“Accurate to the last detail,” said Parsons, smiling to think that at last he’d put one across St. Ives, that at last he had been in ahead of us. “What you don’t know, my good fellow, is that I’ve destroyed them. They were a horror, a misapplication of scientific method, an abomination. I burned them in Dr. Piper’s incinerator without bothering to read more than a snatch of them.”
“Then it’s my view,” said St. Ives, “that Narbondo is dead, or as good as dead. How long he can last in this suspended state, I don’t know, but it’s clear that Higgins couldn’t entirely revive him. Neither can I, and without the notebooks, thank God, neither can you.”
Parsons shrugged again. “Keep him on ice,” he said to the constable. “The Academy will want him. He’ll make an interesting study.”
The use of the word study had a Willis Pule ring to it that I didn’t like, and I was reminded of what it was about Parsons that set the men of the Academy apart from a man like St. Ives. I was almost sorry that Narbondo at last had fallen into their hands.
St. Ives, however, didn’t seem in the least sorry. “I suggest we retire to the Crown and Apple, then,” he said. “I have a few bottles of ale in my room. I suggest that we sample it — toast Professor Parsons’s success.”
“Here, here,” said Parsons, a little vainly, I thought, as we trooped out into the night, leaving the icehouse behind. In fact, though, a couple of bottles of ale and a few hours of sleep would settle me right out. Our adventure was over, and tomorrow, I supposed, it was back to London on the express. I patted my coat pocket, where I still had the proof of my reserving a room for me and Dorothy at The Hoisted Pint. You’d think that I would have had my fill of the place, but in fact I was determined to stay there as I’d planned, under happier circumstances, especially since whoever it was that we would find tending to the guests, it wouldn’t be the woman who had hoodwinked me. The constable had already sent someone around to collect her.
* * *
So there we were, sitting in St. Ives’s room, and him passing around opened bottles of ale, until he got to Parsons and said, “You’re strictly a water man, aren’t you?”
“You’ve got an admirable memory, sir. Water is the staff of life, the staff of life.”
“And I’ve got a bottle of well water right here,” said St. Ives, uncorking just such an object. Parsons was delighted. He took the glass that St. Ives gave him and swirled the water around in it, as if it were Scotch or Burgundy or some other drinkable substance. Then he threw it down heartily and smacked his lips like a connoisseur, immediately wrinkling up his face.
“Bitter,” he said. “Must be French. Lucky I’m thirsty after tonight’s little tussle.” He held out his glass.
“Mineral water,” said St. Ives, filling it up.
I was tempted to say something about “tonight’s little tussle” myself, but I put a lid on it. Hasbro had fallen asleep in his chair.
Parsons winked at the professor. He was as full of himself as I’ve ever seen him. “About revivifying Narbondo,” he said. “I’ve got a notion involving Lord Kelvin’s machine. You’ve read of Sir Joseph John Thomson’s work at the Cavendish Laboratory.”
St. Ives’s face betrayed what he was thinking, as if he had known that it would come to this, and here it was at last. “Yes,” he said, “I have. Very interesting, but I don’t quite see how it applies.”
This made Parsons happy. To hear St. Ives admit such a thing was worth a lifetime of waiting and plotting. He had the face of a man holding four aces and looking at a table mounded with coin. “Electrons,” he said, as if such a word explained everything.
“Go on,” said the professor.
“Well, it’s rather simple, isn’t it? They spin sphere-wise around their atom. An intense electromagnetic field yanks them into a sort of oval, rather like the shifting of tides on the earth, and in animate creatures causes immediate and unrestrained cellular activity. What if Narbondo were subjected to such a force — a tremendous dose of electromagnetism? It might — how shall I put it? — ‘start him up,’ let’s say, like turning over an Otto’s four-stroke engine.”
“It might,” said St. Ives darkly. “It might do a good deal more. I’ll get directly to the point here; this isn’t a matter for dalliance. The Academy undertook to start that damnable machine once, and to be straight with you, I had my man sabotage it. Do you remember?”
Of course Parsons remembered. It had been the incident of Lord Kelvin’s machine that had caused the deepening of the chasm between the two men. Parsons looked almost sneery for a moment and said, “He loaded the contrivance with field mice, if I remember aright. Very effective, if a little bit — what? — primitive, maybe.”
“Well,” continued St. Ives, going right on, “some few of those field mice lived to tell the tale, as my friend Jack might put it. I carried on a study of them for almost two years in the fields round about the manor, until I was certain, finally, that the last of those poor creatures was dead, and what I discovered was a remarkably horrendous syndrome of mutations and cancers. It’s my theory quite simply that this ‘unrestrained cellular activity,’ as you put it, is more likely ungovernable cellular growth. Your engine analogy may or may not apply. It doesn’t matter. You simply cannot start the machine for any purpose, especially for something as frivolous as this. Leave Narbondo’s fate in the hands of the Almighty, for heaven’s sake.”
“Frivolous!” shouted Parsons. “I don’t give a rap for Narbondo’s fate. Imagine, though, what this will mean. Here’s poor Higgins, who has devoted a lifetime to the study of cryogenics. Here’s Narbondo and a lifetime’s study of chemistry. He was a monster, certainly, but so what? You must be a pitifully shortsighted scientist if you can’t see the effect the sum total of their work will have on the future of the human race. And it’s Lord Kelvin’s machine that will usher in that future. To put it simply, my ship is putting in and I mean to board her.” Parsons struck the arm of his chair with his fist to punctuate his speech. Then his eyes half closed and his head nodded forward. He shook himself awake and mumbled something about being suddenly sleepy, and then his head fell against his chest and straightaway he began to snore through his beard, having said, apparently, all he had to say.
The sight of him sleeping so profoundly put me in mind of my own bed, and I was just yawning and starting to say that I would turn in too, when St. Ives leaped to his feet, dropped an already-prepared letter into Parsons’s lap and cried out, “It’s time!” Then he roused Hasbro, who himself leaped up and headed straight for the door.
“Coming or not, Jacky?” asked the professor.
“Why, coming, I suppose. Where? Now?”
“To the Dover Strait. You can sleep on board.”
With that he rushed into Parsons’s room, coming back out with a bundle of the man’s clothes, and I found myself following them through the night — out the backdoor of the inn, down along the seawall, and clambering into the tethered rowboat. Hasbro unshipped the oars and we were away, through the patchy fog, dipping along until the shadowy hull of a small steam trawler rose out of the mists ahead of us. We thunked into the side of her and clambered aboard, then winched up the rowboat after us. Up came the anchor, and I found myself saying hello to Hasbro’s stalwart Aunt Edie and to the grizzled Uncle Botley, pilot of the trawler. Roped onto a little barge behind us rested the diving bell that we had stolen earlier that very night from the icehouse.
St. Ives had drugged poor Parsons. The water bottle had been doctored, and Parsons, in the joy of his victory, had swallowed enough of it to make him sleep for half a day. We would get into the Strait before him, towing the bell, and when we did…
Parsons Bids Us Adieu
We found the waters around the submerged machine alive with a half-dozen ships, all of them at anchor a good distance away. They had attached a buoy directly to it, to track it so as to avoid either losing it or coming too near it. We showed no hesitation at all, but steamed right up to the line. That was
where I played my part, and played it tolerably well, I think.
Up onto the deck I came, wearing an enormous white beard and wig and dressed in Parsons’s clothes, which St. Ives had stolen from his room at the Apple. St. Ives stayed hidden; his face would excite suspicion in any of a number of people. He coached me, though, from inside a cabin, and together we bluffed our way through that line of ships with a lot of what sounded to me like convincing talk about having learned how to “disarm” the machine and having brought along a diving bell for the purpose.
Anyway, certain that I was Parsons, they let us through right enough, and we navigated as close to the buoy as we dared, then set out in the rowboat, towing the barge with the bell standing straddle-legged atop the deck, the jib crane attached to the barge now with brass carriage bolts, its chain pulled off and replaced entirely with heavy line. We would have to be quick, though. Uncle Botley had removed as much iron from the rowboat and barge as he could manage, but there was still the chance that if we didn’t look sharp, the machine would start to tug out nails and would scuttle us.
Hasbro and I manned the oars — work that I was admirably suited to from my days of punting on the Thames. They must have been surprised, though, to see old Parsons hauling away like that, given that he was upward of eighty-five years old. The idea of it amused me, and I pulled all the harder, watching over my shoulder as we drew slowly nearer to the buoy.
St. Ives was in the bell itself, making ready. His was the dangerous work. He was going down without air, because a compressor would have been pulled to pieces. But it was a shallow dive, and it wouldn’t take him long. That was his claim, anyway. “Give me eight minutes by the pocket watch,” he had told us, “and then pull me out of there. I can go down again if need be. And,” he said darkly, “if the rowboat starts to go to pieces, or if there’s trouble down below, cut the line and get away as quick as you can.”
Hasbro insisted at once on going with him, as did I, neither one of us keen on getting away. But that wasn’t St. Ives’s method and never had been. He was still in a funk because of the time he thought we had wasted and because of the two ships that had gone down needlessly. And there was the fact of his — as he saw it — having allowed the machine to exist all these years, sitting placidly in that machine works, only to be stolen and misused. He was the responsible party, and he would brook no nonsense to the contrary. There was a certain psychological profit, then, in his going down and facing the danger alone; his face seemed to imply that if something went wrong and we had to leave him, well, so be it; it was no more than he deserved.
Then there was the business of Alice, wasn’t there? It hovered over the man’s head like a rain cloud, and I believe that I can say, without taking anything away from his natural courage, that St. Ives didn’t care two figs whether he lived or died.
And although in truth I had no idea how much air one working man would breathe at a depth of eight fathoms, I accepted his assurances that two men would breathe twice as much and increase the dangers accordingly. The controls were meant for a single man, too, and St. Ives had been studying and manipulating them all the way out from Sterne Bay. Hasbro and I would have been nothing but dangerous baggage, trying to demonstrate our loyalty by our willingness to die along with him, if it came to that. He didn’t need any such demonstrations.
Down he went, into the dark ocean. One of the handlike armatures of the bell held on to a bundle of explosives wrapped in sheet rubber and sealed with asphaltum varnish. There was a timing device affixed to it. St. Ives had never meant to “disarm” the machine at all. He had meant all along to blow it to kingdom come, and he had stolen Higgins’s bell for just that purpose.
The Strait was blessedly placid — just a trace of wind and a slightly rolling ground swell. Line played slowly out through the oaken blocks, and we watched the bell hover deeper, down toward the vast black shadow below. I hadn’t expected quite what I saw — a sort of acreage of shadow down there, but then I realized that what I saw wasn’t merely the machine, but was a heap of derelict iron ships clustered together, the whole heap lying, I supposed, on a sandy shoal.
And that was why St. Ives hadn’t done the obvious — merely wrapped a hunk of iron into that package of explosives and tossed it over the side. It might easily have affixed itself to the hull of a downed ship and blown it up, leaving the machine alone. What the professor had to do was drop onto the machine itself, or grapple his way to it by the use of the bell’s armatures, and plant the explosives just so; otherwise they were wasted. Eight minutes didn’t seem like such a long time after all.
But then the line went suddenly slack and began to coil onto the top of the water. St. Ives had hooked on to something — the machine, a ship. All of us studied our pocket watches.
You’d think that the minutes would have flown by, but they didn’t; they crept. The breeze blew, clouds slipped across the sky, the loose circle of ships rolled on the calm waters, no one aboard them suspecting who I really was in my beard and wig. Hasbro counted the minutes aloud, and Uncle Botley stood at the winch. At the count of eight the three of us put our backs into it. The line went quivering-taut, spraying droplets. The blocks groaned and creaked. The bell very slowly swam into view, and in a rush of ocean water it burst out into the air, St. Ives visible within, the explosive package gone. He had either succeeded or failed utterly; it didn’t matter which, not at the moment.
Thunk went the bell onto the deck, and while Uncle Botley lashed it down, Hasbro and I bent to the oars and had that barge fairly skimming, if I do say so myself. There’s nothing like a spot of work when you know what the devil you’re doing and, of course, when there’s an explosion pending.
A cheer went up from the ships waiting in a circle around us, and I took my hat off and waved it in the air, my wig nearly blowing away in the sea wind. I clapped the hat back down and gave up the histrionics, hauling us through the chop, bang up against the hull of our trawler. We clambered aboard, taking the barge in tow and setting out at once.
We didn’t leave St. Ives in the bell, of course. He climbed out at the last possible minute, taking the risk now of being seen. “Let’s go,” he said simply, and into the cabin he went as I took up the speaking trumpet and started to shout at the nearest ship, on which a half-dozen men stood at attention along the rail, and a captain or some such thing awaited orders. In my best Parsons voice, helpfully disguised by the speaking tube, I gave him all the orders he needed — that we had set into motion the disarming of the machine, but that its excess electromagnetic energies would reach capacity just before she shut down. Move away, is what I told him, for safety’s sake, or risk going to the bottom!
That drew their attention. I think they would have run for it even if my beard had been plucked off right then by a sea gull. Flags were run up; whistles blew; men scrambled across the decks of the several ships, which began to make away another quarter of a mile, just as I told them, where they would await orders. We kept right on going — steaming back toward Sterne Bay. That must have confounded them, our racing off like that. For my money, though, it didn’t confound them half as much as did the explosion that followed our departure. We were well away by then, on the horizon, but we saw the plume of water, and then heard the distant whump of the concussion.
* * *
So Lord Kelvin’s machine was nothing but sinking fragments, an instant neighborhood for the denizens of the sea. Dr. Narbondo would continue his cold sleep until whatever it was that animated him had played itself out. Parsons, poor man, wouldn’t be at the helm of whatever grand ship he had imagined himself piloting into the harbor of scientific fame. His schemes were a ruin — blown to pieces. Even his victory over St. Ives had been a short-lived one — toasted to with drugged water.
St. Ives wasn’t happy with that part. He felt guilty about Parsons, and he felt even worse that Narbondo would sleep through what ought to have been his public trial and execution. Ah well, I was happy enough. I wasn’t fond of Parsons in the
first place, and had rather enjoyed parading around in the beard and wig. I wish there had been some way to let him know about that, just to make him mad, but I guess there wasn’t. He would hear most of it, likely enough, but he probably wouldn’t guess it had been me, and that was too bad.
We landed in Sterne Bay, our business done. And we parted company with Hasbro’s aunt and with Uncle Botley. At the Crown and Apple we found a note under St. Ives’s door — the same note, in fact, that St. Ives had left on Parsons’s lap. The old man had scrawled on it the words, “I’m on the afternoon train to London; you might have the kindness to see me off.” Just that. You would have expected more — some little bit of anger or regret — given what St. Ives had revealed to him. But there was no anger, just the words of a sad man asking for company.
We hurried down to the station to do his bidding. It was the least we could do. His just giving in like that made the business doubly sorrowful, and although I was tempted for a moment to wear them, I left the beard and wig at the Apple.
The train was chuffing there on the track, the passengers already boarded. We ran along the platform. St. Ives was certain that there was some good reason for Parsons’s having summoned him, and that it was his duty, our duty, after exploding Parsons’s dreams, to see what it was that the old man wanted, what last tearful throwing-in-the-towel statement he would utter. Let him complain to our faces, I thought, taking the long view. He had been riding high just yesterday, astride his charger, but now, as they say, the mighty had fallen. The race was not always to the swift. Parsons could have his say; I wouldn’t begrudge him.
But where was he? The cars were moving along. We trotted beside them, keeping up, out toward the empty tracks ahead, the train chugging forward and away. Then, as the last car but one rolled past, a window slid down, and there was Parsons’s face grinning out at us like a winking devil. “Haw! Haw! Haw!” he shouted, apparently having run mad, the poor bastard.
The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (the adventures of langdon st. ives) Page 52
