Steampunk'd

by Jean Rabe

  He fastened the rubber hose onto Fulton’s posterior valve, then opened the tank to give a full charge. The needle on the pressure gauge rose slowly until it reached max. Francis turned off the valve and disconnected the hose.

  “You’re set to ambulate for another week or so. Just don’t leak, will you?” Francis smiled. Fulton rocked back on his haunches and clacked his jaws together, as if he understood.

  Turning to his workbench, Francis began redoing his calculations. The day faded outside and cold wind whipped through cracks in the walls, but he hardly noticed, lighting a coal oil lamp as he worked.The equations took on a life of their own, and he began to understand what was happening, all except the one recurring term. The goal of the ages fluttered within his grasp if the term would only vanish. He felt it.

  When the door to his small shack opened, he jerked around, startled. His lab book fell to the floor where Fulton sat up. His eyes flashed again.

  “Stop that,” Francis said to the dog.

  “I’ve come for you. There’s little time.” The unknown woman looked windswept and flustered.

  “Who are you, young lady?”

  “Who I am isn’t important. You must come away immediately.”

  “Leave when I am so close? Never!” His outrage was directed more toward the notion of quitting before success than at the woman, whoever she was.

  She closed the door and stepped closer. He held up his coal oil lamp to better see her. She was thin, but nicely filled out the khaki shirt she wore. Her canvas britches might have belonged to an American miner; the tops were tucked into calf-high, fully laced brown leather boots. She shivered with the cold because she lacked a coat, but she wore a broad web belt with a holster dangling at her right hip.

  “Explain yourself,” Francis demanded. He motioned for Fulton to remain where he was, but the robot had not budged. He almost bent to examine the mechanism since the dog was geared to rush forward to greet anyone getting too close. For whatever reason, he hadn’t budged an inch.

  “The king desires your immediate presence, Sir Francis.”

  “I’m not a knight.”

  “You will be when we return to England. The king has you on the honors list.”

  “Whatever for?” Francis mumbled. “I have not completed my experiment here, the one that would entitle me to such an honor.”

  “You are in great—you must come with me. I have an airship nearby.”

  “I did see an airship! Earlier today, right after my test. The cloud that moved about so anomalously.” He held out the lamp and studied her face. She was quite comely, though she had such a serious expression. “Its lower superstructure is painted white to mimic a cloud.”

  He was pleased to see her amazement.

  “You are more observant than most,” she said. “That must be another reason the king wishes to honor you.”

  “King Edward can wait. I need more time, definitely more time. One more test.”

  “Your weapon is almost complete?” She sounded distraught at this.

  “Oh, please, rest easy on that score. This is not a weapon.” He bent and picked up his fallen lab book, placing it next to the lamp on his table. “I have completed my equations, though there is a term I cannot explain. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is how a new test will prove my theory of transmogrification.”

  “That’s a weapon?”

  “Who are you, young lady?”

  “Nicole, Nicole Larouse.”

  “You are not English. I detect a most delightful French accent, though your English is quite good.”

  “I . . . I work for the AFA.”

  “The Anglo-French Alliance holds no sway over me,” he said stiffly. “Politics is beneath me, especially after they stole my work in such an underhanded fashion. Why, they even seized my laboratory equipment, forcing me to deplete my financial resources to buy all this. It took every farthing I had left. And what I did in Liverpool was hardly a weapon, yet they—you!—seized it under the State Secrets Act. Imagine that, a medical device foolishly press-ganged as a weapon!” He waved his arm in an all-encompassing gesture that almost knocked over the lamp.

  The woman reached for the pistol at her hip, but Fulton clacked his teeth together and rose onto all fours. She stared at the mechanical dog, then glared at Francis.

  “You must come with me. Your life is in danger and a robot bodyguard won’t save you.”

  “Oh, bother. I am in no danger here. Fulton is not my only companion. Lawrence and a half dozen others in my crew are capable of . . .” His voice trailed off when he saw the expression on her face.

  “He’s not . . . as he seems.”

  “You are so lovely and yet the lie comes easily to your lips,” he said. “Leave now. Get into your airship and leave me be.”

  “There’s war brewing on the Continent, and Lawrence wants your weapon. The test firing this afternoon demonstrated its power.”

  “It misfired,” he said. “And my transmogrification ray is not a weapon. I pursue alchemical highways toward—” He bit off his explanation. She did not deserve it. She was more than an interloper on his privacy, she had admitted working for the AFA and that alliance had robbed him of a device capable of saving millions of lives.

  “Yes?”

  “Go now,” he ordered, pointing to the door. “I will have nothing to do with you or your wild accusations.”

  “You’re coming with me,” Nicole said, reaching down to draw her pistol. She had barely unsnapped the leather flap when Fulton launched for her leg, sinking sharpened brass teeth into her boot.

  Francis saw that the teeth hadn’t penetrated flesh, but it threw the woman off balance. He moved swiftly to enter the fray, grabbing her slender wrist and twisting. With the leverage afforded by the fifty-pound brass dog on her leg, Nicole Larouse fell backward, crashing into the thin wood wall. A plank was knocked loose and let in a gust of cold night air.

  It also admitted sounds from the direction of the mineshaft.

  “You’d better leave immediately,” Francis said sternly. “Lawrence and the rest of my men have been alerted.”

  “You’ll rue this, Mr. Barstow.”

  “Rue what? Not being kidnapped or passing up the chance to be knighted by King Edward?”

  “I’ll be nearby if. . . .”

  Nicole shook herself free of Fulton’s teeth and pushed open the door, then limped into the darkness. He watched her go with a mixture of regret and relief. She was a lovely woman but taken to wild flights of fancy, and he simply did not have time for her at the moment. Not with preparations to be made for the next test. He was sure he had worked out the frequency problem so the transmogrification ray would work its alchemical magic on the lead and form gold.

  “Mr. Barstow, are you all right? I heard voices.” Lawrence stared at the broken board in the wall, then reached inside his heavy woolen coat as if fumbling for a pocket watch, although his waistcoat would have been a more sensible place to carry it rather than at his hip.

  “Oh, it was nothing.”

  “Your work?” Lawrence pointed to the lab book precariously balanced at the edge of the work table.

  “The calculations are completed. I can tune the ray, I am sure of it.”

  “More power?”

  “Oh, it’ll be ten times as powerful as today,” Francis said, becoming lost in the maze of his own jumbled numbers once more. “But focused. There won’t be any unexpected blast. No, no, it’ll be contained to the target.”

  “An order of magnitude more powerful?”

  Francis looked sharply at his assistant.

  “See that the roughing pump is started to pull the vacuum in the collimating tube. Run it until dawn, then begin the oil diffusion pump for the final evacuation.”

  “I’ll have the magnets powered up, too,” Lawrence said. His eyes burned like dark coals. “When will you test the . . . ray?”

  “Considering how easy it is to remove the unwanted atmosphere at this lung-straini
ng attitude, the vacuum ought to be hard enough by ten in the morning.”

  “We’ll work all night,” Lawrence promised. He looked down at Fulton, who clacked his teeth, then left, shouting to the crew to begin preparations.

  Francis felt a surge of excitement not unlike finding a new continent, he believed, or achieving some other landmark in exploration. Tomorrow by this time he would have a ten-pound bar of gold, transmogrified from what had been lead in the morning. Whistling, he turned back to his lab book, frowned at the unexplained term, then drew an X through it.

  “Second order term,” he muttered. No one bothered with second order terms. Not when there was gold to be made.

  Francis Barstow slept poorly on the cot, under the heavy blanket that also had served him well during the Liverpool winter. He finally sat up, aware that sleep was going to elude him because of the thrill of discovery. Today history would be made. By Francis Herschel Barstow.

  He stretched, yawned, then smiled.

  “Sir Francis. I like the sound of it. I’ll be able to supply the Crown with more gold than ever came from the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

  He looked down at the faithful Fulton, stretched out at his feet. The dog wheezed asthmatically.

  “I’ll get you the finest rubber joints and connections, I promise,” he said. “Why, I could replace your brass parts with gold ones. Yes, I will! What would a half hundredweight of gold matter when all I need do is turn on my fabulous ray?”

  He reached down and put his hand on the dog’s cold metal head. The glass optics lit.

  “Stop it. No photographs.” The light died in Fulton’s eyes. “Perhaps I can ask your counsel, good and loyal dog.” Fulton perked up, as if he understood. “Should I turn this discovery over to the Crown at all? Why, the king—or at least the AFA—sent a woman to kidnap me!”

  He shivered in the cold, pulled the heavy blanket up around his shoulders, but did not lie back even as he thought of Nicole Larouse. Such a fine-looking woman with such a mellifluous name. If she had been of a different bent, a different sort of spy or agent provocateur or whatever she was, simply asking him to accompany her on an assignation would have worked. Being alone in the mountains, or alone as far as feminine companionship went, made for nights longer than a mere clock could tick out. She was both comely and had a fiery personality—both traits that appealed to him.

  “But she tried to kidnap me,” he said with some sorrow. “You prevented that, didn’t you, Fulton?” The robotic dog looked up at him and rotated its head to one side, as if listening intently. “I’m not sure if that was for the best, you stopping her as you did. No, what am I saying? Of course it was. My experiment takes precedence over a mere tryst, even with a lovely Frenchwoman named Nicole.”

  The name tasted sweet on his lips. Would her lips, pressed against his, be as fine?

  “What are you doing, Fulton?”

  The dog ground gears as he got to his feet, then plowed straight ahead, head smashing into the door repeatedly until it slipped its latch and popped open. In a brass flash, the dog darted outside.

  “Oh, bother,” he said, tossing back the blanket and going after Fulton. It wasn’t as if the dog had to be let outside. The idea of Fulton leaving behind brass turnings or spots of lubricant amused him. He followed the dog up the path of a small hill from where he intended to view the test. Something moving on the summit slowed his steps. Fulton clacked his jaws and looked from his master to the figure lit by the first light of dawn.

  Francis motioned the dog to silence and edged around to get a better view of . . . Lawrence. His assistant hunched over a black box, fiddled with it and then stood straight. For a moment, Francis couldn’t figure out what he was doing, then saw a brilliant speck from the hills some miles distant.

  “A heliograph,” he said softly. He watched Lawrence diligently send code and receive an answer. Francis almost called to him, then backed away and headed for the mineshaft to inspect the preparations for the crucial test to be run in a few hours.

  More than once he looked over his shoulder at Lawrence, but by following the curving, rocky path to the mine, he was quickly lost to sight. Francis scowled as he considered what his assistant was up to signaling like that, then forgot about it when he neared the vacuum pump. It sounded raspy as it pulled out the last atoms from the aether inside the narrow long glass tube stretching from the electrodes all the way to the lead target placed in a bell jar to contain it this time.

  “Turn on the oil diffusion pump,” he ordered a worker fiddling with the vacuum system. “There’s not going to be any more air sucked out of the tube using only the roughing pump.”

  He spent the next ten minutes inside the mine, a carbide miner’s lamp hissing on his forehead as he made final adjustments, more to keep himself occupied than because it was required. The block of lead was placed directly on the ray’s axis. He edged along the shaft and made sure the Corrigan rare-earth magnets were in place. It took only a moment to be certain they were rigged in such a way to oscillate and accelerate the particles produced in the tube. He left the mine and stripped off the miner’s lamp, turned off the light, and tossed the unit aside as Lawrence ran up.

  “Mr. Barstow, you’re here early. I didn’t expect you to arrive for another hour.”

  Francis glanced from Lawrence to the distant peak where the other heliostat had answered whatever message his assistant had sent.

  “You look confused, sir,” Lawrence said. “Didn’t that term fall out properly for you? In your calculations?”

  “I . . .” Francis tried to sort out his confused thoughts. Secret signals to who knows where. Did Lawrence contact Nicole Larouse? Francis just didn’t know what to think.

  Didn’t know. . . .

  The curious second order term in his equation hinted at something important. He knew that but there was no physical manifestation possible, not if the transmogrification took place.

  Fulton’s clacking and hissing tore his thoughts away from his calculations.

  “What is it, boy?”

  “You talk to that damned hunk of brass like it’s alive,” Lawrence said. He put a hand over his mouth when Francis looked sharply at him.

  “Your disrespect is uncalled for, sir,” Francis said. “See to the experiment. When the vacuum in the collimating tube is sufficient, we will fire the unit.”

  “Yes, sir, of course, Mr. Barstow.”

  Francis watched his assistant closely. His tone was servile, but the set of his shoulders, the way his chin jutted and his eyes—those hot, hot eyes!—told a different story. Lawrence came within a hair of being openly defiant. As he stormed off, Francis started to ask what he carried in his coat pocket that stretched the cloth to the limit—in the shape of a lab book.

  Fulton’s clacking broke his train of thought, and he looked toward the steam engines that powered the experiment.

  “Thank you, Fulton,” he said, going to adjust one of the large transfer belts. It slipped and robbed the powerful engine of most of its power. By the time he had tightened it and turned his attention back to the mouth of the mine, he saw Lawrence and two workmen standing close together. His assistant angrily ordered the others around. Francis was taken aback when both men saluted Lawrence before going into the mineshaft.

  He trooped over and demanded, “What is going on?”

  Lawrence made no effort to hide his contempt as he pulled the lab book from his pocket. Francis grabbed for it but was shoved back.

  “You’ve built the perfect weapon, and all you want to do is blow up tiny blocks of lead,” Lawrence said, his tone cold. “I’ve got your notes. We will get the data from the experiment, so there’s no more need for you.”

  “This is mine! I built the ray!”

  “Good King Raoul will use the ray to defend the crown of Portugal,” Lawrence said.

  “You’re a spy!”

  “I’m a thief, and the King of Portugal pays me for weapons technology. With this ray, he will have a perfect defense
against both the Kaiser’s Zeppelins and the AFA battleships cruising along his coast.” Lawrence shoved Francis back again and laughed this time. “You could have sold this marvelous weapon, but you were too shallow.”

  “I am defying the wisdom of the ages. I am seeking the power to transmogrify!”

  “Was there any trace of gold? No,” Lawrence said. “You blew up solid metal and then disintegrated a hole the size of my fist in the mountainside. The power!”

  Francis reached behind him and found the contacts on the Crooke’s tube. Wires ran off a safe distance to initiate the test by remote control. He scraped the insulation off one wire using his fingernail and bent the bared copper around so the contacts touched. The tube lit up, its purple glow dazzling to the eye.

  Screams came from within the mineshaft as the ray lanced toward the lead target, but also taking the lives of Lawrence’s two henchmen.

  “Killing them only makes the reward larger for me,” Lawrence said, lunging. He tripped and fell over Fulton, who began snapping and tearing at the man’s arms. The whine from the engines and pumps ran through his ears like an ice pick, and the tension of high voltage made his hair began to rise on his head, in spite of the sticky pomade he used to hold it in place.

  Francis knew grappling with his assistant would never do. The man was stronger, younger, and more vicious. Instead of fighting, he ran for the line shack, not knowing what he would do there since he lacked a weapon. As he stumbled along, he heard the soft whistle of props cutting through the thin mountain air. Above loomed a patch of white. As he stared, it banked slightly, revealing the streamlined frame of a small airship.

  “Nicole!” Distance and ambient noise from the steam engines were too great for his voice to carry to her. He veered from the shack, hit the trail leading to the top of the summit where he had spied Lawrence working with the heliostat and skidded to a halt when he found the device. The small black box had been hidden from casual sight between two large rocks. He drew it out and saw the tripod folded beneath it, but there was scant time to set it up properly.