothing among the willows and shrubs.

“A prowler, sir,” replied Hasbro, ready, it seemed, to let fly another round if given the least opportunity. “I caught him in the study, and he was out the open window before I could have a go at him. My fetching the rifle, I fear, gave him time to make away along the riverbank. He’d been at your papers, sir - strewed them across the floor, emptied drawers in the press. He was still at it when I happened in - and a lucky circumstance that was - so I’m in hopes he hadn’t found what it was he was after.”

St. Ives was loping across the lawn when these last words were uttered, leaving Hasbro to poke among the riverside shrubs for the prowler. He burst in through the open front door, past the disheveled study and into the library. He hauled out his copy of Squires’ Complications and thrust his hand into the broad hiatus left by the stout volume. Behind was the familiar bulk of Owlesby’s manuscript, undiscovered.

He sighed with relief, wondering at the same time who it was had been after it. For it had to be Owlesby’s manuscript the prowler sought. Like it or not, he thought despairingly, London would have him. Mohammed had refused to go the mountain, so here was the mountain, dragging round to Harrogate to kick apart his personal effects. He couldn’t shake the machinations after all. He returned Squires’ to its niche and walked into the study where Hasbro, having lost his man on the riverbank, was just then stepping in through an open French window.

The study, as Hasbro had promised, was ransacked. What had been heaps of paper were no longer heaped, but were scattered across the plank floor. Books lay higgledy-piggledy. Drawers were yanked from chests, their contents flung and kicked. A plaster bust of Kepler lay split in two, clubbed, apparently, with a heavy Waterford decanter, shards of which glistened in the afternoon sunlight that poured through the windows. Half the destruction was clearly a matter of a wild and hasty search for the manuscript; half of it was pure, irrational villainy.

St. Ives rolled Kepler’s broken head with his toe. “Did you get a good look at this man?”

“Tolerably, sir, but he was clothed so strangely that his features were effectively hidden.”

“Disguise was it?”

Hasbro shrugged, then shook his head. “Bandages, it seemed to me, swaddling his head. He peered at me through eyeslits, for all the world like one of the Pharaohs at the museum in Cairo. And he reeked of some chemical - carbon tetrachloride, if I’m not mistaken, and something that very much resembled anchovy paste.”

“Was it, do you suppose, one of our ghouls?”

“I’d hesitate to say so, sir. He was far too energetic - in the act of beating poor Kepler so altogether viciously that I took him at once for a madman. The rifle, I could see straightaway, was the ticket.”

St. Ives nodded. It certainly seemed so, given the mess. Damned foolish way to go about thievery - smashing things up for sport in the middle of the afternoon. St. Ives stiffened, the sudden picture of the man with the chimney pipe hat flickering unbidden into his mind. “Did he wear a hat?”

“No, sir.”

“Fairly short, was he? Lank, oily hair? Yellow shirt, perhaps, and a leather coat with the sleeves out at the elbows?”

Hasbro shook his head. “On the stout side, sir, running to fat. Blondish hair in curls.”

St. Ives was relieved. He didn’t at all want it to have been Keeble’s garret thief. And what on earth would the man have been after? Keeble had the plans to the engine, after all. Blond, curly hair - the description was maddeningly familiar somehow. A face swaddled in chemical-soaked bandages. St. Ives snapped his fingers, then slammed his hand into his open fist. Narbondo’s assistant! What was his name? Pigby… Peebles… Publes. St. Ives rooted through his mind. Pule! That was it. Willis Pule. Of course it was he. Narbondo had set him to it. But how in the world, he wondered, did the doctor know that St. Ives possessed the papers? “Let’s have a look along the river, shall we? Lock the house up and tell Mrs. Langley to shriek like a banshee from the kitchen window if she hears so much as a floorboard creak.”

And in moments the two men, each carrying a rifle loaded with birdshot, thrashed among shore grasses and willows, following Pule’s evident footprints northwest along the Nidd until, some mile down, they disappeared into the waters of the river itself, their quarry having, apparently, swum for it. A man named Binger ferried the two across in a little rowboat, promising, on the strength of a half crown’s reward, to return to the manor and keep Mrs. Langley company in the kitchen, and to retrieve the two of them from the opposite shore when they’d worked their way back down.

But across the Nidd there were no footprints at all, and their chances of success declined with the settling dusk. Pule, apparently, had sloshed along in the shallows, perhaps doubled back upriver to confuse them. There were endless boats swirling past and here and there one anchored along shore. He might easily have clambered into one and rowed away downriver to Kirk Hammerton. And who was to say he had no accomplices? Narbondo himself might have been waiting beyond the hill in a wagon. Narbondo! The thought of him sobered St. Ives, who had been caught up in the idea of pursuing Pule, of running him down and delivering the scoundrel to the magistrate.

He’d taken a bit for granted, leaving his cook alone in the manor and merely sending an old man along to her when none of them had any idea what sort of foe it was they hunted. He’d been rash. Pule, after all, hadn’t got away with a thing. The threat of future danger certainly outweighed the necessity of pursuit.

Stars had flickered on in the evening sky. The lights of Harrogate shown in the west. St. Ives shouldered his rifle, and the two men set out apace for the manor, St. Ives breaking into a jog at the idea of poor Mrs. Langley confronting the hunchbacked doctor or a band of his blood-eating zombies. He and Hasbro were scouring along the last quarter-mile of riverside when the sky beyond the willows changed without warning from deep twilight purple to bright yellow, and a thunderous explosion rocked the meadows.

The man in the chimney pipe hat sat in the branches of a willow, squinting in wondering assessment at the fleeing figure whose head was a mess of loose rags. Through an open window stepped a tall, balding man in a dark suit, a rifle over his shoulder. Billy Deener hadn’t any liking for guns if they were in someone else’s hands - and here was one in the hands of a man who quite apparently knew what he was about. He threw the weapon to his shoulder and emptied both barrels at the retreating figure, who stumbled, rolled back to his feet, and ran all the faster, weaving back and forth through knee-high grass, white filaments of loosening bandages trailing behind him as if he were an unraveling mummy.

Deener wondered who this interloper was - a common thief? Not at all likely, not with a head wrapped in rags. Countryside thieves wouldn’t go abroad dressed so. It was easier by far simply to wear a mask. Whoever the man was, he hadn’t been carrying the box, more’s the pity. It would have been an easy thing to strangle him with his own loose bandages.

Deener climbed out of his willow and sprinted toward the silo recently vacated by St. Ives. In a moment he was in at the door, out of sight of the two on the riverbank. Luck was with him. They’d be caught up in the pursuit of the bandaged man. It was a perfect diversion. He couldn’t have planned a better one.

Before him sat the rocket, the space vehicle perched atop it, almost lost in the shadows of the windowless upper reaches of the silo. Deener climbed the stairway toward the domed ceiling. A rare smile flickered along the set line of his lips. Here was something worth meddling with. Worth smashing up. Worth destroying. He’d have the box for Drake and some fun besides, at the expense of the tweed-coated phony with the idiot false mustache. He was tired of the man and his showy friends. He’d fix the filthy lot of them if he could, starting now. He fiddled with the hatch, twisting at the cone with both hands until, with a sigh of escaping air, it clicked counter clockwise half a turn and the circular hatch popped open like the lid of a jack-in-the-box, narrowly missing his outthrust chin. All was dark inside. He fumbled in his coat pocket for a match, struck it against his shoe, and thrust it into the interior. The light illuminated the cabin briefly, and when it flickered out, Deener lowered himself in, struck a second match, and lit a pair of little gaslamps, one on either side of the cabin.

The interior of the craft was a gothic wonder of potted plants and machinery. Deener scratched his head at it, not knowing where to begin. Best to start at the start, he thought wisely. That had always been his way. It was the box he was after first, or at least it was the box that Drake was after. And there it was, affixed to the wall next to his left ear.

He patted his pantleg, feeling beneath the fabric the flat surface of a prybar and the round bulk of a ballpeen hammer. In a moment he had them out and tapped the prybar under the edge of the box with the hammer. A grinning hippo watched him from the front of the box. He raised the hammer in a sudden rage; he’d beat the thing from the wall. Smash the offending hippo. Reduce the thing beside it to splinters. What the hell was it anyway? A sea monster? An octopod? He’d beat it to bits. He’d… but Drake. What would Drake do to him? He lowered the hammer and breathed heavily for a moment, staring at the loathsome box. Then once again he shoved his bar in under it, gave it a heave, and caught the box as it fell to the floor. He shook it, but nothing rattled inside. He searched for a latch, but there was none. All six sides of the box were identical, aside from the carvings and a cigar-shaped brass pipe issuing from the mouth of a winking basilisk seated on a divan, a tiny book open on a table beside him. A brass crank thrust out from the ear of the basilisk.

Deener shrugged in momentary resignation, shoved through the hatch, and lay the box on the landing outside, then lowered himself back in. Drooping spikes of orchid flowers caught his eye. Flowers offended him almost as much as the hippo foolery of the box. He slashed at a stem, severing it. Then he hacked at another. They were astonishingly brittle. He swept his arm back and slashed at the little forest of stems. Blossoms flew. He stamped at them, danced on them, pummeling the broad leaves of begonias until they sailed like scattered paper in an autumn wind.

The reflection of his face in a porthole window caught his eye, and he lashed out at it, smashing the curved end of the bar against the heavy glass, which thudded with the blow but refused to shatter. That wouldn’t do. He smashed at it again and then again, cursing it, wheezing for breath. He threw down the bar and plucked up the hammer. Indestructible, was it? He’d see about that. He grabbed an iron rung on the curved wall of the ship and edged in around a cushioned seat. He couldn’t seem to get the right angle. Glancing blows wouldn’t do. The damned seat was square in the way. He beat at the chair, the hammerhead ripping into the soft leather. He kicked at it, shrieking, whipping around as if to surprise the window and delivering against it one final blow. The handle of the hammer split as a spider web of cracks sprang into the heavy glass, breaking the reflection of his sweating face into fragments. He threw down the rest of the handle and pulled himself through the hatch, losing his hat in the process. It bounced once on the landing, rolled onto the stairs, and sailed into the diminishing light of the silo, tumbling groundward end over end.

In a rage, he threw his prybar after it, then stooped, grabbed the box, and raised it over his head as if to smash it down too, to reduce it to rubble on the cobbled floor forty feet below. He stood just so, heaving with exertion, animal noises issuing past his teeth, and then slowly lowered the box, visions of Kelso Drake winking into focus across the tangled confusion of his mind. He turned and leaped wildly down the stairs, three at a time, his breath escaping in mewling grunts with each jolt.

He jerked to a stop at the base of the stairs, crouching before a bank of levers on the smooth side of the rocket. He dropped the box and grasped first one and then another of the levers, wrenching them this way and that. One snapped off in his hand and he slammed it against the others, then cast it with such force against the clapboard wall of the silo that it impaled itself, vibrating audibly.

He reached for another lever, but stopped dead. A humming noise, growing louder by the moment, filled the silo. A low rush followed, building toward a roar. Billy Deener leaped back at a quick surge of heat from the base of the rocket. He grinned with sudden anticipation, and in a stooping run, grabbed the box from the stones with one hand, his fallen hat with the other, and was out the door, pounding across the green toward a distant copse that lay like a shadow against the evening sky.

A blast behind threw him onto his face in the grass, and the darkness suddenly evaporated. He crouched, turned his shaded eyes toward the silo, and watched in amazement the domed roof burst outward in a spray of shingles and shards of wood, the debris spinning slowly in the air roundabout the shattered roof. Through the airborne debris rose the rocket, a pinwheel of sparks showering down like bursting fireworks. It seemed hardly to make headway, but angled jerkily, its nose threatening to dip groundward.

Deener was struck with the sudden thought that the entire thing was going nowhere, that it might teeter over and plummet onto the green, onto his head, in fact. He rose slowly to all fours, ready to throw himself flat, then dashed once more for the trees, watching the struggling rocket over his shoulder.

The thing stopped abruptly and hung for a moment in the air. It shuddered, like a dog shaking water from its coat, and the dark little sphere at the top popped off in another wash of sparks, soaring like a champagne cork northward, over the tops of the willows along the River Nidd, whistling as it flew like a rubberized, inflated bat slowly losing air through a tiny hole. The whistling diminished, momentary silence fell, then the remains of the rocket smashed full length onto the meadow, flickering with sparkling little fires before snuffing out into darkness. Deener watched with evident satisfaction from the edge of the wood. He clapped his hat onto his head, tossed his box skyward, caught it, and strode away through the trees toward the village of Kirk Hammerton.

“Holy Mother of God,” whispered St. Ives, staring in horror across the tops of the willows. A nebula of sparks whirled from the burst top of the distant silo, lighting a rain of shingles. The suddenly appearing rocket edged skyward, visible above the trees, threatening to soar into the heavens, to shoot away toward the winking stars. But it didn’t. It was almost stationary, as if it hung by a sky hook, and just before its nose dipped and the thing fell lifeless to the meadow, the spacecraft, the product of years of work, jumped from the end of the rocket as if shot from a child’s pop gun, and arched through the air over their heads, its gaslamps curiously lit within, its hatch flung back on its hinges.

It sailed several hundred yards toward town, stuttering out little jets of smoke and fire through motivator tubes, and making a foolish whistling noise that died out even as the two men watched the craft disappear beyond distant trees. A short, far-off crash sounded. St. Ives lurched. A wave of fear washed through him -fear that some local manor house had been destroyed by his craft, or worse, that people had been hurt, killed perhaps. The fear turned almost at once to anger, and he shouldered his rifle and fired both rounds at the moon, imagining briefly that it was the loathsome, pocked face of Willis Pule, who had, obviously, doubled back on them and launched St. Ives’ rocket out of spite.

Well he’d see. If it was a fight the bastards wanted, St. Ives would jolly well give it to them. Tomorrow. It was too late to get an evening train; the seven a.m. express would do nicely. London would regret his return. The Trismegistus Club had set out to fight villainy, and here was villainy in spades.

He shouted across the river, but had hardly begun when he noticed that the rowboat was already halfway across, skimming along behind a bow lantern that illuminated the astonished face of old Binger.

“Did you see it!” he cried, slamming up against the grassy bank. St. Ives said nothing, but merely clambered aboard. Hasbro followed, respectfully silent, considering, perhaps, that there was little but cliché to offer when a man’s work had gone up, literally, in smoke.

The old man carried on wildly. He’d seen the explosion, the tired flight of the rocket. And it had burst out of a silo too, that anyone would think would be filled with corn. Bang, out the top it came like some kind of bird. It gave a man a start, with all the talk of burglars and such. Did St. Ives suppose it was his man in the river that did it, that set it off? St. Ives did. That beat all, said the old man. He’d seen the little ball pop off and sail away. It was the damnedest thing. He and Mrs. Langley went up to the attic, and there the damned thing went over the trees like a duck and smashed Lord Kelvin’s barn to splinters. Right through the roof.

The old man dropped an oar in order to illustrate his story with helpful gestures, sailing his hand in a little arch while he whistled through the gap in his front teeth, then disappearing the hand between his knees, which, St. Ives supposed darkly, represented Lord Kelvin’s barn. “Pow!” shouted old Binger, throwing his knees apart to demonstrate the barn’s going to bits. He wheezed out a sort of laugh and had another go at his knees. Meanwhile the little rowboat rocked dangerously and slipped downstream. St. Ives gritted his teeth. It would be Lord Kelvin, secretary of the Royal Academy. Pule had reduced his spacecraft and his reputation to rubble in a single, fell yank of a lever. Why the devil hadn’t he locked the door to the silo?

St. Ives lurched forward as the rowboat ran up onto the bank, nearly dumping his fowling piece into the river. Off to the north, coming along the highroad, was a scattering of waving lights, flickering against the dark night. They bounced and flared -torches, evidently, carried by any number of people. A murmuring reached them on the breeze. St. Ives was struck suddenly by the ominous implication of the approaching people - a mob, perhaps. What were they about? Did they carry hay forks? Guns?

He’d never seen any profit in advertising his experimentations. Rumors filtered out now and again. He’d been suspected of vivisection and of the building of infernal devices. Men from the metalworks no doubt alerted the populace to his having contracted for the shell of the craft and odd parts. But no one, certainly, besides Hasbro and certain friends - the Trismegistus Club specifically - knew that an hour earlier a launchable space vehicle had been moored in the silo.

He climbed the little rise atop which sat his house, lit, now, like Christmas, Mrs. Langley having apparently decided that an abundance of lights would frighten off villains. Perhaps she was right. The blasted silo sat dark and silent on its meadow, lit only by a little sliver of moon that slipped in a low arc above the horizon. It was impossible at the moment to see that the silo was roofless - a relief, certainly.

The torchbearers approached. St. Ives recognized an old farmer - McNally, it was, and his two pudding-faced sons. And there behind them was Stooton from the post office, and Brinsing, the Scandinavian baker. There were a dozen more, generally speaking, and the lot of them seemed to be in a collective terror; they didn’t at all bear accusatory looks. Old Binger, seeing that he had lucked upon a comparatively vast audience, started in on the subject of the sailing bat thing, using hand gestures and grimaces to good effect.

St. Ives was in a sweat to shut him up. It mustn’t be known that the imbroglio was sponsored by St. Ives. Hasbro, anticipating as much, silently and unheeded, shoved Binger’s rowboat out into the current with his foot, then stepped forward and shouted, “The boat!” in such a commanding and inflammatory tone that Binger stopped in midsentence, his hand having completed only half its customary flight, and bolted through the ferns along the riverbank, shouting at his mutinous boat.

St. Ives nodded appreciatively at Hasbro, and decided to give Binger twice what he owed him when he returned, for the old man would without a doubt be wet through before he found his way home that night to work the space vehicle gestures on his tired wife.

The mob - not one of whom was carrying a hayfork, to St. Ives’ immense relief - was full of an undefined fear. The spacecraft, apparently, played second fiddle to a more nefarious threat. An alien had been sighted. It bore, insisted Mr. Stooton, the rag headgear of Islam, and was taken to be a member of that tribe by Mrs. Stooton, who hadn’t, as yet, been apprised of the spacecraft that had just pulverized Lord Kelvin’s barn and smokehouse.

More sightings had occurred, always the same. A man wound with rags was abroad, a creature, surely, from a distant sun. Wasn’t the thing in Lord Kelvin’s barn a spacecraft? Could there be any doubt that this wrapped man had driven it? Mightn’t he be a very dangerous alien?

No doubt whatsoever, assented St. Ives. He was surely a dangerous villain, this rag man from a far-off galaxy. Beat him into submission first, suggested St. Ives; question him afterward - when he was malleable. The man had been sighted, went the rumor, on the road into Harrogate, fleeing the general area of Lord Kelvin’s manor. Two farmers had given chase, one of them managing to hit him in the back of the head with a hastily thrown rock, but the alien made away into the fields and disappeared.

“Toward Harrogate, did you say?” asked St. Ives.

“Right you are, sir,” said McNally. “Hoofing it into town like the devil was after him. And he was a bad ’un, too, I can tell you. He beat a dog, he did, on the road. Chased him with a stick long as your arm. A vicious thing, your space man. That was when old Dyke hit him with the rock - slam on the noodle, and away he went. And they’d have had him too, if it weren’t for the dog, poor beast. It’s thought this alien was going to eat it, raw, right there on the road.”

“I wouldn’t at all doubt it,” said St. Ives grimly, trudging up to the manor with Hasbro beside him and the crowd of men behind. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d set out after him with dogs. Run him down. I’m a man of science, you know. What we face here is a threat, and there’s no gainsaying it. Dogs are your man for tracking aliens of this sort. They have a distinct smell. Comes from travel through space. And they’re prodigious liars. I’ve studied it out. The first thing he’ll do is deny the whole business. But there’s his craft, isn’t it? And there he is wound up in lord knows what sort of filthy rags. Don’t let the creature deny his rotten origins; that’s the word from the scientific end. Loosen his tongue for him.”

St. Ives’ speech worked the mob up thoroughly. Along the road two hundred yards off came another dozen men, and St. Ives could see, in the direction of Kirk Hammerton, a procession of torchlights. By God, he thought, they’d have Pule yet! And if the populace made it warm for the scoundrel, fine. There was, apparently, no end to the man’s villainy. Beating a dog on the road! St. Ives fumed. He was suddenly anxious, however, to diminish his role in the night’s proceedings. He wondered if there were any identifying marks about the ruinous spacecraft that would give him away before he had a chance to think of something to do. He looked at Hasbro, who stood silently holding both rifles. Hasbro raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the house. This was, he seemed to indicate, no time to be chatting with local vigilantes.

“I’d like to know,” St. Ives said to McNally, “if you run this man down. Don’t kill him, mind you. Science will need to have a go at him - to study him. This sort of thing doesn’t happen every day, you know.”

The growing crowd of men agreed that it didn’t. They seemed to be waiting for some further word from St. Ives. He could sense that they looked to him for advice, he being the one among them who most understood such strange transpirings. “Keep at it, then!” he said in a stout voice. And he turned on his heel and clumped up the stairs.

“Look there!” cried someone directly behind him. It was a familiar voice - Hasbro’s voice. St. Ives spun round, expecting to see some revelation - perhaps Pule being dragged across the meadow by his heels. What he saw was Hasbro pointing in theatrical horror at the blasted silo, clearly visible now in the thin moonlight. A simultaneous murmur of surprise issued from the crowd.

St. Ives flinched. Had Hasbro gone mad? Had he been bought off by Narbondo? He squinted at his otherwise capable gentleman’s gentleman with a face which he hoped betrayed nothing to the several dozen onlookers, but which would be an open book to Hasbro.

“The spacecraft, sir, appears to have shorn off the silo roof -blew it to bits, if I’m any judge.”

“So it has!” cried McNally.

“The scoundrel!” shouted Brinsing the baker, shaking a fist over his head to illustrate the enormity of the act.

“The filthy dog!” cried St. Ives, echoing the general sentiment and relieved that Hasbro hadn’t, after all, gone mad. They’d eventually have seen the silo, after all. It was far safer to explain it away so simply and logically. The ship had destroyed his property too - had narrowly missed the house, had strewed all sorts of debris about the meadow. Poor Mrs. Langley! He glanced down and there was old Binger, returned, standing agog, scratching his head. Hasbro’s suggestion that the craft had simply ripped the lid from the silo as it passed along overhead ran counter to his memory.

“Binger!” shouted St. Ives suddenly, descending the stairs and collaring the old man. “There’s that business of the half pound I owe you. Step along with me now, and I’ll pay up. Mrs. Langley has a pie, too, unless I’m mistaken, and we’ve bottles of ale to wash it down with. Come along, then.” And he stepped across the threshold, dragging Binger with him, Hasbro closing in behind.

“Half a pound, sir?” asked the innocent Binger, thoroughly befuddled.

“That’s right,” said St. Ives. “Step along here now.” He turned to the crowd on the meadow, tipping his hat. “Keep at it, lads,” he cried, shutting the door behind him and precipitating the old man down the hallway toward the kitchen. “We’ll just have a go at that pie now.” He smiled and drew a half pound from his pocket. “It’ll be in the pantry, I should think. Cool as a cellar in here.” The pantry door swung back to reveal two prone corpses on the stone floor - the remains of Narbondo’s ghouls. “No pies here,” rattled St. Ives, slamming the door shut. “Take care of this, will you?” he whispered to Hasbro.

“Certainly, sir. And I’ll just take the wagon along to Lord Kelvin’s afterward, don’t you think? If I can… collect the spacecraft, sir, we could study it at our leisure.”

St. Ives nodded hugely. Hasbro’s talk of “studying” the spacecraft was lost on Binger, though, for the man stared openmouthed at the shut pantry door.

“A five-pound note was it?” asked St. Ives evenly.

“Beg pardon, sir, but…”

“No buts, Mr. Binger,” cried St. Ives. “You’ve rendered us a service, man. And I intend to reward you. Disregard the dead men in the pantry; they’re not what you suppose. Sent along by the undertaker, they were. Victims of a wasting disease. Quite conceivably virulent. Here’s the note, eh? And here, by heaven, is a bottle of ale. Join me? Of course you will!” He hauled Mr. Binger along toward the parlor. “I was just set to have a go at one of these when that damned alien appeared. Tore the roof right off the silo. You saw that, did you?”

“Aye, sir. What was he doing inside it, sir? I’d swear he come out through the roof.”

“Optical illusion, I should think. Difficult scientific matter. These men from the stars aren’t like you and me. Not a bit. Liable to do anything, aren’t they?”

“But wasn’t he down on the river...”

“I don’t at all wonder that he was,” said St. Ives. “He’s been high and low tonight, hasn’t he? Smashing my silo, beating dogs up and down the highroad, tearing into Lord Kelvin’s barn - you witnessed that, didn’t you, Mr. Binger. Quite a sight, I don’t doubt. From the attic window, you say, after it beat the devil out of my silo?”

“Yes, sir,” said Binger, livening up. He balled his hand into a fist and sailed it along from one side of his chair to the other, burying it between the arm and the cushion.

St. Ives sat transfixed. “Just like that, was it? Remarkable narrative powers you have, Mr. Binger. Really remarkable. Quite an explosion when it struck, was there?” St. Ives opened two more bottles of ale. He needed them every bit as much as he needed to pour them down the confused Binger.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Hasbro dragging a body down the hallway toward the rear door - the second ghoul, from the look of the checked trousers. Mr. Binger’s back was to the hall. St. Ives blinked and grimaced at him, hoping that his evident satisfaction with the man’s brief but gesture-ridden tale would encourage him to generate some really colorful, time-consuming detail. The next corpse followed the first out the back door, which slammed after it. And in a moment St. Ives heard the wagon rattle away out of the carriage house. He looked out through the window to see Hasbro driving along toward the river through moonlit dust, the two corpses flung into the wagon behind him.

St. Ives was relieved. It wouldn’t do to bury the creatures on the grounds - not with the night’s complications. They’d be miles down the Nidd by morning. And if they were discovered, their deaths would be laid to the alien, to Willis Pule. Damn Pule, thought St. Ives. Willis Pule! His very name sounded almost like an obscenity. The spacecraft gone! If Hasbro could retrieve it, he’d put in to have the man declared a saint. He pulled out his pocketwatch. It was coming onto ten o’clock. He’d have to pack. There was no telling when Hasbro would return. They’d be on their way into Harrogate by four in the morning.

“Astonishing business!” cried St. Ives heartily, interrupting the old man’s by now oft-told story. “Come round and see us again, my good fellow. That’s right. Here’s a bottle for the road. Give Mrs. Binger our best. And what of young Binger? Working at the mill is he? Capital, capital.” With that Mr. Binger found himself on the front porch, a bottle of ale in each hand, trying to answer all of the professor’s questions at once, but finding himself in conversation, all of a sudden, with an oak slab door. He set off down the drive, richer by five pounds, two bottles of ale, and a story that would last him years.

St. Ives tumbled halfway up out of sleep three hours later at the sound of the wagon rolling along the drive. He pulled himself up in bed and peered out into the night. The wagon drove past, the dark bulk of the spacecraft atop the bed. Into the carriage house it went. A door slammed. St. Ives dropped away again and awakened before dawn the next morning to the sound of Hasbro hauling suitcases out the front door.

The two of them drove along toward Harrogate and the London express a half hour later, the sun just peering up over the trees in the east. What strange activities lay before them St. Ives could only guess at, but the set of his mouth and the squint of his eye promised that he was ready for them, that he’d breakfast on them. His error had been that he’d thought himself apart from the villainies of the London underworld. But he saw things more clearly now, much more clearly.