by Mike Ashley
Once seated on a velvet-covered chair in a large darkened amphitheatre with scores of others, Wheatstone was treated to a show of magic-lantern slides accompanied by a very entertaining speech given by one of the many trained actors who served as guides to the fair. He thrilled once more to the famous tale of the castaways, an abbreviated saga which was followed by an account of the subsequent thirty years. The act of Congress in 1875 which had reluctantly but decisively allowed the petition of the Iowans asking to secede from the rest of the United States; the attempted invasion of the fledgling country by a cabal of European powers, launched from their base in Canada, which had been efficiently and mercilessly repelled by uncanny weapons of a heretofore unseen type. The signing of various peace treaties and the establishment of Iowan hegemony in several areas of international commerce and trade. The immigration policies which encouraged savants from all corners of the globe to flock to Lincoln Island –
After this, Wheatstone toured several exhibits, taking copious notes. From the Hall of Gravito-magnetism to the Chamber of Agricultural Engineering; from the Arcade of Electrical Propagation to the Gallery of Pneumatics –
Finally, though, even the exciting speculations failed to compensate for Wheatstone’s natural fatigue after such a busy day, and, after consuming a light snack of squab and sausages from a fairground booth, he returned reluctantly to his hotel room.
There, to his surprise, a blinking light on the ordinator panel in his room signalled that a message awaited him. Triggering the output of the electronic pen produced a cryptic sentence or two that lacked all attribution of sender, as if such information had been deliberately stripped away.
Mr Wheatstone – have you noticed the absence of a certain name from these festivities? I refer to the appellation of “Nemo.” Would you know more? Meet me this evening after midnight at the Gilded Cockerel.
As a journalist, Wheatstone was used to such anonymous “tips.” In the majority of cases, they led precisely nowhere. But every now and then, such secret disclosures did produce large stories of consequence. The young reporter could feel his blood thrill at the possibility that he would bag such a “scoop” from this message. This was an outcome he had hardly dared hope for when he had received his current assignment. But if he could manage to distinguish his reportage from all the other laudatory profiles that would be filed from this dateline, both he and the Boston Herald would benefit immensely. And proprietor William Randolph Hearst could be most generous to his successful employees.
Checking his pocketwatch, Wheatstone determined that he could snatch a few hours’ sleep before making the rendezvous with the mysterious informant. But before he stretched himself out, he fired off an ordinator message of his own, to his ladylove back in the land of the bean and the cod.
Dear Matilda – I have arrived safely in Lincoln Island and already find myself embroiled in matters of some significance. If I succeed in making my name as I suspect I will with this assignment, perhaps you and I may finally get married. As you well know, my resolve not to ride on the Lodge family coat tails necessitates my obtaining a certain stature within my chosen profession before any nuptials can proceed. Please send all your kindest thoughts my way.
Having dispatched this message, Wheatstone stripped down to his undergarments, set the alarm clock by his bed to sound at 11:30 p. m., and was soon deeply asleep.
The clanging of the alarm seemed subjectively to occur almost simultaneous with his descent into the realm of Morpheus, and Wheatstone awoke with a start. Yet it was but a matter of minutes for him to refresh himself, dress, and descend to the lobby of the Hotel Amiens. There, he inquired of the concierge the address of the Gilded Cockerel. The rigorously circumspect fellow looked askance at Wheatstone, as if his query were somehow improper, but supplied the address nonetheless.
Outside, the thronged streets of Lincolnopolis were well-lighted not only by the permanent electric standards, but also with numerous strands of coloured bulbs celebrating the exposition. Wheatstone had no trouble hailing a jitney, and soon found himself standing outside the door to the Gilded Cockerel.
Judging by its exterior, the tavern, situated in a shadowy, mirey lane totally incongruous with the rest of Lincolnopolis’s civic splendor, seemed somewhat louche. But Wheatstone had been obliged to frequent worse places, and he entered boldly.
The interior of the establishment confirmed Wheatstone’s original estimation. Gimcrack decorations could not conceal the shoddiness of the furnishings. Odours of spilled ale and less savoury substances clogged Wheatstone’s nostrils. Raucous laughter and shouts indicated a total lack of public decorum. But what was more offputting than any of the sensory assaults were the figures of the patrons of the Gilded Cockerel. To a man – and there were no females present – the customers were clothed as total fops. The amount of lace and brocade present would have outfitted the vanished court of Louis the Fourteenth.
Wheatstone knew instantly that he had fallen in with sodomites. Their generic resemblance to the infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde was indisputable.
Bracing his spine, careful not to make any physical contact with the seated, simpering deviants, Wheatstone advanced toward the barkeep, a burly chap whose sleeveless shirt afforded a view of his numerous tattoos.
“I am supposed to meet someone here tonight.”
The barkeep’s mellifluous voice was utterly at odds with his appearance. “What’s your name, honey?”
“Mr Bingham Wheatstone.”
“Ah, of course. Your date’s awaiting you in one of the private rooms. Last door on the right, dearie.”
The nominated door opened to Wheatstone’s touch and he stepped inside. Not electricity, but a single candle illuminated the small room: rickety table, two hard chairs, an uncorked, half-full bottle of wine and a single glass. A man stood with his back to the door. At his feet bulked a large carpetbag.
Hearing Wheatstone’s entrance, the man turned, and Wheatstone could not suppress his exclamation.
“Harbert Brown!”
“Quiet, you dolt! I trust everyone here, but there’s still no need to announce my presence to the world. Now, have a seat.”
Wheatstone took one of the chairs, using the time to study the familiar yet altered face of Brown. The man’s lips appeared to be painted, and his eyelids daubed with kohl. Taking a moment now to light a slim cigar, Brown exhibited a limp-wristed effeminacy. Although the youngest member of Lincoln Island’s ruling council, Brown was still middle-aged, with all the attendant sagging flesh of that stage of life, having been an adolescent stripling during the castaways’ adventures, and today his unnatural airs reeked of a jaded degeneracy.
Wheatstone ventured to paint the picture presented by Brown’s appearance in the most charitable light.
“Sir, you have adopted a most convincing disguise –”
“Oh, you know as well as I do that’s stuff and nonsense, Mr Wheatstone. This is the real me. It’s when I appear in public as a moral and responsible politician that I am actually in disguise. And what a trial it has been, maintaining that façade all these years. Little did I imagine when I became Pencroff’s catamite as a youth that I was embarking on a tedious charade that would last decades.”
Wheatstone felt his mind whirling in a tornado of overturned conceptions. “But what are you implying?”
Brown languidly expelled a cloud of cigar smoke. “Need I spell it out for you. Mr Wheatstone? What kind of relationship did you suspect existed between a lusty sailor and a young boy who inexplicably accompanied him everywhere? Pencroff and I were lovers during our imprisonment in Richmond, Virginia, and we remained so for three years on Lincoln Island after our balloon escape. In fact, in the absence of females, I was able to provide carnal solace to all our little band during that period. Although none of the other men were bent that way originally, they all gladly succumbed to my charms when their natural urges reached a certain crisis point.”
“But, no, this can’t be –”
“Oh, don’t be so shocked, Mr Wheatstone. It’s not becoming in a supposedly seasoned reporter. And anyway, this is not the matter I invited you here to discuss. The sexual habits of Lincoln Island’s rulers have little import outside the narrow confines of our tiny elite. No, the topic today is the very future of human progress. You see, Mr Wheatstone, I fear that Lincoln Island has become a positive blockade to technological advancement, and that its continued dominance in the global scientific arena will eventually doom mankind and actually induce a long, hard fall back to savagery.”
“How can you assert such an impossibility, sir? It contradicts everything I know.”
Brown sighed, took a seat, poured himself some wine without offering Wheatstone any, sipped, then said, “Ah, that is the problem, Bing. May I call you ‘Bing’? You most assuredly do not know everything. What, for instance, do you make of the name of Captain Nemo?”
“This is the name you mentioned in your message to me. Well, I seem to recall that a brigand once roved the seven seas under that nom de guerre, harrassing shipping and so forth. Were his quixotic campaigns not chronicled in some musty old volume early in this century? Beleaguered Below the Seas, or some such title? If this is the fellow you refer to, his relevance is not immediately apparent.”
“Indeed, you recall the broad, distorted outlines of Nemo’s career. I’m surprised you apprehend even that much. During our Robinsonade upon Lincoln Island, Nemo had already been absent from the public scene for thirty years. Nowadays he is hardly even a phantom. And much of that public nescience regarding him and his works is deliberate, fostered by us here. Yet such was not the case three decades ago, when his name was still on the lips of the cognoscenti. You can imagine our surprise when we discovered this notorious criminal genius to be a fellow resident of our little island.”
“He was cast away, like yourselves, then?”
“Not at all. He had retreated to the island purposefully, to spend his final bitter days in peace and seclusion. We witnessed his death from natural causes, and buried him there.”
“How then can his name play any part in the current discussion?”
“Nemo was a wizard, Bing. And he was buried in his wizardly craft, the Nautilus, a submersible vessel. We sank it with his corpse, as per his last wishes. But the trouble – the trouble is, the Nautilus did not remain sunk.”
“I am beginning to see the vaguest hints of the direction in which your story is heading. Pray, proceed.”
Harbert Brown took a long meditative swig of wine before continuing. The guttering candle caused shadows to warp eerily across his bleary-eyed visage.
“Can you envision the ambitious dreams and lofty expectations which the six of us repatriated survivors held, once we were transplanted to Iowan soil, Bing? On primitive Lincoln Island we had struggled against all odds and created a semblance of civilization out of nothing but our wits and the abundant raw materials present. True, we had benefited from the secret interventions of Nemo at certain crucial junctures. And even now, with his final gift of a casket of riches, he was underwriting our mainland venture. But despite his bolstering, we had firm faith that we six alone could still establish a beacon of superior living in the midst of these United States. Imagine then how our hopes were dashed when so much went wrong in the first few years. Crop failures, natural disasters, cut-throat competition from neighbours, prejudiced merchants who refused to deal with us because of the presence of Negroes such as Neb, governmental restrictions, a poor quality of lazy immigrant workers from the sewers of Europe – all these factors and more conspired to render our Utopia a stillborn shambles. And at the head of it, our leader, Cyrus Smith, despondent and despairing for the first time in his life. Now you must realize one thing, Bing. Cyrus is not the genius the world thinks him. He is clever, and well-versed in engineering lore. But he hasn’t an original bone in his body. He can re-create, but not create.”
“But all the flood of inventions that have come from his fertile brain –”
“They did not come from Cyrus Smith’s brain, Bing! They came from Nemo’s!”
“You mean –?”
“Yes! In eighteen-seventy, using the last of our wealth in a desperate gamble, we mounted an expedition back to the site of the vanished Lincoln Island, back to that small remnant crag of rock from which we were rescued. We sent a primitive submersible down to the sea floor – providentially shallow – and found the Nautilus, miraculously intact. Pencroff in his undersea suit entered through her open hatch, and managed to get her miraculous engines going again. Luckily, the indestructible machines had shut themselves down in a programmed fashion when we scuttled her. We crewed the Nautilus and brought her back to the East Coast. There, we lifted her into drydock, sundered her into sections, and carted her back to Iowa. Then began in secret the plundering of her real wealth, all the marvellous inventions she contained.”
“Suppose I credit this tale, Mr Brown. What of it? You have disclosed the ignoble reality behind the myth of Cyrus Smith’s genius. I suppose we could concoct a three-day scandal out of such material and sell a few extra papers. But how does this revelation materially affect the grandeur of what you Iowans have achieved? And how can you possibly deduce the end of civilization from your tawdry tale?”
Brown leaned forward intently, all foppishness banished by earnestness. “Are you the same fellow who wrote that series of articles entitled ‘Some Thoughts Toward the Manifest Destiny of Our Arriving Twentieth Century’? That’s why I picked you, Bing, because of the speculative acumen you exhibited in those writings. You seemed to recognize that the continued success of our present planetary culture is based on a perpetual flow of advancements. There can be no such thing as holding still. The growing interconnectedness of the world, the demands of a surging population, the rising expectations of the common man as to what life will bring him – all these factors and more conspire to demand a flood of fresh inventions from the world’s laboratories. And the world looks to Lincoln Island to lead the way. If we were to stagnate, the worldwide system would collapse in a Malthusian disaster of rioting, starvation and savagery.”
“Agreed. But surely the risk of stagnation is next to nil –”
Brown banged a fist upon the table, sending his tumbler of wine toppling. “Don’t you get it, Bing? We’ve copied and slightly improved all of Nemo’s technology. If I may coin a term, we applied ‘reverse-engineering’ to his devices. Smith’s talents were perfectly adequate for that. But we don’t understand the first principles of any of it. We’ve engaged scores of brilliant men from around the globe – Edison, Bell, Ford, Michelson, the Curies, and many more whom I could name – and none of them have had an ounce of success at unriddling, say, gravito-magnetics. We’re like primitive witchdoctors recreating effects by following formulae passed down from the gods.”
“Surely you judge yourself too harshly,” Wheatstone protested.
“Not at all! It’s taken every iota of ingenuity we possess just to translate Nemo’s devices into automobiles and trains and such. That’s why large-scale manned flight has baffled us. Nemo’s engines were never designed for such applications. And we’ve just about reached the limit of what we can mine from the last scraps of the Nautilus. But what’s even worse is how we’ve fatally detoured the destined course of scientific history. By futilely investing generations of talent in following Nemo’s bizarre avenues, we’ve allowed the foundations of science circa 1870 to crumble and molder. The world of 1898 is not what it should have been. There is no organic path left for us to follow from here out. To re-organize the scientific establishment that existed thirty years ago is nigh impossible. Yet our only hope for the future is to attempt such a thing. But we cannot even make such a last-ditch effort until we first tear down the sickly monster we have erected. And your help is essential for that task.”
Wheatstone felt torn between a host of contradictory impulses. His affection for what Lincoln Island had created vied with his desire to make a journalistic splash. His
belief in Brown’s sincerity – the man appeared to truly believe everything he had said – warred with his incredulity at the enormity of the long-standing hoax.
“How can I accept what you tell me without some kind of proof, sir?”
Brown got tipsily to his feet and secured the neglected carpetbag from the corner of the room. He hoisted it to the tabletop, unclasped it, and reached within. From the bag he lifted a fantastical helmet with thick glass plate for a visor, bearing an ornate capital N. This he thumped down on the table.
“Here is one of the diving helmets from the Nautilus.”
Brown examined the headgear with interest. “Intriguing, sir. But this could be something intended to deceive me.”
“Thought you might say that.” Brown reached again into the bag and removed another exhibit.
Wheatstone’s knowledge of human skeletal anatomy had been buffed by various professional interviews with leading anthropologists. The skull now flaunted before him displayed odd configurations of bone that seemed to hint at larger mental proportions than the human norm.
“Yes,” Brown confirmed, “this is Nemo’s very skull. The fishes had picked him quite clean by the time we returned. He claimed to be an Indian prince, but I suspect that he was much more. Perhaps a visitor from the future, perhaps a stranded traveller from another star. Or perhaps a human sport, a forerunner of some species of mankind yet to come. In any case, he possessed qualities of mind the likes of which are all too seldom encountered.”
The skull formed a shocking weight in the pan of the scales that favoured Brown’s story. But still Wheatstone hesitated. So much was riding on his decision –
Brown sensed this hesitancy. “Damn it, man! I had been hoping to avoid this, but I can see I’ve got no choice. Come with me. I’m taking you to see the carcass of the Nautilus itself!”
Brooking no resistance, Brown grabbed Wheatstone’s sleeve with one hand and his bottle of wine with the other, and they departed the Gilded Cockerel. Outside, they strode off, Brown leading. He continued to swig from his bottle, muttering all the while.
