A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  “What in the world is going on here?” she demanded of Wittenoom, the moment she was left alone with him. “What in the world is Tudela doing on this island?”

  “That’s easy enough to tell. He’s planning to make the smaller moon drop to the earth.”

  “What? How? Why?”

  “‘How’ is a little past my understanding, electrical phenomena being outside my field, as you know. ‘Why’ is a simpler matter. He’s being paid to do it.”

  “Paid? Paid by whom? And that still leaves open the question of ‘why.’ Why would anyone, Tudela or otherwise, want to drop the moon onto the earth? It’s the stupidest thing that I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know. But every time the smaller moon passes through the zenith, he gives it a nudge with his machinery and it drops just a little closer.”

  “But that’s madness. You told me yourself that it’d mean eleventy squillion tons of rock smacking onto our heads.”

  “True. But I think that neither Tudela nor his sponsors care much about that. In fact, I believe that is exactly what is supposed to happen. That is, eleventy squillion tons of rock smacking onto our heads, to use your graphic phraseology.”

  “But why?”

  “I’ve no idea. It seems extremely malicious. Tudela’s always been an un-likeable man, but I wouldn’t have suspected this of him. It must be someone else’s idea.”

  “Did Tudela have anything to do with Hughenden’s attempt to maroon us?”

  “You’d have to ask him that, but I’d be inclined to think so.”

  “So would I.”

  Tudela joined them at breakfast the next morning, where, perhaps because he was under too much of a strain to maintain his usual aloofness, he was far more personable than the evening before and even became absolutely conversational, if not particularly informative. He had changed little since Bronwyn had visited him in his Academy laboratory: still tall and exceedingly lean, with glossy black hair, moustache and imperial. His skin was still excessively pale, with the unnatural whiteness of bleached paper, on which his dark features looked like blots of ink. His fingers were long and flexible and always gloved.

  “The food is simple,” he apologized, “but it is nourishing and not, I think, unpalatable. I have come to believe that well-fed people are seldom inclined to cause difficulties. Are you aware of a revolution ever occuring in a country, however bad its régime may have been, that had food enough for its people?”

  “I have no doubt that you’re correct, Doctor,” replied Bronwyn. “I certainly have no complaints. Breakfast is delicious. But then, starvation is a wonderful appetizer.”

  “Thank you. Unfortunately, there is no work for you to do here, unless you’d care to clean up the bloody footprints you have left all over my house. My servant has complained. Beyond that, I can’t think of any use for you. I have allowed myself exactly that number of technicians that my project requires and no more. And even if I were short-handed, there is nothing that you would be capable of doing, even if you understood what was needed. Please take no offense; the Professor here has a vastly greater scientific education than you, yet he is as a newborn babe in the midst of the work that I have undertaken. It is no fault of his or yours. Feel free, however, to observe all you wish. I only ask that you not interfere.”

  “You’re too kind. Would it be possible for you to give me at least the gist of this project of yours? I take it that it’s intimately involved with the future of the small moon?”

  “You’re correct, of course. It has everything to do with the small moon.”

  “Yes?”

  “By means of a technique which I cannot begin to attempt to describe to you here and now, and probably never, I am going to drop the smaller moon onto the earth.”

  “But why? I don’t understand what the sense of that would be.”

  “Of course you don’t. You haven’t enough information. However, the why of my actions is far simpler to explain than the how.” He leaned back in his chair and dabbed daintily with his napkin at his moustache. He had used a new napkin for each dish he had consumed. Nor had he removed his gloves to eat. Finished, he carefully folded the linen square and placed it atop the others. “I had nearly decided to abandon certain researches that were taking me into fascinating areas, but which were at the same time forbidding my entry for lack of funds to develop and construct the necessary equipment. As you well know, Princess, I require elaborate, precise and unique devices . . . which are by their very nature extraordinarily expensive. There was no way, I knew, that I could convince either the Academy or the government to tender me the enormous sums I knew that I would need. It is one of the tragedies of this imperfect world that genius must be hobbled by ignorance combined with parsimonious purses. Be that as it may, I was one day approached by an individual purporting to represent a, um, consortium which had the means and will to allow me to continue my work on the scale it demanded. My sponsors only required the practical use of it.”

  “I take it, then,” asked Bronwyn, “that it’s this consortium that has contracted for the collision of the moon with the earth.”

  “Of course.”

  “But how could you agree to something like that?”

  “What was it to me? They obviously had their reasons and I was convinced that they were good and sufficient. In any case, I established myself here, on this remote island, on the opposite side of the planet from the agreed-upon point of contact.”

  Bronwyn tried to recreate a map of the world in her mind, but was not very successful. What was on the other side of the globe from Skupshtina Island? For that matter, where exactly was Skupshtina Island?

  “But, if you’ll pardon me, Professor Wittenoom told me that the moon was going to fall down here, on this island.”

  “That was after I changed my mind.”

  “Changed your mind? About what?”

  “About some of my goals. This occured after I learned of the composition of the smaller moon.”

  “You mean the gold.”

  “Yes, of course, but not just the gold alone; in fact, hardly for the gold at all. After all, a moment’s thought should reveal that such a mass of gold would be valueless.”

  “Well, that’s true, I suppose. But if not for the gold, what for, then?”

  “For the mass itself. If you will excuse me?” he requested, abruptly, rising from the table. “I have much that requires my attention.”

  Left alone with the remains of her own breakfast and Professor Wittenoom, Bronwyn was more than ever preoccupied with more than usually morbid thoughts.

  Bronwyn discovered that she, like the professor, indeed had the freedom of the island, exactly as promised, such as that freedom was and such as the island was. There were, she quickly found, no boats and had been none for months. Tudela had effectively and efficiently marooned himself and had no intention of leaving, or allowing anyone else to leave, until his project was completed.

  The professor showed her the path he was accustomed to taking, that led from the camp to the sea, and even led her down the cliff face to the big rock on which he had been meditating when she had presented herself to him as a mermaid. She was a little disconcerted to discover that by following the meandering stream she had inadvertantly taken the most sesquipedalian route, the professor’s path traversed the same distance in only two or three miles of soft, smooth sand. The island was surrounded by more of the ragged basalt cliffs, -like barriers of shattered black glass, that had so daunted the princess when she had regained her bipedality. Even the rare coves were barracaded from the sea by reefs as treacherous and sharp-toothed as bear traps. She showed the professor the place she had landed and he was appalled at the appearance of the thundering surf and knife--like rocks, to say nothing of the precipitous path she had taken. The tide was high and the little beach was invisible beneath the surging grey water that beat the adamantine black rocks with foamy, impotent fists. Obviously her perspective had changed a great deal since he
r retransformation and now she could not imagine any reason trenchant enough to convince her to plunge into that surging maelstrom.

  The sole practical access to the island, the only passage through the barricading cliffs, was scrupulously guarded twenty-four hours a day. Tudela had, once he had established his camp, stocked supplies for nearly a year and had sent the last boat away with orders not to return until his signal. Once a month a ship would swing out of the lone shipping lane that crossed the Great Sea, heave to for one day within sight of the island and then, if it saw no signal, would proceed upon its way. Bronwyn witnessed one of these vigils as she and the professor strolled along the broken clifftops on the afternoon following her arrival. She saw the ship first and pointed it out to the professor. It was little more than a kind of pimple on the horizon, which Wittenoom told the princess was more than twenty miles away as seen from their lofty vantage point. Bronwyn’s sharp eyes were able to spot the faint plume of smoke from the idling boilers.

  “Why don’t we try and signal it?” she asked.

  “It’s been tried. One of the workers here couldn’t stand the isolation and ignited a huge bonfire in a grove of dry scrub. The fire and smoke must have been visible for miles, but the ship ignored it. There must be some peculiar, secret signal that will elicit a response, and all others are disregarded. A smoke signal would be, in any case, difficult to distinguish from the natural sources of steam and smoke on a volcanic island.”

  “What happened to the worker?”

  “What? Oh. I don’t know.”

  The princess stared at the distant smudge for a long time afterward, but, try as her brain might, it could not help her, which made it feel bad, and staring into the wind only made her eyes sore and red.

  The princess was, so far as she could tell, the only woman on the island. The doctor, she knew from experience, was sexless and therefore her gender gave her no advantage. Nevertheless, Tudela had in the past always treated her civilly, if condescendingly, answering her questions and demonstrating his devices and theories with a cold courtesy and he acted no differently now. Although she knew that he did, in fact, respect her intelligence, perhaps as much or more than many of his colleagues, she also knew that what she was playing upon was the man’s immense ego. As powerful as the man was, he was no more difficult to control than a high-pressure steam engine, which for all of its power could be managed by the lightest touch of even a child’s hand.

  The doctor eventually took her on a tour of his facility, with but a single exception not barring her from any of its details. The stone building contained on its ground floor a series of turbine-propelled dynamos. These were half a dozen squat, dull-black, humpbacked objects that closely resembled huge loaves of bread. The thick pipes that emerged from their sides and curved into the floor made them resemble crouching hippopotami, or arthritic buffalo. Steam puffed and hissed from their nostrils as they found their bovine contemplations disturbed by the presence of a stranger. The stone floor quivered with a power that frightened Bronwyn. The machines, the doctor explained, were powered by superheated steam that he easily obtained by drilling into the floor of the caldera. The electrical current produced by the dynamos was carried by six-inch-thick copper busbars to the upper floors of the building where gigantic coils, prepared to his special design, converted the current into a peculiarly powerful form of his unique invention: high-tension current.

  Much of Bronwyn’s curiosity was eventually satisfied by recourse to an old and unregenerate habit: she rifled Doctor Tudela’s desk. She had no difficulty whatsoever in picking the lock to the office that adjoined his bedroom suite. The desk within was itself unlocked and, without a moment’s hesitation, she began to pore through its neatly arranged drawers and pigeonholes. She discarded most of what she found, letters, bills and invoices, page after page of incomprehensible calculations, drawings of complex circuits, machinery and devices, until she discovered what appeared, and proved to be, a variety of journal or memorandum-book. She scanned through pages full of the doctor’s closely-written, precise script, her mind open to any telling or significant words or phrases. What eventually caught her eye was not a written entry, but a neatly-drawn map. It was of the world, on Stroonpeen’s projection, showing the familiar cluster of continental masses that traditionally occupied most of the right-hand side, but, in addition, there was an unfamiliar landmass that filled almost the entirety of the Great Sea, an area that she knew was in fact completely unoccupied. This new continent was indicated by a dashed line, giving it a kind of speculative appearance, and enclosed a circular area not much less than three-quarters that of the combined islands and continents of the known world. This circular area was labled Tudeland. At its very center was a small dot with its label, Skupshtina, crossed out.

  Bronwyn looked at this map for quite a long time, suspecting it of a special significance, but not quite being able to understand what that might be. Eventually her brow cleared, which always improved her appearance, she habitually scowled far too much, while her face drained of its color, becoming as pallid and unappetizing as a turnip. Quickly searching the desk for some blank paper, she found a sheet of unused onion skin, whose translucency was ideally suited to her needs. Laying this over the page in the journal, she carefully traced the map. Replacing everything as best she could, she closed the desk and retreated from the room, relocking the door behind her.

  She found the professor on his hands and knees collecting bits of lichen from the rim of a tiny, hissing fumarole a hundred yards beyond the outer perimeter of the camp. Holding a damp handkerchief over her nose against the sulfurous fumes, she showed him the copied map.

  “What do you think of this?” she asked.

  “Where did you get this?” he replied, and she told him.

  “Interesting,” observed the professor. “Not honestly procurred, but interesting. He certainly doesn’t seem to know much about geography, does he?”

  “I think that it’s speculative geography,” the princess said, “if I’m not coining a term. I think that this is what the world is going to look like. See? Skupshtina Island is almost exactly in the center of this so-called Tudeland. And look: the dotted line is almost perfectly circular. Doesn’t that suggest something to you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you mind if we go over there to talk?” she asked, pointing to a broad, flat boulder that protruded shelf--like from the gently rising ground a hundred yards away. “These fumes are making me sick.

  “You and Tudela have both told me,” she continued once they had reached a strata of sweeter air, “that he intends to drop the moon not only onto the earth, but that it’s going to drop right here, right on top of Skupshtina Island. What if this Tudeland is what’s left of the moon after it falls?”

  “That’s possible, that’s possible,” the professor mused, sitting down on the prickly surface and staring at the map. “It’s quite possible. But look here: this Tudeland is nowhere near big enough to account for the mass of the moon. At first glance I would have told you that your suggestion is untenable. But I’ve been thinking about this coming collision. There is a point above the earth where a large object could not orbit without unbalanced tidal forces tearing it apart. One of the Academy’s mathematicians calculated this and it’s called Mozzuferplore’s Boundary in her honor. If the moon were to simply drop onto us, like an interplanetary meteoroid, it would pass through this critical distance relatively unscathed, it would, after all, take some time for a body the size of the smaller moon to be disintegrated by internal tides. However, the moon is not dropping onto us, it is spiralling in gradually. I suspect that it will have more than enough time to be torn into a number of fairly large pieces before any one of them can enter the atmosphere and reach the surface. It would not take all that large a piece to create this Tudeland. Perhaps this area on the map indicates that Tudela expects only the core to survive.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “Oh, the creation of Tudeland woul
d of course automatically stop the effects of the good doctor’s machinery and without that influence I suspect that the remainder of the moon would simply stay in orbit.”

  “So the whole idea behind his scheme is to create this new island?”

  “Continent, rather; this Tudeland is awfully large, as you can see. But, yes, apparently that’s his idea.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. We’ve got to stop this, of course.”

  “Well, yes. I have to agree with you. The fall of even such a relatively small remnant would prove catastrophic to the rest of the world.”

  “What would happen?”

  “Earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves miles high, that sort of thing. The impact would no doubt reduce all of the modern world to subprimitive barbarism. If, of course, it doesn’t eradicate life from the planet entirely.”

  “I would have thought that such an impact would create a huge hole, like the craters on the moon, not a new landmass.”

  “That’s because the constitution of the moon is quite un-like that of any other celestial body.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “One of the things that I discerned while visiting our doomed neighbor is that its composition is much like that of a spongecake. You know that I was puzzled at how such a relatively large body could contain so much gold in its composition, yet not have nearly the mass it ought to have. The answer is that the whole body of the moon is porous, sponge-like, riddled through and through by millions upon millions of bubbles. When it hits the earth, it will simply collapse, like a failed soufflé.”

  “Leaving Tudela with a fresh, new continent all his own.”

  “I suppose that’s the idea.”

  “But he’s planning to devastate most of the planet in the process, just so he can have a continent he can call his own! The man’s out of his mind.”