“If I may, Professor,” Kong interjected, “let me agree with Miss Underhill’s suggestion that we employ a modicum of caution in our dealings with these creatures.”
“Why, man? Tell me why we should give these savages anything more than the hiding they deserve.”
Kong visibly held his tongue for a moment, then composed himself before continuing.
“Because, Professor, they can hardly be counted as savages...”
MacGuffin snorted like a surfacing walrus.
“Balderdash, man, how else would you describe the beggars?”
“I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess without further data, sir, but one thing is certainly clear—they’re advanced enough to have developed their own equivalent of the Omniscope.”
“Hogwash!”
“That can be the only explanation for our present predicament. You will remember that the creature who took Mister Monk was using a device when we first caught sight of him, a device he turned in our direction...”
I did indeed recall the camera-like apparatus that the stilt-man had been operating, as did the professor, if his wordless grumble was anything to go by.
“I surmise that it has to be a mechanism very like our own. That can be the only explanation for the tear in the fabric of space. We observed him as he turned his own Omniscope in our direction and the beams of the two devices interfered with each other, creating the disruption that has bridged the gap between our two worlds...”
“Oh,” said the professor succinctly before qualifying this pearl of wisdom with a superfluous, “Ah.”
The debate was obviously at an end.
Kong sent the launch hurtling into a broad channel lined with the corkscrew trees. It seemed to lead straight to the cyclopean tower.
“Let us all be on our guard,” he warned as we cocked our weapons.
Then some of the tree trunks moved in the water, and I realised that we were surrounded by hooting stilt-men who had hidden their upper bodies in the thick foliage.
“Hell’s teeth!” the professor bellowed, but their nets were upon us as he cried out. Our launch remained spinning in the water as we were hauled upwards in the sticky mesh. Even though we were hoisted by our own petard, we were well and truly sunk.
IV. Capitulation And Recapitulation
I have no memory of swooning, but I will never forget recovering consciousness at the top of that improbable tower. My self-disgust at passing out like the simpering heroine of dime-novel cliché was allayed by the realisation that both Kong and the professor were also recovering from fainting spells. I concluded fuzzily that we had all been drugged. Our guns were gone, but someone had had sufficient decency to leave me with my handbag. Then I managed to focus on my surroundings and was greeted by the nauseating sight of a nearly naked Monty Monk wearing what looked like a giant turban and holding hands with similarly attired stilt-men.
“Quisling quack-quack blancmange,” Monty announced.
“Toad snipe, toad snipe!” one of the Moon-men snapped, and Monty adjusted his strange headgear.
“Ah, hello? Oh yes, much better! Evening all!”
“What in the blue blazes is going on, dear boy?” the professor demanded. “What have these lanky fiends done to you?”
Monty laughed with a peculiarly girlish giggle. “I’m in the club! I’ve become a member of the lunar élite.” We looked at him as if he had lost the last of the few wits that God had given him. “The tall chaps are just servants around here, you see—it’s the floaty fellows on our heads who are la crème de la crème around here.” The strange hats did indeed look like swollen brains, and I realised with a shock that the clouds we had seen scudding towards the tower had actually been these curious lumps of grey matter.
“Long, long ago,” Monty went on, “before their ancestors came down from the stars and colonised the interior of the Moon, they were all the same. Then evolution took over. The menials who did the work stayed on the ground, growing ever longer legs to get around the swamps, while the nobility simply evolved into a more gaseous form of lighter-than-air being that could float free and enjoy the high life. Nowadays, the élite either sun themselves around the lodestone that holds the air in and lights up the place, or pop down, sit on people’s heads and tell their minions what do. It’s absolutely super! They want me to be part of it—and you too –”
“Now, Monty,” I said, “no one ever pretended that you were the sharpest blade in the shaving kit, but presumably, since you haven’t yet learned to fly, this would mean that they want you to be one of their slaves too.”
“Would it?” Monty asked before adjusting the brain-beast squatting on his head, as if he was tuning the cat’s whisker of a wireless set. “Oh, right, yes—it would.”
“Beatle wig, sandwich board, fondue,” one of the stilt-men ordered sternly while pointing at the three of us with a sucker-tipped finger. We were hauled to our feet and dragged towards a ledge like a gangplank at the edge of the tower. Three floating brains drifted towards us with menacing intent, their eyestalks and vestigial limbs wriggling greedily.
“Montgomery Montgolfier Monk, you are a disgrace to your country and the Crown!” Professor MacGuffin said with disgust. “You may be quite content to wander about naked as the day you were born wearing a power-crazed tea-cosy on your head, but I, sir, am certainly not of that kidney!” The professor struggled, but even under the lesser lunar gravity, he could not shake off his captors. “I am prepared to fight the mesmeric might of these malevolent mentalists with my own will, but spare the lesser fortitude of the woman and my servant –”
Kong turned his placid and inscrutable face to me, and whispered a few words of comfort: “Madam, as I believe Confucius himself once said, ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers!’”
He moved with startling grace, catching his captors off balance and flinging them bodily into the guards holding me. Then the Chinaman’s hands and feet moved with uncanny speed in the reduced gravity, chopping and kicking this way and that. The spindly guards were sent flying and we were free for a moment, but more of the puppet-like stilt-men were already charging up the stairs to seize us.
“Miss Underhill,” Kong cried, even as he was brought down and gagged, “your cigarette lighter –”
It seemed odd that any man should suggest that a woman should commit the social faux pas of smoking outside, even at a time like this. However, as one of the floating monsters reared above me, I guessed what he meant. If the things were lighter than air, then they had to contain pockets of gas like a Zeppelin—gas that was probably combustible.
In a trice, I pulled my lighter from my bag and struck the flint. The brain-beast veered, but I tickled its underside with the naked flame.
There was ghastly, flatulent bang and the ugly lump of grey matter shot off like a skyrocket before exploding messily in mid-air. Everyone else froze for a moment. I advanced on the other creatures, all perched like substandard millinery on the stilt-men’s heads, and the rout began.
The humid and watery environment of the lunar interior had meant that fire, the Achilles’ heel of the floating dictators, had never troubled them before. Once some of the stilt-men had been released from their mental bondage, their minds soon cleared, and they helped us to liberate more of their kind. All-out revolution was in progress around the tower before long. Freedom spread—and I choose my words with care—like wildfire. The brain-beasts knew they were toast and fled for the skies, floating dejectedly away from the lands they had ruled so poorly.
We returned to our launch escorted by a host of joyful stilt-men.
“Parsnip! Parsnip!” they cried gratefully as we cast off, but the comment was lost on us. We tried to be polite by randomly shouting the names of other root vegetables back at them.
We returned to the Omniscope portal uneventfully, and were pleasantly surprised to re-enter the world we knew in time for breakfast.
V. Coda In Codicil
