Monteith looked like a man for whom Christmas has come early and then waged a campaign against the rest of the calendar so that it might never leave again. “I had no idea! You mean to tell me that your father was Hercules Danvers?”
Danvers drew on his cigar with jovial complacency. “That’s the old fella. He of the ten labours, of which I was one. Interesting man, though I say so myself. Used to love playing around in his workshop, although I’m sorry to say little of his genius passed my way. Still, I was fond of him and he of me, and I wept wet tears at his graveside.” He sighed heavily, his ebullience momentarily dimmed. He raised his glass, “To good fathers,” and the company joined him in the toast, except for Walker, whose paternal relationship was complicated, and had so far involved several shootings and a swordfight.
After a decent pause, Danvers said with the air of an afterthought, “Of course, if he’d died during that gyrosphere race, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“Gyrosphere race?” said Chiltern. “A race? How could they race? I was under the impression they couldn’t steer?”
“Ah,” said Monteith, keen to demonstrate his technical knowledge, but he was prevented in doing so by Danvers rising to his feet and making a stately approach to the fireplace. It was summer, and the fire was out, but by the fireplace was the traditional place at which one might tell a story. Danvers leaned on the mantelpiece while a waiter, apparently summoned by the ineffable telepathy employed within the best gentlemen’s clubs, arrived with a fresh whisky.
Thus watered, Danvers began his story.
“It was in the late summer of 188— that my father made his way westwards…”
“I beg your pardon?” It was Kay, the chemist.
Danvers stopped and frowned. “I’d hardly started. I was just saying that my father was sent west in 188— to…”
“There!” said Kay, waving a finger closely enough in Danvers direction to be accusative without actually being rude. “You did it again! You made a noise!”
“I did not,” said Danvers, a little hotly. “What sort of noise?”
“—“ said Kay.
Now it was Danvers’ turn to say, “I beg your pardon?”
“You said ‘eighteen eight,’ and then you made a noise that sounded just like ‘—‘.”
“He’s right, old fellow,” said Wilson. “You went ‘—‘ just as you were saying the year.”
“Oh, that? Why, that was deliberate. It’s normal in telling tales such as this to show a little circumspection.”
“But why?” demanded Kay. “If your father is as famous in engineering circles as he seems to be, surely it would be simple enough to discover which year of the ten you have already narrowed it to it actually is?”
“It is how,” said Danvers stubbornly, “these tales are told.” He looked around the circle until everybody looked away or shrugged. “Very well. I shall continue. My father on a commission for the company with which he was at that time employed, a commission that would take him to the city of B— in the West Country.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” muttered Kay loudly. “It’s Bristol, obviously.”
“B—,” said Danvers forcefully, “is known for its proud maritime history…”
“Bristol,” said Kay, contentiously.
“…fine engineering works…”
“Bristol.”
“…and…”
“Bristol blue glass?” asked Kay, not altogether innocently.
Danvers fumed at him for a long moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “Bristol blue glass.” His eyes narrowed defiantly. “From B—“
“Oh, do let him get on with the telling, Kay,” said Wilson. “We’ll be here all night else.”
Kay sank back into the gloom of his high winged chair like a great conger eel siding back into the coral.
Thus unconstrained, Danvers finally cleared the slips and told his story, which went much as follows.
“In the late summer of 188—, my father, Hercules Danvers, was sent to the West Country to attend the first ‘Great Gyrosphere Race’ ever held not only in England, but the world. We are all familiar with modern gyroscopic levitators of the sort used in aeroships, but many are ignorant of this brief but exciting period of their development.
“It was the brilliant physicist, Gagné, who first demonstrated the principal of gyroscopic levitation, a principle that had previously been overlooked due to the mechanical precision and great size necessary before a gyroscope starts to exhibit measurable levitation. Modern units use other underlying principles of which Gagné and his contemporaries were unaware and that allow the units to be so much smaller and more efficient nowadays. The original levitators were very different affairs. You’ve probably seen daguerreotypes or drawings of them. Gyrospheres. Great skeletal spheres like an armillary globe, containing two independently mounted gyroscopes centred around the same axes. The heavier internal gyro — the ‘lifter’ — is a vast thing, perhaps thirty feet in diameter and weighing about four tons. Outside that was a weighted band that moved in mountings that could travel across the outer sphere’s ribs. That one was called the ‘rudder’ as it was used to apply torque to the sphere as a whole. Below the sphere was the basket, and three or four support legs, depending on the design. Directly above the basket was the ‘burner,’ where vernium fuel emulsion was reacted to power the whole unwieldy contraption.”
“Sounds dangerous,” said Wilson.
“Terrifically so. Two gyroscopes, the frame, the mesh over the frame to stop birds flying in — that was less to save the birds than to prevent the gears becoming jammed with mulched starlings or whatever — the burner, and the fuel supply… the weight was immense. The Montgolfier brothers famously died when landing; the support legs buckled under impact and eight tons of thrashing gyroscope settled upon them. Theirs was a single gyro affair at that. Early days.
“As is always the way, ingenious minds work their magic and the machines improve. Better alloys, better engineering, all combined to make the late period gyrosphere quite an elegant way of getting around. They weren’t a fast mode of transport, true, dependent on wind to make them move in the horizontal plane, but my father often used to tell me how glorious it was to travel that way. The vault of the heavens above, the boundless horizon visible in every direction, man amongst the clouds with only his thoughts and the sound of gyroscopes, singing like angels.”
Monteith sighed happily at the imagery. “What wonder.”
“Oh, I’ve heard a gyrosphere turning over,” said Danvers. “My father was letting the muse run away with him. It sounded like a row of farmers scything through the hay with great vigour. Quite a terrifying noise, really. I suppose the old fella was used to it, though, and that sound meant everything was functioning as it ought. Nice assurance when you’re five hundred feet up.
“So, this was my father’s business in the west, as he was working for Travers, the engineering company at the time. Travers had a ‘sphere in the race; the Davina, and my father had been entrusted to make a good fist of it and, it was hoped, bring back some silver for the boardroom.
“The race was to commence from the grounds of Ashton Court. If you don’t know it, it’s owned by the Smyth family, pleasant enough pile, built in the time of the first Charles. Not by Inigo Jones, but you could be forgiven for thinking it is. The important thing was that it had some nice, open lawns from which to launch the gyrospheres. All the toing and froing played the devil with them, of course, but the Smyth clan were good sports and there was talk of running a race from there annually, which actually did happen, but only for three or four years before the science of it moved on. Shame, but there it is.
“So, my father and his colleague, M—“
There was a small groan from the direction of Kay.
“McMurdo,” relented Danvers. “His name was McMurdo.” He accepted a grateful nod from Kay, and continued. “My father and his colleague McMurdo were sent to pilot the Davina — named for old man Travers’ daugh
ter, should you care — and, by George, they were intent on doing the best job as ever they could. They arrived on the afternoon of the day before the race, and spent the time conferring with the mechanics and helping where they might.
“It was a fine field that would be competing, with gyrospheres and pilots from around the world. My father expanded his horizons well that evening, speaking with fellow aviators from San Francisco to Krenz. He had every reason to be optimistic of their chances; the Davina, he could now see, was comfortably advanced on some of the other ‘spheres present, even though they had only been built a year previously. That was how quickly the science of it was progressing.
“It wasn’t all fun, though. My father happened upon a couple of men that evening making a slow round of the machines. There was something about them that raised his hackles slightly, but he couldn’t say why and put it down to his own nerves. They got to talking about the Davina and my father realised that both of the men knew at least something about gyrospheres. The one who did most of the talking was trying to be friendly, but my father detected a glibness in the man’s manner that he found dislikeable. The other said far less, but when he did speak, it was to make some technical comment that showed a depth of understanding beyond the common knowledge or even, my father felt, that of the average enthusiast.
“They seemed appreciative of our machine up until he mentioned that her steering gear was of a new design. My father had conceived half a notion that these fellows were fishing for new innovations to steal — industrial spies, if you will — and was girding himself for their inevitable request to see the new gear and his equally inevitable refusal, when they quite startled him by suddenly losing interest.
“As they wandered off to try their luck with the patience of some of the other gyrosphere crews, McMurdo said to my father, ‘I don’t like the look of them, Danvers. I don’t know what they’re up to, but I’m sure it is nothing good.’ My father did not disagree.
“Just quickly, a word on how gyrosphere races were staged. Chiltern was voicing an oft-heard conceit about them; they were unsteerable and at the mercy of the winds. This is only partially true. They were indeed at the mercy of the winds, but only in the same way that a sailing boat is. A gyrosphere steers neither gracefully nor with alacrity, but she does steer thanks to two innovations. The first is the rudder sphere, to which I alluded earlier. This allows torque to be applied to the whole structure, causing it to twist this way or that around a vertical axis running through the gyro centre. The second is less technical, but just as efficacious. From either side of the machine, running from the lower surface of the sphere to the base of the basket, are sails. These provide the gyrosphere’s main source of forward movement, but by furling one or the other, they can also be used to steer. Between the rudder gyro and the sails, a competent pilot may make his craft perform quite sharp manoeuvres, although they are incapable of tacking or beating against the wind like a sailing vessel, and therefore a full 180° range of travel is denied them.
“The race was a timed affair, which is to say, the gyrospheres would take to the air at five minute intervals. The prevailing winds in the area are in the west, so a line was drawn along a longitudinal line of the map running through the nearby city of B—.” Danvers paused. “Ah.”
“Ha!” snorted Kay. “Hung by your own petard now, aren’t you, my boy?”
“Ba—,” said Danvers, but didn’t seem very convinced by this innovation.
“Banbury?” offered Kay innocently. “Or perhaps Barrow-in-Furness? Could it be Barking? Oh, but wait. You specifically said it was a city. Let me think — how many cities in Britain start with the letters ‘Ba’?” He pantomimed deep thought and then sudden inspiration. “Why, that is a list of precisely one. One city.”
He looked intently at Danvers, who crossed his arms and looked recalcitrant.
“One city,” repeated Kay. “Bath Spa, some fifteen miles east of Bristol.” His tone softened. “Really, Danvers, all this ‘—‘ business is entirely unnecessary.”
“A line running north and south through Bath,” said Danvers, affecting that he hadn’t heard Kay and this was his own decision. “All was in preparation. There were fourteen gyrospheres in contention, and the order in which they were to launch had been settled by lot. The Davina had drawn an early departure, which pleased McMurdo. ‘We’d no want the sky aheed of us t’be full of obstacles t’pass,’ was his comment.”
This, Danvers delivered in an ill-considered personation of a Scotch accent that would have filled Harry Lauder with dismay. Certainly it caused Robinson, the club’s resident Scot, to submerge behind his paper mouthing foul imprecations.
“The conditions were excellent: blue skies with only a few fleeting rags of cloud high in the firmament, the wind in the west, and a good steady blow of ten knots or so, according to the anemometer. The first ‘sphere was scheduled to lift at eight sharp, and my father’s at a quarter past. There was a decently sized crowd, many more people than anticipated, actually, and the men marshalling the area had their work cut out for them. Still, that was of no concern to my father and McMurdo as they readied the Davina to take to the air the very second that the official waved them off.
“You can imagine it was all getting quite loud, between the whisking of gyroscopes filling the air, the great armatures spinning just fast enough to ameliorate almost all the vessel’s weight, all but a statutory ton to keep them on the ground in that wind. There were shouts between crews and officials, the chatter of the crowd, and so it was understandable that neither my father nor his colleague took any notice of raised voices coming from an adjacent machine. The Glory, for that was her name, was scheduled to fly some ten minutes after the Davina, so you can imagine my father’s surprise when McMurdo tapped him on the arm and pointed, with a cry of, ‘What’s this about, then?’
“For the Glory was lifting, people running around in her shadow with cries of dismay and rage.
“Our first guess was that they had misjudged her gyro speed and she had gained the air prematurely. It wasn’t unknown and, indeed, that exact thing had happened at a private demonstration in the Midlands a few months earlier, an unmanned gyrosphere ending up flying across the country steadily gaining height until it was lost to sight and the ken of man. Best calculation is that it ran out of fuel and crashed in the North Sea, but nobody saw it happen. As a further aside, when the first etheric gatherers were tested, a gyrosphere was used as a test machine and it, too, was lost in a similar manner. Using a gatherer at high altitude means it would have stayed aloft until a bearing failed and that could have taken months or even years.”
He paused to give the gathering a moment to reflect on the romantic notion of a ghost gyrosphere, endlessly circumnavigating the Earth borne on winds both palpable and not.
“But, I digress. That first supposition of an accidental launch was damned within seconds when they saw the sail booms rise and, the moment the path was clear, the sails were unfurled. McMurdo and my father, along with all the other crews I would guess, stood dumbfounded by this turn of events. “‘Somebody’s jumped the gun,’ said McMurdo, and then added with a degree of cynical satisfaction, ‘That’s them disqualified.’ Then he looked at the activity at the Glory’s launch spot and reconsidered. ‘Aye, but something’s afoot, Hercules.’
“And indeed there was. There were people milling around, talking animatedly amongst themselves and occasionally pointing upwards to the sky where the Glory was starting to catch the wind. One of the Davina’s riggers came running over in a state of much excitement. ‘There’s been a robbery!’ he called to my father and McMurdo breathlessly. ‘Plate and gems from the house. The police are coming!’ He pointed at the flying gyrosphere. ‘That’s the thieves! There they go!’
“’A fat mickle of use calling the police here will be,’ growled McMurdo.” From behind his newspaper, Robinson could also be heard growling. “’By the time they get here, the Glory will be a halfway to London.’ The reality was th
at it would have been ditched in a field somewhere by that point, of course, a pre-arranged rendezvous with confederates who would assist in having the thieves and their booty safely away in short order. In all likelihood, they would have set the gyros to ascend before abandoning the gyrosphere, leaving the evidence to blow away on the westerly winds.
“Both McMurdo and my father were instantly convinced that the thieves were the two suspicious men of the evening before. They had been sizing up which of the ‘spheres would be best for their plan, and clearly the less talkative but more knowledgeable of them was the pilot. No wonder he’d lost interest when they’d started to describe the new steering gear to him; he wasn’t interested in innovation in the controls, but only familiarity. My father and McMurdo looked at one another; they could not let this outrageous crime go unchallenged.
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