Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [142]
Again, we took our seats. Sans disguises, on the assumption Stent wouldn’t notice us in the crowd — at least, not until the crucial moment. The hall was packed, as if word had leaked out that Lola Montez would be tightrope-walking nude over the audience while Jenny Lind sang all eighty-six verses of ‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’. Every branch of science was represented, for Stent had announced his lecture would radically affect all of them equally. A lot of text-books would need revising (or burning) after this one, the rumor-mill insisted. To me, the mob looked like an unkempt crowd of smelly schoolmasters on a spree, but the Prof clucked and tutted to himself, listing the great names who had shown up. Besides our home-grown brain-boxes, there were Yanks, Frogs, Krauts, Eye-ties, dressed-up darkies of assorted hues and an authentic Belgian — all trailing more degrees, honors, doctorates and professorships than you could shake a stick at. It would have been humbling if they weren’t mostly aged and chalk-covered. We had salted the room with a few of our own fellahs, who carried hat-boxes or picnic hampers and were a bit fidgety in clean, respectable clothes. A squeaky-voiced draper’s clerk tried to squeeze in on a platform ticket, but was properly ejected for being a lower-class bounder.
This time, Stent went for dramatic effect.
The house-lights dimmed, and a spot came up on the lectern. The Conqueror of Mars posed dramatically, in a vestment-like long white coat.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “we are not alone…”
He whipped a dust-cloth from the ‘reflecting telescope’ which incorporated the ‘crystal egg’. In the end, Polly had been forced to draw him a picture to show how she had ‘accidentally’ made it work. Between shows, someone had to reset or replace the strip of exposures inside the box and put in a new incandescent bulb — which meant getting Stent away from his toy. Fortunately, he’d quite a nose for Dr. Tirmoary’s Infusions and was often in a daze.
“I give you … the Planet Mars!”
Stent toggled a lever and electric current made a motor grind. Red images were cast on a white board erected on the platform. Squid crawled across a sandbox, gagging for water. There were gasps of awe, though a few coughs of scepticism too. A few sequences wound backwards, which gave an eerie, unnatural effect — as if pictures that moved weren’t unnatural enough.
I’d seen some of these views ‘taken’ by Mr. Paul A. Robert of Brighton. Urchin assistants had to hand-color the scenes, picture by picture. Robert has a glass-roofed studio under construction on the downs. I had to be blindfolded and driven up and around country lanes before visiting it because he fears some Yankee swine is out to poach the process and present it as his own invention. Good luck to him, I say. Apart from making a fool of the Astronomer Royal, all Robert’s whateveroscope is good for is giving anyone who stares too long at the stuttering pictures a blinding headache. I daresay few in the audience had seen the like. There was still that damned whirring and flapping as exposures passed in front of the incandescent. The bloody racket is why Robert’s Box Pictures in Motion will never ‘catch on’, if you ask me. They’ll never replace the stereopticon.
After the images from the crystal egg passed, Stent was assailed by questions. Some were about the creatures, but most were about Robert’s Box — which several in the audience had heard of before. One or two had even seen the thing demonstrated while the inventor was soliciting funds for development of his annoying wonder of the age. When Stent repeated his assertion that the Box was a ‘reflecting telescope’, someone called him