Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02

by Lord Kelvin's Machine

  In a cloth bag beside him wriggled a dozen snakes, collected from the high grass beyond the manor house. In a wire-screen cage beneath the snakes was a score of mice, hungry, as were the snakes, from days of neglect. A leather bellows dangled from his belt, and a hooded lantern from his right hand. No one else was on the meadow.

  The Royal Academy had been glad to be quit of Ignacio Narbondo, who had taken ship for Oslo to effect his preposterous machinations. That was the rumor around Lord Kelvin's barn. The Academy would reduce his threats to drivel now that the machine was built. Why Narbondo hadn't followed through with his plan to alert the press no one could say, but it seemed to Secretary Parsons to be evidence that his threats were mere bluff. And that crackpot St. Ives had given up, too, thank God. All this had lightened the atmosphere considerably. A sort of holiday air had sprung up around what had been a business fraught with suspicion and doubt. Now the Academy was free to act without impediment . . .

  Kraken bent out from under the willows and set out across the meadow carrying his bundles. It would do no good to run. He was too old to be cutting capers on a meadow in the dead of night, and if he tripped and dropped his mice or knocked his lantern against a stone, his plan would be foiled utterly. In an hour both the moon and the comet would have appeared on the horizon and the meadow would be bathed in light. If he was sensible, he'd be asleep in his bed by then.

  The dark bulk of the barn loomed before him, the pale stones of its foundation contrasting with the weathered oak battens above. Kraken ducked along the wall toward a tiny mul-lioned window beneath which extended the last six inches of the final section of brass pipe—the very pipe that Kraken himself had wrestled through a hole angered into the barn wall on that first day he'd helped Lord Kelvin align the things.

  What, exactly, the pipe was intended to accomplish, Kraken couldn't say, but somehow it was the focal point of the workings of the device. Beyond, some twenty feet from the barn and elevated on a stone slab, sat a black monolith, smooth as polished marble. Kraken had been amazed when, late the previous afternoon, Lord Kelvin had flung a ball peen hammer end over end at the monolith, and the collected workmen and scientists had gasped in wonder when the hammer had been soundlessly reflected with such force that it had sailed out of sight in the general direction of York. That the hammer had fallen to earth again, not a man of them could say. The reversal of the poles was to be accomplished, then, by emanating toward this monolith the collected magnetic rays developed in

  Lord Kelvin's machine, thus both exciting and deflecting them in a circuitous pattern, and sending them off, as it were, astride a penny whirligig. It was too much for Kraken to fathom, but Lord Kelvin and his peers were the giants of electricity and mechanics. A job like this had been child's play to them. Their heads weren't like the heads of other men.

  Kraken squinted through the darkness at the monolith, doubly black against the purple of the starry night sky, and wondered at the remarkable perspicacity of great scientists. Here sat the impossible machine, primed for acceleration on the morrow. Could Kraken, a man of admittedly low intellect, scuttle the marvelous device? Kraken shook his head, suddenly full of doubt. He had been entrusted with little else than the material salvation of humanity . . . Well, Kraken was just a small man with a small way of doing things. He had seen low times in his life, had mucked through sewers with murderers, and so he would have to trust to low means here. That was the best he could do.

  He quit breathing and cocked an ear. Nothing but silence and the distant hooting of an owl greeted him on the night air. He untied the bellows from his belt and shook them by his ear. Grain and broken biscuits rattled within. He shoved the mouth of the bellows into the end of the brass tube and pumped furiously, listening to the debris clatter away, down the tilted pipe. Long after the last of the grain had been blown clear of the bellows, Kraken continued to manipulate his instrument, desperate to send the bulk of it deep into the bowels of the apparatus. Haste would avail him nothing here.

  Finally satisfied, he tied the bellows once again to his belt and picked up the mouse cage. The beasts were tumultuous with excitement, stimulated, perhaps, by the evening constitutional, or sensing somehow that they were on the brink of an adventure of powerful magnitude. Kraken pressed the cage front against the end of the tube and pulled open its little door. The mice scurried around in apparent amazement, casting wild glances here and there, curious about a heap of shredded newspaper or the pink ear of a neighbor. Then, one by one, they filed away down the tube like cattle down a hill, sniffing the air, intent suddenly on biscuits and grain.

  The snakes were a comparatively easy case. A round dozen of the beasts slithered away down the tube in the wake of the mice, anxious to be quit of their sack. Kraken wondered if he hadn't ought to wad the sack up and shove it into the tube, too, in order to make absolutely sure that the beasts remained trapped inside. But the dangers of doing that were manifold. Lord Kelvin or some particularly watchful guard might easily discover the stopper before Kraken had a chance to remove it. They mustn't, said St. Ives, discover that the sabotage had been the work of men—thus the mice and snakes. It might easily seem that the natural residents of the barn had merely taken up lodgings there, and thus the hand of Langdon St. Ives would go undetected.

  It was very nearly within the hour that Bill Kraken climbed into bed. But his dreams were filled that night with visions of mice and snakes dribbling from the end of the tube and racing away into the darkness, having consumed the grain and leaving nothing behind sufficient to foul the workings of the dread machine. What could he do, though, save trust to providence? The shame of his failure—if failure it should be—would likely be as nothing next to the horrors that would beset them after Lord Kelvin's success. God bless the man, thought Kraken philosophically. He pictured the aging lord, laboring night and day to complete his engine, certain that he was contributing his greatest gift yet to humankind. His disappointment would be monumental. It seemed almost worth the promised trouble to let the poor man have a try at it. But that, sadly, wouldn't do. The world was certainly a sorrowful and contradictory place.

  THE BRIGHT APRIL weathcr had turned stormy and dark by the time St. Ives and Hasbro had chuffed into Dover, and the North Sea was a tumult of wind-tossed waves and driving rain. St. Ives huddled now aboard the Ostende ferry, out of the rain beneath an overhanging deck ledge and wrapped in an oilcloth, legs spread to counter the heaving swell. His pipe burned like a chimney, and as he peered out at the roiling black of the heavens, equally cloudy thoughts drew his eyes into a squint and made him oblivious to the cold and wet. Had this sudden turn of arctic weather anything to do with the experimentation of the Royal Academy? Had they effected the reversal of the poles prematurely and driven the weather suddenly mad? Had Kraken failed? He watched a gray swell loom overhead, threatening to slam the ferry apart, only to sink suddenly into nothing as if having changed its mind, and then tower up once again overhead, sheets of flying foam torn from its crest and rendered into spindrift by the wind.

  His plans seemed to be fast going wrong. The dirigible he had counted upon for transport had been "inoperable." The fate of the earth itself hung in the balance, and the filthy dirigible was "inoperable." They would all be inoperable by the end of the week. Jack Owlesby had stayed on in Ramsgate where a crew of nitwits fiddled with the craft, and so yet another variable, as the mathematician would say, had been cast into the muddled stew. Could the dirigible be made operable in time? Would Jack, along with the flea-brained pilot, find them in the cold wastes of arctic Norway? It didn't bear thinking about. One thing at a time, St. Ives reminded himself. They had left Jack with a handshake and a compass and had raced south intending to follow Narbondo overland, trusting to Jack to take care of himself.

  But where was Ignacio Narbondo? He must have set sail from Dover with Hargreaves hours earlier, apparently under a false name—except that the ticket agent could find no record of his having boarded the Ostende ferry. St. Ives had descr
ibed him vividly: the hump, the tangle of oily hair, the cloak. No one could remember having seen him board. He might have got on unseen in the early morning, of course . . .

  It was conceivable, just barely, that St. Ives had made a monumental error, or that Narbondo had tricked the lot of them, had been one up on them all along. He might at that moment be bound, say, for Reykjavik, intent on working his deviltry on the volcanic wastes of the interior of Iceland. He might be sitting in a comfortable chair in London, laughing into his hat. What would St. Ives do then? Keep going, like a windup tin soldier on the march. He could imagine himself simply ambling away into Scandinavian forests, circling aimlessly through the trees like a dying reindeer.

  But then in Ostende the rain let up and the wind fell off, and the solid ground beneath his feet once again lent him a steadiness of purpose. In the cold station, a woman stirred a caldron of mussels, dumping in handfuls of shallots and lumps of butter. Aromatic steam swirled out of the iron pot in such a way as to make St. Ives light-headed. "Mussels and beer," he said to Hasbro, "would revive a body."

  "That they would, sir. And a loaf of bread, I might add, to provide bulk."

  "A sound suggestion," said St. Ives, striding toward the woman and removing his hat. He Hked the look of her immediately. She was stooped and heavy and wore a dress like a tent, and it seemed as if all the comets in the starry heavens couldn't knock her off her pins. She dumped mussels, black and dripping, into a cleverly folded newspaper basket, heaping up the shells until they threatened to cascade to the floor. She winked at St. Ives, fished an enormous mussel from the pot, slid her thumbs into the hiatus of its open shell, and in a single swift movement pulled the mollusk open, shoved one of her thumbs under the orange flesh, and flipped the morsel into her open mouth. "Some don't chew them," she said, speaking English, "but I do. What's the use of eating at all if you don't chew them? Might as well swallow a toad."

  "Indubitably," said St. Ives, happy enough to make small talk. "It's the same way with oysters. I never could stand simply to allow the creatures to slide down my throat. I fly in the face of custom there."

  "Aye," she said. "Can you imagine a man's stomach, full of beasts such as these, whole, mind you, and sloshin' like smelts in a bucket?" She dipped again into the caldron, picked out another mussel, and ate it with relish, then grimaced and rooted in her mouth with a finger. "Mussel pearl," she said, holding up between thumb and forefinger a tiny opalescent sphere twice the size of a pinhead. She slid open a little drawer in the cart on which sat the caldron of mussels, and dropped the pearl in among what must have been thousands of the tiny orbs. "Can't stand debris," she said, grimacing.

  The entire display rather took the edge off St. Ives's appetite, and the heap of mussels in his basket, reclining beneath a coating of congealing butter and bits of garlic and shallot, began to remind him of certain unfortunate suppers he'd consumed at the Bayswater Club. He grinned weakly at the woman and looked around at the hurrying crowds, wondering if he and Hasbro hadn't ought to join them.

  "Man in here this afternoon ate one shell and all," she said, shaking her head. "Imagine the debris involved. Must have given his throat bones some trouble, I daresay."

  "Shell and all?" asked St. Ives.

  "That's the exact case. Crunched away at the thing like it was a marzipan crust, didn't he? Then he took another, chewed it up about halfway, saw what he was about, and spit the filthy thing against the wall there. You can see bits of it still, can't you, despite the birds swarming round. There's the smear of it against the stones. Do you see it there?—bit of brown paste is all it amounts to now."

  St. Ives stared at the woman. "Big man?"

  "Who?"

  "This fellow who ate the shells. Big, was he, and with a beard? Seemed ready to fly into a rage?"

  "That's your man, gents. Cursed vilely, he did, but not at the shells. It was at the poor birds, wasn't it, when they come round to eat up what your man spit onto the wall there. You can see it there, can't you? I never ..."

  "Was he in the company of a hunchback?"

  "Aye," said the woman, giving her pot a perfunctory stirring. ' 'Greasy little man with a grin. Seemed to think the world is a lark. But it ain't no lark, gentlemen. Here you've been, wasting my time this quarter hour, and not another living soul has bought a shell. You've frightened the lot of them off, is what I think, and you haven't paid me a penny.'' She glowered at St. Ives, then glowered at Hasbro.

  "What time this afternoon?" asked St. Ives.

  "Three hours past, say, or four. Might have been five. Or less."

  "Thank you." St. Ives reached into his pocket for a coin. He dumped a half crown into her outstretched hand and left her blinking, he and Hasbro racing through the terminal toward the distant exit, each of them clutching a bag in one hand and a paper satchel of mussels in the other. The streets were wet outside, but the clouds were broken overhead and taking flight in the gray dusk, and the wind had simmered down to a billowy breeze. A bent man shambled past in trousers meant for a behemoth, clutching at a buttonless coat.

  St. Ives thrust his mussels at the man, meaning to do him a good turn, but his gesture was mistaken. The man cast him a look of mingled surprise and loathing, fetching the basket a swipe with his hand that sent the entire affair into the gutter. St. Ives hurried on without a word, marveling at misunderstood humanity and at how little space existed between apparent madness and the best of intentions.

  In a half hour they were aboard a train once again, in a sleeping car bound for Amsterdam, Hamburg, and finally, to Hj0rring, where on the Denmark ferry they'd once again set sail across the North Sea, up the Oslofjord into Norway.

  St. Ives was determined to remain awake, to have a look at the comet when it sailed in over the horizon sometime after midnight. But the sleepless nights he had spent in the observatory and the long hours of travel since had worn him thin, and after a tolerable meal in the dining car, and what might likely turn out to be, on the morrow, a regrettable lot of brandy, he dropped away at once into a deep sleep, and the comet rose in the sky and fell again without him, slanting past the captive earth.

  In Oslo Hargreaves had beaten a man half senseless with the man's own cane. In Trondheim, two hours before the arrival of St. Ives and Hasbro on the express, he had run mad and threatened to explode a greengrocer's cart, kicking the spokes out of one of the wheels before Narbondo had hauled him away and explained to the authorities that his companion was a lunatic bound for a sanitorium in Narvik.

  St. Ives itched to be after them, but here he sat, becalmed in a small brick railway station. He stared impatiently out the window at the nearly empty station. A delay of a minute seemed an eternity, and each sighing release of steam from the waiting train carried upon it the suggestion of the fmal, fateful explosion. Hasbro, St. Ives could see, was equally uneasy at their motionless state, for he sat hunched forward on his seat as if trying to compel the train into flight. Finally, amid tooting and whooshing and three false starts, they were away again, St. Ives praying that the engineer had understood his translated request that they make an unscheduled stop on the deserted tundra adjacent to Mount Hjarstaad. Surely he would; he had accepted the little bag of assorted coffee tablets readily enough. What could he have understood them to be but payment?

  Darkness had long since fallen, and with it had fled the last of the scattered rain showers. Ragged clouds pursued by arctic wind capered across the sky, and the stars shone thick and bright between. The train developed steam after puffing along lazily up a steepening grade, and within a score of minutes was hurtling through the mountainous countryside.

  St. Ives was gripped once more with the excitement and peril of the chase. He removed his pocket watch at intervals, putting it back without so much as glancing at it, then loosening his already-loosened collar, peering out across the rocky landscape at the distant swerve of track ahead when the train lurched into a curve, as if the engine they pursued must surely be visible a half mile farther on.


  The slow labored climb of steep hills was almost instantly maddening and filled him again with the fear that their efforts would prove futile, that from the vantage point of the next peak they would witness the detonation of half of Scandinavia: crumbling mountainsides, hurtling rocks. But then they would creep, finally, to another summit void of trees, where the track was wafered onto ledges along unimaginable precipices. And the train would plunge away again in a startling rush of steam and clatter.

  They thundered through shrieking tunnels, the starry sky going momentarily black and then reappearing in an instant only to be dashed again into darkness. And when the train burst each time into the cold Norwegian night, both St. Ives and Hasbro were pressed against the window, peering skyward, relieved to see the last scattered clouds fleeing before the wind. Then all at once, as if waved into existence by a magic wand, the lights of the aurora borealis swept across the sky in lacey showers of green and red and blue, like a semitransparent Christmas tapestry hung across the wash of stars.

  "Yes!" cried St. Ives, leaping to his feet and nearly pitching into the aisle as they rushed howling into another tunnel. "He's done it! Kraken has done it!"

  "Indeed, sir?"

  "Absolutely," said St. Ives, his voice animated. "Without the shadow of a doubt. The northern lights, my good fellow, are a consequence of the earth's electromagnetic field. It's a simple matter—no field, no lights. Had Lord Kelvin's machine done its work, the display you see before us would have been postponed for heaven knows how many woeful years. But here it is, isn't it? Good old Bill!" And on this last cheerful note, they emerged once again into the aurora-lit night, hurtling along beside a broad cataract that tumbled down through a boulder-strewn gorge.

  Another hour's worth of tunnels, however, began to make it seem finally as if there were no end to their journey, as if, perhaps, their train labored around and around a clever circular track, that they had been monumentally hoaxed one last fateful time by Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. Then, in an effort of steam, the train crested yet another treeless summit, and away to the west, far below them, moonlight shimmered on the rippled surface of a fjord, stretching out to the distant Norwegian Sea. Tumbling down out of the rocky precipices to their right rushed the wild river they had followed for what seemed an age, the torrent wrapping round the edge of Mount Hjarstaad and disappearing into shadow where it cascaded, finally, into the vast emptiness of an abyss. A trestle spanned the cataract and gave out onto a tundra-covered plain, scattered with the angular moon shadows of tilted stones.