Chapter XXIV

A week had gone by. The seven of us sat over our dessert in London's finest dining room: Arold Smiff well-scrubbed and ill at ease, Geoff cheerful as ever. Alec busy savoring the coffee. John cynical again. Colonel Bedford complacent and stolid, my Marion all radiant and lovely, and myself, the erstwhile most savage one-man crime wave since Genghis Khan was a pup, fiddling with the silverware and feeling rather mournful, now that all was over.

At first we spoke of the past, as though each of us hated to think of a future apart from his companions. We asked one another questions of which we had heard the answers a dozen times before. Geoff told again how he had wandered down the secret stair that night, feeling his way along the walls, lonely and worried, and how he had remembered as he came to the ground floor that there was an old hidden exit in the back of the fireplace.

"I give you my word I never meant to use it! I only wanted to see if I remembered the trick of it. You twist one of the hounds on the stone coat of arms, and the door opens behind the logs. Well, I did it, and heard the door clink open; I hadn't tried it since I was a kid, and I thought, By golly, what a lark to go through the underground tunnel and see if the other end's still workable! I guess I had some vague notion of us using it for an escape route, if things got too hot for us in the castle. So I went in, and closed the door behind me.

"I bumbled along the tunnel--how I recalled the feel of those damp, rough bricks!--and came after three hundred feet to the other end, where a hidden trap leads to a summerhouse. I lifted it cautiously, still with no idea of leaving the tunnel, and felt the breeze on my face; and I knew then that I had to go on. I'd come this far and suddenly I knew I had to keep travelin' till I got to Birmingham and Arold. So I slipped out and cut straight through the woods till I came to the road. My lack of sight was no handicap, because there's not a chunk of turf within five miles o' the castle I don't know by its first name.

* * * * *

"After I hit the road it was easy. I just groped my way for a few hours till I knew by the sound of the farm dogs that I'd come to Granny Moore's place. After running into a fence and a cart or two, I found the door and banged on it; explained to Granny that I had to get to Birmingham as quick as possible; and she, bless her staunch old soul, detailed her youngest boy (a lad of forty-nine) to take me there, without so much as a single query as to my reasons--and that's all. I found Arold that afternoon at Old Mag's."

"To think I was standing in the hall when you went through the door in the fireplace," I said. "God! I thought it was ghosts I heard."

"I'd have left a note, or come back to tell you, but I was all carried away with the spirit of rollicking adventure and looniness," said Geoff, filling his pipe. "I expect I gave you some bad hours. I'm sorry."

"Forgiven," gruffed the Colonel. "You saved our bacon."

"And the world," said Marion quietly.

"Yes, the world! The jolly old human race, that didn't even know it was in danger, and wouldn't believe it now if we told it! Hell's sweet bells, it's hard for _me_ to believe!" Geoff laughed. "Did we really pit ourselves against ten thousand fantastic beasts, and drive them from our dimension by a colossal bluff? Or did we dream a long horrid dream, we seven strange crusaders?"

"I begin already to doubt my memory," answered Doctor John. "I was never cut out for a cavalier, wooing weird adventures. I'm a solid citizen. I'm going back to my practice on the steamers."

"When?" I asked.

"Next week." Now the present had intruded in our talk, and the future. "What will you do, Colonel?"

"Been thinking of retiring to the country, but I doubt I could stick it after all the excitement we've been through. I expect I'll stay on at the Albany. Lots of things happening about one, you know, keep a chap young."

* * * * *

I laughed to myself at the thought of the staid old-fashioned Albany being a bee-hive of activity, but said nothing. John went on. "You, Alec, what will you do?"

"Huh? Me? Dunno," said Alec blankly. "Haven't cogitated on it."

"Me neither," said Geoff.

"Marion and Will will marry, of course," said the Colonel, as though that accounted for us forever, and no question about it. "And you, sir," he said to Arold, making that worthy leap in his chair, "what do you intend doing? You're a fairly well-to-do man now."

"Ah, yes, thanks to you gents! As generous and kindly a lot o' toffs--that is to say, gentlemen--as you could arsk for. Me? I'm going over the border. Scotland, that's the ticket for Arold Smiff; nice little village, cozy house, new name, and plenty of gin--welp, anyway, I'm going to Scotland. Never meet nobody there who'd know me, and that's 'ow I wants it after the killings we done down at that there cawstle. Some of the blokes I 'ad to enlist ain't what you'd call above thinkin' of blackmail, to put it straight out. Course they don't know you, but they knows Arold Smiff. Me for the heather!"

"What did you think of the fight?" I asked him. "How did you explain it to them?"

"Hexplyne? To them barst--them blokes? I guv 'em fifteen quid apiece and all the loot they could find. What else 'ld they be wanting?" He grinned. "I might have cawst a few 'ints, such as that we was involved in a political move; the boys is hell on political moves. Maybe I mentioned the Sinn Feiners, careless-lyke. They drawed their own conclusions." He squinted into his cup. "I think I shall call meself Jock MacSmiff," he said meditatively. "Ar, that's a good Scotch name. Maybe I'll even give up the gin. Take Scotch whisky instead, I mean. More patriotic, lyke."

"You'll be able to afford it, old chap, should you live to be a hundred," I told him. "It was nearly all your doing, yours and Geoff's, that we won our fight."

The waiter brought a bottle of Piper Heidsieck '43. The Colonel stood up to propose the first toast.

"Gentlemen and Marion, I give you ex-Sergeant Henry Johnson. There is only one thing we can say of him: greater love hath no man, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

* * * * *

We drank standing. The waiter popped up with a second bottle. We resumed our seats, and Alec said, "The next is mine. I drink to the good green earth, and the race of men who live on it. Maybe they don't go about slopping over with gratitude for its beauty, but I think they appreciate it just the same, and I'm damned glad we saved it for 'em!"

Half-laughing, we drank that one, and many more. I drank to my Jaguar, now a deep red color and never to be identified with the sinister black car which flew out of Manchester that night so long ago. Doctor John drank to Jerry Wolfe, who first discovered the abominable race of beast-folk. Geoff toasted our army of rogues.

They all drank to our happiness, Marion's and mine. Then we called for a fifth bottle, and drank a tall glass down in memory of our victory, total and forever final, over the beast-folk of the silver land. I twirled my glass and stared at it, my eyes unfocused slightly, and I mused on _them_.

The usurpers....

Sir Lawrence Hockling, to give him his human name, had been as good as his word. Within a day, all through the land, the aliens had begun to decamp in disgust. As messengers raced behind the veil to tell their brothers the sad news, the exodus spread, first through the great centers of population, London and Birmingham and Sheffield, Cardiff and Liverpool, and thence into the countryside until all England was touched by this incredible mass desertion of a world, the beasts relinquished their stolen bodies and retreated into their own dimension. Well within my time limit of three days, the flight was completed. Some twenty-seven thousand robots were abandoned in the withdrawal.

Yet these puppets, these husks, had not died. They had become brainless, true; incapable of performing the simplest acts of caring for themselves; but they lived on. It was more horrible than their deaths would have been, I thought ... and yet there was a ray of hope. I had talked it over with my friends, and they agreed there was a chance of its coming true.

These new things (one could no longer call them puppets, when the marionette-masters had gone) were like nothing on earth so much as new-born babies, babies in grown or half-grown bodies. What if their brains, unimpressed thus far by any experience, now began to develop, even as a baby's begins? What if they were not idiots, as they seemed to a horrified world to be, but simply newly-born humans who must be taught learning and manners and speech and all the rest, as though they were so many victims of a titanic wave of devastating total amnesia?

* * * * *

If this were true--and it logically might be--then our rescue of the world would have been bought even more cheaply than we had calculated. Twenty-seven thousand amnesia victims to retrain is a damned sight better than that many idiots or, as we had expected at first, corpses!

There would still be sorrow and tragedy in the wake of the thing we had done. Couples who had spent lifetimes together had found themselves split, their mutual memories lost forever, as one turned infantile and looked mindlessly at the other. Men who had been forces for good in England (the usurpers were not intent on corrupting our daily lives, be it remembered, but on taking over our whole plane) had become useless hulks, great dribbling infants in old bodies. Many suicides had followed the plague of total amnesia.

Yet if my ray of hope chanced to be true, it took nine-tenths of the curse of the business off our consciences.

And some of the problems connected with the plague would then appear much smaller, and even rather funny; as for example, the twenty-seven thousand adolescents and adults who had never been house-broken....

Well! I came back to myself, filled up my glass again, and drank Arold's toast to Lord Nelson. How he ever crept into our party, I'm sure I don't know. By then, perhaps, we were all a little bit drunk; so we welcomed Lord Nelson, and drank to him joyously. Then we drank a final round to our long bitter fight with the usurpers, and we adjourned for the night. The next day we separated, each to his own place, and the great adventure was over at last.