Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [134]
A new reflecting telescope arrived this morning, a bulky cabinet affair on trestles, with an aperture where a separate lens must presumably be attached. It is an unfamiliar design — a presentation, in honor of my achievements in mapping the night skies, from an august body who call themselves the Red Planet League. I have had had my secretary respond with an autographed photograph and a note of thanks. Entering the study, I saw at once that the workmen had mistaken this gift for a species of lamp, and wired it up to the mains. I would be inclined to chide Galvani most severely, had this error not nudged me on the path to discovery.
I unwrapped the supposed paperweight and made close examination of it under the steady illumination of the electric lamps. Cave, the vendor, had mentioned an ‘inner light’ — a phenomenon I soon discovered for myself. It is a trick of the optics, of course — if held up to the light, the interior of the crystal egg coruscates, seeming to hold multiple refractions and reflections.
By accident, when Polly reached into the room and turned off the lights at the wall-switch, I discovered the crystal had the unusual property of retaining luminosity even when the light-source was gone. I did not measure the time of glow-decay, because the undermaid was fussing and apologizing for not seeing I was still in my study when she plunged me into darkness. She whimpered that these new-fangled inventions were not like proper gas. I fear Lady Caroline’s ‘indoor lightning’ theory has infected the servants with irrational terror.
“What’s that egg?” exclaimed the maid, meaning my crystal. “And why’s it lit up?”
I ventured to explain something of the laws of refraction, but saw my learning was wasted on this simple soul. Nevertheless, it is to Polly that I owe my next, most extraordinary discovery. She picked up the crystal egg, rather boldly for a person in her position I might say.
“Doesn’t it go here, sir?” she said, slipping the egg into an aperture of the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope. It was a perfect fit. Before I could chide her, Polly had fiddled with a switch which triggered an incandescent lamp inside the cabinet — projecting a beam through the crystal, which diffracted out into the room. Suddenly, the opposite wall was covered by a swirling, swarming red cloud. Polly yelped, and fled — but I hadn’t the heart to pursue and chastise her.
I was transfixed by the pictures on the wall.
Yes, pictures! Pictures that move! With a faint flicker, accompanied by a definite whirring from inside the reflecting telescope. I had never before seen the like.
At once it came to me that my crystal egg was in fact a crystal lens. When light passed through it just so, the crystal egg — by some means as yet undetermined by science — transmitted images from its interior.
The process was astounding, but I was more overwhelmed by the picture. It was as if I were looking out of a window which floated high over a ruddy desert far from Greenwich. Faintly visible above the horizon were familiar stars, skewed in the sky — as observed not from our home-world, but from a body which must be considered (on a cosmic scale) our near neighbor. I perceived the tiny blue-green circle of Earth, and knew with utter certainty that this window looked out onto the plains of Mars.
The Red Planet.
All the tiny incidents of the last two days impelled me, inch by inch, towards this discovery.
I knew the subject of my next lecture, my next book. Indeed, the remainder of my career could be devoted to this. I am Master of Mars. No other can come close. Og. must have had some inkling, but this is to be Stent’s triumph — not Ogilvy’s. From henceforth, this acreage of red dust will be Stent’s Plain. In the distance, I saw slumped, worn hills, more ancient than the sharper peaked mountains of Earth — the Caroline Range! A deep channel grooves across the landscape, flowing with a thick, red, boiling