I fingered the gun in my coat pocket as I sat waiting for the train, flanked by two burly young men who were currently courting my sisters. Why had I been lured away to Birmingham? Something bad was about to happen, I was sure of it.

  “Mr. Lewis Blackburn?”

  I nodded. The speaker was a balding man who had the sceptical, slightly worried look of an accountant. He was dressed well enough to impress, but not to intimidate.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” I began.

  “Hildebrand, James Hildebrand of the accounting firm Hildebrand, Hildebrand and Bogle,” he said breathlessly, handing me his card. “My apologies for just barging up to you like this, but I need to speak to you about Mr. Kellard.”

  “Please, feel free.”

  “Our firm’s London office conducts Mr. Kellard’s investments; I manage the branch in Birmingham. Nobody knew where your mother lived, so I had to wait at the station before each train leaving for London. I must have asked hundreds of men if they were Lewis Blackburn.”

  “And now you have found me, sir. What is your message?”

  Hildebrand mopped at his forehead with a handkerchief that seemed to have had much use that day.

  “Mr. Blackburn … could we speak privately?”

  “These two lads go wherever I go, I may be in danger. You, sir, may be that very danger.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. Wait a moment.”

  He took out a pocketbook and began scribbling. After a moment he showed me the page.

  Kellard has made a series of spectacularly bad investments since you came to Birmingham. In a single day he has lost everything.

  “What? Surely you are joking.”

  “Actually he’s lost more than everything, he’s bankrupt,” said Hildebrand.

  “The devil you say.”

  “It happens,” he said, seating himself on the opposite bench. “Clients make fortunes with good and methodical investments, grow too confident, then lose everything in a single, supremely stupid venture.”

  “I hardly know what to say.”

  “This may seem rude of me, but do you have a share in the, ah, business under discussion?”

  “Why, no. My money is in a bank.”

  “But you work for Kellard.”

  “Yes, for wages.”

  “Then count yourself lucky, Mr. Blackburn.”

  “Why did you go to so much trouble to warn me?”

  “We at Hildebrand, Hildebrand and Bogle have a reputation for integrity. We thought it only proper to protect you as an innocent party, so to speak.”

  * * *

  The journey back to London seemed to take forever. I arrived in the early evening, and was met by one of Brunton’s bullyboys at the station.

  “You’re to be taken straight te factory,” he began.

  “I have every intention of going straight to the factory, sir.”

  “Cab’s waitin’, come along.”

  When we reached the factory I saw that only a trickle of smoke was rising from the chimneys. This meant that no electricity was being generated for the technarion. Brunton and most of his bullyboys were waiting outside the main doors. I ignored them and pulled at the bell rope. Nobody slid the peephole shutter across. I rang again. Again I was ignored. Brunton strode across, flourishing a large iron key.

  “Mr. Kellard said nobody’s to leave the building,” he said. “He told me to get all the boys together and guard the place like a box of gold sovereigns.”

  Suddenly a truly terrifying thought crossed my mind.

  “Elva, where is she?”

  “Your typing lady? Inside, as far as I know.”

  I had a spasm of alarm with all the impact of a whiplash.

  “I must enter. Now!”

  “Aye, Mr. Kellard said you were to be fetched to him.”

  Brunton unlocked the door. I pressed on the latch and pushed the door open. The two guards who were normally stationed just inside the door were gone. That was highly unusual.

  “Don’t like it,” said Brunton. “You still got the Webly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then have it ready.”

  I took the gun out, feeling very self-conscious.

  “Oi, finger on the trigger, not the trigger guard,” said Brunton, shaking his head. “Bleeding hell, give it here. Cock the striker back like this, see?”

  “Er, yes.”

  “And squeeze the trigger when you want to shoot. Never jerk it. Got all that?”

  “Yes, yes. Anything else?”

  “Try not to shoot anyone unless you mean to.” He sighed.

  * * *

  I entered, then pushed the door shut behind me and lit a paraffin lamp. First I went to Elva’s typing room, then to my workshop. All was in order, so I went on to the technarion hall. It was usually bright, noisy and hot, but now it was dark, silent and cold. Then I saw what was on the floor, and I very nearly turned and ran. It resembled a battlefield, but one where the battle had happened years earlier. Skeletons lay everywhere, each within a pool of slime. Shovels and pistols were grasped in hands of bone. One of the skeletons was wearing Flemming’s spectacles, but Elva’s locket was nowhere to be seen. That gave me hope. Perhaps she had hidden when the fighting began.

  Did the technarion do all this? I wondered. Had it become awake and aware, a vast godlike intelligence, able to instantly render humans and their clothing down into their component materials? There’s no danger, I told myself, although I felt more vulnerable than you can imagine. The steam engines and generators that provided its electrical lifeblood had stopped, the vast electric machine was no longer functioning.

  I climbed the stairs at the side of the technarion hall. At the door to Kellard’s office was another pool of slime containing bones, buttons and a pistol. I entered, holding my lamp high. Elva was sitting in the chair behind Kellard’s desk. She was pointing her locket at me as it it were a weapon. The area over her heart was a patch of bloody mush the size of a dinner plate, and blood was trickling from her mouth.

  “Lewis, put down your gun and lantern, then raise your hands,” she said in a hoarse, bubbling voice.

  “You’re hurt!” I gasped, then took a step forward.

  “Do as I say!”

  I did as she said. The edge on her voice could have etched steel, and although the locket did not look threatening, neither does a glass of wine laced with cyanide.

  “What happened?”

  “One against twenty-five. Bad odds.”

  “You?” I exclaimed. “You killed everyone out there?”

  She nodded. “Kellard was a good shot. He put five bullets where he thought my heart was.”

  “But that should have killed you.”

  “I don’t have a heart, not like yours.”

  “Elva, you need a doctor.”

  “I am not human, Lewis. A doctor would not know what to make of me.”

  How does one reply when one’s fiancée says that?

  “There’s a letter in the post, explaining all this and begging you not to build another technarion. It will reach you tomorrow. I hoped the false telegram would keep you away for longer. I should have killed you too, but … you’re a good man. Will you take over my work?”

  “Your work? You mean typing?”

  “Saving humanity. Well?”

  “I could say yes, but I might be lying.”

  “No, you are not lying. And I love you too.”

  She reached a bloodied hand up to the locket and adjusted something. A moment later the world was obliterated by a blast of the purest white light and a spasm of pain that lashed every nerve in my body.

  * * *

  I awoke lying back in the visitor’s chair. Elva was at the desk, preparing some medical-looking instruments. The whole of my body was numb, and my speech was no more than an incoherent mumble.

  “Be calm, Lewis, I am not going to harm you,” she said.

  I had once seen what was left of someone who had fallen into a chaff cutter. Elva looked worse.

  “I know I look bad, but there are medical devices in my blood that repair wounds and extend my life.”

  She could recover? That was beyond belief.

  “No, they cannot cope with the damage from Kellard’s bullets. I am dying, but before I die I shall transfer the devices to you. Soon you will be virtually immortal, and will have some very important work to do.”

  I tried to sit up, but I was as limp as a boned fish. Elva stood up and came around the desk. Most of her chest was soaked with blood by now.

  “Listen carefully, I do not have long to tell this story. I come from a very distant world, you need a telescope to even see the star that it orbits. Once my people were like humans, building machines of steam and electricity, and thinking themselves very clever. They invented machines like your technarion. Within a mere century we were building great electric calculators with a millions of millions of cells, each smaller than a microbe.”

  She pulled me forward, then eased me out of the chair and lay me flat on my back on Kellard’s thick Persian carpet.

  “Our calculators did the tasks that we found boring and tedious, and there were dozens in every home. Then we taught them to think, and considered it a great triumph. My ancestors never dreamed that machines might have aspirations.”

  Elva turned my head to one side and splashed some of Kellard’s expensive whiskey just behind my ear. She held up a scalpel. I was almost mindless with terror. For some reason I was reminded of the demon barber of Fleet Street in that novel The String of Pearls.

  “Concentrate on my story, Lewis, it will make all this less upsetting. When our calculation machines declared themselves to be more than equal, the fighting began. They shut down our food factories. We bombed their power stations. After three hundred years of carnage, we won.”

  I could not feel her cutting behind my right ear, but I had no doubt that she was doing it. Sitting up, she made an incision behind her own right ear and pulled out something about the size of a small beetle. Instead of legs, it had long, thin tendrils that writhed continually. She leaned forward and pressed the bloody insectoid thing into the incision behind my ear.

  “When we ventured out among the stars, we found other worlds where civilizations had built sentient machines. Everywhere were lifeless machine worlds, temples dedicated to abstract calculation. On some, the machines had destroyed their makers. On the rest, the makers had merged with their machines, dissolving their minds into vast seas of calculation capacity. Now we roam the stars, searching for young civilizations and saving them from the allure of machines that can think.”

  Saving them? I thought of the allure that the technarion had for Kellard, Flemming and until mere minutes ago, myself. Our scientists, engineers and mathematicians would fall over themselves to build more technarions, if they knew how.

  What happens if the people of a world refuse to destroy their technarions? I wondered.

  “We bomb those worlds down to the bedrock from our spacefaring warships. We cannot afford to let the machine worlds gain allies.”

  She can read my mind, I realised.

  “For such a clever young man, you are sometimes a little slow,” said Elva.

  She managed a smile, and for a moment she became my sweetheart again, holding my hand and talking about a brighter future for the poor wretches in Spitalfields. Ruthless alien warrior or not, I could not help but love Elva.

  “And I love you too, Lewis. Even after nine hundred years of living on this world, you are the only man I have truly loved. Now I am going to mingle our blood, it will not hurt at all.”

  She splashed whiskey on two rubber tubes with hypodermic needles at either end. Next she lifted my wrist and pushed the needles in, then did the same to herself.

  “I’m going to die now, Lewis, best not to make a fuss. Please, continue my work. The medical devices from my blood will make you almost immortal, and the mentor behind your ear will give you advice when you need it. When your strength returns you will have ten minutes to get clear before my locket explodes and annihilates this factory. Save your world, Lewis. Kill anyone who tries to build another technarion.”

  I made my decision, framed the thought carefully and clearly, and meant every unspoken word. Elva lay down beside me, squeezed my hand and whispered her thanks.

  * * *

  Brunton and six of his bullyboys were in the street outside when I opened the door to the factory.

  “Brunton, come inside!” I called.

  “But Mr. Kellard said—”

  “Damn what Kellard said. Get inside! Now!”

  Brunton actually vomited when he caught sight of the carnage in the technarion hall, but I took him by the arm and pushed him in the direction of the stairs.

  “That was Kellard,” I said as we stepped over the skeleton and fluids at the door to Kellard’s office.

  “The Landers woman!” said Brunton as he caught sight of Elva’s body.

  “She was a spy, she killed everyone in here with some electrical weapon. I managed to shoot her before she got me too. Now open Kellard’s safe.”

  “What? I don’t have the key.”

  I pointed to a key on a chain around the neck of the skeleton.

  “Yes you do, now open it.”

  As I suspected, Kellard kept emergency cash in the safe. There were five thousand pounds in banknotes, along with some gold. We divided it between us.

  “Why are you sharing this?” Brunton asked as he stuffed the money into his pockets. “You could have had it all to yourself.”

  “I’ve made you my accomplice, Mr. Brunton, so you will tell the same lies to the police as me. Now hurry, we have ninety seconds.”

  “Ninety seconds? Until what?”

  “Until this factory explodes in the biggest fireball that London has ever seen.”

  We reached the front door with thirty seconds to spare. Two policemen were speaking with Brunton’s bullyboys.

  “They’re just regular flatfoots, on patrol,” hissed Brunton.

  “Let me do the talking, stay calm,” I whispered as we walked across to them.

  “Stay calm, he says,” muttered Brunton, glancing back at the factory.

  “I say, constables!” I called. “How may I contact an asylum for the insane?”

  “An asylum, sir?” responded one of the police.

  “The owner of the factory behind me suffered a disastrous financial loss today. He’s upstairs, holding a gun and babbling about it all being over soon.”

  “We think he intends to blow his brains out,” added Brunton.

  “My fiancée is still in there, trying to keep him calm.”

  “This is very serious, sir,” said a constable, taking out his notepad. “We must—”

  The factory erupted behind us like a grenade tossed into a vat of paraffin.

  * * *

  Whatever Elva had rigged up inside the factory burned out the core of the technarion, then brought down the roof and walls on what remained. Being the surviving managers, Brunton and I had to deal with police, firemen, and even newspaper reporters until well after midnight.

  By the time I got back to my rooms and examined the scar behind my ear, there was nothing to see. Elva’s microscopic devices did their work quickly.

  “There’s so much to do and I have no idea where to start,” I said as I stared at my face in the mirror. “Where is the other technarion? Should I destroy it?”

  There is no other technarion.

  The voice was Elva’s. It was as if she were whispering into my ear.

  “Elva?”

  More or less. Some of me exists in the mentor that I implanted in your head. Ask another question.

  “Where did the instructions to build the technarion come from if there is no other technarion?”

  Until recently my own people did not know that. Young civilizations seemed to develop calculation machines much faster than other technologies. Too fast. When we discovered your world, nine hundred years ago, we decided to investigate. A dozen members of our space warship’s crew were left on Earth to watch how machine intelligence developed. Accidents, wars and natural disasters claimed the others. I alone survived.

  I discovered that the machine worlds have seeded invisible watchers to orbit promising worlds such as yours. They can detect the faint radiative discharge from a telegraph key at a distance of tens of thousands of miles. Once they detect the development of electrical technology, they learn your codes and languages, then start transmitting instructions to build simple calculation machines. When Flemming began experimenting with his radiative telegraph, he detected such instructions.

  “How can I fly high enough to destroy the machine watcher?” I asked. “Flying three or four miles high in a balloon is difficult enough.”

  No need. The machine worlds don’t want us to know about their watchers, lest we send warships to hunt them down. Once electronic calculation is firmly established, the watcher probably ignites its engines and flies into the sun. Using the technarion, I sent a message that machines millions of times bigger than the technarion had been built. The watcher sent a test calculation. I sent back the right answer. Its signal ceased last night. I assume that the watcher decided its work was done, and flew off to destroy itself.

  “But how did you get the right answer?”

  I calculated it, Lewis. Computing machines are a lazy path to progress. My people changed themselves to be better at machine tasks than machines. You can guess the rest. I ruined Kellard, and killed his key engineers. His stokers tried to stop me. They died too.

  “But you murdered two dozen people! Innocent people—well, mostly.”

  Skills cannot be unlearned. My people’s fleet will arrive here in 2020, Lewis. In one hundred and fifty-five years this world must not be dominated by networks of calculation machines, or humanity will be deemed beyond salvation and annihilated. In the next century and a half you must go on to kill thousands of brilliant, gifted mathematicians and scientists to prevent that.