The Scarlet Band

"You are right--we do not follow ancient usages," Praeger said proudly. "We take for ourselves the beliefs we require, and reshape them ourselves to our hearts' desire. That is the modern way. That is the Atlantean way. We are loyal to our country, sir, even if misguided officials persist in failing to understand us."

"You don't say anything about the dead 'uns," Walton remarked.

"I don't know anything about them. Nor do I know how to reach the Preacher." Praeger held up a hand before either Englishman could speak. "I shall talk to certain colleagues of mine. If, through them or their associates, word of your desire reaches him, I am confident that he will in turn be able to reach you." His shrug seemed genuinely regretful. "I can do no more."

"Thank you for doing that much," Helms said. "Tell me one thing more, if you would: what do the symbols flanking the cross to either side signify to you?"

"Why, the truth, of course," Henry Praeger answered.

* * * *

Dr. Walton was happy enough to play tourist in Hanover. Even if the city was young--almost infantile by Old World standards--there was a good deal to see, from the Curb Exchange Building to the Navy Yard to the cancan houses that were the scandal of Atlantis, and of much of Terranova and Europe as well (France, by all accounts, took them in stride). Walton returned from his visit happily scandalized.

Athelstan Helms went to no cancan houses. He set up a laboratory of sorts in their rooms, and paid the chambermaids not to clean it. When he wasn't fussing there with the daggers that had greeted him or the good doctor, he was poring over files of the Hanover Herald he had prevailed upon Inspector La Strada to prevail upon the newspaper to let him see.

From sources unknown to Walton, Helms procured a violin, upon which he practiced at all hours until guests in the adjoining chambers pounded on the walls. Then, reluctantly, he was persuaded to desist.

"Some people," he said with the faintest trace of petulance, "have no appreciation for--"

"Good music," Dr. Walton said loyally.

"Well, actually, that is not what I was going to say," Helms told him. "They have no appreciation for the fact that any musician, good, bad, or indifferent, must regularly play his instrument if he is not to become worse. In the absence of any communication from the Preacher, what shall I do with my time?"

"You might tour the city," Walton suggested. "There is, I must admit, more to it than I would have expected."

"It is not London," Athelstan Helms said, as if that were all that required saying. In case it wasn't, he added a still more devastating sidebar: "It is not even Paris."

"Well, no," Walton said, "but have you seen the museum? Astonishing relics of the honkers. Not just skeletons and eggshells, mind you, but skins with feathers still on 'em. The birds might almost be alive."

"So might the men the House of Universal Devotion murdered," Helms replied, still in that tart mood. "They might almost be, but they are not."

"Also a fine selection of Atlantean plants," the good doctor said. "Those are as distinctive as the avifauna, if not more so. Some merely decorative, some ingeniously insectivorous, some from which we draw spices, and also some formidably poisonous."

That drew his particular friend's interest; Dr. Walton had thought it might. "I have made a certain study of the noxious alkaloids to be derived from plants," Helms admitted. "That one from southern Terranova, though a stimulant, has deleterious side effects if used for extended periods. Perhaps I should take advantage of the opportunity to observe the specimens from which the poisons are drawn."

"Perhaps you should, Helms," Walton said, and so it was decided.

The Atlantean Museum could not match its British counterpart in exterior grandeur. Indeed, but for the generosity of a Briton earlier in the century, there might not have been any Atlantean Museum. Living in the present and looking toward the future as they did, the inhabitants of Atlantis cared little for the past. The museum was almost deserted when Walton brought Helms back to it.

Helms sniffed at the exhibit of extinct honkers that had so pleased his associate. Nor did a close-up view of the formidable beak and talons of a stuffed red-crested eagle much impress him. What purported to be a cucumber slug climbing up a redwood got him to lean forward to examine it more closely. He drew back a moment later, shaking his head. "It's made of plaster of Paris, and its trail is mucilage."

"This is a museum, not a zoological garden," Dr. Walton said reasonably. "You can hardly expect a live slug here. Suppose it crawled off to the other side of the trunk, where no one but its keeper could see it?" Helms only grunted, which went some way toward showing the cogency of Walton's point.