The constables kept Osgood for a very long time: they'd have liked to keep him forever, he thought. But since the madman's erratic behavior had been obvious at the carriage house there was no good reason to doubt the watchmaker's story. The stranger's body was recovered from the river, Osgood's cart was recovered from the woods, and at long last he made his way home.
It was very late when he arrived, so it wasn't until the following day that he heard about the strange noises and lights that had plagued the city's outskirts on the day of his adventure. As the day had worn on toward evening there had been a rush of sound and a thunderclap; strange lights had burned in the woods for half an hour, although there was no fire, and then with another thunderclap the apparition had disappeared.
Osgood tallied the hours. This had all happened shortly after he'd witnessed the same phenomenon on Rotwang Bridge. Regretting his bruises, Osgood went out to his stable and removed the carefully wrapped Orb from the back of the cart.
He lit a lantern and looked at the wrapped sphere for an hour. He had still not unwrapped it by the time he went to bed.
Was it possible that some part of the madman's story had been true? That his ship was not a sailing ship at all, but was some sort of sky ship, and that it had kept its rendezvous? That this Orb really did contain all of the knowledge and history of a long-dead race from the stars? Osgood slept, and Osgood dreamed, and in some sense he may never have woken up again. He was no longer the contented clockmaker that his life had made him. He was another man now: and he did not know that ma
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