Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

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-colour 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. 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. [25] Less well remembered than rival cinema pioneers the Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès or Thomas Edison, Paul Aloysius Robert (1870–1944) was a significant contributor to the early days of the motion picture. He directed What Happened to Maisie Under the West Pier (1895), the first British film to be seized and suppressed as pornographic, and A Fight with Sledgehammers in Rottingdean (1902), labelled the ‘original kinema “nasty”’. On the strength of Moran’s memoirs, it seems he could have laid claim to the invention of special effects techniques later associated with Méliès.

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 a ‘blithering idiot’. He looked displeased. Several helpful souls shouted out the principles on which the Box worked. A couple of young fellahs got into a heated argument about ‘persistence of vision’ and ‘Muybridge strips’. No one cared much about what they had seen (it could have been a chuffing train or a couple snogging, for all they cared) but many were intrigued by the process whereby moving images were cast on a board. Stent had caused a sensation, but not the way he expected.

Moriarty smiled to himself.

Seeing things not going his way, Sir Nevil hastened on to what would have been his grand finale.

‘Sirs, men from Mars are among us! They have been here quite some time!’

Hoots, whistles, laughs.

Stent lifted another dust cloth from an exhibit.

‘This is the King of Mars,’ he announced.

There was sudden hush. The window in the bell had a magnifying effect, and the hideous red face of the creature trapped inside loomed. The buccal orifice clacked angrily.

For a moment, everyone was struck quiet and frozen. Swollen alien eyes, set in angry red facial frills, seemed to range over the assembled scientific multitudes, as if ready to direct a ‘hot beam’ across their ranks and wipe out the great minds of Earth before calling down a sky-fleet of bloodthirsty horrors. Red tentacles writhed, ready to crush human resistance before hauling up the Martian standard on the blackened ruins of Burlington House.

The Robert’s Box was forgotten, and this new horror held the attention.

Stent, seeming to sense he was on the point of winning a few converts, radiated a certain smugness, as his thick hide recovered from the earlier pinpricks. His shirt front puffed out a bit, like a squid rising above its spawning depth, and he allowed himself to look on the audience with his old superior attitude. If this King of Mars could cow the Royal Society, then Stent might transfer his allegiance from the lesser, terrestrial monarch he had hitherto served. If his mighty brain went unappreciated on this poor planet, then perhaps he should look elsewhere for patronage…

Then, just as Stent was on the point of recapturing his audience, the Professor stood up and shouted, ‘Where’s his party hat?’

Stent was horror-struck at the sight of an enemy he’d thought bested. His mood turned. For a moment, I assumed he’d seen through the whole business and understood how he’d been gulled, but it was a passing doubt. The Astronomer Royal remained firm in his convictions. He believed what Moriarty had made him believe.

‘I insist,’ he said, holding up a copper tube, ‘this is a visitor from another world.’

Seconds ago, he had been taken at his word. Now, the sceptics and rationalists — for is this not an age of doubt? — were inclined to get close to the old gift horse and pay close attention to his choppers.

An elderly Frenchman from the front row got up and took a closer look at the bell, squinting through pince-nez.

‘This is a “hot beam” device,’ said Stent, voice cracking. ‘A weapon of Mars!’

He aimed it at the now-bewildered crowd, as if willing it to burst them into flame. Of course, we weren’t smeared with the slow-acting chemical concoction which provided the fire when the pretend guns were used in Flamsteed House.

‘This is a squid,’ announced the Frenchman. ‘Someone has cruelly dyed it red. An uncommon specimen, but not unknown.’

Some laughter was forthcoming. A paper dart, folded from a program, zoomed from the back of the room and sliced past Stent’s head.

‘This is the Marsian King,’ Stent told the onion eater. ‘Roi Marty. You, sir, are an unqualified dolt. You know nothing of alien worlds.’

‘Eh bien, perhaps,’ the Frenchman admitted. ‘But I, monsieur, am Professor Pierre Arronax, greatest living authority on denizens of the deep. In debate about the courses of the stars, I would allow you are far more expert than I. However, in matters of marine biology, you are a child of five and I am an encyclopaedia on legs. This, I repeat, is a squid. An unhealthy squid.’

‘I say, Stent, is that the sick squid you owe me?’ brayed one wit.

‘Here here,’ shouted a vocal clique of Arronax supporters. ‘A squid, a squid!’

Stent’s world was collapsing. He knew not what to say. His mouth opened and closed, but no words issued forth. I saw he was desperate for an infusion of Dr Tirmoary’s — damn fine stuff, let me tell you, though even I would caution against excessive use. The Astronomer Royal pressed his fists to his temples as if to shut out the catcalls and retreat into his own ‘sunnar system’. There, many-limbed things crawled across the sands of Mars, intent on climbing into three-legged suits of armour, hurling themselves at the Earth to subjugate humanity for food and amusement.