The Chronological Man: The Martian Emperor Read online

  Smith looked up from the contraption as April dropped the paper onto his desk. “I’ll take a look at it later. In the meantime, I have to figure out what’s so urgent that needs my, I mean our, attention.”

  “April Malone.”

  Smith looked up at her. “I told you not to tell me!”

  “My name is April Malone, and the papers all say that the Martians are invading.”

  “Good lord, Miss Malone. Why didn’t you tell me sooner!”

  The Menagerie

  Ebelin Contral felt goosebumps on the back of his fleshy arms as he read the headline of the newspaper again. Creatures squawked and roared from the various cages in his menagerie, none of them interrupting his concentration. They never did, even when they cried out in pain or loneliness. He was immune to their pleas. He had to be to do the kinds of things that he did.

  He set the paper down and placed a bloody scalpel on the crease to weigh it down. Martians. It had to be a hoax. He was fairly certain of that. But still. His mind wandered. His eyes examined the illustration with careful scrutiny. What if they were real? And so close at hand?

  “Monsieur, it must be a charade of some kind,” came a gravel-edged voice from inside a small cage near his desk.

  Contral turned to the speaker. “I didn’t know you could read.”

  “Oui, monsieur. I can read. I can dance. I can even sing if you would like.”

  “No, I don’t think that will be necessary. Tell me, why do you think it’s a hoax?”

  Small feet shifted. Furry hands clinched the bars of the cage. “Perhaps I spoke too hastily. I think this opportunity is too much to pass up. Perhaps you should return me to the carnival so you can pursue this with all your energy. After all, how often does one get to meet men from another world?”

  “I think we are more than up to the task of entertaining you and all the other guests here. Wouldn’t you like to meet these Martians as well?”

  A tiny fist knocked on the walls of the metal cage. “Not under these conditions, monsieur. I’d much prefer it in some place a little less … depressing.”

  “A necessary health precaution,” said Contral.

  “Whose health? Yours or mine?”

  “Everyone’s. We can’t have our city overrun by strange vermin. It’s my responsibility to see to it that doesn’t happen.”

  “I assure you, monsieur, I am no rat. I was born of Christian blood, just as you. My father was a Huguenot missionary and my mother a converted Algonquin. A sweet, pious woman who misses her son dearly. If only you would let me send her a letter to inform her that I’m well and being taken care of.”

  “A likely story.” Contral picked up the scalpel and tapped his chin as he looked into the small, dark cage. “We still haven’t determined what you are.”

  “I’m a freak. A mutation. That is all. Some men, like you, are destined to be bald. Me, the opposite. Some to be tall, me the opposite. That is all. I was unfortunate enough to have two afflictions. Or blessed, depending upon how you look at it. You’ll have nothing to gain by looking inside me, monsieur. That’s the least interesting part about me.”

  Contral wasn’t so sure. He wanted to know if the small furry man was a freak as he insisted or some other race of man previously unknown to science. He was tempted to have a look at his internal organs but was afraid that once that was done, if he proved human, the inquiry would reach an impasse and he would have to answer to the people who paid for his menagerie as to why he wasted such an interesting specimen.

  He had the curious desire to see what would happen if he attempted to mate the little man with a woman. One of his assistants was making gentle inquiries into the Bowery and Tenderloin districts to see if a suitable woman could be found. Perhaps a Chinese would do. There were plenty of them secreted about various basements.

  Would the offspring be human? Another furry man? If so, what would that mean? Was there yet another lower race for him and his superiors to be mindful of? His mind wandered back to the artist’s illustration of the Martian Ambassador and he was overwhelmed with a frightful thought. What if these Martians were real? What if they looked upon humanity in the same way he regarded the furry little man and other undesirables? Was the Martian visitation a precursor to a planet-wide cleansing? What if they were more advanced versions of himself?

  Contral used the sharp blade of the scalpel to cut the illustration from the newspaper. He placed the clipping at the top of his desk and scribbled a note for his assistants. Hoax or not, it was of the utmost urgency that they capture one of these Martians, either to negotiate with, perhaps a secret alliance, or to dissect and find a weakness.

  “Monsieur, my friends. I am sure they miss me. They are bound to be looking for me.”

  “Oh, they have. But they won’t find you here.” Contral’s gaze drifted across the dark stones that lined the menagerie. “We’re in a most secure location. Practical, as well,” he said with a grin.

  “My friends are clever.”

  “How clever can they be if they work for pennies at the Coney Island sideshow? Besides, I have the law on my side.” Contral jerked a thumb toward a plaque on the wall behind his desk. It sat between two dirty cages and a blanket of cobwebs.

  “I have admired your placard, monsieur. But I couldn’t help but notice that it says nothing of public health. It seems your political appointment is that of Chasseuse de rat Officiale. Perhaps my English is not as good as I thought. But that would make you the city’s official rat catcher and not its public health supervisor.”

  Contral waved a hand at the cages and tables in the menagerie. “Not all rats walk on four legs.” He tapped the drawing of the Martian. “Some may come from the stars.” He was struck by an interesting thought. His hand reached inside his desk and pulled out a folder with large red letters written across it. “Would you consider this a very distressing event?”

  “My capture, monsieur? But, of course. If you mean this Martian affair, why yes, I suppose so. But not nearly so personally distressing.”

  “I agree. My colleagues have been in search of a particular rat, one that likes to burrow for very long lengths of time and then poke his nose out when it’s the least convenient. A very long-lived rat, it would appear. I’ve been under the impression that what we’ve really needed is the right bait to catch this rat.” Contral picked up the Martian illustration. “Hoax or not, I think this affair could provide for just the thing. I suspect the rat I’m seeking won’t be able to resist this.”

  “I hope he’s smarter than moi and doesn’t find himself unconscious from a tainted bottle of rum and a sharp blow to the head.”

  “He’s quite smart. Perhaps the smartest. But that’s his undoing. With his intelligence comes a great weakness: his curiosity. It’s quite possible, with the right nudging, I can get him to step right into one of these cages.” Contral smiled.

  The furry man in the cage looked at the maniacal glee on the cruel man’s face. For the sake of the other man, he hoped he’d be more clever than he was when Contral’s men in black coats came for him backstage at the carnival and that he avoided the city altogether.

  Martians or not, he looked at the blood-stained floors and knew that nothing good could come for this man if he crossed paths with Contral and his minions. The furry man regarded Contral as a cruel child who collected creatures for the sole sake of seeing them scream as he pulled them apart.

  Secret Train

  Smith’s private train raced across the track at eighty miles an hour toward the island of Manhattan. April looked out the window at the night sky. Sparse lights could be seen between the forests and small towns between Boston and New York City.

  “The train, it’s so quiet,” said April. Other than a gentle swaying, it barely seemed to be moving at all.

  Smith was sitting on the opposite couch, examining the newspaper article. “It’s electric. Powered by a dynamo and a large battery. An engine charges them when necessary. Otherwise, yes, it’s quite silent.
Technically, we’re not supposed to be using these tracks.”

  April turned away from the window. “What if another train is coming? Will your engineer have enough time to react?”

  “Engineer … well, Miss Malone, there is no engineer. It’s controlled by an automaton. I mean, really, there’s only two directions, forward and backward. As far as colliding with another train, I have two systems to prevent that. One is a kind of microphone that listens for other trains. The other is a kind of sonic eye, I call it. There’s a device at the front of the train that blows air through a high-pitched whistle. Another microphone, tuned to only that frequency, listens to see if it returns. If it does, then we know we have a problem.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we have a problem.” Smith gestured to a map of the Eastern Seaboard on one wall. Railway lines were marked out in sharp blue. Small metal trains magnetically stuck to the map appeared to move slowly. “That shows us where the trains are supposed to be. It’s updated from telegraphs time to time as stations send signals down the line.”

  April sat down on a red crushed velvet couch. The salon car looked far fancier than something she would have expected from the eccentric yet practical Smith.

  “Is your room to your liking?”

  “Quite so,” said April. He’d given her the master quarters, which took up an entire car.

  Smith nodded. “And your mother?”

  “Excited that I get to go to New York on such short notice.” April had given her mother only the minimum of information about her trip.

  Smith had hesitated to ask April to accompany him. She’d insisted, and he only made a slight protest. Things were still a bit foggy for him. He still wasn’t quite sure about much of his own history, and he only had a vague recollection of her. He could tell, from the feeling in his gut, that he was fond of her.

  They’d only boarded the train an hour before. After April had shown Smith the newspaper, he decided that it was urgent that they get to New York City as quickly as possible. At first he led her up a staircase behind the big metal door. He then stopped halfway up and decided to take a different means of transportation and led her to the basement, where his secret train was waiting. April wanted to ask him what means of transportation was waiting in the attic but decided to ask him at another time.

  She’d heard of underground rails in London and knew that there was talk in Boston of building one and a failed attempt of a pneumatic in New York, but to her knowledge, Smith’s train was the first operating one outside of Europe. The train had traveled a mile underground before emerging from a warehouse near the central rail lines that serviced Boston.

  The tunnel, Smith explained, had been dug as a test for the Boston Metropolitan Rail system in the 1860s and then abandoned. One of his companies had purchased it at auction for pennies on the dollar when the other company went bankrupt. The public, and Boston at large, forgot about it. April suspected that much of Smith’s enterprise was based upon people having short attention spans.

  She sat there watching him out of the corner of her eye as he pored over the newspaper, and she wondered how many details of his own life he had forgotten or overlooked in pursuit of the big mysteries that he chased. She looked back up at the map with the moving trains and marveled at Smith’s offhanded creativity.

  “Bagatelle,” said Smith, as he noticed her looking at the moving map.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I like to make amusement games. A while ago, quite a while ago, I came up with a mechanized version of the Bagatelle game. I think you call it pinball now. The machinists who make my games also make some of my notions like the map with the moving trains.”

  “Yes, but you said it was updated by the telegraph? We haven’t stopped yet.”

  Smith’s eyes lit up as a thought came to mind. “Pardon me, Miss Malone, but you’ve given me an idea. It’s a bit dastardly, I admit. But under the circumstances, maybe necessary.” Smith sat up and walked over to a wooden cabinet. He pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the cabinet. “There’s something missing in the newspaper accounts. They show the front of the Martian obelisk but not the back. On the front they’ve got this indecipherable language. On the reverse, I suspect, is the translation into English. I wonder why they haven’t revealed this.”

  Inside the cabinet was a brass machine with several knobs, cylinders and a telegraph switch. Smith pulled a stool over to the device and sat down. April moved closer to the edge of the couch to watch.

  “You must keep this a secret, Miss Malone.” Smith began to tap the telegraph switch.

  “Of course.”

  “When they started stringing telegraphs across the globe, I was struck with an interesting thought. A telegraph is a means of converting the spoken word into a series of simple patterns. Take, for example, dot dash, dot dash dash dot, dot dash dot, dot dot, dot dash dot dot. That’s your given name in Morse code. If someone wanted to listen in on a conversation between two parties, it’s a very easy matter to do that. I know with good reason that all the world governments do this very thing, despite whether it’s proper or not. Foreign embassies use coded signals to avoid eavesdroppers from listening in on this. But within a country, communications between one government agency to another usually are not encoded. If some fiend decided to listen in on a communique between officials in New York City and Washington, it would be a simple matter.”

  “But would you have to be actively listening for the transmission and connected into the telegraph?” April wondered if Smith had people doing that.

  “That’s one way to do that. But an inefficient way. Why use a person when a machine could do the job better? Remember, words on a telegraph are converted into dots and dashes. You can use the same parts that make a telegraph relay into a device that listens for certain words. Like the dots and dashes of your name. Or the dots and dashes of a word like ‘Martian.’ Then those dots and dashes could be recorded to a cylinder and replayed at a later time.”

  “If some fiendish person went through the trouble of doing such a thing,” said April.

  Smith tapped away at his telegraph. “Said fiendish person could build a box that waited for a series of dots and dashes that told it what to listen for and place it at critical telegraph junctions. And then have them replayed after a matter of time.”

  “Yes, but we’re still moving.”

  “Induction, Miss Malone. This rail line and several others have a telegraph line running along the tracks. A special fitting can receive and transmit along it. Did our subscription to American Railroad Journal lapse?”

  “I must not have gotten to that issue yet.” April rolled her eyes. Smith subscribed to every print publication imaginable and a few unimaginable. Part of her duty was to help keep track of them and remember the details of ones singled out for her.

  “I’m using ‘Martian’ as a keyword. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Ares, the Greek counterpart?”

  “Brilliant, Miss Malone. I would imagine officials would want to use some kind of light code to prevent loose lips at telegraph offices from leaking the details to the press.” Smith types the sequence into his telegraph switch. A series of beeps and longer beeps played back, indicating the signal was received. “Excellent. Now we just have to wait.”

  Smith sat back on the couch and looked up at the moving map. “Another three hours. It should be nightfall when we arrive.” He picked up the paper and held the illustration of the Martian up for April to see. “What do you think?”

  “Life on other planets? Why not? After all, there must be thousands of planets out there.”

  “Millions. Yes, Miss Malone. But do you think this Martian Ambassador is indeed that? It’s not the same question.” He turned the newspaper toward himself. “I’m troubled by a few things.”

  “He does look very manlike,” said April. “I would expect something with tentacles.”

  “Yes, there is that. But there’s something else. Take a look a
gain at the illustration. What stands out to you?”

  April took the paper from him and examined the drawing. The Martian appeared to be wearing a suit not too different from Smith’s own mechanical armor, which looked like a diving suit. “I’d expect the atmosphere to be different, so that explains the glass helmet. I’m not sure why the gas in it is red. I don’t believe the Martian atmosphere is red, so much as the planet. At least not according to what the astronomers have said.”

  “There’s one detail that really bothers me.”

  April tried to see what he was talking about. The Martian appeared like a very tall man. The arms and legs seemed exaggeratedly long. She took a closer look at the legs and noticed something peculiar. “The boots.”

  “The boots?”

  “Wasn’t that what you were talking about?” she asked.

  “No, I thought the backpack looked odd. The pipes weren’t going into the helmet like you’d expect. What is it about the boots?”

  April tapped a finger on the thick soles. “I had an uncle, a short man, who used to wear boots with very thick soles and lifts on the inside. They gave him another three or four inches.”

  Smith examined the boots in the illustration. “Yes. Very good, Miss Malone! These boots would add at least a foot to his height. Maybe more. Our Martian is trying to masquerade as a taller man.”

  “So you’re convinced it’s a hoax?”

  “It has to be. That I’m certain. The reason why is a different matter. It seems our make-believe-Martian friends have gone through a lot of effort for this charade, and I fear this is only the beginning,” said Smith.

  “So you’re convinced he’s not a Martian?”

  “Of course not. He looks nothing like a Martian.”

  April was about to ask Smith what he meant by that statement when his telegraph machine began to emit a series of loud clacks. Smith grabbed a paper tape that was being fed out of it.