The Difference Engine

by William Gibson

  Mallory rose to offer his hand, then realized that his fingers were tainted with acid. He bowed instead, sat at once, and wiped his hand furtively on the back of his trouser-leg. The skin of thumb and forefinger felt dessicated, as if dipped in formaldehyde.

  "I hope I find you well, sir," Fraser murmured, seating himself across the table. "Recovered from yesterday's attack?"

  Mallory glanced down the length of the library. The other patrons were still clumped together at the far side of the room, and seemed very curious indeed about his antics and Fraser's sudden appearance.

  "A trifle," Mallory hedged. "Might happen to anyone, in London."

  Fraser lifted one dark eyebrow, by a fraction.

  "Sorry my mishap should cause you to take trouble, Mr. Fraser."

  "No trouble, sir." Fraser opened a leather-bound notebook and produced a reservoir-pen from within his plain, Quakerish jacket. "Some questions?"

  "Truth to tell. I'm rather pressed for time at the moment—"

  Fraser silenced him with an impassive look. "Been here three hours, sir, awaiting your convenience."

  Mallory began a fumbling apology.

  Fraser ignored him. "I witnessed something quite curious outside, at six o'clock this morning, sir. A young news-boy, crying to the world that Leviathan Mallory was arrested for murder."

  "Me? Edward Mallory?"

  Fraser nodded.

  "I don't understand. Why should any news-boy cry any such damnable lie?"

  "Sold a deal of his papers," Fraser said drily. "Bought one meself."

  "What on earth did this paper have to say about me?"

  "Not a word of news about any Mallory," Fraser said. "You may see for yourself." He dropped a folded newspaper on the table-top: a London Daily Express.

  Mallory set the newspaper carefully atop his basket. "Some wicked prank," he suggested, his throat dry. "The street-arabs here are nerved for anything… "

  "When I stepped out again, the little rascal had hooked it," Fraser said. "But a deal of your colleagues heard that news-boy crying his tale. Been the talk of the place all morning."

  "I see," Mallory said. "That accounts for a certain… well!" He cleared his throat.

  Fraser watched him impassively. "You'd best see this now, sir." He took a folded document from his notebook, opened it, and slid it across the polished mahogany.

  An Engine-printed daguerreotype. A dead man, full length on a slab, a bit of linen tucked about his loins. The picture had been taken in a morgue. The corpse had been knifed open from belly to sternum with a single tremendous ripping thrust. The skin of chest and legs and bulging belly was marble pale, in eerie contrast to the deeply sunburnt hands, the florid face.

  It was Francis Rudwick.

  There was a caption at the bottom of the picture. 'A Scientific Autopsy', it read. 'The "batrachian" subject is pithed and opened in a catastrophic dissection. First in a Series.'

  "God in Heaven!" Mallory said.

  "Official police morgue record," Fraser said. "Seems it fell into the hands of a mischief-maker."

  Mallory stared at it in horror-struck amazement. "What can it mean?"

  Fraser readied his pen. "What is 'batrachian,' sir?"

  "From the Greek," Mallory blurted. "Batrachos, amphibian. Frogs and toads, mostly." He struggled for words. "Once—years ago, in a debate—I said that his theories… Rudwick's geological theories, you know…"

  "I heard the story this morning, sir. It seems well-known among your colleagues." Fraser flipped pages in his notebook. "You said to Mr. Rudwick: 'The course of Evolution does not conform to the batrachian sluggishness of your intellect.' " He paused. "Fellow did look a bit froggy, didn't he, sir?"

  "It was in public debate at Cambridge," Mallory said slowly. "Our blood was up… "

  "Rudwick claimed you were 'mad as a hatter,' " Fraser mused. "Seems you took that remark very ill."

  Mallory flushed. "He had no right to say that, with his gentry airs—"

  "You were enemies."

  "Yes, but—" Mallory wiped his forehead. "You can't believe I had anything to do with this!"

  "Not by your own intention, I am sure," Fraser said. "But I believe you're a Sussex man, sir? Town called Lewes?"

  "Yes?"

  "Seems that some scores of these pictures have been mailed from the Lewes postal office."

  Mallory was stunned. "Scores of them?"

  "Mailed far and wide to your Royal Society colleagues, sir. Anonymously."

  "Christ in Heaven," Mallory said, "they mean to destroy me!"

  Fraser said nothing.

  Mallory stared at the morgue picture. Suddenly the simple human pity of the sight struck him, with terrible force. "Poor damned Rudwick! Look what they've done to him!"

  Fraser watched him politely.

  "He was one of us!" Mallory blurted, stung into angry sincerity. "He was no theorist, but a damned fine bone-digger. My God, think of his poor family!"

  Fraser made a note. "Family—must inquire into that. Very likely they've been told you murdered him."

  "But I was in Wyoming when Rudwick was killed. Everyone knows that!"

  "A wealthy man might hire the business done."

  "I'm not a wealthy man."

  Fraser said nothing.

  "I wasn't," Mallory said, "not then…"

  Fraser leafed deliberately through his notebook.

  "I won the money gambling."

  Fraser showed mild interest.

  "My colleagues have noticed how I spend it," Mallory concluded, with a chill sensation. "And wondered whence the money came. And they talk about me behind my back, eh?"

  "Envy does set tongues wagging, sir."

  Mallory felt a sudden giddy dread. Menace filled the air like a cloud of wasps. After a moment, in Fraser's tactful silence, Mallory rallied himself. He shook his head slowly, set his jaw. He would not be mazed or driven. There was work to do. There was evidence at hand. Mallory bent forward with a scowl, and studied the picture fiercely. " 'First of a series,' this says. This is a threat, Mr. Fraser. It implies similar murders to follow. 'A catastrophic dissection.' This refers to our scientific quarrel—as if he'd died because of that!"

  "Savants take their quarrels very seriously," Fraser said.

  "Can you mean to say that my colleagues believe I sent this? That I hire assassins like a Machiavel; that I am a dangerous maniac who boasts of murdering his rivals?"

  Fraser said nothing.

  "My God," Mallory said. "What am I to do?"

  "My superiors have set this case within my purview," Fraser said formally. "I must ask you to trust in my discretion, Dr. Mallory."

  "But what am I to do about the damage to my reputation? Am I to go to every man in this building, and beg his pardon, and tell him… tell him I am not some hellish ghoul?"

  "Government will not allow a prominent savant to be harassed in this manner," Fraser assured him quietly. "Tomorrow, in Bow Street, the Commissioner of Police will issue a statement to the Royal Society, declaring you a victim of malicious slander, and innocent of all suspicion in the Rudwick affair."

  Mallory rubbed his beard. "Will that help, you think?"

  "If necessary, we will issue a public statement to the daily newspapers, as well."

  "But might not such publicity arouse more suspicion against me?"

  Fraser shifted a bit in his library chair. "Dr. Mallory, my Bureau exists to destroy conspiracies. We are not without experience. We are not without our resources. We will not be trumped by some shabby clique of dark-lanternists. We mean to have the lot of these plotters, branch and root, and we will do it sooner, sir, if you are frank with me, and tell me all you know."

  Mallory sat back in his chair. "It is in my nature to be frank, Mr. Fraser. But it is a dark and scandalous story."

  "You need not fear for my sensibilities."

  Mallory looked about at the mahogany shelves, the bound journals, the leather-bound texts and outsized atlases. Suspicion hung in the
air like a burning taint. After yesterday's street-assault, the Palace had seemed a welcome fortress to him, but now it felt like a badger's bolthole. "This ain't the place to tell it," Mallory muttered.

  "No, sir," Fraser agreed. "But you should go about your scientific business, same as always. Put a bold face on matters, and likely your enemies will think their stratagems failed."

  The advice seemed sound to Mallory. At the least, it was action. He rose at once to his feet. "Go about my daily business, eh? Yes, I should think so. Quite proper."

  Fraser rose as well. "I will accompany you, sir, with your permission. I trust we will put a sharp end to your troubles."

  "You might not think so, if you knew the whole damned business," Mallory grumbled.

  "Mr. Oliphant has informed me on the matter."

  "I doubt it," Mallory grunted. "He has closed his eyes to the worst of it."

  "I'm no bloody politician," Fraser remarked, in his same mild tone. "Shall we be on our way, sir?"

  Outside the Palace, the London sky was a canopy of yellow haze.

  It hung above the city in gloomy grandeur, like some storm-fleshed jellied man-o'-war. Its tentacles, the uprising filth of the city's smokestacks, twisted and fluted like candle-smoke in utter stillness, to splash against a lidded ceiling of glowering cloud. The invisible sun cast a drowned and watery light.

  Mallory studied the street around him, a London summer morning made strange by the eerie richness of the sooty amber light.

  "Mr. Fraser, you're a London man born and bred, I take it."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Have you ever seen weather like this?"

  Fraser considered, squinting at the sky. "Not since I were a lad, sir, when the coal-fogs were bad. But the Rads built taller stacks. Nowadays it blows off into the counties." He paused. "Mostly."

  Mallory considered the flat clouds, fascinated. He wished he'd spent more time on the doctrines of pneumo-dynamics. This pot-lid of static cloud displayed an unhealthy lack of natural turbulence, as though the dynamical systematics of the atmosphere had stagnated somehow. The stinking underground, the droughty, sewage-thickened Thames, and now this. "Doesn't seem as hot as yesterday," he muttered.

  "The gloom, sir."

  The streets were such a crush as only London could produce. The omnibuses and cabriolets were all taken, every intersection jammed with rattle-traps and dogcarts, with cursing drivers and panting, black-nostriled horses. Steam-gurneys chugged sluggishly by, many lowing rubber-tired freight-cars loaded with provisions. It seemed the gentry's summer exodus from London was becoming a rout. Mallory could see the sense in it.

  It was a long walk to Fleet Street, and his appointment with Disraeli. It seemed best to try the train and endure the Stink.

  But the British Brotherhood of Sappers and Miners stood on strike at the entrance to Gloucester Road Station. They had set up pickets and banners across the walk, and were heaping sandbags, like an army of occupation. A large crowd looked on, keeping good order; they did not seem annoyed by the strikers' boldness, but seemed curious, or cowed. Perhaps they were glad to see the underground shut; more likely they were simply afraid of the sand-hogs. The helmeted strikers had boiled up from their underground workings like so many muscular kobolds.

  "I don't like the look of this, Mr. Fraser."

  "No, sir."

  "Let's have a word with these fellows." Mallory crossed the street. He accosted a squat, veiny-nosed sand-hog, who was bawling at the crowd and forcing leaflets upon them. "What's the trouble here, brother sapper?"

  The sand-hog looked Mallory up and down, and grinned around an ivory toothpick. There was a large gold-plated hoop in his ear—or perhaps real gold, as the Brotherhood was a wealthy union, owning many ingenious patents. "I'll give ye the long and short of it, mister, since ye ask so civil-like. 'Tis the goddamn' bloody hare-brained pneumatic trains! We told Lord Babbage, in petition, that the bleedin' tunnels never would air proper. But some spunking bastard savant give us some fookin' nonsense lecture, and now the bastard things've gone sour as rotten piss."

  "That's a serious matter, sir."

  "Yer fookin' right it is, cove."

  "Do you know the name of the consulting savant?"

  The sand-hog talked the question over with a pair of his helmeted friends. "Lordship name of Jefferies."

  "I know Jefferies!" Mallory said, surprised. "He claimed that Rudwick's pterodactyl couldn't fly. Claimed he'd proven it a 'torpid gliding reptile' that couldn't flap its own wings. The rascal's an incompetent! He should be censured for fraud!"

  "Savant yerself, are ye, mister?"

  "Not one of his sort," Mallory said.

  "What about yer pal the fookin' copper here?" The sandhog tugged agitatedly at the ring in his ear. "Wouldn't be taking all this down in yer bleeding notebooks, would ye?"

  "Not at all," Mallory said with dignity. "Simply wanted to know the full truth of the matter."

  "Ye want to know the bloody truth, yer savantship, you'll crawl down there and scrape yerself a bucketful of that moldy shite off the bricks. Sewermen o' twenty years' standing are tossing their guts from the Stink."

  The sand-hog moved to confront a woman in banded crinoline. "Ye can't go down there, darlin', ain't a single train rolling in London—"

  Mallory moved on. "We haven't heard the last of this!" he muttered aloud, vaguely in Fraser's direction. "When a savant takes on industrial consultation, he needs to be sure of his facts!"

  "It's the weather," Fraser said.

  "Not at all! It's a matter of savantry ethics! I got such a call myself—fellow in Yorkshire, wants to build a glass conservatory on the pattern of Brontosaurus spine and ribs. The vault-work is fine and efficient, I told him, but the glass seals will surely leak. So, no job, and no consulting-fee—but my reputation as a scholar is upheld!" Mallory snorted on the oily air, cleared his throat, and spat into the gutter. "I can't believe that damned fool Jefferies would give Lord Babbage such poor advice."

  "Never saw any savant talk straight to a sand-hog… "

  "Then you don't know Ned Mallory! I honor any honest man who truly knows his business."

  Fraser considered this. He seemed a bit dubious, if one could judge by his leaden expression. "Dangerous working-class rioters, your sand-hogs."

  "A fine Radical union. They stood stoutly by the Party in the early days. And still do."

  "Killed a deal of police, in the Time of Troubles."

  "But those were Wellington's police," Mallory said.

  Fraser nodded somberly.

  There seemed little help for it but to walk all the way to Disraeli's. Fraser, whose long-legged, loping stride matched Mallory's with ease, was nothing loath. Retracing their steps, they entered Hyde Park, Mallory hoping for a breath of fresher air. But here the summer foliage seemed half-wilted in the oily stillness, and the greenish light beneath the boughs was extraordinary in its glum malignity.

  The sky had become a bowl of smoke, roiling and thickening. The untoward sight seemed to panic the London starlings, for a great flock of the little birds had risen over the park. Mallory watched in admiration as he walked. Rocking activity was a very elegant lesson in dynamical physics. Quite extraordinary how the systematic interaction of so many little birds could form vast elegant shapes in the air: a trapezoid, then a lopped-off pyramid, becoming a flattened crescent, then bowing up in the center like the movement of a tidal surge. There was likely a good paper in the phenomenon.

  Mallory stumbled on a tree-root. Fraser caught his arm. "Sir."

  "Yes, Mr. Fraser?"

  "Keep an eye peeled, if you would. We might perhaps be followed."

  Mallory glanced about him. It was not much use; the park was crowded and he could see no sign of the Coughing Gent or his derbied henchman.

  On Rotten Row, a small detachment of amazon cavalry—"pretty horse-breakers" they were called in the papers, this being a euphemism for well-to-do courtesans—had gathered about one of their number, thrown
from her side-saddle by her chestnut gelding. Mallory and Fraser, as they came closer, saw that the beast had collapsed, and lay frothily panting in the damp grass by the side of the trail. The rider was muddied but unhurt. She was cursing London, and the filthy air, and the women who had urged her to gallop, and the man who had bought her the horse.

  Fraser politely ignored the unseemly spectacle. "Sir, in my line of work we learn to cultivate the open air. There are no doors ajar or keyholes about us at the moment. Will you inform me of your troubles, in your own plain words, as you yourself have witnessed the events?"

  Mallory tramped on silently for some moments, juggling the matter in his mind. He was tempted to trust Fraser; of all those men in authority whose aid he might have sought in his troubles this sturdy policeman alone seemed primed to boldly grapple problems at their root. Yet there was much hazard in that trust, and the risk was not to himself alone.

  "Mr. Fraser, the reputation of a very great lady is involved in this affair. Before I speak, I must have your word as a gentleman that you will not damage the lady's interests."

  Fraser walked on with a meditative air, hands clasped behind his back. "Ada Byron?" he asked at length.

  "Why, yes! Oliphant told you the truth, did he?"

  Fraser slowly shook his head. "Mr. Oliphant is very discreet. But we of Bow Street are often called upon to put the muzzle on the Byrons' family difficulties. One might almost say that we specialize in the effort."

  "But you seemed to know almost at once, Mr. Fraser! How could that be?"

  "Sad experience, sir. I know those words of yours, I know that worshipful tone—'the interests of a very great lady.' " Fraser gazed about the gloomy park, taking in the curved benches of teak and iron, crowded with open-collared men, flush-faced women fanning themselves, wilted hordes of city children gone red-eyed and peevish in the stinking heat. "Your duchesses, your countesses, they all had their fancy mansions burnt down in the Time of Troubles. Your Rad Ladyships may put on airs, but no one calls them 'great ladies' in quite that old-fashioned way, unless referring to the Queen herself, or our so-called Queen of Engines."