Starcross (36 page)

‘Mother!’ I gasped. I was deeply shocked at her coldbloodedness, for I felt certain that Delphine and her accomplice were no more, and that Mother in her infinite power had crushed them as carelessly as you or I might crush an ant. ‘You have vaporised them!’ I declared.

‘Oh, Art, what nonsense!’ she replied, tying Jack’s bandages. ‘As if I would do such a thing! Go and help them,
while I look to Jack and your sister.’

I went cautiously towards those heaps of clothes, and Nipper and Grindle came with me. The heaps stirred faintly as we drew near. A strange noise came from within the collapsed tent of Delphine’s dress. Sir Launcelot’s tail coat moved clumsily across the floor. Something was alive inside those garments, and we all drew back, recalling tales of witches who turned their enemies into toads …

And then another little sound came from Delphine’s dress, and Ssil, standing behind us, said suddenly, ‘Oh, you sssillies!’ She pushed us aside and stooped over the dress, and pulled out from within it a tiny, pink, blue-eyed, perfectly human baby girl, which lay in her arms, waving its chubby hands and feet about in the jolliest manner and gurgling up at Ssil’s blue face. And Mr Munkulus pulled open Sir Launcelot’s shirt (sending studs flying everywhere in his haste) and fetched out a boy baby, just as tiny, who seemed to think his four strong arms a most excellent cradle, and who, after blowing a few bubbles and saying, ‘Boogle
woggle wiggle,’ fell fast asleep.

Myrtle sneezed loudly, which was a result of Mother having raised her up, and waved a pinch of Mr Grindle’s snuff under her nose. Her eyes opened. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Babies! Where did they come from?’

‘We ain’t entirely sure,’ Mr Grindle confessed.

‘They are Delphine Beauregard and Sir Launcelot Sprigg,’ Mother said. ‘Or rather, they will be. They would insist on being beastly, so rather than setting the machine as Miss Beauregard demanded, I set the time-greenhouse mechanism we used upon the ideospores, only reversing it and taking Delphine and Sir Launcelot back to the age of six months, give or take a day.’

‘Aren’t they sssweet?’ said Ssil, and the Threls gathered round to tickle the babies’ feet and say, ‘Oo’s got pwetty little toesy-woeses, then? Eh?’ before remembering where they were, and doing their best to look like fearsome space mercenaries again.

‘And Jack?’ asked Myrtle anxiously. ‘Can we place Jack in this machine, Mother, and let it revert him to a time before that horrid person shot him?’

Mother shook her head. ‘Jack’s wound will heal well enough in the natural way, given the proper care. Time
reversion is a somewhat dangerous procedure. We would not wish to turn Jack into a baby, would we? Or to send him back so far that he vanished altogether?’

‘No,’ we all said; we would none of us want such a terrible thing, not even Jack, who had a nasty hole in him and would bear the scar of it for ever. Mother gave Nipper strict instructions on how he was to be cared for, placing great emphasis upon cleanliness, and then re-revived Myrtle, who had insisted that
she
should be the one who nursed Jack back to health, but promptly fainted again when she saw all the blood.

Then, returning for one last time to her machine, Mother made a few more adjustments to its controls. ‘Stand well back, everybody, please,’ she warned us.

We all did as she asked, Nipper carrying Jack with great solicitude, Ssil and Mr Munkulus cradling the sleeping infants. That dizziness came over us all again, so that I had to lean on Nipper for support. Mother hurried over to join us, and we stood and watched as the old Shaper machine performed its uncanny dances.

And then it vanished. One moment it was there, humming and singing and glowing and shifting as gamely as ever a mysterious engine of extraterrestrial design can, and
the next it simply wasn’t. There was a mild thunderclap, as air rushed in to fill the empty space it had left in the middle of the boiler room. The lace cuffs of Delphine’s abandoned dress fluttered in a momentary breeze.

‘Where has it gone?’ asked Myrtle.

‘It is still travelling, back and back through time, to a hundred-million-year-old beach on Mars.’

‘And what will it do when it gets there?’ I wondered.

‘It will destroy itself,’ said Mother. ‘All Sir Launcelot’s tinkerings have left it most unstable, so it was an easy thing to induce a runaway alchemical reaction. It will destroy itself, and the section of Mars on which it stands will be blasted into fragments which will fly far, far out into the aether until one of them becomes part of the asteroid belt. An object known as –’

‘– Starcross!’ I said.

‘Quite so. And with the machine gone, those rifts and frayings in Time’s fabric which have troubled this portion of space should all cease.’

I frowned. ‘But, Mother,’ I observed, ‘if the machine is destroyed in the year 100,000,000 BC on Mars, how can it ever have been here? Or at Larklight, in our own time? Will it mean that all our adventures never happened?’

Mother frowned, as if she hadn’t thought of that. Myrtle said, ‘
Some
people are too clever by half.’ Jack groaned faintly as he shifted in Nipper’s claws and his wound pained him.

‘Come,’ said Mother, leading the way upstairs. ‘I do not usually approve of intoxicating fluids, but I believe poor Jack would benefit from a good, stiff brandy. And we must mash up some bread and milk for Delphine and Sir Launcelot.’

On a lonely stretch of Martian beach, ever so many centuries before the birth of Christ, a number of ugly, transparent animals were squabbling over the carcass of a giant land starfish, which had been lately exploded by a maritime distress flare. A sudden vibration made them pause, tasting the air with their horrible feelers. They had no
eyes, and so could not see the curious old machine which had appeared quite suddenly a little further along the curve of the bay. They had no ears, so could not hear the sound that came from within those massive galleries of ducts and whirligigs:

The explosion, according to learned gents who wander the Red Planet in sennet hats and gaiters, studying rocks and fossil sand clams, tore a crater the size of several asteroids in Mars’s flank, and ripped a swathe of the planet’s atmosphere out into the aether, so ending the age of the great starfish in a most dreadful cataclysm.

But Mother says the great starfish were on their way out anyway and would never have amounted to very much.
She
says the explosion merely cleared the way for other forms of life to thrive and flourish, including some which would grow eventually into the Martians we know today.
She
says ’tis an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

And, let’s face it, she should know.

Chapter the Last

A few days later we were sitting outside the beach cafe on Starcross promenade, well wrapped up against the chills of space, watching the starlight play upon the
Sophronia
’s rigging and upon the hulk of the USSS
Liberty
. Our friend the Moob had just settled for a spell on Mother’s head, and was using her voice to explain that it was not unhappy at being left behind when the other Moobs returned to their own time, as it had conceived an affection for the modern era and looked forward to exploring it more thoroughly. And Mr Spinnaker was
suggesting that it might like to accompany himself and Mrs S. on their forthcoming tour of the music halls of Mercury, for it had occurred to him that if it did not mind disguising itself as a top hat again they might work up together quite a nice act in the Conjuring and Mind-Reading line.

‘Listen!’ said Mr Grindle suddenly, pricking up his ears. ‘A train! A train!’

It took a few seconds more till we could hear it, but he was right. With a long
Whoo-Whooooo!
a train came thundering across the heavens and swept down the long incline to Starcross Halt. Not just any old train, either, but an armoured train of the British Space Grenadiers, its engine sheathed in a steel cowl like the helmet of a mediaeval knight, its steel-cased carriages fairly bristling with guns and phlogiston agitators, and the Union flag fluttering from its guard’s van.

It screeched into the station amid spreading clouds of steam, and out from hatches all along its length came pouring brave British soldiers, stomping along in their fighting machines, or perched on the saddles of mechanised cannon. They surged towards us in a veritable tide of shining gun-metal and scarlet cotton drill, and when they had quite surrounded the tables where we sat their ranks
opened and a large figure wearing a fanciful military costume of her own design burst through, crying, ‘Oh, my dears! We are so ’appy to find you safe and well, and not a top ’at in sight!’

‘Your ordeal is over!’ announced a splendid major, appearing behind Mrs Spinnaker, mounted on a roan thoroughbred. ‘Now, where are those accursed Moobs?’

‘How sweetly kind of you to come!’ said Mother. ‘And so well turned out! But I’m afraid you are too late.’

‘Eh?’ said the splendid major, looking on in alarm as the Moob slipped from her head and arranged itself around her shoulders as a stole. ‘Well, it’s no simple matter to prepare an armoured space train; there are orders to write, requisition forms to be sent in, dockets and suchlike …’