Sometime in the last hour the guard had walked by and locked Quillan and Moneypenny into the laboratory.  Neither had looked up from their work at the sound of the key clicking in the lock.

Moneypenny looked again at the remaining documents in her box.  There were only two possible entries left, one from Phileas Fogg's diary and one in the Jules Verne journal.  Unfortunately, she discovered that after only two pages the Fogg narrative ended in mid-sentence.  A frill of paper showed where some pages had been torn out.

What a disappointment!  Moneypenny had only used one of his elegantly worded entries today.  "Bloody hell!" Moneypenny cursed aloud, got up and kicked the empty pizza box lying on the floor.  Her companion looked up from his workbench in concern.  "Sorry, Quillan.  Usually have better control of my temper.  Fogg diary's incomplete.  Some pages have been torn out."

Quillan took up the old and fragile book and examined the ripped edges.  "Well, this is an official Service archive.  Maybe the entry was too personal."

Moneypenny thought for a moment.  "The whole diary is very personal.  When he wrote it he didn't know it would end up in the archives.  No, I rather think he recorded his son's hiding place and then ripped it out later for safety's sake."

Quillan nodded in agreement.  "That sounds reasonable.  Are you going to be OK now?"

Moneypenny nodded and smiled ruefully.  "I'm fine.  I think I'll use the Verne journal.  He has the most detail.  It's just that Fogg's so . . . so sexy!"

Unexpectedly Quillan blushed.  He asked, holding up the diary in his hands, "Yes, well, uh, I'd like to run a few tests on this.  Do you mind?"  Moneypenny shook her head and returning to Quillan's computer, spread the Verne journal out again.  He'd made an entry on New Year's Eve about the events a week before.  The account finished out the book and ended the year.

**********

From Jules Verne's private journal, New Year's Eve.

Whenever I believe I understand Fogg, he surprises me with a new and different face.  Passionate, yes, that first comes to mind.  Impatient, violent, and suspicious, all those I expect he learned whilst spying.  Did spying also teach him to congeal his heart?

He suffers.  I know he suffers.  And not just from the bruises inflicted on his body.  His soul has been bruised far more.  To Fogg, the axiom, "Family is everything," echoes more of holy writ.  Rebecca has been the cathedral where he worships; and his son within a few short hours became his god.  But Fogg left him in the future and will not say with whom the babe hides or why he himself returned.  Fogg tells us nothing at all.  His eyes spend much time on Rebecca; and of evenings, he drinks in quiet, steady concentration.  None of that is new.

It is New Year's Eve.  The Foggs are returning me to Paris and the Aurora flies through a grim and wintry night.  Rebecca and Fogg split the day watch and retired early to their cabins.  No grand party tonight, I fear.  Passepartout has the helm and I will relieve him at midnight to greet the renewing year.

Poor Jean, he blames himself for the babe's loss.  This morning he sought to escape his expiring contract and tendered Fogg a written resignation.  His master frowned over its self-accusatory wording, wadded it up and threw it out the porthole.  He ordered a fresh pot of coffee as he turned back to his Times.  "Such drivel doesn't deserve a reply, Passepartout.  Your wages increase five percent tomorrow and do get yourself a new uniform with household funds.  I begin to tire of that gold-striped thing."

I may be wrong about the party, at least for Fogg.  Rebecca just rattled his door with the bottle of champagne I gifted them for Christmas.  She winked at me when I peeked out into the passageway.  Of us all, Rebecca seems the happiest.  Her cousin's return from the future has canceled her every other concern.  Even the loss of the babe palls against that joy.  Tonight she clearly intends to share with him a New Year's celebration.  He appeared at his door clad in dressing gown and slippers, and granted her entry to his privacy.

I hope she lightens this gloom that has descended upon him.  He confides to me plans for an extended trip, to draw Count Gregory's attention away from Rebecca and myself, he says.  He worries a great deal about this new League ability to strike remotely and with any material at hand.

The League assaulted us on Christmas morn, as we'd anticipated, but in a way we'd never before seen.  Through a debasement of scientific principles the League's scientists transmuted the nursery into something alive and as voracious as quicksand, and hungry for Foggs alone.

At first light, perhaps half past seven, I heard a terrible rattling and Jean's frantic shouts from next-door.  There I found a horrible scene!  The room's floor had come alive.  It no longer lay in flat and normal planes.  It grew unnatural tendrils, ropes and strands.  Some waved about as if seeking something.  Others bound Fogg tightly to his chair.  Passepartout held the baby in his arms and sobbed helplessly, "Master, I sorry.  I change baby!  I not see!"

"Get the baby out of here!" Fogg shouted.  Jean tried to run to the nursery door.  The floor heaved and threw him.  Passepartout landed derrière first on its vile, shifting surface.  I ran to help him arise.  Blind tendrils snatched at the babe but missed.  On I ran to Fogg as he struggled fruitlessly against his bonds.  Despite their fluid movement, the horrid growths had the strength of iron.

Rebecca, who'd left the nursery to don her fighting outfit, heard our struggle far down the hall.  She appeared at the nursery door, a pistol in her hand.  The floor rippled up in anticipation of her presence, rattling chairs, dolls and blocks together in horrid piles of debris.

"Stay back, Miss Rebecca!" Passepartout yelled as he struggled to keep his feet. He held the babe up high.  The monstrous vines stretched to his shoulder and collapsed, unable to attenuate that far.  "It catching only Foggs!" Jean continued.  Indeed no tendrils entrapped me at all.  The growths that attacked Passepartout reached only for the babe.  Without eyes or olfactory organs, some hellish sense directed them to the Foggs.

Fogg's desperate movements became more restricted as vine after vine wrapped him tight.  "Seem to rather fancy me, don't they?" Fogg bantered.  Fear made his eyes white and round.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the vines almost topple Jean to the floor again, "Bloody hell!  Passepartout, get my son out of here!"  Jean struggled to comply but could not move.  The vines that sought the baby had multiplied into dozens and hemmed him in.

Rebecca seemed safe enough outside the doorway.  The unnatural tendrils formed only to the sill.  There they waved about much as hounds that sniff a quarry without discerning its direction.  Rebecca cannot tolerate helplessness.  Unable to join our efforts inside the nursery, she fired her pistol into the floorboards.  It spit back out the bits of lead.

Count Gregory's foul image formed from the planking.  We heard him speak in a coarse, hollow approximation of human voice.  "I will have my son back, Fogg!  And you will die!  I tire of trifling with you.  Prepare yourself to meet your God."  The chimera disappeared.

Fogg's situation became dire.  Despite all my efforts, a thick tendril wrapped his neck and began slowly to wring away his life.  His face colored to dusky red, followed by a bluish tint.  His eyes rolled back.

"Release him, you bastard!" Rebecca screamed.  No answer came.  Gregory could not hear us.

Passepartout shouted to me, "Where star man thing?  Where you hide?"

I turned to the female Fogg outside the nursery door.  She looked near to desperation and had put a foot inside the door.  Tendrils raced and almost grabbed her ankle before she stepped out again.  "Rebecca, it's on my night table!"

She returned within seconds.  Even in her brief absence yet more horrible events transpired.  Whilst his master's plight distracted Passepartout, tendrils dropped from a new source, the ceiling.  They snatched the child from his arms.  This ghastly, unnatural nursemaid carried the crying infant toward a gaping orifice that shimmered beneath the frosted window.

"Spin l'objet!  Spin now!" Passepartout shouted to Rebecca in the hall.  To me, "Master Jules, make wish for Mr. Fogg and bébé!  Wish them safe!  Wish them far away!"

Fast!  I must act fast!  Fogg would die in seconds and the baby return to Count Gregory!  I spewed out the first words that came to mind, "I wish Fogg could take his son to safety in the future."  The future, why had I specified the future?  Did I speak my own heart's wish?

For the third time on that extraordinary Christmas holiday, thick and viscous air whirled from the star man's gift spinning at Rebecca's feet.  In fear she took a quick step back, but only Fogg and the baby disappeared.  And with their fading, the nursery's every plane and surface subsided to its flat and normal state.

Deathly quiet descended on the winter morn.  Last night's snowstorm had blown itself away and a bright beam of light pierced the atmosphere, sparkling the jack frost on the window and the dust hanging in the air.

"They're gone," Passepartout said.

Rebecca stepped experimentally onto the nursery floor, ready if need be to hop out again.  Nothing unnatural showed, and emboldened she walked in further.  "How soon will they be back, Jules?" she asked whilst checking corners to assure no remaining evil lurked.

My miserable face must have answered her question.

"Jules!  Tell me that's not true!  Bring them back!"  She turned to Jean, "Passepartout, you can do it, can't you?"  He looked away.

I gave what little comfort I had.  "I wished him safety for the baby.  Whatever else they are, they're safe.  They're somewhere in the future, Rebecca."

"How far?  Tomorrow?  A hundred years?"

With no other answer to give, I offered her my arms.

She shook her head and her face flushed in anger.  "No!" she shouted again and again, furious to find no ready answer.  "No, no, no!"  I thought it best to take her gun.

Passepartout, who looked even more miserable than Rebecca, picked up our Pandora's box from the hall floor.  He laid a comforting hand on Rebecca's back.  "He come back.  I know he will.  He come back if he can."

"If he can, Passepartout, if he can," I whispered.