Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02

by Lord Kelvin's Machine

  What could he do but carry on? That's what I asked him. He could turn around, that's what. He made up his mind just like that. We were north of Trondheim and just a few hours from our destination. St. Ives would take Hasbro with him. I would go on alone, and see what I could see. He and Hasbro would rush back to Dover where St. Ives would assemble scientific apparatus. He had been a fool, he said, a moron, a nitwit. It was he and he alone who was responsible for the death of those ten men. He could have stopped it if he hadn't been too muddleheaded to see. That was ever St. Ives's way, blaming himself for all the deviltry in the world, because he hadn't been able to stop it. The sheer impossibility of his stopping all of it never occurred to him.

  Hasbro gave me a look as they hefted their luggage out onto the platform. St. Ives was deflated, shrunken almost, and there shone in his eyes a distant gleam, as if he were focused on a single wavering point on the horizon—the leering face of Ignacio Narbondo—and he would keep his eyes fixed on that face until he stared the man into oblivion.

  Hasbro took me aside for a moment to tell me that he would take care of the professor, that I wasn't to worry, that we would all win through in the end. All I had to do was learn the truth about Narbondo. St. Ives must be desperately certain of the facts now; he had become as methodical as a clockwork man. But like that same man, he seemed to both of us to be running slowly down. And for one brief moment there on the platform, I half hoped that St. Ives would never find Narbondo, because, horrible as it sounds, it was Narbondo alone that gave purpose to the great man's life.

  Narbondo had had a long and curious criminal history: vivisection, counterfeiting, murder—a dozen close escapes capped by his fleeing from Newgate Prison very nearly on the eve of his intended execution. There was nothing vile that he hadn't put his hand to. He dabbled in alchemy and amphibian physiology, and there was some evidence that, working with the long-forgotten formulae of Paracelsus, he had developed specifics that would revive the dead. His grandfather, the elder Narbondo, had elaborated the early successes of those revivification experiments in journals that had been lost long ago. And those, of course, were the papers alluded to by the woman in Godall's shop.

  It was a mystery, this business of the lost journals—a far deeper mystery than it would seem on the surface, and one that seemed to have threads connecting it to the dawn of history and to the farthest corners of the earth. And it was a mystery that we wouldn't solve. We would tackle only the current manifestation of it, this business of Higgins the academician and Captain Bowker and the revived Narbondo and the ships sinking in the Dover Strait. There was enough in that to confound even a man like St. Ives.

  It was St. Ives's plan to resort again to the dirigible. I would proceed to Mount Hjarstaad by train and make what discoveries I could, while waiting for the arrival of the dirigible, which would put out of Dover upon St. Ives's return to that city. Ferries were still docking there, but only if they had come in from the north: Flanders and Normandy ferries had stopped running altogether. So St. Ives would send the dirigible for me, in an effort to fetch me back to England in time to be of service.

  We should have hired the dirigible in the first place, lamented St. Ives, standing on the platform in the cold arctic wind. We should have this, we should have that. I muttered and nodded, never having seen him in such despair. There was no arguing with him there in that rocky landscape, which did its part to freeze one's hope. I would have to go on with as stout a heart as I could fabricate.

  And so away they went south, and I north, and I didn't learn another thing about their adventures until I met up with them again, days later, back in Sterne Bay, the dirigible rescue having come off without a hitch and skived at least a couple of days off my wanderings about Norway, but having sailed me into Dover too late to join my comrades in their dangerous scientific quest. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. It's what I found out in Hjarmold, near the mountain, that signifies.

  Narbondo had been fished out of his watery grave,, all right —by a tall thin man with a baldhead. It had to have been Leopold Higgins, although he had registered at the hostel under the name Wiggins, which was evidence either of a man gone barmy or of a man remarkably sure of himself I got all this from the stableboy, whose room lay at the back of the stables, and who had seen a good deal of what transpired there. No real effort had been made for secrecy. Higgins and an accomplice— Captain Bowker, from the description of him—had ridden in late one afternoon with Narbondo lying in the back of the wagon, stiff as a day-old fish. They claimed that he had just that morning fallen into the lake, that they had been on a climbing expedition. There was nothing in their story to excite suspicions. Higgins had professed to be a doctor and had stopped them from sending up to Bod0 for the local medicine man.

  Curiously, he hadn't taken Narbondo inside the hostel to thaw him out: he had set up camp in the stables instead, insisting that Xarbondo's recoven,- must be a slow business indeed, and for the first two nights Xarbondo slept on his table without so much as a blanket for covering. Higgins fed him nothing but what he said was cod-liver oil, but which he referred to as "elixir." And once, when Xarbondo began to moan and shudder, Higgins said that he was "coming round too soon," and he hauled Xarbondo out into the freezing night and let him stiffen up some.

  The stableboy who told me all of this was a bright lad, who had smelled something rotten, as it were, and it wasn't the fish oil, either. He had a sharp enough eye to recognize frauds like Higgins and Bowker, and he watched them, he said, through a knothole when they thought he was asleep. It was on the founh night that Xarbondo awakened fully, if only for a few seconds. Higgins had set up some son of apparatus—hoses, bladders, bowls of yellow liquid. Throughout the night he had sprayed the doctor with mists while Captain Bowker snored in the hay. An hour before dawn, Xarbondo's eyes blinked open in the lamplight, and after a moment of looking around himself puzzled at what he saw, he smiled a son of half-grin and said the single word, "Good," and then lapsed again into unconsciousness.

  I knew by then what it was I had come for, and I had learned it in about half an hour. St. Ives had been right to turn around; it didn't take three men to talk to a stableboy. After that I was forced to lounge about the village, eating vile food, wondering what it was that my companions were up to and when my dirigible would arrive, and worrying finally about one last bit of detail: the frozen man, according to my stable-boy, had had milky-white hair and pale skin, like a man cared out of snow or dusted with frost; and yet Xarbondo had had lanky black hair, just going to gray, when he had catapulted into that tarn.

  The phrase "dusted with frost" wasn't my own; it was the awful creation of my stableboy, who had lived for ten years in York and might have been a writer, I think, if he had put his mind to it. Here he was mucking out stables. It made me wonder about the nature of justice, but only for a moment. Almost at once it brought to mind the letter we had read in Godall's shop, the one signed H. Frost, of Edinburgh University.

  MEANWHILE, Langdon St. Ives and Hasbro arrived back in Dover without incident—no bombs, no gunfire, no threats to the ship. I believe that our sudden disappearance from Sterne Bay had confounded our enemies. Perhaps they thought that the fruit-basket bomb had frightened us away, although Narbondo—or Frost—knowing St. Ives as well as he did, shouldn't have made that mistake. Anyway, in Dover, St. Ives arranged for the dirigible to fetch me out of Norway, and then set about hiring a balloon for himself and Hasbro. They didn't wait for me—they couldn't—and I'm narrating their exploits as accurately as I can, having got the story secondhand, but straight from the horse's mouth, of course.

  St. Ives set about constructing a bismuth spiral, which, for the reader unfamiliar with the mysteries of magnetism, is a simple snail-shell spiral of bismuth connected to a meter that reads changes of resistance in the spiral to determine intensities of magnetic fields. It's a child's toy, comparatively speaking, but foolproof. The very simplicity of St. Ives's notion infuriated him even further. It was someth
ing that ought to have been accomplished a week earlier, in time to save those ten men.

  He affixed the spiral to a pole that they could slip down through a small hiatus in the basket of the balloon, so as to suspend the spiral just above the waves, making the whole business of taking a reading absolutely dangerous—almost deadly, as it turned out—because it required their navigating the balloon perilously close to the sea itself. Why didn't they use a length of rope, instead—play out the line while staying safely aloft? That was my question too; and the answer, in short, is that the science of electricity and magnetism wouldn't allow for it: the length of wire connecting the bismuth to the meter must be as short as possible for the reading to be accurate—that was how St. Ives understood it, although his understanding was nearly the death of him.

  He meant to discover where Lord Kelvin's machine—the enormously powerful electromagnet stolen from the machine works in Holborn—lay beneath the sea, somewhere in the Dover Strait. He assumed that it rested on a submerged platform or on a shallow sandy shoal. Maybe it was anchored, but then again maybe it was slowly drifting at the whim of deep-water currents. He suspected the existence of a float or buoy of some sort, both to locate it and, perhaps, to effect its switching on and off.

  The two of them were aloft within a day. It was doubtful that the ban on local shipping would last out the week; the economy wouldn't stand it. The government would pay the ransom or get used to the notion of losing ships. The Royal Academy still denied everything, right down to the ground, while at the same time working furiously to solve the mystery themselves.

  St. Ives and Hasbro scoured the surface of the sea, from Ramsgate to Dungeness. Hasbro, an accomplished balloonist —the blue-ribbon winner, in fact, of the Trans-European balloon races of 1883—grappled with the problem of buoyancy, of keeping the basket above the licking waves in order not to drown St. Ives's apparatus. The wind blew down out of the North Sea in gusts, buffeting them southward toward the coast of France, and it took all of Hasbro's skill to steady their course at all. St. Ives had fashioned a sort of ballasted sea anchor that they dragged along and so avoided being blown across the coast of Normandy before discovering anything.

  Even so, it finally began to seem as if their efforts were in vain—the Strait being almost inconceivably vast from the perspective of two men in a balloon. It was sometime late in the afternoon, when they were just on the edge of giving up, that they saw a sloop flying the ensign of the Royal Academy. St. Ives could see Parsons on the deck, and he waved to the man, who, after seeming to ascertain who it was that hailed him, replied with a perfunctory little nod and went immediately belowdecks. There was the chance, of course, that the Academy had already discovered the spot where the device had been sunk. And there was the chance that they were still searching. What would St. Ives do? What could he do?

  They swept across her bow and passed her, St. Ives lowering the bismuth spiral one last time to take another reading. It registered some little bit of deviation, the needle swinging around fairly sharply as they drove along south and west, away from Parsons's sloop.

  They were two hundred yards off his port bow when the balloon lurched, throwing both the professor and Hasbro into the basket wall in a tangle of arms and legs. The basket tilted ominously, nearly pouring them into the sea. Hasbro hacked furiously at the rope holding the sea anchor, thinking that it had caught itself in something, while St. Ives held on to his pole and meter, which burst suddenly in his hands. That is to say the meter did—exploded—its needle whirling around and around like a compass gone mad, until it twisted itself into ruin.

  St. Ives let go of the apparatus, which shot straight down into the water as the balloon strained at her lines, trying to tug the basket skyward, but having no luck. The basket, torn in the opposite direction by an unseen force, spun and dipped crazily, fighting as if it had been grappled by a phantom ship.

  The crew of the sloop, including Parsons, lined the deck, watching the wild balloon and the two men clinging helplessly to her. It must have appeared as if she were being torn asunder by warring spirits—which she was, in a sense, for it was the powerful forces of hot air and magnetism that tugged her asunder. The ruined meter told the tale. St. Ives had found the sunken device right enough; the iron-reinforced base of the balloon basket was caught in its electromagnetic grip.

  With a tearing of canvas and snapping of line, the basket lurched downward, almost into the ocean. A ground swell washed across them, and in an instant they were foundering. St. Ives and Hasbro had to swim for it, both of them striking out through the cold water toward the distant sloop, the nails in their bootheels prising themselves out. St. Ives fished out his clasp knife and offered it up to the machine in order that his trousers pocket might be saved. Finally, when they were well away from the snapping line and rollicking bag, they stopped swimming to watch.

  For a moment their basket still tossed on the surface of the water. Then it was tugged down into the depths, where it hung suspended just below the surface. The still-moored balloon flattened itself against the sea, humping across the rolling swell, the gasses inside snapping the seams apart with Gatling-gun bursts of popping, the hot air inside whooshing into the atmosphere as if a giant were treading the thing flat.

  Within minutes the deflated canvas followed the basket down like a fleeing squid and was gone, and St. Ives and Hasbro trod water, dubious about their obvious success. If it weren't for the sloop sending a boat out after them, they would have drowned, and no doubt about it. Parsons, seeing that clearly, welcomed them aboard with a hearty lot of guffawing through his beard.

  "Quite a display," he said to St. Ives as the professor slogged toward a forward cabin. "That was as profitable an example of scientific method as I can remember. I trust you took careful notes. There was a look on your face, man—I could see it even at such a distance as that—a look of pure scientific enlightenment. If I were an artist I'd sketch it out for you ..." He went on this way. Parsons did, laughing through his beard and twigging St. Ives all the way back to Dover, after leaving the area encircled with red-painted buoys.

  AT THE VERY MOMENT that they wcrc aloft over the Strait, I was aloft in the dirigible, watching the gray seas slip past far below, and captain of nothing for the moment but my own fate. I was bound for Sterne Bay. The business of the icehouse had become clear to me while I lounged in Norway. Days had passed, though, since my confrontation with Captain Bowker, and in that time just about anything could have happened. I might rush back to find them all gone, having no more need of ice. On the other hand, I might easily find a way to do my part.

  At the Crown and Apple I discovered that St. Ives and Hasbro hadn't yet returned from their balloon adventure. Parsons was gone too. I was alone, and that saddened me. Parsons's company would have been better than nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating a pint or two and a nap, wanting to escape my duty by going to sleep—drink and sleep being a substitute, albeit a poor one, for company. Sitting there reminded me of that last fateful knock on the door, though—reminded me that while I slept, no end of frightful business might be transpiring. Who could say that the door mightn't swing open silently and an infernal machine, fuse sputtering, mightn't roll like a melon into the center of the floor . . .

  A nap was out of the question. But what would I do instead? I would go to the icehouse. There was no percentage in my pretending to be Abner Benbow any longer. Might I disguise myself? A putty nose and a wig might accomplish something. I dismissed the idea. That was the sort of thing they would expect. My only trump card was that they would have no notion of my having returned to Sterne Bay.

  Still, I wouldn't take any unnecessary risks. I was ready for them now. I went out through the second-story door at the back of the inn, and down rickety steps that led out past a weedy bit of garden and through a gate, right to the edge of the bay. A half score of rowboats were serried along a dock of rotting wooden planks that ran out into the water fifty good yards or so before becoming
a mere thicket of broken pilings. There was no one about.

  The tide was out, leaving a little stretch of shingle running along beside a low stone seawall. I clambered down and picked my way along the shingle, thinking to emerge into the village some distance from the Apple, so that if they were onto me, and someone was watching the inn, I'd confound them.

  Some hundred yards down, I slipped back over the seawall and followed a narrow boardwalk between two vine-covered cottages, squeezing out from between them only a little ways down from where my beggar man was shot before he could borrow any money from me. I hiked along pretty briskly toward the icehouse, but the open door of The Hoisted Pint brought me up short.

  I had never discovered whether my rubber elephant inhabited a room there, largely because I had been coy, playing the detective, and was overcome by the woman behind the counter, who, I was pretty sure, had taken me for a natural fool. The truth of it is that I'm too easily put off by an embarrassment. This time I wouldn't be. I angled toward the door, up the steps, and into the foyer. She stood as ever, meddling with receipts, and seemed not to recognize me at all. My hearty, ''Hello again," merely caused her to squint.

  She pushed her spectacles down her nose and looked at me over them. "Yes?" she said.

  Somehow the notion of her having forgotten me, after all the rigamarole just a few days earlier, put an edge on my tone. I was through being pleasant. I can't stand cheeky superiority in people, especially in clerks and waiters, who have nothing to recommend them but the fact of their being employed. What was this woman but a high-toned clerk? Perhaps she owned the inn; perhaps she didn't. There was nothing in any of it that justified her putting on airs.