The Technologists: A Novel

by Matthew Pearl

  To Marcus, the grating sound of pencils scratching could not cover up the forlorn, troubled note in the professor’s last comment. Everyone at Tech carried on as though Rogers were merely occupied in his office, and would be down any moment for his next lecture, his hand still on the tiller.

  After class, the three conspirators hurried together down the hall. “What is the key?” asked Edwin.

  “The answer,” Bob said, smiling mysteriously.

  He led them down to the basement, near the location of Ellen Swallow’s private laboratory.

  “Are we going to see Miss Swallow?” Marcus asked sarcastically. “It might be hard to believe, but unlike most of the belles in Boston, I’m not sure you can win her heart with a smile, Bob.”

  “I hope we are not going to be meeting at the Temple,” said Edwin, looking worriedly at the entrance to the urinals located under the basement stairs.

  Bob stopped at the next door down the corridor from Miss Swallow’s laboratory. With a wide grin and a grand flourish, he unlocked it.

  “Welcome to the metallurgical and blowpipe laboratory!” Bob announced, swinging the door open. “No,” he said to his friends’ bemused expressions, “it’s not used very much. When the treasury ran out of money during the construction it was never fully completed. I didn’t know it was even here.”

  Marcus looked around at the ill-lighted room. It had a gas furnace, a reverberatory furnace, three crucible furnaces, bean pots along the shelves, a screw press, a forge, some crude ore-dressing equipment made of galvanized iron, and storage bins for charcoal, wood, and anthracite. It was dusty and had a stale odor.

  “How did you get the laboratory key?” asked Marcus.

  “Inside first, fellows, then I’ll tell you. Close the door behind you, Eddy,” Bob said. When the door was shut, he explained. “Two years ago, someone reserved this laboratory for the use of a society of students called the Technologists. I suppose some poor fellow wanted to emulate Harvard with their Rumford Society, the Hasty Pudding Club, and of course the Med Fac.”

  “Med Fac … what’s that?” Marcus asked.

  “Med Fac stands for Medical Faculty,” Edwin explained, “although it is actually Harvard students who call themselves that because they see their dark deeds as aiding the health of the students. It is the most secret of all Harvard’s secret clubs and to be initiated one must perform an act that could result in expulsion or even arrest—stealing the tongue of the college bell, shaving off a freshman’s mustache while he sleeps, or, if they wish to be an officer, blowing up part of a building.”

  “Were you part of it before you left?” Marcus asked.

  “Heavens, no! My time at Harvard was spent locked inside Agassiz’s dissection rooms. The Med Facs are notorious, and some say worship the devil.”

  Bob laughed at the thought. “I hope not, since my brothers were all members. Harvard has suppressed them out of existence, anyway,” he added.

  Marcus rolled his eyes, not as amused as Edwin and Bob by Harvard boys’ childish games. “This Technologist group must be very secretive itself. I’ve never heard of them.”

  “That’s because nobody ever joined the society,” Bob explained gleefully.

  “Some class feeling Tech has,” Edwin said, frowning. “Same problem as usual—too many brilliant ideas and not enough men.”

  “Nobody joined—until now,” Bob corrected himself. “There are currently three members in good standing.”

  “Robert Richards, Edwin Hoyt, and Marcus Mansfield,” Marcus said with a smile.

  “We’re now signed up as the society’s entire membership. Which means we have this laboratory reserved, with our own key, for all times it is not in use by a metallurgy class—and you know the metallurgical professor this term is Eliot, who is too vain to give up time away from his lecturing.”

  They shook hands all around and took their time admiring their headquarters.

  XIX

  Mecca

  “DOWN BELOW, BOY,” said a sailor busy coiling a rope, anticipating the visitor’s question.

  Marcus nodded thanks and descended from the main deck into the cabin of the schooner, escaping the unpleasant mixture of rain and snow that had begun sometime during the morning. He hastily removed his hat when he reached what had the trimmings of a stateroom, where a man clearly in authority perched on a hard stool.

  “Well, what do you want?” the officer snapped, turning his face only halfway.

  “The bill posted, sir,” Marcus said. “Advertising for able-bodied seamen.”

  “You can read, then, that’s a first all day. I am Captain Beal. This is the Convoy you stand in now, and I expect my men to remember the name of the vessel they sail in. So you have a taste for the briny?” He was older and thinner than Marcus had pictured the hero described by the old wharf rat, and he looked like he had fought his way to Hell and back again. His eyes were dark and sunken as they passed over Marcus, and he sat with his hands folded inside his sleeves.

  “I have not gone on a voyage as a sailor before. My father, sir, was a merchant ship captain, for a time.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.” He would have said dead, but there was something about the captain’s face that warned against any deceit. Not that it would have been a lie, exactly—his father may well be deceased. Almost all he remembered of him was the large chair he used to sit in, on which was carved a motto: He that wavereth is like the wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed; let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. When he was a small child, Marcus revered this object and liked to think that his father had carved the words himself, and so lived by them. The boy committed the words to memory and recited them to himself whenever he felt himself losing faith or confidence. Later, when his mother married again, he cursed his father’s absence and had to admit to himself the motto said everything that the man probably was not. This man in front of him, this bronze-faced captain, could be my father, thought Marcus, if he were a few years younger.

  “I was born in Newburyport, sir,” continued Marcus, “around ships and water. I helped with many riggings in port, and I can splice a rope.”

  “You helped your father?”

  “No, sir.” He regretted having mentioned his family history at all as he saw the captain had taken hold of the topic hungrily and would not let go.

  Beal nodded absently. “I suppose you’re the brave one of your friends, then.”

  “Sir?”

  “First, to lose your father to the water, in spirit or in body, you don’t say—no matter—but to lose him, sure enough. Yet still to want to ship out with us. Second, it is the rare young man right now in Boston who is looking to be shipping out at all, and in a vessel under my command.”

  “Why, Captain?”

  “You heard what happened here at the harbor, did you? Yes, I suppose you have, unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand. Everyone heard, everywhere around the world, because of the blasted telegraph. Messages sent from land to land across the water, like cannonballs that can’t be seen. Imagine, what name would an Arab give to that sort of black magic? Now look at me. Look at me.” When Marcus complied, Captain Beal slowly drew his hands from his sleeves. They were both wrapped in thick, red-streaked bandages. “That’s what a sailor is, boy! From pulling out some unlucky souls whose steamship caught on fire, burned on every finger by the steam. A ship captain with no hands to use for months to come—and not enough men to be my arms and legs for me. One day, boy, we all drown of our dead weight.”

  “What of the crew of your old ship? The Light of the East?”

  “You do read the newspapers. Aye, a rough set of fellows, as usual in a merchant ship. Most of them couldn’t read the articles of shipping they signed. They could take gales and disease and even a sea monster—but this? It makes shipwreck of their faith. What superstitions they concocted—half of them will never step onto the boards of another ship again, and the other
half I wouldn’t want. A spooked seaman on deck is a man waiting for death.”

  “They say the instruments were manipulated,” Marcus ventured. “In the newspapers,” he added quickly.

  “The newspapers,” Beal repeated gruffly. He stood smiling, and awkwardly plucked an object from his table with his bandaged claw. He tossed it at Marcus, who caught it in midair. A pocket compass.

  “Look at it,” Beal said.

  He cautiously obeyed.

  “It was the one I saved from the wreck. The rest are with the bones of the East on the ocean floor. The damned police officer wanted this, but I’ve had that one since I was younger than you. What do you see when you look upon it?”

  “I see it is working,” the pupil answered quietly.

  “Fourteen September, 1492. Do you know what happened on that date?”

  “The voyage of Christopher Columbus.”

  “Nah, that date was almost the ruin of his voyage, that’s what. It was the day Columbus, sailing westward, saw that the north point of his compass needle no longer indicated the polar star, and his men began to mutiny. In their fevered minds, if the compass could be wrong, they would never again be able to return to Spain. They had sailed off the map. Now Boston has been knocked off the map, too, and I don’t know if it can ever be put back where it was.”

  Marcus studied the compass top to bottom.

  “And if it could be explained?”

  “By who?” the captain inquired skeptically. “You?”

  He did not reply.

  “If they understood it,” the captain said. “Is that what you mean? Why, they’d be more alarmed than ever. They do not understand the science; they rely on it. Do you see? That instrument you hold wasn’t ‘manipulated,’ as you say, boy—it was the very air of Boston itself that was poisoned. A wise sailor shouldn’t be frightened of shipping out—he should be frightened of staying here! I wouldn’t go an inch past Castle Island if I ever return this way.”

  Marcus looked up with interest. “Castle Island. Is that where your vessel was when the instruments went wild?”

  “Aye, just beyond it. I understand we were the final vessel to be pulled in by the devil’s breath.”

  “All of the compasses were affected at once?”

  The captain bored of the topic. “If you can fetch five other able men by the end of the week to ship out with you, you can increase your rate of pay. No Irish, ’course. Well, those are all the terms. But heaven as my witness, you won’t be back.”

  “Pardon me, sir?”

  Beal stared at him. “I don’t know what you are, boy. You’re not a sailor.”

  “I can learn,” Marcus insisted, as though he really were planning to go to sea.

  “Aye, you can learn to sail but you’ll never be a sailor. True seamen won’t sail next to a man who is not like them; they can smell the difference. You have milk and water running through your blood. You’d be thrown into Davy Jones’s locker, you and your luggage, too.” Beal laughed harshly at his joke.

  Marcus stiffened as if readying a protest. He realized how intently he had been gripping the compass and that the captain had noticed.

  “Tell me why you’ve really come, boy,” growled Beal. “Speak, but speak advisedly! I wouldn’t trust you or your father with the simplest rigging on board.”

  Marcus threw the compass down to the floor, smashing the glass case. Beal did not flinch, a silent grin fixing itself on his face, as though finally satisfied with his visitor.

  “Maybe you could manage the sea, after all,” said the captain. “If they allow it.”

  “If who allows it? Your crew?”

  “No. Those demons who have you tied up in knots.”

  Marcus turned his back to him and hurried out without another word. He found himself walking and walking along the water’s edge aimlessly, as if trying to escape the captain’s stinging voice. He went through less familiar parts of the harbor, but he did not mind feeling lost while he mastered his emotions. Then through the heavy weather he spotted Agnes Turner.

  Hailing her, she seemed as surprised as he had been.

  “Mr. Mansfield, how unexpected,” she said, tidying her dress and bonnet with a quick motion.

  “I had some business for the Institute at the harbor—you, Miss Agnes?”

  “With so few of us at the house at Temple Place, we have to share the errands. I must gather this list of things for Miss Maguire to cook for our supper. I suspect my cousin liked very much the idea I would smell of fish the rest of the day.”

  Marcus laughed.

  “Have you found extra hours somewhere?” he asked.

  She nodded. “A few evening hours here and there with a woman of society who needs some help getting around the city. It is something, at least, until things are normal again. We hear little more than rumors from Philadelphia, only that the professor remains in a worrisome state. Well, I suppose you must be on your way,” she said firmly. “As I must be.”

  “As you please,” Marcus said, bowing.

  “I must admit,” Agnes added quickly, “I do not usually come to the harbor, and may not have followed Lilly’s instructions as well as I intended.”

  “Do you mean you are lost?”

  Agnes looked around and gave him an embarrassed frown. “I might be.”

  “May I escort you?” he asked.

  “Only until I know where I am, mind,” she said, shaking her finger at him.

  “That might be a while,” he said, taking her arm and glancing at their surroundings.

  “Why, do you know where we are, Mr. Mansfield?”

  “Do I?”

  “Do you?”

  He gave a little shrug and they kept walking. Something remarkable had happened. He felt light and unworried, and the captain’s harsh interrogation had vanished entirely from his thoughts after only a few minutes of the housemaid’s company.

  * * *

  WITH EVERY SPARE MINUTE, they made use of their private laboratory, the single key passed among themselves until they were able to access the right equipment on the second floor to forge several extra sets. Little by little, they were mixing compounds and constructing equipment, with the next fellow who had a free interval doing the next step and leaving modified instructions for the one after him. Marcus was locking the laboratory after one of his turns when his eye was caught by a piece of paper tacked with laboratory pincers to a wooden beam in the corridor. He reached up and unfastened what turned out to be a crude drawing of a slender woman in peaked hat, tied to a broomstick, about to be lowered into a boiling caldron.

  As he studied the caricature he took a step back against the wall. He heard a clicking sound, then the muffled ringing of a gong from somewhere in the basement before the door to Ellen Swallow’s laboratory was yanked open.

  “Aha! You! What do you want?” The mystery lady herself peered out at him, her marble-white face and long neck a stark contrast to the basement gloom. She was a year or two older than Marcus, and four or five years older than most of his fellow seniors at Tech, even though she was only a freshman. That made her life there even more difficult than it already was. Her eyes were dark and intense as she stared at him and added, “I do not know you.”

  “I am Marcus Mansfield, Miss Swallow. We spoke on the stairs …”

  She clucked dismissively. “I know your name, Mr. Mansfield. That’s not what I meant.”

  “I am sorry for disturbing you. I didn’t realize you were there.”

  “Then you are even stupider than the others. I am always here. I cannot attend classes with the other freshmen, lest I offend or elope with a man. This is where they cage me between my private sessions with professors; and that is how I like it. Are you down here to spy on me?”

  “Miss Swallow,” he said, thinking he would show her the drawing he’d found and express his sympathy. Surely she was accustomed to vandals among students who did not want her there, and a cartoon depicting her burned alive was probably the least of it.
He remembered his freshman year, the whispers of “factory boy” dogging him. He crumbled up the paper and stuffed it in his pocket. “I assure you that I’m not spying,” he said, holding her steady gaze.

  She blew out an impatient sigh. “At the moment, Mr. Mansfield, I do not have the time to be misanthropic. If you are looking to drive me away from Tech, I must proffer my own apology. I am here for a reason—and will stay. What are you doing in there?”

  “Where?”

  “The metallurgical and blowpipe laboratory. You are a civil-engineering student.”

  He hesitated, taken by surprise that the Institute’s hermit knew so much about him. “We have a society. It is called the Technologists.”

  “How I should like to belong to a society! The Technologists,” she repeated in singsong, still staring a hole through him. “What is it this society of yours does, exactly?”

  He hadn’t thought about how to answer that.

  “It isn’t philanthropic?”

  “Oh, no. We are a …” He stalled.

  “A secret society.” The voice was Bob’s, who was entering with a jaunty step from the dark stairwell.

  “Tech has no secret societies, Mr. Richards,” Ellen protested when he joined them.

  “Until now it indeed was lacking in them,” Bob said.

  “How good for the Institute,” she said dryly. “It is not very secret if I, of all forsaken people, know the identity of all its members.”

  “Ah, we are only but two representatives of its membership, Miss Swallow,” said Bob.

  “Then I suppose your other pet, Edwin Hoyt, is another.”

  Neither Bob nor Marcus answered, but both appeared nonplussed. “Eddy is the smartest fellow in this place. Smarter even than Hammie,” Bob finally blustered.

  “It seems very queer,” she went on, her long arms locking tightly on to each other. “I am cut off from all earthly ties in this private laboratory, not permitted to attend classes up there with the other freshmen, instead shut up down here like a dangerous animal. I have kept in my corner and worked for myself because I believe God is using my hardships to prepare me for something. Yet by choice you isolate yourselves down here in a dark, unused room, under the farcical guise of some society. Why?”