Free The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) by Mark Hodder Page A

and Spencer entered.
    Wending their way past the machinery, they arrived at the central work area, where they found Algernon Swinburne waiting with Charlie Babbage.
    “Hey ho, fellow rabble-rousers!” the diminutive poet cried out. “Welcome to the dark heart of the insurgency. My hat, it’s like the jolly old Gunpowder Plot. What! What! What!”
    Babbage said, “We’ve been waiting. Why are you late?”
    “I don’t know,” Burton replied truthfully.
    “We was at the Penfold Private Sanatorium,” Spencer put in. “Sister Raghavendra says they can’t save Monty Penniforth’s arm an’ will ’ave to remove it an’ grow ’im a new ’un.”
    Babbage waved a hand dismissively. “Immaterial. Immaterial.”
    “Not to Monty,” Swinburne observed. “That’s his drinking arm.” He quivered and spasmed in his usual over-excitable manner.
    Isambard Kingdom Brunel trundled into view. One of his wheels squeaked annoyingly. His brain was plainly visible, floating in a dome-shaped glass container, and his many thin metal tentacles were in constant motion, writhing and curling restlessly.
    “Hello, Lieutenant Burton,” he said. His voice sounded like bubbling liquid. “Mr. Spencer.”
    Burton nodded a greeting then looked at the ruined attire spread out on one of the workbenches.
    “Edward Oxford’s time suit,” he observed.
    A recurrent dream. Or nightmare.
    “Yes,” Brunel replied. “Charlie will explain. He feels he might have a solution to our problem.”
    Babbage hissed impatiently. “Feels? Feels? Don’t impose the imprecision of emotions upon me, Brunel. My theories, premises, hypotheses—call them what you will—originate in logical thought. There is no room for doubt in science. Either something is, or it isn’t, or it’s unknown. If I say I have a solution, it’s because I do. My feelings don’t enter into it.”
    “The terminology I employ has no influence upon the facts,” Brunel countered.
    Babbage rasped, “Just the attitude that has weakened the Master Guild of Engineers to the point of extinction. Accuracy! Accuracy! I’ll have exactitude, if you please!”
    “Must I stand here listening to you two squabbling?” Burton asked. “What is your proposition, Charlie?”
    “That we give up the fight.”
    Before Burton could respond, Swinburne screeched, “That’s it? That’s your idea? Gladstone’s dictatorship continues unabated, he’s taken Isabella Mayson as his unwilling mistress, Prince Albert is incarcerated in the Tower of London and due to be executed next week, the Libertines are employing their mediumistic powers to incite a war with Prussia, most of our allies are dead, and your great plan is to give up? By my Aunt Carlotta’s cruelly constraining corsets! Why would you propose such a thing? It’s perfectly monstrous!”
    “I suggest it,” Babbage said, “so that we might start the rebellion from scratch.”
    Burton looked from Babbage to Swinburne to Brunel and back at Babbage. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    The scientist placed his right hand on the time suit’s headpiece. “This,” he said, “contains what amounts to a synthetic intelligence, though one virtually incapacitated by the ravings of a madman. Nevertheless, by putting carefully considered questions to it, I have managed to ascertain that the suit transcends the natural flow of time by employing an extraordinarily sophisticated mathematical equation. What fragments of it I’ve had access to leave me convinced that, were I to extract it in full, I’d be able to construct a machine to emulate the function of the garment.”
    Herbert Spencer said, “Yer mean t’ say, you could build another of the bloomin’ things?”
    “If that is what I meant to say, I’d have said it,” Babbage responded. “No. The techniques available in the year 2202 are beyond even my understanding. Without them, we cannot create microscopic systems. I might, however, be capable of constructing a