Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

The Puzzle of the Perigrinating Coach

Written by George Phillies

Illustrated by Richmont Gan

. . . the late Sir John Wickers-Oates, F.R.S., D.D.S.

Shades of dying twilight hung gracefully over the London skyline, limning its towers and steeples in a delicate indigo. Helmesham and I had just finished a generous repast, and were preparing to turn to the Port. Helmesham had confessed that in addition to his familiar forensic investigations, he had at last applied his mind to the financial world. "It's not so complex," he confided. "I can foresee a time when I will need to adopt a more leisurely mode of life. So, for the past few years, a fee here, a fee there—it all accumulates." How much had accumulated would soon reveal itself in the Puzzle of the Bilious Banker.

"And what," I asked, "will a man of your vigor do with all this prospective leisure?" I knew that it couldn't be aeroplane racing again. That had been last year. The aeroplane had perhaps been a useful aid in the Puzzle of the Precognitive Pachyderm, but I continue to believe that man's lack of wings is indicative of the Creator's opinion of human flight.

"Oh, opera, music, perhaps the mysteries of the natural and the supernatural," Helmesham answered. "Notwithstanding our visit to the fog-shrouded Plateau of Leng, most of the latter are frauds, exploited by Fleet Street for its sordid purposes. Why, not two days ago the Druids of England held a moot in Surrey, and here are the papers claiming the Druids summoned an aerial being. 'A great torpedo-shaped cloud with flaming eyes and buzzing wings.' What rubbish!"

"The criminals of the world will see good news in your retirement—though I doubt that it will happen soon," I said. Helmesham retained the vigor, appearance, and (most important, as a man of my profession would know) the firm strong teeth of a man of twenty-five. Why he pondered retirement, when he had decades of healthy life ahead, was a continual puzzle to me.

"Perhaps the mysteries of the atomic spectrum," Helmesham mused, "Certainly Frauenhoffer's little instrument has aided me often enough in my investigations. I discussed this with Einstein last year in Berlin. . . ." My memory turned briefly to our Autumn tour of Europe, viewing the Eiffel tower from above with Santos-Dumont, an excursion with Count Zeppelin and his dirigible—now there was a mode of transport truly English in its majesty, even if a Hun had invented it—and several days at the Prussian Academy of Science, talking with a man who disbelieved the most self-evident properties of every common timepiece. I did not begrudge Helmesham his visit, as the trip gave me the opportunity to lecture on the most logical of the medical sciences—nay, the only one reduced to a scientific form—with the most methodic of all men, the Prussians. I made certain, of course, that they understood that it was they who were to learn from English dentistry, not the reverse. My Roentgen-Ray plates of impacted molars are stunning, especially when coupled with my systematic treatment of rules for the avoidance of Roentgen-ray burns. It seemed unnecessary to dwell upon my involvement in the Exhumation of the Exradiant Examiner, or what that case revealed of the ills attendant to an excess of Roentgen Rays.

There came a tap at the door. Now, I had previously given firm orders to the staff that I was not to be interrupted at Dinner save for fire, flood, or a division of Napoleon IV's cavalry in the garden. I expected no disturbance. But a disturbance there was! I would not, of course, have objected if Napoleon IV himself had appeared again. He is a most charming man, and after their failure to prepare for the Second Invasion the French Republicans can have no complaint that he sent them all packing.

Helmesham glanced out the window. "An important guest from the government. From the coat, hat, and bearing, his driver is an officer of the Grenadier Guards." Helmesham's deductions were, as usual, entirely correct. We soon received one of the more important visitors I have ever had the honor of receiving in my town-house.

"Helmesham! Thank God you're here!" The speaker was a patient of mine, a man of utter imperturbability who disdained the use of anaesthetics. "A terrible disaster has befallen the World, England, and His Majesty's loyal ministers," he gasped. Of his fears, I was prepared to believe that the last might be true. "It involves Woking. Have you perhaps heard of that town?"

"I believe I have," Helmesham answered sweetly. It was, after all, possible that in some Tibetan lamasery someone has not heard of Woking, the first town to be destroyed by the Martians in their 1896 invasion. My guest was so distraught that he could scarcely put one word after the other. Neglecting the well-known fact that our visitor was a rigid teetotaler, I prepared from the sideboard an appropriate medication, North English in origin, that soon had its desired effect on him. Recalling that our visitor did not share my hope that our Island's ancient divisions will soon lie forgotten, I of course referred to the medication as Scotch Whiskey, not as English Grain Brandy.

"It involves diplomatic negotiations of the most delicate sort, which must not be mentioned beyond the confines of this room," he finally explained.

I rose to leave. I am, of course, a loyal Englishman, with no desire to infringe on any secrets of state. "Sir John," my guest entreated, "Please stay. We have need of your insight. Besides, you'll learn it all anyway as soon as you put one of us under gas." I did, after all, minister to the maxillary and mandibular needs of half the cabinet, most of whom were unrestrainedly loquacious once under the influence of nitrous oxide.

Our guest composed himself. "As you realize the state of Europe has gone from bad to worse. While our glorious Navy will forever protect these shores from continental invasion, and our Army and Flying Corps stand ready against our solar foes, we cannot remain aloof whenever any one power seeks to dominate all of Europe. It has for some time been apparent to his Majesty's government that the Prussians harbor precisely these ambitions." Helmesham nodded gravely.

I had swallowed several decades of confirmed opinion and switched parties at the last election, because the government could not see that France, land of the Emperors Napoleon, was and would always remain the greatest threat to English liberties.

"For the past months, the government has negotiated with the French a treaty for the maintenance of Belgian neutrality. The treaty implies no other alliance, but even the Opposition agreed that we must be prepared to take steps for the protection of the Belgians. A courier was sent to Paris, carrying the text of the treaty, to secure the final approval of the French cabinet." Helmesham nodded again. It was certainly clear why this matter was so delicate. Some members of the Opposition might have agreed to this foolishness, but others equally certainly had been left in the dark. Were the press to learn, the ensuing scandal would assuredly bring down the government, forcing fresh general elections. "Then came the disaster. On the way to the Channel, the courier and the treaty both disappeared. It's incomprehensible."

"Could he have become lost?" I asked hopefully. The political mind has an almost infinite ability to overlook the obvious. Continentals are notoriously unable to read street signs in civilized languages, or to hear simple spoken directions, no matter how much one raises one's voice.

"It's not quite that simple, Sir John," my guest answered. "The messenger, the message, and General Oglethorpe all traveled by Oglethorpe's private train. You may have seen photographs of it: a single vehicle, carrying its own engine, separate wheels for travel on continental-gauge tracks, even a lifting hook so that a crane could set it on board a fast ship and unload it at Calais without loss of time."

"Oh, yes," said Helmesham, "That was a demonstration vehicle for beryllium, or would have been, if the metal hadn't been so expensive."

"In any event, the coach passed on a single track from West to East. We had men in every station to confirm its safe passage. Just beyond Woking, the car simply disappeared," our guest said. "The car was seen to pass Woking at 3:40, but did not appear at any later hour in Overshaw. My men searched diligently but found absolutely no trace. We can not afford delay. The French cabinet might fall on any day. If word of this becomes public, the consequences will be intolerable. In this hour of crisis, England again turns to you, Helmesham. Naturally, expenses, assistance, your usual fees . . . whatever you need." Helmesham signaled his agreement.

"Sir John," Helmesham remarked to me, "you will perhaps want an overnight kit, for the game is afoot, or perhaps on rail."

Morning found us in a private car on a siding near Woking. I had elected to conserve my energies with a carefully planned nap, but Helmesham remained awake for half the night consulting maps.

A half-dozen witnesses had seen the coach pass through Woking. The constable, a man of thirty years standing, was one of them. The Officer standing sentry in Overshaw had waited until sunrise for the coach to pass; only then had he raised the alarm. Helmesham suggested bribery. Perhaps the coach had passed through Overshaw, and been waylaid elsewhere. That was out of the question, our client responded. You would have had to bribe at least three men. Besides, the man in Overshaw was an Officer! In the Guards! Helmesham did not pursue this line further with our client, though I imagine he planned discrete investigations elsewhere.

After a light breakfast—grilled steaks with chutney, eggs, curried chicken, a proper rasher of bacon, pastry, and coffee—we set out to inspect the railway. The suspect section was not more than eight miles in length, which we traversed by hand-car. Every cutting, every siding, had to be carefully checked for traces of the train. There were no abandoned coal pits, no mines into which the train might have vanished. Nor was there a rail repair yard.

At perhaps the fifth mile, we came to a section in which the English countryside could be seen in its utmost beauty. The ground was flat, but a gentle rise of land hid from sight the farmhouses which dotted the landscape in all directions. The green of the grass was, I admit, a little lacking, for the August heat and recent drought had parched the grass to yellow. Not a bit of green remained. Helmesham's sharp eye noted an object near the track.

"Well, here's something," he announced, picking a cap from the gravel. The headpiece was strangely cut, though familiar. "French?" I asked.

"Precisely, Sir John, precisely," Helmesham answered. The golden bees woven into its crest supplied a mute affirmation. "There has been a French Officer here. From the lack of oil on the fabric, within the past day or so. I believe a little reconnaissance is in order."

I joined the search, though it was not clear to me that the cap necessarily meant anything. The sides of most railways are littered with articles of abandoned clothing. Despite my doubts, it was I who found the next clue, and recognized its significance. As I quartered the deep grass near the rails, my eye was struck by a flash of reflected sunlight. I found a shattered half-bottle whose label I instantly recognized, though not without some slight repugnance.

Helmesham was at first unimpressed with my find. It is indeed seldom, despite his years of coaching, that I ever make a serious contribution to Helmesham's investigations, but today I had done so. "Look at the label," I said. "You don't see? Consider. Champagne is really an artificial concoction. A key step in its preparation is the final addition of sugar, to the level of 75 or 150 grammes to the liter, without which it would be totally unfit to drink. This bottle, however, contained a Brut champagne, from"—I rattled off an estate name, now mercifully forgotten—"a Champagne with less than 20 grammes sugar. Only a Frenchman would drink such a vile mixture. And some of them do, as I sampled one on our tour last year, manfully managing to swallow the thing without gagging. From its odor, this liquid is still Champagne, if largely flat, so the bottle broke recently, likely within a day. And it must have been brought by the Frenchman, as no decent Englishman would go near the horrid stuff." Helmesham, of course, had grasped all the further details as soon as I spoke the word "Brut."

I do not usually complain about trivial discomforts of the body, but as shall be seen in this case they played a central role in Helmesham's deconvolution of the puzzle. Having noted from the shattered glass the direction of fall of the bottle, I went down the embankment, looking for some further trace of the crime. An unexpected slip left me in ankle-deep water. I had located a small spring, not visible from above. Helmesham assisted me to dry land, then gravely measured the extent of the water-efflux, to what purpose I did not then understand.

Notwithstanding the assurances of our client, we continued our search beyond Overshaw to Little-Overshaw-on-the-Lea, the Lea in question being a creek sunk far below its usual depth by the drought. On its bank stood a tavern. Fortified by a proper lunch: crushed oysters, poached salmon, lamb's feet in aspic, fresh-baked bread, and a medley of fruits, we returned to Overshaw. Helmesham methodically interrogated those who had been seen in the station house, learning nothing. We then followed the rails back to Woking, a pleasant town entirely rebuilt since its utter destruction seventeen years earlier.

Helmesham's investigations uncovered one further witness. Woking's resident amateur astronomer had been photographing the comet. At precisely 3:41:03, a single-car train had appeared over the ridge opposite his observatory. Its lamps imperiled his spectroscopic analyses, so he closed his shutters and made a note of the precise time. After three minutes, the train had passed, permitting him to resume his development of the comet's spectrum. Helmesham manfully resisted his usual desire to talk at length with users of spectrographic apparatus.

As is so often the case, I was totally baffled as to how the clues could be rearranged to solve the puzzle they posed. Helmesham spent some little time reading the papers, then went for a walk to compose his thoughts. Our client sent a hundred men to search the area where we had found the bottle. They returned with a large collection of junk, which Helmesham honored with his usual polite curiosity.

Tea was an early and stiff event. Our client was in a considerable state of alarm. The state of the French cabinet was sinking by the hour. Thus far the popular press had no inkling of the matter, but such a disaster could only be a matter of time. Oglethorpe's car, moving at precisely thirty miles an hour through the English night, had somehow been swept from the face of the earth.

Helmesham would rarely speak about a case until he had found the solution. Having no professional reputation in criminology to hazard, I was more willing to chat with the client about different possibilities, though I did little beyond repeating Helmesham's remarks of earlier in the day, closing with 'after all, it could not have sprouted wings and flown away.'"

I caught a twinkle in Helmesham's eyes. "Surely not?" I asked.

"Oh, no, the largest aeroplane in the world could never lift the six tons of Oglethorpe's vehicle. Even one of Sikorsky's Russian brutes could never handle the weight," Helmesham assured me.

The local papers revealed no clues, at least to my eyes. Helmesham had busied himself with a set of maps and a slide rule. Seeing naught else to do, I scanned the accounts of the Druids and their flying monster. To judge from the creases in the paper, these were also the reports which Helmesham had been reading. My favorite note, from a town a little way east of here, came from the local who averred that the beast must have been a devil because it "approached toward the church tower, but fled straightaway when the clock struck half-past-three." With nonsense like this spoken and believed by the masses, it is no wonder that sensible men regret the extension of suffrage to men of limited means. Now, if enough damage has not already been done, there are those who would further extend suffrage to the distaff half of the population. This is an utter absurdity, as no woman—I suppose I must except Mrs. Helmesham, but that is a different tale—could possibly have the firmness and good sense needed to play even the least role in governing our great Empire.

Helmesham looked up, visibly excited. "Quick, Sir John. There's no time to waste. The Royal Flying Corps has an aerodrome not ten minutes from here." Our client was told in no uncertain terms that not one but two aeroplanes were to be readied at once, and that other aerodromes—Helmesham rattled off a list of names—were to stand by, so that we might refuel if need be. Then we were off.

The aerodrome at West Overshaw was virtually unpopulated. It was a Sunday, after all, so that we were fortunate to have even a single pilot and his mechanic in attendance. The pilot, a Captain O'Rourke, was fully cooperative. His mechanic, a Finnish emigré who had come to England to avoid Russian conscription, was something of an enigma. Still, our aircraft were waiting. Without delay, we flew off into a cloudless afternoon sky.

I still had no knowledge of our destination. My pilot, a skilled aviator who perished in the next war, kept scanning the ground, searching for an unnamed objective. We landed some hours later near the coast of the North Sea. From a map, I learned that we had followed a careful compass course, though how it had been set evaded me. Helmesham and the