The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  Oh, for goodness’ sake, a man with this knack for making everything long-winded and tedious simply couldn’t be in bed with the terrorists! Sophie began drawing an elaborately decorated letter P in her notebook.

  “Speaking simply of the forms of power that actually make machines run,” Mr. Petersen continued, “what are the traditional preferences of the Hanseatic states?”

  Nobody answered.

  “We generally prefer electricity to fossil fuels,” Sophie said, feeling the rest of the class go stiff with boredom. “We’ve developed highly efficient technologies partly because of our relative lack of natural resources. Countries that’ve got a lot of coal tend to be almost profligate with steam power; it’s precisely because we can’t afford to use up all our supply running trains that we’ve developed ways of using electrical power to move vehicles far in advance of anything they have in Europe or the Americas.”

  “Part of what Sophie’s saying,” said Mr. Petersen approvingly, “is that human ingenuity can do a great deal to counteract so-called natural disadvantages. In Scotland, for instance, engineers have developed superb new technologies that quite make up for the fact that coal’s in such short supply. And at the international level, the Nobel Consortium has been able to use its monopoly on top-quality armaments to secure political autonomy for the Hanseatic states. Weapons equal peace.”

  At the word armaments everyone groaned. Even Sophie wasn’t sure she agreed with Mr. Petersen. Weren’t explosives responsible for more evil than good in the world? Sophie remembered crying when she first learned about the seals trained to drag harnesses of explosives to blow up tankers. The poor creatures died in the service of a cause they didn’t even understand, and that couldn’t be right, could it?

  “No, no, hear me out,” the teacher said. “This weapons business is really important. What’s the classic example of science directly affecting politics?”

  “The establishment of the state of Israel,” Fiona said. “Chaim Weizmann traded the secret of the acetone process—which lets you turn corn into acetone for manufacturing cordite—for the European Federation’s support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.”

  “Very good, Fiona,” said Mr. Petersen. Sophie was bursting with jealousy. “Of course, politics can have very direct results on science and technology as well. The outcome of America’s War of Secession depended very heavily on access to explosives. At the war’s outset, almost all the gunpowder mills were located in the Northern states. The Northerners would have won and the United States of America would still exist as a single entity if Delaware hadn’t seceded to join the Southern cause. Why was Delaware so important?”

  Everyone knew the answer to that.

  “Delaware had the DuPont munitions factories,” Jean said. Her eyes were still a bit red, Sophie noticed, but she didn’t sound upset anymore. “Once the Southerners got hold of them, the Northerners had to let them secede.”

  “Mr. Petersen?” said Fiona, raising her hand.

  “Yes, Fiona?”

  “Weren’t we supposed to do an experiment today? We’ve used up more than half our class time already.”

  Mr. Petersen looked at the clock and did a comical double take when he saw the time.

  “We’ve not a moment to lose!” he said.

  It turned out that Mr. Petersen had got hold of an old but functional pair of Caselli pantelegraphs, which allowed a person at one end to transmit an image to a receiver at the other. The sender wrote a message with nonconducting ink on a sheet of tin, which was then fixed to a curved metal plate and scanned by a needle. Telegraph wires carried the electrical message to the receiving machine, where it was transcribed in Prussian blue onto paper soaked in potassium ferrocyanide.

  This was fun, Sophie thought, watching each set of lab partners take their turn to send a message, with much wrangling over who got to have the final product as a keepsake. Sophie and Leah were the last ones in line, and when their turn came, only minutes before the end of class, Leah took the sender’s station and Sophie manned the receiver.

  “I’m going to send you my famous drawing of a camel,” Leah said, scraping earnestly at the tin with the writing instrument.

  She came to join Sophie once she’d finished drawing and positioned the needle to do its work. As the clean blue marks began to appear on the paper, the two girls leaned over to watch, holding their breath.

  “Look!” Leah said, jumping up and down and pointing. “There’s the crescent moon in the background!”

  Leah’s camel posed in silhouette against a desert horizon, complete with palm tree and oasis and moon sliver. They watched with excitement as the triangular leaves of the palm tree and the camel’s skinny head and neck began to emerge at the top of the page.

  About a quarter of the way down, though, the line experienced a disruption. The stylus dug deep into the paper, racing back and forth.

  “What’s happening?” Leah asked Sophie.

  The machine had gone haywire. After a minute the needle began to behave again, falling into its regular back-and-forth movement. But something was clearly awry. Beneath the horizontal strip of desert landscape with camel was a slice—growing even as they watched—of something quite different.

  “What is it?” Leah asked Sophie, who shrugged again and shook her head.

  “Some kind of a technical drawing?” one of the other girls said.

  “Yes,” said Sophie with impatience, “but what’s it a drawing of?”

  Leah peered at the line of text along the bottom. Parts of the diagram were labeled as well.

  “Oh!” she said. “At first I thought the letters had come through all fuzzy because of the needle, but they’re not even real letters!”

  When Sophie looked, though, she saw something quite surprising: the letters were real, but they were in the Cyrillic rather than the Roman alphabet.

  Beginning to puzzle out the words, she’d caught nothing more than the place and date lines—Sankt Peterburg, 21-02-23—and the words serdtsevina and reaktor when a hand snatched the page out of the calipers holding it in place. The stylus began whirring, and a wisp of smoke drifted from the guts of the machine.

  Sophie looked up to see Mr. Petersen, his face pale and his hands shaking.

  “What’s wrong?” Leah said. “Mr. Petersen, why did you take our facsimile? We hadn’t finished looking at it—do you know what went wrong?”

  “Does the machine have a mechanical memory that it stores pictures in,” Nan asked, “and could it have sent an old one by mistake?”

  “No,” said Mr. Petersen blankly, “there’s no memory. I can’t imagine what happened. Some kind of a misfire, I suppose.”

  “Oh,” said Leah. “Will we get full credit for the experiment, even though it didn’t work properly?”

  “Certainly,” said Mr. Petersen, a little color coming back into his face. He had rolled up the malformed image and tucked it into his breast pocket. “Full credit for the practical part, at any rate. I won’t make any guarantees about your marks for the report. It depends on how well you write everything up; better than last time, Leah, I hope!”

  The bell rang. Sophie lingered as the others left the classroom.

  “I’m sure it was a technical drawing of some kind,” she said to Mr. Petersen. “Had you any idea what it might be for?”

  Mr. Petersen gave her a wary look. “Had you?” he countered.

  Sophie shook her head. It was strange, but she could have sworn he seemed relieved.

  “Do you think I could take it with me, and see if I can work out what it is?” she asked.

  “No,” said Mr. Petersen in a loud voice. “I need to hold on to it,” he added semiapologetically, “to help me learn what went wrong.”

  “All right,” said Sophie, though she couldn’t see how it would help him. In any case she remembered the drawing perfectly well.

  Her first impression was that it was some kind of fortified chamber, something one might build to test a hi
gh-powered explosive reaction, but the real mystery was where it had come from. In spite of Mr. Petersen’s dismissive answer to Nan’s question, could the machine have retained the memory of something transmitted in the past?

  It was an intriguing puzzle, one consuming enough that Sophie barged straight into Miss Chatterjee in the corridor outside the chemistry classroom.

  “Sophie!” said Miss Chatterjee, using a handkerchief to wipe the hot coffee off her front.

  “Really, Sophie,” added Miss Hopkins, who had been walking alongside Miss Chatterjee, “you could hardly be more careless.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Miss Chatterjee,” said Sophie, feeling like the worst person in the world.

  “Sorry doesn’t put dinner on the table,” Miss Hopkins commented. “Sophie, get the mop and bucket from the janitor’s cubby and clean up that spill before someone slips and hurts herself.”

  “Yes, Miss Hopkins,” Sophie said, not bothering to mention that mopping would make her late for her next class.

  Of course it took ages to find the bucket, fill it with hot water and Nightingale fluid, and go back to clean up the mess. By then Sophie was mopping so frantically that it took her a minute to realize she was hearing a three-way conversation between Mr. Petersen, Miss Hopkins, and Miss Chatterjee in the classroom behind her.

  “Are we protecting the girls,” said Miss Chatterjee in her unmistakable cut-glass accent, “or are we simply protecting the country?”

  “A ridiculous question,” Miss Hopkins said. “There’s no reason to see any conflict between the two. Myself, I think the latest development’s more exciting than ominous.”

  “It all depends,” said Mr. Petersen, “on what you think of the procedure itself. I remember—”

  But Sophie was not to hear what Mr. Petersen remembered. A loud snort caused her to look around and see the unmistakable looming figure of Miss Henchman.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “I ASSUME A TEACHER GAVE you permission to use the janitor’s equipment?” the headmistress said frostily.

  “I’m sorry to get in your way, Miss Henchman,” said Sophie. She’d never seen the headmistress in the science wing; she hoped it wouldn’t set a precedent. “I bumped into Miss Chatterjee and spilled her coffee, and Miss Hopkins told me to clean up.”

  “Quite right, too,” said Miss Henchman.

  Miss Henchman was surprisingly fair when it came to real accidents. She didn’t have the irritable and unjust temper that led some teachers to punish one for mishaps resulting from carelessness rather than disobedience.

  “Aren’t you meant to be elsewhere by now?” the headmistress added.

  “Yes, Miss Henchman,” said Sophie, thinking that she’d better not rush off until Miss Henchman actually dismissed her.

  The headmistress nodded, and Sophie trundled the bucket as fast as she could back to where it belonged, then hurried to class.

  There Miss Botham, rapt to the point of passion, was already in the midst of praising to the girls the nineteenth century’s innovations in standard office practice, down to improvements in ordinary writing tools (the mass-produced lead pencil, the steel-nibbed pen, the patented reservoir pen with its ink stored in a kind of fountain inside the barrel).

  “Typewriters, invented in the 1860s, shortly became indispensable,” said Miss Botham, sounding like a braying donkey, “and the word typewriter soon came to be used interchangeably with secretary or clerical assistant. The machine became even more valuable with the introduction of the Dictaphone, which allows an employer to dictate a draft of a letter or a memorandum at any hour of the day or night in a medium the secretary may transcribe later on the typewriter.”

  The woman sounded like a paid advertisement, Sophie thought. Meanwhile Miss Botham drew a diagram of the Dictaphone on the blackboard.

  “Girls who go to IRYLNS, girls who go modestly and without complaint to work in a local office, girls who stay at home to help their fathers with secretarial tasks,” she rhapsodized, “all these girls do the country a service that may add up to precisely the difference between victory and defeat. Remember, your outlook is just as important as the skills you learn. To be a really first-rate secretary, one must know far more than shorthand and typewriting.”

  “And what’s the correct outlook, Miss Botham?” asked Harriet, leaning forward in her seat with a disgustingly angelic smile.

  “The perfect secretary experiences a sense of pleasure and excitement about each piece of work she undertakes,” said Miss Botham, smiling at Harriet in a way that made Sophie want to be sick. “The perfect secretary is without morbid self-consciousness or sensitivity. She is a miracle of tact and discretion, and she is always in a good mood.”

  It was a relief when Miss Botham finally stopped and showed them how to put on the headphones and operate the foot pedal for slowing down or speeding up the rate at which the machine played back.

  Sophie surprised herself by adjusting to the new technology with something like delight. She rapidly figured out how to turn herself into a highly efficient automaton—one had to leave one’s brain entirely out of it, becoming a linked circuit of ears and hands and eyes without any conscious input. Thinking about any individual part of the procedure would only slow one down.

  After a little practice, she was able to type the memorandum recorded on her particular cylinder (a terribly dull set of revisions to the school out-of-bounds rules—it was just like Miss Henchman to kill two birds with one stone by getting the girls to do her typing for free) without touching her foot to the slow-down pedal more than once every thirty seconds. Then she sped the recording up even faster than the ordinary speaking voice. Now her fingers flew over the keyboard, typing faster and faster until a pair of hands wrenched off her headphones.

  Sophie looked up to see Nan staring at her, Sophie’s headphones in her hands, a circle of girls surrounding them and Miss Botham fuming at the front of the classroom.

  Sophie was bewildered. She’d really been in the flow of things. It was most annoying of Nan to interrupt!

  “Sophie, you were typing so fast we thought you must be pretending,” Nan said. “Fiona used her stopwatch and clocked you at a thousand keystrokes per minute—you were ripping those sheets out of the platen like nobody’s business! I can’t believe the machine didn’t jam. Miss Botham thought you must be putting it on. She asked me to stop you and see whether you were really typing what was on the recording.”

  “Why should there be a problem?” Sophie said.

  Her brain had been so far out of the loop of activity that she couldn’t even remember what she’d just typed. It was always faster to type that way, even if one sometimes introduced awkward mistakes. Still, since Nan seemed worried, Sophie rolled the page out of the typewriter and hastily glanced at the first few lines.

  “It looks fine to me,” she said.

  Nan took it from her hand, no longer so certain as before that something must be wrong. A few minutes later, though, she started laughing.

  “All right, I admit it’s a good joke,” she said. “For a minute there, I really thought you’d acquired superhuman prowess as a typist, or crossed over into the fifth dimension or something. I still don’t see how you got the machine to work so fast. What’s the trick?”

  “There’s no trick,” said Sophie, snatching the page back from Nan and reading it more slowly from the top.

  Nan jabbed a finger at the middle.

  “That’s what you’re looking for, I think,” she said. “I must say, Sophie, I don’t approve of that kind of language.”

  Many of the other girls had gone back to their work, but a few still stood nearby, Miss Botham hovering at the periphery.

  Sophie followed the direction of Nan’s finger and gasped. How had she made such an awful mistake? Would she ever survive the shame of Nan having seen it?

  A quick look suggested that the previous pages were just as they should have been. This one, though, contained an appalling swerve from the straight and n
arrow.

  In the numbered list of instructions she’d been typing, the break was painfully obvious:

  48. No girl shall wear slippers outside the dormitories.

  49. No girl

  if the bloody bitch hadn’t interfered i’d not be here at all i’d be living it up in one of the baltics damn them all to hell and the girl too for all she looked so young and that other harpy who paid me off in the first place and the gentleman too both of em up to no good i’d say but the young un worse than the old un and what’s happened to my favorite little fellow i’d like to know

  xajiodgoihovhoiahdoifhdaoifnoidasngoidnagoinadgoinagsoin doignadoignado;isgnoadsingoai;sdnaoisdhfiuoahughdoiaugna dskjnfgasdngdasiohgoiadshgoia

  mind me girl it’s not the one you think it’s the other one make sure th

  And the rest of the page was blank from where Nan had cut her off.

  Sophie crumpled the paper into a ball and stuffed it into her pocket so that the teacher wouldn’t be able to read it.

  “Nan, I swear I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said urgently. “It must have been some kind of a fit. I think it might be related to what happened in Mr. Petersen’s class just now. I’ll explain—”

  But Miss Botham had marched up to them, gathered up the stack of typed pages beside Sophie’s machine, and laid her meaty hand on Sophie’s shoulder.

  “You’ll not get away with creating a disruption in my classroom,” she said, “not after being so disrespectful as to arrive late without an apology.”

  “But—,” Sophie started to say.

  Miss Botham jostled her so hard that Sophie almost fell, her leg crumpling under her.

  “Put your things together,” the teacher said in a cold voice, “and go straight to Miss Henchman’s office. You’ve distracted the other girls and willfully created a nuisance.”

  Sophie waited wretchedly by the door as Miss Botham scribbled a note and sealed it in an envelope.

  “That’s for the headmistress,” said the teacher, “and above and beyond whatever punishment she metes out, you’ll type me ten clean copies of page three hundred and fifteen of Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet. A fine way for a big girl like you to behave! I expect to see a thoroughly reformed character the next time I lay eyes on you, Sophie Hunter.”