… what, abundant energy from next to nothing? You may recall that one hundred years ago the same dream had given birth to the bombs that put an abrupt end to the Second World War … not so much a dream as a nightmare, as it happened—at least until someone began speculating about the possible benefits: that perhaps nuclear power could provide cheap energy for the entire world, which, of course, never really worked out. The fuel was dirty, dangerous, and had safety problems; the mutations and fatal diseases that followed on inevitably from the errors and accident were hideous, while some of the infected radioactive regions remain hot even to this day.
“Well, history repeats, Julian. Plasma Fusion was the next best hope for cheap energy, far better and cheaper and so much easier to produce … why, men might even go to the stars with it—if it worked! But it didn’t, or rather it did, except even the smallest, most cautious of tests warned of a Pandora’s Box effect. Only let it loose, and it would initiate a chain reaction with anything it could touch and fuse with. That’s the only and best explanation I can give to a layman, especially in what little time we have left. But enough: we stopped working on it, and the world authorities—every single one of them who recognized the awesome power of this thing—signed up to a strictly monitored ban on any further experimentation … simply because they could not afford not to!”
While Henry talked, his voice gradually falling to a whisper, we had proceeded from the amazingly and relatively pristine platform to the stairs and elevator. The latter had not worked since the night of the invasion, of course not; but the stairs, completely free of rubble, had taken us eventually to the surface, which upon a time had been a landmark, a renowned open-air concourse where many streets joined in that great circus it was named for; a far different sort of circus now.
“This place,” I said, my normal voice echoing, “is looking rather empty. Not what one would expect, eh?”
“I know,” Henry agreed in a whisper, probably unable to understand why I wasn’t whispering, too. “It’s been like this each time. You would think it should be crawling, right? Which, in a way, it is. Not how you might expect—not crawling with alien life, no—but with the very meaning of the word alien itself!”
Crawling, yes. And making one’s skin crawl, too. Even mine. It was the way it looked, its shapes, angles; its architectural feature, if you could call them that. Non-Euclidan geometry.
It had four legs—or was it three? Maybe five?—all leaning inward, or was it outward? Something like the Eiffel Tower, but a twisted version, and what we’d surfaced into was the base of one such leg that had used to be Piccadilly Circus; the rest of them were green-misted with distance and aquatic, submarine-tinged shoggoth light and the intervening structures of anomalous buttresses, columns, and spiraling staircases. And nothing stood still but appeared literally to crawl, each surface flowing and changing shape of its own accord.
As for the staircases: some had steps as broad as landings, other with steps like frozen ripples on a pond, but rising, of course, and a third sort with no steps at all but smooth, corkscrew surfaces of glassy substance, sometimes turning on clockwise threads, and at other times winding in reverse. And all of them stationary, until one looked at them.
We were dwarfed, Henry and I, made minuscule by the gigantic scale of everything; and screwing up his face, shielding his eyes as he peered up into reaches that receded sickeningly into skyscraper heights and vast balconied levels, Henry said, “That must be where the life is: Bgg’ha’s throne room, cages to house his prisoners, dwelling areas for them that serve him. The monster himself will sit high above all that, dreaming his dreams, doing what he does, probably unaware that he’s any sort of monster at all! To him it’s how things are, that’s all.
“But as for his underlings—the flying things, Deep Ones, shoggoths that build and fashion for him, varnishing their work with slime that hardens to a glass as hard as steel—I have to believe that most of them … well, perhaps not the shoggoths—who are more like machines, however monstrous—that the majority of them, know full well what they’re about.”
I think you’re right,” I told him. “But you know, Henry, we’re not too small to be noticed. And I can’t imagine that we would be welcome here; certainly not you, suitcase and all! You need to be about your revenge, and should it work—to however small, or enormous effect—then, while you will have paid the ultimate price, at least your physicist friends in the SSR will surely be aware of your success and will carry on your work. So why are we waiting here? And why is that awesome weapon you’re carrying also waiting … to be put to its intended use?”
It was as if he had been asleep, or hypnotized by his alien surrounding, or maybe fully aware for the first time that this was it—the end of the long last night. For him, anyway—or so he thought. And he was right: it was the end of the road for him, but not as he thought.
“Yes,” he finally answered, straightening up and no longer whispering. “The others who helped me put it all together, they will surely know. They’ll see the result from the skeletal roof of the museum. When the explosion takes this leg out, the entire tower may rock a little … why, it could even topple! Bgg’ha’s house, brought crashing down on the city that he destroyed! And that, my friend, would be acceptable as a real and very genuine revenge! By no means an eye for an eye—for who has lost more than me?—but as much as I could hope for, certainly.”
“The roof of the museum?” I repeated him as he headed for a recess—outcrop, stanchion, corner or nook?—in the seemingly restless wall. “What, the Victoria and Albert, whose cellar was your home?”
“Eh?” He stared at me for long, hard moments … then shook his head. And: “No, no,” he said. “Not the Victoria and Albert, but the Science Museum next door, behind the great pile of rubble that used to be the Natural History Museum.”
“Ahh!” And at last I understood. “So that is where and how you and your team from the SSR built it, eh? You used materials and apparatus rescued from the ruins of the Science Museum, and you put it all together … where?”
“In the Museum’s basement,” he replied, as the wall seemed to enclose us in a leadenly glistening fold. “Those massive old buildings—and their cellars—were built to last. We had to work hard at it for a long time, but we turned the Science Museum’s basement into a workshop. After tonight, when they’ve seen the result of our work, they’ll make the next bomb much bigger; big enough to melt the entire city, what’s left of it … ”
And that was that. Now I had all that I needed from the old man, all that I’d been ordered to extract from him. Wherefore:
You can come for him now, I told the tower’s creatures—or certain of them—fully aware that the nearest ones would hear me, because they would sure as hell have been listening out for me. But meanwhile:
We had entered or been enveloped in a fold in the irrationally angled wall, a sort of priest’s hole in the flowing, alien cinder-block construction. And there in a corner—I’ll call it that, anyway, but in any case “a space”—was Chattaway’s device, its components contained in four more small suitcases, arranged in a sort of circle with a gap where a fifth (the one we’d been keeping from damage for this entire subterranean journey) would neatly fit. The cases were connected up with electrical cables, left loosely dangling in the gap where the fifth would complete the circuit; while a sixth component stood central on four short legs, looking much like the casing of a domed, cylindrical fire extinguisher. In series, obviously the cases had been a kind of trigger, while the cylinder—the bomb—would have contained anything but fire retardant! And affixed to the cylinder at its domed top, standing out vividly against the metal’s dull gleam, sat a bright red switch which, apart from the warning made manifest by its color, looked like nothing so much as an ordinary electrical light switch. The cylinder and its switch—a deadly, however inarticulate combination, as the bomb had recently been—told a story all their own, but one which was now a lie!
Quickly kneeling, Henry opened his case, reached inside and carefully uncoiled a pair of socketed cables which he connected up to the dangling cables on both sides. And now he was ready.
Screwing