“In Which Colonel Shawbridge Faces an Impossibility”
1.
Corporal Heath caught up with Annabelle as she stepped out onto the beach. She caught the look on his face, and whether he shared her anger or was simply in pain from his injuries she couldn’t tell.
“And that thing back there says there’s no God,” he said, shaking his head. “Who does he think made him, then?”
“If Hermes has been here, under the surface of Mercury, for all those thousands of years without seeing beyond it, blind and deaf to the universe, perhaps it’s no wonder that he can’t conceive of a god.”
“Nah, miss,” said Heath with a shake of his head. “I don’t think it’s that. I reckon it’s more than that—I reckon he’s evil, plain and simple”
“Is that what you really think?”
“Think what?” asked Nathanial, catching up with them, his feet slipping on the gritty sand.
“The corporal here thinks…thinks that that thing might be evil. And I’m half inclined to agree with him. Those things that he was saying—about the soul and God.” She glared at him. “And you just stood there and didn’t challenge him, did you? Either of you!” She rounded on Arnaud who had almost caught them up. He skidded to a halt at the ferocity of her words, little puffs of sand jetting up in front of him.
Annabelle looked down at her own grubby blouse and trousers.
“But Annabelle,” protested Nathanial, “that was just…” He gave a shrug. “That was just talk. Hypothesising.”
“That is not how it appeared to me. That thing is convinced that God doesn’t exist, that we have no souls and that when we pass away…well, that we just stop existing. Like someone turned out a light. That’s a little more than hypothesising, isn’t it? How dare he be so dismiss—”
“Annabelle, Annabelle,” said Nathanial gently, placing his hands on her folded forearms. “Don’t let it distress you so. It was just words. And you have to admit, it did have some very interesting ideas.”
“I don’t have to admit anything of the sort, Nathanial Stone,” snapped Annabelle, pulling away from him. “I might expect that sort of poppycock from simple-minded savages or even children, but that thing has had thousands of years to sit and think in his clammy little cave—and that’s what he’s come up with. And you were encouraging him,” she added. “What’s happened to you, Nathanial? You used to be as strong of faith as I am.”
“My faith is as strong as it ever was, Annabelle.” She could see the steely look in his pale grey eyes. “But you have to admit we have seen some queer things since we left Earth, things that we’ve made sense of through science. You have a brilliant mind, Annabelle. Don’t close it down like this. At least think about what Hermes said. We can talk about it later, if you—”
“Talk about it later? So that you can convince me that Hermes is right and that I’m wrong?”
“Of course not.” Nathanial looked aghast, but Annabelle was not to be fobbed off.
“That’s exactly what you’ll try to do. Well, excuse me if I don’t very much like being patronised and spoken down to as if I’m an idiot!” She felt the heat of her own flushed cheeks as she pulled further away from Nathanial and took up a position next to Corporal Heath. “Maybe you two ‘rational scientists’ should talk about it later instead? Or maybe even right now. I’ll see you later, Nathanial.” She turned to the soldier who stood awkwardly with his lamp a few yards away.“Corporal, would you mind escorting me back to the station?”
“Not at all, miss.”
And with that, the two of them set off. And not once did Annabelle look back.
2.
“That did not go well, did it, mon ami?” asked Arnaud in a whisper as they watched the retreating backs of Annabelle and Corporal Heath.
“That’s an understatement.” Nathanial rubbed the back of his neck. “I can’t think what’s got into her.”
“When science and belief collide,” said Arnaud, “there are few survivors.”
“More philosophy and poetry?”
“Why would I not be poetic? Because I am a scientist? Cannot I not be, peut-être, a poetic scientist? Or perhaps a scientific poet?” Arnaud considered for a moment and then pulled an expression of disapproval. “No, not that one—that does not sound so good.”
Nathanial let out a weary little chuckle. “And what, pray tell, would I be then? A scientific religionist or a religious—”
“Scientist,” Arnaud finished his sentence for him. “Yes, that is the one. A religious scientist. Clearly we still have much work to do with you then.”
“With me?”
“Mais oui,” replied Arnaud as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “We must endeavour—yes?—to cure you of your religiousness. Simple!” And with a hearty pat on Nathanial’s shoulder, the Frenchman went striding off along the beach towards the path, thrusting his hands into his pockets as he did so.
3.
The further Annabelle got from Nathanial and Arnaud, the more feelings of foolishness began to overtake those of anger. It wasn’t often that the two of them had such basic disagreements, and even rarer that they led to one or the other of them storming off. She felt quite hot and out of breath by the time they reached Uncle Ernest’s office to tell him about Hermes, but he was nowhere to be found. Of Iris, too, there was no sign.
“It’s late,” she said to Heath. “Maybe he’s gone to bed?”
He clenched his fists and shook his head. “We need to tell him, don’t we, miss? About that thing.”
“Of course we do, but it can probably wait until the morning. I mean, what can he do at this time of night?”
“He could give me a barker and send me back down there is what he could do.”
While Annabelle sympathised and agreed—broadly—with his supposition that Hermes was a worrisome, godless thing, she wasn’t quite sure that his degree of ire matched the situation, or that returning with a gun would improve the situation.
“And then what? You know that thing we saw wasn’t actually real, don’t you? It was a mental projection of some sort—it said so itself.”
“And you believe it?” Heath glowered. “I wouldn’t believe a word that devil said.” He shook his head and wiped his face with grubby hands, leaving smears of dirt across his cheeks. “Sorry miss, getting a bit worked up. So you believe all that gammy stuff, do you?”
“Gammy?”
“Yeah, miss—lies.”
“Well,” she prevaricated, feeling a little like she was being manoeuvred into expressing a point of view that she wasn’t quite sure she held. “Nathanial generally knows what he’s talking about, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve encountered telepathy—mental projection.”
“Maybe,” Heath conceded. “But that doesn’t mean that thing isn’t a devil, does it? I mean, the bare-faced cheek of the thing, insisting that there’s no such thing as souls or God. That’s just blasphemy, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is, of a sort. Look, maybe we should get some sleep, give ourselves a chance to think, to cool off. We can find Uncle Ernest in the morning and fill him in on it all.”
Heath pulled an unsure face—and then suddenly his eyebrows shot up. “The chaplain!” he said. “He’ll still be up—we should talk to him. He’d know, wouldn’t he?”
“Would he?” Annabelle was a little doubtful.
“Course. Stands to reason—he’s a man of the cloth. If anyone can tell us, he can.” Heath turned to go and then realised that Annabelle wasn’t following him. He turned back to her. “You coming, miss? I know it’s late and all, but maybe, you know, it’d help. I saw how upset you were with the professor back there. Talking to Reverend Lyden might help.”
Annabelle realised, suddenly, how quite out of his depth Heath was. He’d already been through the death of Professor Fournier, laid up in hospital for weeks, and now this. Abandoning him now seemed a little heartless, especially in his current distress.
“Okay,” she said. “But just half an hour.”
Heath’s face broke out into a smile of gratitude that almost broke Annabelle’s heart. “You don’t know how much this means to me, miss, really you don’t. Come on—it’s just over there.”
And maybe, Annabelle thought as they set off, this Reverend Lyden might be able to help me, too.
4.
Although he didn’t know it, Shawbridge missed the two of them by mere minutes.
He’d been down to spend some time with his beloved Esmeralda—polishing a few rivets, checking over the aether propeller. Of course, it had been finished and actually flight worthy for a while, but in the absence of anywhere to go, and any leave in which to go there, he still liked to spend time there.
He’d barely entered the building when he stopped, convinced he could hear something outside. Shawbridge turned back to the door and pulled the shutter wide, peering this way and that: outside, barely visible, was a stationery figure. Wondering why the chap was simply standing there, he opened the door and saw that he seemed to have moved and was now standing directly under one of the station’s electric lights, his face daubed with pools of inky shadow, eyes hidden.
“Who’s that?” called Shawbridge, not recognising the man—and that was something that never happened on Mercury.
The figure said nothing and made no movement, and for a moment Shawbridge wondered if it were a dummy, made up for a joke.
“I said who’s that?” he called again, this time more imperiously.
When the figure still refused to respond, Shawbridge started towards it—halting sharply when the figure seemed to flutter, as though painted onto a waving flag. After a few moments, it settled down.
“What the Devil is going on, man? What is all this?”
And then it spoke to him in a tenor that seemed familiar and yet not familiar at all. “I’m sorry,” it said, as clearly as if speaking into Shawbridge’s ear, despite remaining a good ten yards away. Shawbridge spun around, expecting to find someone else behind him. But there was no one there.
When he turned back, the man had gone—and then he was suddenly there again, just a couple of yards away.
“I know you’re not scared,” the man said. “But you are confused, aren’t you, old chap?”
Despite being backlit by the street lamp, there was enough light spilling from the now-unshuttered window for Shawbridge to make out the man’s face.
It was he.
Shawbridge just stared, unable to understanding what was happening. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice now little more than a whisper.
“I don’t quite know,” his doppelgänger said, a little hesitantly. “I think I’m you. Or you are me…” The man tailed off. “No, that can’t be right. I’m you, yes.” Then he raised a hand and rubbed his forehead—and Shawbridge instantly recognised the gesture as one of his own.
“What the Hell is going on, man? How can you be me?” blustered Shawbridge. “Who’s put you up to this? It’s not that niece of mine, is it, or her friend, Stone?”
“No, they have nothing to do with this. I don’t…I don’t really understand what’s happened. I keep trying to remember, but everything’s so damn foggy. That can’t be right, can it?” Shawbridge’s double tipped his head back slightly and the haze covered his features seemed to shift and vanish. “Help me,” he said, his face now a picture of confusion. “Please, help me.”
“Help you? What are you on about man? Help you what? How?”
“Help me remember what happened.”
Shawbridge spread his hands wide in a shrug. “How can I help? I’m as much in the dark as you.” He paused as he realised what the man must be. “You’re a ghost, aren’t you? Like the others.”
“A ghost?” the man seemed alarmed at the suggestion—which, now that Shawbridge thought about it, didn’t seem unreasonable at all. As good as telling someone they were dead. “What others?”
“The other ghosts, man. Here. Everyone’s seeing them now.” He rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands, almost hoping that, when he looked again, the ghost would be gone, and he could turn around and go back inside and pretend that none of this had happened. “That’s what everyone’s saying. Ghosts everywhere. Like you.”
“Am I dead?” The man’s voice was full of horror. “Am I your ghost? Do I look like you?”
Shawbridge could only stare—he had few enough explanations for all of this, and the poor fellow before him seemed to have even fewer.
“And how can I be your ghost when you’re still alive?” the man asked. “You are alive, aren’t you? You’re not like me, whatever I am.”
“I don’t think so, no. I’m sorry but I don’t know—I don’t have any answers.” And then a thought struck Shawbridge. “But I know a fellow who might….”
5.
Nathanial and Arnaud were back in Professor Fournier’s lab—Arnaud nursing the remains of the bottle of cognac, Nathanial pacing the length of the cluttered room.
“This is incredible!” he exclaimed for about the fifth time.
“You have said so, Nathanial. Once or twice.”
“There is so much that we never discussed properly. What is this ‘copy’ of Professor Fournier that Hermes mentioned? How does this—” he brandished one of the crystal plates “—work, exactly?” He held it up to the light but it remained stubbornly, deep-reddishly silent. “Professor Fournier must have known about some of this, surely.”
Arnaud gave a heavy shrug and leaned back in his chair. “I think, perhaps, that you should be more concerned about Annabelle.”
Nathanial stopped in his tracks. “Annabelle? What about Annabelle?”
“You saw how she was on the beach, mon ami. She was most distressed.”
“Oh, she will be fine. Give her a good night’s sleep and she’ll be back to her jolly self, trust me.” Nathanial was only half listening whilst fitting the plate back into the holder on the analysis machine.
“I am not so sure. When ones faith is challenged, it can strike very deeply, you know.” Arnaud yawned again. “What are you doing now?”
“You remember the delay we noticed before? Between the light going into this and coming out again?”
“What of it?”
“For a start, it was orders of magnitude higher than it should be. Do you know of any other material that transmits light like it did, but with such a delay?”
Nathanial’s talk had piqued Arnaud’s interest, and he put down his bottle and glass and came over to Nathanial. “I have never seen such a material, no. But I do not understand the significance.”
Nathanial’s head snapped up. “What if this glass, this material, isn’t simply a passive transmitter of light? What if it’s doing something with it! Something that causes the delay. I don’t know—working with it, somehow.”
Arnaud nodded thoughtfully. “That would explain the delay, yes. And it might explain how it functions as part of Hermes’ physical form. The plates might be the équivalente of the brain cells.”
“So what we have here is possibly a piece of Hermes’ brain. Just think how vast the rest of it must be, spread out throughout the planet.” Nathanial shook his head in frustration. “There’s so much we never asked, isn’t there? Maybe we should go back and—”
“Not tonight,” said Arnaud, giving a huge stretch. “We are both tired.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Nathanial, and then nodded in the direction of the cognac bottle. “Perhaps if you’d managed to put away a little bit less of that, you might not be so sleepy.”
Arnaud grinned and reached up and squeezed Nathanial’s shoulder affectionately. “You should learn to let go a little more, Nathanial. You British are always so….”
“Sober?” ventured Nathanial archly.
“That’s one way of saying it, yes. Right, mon ami, I am off to the land of nods—yes?”
Nathanial smiled and nodded as Arnaud headed for the door—but not before collecting his bottle and glass.
“The land of nods. Yes. Good night, Arnaud.”
For a few seconds after the Frenchman had left, Nathanial stared at the door, wondering if, perhaps, there might not be another bottle of cognac concealed somewhere in the lab. Drunkenness was not a state he felt particularly comfortable with—or at least the anticipation of drunkenness. Once he had arrived at that particular state, he usually found it very pleasant, even if he did suffer dreadfully from hangovers. But no, there was work to be done.
He hunted round for a few more samples of the crystal plates—and found that Professor Fournier really had accumulated quite a collection of them: all sizes, from tiny ones the size of a fingernail right up to ones that you could eat your dinner off. And they varied in thickness from a quarter of an inch right up to a stunning behemoth, two inches thick, and a full twenty inches across. It weighed an absolute ton, and after struggling to heave it up onto the workbench, Nathanial began to wonder how Professor Fournier had managed….
Of course—she had had Corporal Heath.
“What an idiot!” Nathanial exclaimed out loud. “The person that was closest to her and her work—and I’ve been all but ignoring him!”
Perhaps Heath knew something about the ghosts and the plates and her discoveries.
Nathanial sighed when he realised that it must have been getting on for midnight and that Heath would probably be in bed. Tomorrow, then.
There was a knock at the door, and before Nathanial could say anything, Colonel Shawbridge let himself in, looking pale and more than a little unsettled. “Ah, Stone. Still up, I see? Good.” Shawbridge glanced back, through the open door. He seemed edgy and not the confident man that Nathanial had met upon their arrival: there must be something terribly wrong. “Professor Stone, I’d like you to meet someone. But before you do… I know that you are a scientist. And that’s the main reason for coming here: if someone can work out what the Devil’s going on, I’d put my money on you. Don’t be alarmed at this chap, now. I’ll warn you, it can be a bit unnerving, what you’re about to see. But it’s—he’s—nothing to be frightened of, I can assure you.”
Shawbridge looked over his shoulder again and nodded, and Nathanial could just make out the figure of a man.
“Dear Lord!” he exclaimed loudly as, abruptly, the figure outside simply vanished—and reappeared just inside the room. Nathanial’s shock at the man’s materialisation paled in comparison to his shock at seeing a perfect—if somewhat hazy—copy of Colonel Shawbridge himself, right down to the uniform.
“Yes,” anticipated Shawbridge. “It’s me—or rather, it’s—if you’ll pardon the terminology—it’s my ghost. Or a ghost of me.” He waved his hand in the air. “I don’t understand it at all, and neither does he, which is why I thought you might be able to shed some light on this whole damned queer affair.”
Shawbridge closed the door as Nathanial stared at the ghost. After his encounter with Hermes earlier, nothing should have surprised him; but there was something more real and more disturbing about seeing a man and his own ghost in the same room.
“Can he hear me?” Nathanial asked the colonel. “And see me? Can he talk?”
“Yes,” replied the ghost, making Nathanial jump. Although slightly detached, the voice was sharp and clear inside his head—like Hermes’ had been.
“Well!” Nathanial exclaimed. “I thought I’d seen everything. So…you’re a ghost, are you? An actual, real ghost. Sorry—but aren’t ghosts meant to be the spirits of the dead? I’m fairly sure that the colonel here is very much alive.”
“That’s what I always thought, Stone,” said the voice in his head. “But what am I, if not a ghost?”
Although visually they were worlds apart, the manners of speaking of Hermes and Shawbridge’s ghost—straight into his mind—were identical. Surely that could not be coincidence.
“What do you know of Hermes?” Nathanial asked, eyes narrowed.
“Hermes? The god chap—he was the Greek version of the Romans’ Mercury, wasn’t he?”
“No, another one—a person, a thing, I don’t really know what to call it. But living here on Mercury, right beneath our feet.”
The ghost frowned and, in an all-too familiar gesture, rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead. “No, I don’t…I don’t think I have.”
The vocal inflections and mannerisms of the real colonel were being more and more accurately recreated, as if the ghost were becoming surer of itself.
“That’s interesting,” Nathanial mused to the real Shawbridge.
“Is it? Why? And what’s this Hermes chap you’re on about?”
“Not so much a ‘chap’, Colonel—more of a, I don’t know, a living thing. It doesn’t seem to have a particular sex, as it were.”
“What? Sounds damn rum to me. Why was I not told about this thing, then? I am still in charge of this station, if I recall correctly.”
“My deepest apologies, Colonel,” said Nathanial. He’d assumed that Heath would have raced off to tell him, but clearly he hadn’t. “We only discovered it this evening.”
Nathanial turned back to the ghost who still wore a thoughtful, almost puzzled, look on his face.
“Very odd,” Shawbridge’s doppelgänger said. “I feel like I ought to know this fella, this Hermes, and yet I don’t. And yet…I do.” He shook his head. “Anyway, if he were that important I would have remembered him, wouldn’t I?”
“Maybe,” Nathanial said. “But let’s talk about you—you’re much more interesting.”
“Am I?” The ghost colonel looked dubious at the suggestion.
“Oh my, yes! For one thing, you’re here. Right here. And for another, if we can work out quite what you are—no offence meant—then maybe we’ll be a step forward in understanding Hermes. Do you don’t have any memories from ‘before’?”
“Lots of them. I was about to say ‘all of them’, because it would be ridiculous for a man to not have all his memories, wouldn’t it? How would he know otherwise. But that’s not what it’s like… It’s like they’re…” He broke off and waved his hands about vaguely. “Like they’re still being sketched in. Yes, that’s it, damn it!” He squeezed his fist up into a ball. “It’s like they’re being sketched in and I’m not allowed to look until they’re finished. Does that make any sense, Professor Stone?”
“As much sense as anything we’ve seen or heard today, to be honest. So…if you are, indeed, a ghost of the real colonel, how can you exist when the real colonel is still very much alive?” Nathanial drummed his fingers on his bottom lip as he looked from one to the other. Even as they’d been talking, the ghost colonel had solidified. It was now almost impossible to tell one from the other. “Perhaps, by some inexplicable process, you’ve become detached in time. A sort of reverse echo if you like.”
The ghost looked at its living counterpart. “You mean that the colonel there will die sometime soon and that I’m what will become of him, only from the future? I can’t begin to imagine how that works, Stone. Do you really think that such a thing is possible, then…?”
“There’s another explanation, though,” Nathanial said, avoiding a direct answer to the question. “We never had the time to investigate it further, but Hermes talked about having made a ‘copy’ of Professor Fournier…”
“A what?” exclaimed the real colonel. “A copy? Ghosts I can get to grips with, but…a copy?”
“I know, I know—sounds like utter madness, doesn’t it? But nevertheless, Hermes talked about the professor in the present tense, saying that she talks to him. And then we had some bizarre discussion about the soul and the existence of God and we got somewhat side-tracked. But I’m wondering whether the colonel here isn’t something similar.”
“I’m a copy? But if that’s the case, why am I like this? Why am I different to,” the ghost gestured at the real colonel, “to him?”
Nathanial could only shrug. “Hermes said that Professor Fournier died in that rockfall, but also that she didn’t. We’ve all seen her body. But she appeared to Annabelle herself this morning.”
“Did she?” exclaimed the colonel. “And no one thought fit to tell me about this, either?”
Nathanial wasn’t about to be side-tracked. “Hermes said that it made a copy of her mind, her intelligence. Don’t ask me how, but let’s imagine that it was speaking the truth. Perhaps Hermes did the same to you, copying the colonel’s memories and personality. And you are the result.”
The real colonel shrugged. “The more you say, Stone, the more insane you sound.”
“Sorry, Colonel—but you think the idea of ghosts appearing before their bodies have died is less insane? It just strikes me as a little strange that your doppelganger, there, has no knowledge of Hermes. If it’s been speaking to the copy of the professor, why has it not been doing the same to you?”
There was a sudden, sharp knock at the door. Nathanial looked from one colonel to the other. There was a moment of awkwardness before the ghost colonel suddenly caught on.
“Oh, you think I should go?”
“Probably wise,” said the Shawbridge with a curt nod. “Whoever it is, seeing two of us in here might be a bit much—for now at least.”
The ghost nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll, um, see you chaps later then?”
“I do hope so, Colonel,” said Nathanial.
And then, without a sound, the ghost simply winked out of existence. There was another, firmer, knock.
“Come in,” said Nathanial, and the door was opened by Iris McConnon, looking very pale and shaken.
“Colonel,” she said. “Professor Stone. Sorry for the interruption, but something very strange is happening and I thought you ought to know.”
“What is it, Iris?”
“These ghosts, sir…”
“What about them?”
“You need to come and see. They’re everywhere.” Her eyes were wide and her face pale. “It’s like we’re being invaded.”