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Page 34.
Chapter 17. Victorian World in 1892
 As I became conscious, I panicked briefly—I was underwater, struggling to swim.
Then I realized I didn't need to struggle—I was buoyant and virtually weightless.
Immediately after that, I realized that the adjustments just made were helping me breathe underwater. The Membrane not only makes changes, but often leaves a trace memory in the mind, like a technical writing with charts and diagrams. The Membrane 'explained' that we had been 'adjusted' and sent to a random though suitable (by the Membrane's logic) station in the network: London in 1882.
With my improved body, I felt a new sense of strength and capability as I swam up toward a greenish, wavering blob of light. I saw the dark silhouettes of Sindi and Trini making similar motions on either side of me. They appeared to be in no more trouble than I was. I was actually amused to watch the large, quicksilver bubbles of my own breath floating above me. Together, the bubbles and the women and I shot toward the terminus of this pleasant experience.
I broke surface and immediately felt my eyebrows sizzle into a frozen state. The air was frigid, and the water on my skin iced over in a moment. My hair solidified into a helmet of icy pain. "Oh Gods," I said as we three regarded each other with stunned eyes and wide-open, shocked mouths.
"You there!" said a clear, crisp voice in what I would soon learn was an upper-class British accent. "Are you absolutely insane?"
It was a wonder that my heart hadn't stopped. I struggled to move toward the shore of this backyard paradise, but my muscles were becoming solid and sluggish. Talk about a test of my newly adjusted body! The three of us just managed to drag ourselves from the water. What had looked warm and green from below was an absinthe-colored layer of ice a quarter inch thick, reflecting the wild array of tropical plants in the greenhouses in back of Mr. Darby Tatnall's mansion on the northern outskirts of London.
As the three of us crawled up through the snow toward the building, a tall man in a house coat bore down on us holding an old revolver. He was a wiry young man just starting to show the first signs of gray in the thick black hair above his ears. He wore thick leather slippers lined on the inside with fur, dark corduroy trousers, and a dark red woollen smoking jacket over a collarless white shirt. His breath came in tatters of vapor.
Another man's voice behind him said: "Is everything quite all right, Tatty?"
"You can watch over me from the porch with the squirrel gun, Herbert, if you don't mind." He looked at us uncertainly, as anger and apprehension turned to pity. "Drunken lot, are you? You picked a hell of a night to fall in my pool."
The man named Herbert appeared on the porch among the ivies and bromeliads, the trumpet vines and potted ficus. He was a slight, blond man of about 25 or 26 and he walked with a trace of a limp. When he saw us, he cried out in astonishment: "I say, there's two women with him. Do you suppose they are having some sort of feminist demonstration?"
"More likely ruddy drunk, the lot of them. Come up here and warm up while I think about calling the police."
Herbert said: "They have ice on their backs. Quick, Tatty, get them before a fire or they'll die of cold."
"Oh Gods yes, please," the three of us said as we stumbled up the snowy, grassy lawn from the swimming pond below. Ahead was a brick house glowing with light and warmth and comfort. A glance back revealed the black pond, glittering under starlight, with an enormous planet sitting smack dab over the turrets, domes, and chimneys of the city. I managed one more shocked glance at this planetary apparition, the likes of which I'd never seen or imagined. There seemed to be a face on it, which made me wonder if this was all a dream. I was violently shivering by now, and my teeth rattled in my skull so that my ears started to hurt.
"You're in bad shape, aren't you," said the man called Tatty as he put the gun aside and helped us one by one into his home.
"Thank you, thank you," was all we managed to stammer while shivering.
"Here, by the fire," said Herbert as he took Sindi and Trini by the elbows and guided them to a potbellied stove in the corner. Its burnished steel cylinder glowed almost red, and Herbert added more coals and rattled them about inside with a poker. Meanwhile, Tatty guided me to a large brick fireplace and threw a blanket over me. "You can turn toward the fire as you peel off those soaked things," he said. He turned to the women. "Ladies, modesty compels me to tell you that there are blankets in the chest under the window. Mr. Wells and I will absent ourselves from the room for a few minutes to give you time to change out of your wet clothing and wrap yourselves in warm blankets. It is the best we can do for now. If you'll excuse us, we will bring hot tea and brandy. Have you eaten?"
We got it all sorted out, by and by, and soon enough we were sitting at a square oak table with the two men. The older man, who was about 30, introduced himself as Darby Tatnall. He'd made his fortune in various engineering ventures, including machine parts for the newest steamships of the Royal Navy (the British Navy, he explained, as we looked puzzled). The other introduced himself as a teacher of biology who happened also to fancy himself as being a writer.
Wells said: "You speak heavily accented English, and we can barely understand you."
"I understand you very well," I said. The Membrane floated an understanding of all this through me, but I said nothing of that. It seemed our language and that of Tatty and Wells were distantly related, and when I spoke, my mouth was forced into unfamiliar gyrations to put out speech these two men would recognize.
"Where are you from?" Tatnall asked.
"Mars," I said.
Tatnall and Well sat back with a start. For a moment their eyes bulged. Then they slapped the table and started laughing. They nearly laughed themselves unconscious. They had already had some brandy with their tea, and this lubricated their sense of humor.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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