Lord Kelvin's Machine (Langdon St. Ives)

by James P. Blaylock

  Abruptly he thought of food, of cottage pie and a bottle of beer. With effort, he began to think through the recipe for cottage pie, reciting it to himself. It wouldn’t do to talk out loud. Hasbro would haul him straight out of the water. He pictured the pie in his head—the mashed potatoes whipped with cream and butter, the farmer’s cheese melted across the top. He poured a mental beer into a glass, watching it foam up over the top and spill down the sides. Keeping the image fresh, he pulled in the line again, working diligently until he gripped the noose once more. Then, slowly, he carried it back out with the mechanical hand. He dropped it carefully, and this time it floated down to encircle a solid piece of outthrust metal.

  “Cottage pie,” he muttered.

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “Got its... eye,” he said weakly, realizing that this sounded even more lunatic than what he had said. It didn’t matter, though. He was almost through. Already the feeling of desperation and confinement was starting to lift. Carefully, he clamped on to the line again, pulling it tight inch by inch, working steadily to close the loop. If he could attend to his work he would be on the surface in ten minutes. Five minutes.

  “Up we go,” he said, loud this time, like a sea captain, and in a matter of seconds there was a jolt, and the bathyscaphe tilted just a little, lifting off the ocean floor. It rose surfaceward in little jerks, and the school of John Dory followed it up, nosing against the portholes. St. Ives was struck suddenly by how friendly the fish were, nosing against the glass like that. God bless a fish, he thought, keeping a man company. The water brightened around him, and the feeling of entombment began to dissipate. He breathed deeply, watching bubbles rush past now and the fish turn in a school and dart away. Suddenly the wave-lapped surface of the gray ocean tossed across the porthole, and then the sea gave way to swirling fog, illuminated by a morning sun and enlivened by the muffled sound of water streaming off the sides of the bathyscaphe. Then there was the solid clunk of metal feet settling on a wooden deck.

  St. Ives opened the hatch and climbed out, and immediately he and Hasbro swung the dripping bathyscaphe across the deck so as to make room for Lord Kelvin’s machine. They unfastened it from the jib crane and lashed it down solidly, hiding it beneath oiled canvas, working frenziedly while the sun threatened to burn off the fog and to reveal their efforts to the light of day. Hurrying, they fixed the line that grappled Lord Kelvin’s machine to the jib crane and set about hauling it out of the water, too, afterward hiding it beneath more tied down canvas.

  In another twenty minutes the steam trawler, piloted by the man that St. Ives knew as Uncle Botley, made off northward. St. Ives remained on deck for a time, watching through the mist. Soon they would be far enough from the site that they could almost pretend to be innocent—to have been out after fish.

  It had been six months since anyone from the Royal Academy had been lurking in the area. So they ought to have been safe; the issue of the machine was officially closed. Yet St. Ives was possessed with the notion that he would be discovered anyway, that there was something he had missed, that his plans to save Alice would fail if he wasn’t vigilant night and day. Fears kept revealing themselves to him, like cards turned up in a deck. He kept watch for another hour while the fog dissipated on the sea wind. The horizon, when he could see it, was empty of ships in every direction.

  Exhausted, he went below deck and fell into a bunk as the trawler steamed toward Grimsby, bound, finally, up the Humber to Goole. In three days he would be home again, such as it was, in Harrogate. Then the real work would start. Secrecy now was worth—what? His life, pretty literally. Alice’s life. They would transport the machine overland from Goole, after disguising it as a piece of farm machinery. Even so, they would keep it hidden beneath canvas. No one could be trusted. Even the most innocent bumpkin could be a spy for the Royal Academy.

  When they reached the environs of Harrogate they would wait for nightfall, sending Kraken ahead to scout out the road. That’s when the danger would be greatest, when they got to within hailing distance of the manor. If the Academy was laying for St. Ives, that’s where they would hide, waiting to claim what was theirs. How desperate would they be? More to the point, how far would St. Ives go to circumvent them?

  He knew that there were no steps that Parsons wouldn’t take in order to retrieve the machine. If Parsons knew, that is, that the machine was retrievable. For the fiftieth time St. Ives calculated the possibility of that, ending up, as usual, awash with doubts. Parsons was a doddering cipher. He had out-tricked St. Ives badly in Sterne Bay, and the only high card left to St. Ives now was the machine itself. Parsons hadn’t expected St. Ives to destroy it, and he certainly couldn’t have expected St. Ives to pretend to destroy it. Perhaps he should pretend to destroy it again, and so confuse the issue utterly. He could spend the remainder of his life pretending to have destroyed and recovered the machine. They could scuttle Uncle Botley’s trawler after transferring the machine to some other vessel, making Parsons believe that it was still on board. Of course, Parsons didn’t know it was on board in the first place; they would have to find a way to reveal that. Then they could pretend to pretend to scuttle the ship, maybe not move the machine off at all, but only pretend to...

  He tossed in his bunk, his mind aswirl with nonsense. Finally the sea rocked him to sleep, settling his mind. Water swished and slapped against the hull, and the ship creaked as it rose and fell on the ground swell. The noises became part of a dream—the sounds of a coach being driven hard along a black and muddy street.

  He was alone on a rainy night in the Seven Dials, three years past. At first he thought his friends were with him, but around him now lay nothing but darkness and the sound of rain. There was something—he squinted into the night. A shop window. He could see his own reflection, frightened and helpless, and behind him the street, rain pelting down. The rainy curtain drew back as if across a darkened theater stage, and a picture formed in the dusty window glass: a cabriolet overturned in the mud, one spoked wheel spinning round and round past the upturned face of a dead woman...

  He jerked up out of his bunk, fighting for breath. “Cottage pie,” he said out loud. Damn anyone who might hear him. What did they know? He was a man alone. In the end, that was what had proved to be true. It wasn’t anybody’s fault; it was the way of the world. He lay down again, feeling the ship rise on the swell. He thought hard about the pie, about the smell of thyme and rosemary and sage simmering in a beef broth, about the herb garden that Alice had started and that was now up in weeds. He hadn’t given much of a damn about food before he knew Alice, but she had got him used to it. He had kept the herb garden flourishing for a month or so, in her memory. But keeping the memory was somehow worse than fleeing from it. Moles were living in the garden now—a whole village of them.

  He drifted off to sleep again, dreaming that he watched the moles through the parlor window. One of them had the face and spectacles of old Parsons. It pretended to be busy with mole activities, but it regarded him furtively over the top of its spectacles. Away across the grounds lay the River Nidd, fringed with willows. Through them, his beard wagging, stepped Lord Kelvin himself, striding along toward the manor with the broad ever-approaching gait of a man in a dream. He wasn’t in a jolly mood, clearly not coming round to chat about the theory of elasticity or the constitution of matter. He carried a stick, which he beat against the palm of his hand.

  Willing to take his medicine, St. Ives stepped out into the garden to meet him, nearly treading on the mole that looked like Parsons. Weeds crackled underfoot and the day was dreary and dim, almost as if the whole world were dilapidated. This wasn’t going to be pretty. Lord Kelvin wasn’t a big man, and he was getting on in years, but there was a fierce look in his eyes that seemed to say, in a Glasgow brogue, “You’ve blown my machine to pieces. Now I’m going to beat the dust out of you.”

  What he said was, “I spent twenty-odd years on that engine, lad. I’m too old to start again.” His face was sad
dened, full of loss.

  St. Ives nodded. One day, maybe, he would give it back to the man. But he couldn’t tell him that now.

  “I’m truly sorry...” he began.

  “Ye can’t imagine what it was, man.” He gestured with the stick, which had turned into a length of braided copper wire.

  On the contrary, St. Ives had imagined what it was on the day that he walked into Lord Kelvin’s barn, looking to ruin it. He took the braided wire from the old man, but it fell apart in his hands, dropping in strands across his shoes.

  “We might have gone anywhere in it,” the old man said wistfully. “The two of us. Traveled across time...” He could be open and honest now that he thought the machine was blasted to pieces. There was nothing to hide anymore. St. Ives let him talk. It was making them both feel better, filling St. Ives with remorse and happiness at the same time: the two of them, traveling together, side by side, back to the Age of Reptiles, forward to a day when men would sail among the stars. St. Ives had worked too long in obscurity, shunned by the Academy and so pretending to despise it—but all the time pounding on the door, crying to be let in. That was the sad truth, wasn’t it? Here was its foremost member, Lord Kelvin himself, talking like an old and trusted colleague.

  Lord Kelvin nodded his head, which turned into a quadrant electrometer. In his hand he held a mariner’s compass of his own invention. The needle pointed east with awful, mystifying significance.

  “I knew what it... what it was,” St. Ives said remorsefully. “But I wanted the machine for myself, to work my own ends, not yours. I’ve given up science for personal gain.” He couldn’t help being truthful.

  “You’ll never be raised to the peerage with that attitude, lad.”

  St. Ives noticed suddenly that the mole with Parsons’s face was studying him out of its squinty little eyes. Hurriedly, it turned around and scampered away across the meadow, carrying a suitcase. Lord Kelvin looked at his pocket watch, which swung on the end of a length of transatlantic cable. “If he hurries he can catch the 2:30 train to London. He’ll arrive in time.”

  He showed the pocket watch to St. Ives. The crystal was enormous, nearly as big as the sky, filling the landscape, distorting the images behind it like a fishbowl. St. Ives squinted to make things out. The hands of the watch jerked around their course, ticking loudly. Behind them, on the watch face, a figure moved through the darkness of a rainy night. It was St. Ives himself, wading through ankle-deep water. It was fearsomely slow going. Like quicksand, the water clutched his ankles. Going round and round in his head was a hailstorm of regrets—if only the ships hadn’t gone down, if he hadn’t missed his train, if he hadn’t come to ruin on the North Road, if he could tear himself loose now from the grip of this damnable river... He wiped rainwater out of his eyes. Crouched before him in the street was Ignacio Narbondo, a smoking pistol in his hand and a look of insane triumph on his face.

  St. Ives jackknifed awake again. The air of the cabin was cold and wet, and for a moment he imagined he was once more in the bathyscaphe, on the bottom of the sea. But then he heard Uncle Botley shout and then laugh, and the voice, especially the laughter, seemed to St. Ives to be a wonderful fragment of the living world— something he could get a grip on, like a cottage pie.

  St. Ives studied his face in the mirror on the wall. He was thin and sallow. He felt a quick surge of terror without an object, and he realized abruptly that he had gotten old. He seemed to have the face of his father. “Time and chance happeneth to them all,” he muttered, and he went out on deck in the gathering night, where the lights of Grimsby slipped past off the starboard bow, and the waters of the Humber lost themselves in the North Sea.

  THE SAVING OF BINGER’S DOG

  St. Ives sat in the chair in his study. It was a dim and wintry day outside, with rain pending and the sky a uniform gray. He had been at work on the machine for nearly six months, and success loomed on the horizon now like a slowly approaching ship. There had been too little sleep and too many missed or hastily eaten meals. His friends had rallied around him, full of concern, and he had gone on in the midst of all that concern, implacably, like a rickety millwheel. Jack and Dorothy were on the Continent now, though, and Bill Kraken was off to the north, paying a visit to his old mother. There was a fair chance that he wouldn’t see any of them again. The thought didn’t distress him. He was resigned to it.

  A fly circled lazily over the clutter on the desk, and St. Ives whacked at it suddenly with a book, knocking it to the floor. The fly staggered around as if drunk. In a fit of remorse, St. Ives scooped it up on a sheet of paper, walked across and opened the French window, and then dumped the fly out into the bushes. “Go,” he said hopefully to the fly, which buzzed around aimlessly, somewhere down in the bushes.

  St. Ives stood breathing the wet air and staring out onto the meadow at the brick silo that rose there crumbling and lonely, full to the top with scientific aspirations and pretensions. It looked to him like a sorry replica of the Tower of Babel. Inside it lay Lord Kelvin’s machine, along with Higgins’s bathyscaphe. St. Ives had removed and discarded most of the shell of the machine, hauling the useless telltale debris away by night. What was left was nearly ready; he had only to wheedle what might be called fine points out of the gracious Lord Kelvin who would abandon Harrogate for Glasgow tomorrow morning.

  St. Ives hadn’t slept in two days. Dreaming had very nearly cured him of sleep. There would be time enough for sleep, though. Either that, or there wouldn’t be. On impulse, he left the window open, thinking to show other flies that he harbored no ill will toward them, and then he slumped back across to the chair and sat down heavily, sinking so that he rested on his tailbone. A shock of hair fell across his eyes, obscuring his vision. He harrowed it backward with his fingers, then nibbled at a grown-out nail, tearing it off short and taking a fragment of skin with it. “Ouch,” he said, shaking his hand, but then losing interest in it almost at once. For a long time he sat there, thinking about nothing.

  Coming to himself, finally, he surveyed the desktop. It was a clutter of stuff—tiny coils and braids of wire, miniature gauges, pages torn out of books, many of which torn pages now marked places in other books. There was an army of tiny clockwork toys littering the desktop, built out of tin by William Keeble. Half of them were a rusted ruin, the victims of an experiment he had performed three weeks past. St. Ives looked at them suspiciously, trying to remember what he had meant to prove by spraying them with brine and then leaving them on the roof.

  He had waked up in the middle of the night with a notion involving the alteration of matter, and had spent an hour meddling with the toys, leaving them, finally, on the roof before going back to bed, exhausted. In the morning, somehow, he had forgotten about them. And then, days later, he had seen them from out on the meadow, still lying on the roof, and although he remembered having put them there, and having been possessed with the certainty that putting them there was good and right and useful, he couldn’t for the life of him recall why.

  That sort of thing was bothersome—periods of awful lucidity followed by short bursts of rage or by wild enthusiasm for some theoretical notion having to do with utter nonsense. Moodily, he poked at the windup duck, which whirred momentarily to life, and then fell over onto its side. There were ceramic figures, too, sitting among comical Toby mugs and glass gewgaws, some few of which had belonged to Alice. Balls of crumpled paper lay everywhere, along with broken pens and graphite crumbs and fragments of India-rubber erasers. A lake of spilled ink had long ago dried beneath it all, staining the brown oak of the desktop a rich purple.

  Filled with a sudden sense of purpose, he reached out and swept half the desk clear, the books and papers and tin toys tumbling off onto the floor. Carefully, he straightened the glass and ceramic figurines, setting a little blue-faced doggy alongside a Humpty Dumpty with a ruff collar. He stood a tiptoeing ballerina behind them, and then, in the foreground, he lay a tiny glass shoe full of sugar crystals. He sat back and looked a
t the collection, studying it. There was something in it that wasn’t quite satisfying, that wasn’t—what? Proportionate, maybe. He turned the toe of the glass shoe just a bit. Almost... He rotated the Humpty Dumpty so that it seemed to be regarding the ballerina, then slid the dog forward so that its head rested on the toe of the shoe.

  That was it. On the instant, meaning had evolved out of simple structure. Something in the little collection reminded him of something else. What? Domestic tranquillity. Order. He smiled and shook his head nostalgically, yearning for something he couldn’t recall. The comfortable feeling evaporated into the air. The nostalgia, poignant as it had been for that one moment, wasn’t connected to anything at all, and was just so much vapor, an abstraction with no concrete object. It was gone now, and he couldn’t retrieve it. Maybe later he would see it again, when he wasn’t trying so hard.

  Frowning, he returned to the window where he worked his fingers through his hair again. There was a broken limb on the bush where he had dropped the fly, as if someone had stepped into it clumsily. For a moment he was puzzled. There hadn’t been any broken limb a half hour ago.

  A surge of worried excitement welled up in him, and he stepped out through the window, looking up and down along the wall of the house. Here he is again! he said to himself. No one was visible, though.

  He sprinted to the corner, bursting quickly past it to catch anyone who might still be lurking. He looked about himself wildly for a moment and then ran straight toward the carriage house and circled entirely around it. The door was locked, so he didn’t bother going in, but headed out onto the meadow instead straightaway toward the silo. He realized that he should have fetched Hasbro along with him, or at any rate brought a weapon.