When we reached the ship I noted that the hatch opened outward, and would be sealed by a rubber collar. Inside, the Cylinder was indeed like a greater version of my Nautilus, with the same reassuring smell of copper and rubber and oil - but much wider and turned on its end, and illuminated throughout by lanterns. The interior was divided into decks by sections of open mesh flooring, although a solid deck of polished oak blocked off the bottom of the compartment. Oddly there was carpet affixed to some of the walls, and bits of furniture bolted to the decks – chair, tables, hammocks, cupboards, even a big navigator’s table of the type I had seen on the Indomitable. In a middle deck I saw a ring of guns, naval weapons surely but of quite small bore, and sacks of shot and powder fixed to the walls nearby. These guns faced outwards, their muzzles set against the hatches I had spotted in a ring around the hull, and I wondered what enemy ships they were meant to repel.
Thus, a ship designed to swim in Inter-planetary Space! I had never conceived of such a thing. But I was an engineer, and I inspected her and tried to understand how she would work.
Anne was watching me. ‘What do you think of her?’
‘I think she looks mighty expensive. I can see where the money has been spent that might have built the navy ships to turn the war …’
‘You can see the hand of your mentor Fulton.’
I grunted. ‘I immediately see he has left issues to resolve.’
‘Such as?’
‘This hatch, for one thing.’ I pushed it back on its hinges. ‘My understanding is that the worlds swim in a vacuum - is that not the best philosophical thinking?’
‘Else the planets through friction would spiral into the sun.’ She rapped on the hull. ‘The vessel is meant to contain its own air.’
‘Then this hatch is a weak point. Anne, what do you understand of pressure? My Nautilus was built to withstand the greater pressure of the water outside its hull, which would overwhelm the air pressure within.’ I mimed squeezing an orange. ‘But in the case of your Cylinder, the greater pressure will come from the air within – the hull will seek to pop like a soap bubble. And here you have a hatch that longs to blow outward, on its hinges! Have your engineers rebuild this, Anne. Have the hatch open inward – and let it be shaped to sit in its frame so that the outward pressure of the air forces it closed, not open.’ I glanced around at the small portholes. ‘I may take a look at those windows too, before we’re done.’
Again she took my hand, and the simple physical touch thrilled me. ‘There can scarcely have been a stranger ship built in all human history. Yet you grasp her essence, immediately. This is precisely why we needed you here, Ben - for just such insights, once we lost Fulton. Please, let me show you more …’
So we clambered up and down ladders affixed to the interior of the curving hull. I was struck again by the squares of carpet affixed to the walls, and the way every chair and couch and cot was fitted with harnesses, and how there were little latches on the tables that could be used to fix plates and cups in place. At first I imagined that these were precautions in case this ship of Space should roll and pitch like an invasion barge in a Channel storm, but Anne tried to explain to me that while there are no storms in Space (or so the philosophers opine) a much stranger phenomenon will occur. ‘The Cylinder will be beyond the clutches of the gravity of earth, Ben. The engines’ push will be brief – like the great thrust applied to a cannonball in the breach.’ She said no more, for now, of how that great thrust would be generated. ‘But after that the Cylinder, and all her contents, will fall freely between the worlds. And a crewman will bounce around inside this hull like a mouse in a hollow cannonball! It’s all to do with Newton’s calculations … Now can you see why there is carpet on the walls?’
I saw, and I was astonished anew.
That navigator’s table was an expensive affair, with a big compass set in its surface, and I saw fine-looking Harrison chronometers. Cupboards nearby were stocked with sextants and other equipment of that type, which the sailors use to measure the angles of the stars in the sky. ‘Nobody knows if a compass will work between the worlds,’ Anne said. ‘Or what meaning “north” or “south” may have! But the navigator will be able to track the curving path of the ship as she sails from earth to Mars and back again, by mapping the shifting positions of the stars – and indeed sun, moon, Mars, and earth itself.’
‘But why carry a navigation table at all?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It would be futile to spread canvas in the windless vacuum of Space – wouldn’t it? Then I cannot understand the good of all that patient charting and star-bothering if the ship cannot be controlled.’
‘Ah,’ she said, smiling. ‘A good question. And that is why this ship of reconnaissance has a gun deck.’
Now I learned that the cannon mounted amidships were not, after all, for fighting Martian men o’war, but for steering! The Cylinder would have no rudder. But to deflect her course the crew would fire a cannon shot, in the opposite way she was desired to turn, and the recoil would do the rest - I myself had seen the violence of recoil of a cannon fired in anger. Of course this was a rough and ready method of steering, for a cannon’s fire is scarce repeatable one ball to the next; but after such a shot you could take more measurements of the stars, and fire again, to tinker with your course in a secondary way. And thus the Cylinder would be steered to Mars and back, to the put-put of cannonballs fired off into the endless immensity of Space! In all these designs the architects of this strange mission were quite confident, it seemed.
The cupboards were well stocked with clothing and blankets and the like, but I did wonder how the crew would keep warm in Space, for everybody knows how cold it can be if you climb a high mountain. But Anne explained that the problem would be to keep cool, rather than hot; the sunlight, to which the Cylinder would be exposed continually, would be more intense than on the clearest summer day. There was however, an ingenious little heating system devised by Watt which ran on the combustion of oil; this at least would suffice to boil a kettle!
The galley, by the way, was a cleverly compact affair, and quite well stocked with meat and beans in sealed cans, and dried fruit that would keep, and such familiar comestibles as ship’s biscuits. The crew would be three, Anne said – and the stock of food was intended to support them for a journey that might last years!
Regarding the more delicate matter of what emerges daily from the other end of a human being, Anne showed me an ingenious closet fitted with valves and levers, which should suck one’s daily offering out into the vacuum of Space, without exposing tender flesh to that airless condition. I made a mental note to check the integrity of the gadget. With liquid waste the situation would be different. It was recognised that a water tank sufficient for the trip would fill the hull and beyond, and so there was an elaborate system of filters, of sand and fine cloths and other materials, that would enable the urine produced on Tuesday to be drunk again on the Wednesday! This was based on systems developed over the years by desperate miners stuck down the shafts by rock falls and the like. I admit I gagged at the thought, and even Anne, who never liked to show weakness, wrinkled her pretty nose at the idea. [This last detail is entirely the author’s invention. – A.C.] That business of the water, though, prompted me to think about the air that would be needed to keep that brave crew alive between the worlds.
She led me at last to the lowest deck of that copper hull, and we stood on the stout oak bulkhead. I saw three big brass bolts set on threads that penetrated the bulkhead, the bolts to be turned by twisting wheels. ‘And this,’ she said, ‘is the Cylinder’s greatest marvel of all – the secret of how she will be able to thrust herself out of the atmosphere. All the crew will have to do is turn these wheels.’
For this marvel we had to thank the restless brain of James Watt. It had been Watt’s suggestion to use the Phoebeans’ brute strength in mining. But he became intrigued as to how that great strength was generated, and to what further uses it cou
ld be put.
Anne said, ‘It’s well known, and first observed by Newton, that if a Phoebean gets too hot he soon ceases to function. Newton called it a “Calenture”, and it is profoundly useful in controlling the animals. It was Watt who first tried the obvious experiment of seeing what happens if you melt a Phoebean altogether.’ She grinned. ‘He blew up his laboratory, and nearly took himself with it! It seems obvious, Ben. The stuff of which Phoebeans are built is like ice, but it is of a more exotic variety - Watt and his peers call it anti-ice. The tremendous energy of a Phoebean is somehow stored in the anti-ice – as energy is stored in your own muscles. And when you melt the ice, all that energy is released, in a flash. It’s as well for Watt that he first experimented only on a tiny crab.’ She eyed me. ‘Perhaps you can see how this is relevant to the problem of firing the Cylinder into the air.’
I nodded, and glanced down uneasily at the wooden bulkhead. ‘There are Phoebeans down there.’
‘There will be, on the day of the launch. Clutches of young crabs will be loaded in, before they have a chance to grow. The crew will turn these wheels to drive a spring piston down onto the crabs, crushing them in a sort of funnel. Then a flintlock mechanism – Watt will give you the details – will cause an oil fire to blaze, and the anti-ice fragments will immediately melt. The detonation chamber is ingeniously shaped. The expanding gases will be thrust from a nozzle. The ship will be blown into the air -’
‘Like a Congreve rocket.’
‘Exactly that. The crew will be protected by the spring under this platform. It will last only seconds – but when it is done, the Cylinder will already be hurled beyond the air, and en route to Mars!’ She studied me. ‘You seem uneasy. It has all been tested, on smaller models – Watt is sure of his design.’
‘No doubt. But the wretched Phoebean chicks will not enjoy the experience.’
Again she took my hand. ‘I have suffered the same doubts, dear Ben. But my father says there is a sort of justice in using the Phoebeans’ own lethal energy agin them. There is much to be done to make the rest of this unwieldy vessel work – and little time. My father wants to launch in seven days.’
I thought that over. ‘On Boxing Day!’
‘The Cylinder must be lofted and away before the Ogre can get his hands on her, and use this technology for his own purposes. You see why you must help us, Ben. With Fulton gone, you are perhaps the only man in the world who knows how to build a vessel to submerge in the sea – and here we are striving to build a ship that can be submerged in Space!’ She released my hand and drew back. ‘Oh, we can keep you here by force, but you cannot be compelled to work. It is your choice.’
And I considered that choice. In the middle of the Napoleonic invasion, I was probably as safe here as anywhere in England, at least for now. And I could see at a glance that without my intervention Cuddy and his wretched crew would not survive the launch to see the top of the air, let alone to view the strange landscapes of Mars. Besides, I am an engineer; I enjoyed defining novel problems and solving them – and what more novel than this?
And here was Anne, staring at me almost hungrily.
I took her hands now. ‘If you will look on me forgivingly – if you will promise to speak to me daily – then I will stay, dear Miss Collingwood.’ And perhaps, a cunning side of my mind considered, I might win more than that if I impressed her.
But dear Anne suspected nothing of this base calculation. [Yes, I did. – A.C.] She flung herself at me and hugged me. ‘Oh, thank you, Ben! Thank you! I must tell my father!’
Chapter XIV
So began one of the stranger weeks of my life – though what is to follow will surely be much stranger still!
Encouraged by my tentative contract with Anne – a man must have a dream! – I threw myself with a will into the design of the Cylinder, and found myself profoundly dissatisfied, and demanded a list of changes before the shot could be fired, beginning with that ludicrous hatch. Watt’s concern was his precious anti-ice rocket chamber, and my area of expertise and his overlapped but little, and he gave me my head; but many of his juniors protested loud and long at my meddling. But I stood my ground, pointing out it was futile to ask my advice if it wasn’t to be acted upon, and I won all these petty wars.
I checked over the design of the water filtering system, such as it was; I wouldn’t have been keen to sup it myself, but simple calculations and measurements showed that it ought to be sufficient to provide potable water daily for three people, with a little excess for washing. The air that they should breathe, though, was a greater worry. It soon became apparent that virtually no thought had been given to this aspect of the design - perhaps because air cannot be seen we take its provision for granted, but to the engineer of a submersible boat it was the first concern. I immediately set the engineers to making copper bombs, simple spheres of compressed air, of the type I had carried on the Nautilus. But even as this work progressed I remained concerned about this issue, and some others, which seemed to me to challenge the viability of the whole enterprise.
While this went on Collingwood was kept informed with the progress of the war. There were daily dispatches from Newcastle, and more irregularly from Edinburgh to which the King, Pitt and his government had decamped. Wellesley had indeed made his stand at the ancient Roman fort at Housesteads on the Wall. Though Napoleon had a portion of his force bogged down trying to burn through Newcastle, he pitched his main effort at Housesteads, and over those dying days of the Year Five he threw his men again and again at Wellesley’s positions.
The French under the Corsican fight a brutal but effective method of war, with fast marches and dispositions, mass artillery fire, and then an advance of the infantry in blocks. But Wellesley had come up with a way of countering him. He spread his forces thin along his defensive positions, and you might think he was asking for trouble. But he had the advantage of the higher ground and the cover of the Wall and the ridge it stood on, and every musket in the line he commanded had a line of fire to a Frenchman in his block – every shot counted - whereas the French got in each other’s way, and only the front rank could fire back. Wellesley’s boys held their fire until they closed, and followed up with spirited bayonet charges. And after several days of destructive stalemate it seemed clear to all observers that Wellesley was holding his own, and was even daring to make forays against the French positions.
Meanwhile, according to a dispatch Collingwood showed me from Edinburgh, the French might have reached their high water mark in their American adventure too. An army of combined British, Canadian, American and Indian regiments was striking down the length of Lake Champlain, a deep trench between the mountains which runs a hundred miles south of Montreal towards Albany and New York State. A hothead of an American general called Jackson, who once fought the British aged thirteen, was making a name for himself as he ran the French positions ragged.
And in the American action – Collingwood himself read me out a passage, but I scarce believed it – the British were experimenting with the use of Phoebeans, big ones culled from the herds in the Canadian Arctic. He even showed me a newspaper sketch of a cavalry officer riding the back of a brute the size of a church, and he had a kind of harness of copper wires and electrical ‘cells’ through which he delivered shocks to the electrical effluvium which controls the beast, and hence goaded it to march this way and that! Well, I had seen something similar in the Channel. I had to puzzle out the meaning of the ‘cells’ – they are the invention of an Alessandro Volta, who has found that if you dip copper and zinc into brine you get a flow of electric – or somesuch!
‘Wellesley, you know, is keen to get his hands on such beasts,’ Collingwood confided to me. ‘He saw elephants used in war in India – deuced difficult to control, but deploy them right and they can spread panic. Give me my Elephants of Ice! – so he’s said. Well, once the French retreat starts, and if the winter cold lasts, he’s sure to have his way …’
He shared this with me in his rat
her chilly office in the Ulgham installation on the morning of Christmas Eve, only two days before the launch was due. He had called me here, along with Miss Caroline Herschel, who sat bundled up in a heap of blankets. I was glad of the meeting, for my technical concerns remained, and I felt the need to express them to the Admiral. But we shared mugs of hot tea, and sat in battered old armchairs before the fire in the hearth, and his dog slept contentedly at his feet, and old Cuddy seemed in contemplative mood.
‘There will be some, though,’ he said now, ‘who will question the morality of exploiting the Phoebeans in war, and indeed as beasts of burden. For they are self-evidently intelligent.’
‘Self-evident, is it?’ I asked.
‘They organised themselves for their first strike on Newcastle, during the Ice War – though some dispute that conclusion. And the naturalists in the Arctic have mapped very complex behaviours, with communities of them clustering around the great queens.’
‘There is also evidence,’ Caroline Herschel said in her grey Germanic, ‘of swarming and clustering in the concentration on Mars, though it is at the limit of visibility. And evidence, from an examination of astronomical records, that the Comet which delivered the first Phoebeans here in the year 1720 was not a random visitor, but may have been directed to make a close approach – presumably by Phoebean activity.’
Collingwood said, ‘They tell me it’s not an intelligence of our sort – or of a dog’s or cat’s or monkey’s. An individual Phoebean seems to be a dumb brute. It’s when they get together that the cleverness emerges, rather as ants in a hive, themselves stupid, are capable of great feats of organisation. It’s all rather exciting, philosophically, even if the Phoebeans pose a threat to us. We are not alone, under God; there are other minds than ours. But what sort of minds? Can we ever speak to them? What kind of heaven do they imagine?’
Newton's Aliens: Tales From the Anti-Ice Universe Page 15