to dismantle it in secret.
Poor Lord Kelvin, thought Kraken, shaking his head. The odd sight of the rocketing beasts had rather unnerved him—perhaps more so even than the ruination of his device. And the muck clogging the tube just before the explosion... Kraken giggled. But his success wasn’t entirely a cause for celebration. There were questions of a philosophic nature to be asked, for sure—questions concerning his lordship’s manufactured failure and the sleepless nights of vain speculation that failure would engender, questions of the expendability of dumb animals for the sake of saving mankind. Kraken wasn’t sure he liked either notion, but he liked the idea of a mutant future even less.
These scientists, thought Kraken, there was no telling what sorts of tricks they’d get up to, scampering like so many grinning devils astride an engine, laboring to turn the old earth inside out like a pair of trousers, one of them yanking at a pant leg with a calipers while another filled the pockets with numbers and gunpowder. And here on the horizon, slipping as if by magic into the sky, rose the comet, the stars paling roundabout like lanterns enfeebled by sudden daylight.
Kraken tipped his hat at the sky and set out. He trudged past Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament and climbed into a waiting dogcart, pausing just a moment to look once again over his shoulder at the ascending comet. He took up the reins and shrugged, then reached out to pat the flank of his horse. Success, he thought to himself as he set out at a leisurely canter toward Chingford, is a relative business at best.
PART II
THE DOWNED SHIPS: JACK OWLESBY’S ACCOUNT
THE HANSOM CAB LUNATIC
I was coming along down Holborn Hill in December, beneath a lowering sky and carrying a tin of biscuits and a pound of Brazilian coffee, when a warehouse exploded behind Perkins inn. Smoke and lumber and a twisted sheet of iron, torn nearly in half from the blast, blew out of the mouth of the alley between Kingsway and Newton Street and scattered the half-dozen pedestrians like autumn leaves.
I was clear of it, thank God, but even so the concussion threw me into the gutter, and I dropped the biscuits and coffee and found myself on the seat of my pants, watching a man stagger away from the explosion, out of the mouth of the alley to collapse bloody on the pavement.
I jumped up and ran for the man on the ground, thinking to help but really not thinking at all, when a second blast ripped through and slammed me against a bakery storefront. Glass shattered where my elbow went through the window, and then the rest of me followed, snapping the mullions and tumbling through in an avalanche of buns.
Directly there was another roar—not an explosion this time, but a roof caving in, and then a billow of black smoke pouring out of the alley and a fire that reminded you of the Gordon Riots. I could walk, if you call it that, and between the two of us, the baker and I, we pulled the bloody man across to where my coffee lay spilled out in the gutter. We needn’t have bothered; he was dead, and we could both see it straight off, but you don’t leave even a dead man to burn, not if you can help it.
I couldn’t see worth anything all at once, because of the reek. It was a paper company gone up—a common enough tragedy, except that there was an element or two that made it markedly less common: Mr. Theophilus Godall was there, for one. Maybe you don’t know what that means yet; maybe you do. And the paper company wasn’t just any paper company; it was next door but one to an empty sort of machine works overseen by the Royal Academy, specifically as a sort of closed-to-the-public museum used to house the contrivances built by the great Lord Kelvin and the other inventive geniuses of the Academy.
My name is Jack Owlesby, and I’m a friend of Professor Langdon St. Ives, who is perhaps the greatest, mostly unsung, scientist and explorer in the Western Hemisphere. Mr. Oscar Wilde said something recently along the following lines: “Show me a hero,” he said, “and I will write you a tragedy.” He might have taken St. Ives as a case in point. I’m rather more inclined to enlarge upon the heroism, which is easier, and of which you have a remarkable surplus when