King of the Cracksmen

by Dennis O'Flaherty

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, and handed the glass to Crazy Horse, who looked at the men first.

  “You know them?” he asked Liam and Becky.

  “Oh, yes,” they chorused.

  “In fact it was me that put that bird there on a crutch,” Liam said to Crazy Horse, “and I’m just wondering whether it was actually your friend Plekhanov who blew up the Palace or if it was those lads there.”

  “And if Boylan and his people are the ones who dynamited the Palace,” Becky added, “that means the mysterious Lukas will be somewhere in the wings waiting for his cue. Though just how he’ll receive it with only Government wires between here and the U.S., I don’t know—I suppose they’re planning some sort of insurrection and they’ll signal him once they succeed and take over the telegraph.”

  Crazy Horse looked startled. “Lukas?” he said. “From what I’ve heard here and among my old comrades in Land and Freedom, ‘Lukas’ is simply a nom de guerre for the Tsar’s morganatic son Nikolai Aleksandrovich. Those who know him say he hates our beloved Viceroy beyond all the ordinary bounds of virulence.”

  They chewed on that for a minute before Liam broke in: “I’ll tell you this much—if Lukas is aiming to come to Little Petersburg and head up a new Government there’s no guessing how bad things can get. I’ve gone up against him and I’m not in a hurry to do it again. In fact, I’m not sure he thinks of any of us as being more interesting than the mice a scientist studies in his lab. We’d better get to New York as fast as we can and stop him before he goes any farther.” He paused for a moment, then hit the punch line: “How fast do you think that monster over there will fly?”

  “You’re crazy, McCool,” Custer blurted out. “You press the wrong button on a contraption like that and you’re going to end up on the moon!”

  But Becky was already thinking: “Hmmm,” she said. “Any reason why our diversionary action shouldn’t work just as well with that Delta as it would with a barrage balloon?”

  There was a pause as Crazy Horse and Custer looked at each other and then shrugged. Crazy Horse turned to Becky:

  “We’ll give you five minutes to get as close to the gate as you can, crawling on your stomachs. Then when you’re in position we’ll throw the first bundle of dynamite, and from there on …” he spread his hands and smiled thinly. “It will be in the hands of the Great Spirit.”

  Custer was peering through his spyglass again. “By Jupiter,” he said, “I think that big building over there by the barracks is what they were calling the hydrogen reservoir.”

  “That ought to ginger them up,” Liam said with a grin. He took Custer’s hand and then Crazy Horse’s. “It’s been an honor,” he said, “not to mention a lot of good clean fun.”

  They all embraced and then Liam gave Becky a jocular half-bow: “After you, Miss.” She nodded and headed out of the tree line into the snow, trying to blend in with the bushes as long as she could. When there was nothing left but open snow Liam pulled Becky close and held her for a long moment. Then, blessedly, the clouds closed up again and Liam whispered: “Let’s get moving while it’s dark. This time I’m going first.” Becky didn’t argue and they flopped onto the snow and started crawling as fast as they could, pulling themselves forward with their elbows and trying to keep their faces down.

  It seemed to Liam that this process was lasting pretty close to forever, his knees and elbows first getting colder than he’d ever felt them, then hurting furiously, then going totally numb. Just as he started wondering if they were going to end up like those woolly mammoths, there was a shattering double explosion followed by a brilliant fireball that climbed high into the sky, lighting everything up like the sun before it winked out abruptly and gave way to a raging fire spreading among the aerodrome’s buildings.

  “That’s our signal,” Becky said excitedly.

  “And there go Boylan and his playmates,” Liam announced, jumping to his feet and helping Becky to hers. “If you aren’t frozen solid we need to make our run for it now!”

  Becky nodded solemnly, then leaned forward on an impulse and kissed him on the lips. He returned the kiss hard, then shook off the moment of foreboding:

  “Come on,” he said, “we aren’t going to let those bums beat us.”

  He took off running at full speed and Becky, getting the most out of her costume’s flat boots, kept right up with him. As they approached the gate, one of Boylan’s men appeared around the corner of a shed and jumped back in alarm, fumbling for a gun in his belt.

  “Hey! What’s the big idea?”

  Liam put on his thickest brogue: “Sure, it’s a message I have for yez from Boyo himself!”

  “Go on with yez,” cried the other, approaching them suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “This,” Liam said with a grin, striking like a cobra and knocking the man cold with one punch. “Come on,” he shouted to Becky, “we’re almost there!”

  There was another huge explosion—probably two bundles of dynamite at once, Liam guessed, then they were across the last patch of snow and up the little flight of metal stairs into the belly of the giant aircraft, pulling up the stairs instantly and slamming the hatch shut after them.

  The inside of the giant airship was breathtaking, like the illustrations to Liam’s beloved first edition of Verne’s Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers brought improbably to life. The interior of Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus was no more luxuriously paneled in oak nor ornately trimmed with curlicues of brass or impressively packed with mysterious machinery than this nameless behemoth of Stanton’s, softly lit by rows of tiny electric bulbs concealed within frosted glass globes.

  On the far side of the main cabin, spread in a semicircle beneath a sort of bay window with three thick panes of glass, was a curved panel studded with dials and switches beneath which a hanging jungle growth of wires and cables could be seen. Liam and Becky headed towards it hastily, listening to the gunfire outside and watching the scurrying figures of armed men through the thick glass windows.

  “We have to find a way to get this thing off the ground fast,” Liam muttered.

  Becky leaned forward to read the brass labels with their embossed and painted lettering. “At least it seems to have been laid out with a care for ordinary people’s engineering skills,” she said. “I suppose the rank-and-file aeronaut needs to be able to run it if all the officers are down.”

  “Thank Heaven for that,” Liam said, “my engineering skills never got beyond the study of lock mechanisms.” He examined the panel for a moment, then pointed to a dial labeled “Power Resources” which was divided into three arcs—the first black, the second green and the third red. “Looks like we’ve got plenty of power,” he said. The needle of the gauge pointed straight up and down through the green arc, which was labeled “Steam Up.”

  “There,” said Becky sharply, “throw that switch!”

  In a neighboring quadrant of the panel were various knobs and knife switches, including the big one that Becky was pointing to. Above it, in large red-enamel letters, were the words “Engage Engines.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” said Liam in a bemused tone.

  The minute he pulled the switch down the lights dimmed momentarily, then flared as the entire enormous vessel began to quiver like a hunting dog on point and a deep, sonorous thrum of steam turbines sounded beneath their feet.

  At almost the same instant they heard a furious pounding and shouting at the hatch they had slammed shut earlier, followed by a series of shots that pinged! off whatever the ship was armored with.

  “Bloody hell!” exclaimed Liam, then: “Sorry, Becky!”

  “No, no,” she said, “bloody hell indeed! If one shot gets to the hydrogen in these cells we’ll know just how the cockroaches in the hydrogen reservoir felt!” She looked around urgently. “There must be guns on this thing!”

  In the quadrant of the panel to Liam’s left there was a series of small knife switches with red handles, all in the up position an
d labeled “Rapid Fire.” Without a second thought Liam reached across and slammed them all down, and abruptly the ship was filled with the overwhelming racket of an unknown number of Gatling guns firing on all sides of them, with a tinkling obligatto of empty brass flying into collecting bins.

  “Dear Heaven!” murmured Becky. As Liam turned towards her and followed her gaze he could see everything visible outside the windows shredding and falling to pieces in the way he remembered too well from Gettysburg. “Enough!” Becky added in an appalled voice. Then her glance caught something on the next quadrant of the panel and she leaned towards it curiously.

  At the same moment, Liam reached across to the left and slapped the gun switches back into the up position, then lost his balance for a moment as the ship shuddered and lurched. Becky laughed helplessly and pointed to a large brass wheel with a rosewood handle fixed to it at right angles. At the left of the wheel were two-inch-high green letters spelling “ASCEND” and a green arrow sweeping around the circumference of the wheel to the right, where the rosewood handle now rested against a stop peg.

  “Going up?” she quipped a little shakily.

  It was a queer and overwhelming feeling: as if they really were standing in one of the new Otis steam elevators heading upwards at full speed with no top floor to stop them. Outside, the snow flurried thicker and thicker around the windows, illuminated by the lights from the cabin and the occasional shaft of moonlight. Becky turned back towards Liam and gave him a quizzical smile.

  “Now what?” she said.

  In the Air July 1—July 2, 1877

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The view was definitely the most spectacular thing either of them had ever seen. Far below them, like a rolling field of snow stretching away to all four points of the compass were the clouds, illuminated by the clear, cold, unwavering light of a quarter moon. Above them and seemingly all around them were more stars than either of them knew existed, unobscured by clouds, steam-engine smoke, dust, and all the myriad things that came between earthbound humans and the heavens.

  Becky and Liam were seated where they imagined the Captain and the First Mate (or something of the sort) must ordinarily sit—two very comfortable kidney-buttoned chairs of dark green leather on shiny brass pedestals that let them swivel in any direction they pleased. At the moment, they pleased to be facing forward, drinking in the stars. Finally Liam spoke:

  “Becky Fox, will you marry me?”

  She laughed her deep, unrestrained, joyous laugh—just hearing it made Liam smile.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Liam McCool, if I marry you will you give up being King of the Cracksmen so I needn’t worry every day about somebody or other clapping you in the jug?”

  Liam thought that over for a bit and then grinned: “Perhaps.”

  “Well, then,” she said with a smile, “let’s just wait and see and meantime enjoy every minute we can.”

  “That sounds like a good plan to me.”

  They sat there for a little while longer, each of them playing with daydreams of the future, until finally Liam tore himself away from Becky and the view and got up. “All right,” he said, “maybe we’d better figure out how to set a course and get this thing flying properly on its way home.”

  With a little sigh of regret Becky pushed herself free of the armchair’s embrace and joined Liam at the control panel. At the top of the first bank of instruments was an enormous convex glass magnifier, perhaps three feet square, above which was a brass plaque with inch-high enamel letters reading “Mapping.” It was illuminated by electric bulbs that had been recessed into its frame all the way around the edges, and was currently showing the area around New Petersburg. In the center, below the bottom edge of the magnifier, were dials labeled “Country,” “City,” and “Environs.”

  “See if you can find New York,” Liam suggested. Becky bent over and turned the first knob to “U.S.” which came up on the dial alphabetically (after tedious knob twirling through a gazetteer of other countries) following “Little Russia.” Fascinated, Liam watched as the map of Little Russia slid out of view, only to be replaced with one of the U.S. showing the area more or less across the Mississippi from where they had just been.

  “I don’t think that’s what we want right now,” Liam said, “let’s try this.”

  He gestured to a bank of dials and switches on the other side of the Mapping device that surrounded a steering bar pretty much like the one in any ordinary steam car. Liam pointed:

  “There’s the compass that shows how we’re heading, which right now is due east. And there next to it is the Course Selection Compass—it looks like you move the needle the way you’d set the hands of a clock and then lock it onto your course with that green switch there that says ‘Set Course.’ The big question is, what’s the best route to get us home?”

  Becky thought about it for a few moments. “The first thing we need to consider is what time we want to arrive. The main chronometer says it’s 10:20 p.m., July 1st, and we need to cover something like a thousand miles at what that air speed indicator says is 200 miles per hour, so allowing for unfavorable winds and the general cussedness of things if we head directly there we would probably be arriving in or near New York uncomfortably close to dawn.”

  Liam nodded thoughtfully. “Hard to make a clandestine landing in broad daylight in an aerial battleship the size of Staten Island.”

  “It could be a bit sticky,” Becky agreed.

  “Another thought is Stanton’s aerial patrols, you know …” (he made a simpering face) “… the ones your handsome beau Ubaldo told us about.”

  “I’m much stronger than you realize,” Becky said with a pleasant smile, “if I hit you might be quite sorry.”

  “Hmph,” Liam said. “Anyway, now that we’ve crossed the Mississippi into the U.S. we’re obviously in greater danger of discovery. So what do you think about heading directly north until we cross the Canadian border and then more or less following it until we get to Lake Ontario? From there to the city is only about three hundred miles, so if we can figure out someplace remote on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario where we can lay low in the daytime tomorrow, we should be able to time our arrival late enough on the 2nd to avoid putting on a show.”

  Liam could see that Becky was turning the idea over thoroughly and finding it satisfactory.

  “I think I know a good place,” she said, “I once did a story on the Mississauga Ojibway who moved north to escape land-hungry New Yorkers. All along the Canadian side of Lake Ontario there are huge grassy stretches of prairie where we can set this thing down for as long as we like without a soul to see us or care if they do.”

  “Perfect,” said Liam, “let’s set the course compass for due north—we should be in Canada in less than half an hour.”

  As Becky set the course selection compass and locked down the “Set Course” dial, Liam investigated some of the other controls on the panels in front of what they assumed to be the Captain’s chair. Directly to the right on the panel facing the Captain was a red button the size of a silver dollar with an enameled label reading “TeslaBolt.”

  “What the Dickens do you suppose that is?” he mused, resting his thumb on it as Becky joined him. Becky looked at the button dubiously and was about to pull Liam’s arm back when he gave in to temptation and pushed. Instantly a red light began flashing behind a brass label with cut-out letters reading “Capacitor Charging,” at the same time as a weird, groaning whine arose somewhere behind the control panels, moving rapidly up the scale till it reached an almost unbearable pitch. Involuntarily, Becky and Liam moved closer together, but before either of them could think what to do or where to go, a lightning bolt of blinding intensity shot out into the night from somewhere below the front of the Delta, filling the air in the control area with a sharp scent of ozone followed simultaneously by a thunderclap so loud that they both scrunched their eyes tight shut and threw their hands over their ears.

  When they finally opened their
eyes again the serene vista of moonlit clouds was stretching in front of them once more, the only clue to what had happened a moment before being the jagged after-images that still burned in their vision.

  “Holy Mary!” Liam said hollowly.

  Becky looked around at the cavernous space behind them, with its cheerful brass fixtures and green shades, thick maroon carpeting, and endless expanses of decoratively carved wood and mahogany paneling.

  “Just look at that,” Becky said with a slight tremor in her voice. We might as well be in the lobby of a really lovely hotel, but we seem to be surrounded by more hideously lethal weaponry than our surface Navy has in any of its heavy battleships.”

  Liam nodded soberly. “I expect this thing will end up on Shelter Island at Freedom Party headquarters within the next few days, but once it’s landed there you’d better tell Mr. Clemens to be ready to blow it to smithereens if either Stanton’s or Lukas’ people come after it. No politician anywhere has the brains and the goodness to be trusted with a gadget like this.”

  Sunk in thought, Becky and Liam went back to their armchairs and watched the stars until finally the alarm on the control panel chimed.

  “Well, Miss Fox,” Liam said with a stretch and a yawn, “unless we’re total dunces at mathematics, we should be about twenty miles into Canada by now. What do you say we re-set the course for Lake Ontario and catch a little shuteye before it starts to get light out?”

  Becky smiled and copied Liam’s stretch, then got up and walked over to the control panel. After a few minor adjustments she closed the “Set Course” switch again and looked around.

  “Now where do you suppose the officers’ staterooms are?”

  Liam got up and joined her, looking around on every side and then making a face as he discovered where Becky was looking. A short corridor branched off the main cabin to the right and a couple of bulbs glowed behind a glass panel that announced “Officers’ Quarters.”