The Technologists: A Novel

by Matthew Pearl

  “What are you talking about, Hall? About what happened in the harbor?” Marcus asked.

  “That’s old news! Something happened in the financial quarter, just this morning. Conny heard all about it.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Bob insisted to Marcus.

  “Who told you, Conny?” Marcus asked, walking up behind Whitney Conant and tapping his arm.

  “The old organ grinder passed by while I was out here having my smoke and blabbed to me,” responded Conant.

  “What happened precisely, Conny?” Marcus asked the southern student. “They had another fire down there?”

  “No, no, this was no fire, nothing so ordinary. Maurice said he didn’t see it, but that he heard the windows of the buildings suddenly came alive. That the most common piece of glass in the area became a deadly weapon. Well,” Conant added with a dry chuckle, probably realizing how his tale must have sounded when several classmates broke out into dismissive laughter, “you know these Papist organ grinders don’t have the finest command of the English language, and dwell on their superstitions.”

  “Can we make it to State Street on the way back, before physics laboratory?” Bob asked Marcus. “It’s almost one and a half o’clock now.”

  Marcus thought about it and agreed that they might.

  “Wait, fellows, I wouldn’t,” Conant interjected. “You know what President Rogers always says about being seen to be associated with anything harmful to the welfare of Boston.”

  Conny was right. Every time there was the occasional incident inside the Institute, when an exploding chemical or some other loud boom was overheard by some outsider, the newspapers printed a column about a “dangerous accident.” Then there had been the brief public outcry over Hammie’s infamous idea for a Steam Man. Since then, the authorities at the Institute had never failed to remind the students that when it came to scientific investigations, quiet and smart was better than clever and loud.

  “Perhaps it’s not the wisest idea at that,” Edwin stammered, then changed tactics when he saw Bob was unmoved. “Bob, you haven’t even had your dinner.”

  “Eddy, didn’t you hear Conny? The windows came alive!” Bob said with a chuckle. “Surely we cannot be deprived of seeing such a sight for ourselves, dinner or no dinner. I’m certain President Rogers would agree. No more old-womanish twaddle—we’re off!” When Bob Richards led you by the shoulder, there was no resisting.

  Bob, Marcus, and Edwin had no trouble finding the location of the incident. A mass of people crowded at the busy intersection of Court, Washington, and State streets. The police and two or three fire companies formed a barricade to keep people out. From the back of the crowd, they could hardly see a thing, a fact pointed out with satisfaction by Edwin. Unswayed, Bob kept pushing through the dense sea of onlookers, clearing a path as he went for Marcus and Edwin.

  Marcus tried asking a few of the spectators whether anyone had been injured, but they all seemed too busy trying to see over and around the nearest heads, tall hats, flowers, and bonnets to answer him.

  “I ’ear there were some kind of thick fumes in the air and then hundreds hurt in the blink of one eye!” one woman finally said to him.

  “First the harbor, now the very streets we walk on,” shouted someone in the crowd.

  At every turn, they were blocked from moving closer. Any available spot to stand was filled immediately, as if they were on the sideline of a parade. There were men, women, and children who were weeping, asking whether their relatives or friends who worked nearby were safe.

  “We better go back,” Edwin said. “This is all for naught, Bob, and a drearier scene I’ve never seen in Boston. We can’t get close enough to even see!”

  “Give a fellow a boost, will you, Mansfield,” Bob said, jumping up to reach the railing of a balcony jutting out from one of the older three-story brick buildings. Marcus stooped and let Bob push up with his heels against his strong shoulders. Then Bob heaved Marcus up with him. Edwin waved away their offer to join them. A sharp, acrid smell like rotted eggs and oranges floated on the breeze.

  Their vantage point revealed an immediate mystery. Almost every window in the buildings on both sides of the streets was missing.

  “What in the devil could shatter all those windows?” Bob asked. “Some kind of earthquake?”

  Marcus took off his hat for an unobstructed view. “You have your opera glass?” Bob fished it out of his coat pocket and handed it to him. “Look closer, Bob. They weren’t shattered. The windows in the buildings and the carriages and all the glass everywhere on the street somehow has been … liquefied and … dissolved, erased. The glass didn’t shatter—it disappeared.”

  “There’s no sign of any fire or flame that could have melted them.”

  “Do you smell that? Some kind of acid or chemical is still in the air.” Marcus paused, watching those who had been trampled in the panic and confusion as they were lifted from the ground or supported on the shoulders of rescuers.

  Bob’s face turned ashen gray. He took a few steps back and let Marcus stand in front of him on the balcony, watching a seemingly rigid object being lifted by two policemen out from the planks of a broken wagon. Marcus leaned forward as far as he dared and felt a quiver down his spine as he realized it was a woman, wrapped as though with another layer of skin in a weave of cracked glass. The college students exchanged glances but were speechless.

  The dead girl’s eyes remained wide open in her transparent tomb. It seemed, as they watched her lifted, that her stare implored them.

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Mansfield, give me back the glass.” Bob muttered something to himself as he peered through the lens.

  “What is it?”

  “That girl—I think. Yes, I’ve seen her before. Heavens! Chrissy, I think she’s called.”

  “How?”

  “You know sometimes I find myself in the theater, and wander my way to the third circle of seats, where, well, the friendlier sort of actresses and other young swans congregate to make fast acquaintances and a few extra pennies, sometimes selling apples or pencils, sometimes keeping a visitor from a lonely evening.”

  “She was one of them?”

  “I only knew her to give a greeting by name, but she seemed cheery enough company. Not pretty, really, something far better. Bless her! What kind of fate for a dewy-cheeked girl! What’s happening?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Bob lowered the opera glass, then took a breath. “Nothing, Mansfield. I thought … My nerves are out of tune. I don’t know—it was as though everything blurred together for a moment.”

  “Let me see that again.” Bob handed Marcus the small binoculars. “There!” The top of one of the lenses had become discolored. “Whatever caused this, there’s residue still in the air.”

  When Bob and Marcus had climbed down to the street, they found a change in the spectators. General curiosity and annoyance had been overtaken by quick boiling anger, fast turning the crowd into a mob.

  “Stay back,” Marcus said, holding Edwin’s arm so he wouldn’t be trampled. “Edwin, what do you make of this?” He passed him the opera glass.

  Edwin studied the lens, bringing it close to his face, then looking through it from the other side. “Nothing, Marcus. I can make nothing of it! Our age has an engine but no engineer,” he said, dropping into a whisper.

  “What?”

  “Emerson,” explained Edwin, closing his eyes tightly. “In a lecture I heard, he said our age has an engine but no engineer. What if he’s right, Marcus? What if it’s all unraveling around us? The crowd will tear us apart.”

  “They don’t want us, Edwin,” Marcus said. “Look.”

  The mob was heading for the policemen who blocked the way to the devastation. People began to throw bricks and rocks and to light fires in the middle of the street.

  “This is Sergeant Lemuel Carlton speaking,” shouted a flustered man on horseback, who moved out in front with a speaking trump
et. “You must move away immediately, or my men will be forced to make arrests! You needn’t be afraid. Boston is still as safe a place as any the world over!”

  IX

  The View from Number 18

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, across the river, at Number 18, Stoughton Hall, William Blaikie sipped his tea, puckered his lips, then tapped on the table for the college waiter.

  “I changed my mind,” he said, handing off the cup. “I no longer wish any tea.” As the waiter took the cup away, Blaikie glanced wearily around and said, “Ten. Is that all?”

  “Many of the fellows are studying for examinations, Will,” answered one of the other collegians present.

  “Ten men? Are there so many wretched digs in this school that we cannot manage more at a meeting of the Christian Brethren?”

  “Others are frightened about what happened in the city yesterday. Perhaps we should start the meeting for those who are here,” suggested a soft-spoken junior.

  Blaikie ignored this. “Ten men. No wonder a weakling from Tech could think he’d get the better of a Harvard man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A Christian university like Harvard should be able to muster better class feeling than this, that’s what. We are declining, I say, in moral and intellectual strength. Some of our own professors teach disgusting and degrading literature, putting alien languages on the tongues of decent young men. The honor of our school is in danger. That is why an ugly duckling like the Institute of Technology—the ugliest duckling ever seen—would have temerity enough to even put up a building in Boston and dare call it a college, when it is nothing more than a resort of weaklings, which should be duly subordinated.”

  “Blaikie, pardon me,” said the junior, “but do you not think we should begin the meeting with our scheduled business?”

  “Am I made of glass? Is my skin like water?” Blaikie asked dramatically. “I know you hope to be president of the society when I am graduated, but at the moment that title is mine. You do see me sitting here? Then you would not mind postponing your electioneering until after June. Too many cooks, you know. Pardon me if I happen to personally believe, with all my soul, that our commonwealth’s colleges should turn out men—not machines.”

  “Pardon me once again, Blaikie,” the junior replied, just as mildly. “I simply do not think it very Christian to speak poorly of another institution, however odd it might be, out of some personal spite.”

  Blaikie rose as if to strike him across the face. When the junior stared back at him, the society president took a long breath and said, “So let us begin, shall we, gentlemen? I would like to add to our agenda a motion that college studies do not afford an excuse for nonattendance of a meeting of the Christian Brethren. We shall also discuss a request from Professor Agassiz of the scientific department to assist in refuting, using Christian principles, the increasing support of Darwin’s theories among certain so-called intellectuals in Boston. Finally, if time permits this morning, we will consider two other proposals—”

  Blaikie stopped in midsentence, his gaze fixed past his flock and out the window. The Brethren rose to discover for themselves what had arrested their leader’s attention. Down below in the college yard, the shiny buttons and blue uniform of a Boston policeman caught the sunlight. The representative of the law was marching through the middle of campus, followed by a stout man who had the self-important air of a typical politician and, in fact, was a politician, and another man whose bulky frame required him to slow his steps every few moments to draw a handkerchief across his brow, despite the chill in the air. The more knowledgeable among those watching from all four stories of Stoughton Hall, and from behind the handsome edifice of the library housing nearly one hundred thousand volumes, and from within the university’s busy administrative offices, recognized the stout man as Representative Cyrus Hale of the Massachusetts state legislature. Some of the students who had had the misfortune of being dragged into the police station after a night of drinking in Boston’s less gentle neighborhoods ruefully recognized Sergeant Carlton, the blue-garbed officer, as well as his superior, Chief of Police John Kurtz.

  Dozens of curious watchers wished they could be invisible among the small party on their expedition and know what exciting business had brought them onto the university grounds.

  Leaving behind the curious gazes, the three visitors followed a less traveled path to the street opposite Divinity Hall and into the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy building, where they inquired after its director and were pointed to the floor below. On every shelf of the cellar, huge glass jars displayed exotic fish, mollusks, and sea urchins afloat in yellow alcohol. The air smelled of some ancient sea.

  “Professor?” called the politician, his inquiry echoing ahead through the chamber. “Professor Agassiz? It is Cyrus Hale here.”

  There was the sound of a crash. Among the barrels and jars, the powerful figure of Harvard’s chief scientist came into view, puffing a cigar. He was shaking his head, sweeping his long chestnut-gray locks behind his coat collar. His neck and feet seemed too small to support his grand head and chest. He was scolding a young man who was collecting glass from the floor.

  “But it slipped from my hands, Professor,” the student insisted.

  “Mr. Danner, you are completely uneducated! Some people perhaps now consider you a bright young man. But when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you at all, what they say will be: ‘That Danner, oh, yes, I know him. He used to be a very bright young man!’ ” Agassiz turned and nodded at the Speaker of the House without any formal greeting and without acknowledging the two men from the Boston Police.

  “Hush, hold this!” he said in his thick Germanic accent, handing Hale a dead grasshopper. “Danner knocked over the poor fellow’s jar. In natural history, it is not enough for a student to know how to study specimens. You must know how to handle them. I cannot impart this. That is my dilemma. I must teach and yet give no information. I must, in short, to all intents and purposes, be as ignorant as that boy over there picking up glass shards. Hale, did you hear what happened?” he asked, his voice rising with excitement. “There was an arson fire at the stables of the racetrack last week. A dozen horses dead—at least, they say. What a pity.”

  “It is a terrible loss of property,” Hale said, nodding.

  “Horrible!” Agassiz exclaimed with emotion. “Poor noble animals! However,” he said brightly, “for years I have wished to compare the skeletons of Thoroughbred horses to those of the usual kind. I have sent one of my assistants there.”

  “Why, he shall be tarred and feathered for asking such a thing only days after a fire,” Hale said.

  Agassiz threw up his large, expressive hands. “Science is not always a safe pursuit, Cyrus! I venture to bet my student shall not return without a skeleton, even if pursued the whole way by a mob of angry jockeys. Are these gentlemen here to talk with me?”

  Hale nodded.

  “Fine, fine. I shall take you upstairs, and I will try to make a guess of the subject along the way.”

  Climbing the stairs, as Agassiz sang the second half of an old French song, they passed through several rooms of young men bent over magnifying glasses as they sorted through plant specimens. Reaching his lecture room, Agassiz proudly showed them cases filled with specimens of insects and fossils. The police chief winced as he studied a hideous dead insect with fiery red eyes.

  “Did you know there are more than ten thousand fly species living among us?” Agassiz advised, upon seeing the officer’s interest. Finally he sat down after his guests had chosen their chairs. “My guess is you wish to speak of my proposal to fund an addition to the museum.”

  “This is something else, I’m afraid, my dear Agassiz,” Hale said. “You have heard the tidings about the terrible incidents of late around Boston.”

  The light in Agassiz’s bright eyes dimmed, his interest evaporating. “Of course—I suppose nobody has been immune from hearing of it.”

  “The scien
tific knowledge needed to comprehend what has transpired is vast, and beyond the police. Yesterday afternoon, after the event that came to pass in the business district, we voted to pass an emergency measure in the legislature to engage a consultant for the police department. Nobody, even the municipal experts, has been able to properly investigate what happened. We wish the consultant to be you. Will you do it, Professor?”

  “Me? Are you not aware how occupied I am currently with the museum, Hale?”

  Chief Kurtz broke in. “Sergeant Carlton has been leaving notes for you, Professor, over the last week, which he says you have not answered. These are matters of life and death, happening practically outside your window!”

  “Do you not think what we do here is important, is life and death, even if it is not written about in the newspapers?” Agassiz demanded, his round face turning a dull crimson. “How sad for a naturalist to grow old. I see so much to be done that I can never complete. Look, look, look—in that glass case behind you. Yes. See what you can make of it. Those are Jurassic cephalopods. Soon we will outrun even the best museums of Europe.”

  “Professor, I speak of life right here in Boston yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” Hale said firmly. “You have seen these? God save the commonwealth!”

  He slid a pile of newspaper cuttings across the table.

  TALES OF TERROR IN THE HARBOR AND STREETS

  —MORE INJURED RECOVERED—

  Women and Some Men Faint of Fright as Countless Windows Spontaneously Dissolve—Fears of Plot out of New York to Ruin Boston Commerce—Damage to Shipping, Brokerage &c.—Further Particulars of the State Street Catastrophe.

  Is Technology a Threat to Our Peace?

  APPARENT SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS WREAK DESTRUCTION ACROSS BOSTON.

  Amid fears of more to come, droves of citizens attempt to flee the city limits at the same time, one bridge collapsing from excessive weight and injuring three.