The Technologists: A Novel

by Matthew Pearl

  “I saw her when she was being brought into the infirmary at the Catholic convent. The Irish lass. She was pretty. Awful pretty.”

  Marcus thought this was his way of saying he was sorry about what had happened to Agnes. However lost Hammie might have seemed in his own introspection, he’d noticed Marcus’s grief.

  “Thank you, Hammie.”

  “I did notice at the opera other misses who seemed like they fancied your favor,” Hammie said with a paternal interest. “But I know that a heavy heart does not love easily. Where would you like to go next, Mansfield?”

  “Can we take this to see the lighthouse you told me about?”

  “The lighthouse, then.”

  As Hammie made a series of adjustments in his controls, Marcus ventured to ask, “You have been in love yourself, have you?”

  “At twenty-one years old, certainly I have!” Hammie said indignantly. “She loves, too—but she loves another.”

  “You mean the girl you fancy already has a beau? I’m sorry for it, Hammie.”

  “Well, one cannot fairly compete with Bob Richards!”

  Marcus marveled at the comment. “What in the deuce do you mean?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t notice when the two of them are together in the laboratory?”

  “You couldn’t mean to say Bob and Ellen Swallow, could you, Hammie?”

  “I mean it and I say it! Plain as a full moon in the sky! She would surrender her heart to him at his slightest desire. She is a rather unique creature, whom most people will never understand. Do you think she sees beyond the rake Richards presents to people? Now, are you ready to launch?”

  A sound like howling suddenly came from around the propeller and prevented Marcus from further questioning Hammie’s remarkable statement. The machine quickly descended a few inches.

  “Not again! A leak! Well, you see, Mansfield, I have not actually been able to quite keep it operating for more than a few minutes before it begins to, well …” Then, blushing, he trailed off.

  “Sink?”

  “Just some trivial adjustments to make now, indeed! Quickly, help me get it back into Spouting Horn,” he said more urgently, “or we’ll be popped out like Champagne corks in a minute.”

  After hastily maneuvering the White Whale back into its resting place, they continued their explorations by foot.

  Over the next days, Hammie introduced Marcus to all the byways and hidden corners of the peninsula. Nahant was quiet. There was no busy village square. There were a few hotels and old brown cottages dotting the coast, with most of their residents preferring seclusion. This was not one of the resorts that relied on a social whirl. Nahant was a dream of unadorned ocean and sky: not exactly beautiful, but fully contained.

  It was also subject to violent storms that could be seen coming from far out at sea, and it was an especially sudden one that charged in from the east one afternoon, sending them running over the rocks into the family cottage. They settled in to wait out the weather, which continued for two days. Hammie entertained his companion by demonstrating a steel doormat boot scraper he had invented; they spent hours watching his two pet green snakes, which he’d trained to wrap themselves around his neck; and in a separate structure behind the house, Hammie unveiled an assortment of rifles, including a Whitfield that he boasted was better than a French or Enfield, with heavier bullets and a target sight, and a wide array of topnotch sporting gear. On the third day, the classmates played checkers and cards on the covered terrace, watching the sheets of rain hammer the ocean and growing accustomed to the earthshaking thunder. Hammie concentrated on every move in each game as though his life depended on it, but despite Hammie’s appetite for conversation, Marcus felt suddenly overwhelmed by loneliness.

  Without quite realizing he was doing it, he reclined on an inviting hammock while waiting for Hammie’s next move. When he woke, he was alone on the terrace and inside found only some servants. The rain had stopped. Marcus wandered upstairs into Hammie’s bedroom, where he surveyed the enormous collection of scientific books, most of them in foreign languages. He noticed a rope dangling above him and pulled open the entrance to the attic.

  Lighting a candle, he climbed up and crawled into the upper chamber, remembering Hammie’s stories about starting a secret laboratory there as a child. Tacked on to the wall was the same list Edwin had made of impossible scientific feats, copied in Hammie’s handwriting—with the initial “H.” by each and every item. At the bottom of the page Hammie had added: “Make them eat their words.” Beneath that, resting on a steamer trunk, he noticed stacks of class notes, and, curious, stopped for a closer look.

  Here is what struck him first. The notes were beautifully complex—not really class notes as he thought about them. Hammie drew out conclusions far beyond the scope of their experiments. And there was something still more remarkable. All the notes at the top of the pile—he shuffled through more and more, faster and faster, until the formulas seemed to dance and transform—were on an assortment of other topics. Magnetic deviation. The uses of barium. Double fluorides. Chloride of lime. Topics that had been on the tips of their tongues every hour in the last weeks. Topics directly involved in the catastrophes that had shaken Boston and changed Marcus’s life.

  Then he focused on the steamer trunk itself and dropped the papers he had been examining. He scrambled down from the attic and outside to the shed, fumbling through the rifle rack. As he seized one, a glimmer of metal caught his eye and he moved deeper into the shed to investigate. What he found looked like a monstrous human skeleton, hung by its wrists from the wall, a silk hat perched atop its head.

  He circumspectly moved closer. The figure was constructed of iron and other metals. It must have been almost eight feet tall, its legs covered with cranks and levers, its chest and back bursting with gauges and vents, all partially covered by something like a suit, which Marcus had to feel between his fingers to believe.

  “He took it,” he said to himself.

  The monster’s hat, on closer inspection, enclosed a steam stack. The face had been molded into lifelike features, complete with a mustache and facsimiles of teeth formed into a wide, innocent smile; in the center of the teeth was a steam whistle. The steam man! The humanlike machine with the body of a steam engine that Hammie had described and drawn at one of the college exhibitions, producing so much consternation and disapproval.

  Hurrying back into the cottage and up the stairs into Hammie’s room, Marcus pulled out his carpetbag, took apart the rifle, and stored the parts inside. He heard the front door below opening and shutting.

  “Mansfield, old boy, are you here?” It was Hammie, suddenly affecting a Bob Richards imitation.

  He hurried into the attic and piled Hammie’s class papers back into some order, dropping himself back down and closing the attic only seconds before Hammie entered the room.

  “There you are,” Hammie greeted him, his peculiar smile looking at the moment as though he’d just heard a joke too vulgar to repeat. “You must be famished. The cook is just coming in from his quarters to begin supper—fish chowder as usual, I’d wager.”

  “Thank you, Hammie.”

  “I was thinking, Mansfield, when I was out—say, Mr. Van Winkle, you sleep like a top, don’t you?—I made some adjustments to the White Whale and moved it to a more protected place for now, in case the squall starts up again. As I say, I was thinking, Van Winkle, it is a shame about the Technologists Society. A shame about Tech, too. I can’t even imagine what I’ll do now. Something wrong, Mansfield?”

  “Nothing,” he said a little too quickly.

  “I know,” he went on, as he dried his neck and hair with a towel, “that this whole week you have been thinking of that poor girl Miss Turner.”

  Marcus nodded.

  “Someone out there will avenge what has happened,” he continued, abstractedly. “Do you remember what he said to us?”

  “Who?”

  “That man, what was his name? Joseph Cheshir
e. The man in front of the Institute. ‘I am the avenging angel and my tongue is my flaming sword.’ It sounds like something out of a Bible sermon. Do you know I attended church every Sunday from the time I was a child, even when I was at my sickliest?”

  “Yes, Hammie, that was his name. Joseph Cheshire.”

  L

  Mind

  BY THE TIME HE REACHED WHITNEY’S HOTEL, Marcus had formulated his plan.

  “I need to send a telegram,” he said.

  The telegraph operator prepared a form for him. “But you should know, young fellow, we have been having some disconnections the last few days. It might take longer than usual.”

  “The storms?”

  The man blinked indifferently at Marcus’s question and returned to a book he was reading.

  “This is important,” Marcus said. “If there is any way I could be ensured the transmission will be made as soon as possible, I would be grateful. I will be waiting here at the hotel for an answer. Can you find me when it comes?”

  “Are you a guest here, young man?” The operator squinted at him.

  “No, sir.” Nor did he have the money for a room.

  “You are sending a wire at nine o’clock! Will you wait here all night for an answer?”

  “If I have to.”

  “But you are not a guest.”

  “I am a customer of the telegraph office of the hotel, aren’t I?” This seemed indisputable.

  It was not yet the busy season of the summer, but the place was already buzzing with families wanting to get far away, physically and mentally, from the events that had plagued Boston. He found a chair in the public parlor of the hotel and for the remainder of the night alternated between sitting restlessly and pacing the length of the room, to the consternation of the hotel staff. A kind chambermaid brought him some coffee and a blanket, and he dozed fitfully.

  In the morning, he was startled by gentle eyes and a familiar face leaning over him.

  “Edwin!”

  “Marcus, what in the land brings you here?” Edwin gleefully took hold of his hand.

  “I was chumming with Hammie,” he said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the Hammond cottage. “Why are you here?”

  “My family likes this hotel when they wish to leave Boston. Did you know the poet Longfellow has a cottage not far from here? Nahant is a small rock, and the people a gossipy sort, but there is always something to do. Since I don’t seem to have graduating examinations to study for …” He stopped, stricken, and paused to collect himself. “About what happened with Blaikie …”

  “Don’t finish your sentence,” said Marcus. “I understand.”

  “No, you do not, Marcus! While Bob was being restrained from starting a row in the vestibule, Blaikie pulled me aside. He told me that if I didn’t agree to come back to Harvard then and there, he had the means to tie you and Bob directly to the catastrophes and have you arrested!”

  “He lies.”

  “But he also has Agassiz’s willing ear and we do not,” Edwin said. “I saw no choice but to consent.”

  “You went with him to Harvard?”

  “I rode in the carriage with him. For a moment, I confess it, Marcus, I felt a sensation of great relief sweep over me. No more fighting for people to believe in me and my college. I would be a Harvard man again, and all the respect that comes with it. I thought of my father, and how pleased he would be. All this lasted but a minute before I was so sick with disgust in myself and in Blaikie that I couldn’t say a word. Then Blaikie started asking about you. Questions about your temperament, your disposition, and so on, as if you had just fallen from the sky. I realized, Marcus, that he feared you. Too much so to ever make good on his threats against you and Bob. I told the driver to let me out, and I walked all the way home. Though Bob first refused to speak to me, I finally waylaid him in the street and he forgave me in grand fashion.

  “Mother and Father heard all that has happened at the Institute, and that I rejected a chance to return to Harvard. Naturally, they think I am suffering from some kind of nervous attack,” he continued, smiling. “They hoped the waters here would improve my health. Come, we’ll continue talking out there.”

  “Where are you going now, Edwin?”

  “To have breakfast on the piazza. Do join us. My family is dull, but the seed cakes are fine.”

  “Would they mind if you skipped breakfast?”

  Edwin’s expression turned unaccountably sad. “I suppose they wouldn’t mind, in fact. Is it very important, Marcus?”

  “I risk being seen if I sit outside. I must speak to you right now.”

  “Marcus, something new has happened, hasn’t it? You must tell me.”

  “I will. I should also not want your family to become too curious, my friend. Breakfast with them. But eat quickly.”

  When Edwin rejoined Marcus fifteen minutes later, they continued their conversation in the hotel library with the door closed.

  “Brace yourself, Edwin. Hammie is far more ingenious than any of us knew. He has become a sort of technology vampire. He even built a submarine vessel. It does not work, but it’s damned impressive nevertheless and he did it on his free time. You know how he always seemed bored at Tech? Well, he was. I think he had a constant need to find additional ways to occupy his mind.”

  Edwin fidgeted at Marcus’s obvious awe of Hammie’s intelligence, but couldn’t disagree. “When we were sophomores, I chanced to come upon Hammie while attending the opera. There he was, Marcus, attending the performance and at the same time busy with his notes and his schoolwork. Then, another time, when Bob dragged me into one of his preferred parlor houses, there was Hammie again, a young girl in disordered dress on one side, and a scientific book on the other. I knew no matter how industrious I was, how many hours I studied, I could never surpass a fellow doing three-dimensional analytical geometry between acts of Fra Diavolo or, well, more involved pastimes. What is it you’ve discovered, exactly?”

  “Remember Joseph Cheshire?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was Hammie who was with me the day he came to the Institute. Besides Runkle, he was the only other one who heard Cheshire’s threats against our group.”

  “But he wouldn’t have known what meaning Cheshire’s words contained, or who the fellow was.”

  “I thought not at the time. But last night, when I was at the cottage, Hammie said his name.”

  “Whose?”

  “Cheshire’s. Cheshire never told us his name.”

  “Hammie could have read about him in the newspaper after Chesire died, as you did.”

  Marcus admitted the point. “Only I don’t think that’s it, Edwin. And Hammie was in Runkle’s private study before I was—and Runkle, or ‘Uncle Johnny,’ as Hammie calls him, revealed to him that he had also heard Cheshire’s words. All of that, the same day as Runkle’s drawer exploded, almost taking our heads clean off.”

  “You don’t think Hammie would have …” Edwin stopped himself, shook his head. “Why?”

  “To protect himself from Cheshire’s inquiries. In his attic compartment in the Hammond cottage, I found his notes from Tech—pages and pages with formulas and chemical combinations related to how all three of the disasters were engineered. Edwin: The traveling trunk he had in his attic was identical to the trunk we found holding the pieces of iron with the electromagnetic wires on the seabed! Then, in an outbuilding, I came upon his steam man: You remember—Hammie had the idea to build a machine in the shape of a man to perform heavy labor.”

  Edwin listened, his mouth agape. “Yes, I do. But what does that have to do with it?”

  “Because parts of its covering were made from the machine suits we built for our diving expedition. He was the one who took the suits!”

  “No!”

  Marcus nodded, continuing. “I’ve been over it all night. On the side of his yacht, the Grace, there are these scrapings, the same kind that would be made by lowering a trunk so filled with heavy cargo—like iron�
�that it could not be lowered straight down even by a strong grappling hook. Edwin.”

  “Yes?”

  Marcus seemed uncomfortable. “Edwin, I was wrong to turn my back on all of you in our laboratory. On the Technologists. I am sorry to have abandoned you.”

  “Sometimes you must let go of the reins of your team, before they run away with you.”

  At that moment, the telegraph operator knocked, and, upon being admitted, handed Marcus a message, bowing to Edwin, the rightful hotel guest.

  “What is it, Marcus?” Edwin asked, watching as his friend unfolded the message, then closed his eyes, his expression grim.

  “It’s him. It is. It’s Hammie,” he said, the enormity of the words belied by his tone of quiet astonishment. “Hammie is the experimenter.”

  “What do you mean? What does it say?”

  Marcus told Edwin how after first having left a brief note for Hammie that he had to return to Boston, he had sent a wire to Daniel French, the freshman at Tech he had coached. He asked French to look into a question of the ownership of the private laboratory that had collapsed around them.

  “But we tried to find that already,” Edwin said.

  “No. We’d tried—unsuccessfully—to find the name of the tenant, thinking what mattered was who occupied that laboratory. I asked Mr. French to inquire at the city records into the ownership of the building itself. Hammie would have been able to see exactly which laboratories were vacant and exactly when—because that building as well as several other properties in that district are owned by the Hammond Corporation.”

  Edwin stared at the message himself as he reflected on everything he had been told. “Why?”

  “We can speculate. He felt isolated from other students, bored to the point of madness by his classwork, chastened by his father, and replaced by a factory hand—my own Frank—during a war where he thought he could have proven his worth and heroism. Why would he do it all? To prove he could do more than anyone expected. To prove to all of Boston and the world and especially to his father that knowledge was power, and that he had more of it than anyone imagined—that he held the power to conjure a tempest in a teapot.”