The Technologists: A Novel

by Matthew Pearl

  “Quickly!” Agnes’s voice warned from outside in the corridor.

  Before he could exit, the doctor entered with a purposeful march to the bed. “You,” he addressed Marcus. “What are you doing in here?”

  His surprised expression seemed to carry no recognition from the previous day, for which Marcus was grateful. But he still had to say something in response. He opened his mouth but was interrupted before he could speak.

  “There you are,” broke in another voice. It was Agnes, showing a frown in the doorway. “Boy, have you fetched those clean sponges yet to bring along in the carriage for the long drive? Go on, now.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “And make haste for once,” she added, with a sparkle of mischief in her eye.

  Marcus bowed his head slightly to the doctor and hurried out of the room. After he waited a few minutes, Agnes met him by the servants’ entrance in the back of the mansion.

  “Well?”

  He shook his head sadly. “It was as you said. I do not think he understood at all.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Mansfield. What will you do now?”

  “I do not know. I see now how fortunate it was that Professor Eliot sent me to him when he did, or I am certain Runkle and Tobey would have disposed of his materials altogether.”

  “Fortunate!” She turned on him with a questioning expression.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I believe you are confused, Mr. Mansfield.”

  “No, I do not think so.”

  “Indeed you are! It was Professor Rogers who sent a note to Professor Eliot asking that you come to him before class. I believe he was already feeling quite ill at the time. His hand was terribly unsteady as he wrote.”

  Marcus was stunned. “He asked me to come? Are you certain?”

  “Quite! He even marked it ‘urgent.’ I handed the note to the messenger myself to be brought to the Institute. Rogers was waiting for you.”

  XIV

  Mind and Hand

  “THREE CHEERS FOR TECHNOLOGY CLASS OF 1868!” Bob called out. “Some class feeling for once, fellows, please?” he asked after a sputtering response.

  The players were stripping down to thin cotton shirts with turned-down collars and narrow cream trousers, leather belts circling their waists.

  It was afternoon break, and Bob was arranging the football game in the empty fields around the college building. Some Tech students preferred to lounge, doze, or continue studying inside, but with eight hours of sitting in classrooms and laboratories, six days a week, there were others who relished any chances for physical activity outdoors.

  As the game got started, Marcus kept pace alongside Bob. “Bob, I’ve been trying all day to find a minute to speak to you alone.”

  “Over here!” Bob waved a teammate for the ball. “Rats. Are you blokes blind?”

  “Bob, please!”

  Bob ran past him. “We’re in the middle of a game now, Mansfield! Can’t it wait?”

  “It’s important.”

  “You were the one to disappear this morning. And I couldn’t find that little tigress anywhere when I woke up on the chair. I hope Mrs. Page didn’t catch her leaving. Do you hear that?”

  “What?” said Marcus, keeping up as they crossed the field.

  “There! I heard it again, the sounds of melting hearts,” he said. “Shall we cause some trouble?”

  “Could I prevent it if I said no?”

  “No,” Bob replied thoughtfully, “I suppose not!”

  There was no mistaking the sounds from the Notre Dame Academy on Berkeley Street as they moved closer. The ball came to Marcus and he kicked it forward until he was close enough to propel it over the high fence that marked the boundary of the Catholic academy for young women.

  During free hour at the academy the young ladies, age seventeen years old down to six, would be out in the gardens strolling and chatting in the sun. A sensible plan would have sent one or two men over the fence to retrieve a ball. Instead, a column of six, then seven, now eight, climbed in pursuit.

  Bob started to follow, but Marcus held him back by the sleeve.

  “What’s the idea, Mansfield?” He tried to shake him off.

  “Bob, listen to what I have to say. I went to see Rogers’s maid this morning, the girl called Agnes. She said that Rogers had told Eliot to send me to Temple Place the morning he collapsed.”

  Bob stopped to consider this. “That would explain Eliot’s hurry for you to go there, and his annoyance, since we walked in late to class. He was concerned with being reprimanded himself. But why would Rogers send for you just then?”

  “I don’t know. Judging from the fact that Rogers instructed Eliot to do it directly, and had those materials together on his desk, I think Rogers knew he was growing weaker again. Bob, I think he was going to ask for my help!”

  “Why? Why you, I mean, Mansfield?”

  “He noticed me during the faculty meeting. He knew I thought something should be done. He could read it in my eyes.”

  “Well, speak with him, then.”

  “He is in no condition, and Mrs. Rogers is taking him to Philadelphia now and will not permit any Institute business! If only I had reached Rogers a few minutes earlier. If only I had not been delayed by Miss Swallow, or by walking instead of taking the cars.”

  “A pity! All of it. Come on, no more time to waste.” He started to run for the fence, but Marcus ran ahead and blocked him. “Mansfield, those lovelies are waiting for me,” Bob protested, trying to shove him aside. “You know how they applaud when I stand on my head.”

  “You said last night that this could prove to be the scientific study of a lifetime.”

  Bob laughed. “You know it was the liquor speaking!”

  “Well, you’re sober enough now!” replied Marcus, his frustration rising. “If we can discover who and what caused these incidents, we demonstrate once and for all to the world that the kind of science the Institute teaches helps society, just as Rogers wanted. We can protect Boston and ensure the Institute’s future at the same time.”

  Bob shook his head and became uncharacteristically serious. “There are adventures and there are adventures, Mansfield. There are experiments and there are experiments.”

  “Please, Bob. Look what’s happening before your eyes. The city fears what we do here too much to ask the Institute for help. The Institute is too anxious about the public perception of us to volunteer it. So now we wait for Professor Agassiz, a man who is a brilliant practitioner of every type of tired science we seek to make obsolete, to stumble his way to a solution? Someone here has to do something. I’ll need your help. Nobody knows Boston as well as you, not to mention metals and geology.”

  “You would put your entire future in jeopardy! Would you do that for Rogers? Maybe he did not want to ask you to do this at all. Maybe he planned to ask you to repaint his library.”

  “It matters not even if that is so. This is our institute. Not just President Rogers’s and Professor Runkle’s but mine, yours, Edwin’s, even that foolscap Tilden’s. We were here at the beginning, and we are here now. It’s something that Frank said to me when we toured the machine shop. I am still here, Bob. Four years later, I’m about to be graduated. Nobody would have expected that.”

  “What would you have us do?”

  “If I understand them correctly, Rogers’s notes detail how the maintenance of compasses corrects for the alternations in magnetic value from the metals used in the construction of ships. I think I can get some metals right from the foundry at the locomotive works and we can use the new machines upstairs in the metallurgy room to separate them by their degrees of magnetism. We’ll need to secure a variety of compasses to test. We could do this.”

  “Or we could fail. Have you thought of that yet? Fail the Institute, fail Boston,” Bob said, his mind far away. “That actress, her glare, it lives in my head at all times, Mansfield, I see her everywhere I turn. I feel an awful guilt. I thought that girl last night w
ould help me forget her, but she began to look more and more like her in my eyes. Don’t even think of her name, I say to myself. See, you’ve forgotten already, because it’s not your business! Then, I think: Chrissy. Hang the rest of the world, I say, but for once can’t you even follow your own counsel? Now think, if I had tried to stop that, and could not, how much worse it would sting?”

  “More people could die.”

  “Your knot is not screwed on right at the moment.”

  “That’s what Tilden said to me.”

  “Mansfield, have you thought about what can happen if you’re found out?” Bob pressed, suddenly agitated. “Why, I’d have to take Runkle’s mathematics class again to be able to count the number of violations. Arranging unauthorized experiments, defying a college-wide resolution. Listen to me—I’m beginning to sound like Hall.”

  Bob’s voice was clear and resonant, but it did not overtake the low, simple plea of desperation Marcus still heard in his ears: Help me, Mansfield.

  “It is too big for you, for any of us.” Bob kept trying. “You’re talking about building castles in the air, but this is no college ruse!”

  Then, his winsome smile restored, he ran backward toward the girls’ school, waving for Marcus to follow. “Mansfield, enough of all this. We’re seniors, we have our whole lives to be occupied but only a few minutes before the nuns call for reinforcements!”

  Marcus took his time walking back to the Institute. He stood in the front hall looking up at the Institute seal. The emblem, a more refined version of Rogers’s sketch, depicted a laborer in workclothes, with a hammer and anvil, along with a scholar in a gown, studying a book. Underneath the pair of men was the Institute motto. Mens et Manus: Mind and Hand. As a sophomore, he used to stop and stare at the freshly painted seal, proud that he was in a building with its own emblem. These days were so hurried, he could not remember the last time he even noticed it.

  “Mens et Manus.”

  He thought he heard the hushed words echo up from the chatter of his classmates heading toward classes. He turned, but found no sign that his classmates were thinking of anything more than their latest adventures with the Notre Dame schoolgirls. Then he joined the student stampede into a laboratory, as though everything were as it had been before.

  XV

  The Police Chief of Smith Prison

  Three hundred soldiers from the battlefield hospital are told the prison to which they are being taken is spacious and comfortable, and will be a great relief from their marching and fighting. But it is too dark to see much outside on the night of their arrival at Smith Prison that spring of 1862. The prison itself looks like it is inside a four-story brick building, and Marcus Mansfield’s detachment is led into the basement.

  Men take up every square inch of the hard floor. At night, you must remain still; if you turn over you will disturb the sleep of two dozen comrades; if your foot twitches it will kick another head, and brutal fights can begin. In claiming your place through means of a filthy haversack on the floor, you seek to be as far from the privies as possible.

  The stench stays with Marcus, as it will always. It isn’t only the smell of disease and filthy men; before the war, the building had been a tobacco warehouse. Every crevice and crack in the floor is covered in dried tobacco juice. Stale tobacco and its dust fills their mouths, eyes, and noses every waking and sleeping moment.

  To make matters worse, the amount of space for each man—at most, five feet of sleeping room—is limited further by thirty large tobacco presses. When one of the friendlier guards is asked whether the presses could not be removed to free more space, the sentry shakes his head and says, “No, sir. When we defeat you damned Federals, all the warehouses and factories now used as prisons will be fully in operation again. It’s a matter of time.”

  There are windows that could open to provide more ventilation, but Rebel guards are stationed outside with orders to shoot at any man standing at a window. Sometimes it becomes so bad that a prisoner will lean outside for a breath, knowing the risk. In the first three weeks, five men are shot dead that way, clean through their heads or necks. Twice the rifle ball misses the man at the window and hits another prisoner, injuring one and killing another.

  Marcus makes the acquaintance of the prisoners whose haversacks are nearest. One of these is Frank Brewer, who is also an eighteen-year-old soldier from a Massachusetts town. Marcus pities the boy, who arrived frail and sick from battlefield injuries.

  When a new detachment is brought into the basement, taking the place of some who have died, one of the men looks Frank over, taking in his dirty skin and his tattered clothes. Frank is naturally bony and angular, and now is even more so, like all of them, subsisting on the scanty rations. “Are you a foreigner?” the stranger asks, not yet understanding what a man becomes after months of confinement.

  “I belong to Massachusetts, and am dreadful proud of it!” Frank says. “When I’m home again, I’ll wrap myself in God’s flag.”

  Marcus smiles at this display of passion on the part of feeble Frank. Marcus is naturally reticent, and almost speechless when under duress, but Frank, when prodded, is defiant and verbose, his eyes burning with conviction.

  “You should know,” Frank says, “that Chauncy Hammond will probably be investigating my whereabouts already. He has great influence and we should all be out soon.”

  But Frank is going to die. Sometimes he speaks very clearly on the topic, and he asks Marcus to tell his mother, sister, and niece in Springfield that he died a soldier. At other times, he seems to be living in a dream, talking of revenge on the Rebs who injured him, or weakly singing the battle songs they all happily had on their lips as they marched, new soldiers with only hazy thoughts of the trials to come.

  We are coming, Father Abraham

  Three hundred thousand more …

  Frank reveals that his father had followed his own father before him as a lumber merchant in Chelsea, but after each sign of success began drinking more and inevitably failed his business, until there were no more chances from the bank or his creditors. Frank’s mother prayed over her son’s bed every night when he was asleep that he would not succumb to these same demons, and sometimes he would stay awake in order to listen, the fire of some vague determination burning in his young heart. Years later, when he heard of the great need for soldiers, he jumped, traveling from Springfield to Boston to answer an advertisement for a substitute for a young man whose father, a successful industrialist named Hammond, did not want him to serve. Frank is proud of this. It means he will have a position waiting for him at the industrialist’s works, while many other uniformed men wonder anxiously what they will do when they return home, with the trades and industry changing so rapidly. It means, he believes, he is already a Boston man before having lived in Boston.

  Marcus watches over him day and night, since a sick man is a target for thieves. He tells the ailing soldier about his own family, his own secrets and shame, hoping to keep his interest and will to live.

  What Marcus tells him, which he has tried to hide from everyone he’s ever met, is about his father. Like many wandering men of the day, Ezra Mansfield was a sailor, a mechanic, and a salesman by phases of the moon—and had lived with them in Newburyport for only a few years. Marcus says that although his mother told him he died at sea, he later heard his father had left and started a new family elsewhere. Marcus worked at seventeen at a small printing press on the machines, but the press, like many businesses in town, could not compete once the railroads had fully stretched out their iron arms and drawn employees into the city and their massive factories. He did not volunteer for the war to be a hero, nor to change the world, either, but did think it was the best thing a man could do. And it would get him away from Newburyport and his disgruntled stepfather.

  Almost as wearying as the lack of rations and the physical conditions at Smith are the enforced idleness and crushing monotony, which alone might drive a man mad with self-loathing. The men occupy thems
elves by searching for and removing insects from hair and clothing, and talking and telling their stories, often of battles. A third release is the contemplation of escape. Plans and ideas are whispered from the very first minutes.A New York man whom Marcus helped hide a pocketbook before the guards could confiscate it has the idea of tying his own toes together and posing as a dead man. He would be dragged to the dead house across the courtyard, from which he feels confident he could run into Richmond and from there be able to disguise himself until reaching Union lines.

  He asks Marcus if he wants to try his grand dodge with him.

  Marcus hesitates. “Why pick me?”

  “You helped me. I stick with my friends, a lesson a young buck like you should take to heart. Come now … Mansfield, right? Don’t you want to get home to your family?”

  “You will get shot dead.”

  “Maybe. But would you rather die in here, breathing in the stench, or die trying?”

  “Maybe there will be an exchange.”

  The New York man gives up. Marcus doesn’t voice the real reason he wouldn’t try the escape, because he feels the plotter would laugh. When roll call is given, if anyone is missing, rations are withdrawn for one or two days for everyone. The daily ration is just half a loaf of maggot-infested bread soaked in beans and water, with insects mixed in that have been inside the beans before boiling, and sometimes a beef bone. One missed ration, and several of the sicker men could die, including Frank, and others still might easily meet their death under questioning by the guards. The New York soldier, Marcus feels certain, is not evil, only indifferent. Anyone who could not help him might as well go to the devil. He is taken out that night with the dead bodies. His escape is discovered and the rations are cut, leading to two of the sicker men expiring before their eyes. Marcus never learns the escapee’s fate.

  Marcus is elected by the other prisoners to be part of the “police” force to prevent the theft of blankets and clothes, which are most sought after, and help provide for the men too sick to fight for themselves. This isn’t an honor most of the men want, as it is correctly seen as a burden and a path to unpopularity, but people have noticed that Marcus gravitates toward the sick and weak anyway. After the former chief of police used his position to extort supplies from a group of prisoners, and abused his authority by whipping fellow prisoners with a cat-o’-nine-tails, Marcus reluctantly comes to accept the promotion.