“But there must be some risk?” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “It’s an immensely powerful explosive, after all, isn’t it?”
“Pound for pound, the explosive force of Dynamite Number One is four times that of gunpowder,” said Mr. Petersen, looking solemn, “and it’s also much denser, so that the same volume of explosive ends up being over seven times as powerful.”
Most of the ladies shivered. Sophie thought they were enjoying this measured flirtation with destruction.
Half an hour into the tour, Sophie was so stunned and impressed by what she was seeing that she’d temporarily forgotten the troubles pressing down upon her. The factory was self-contained, with steam provided by a central boiler house, and electricity and compressed air produced at the on-site power station. Though the four-hundred-acre industrial compound was mostly open to the air, the clustering of tunnels and tramways and pipelines gave parts of it the semienclosed feel of a railway yard. It was quite extraordinary to think that only seventy years earlier, this had been a barren waste of sand dunes stretching down to the sea.
There were more than three hundred buildings, many of them with their own chimney stacks, and Mr. Petersen enumerated some of their functions: the acid works and acid-recovery plant, the mills for processing ammonia and potash and kieselguhr, the steam-and powerhouses, the departments for washing and carding and bleaching the fleecy fiber that would be nitrated into guncotton, the pulping mill and box factories, all connected to one another by the rather sweet little narrow-gauge railway.
The workers wore color-coded coveralls so that the factory superintendents could see at a glance whether a worker was out of place—dark blue for the runners and carriers, light blue for workers assigned to the smokeless powder factory, scarlet for the nitroglycerin house—and the pattern of the colors made the scene look like a modern painting when Sophie squinted a little. There were lots of other things to look at too, including a pond that was blown up once a week by a safety officer to destroy the dregs of nitroglycerin that drained into it and an armory attached to a shooting range where they tested explosives for rifles and shotguns. Sophie stopped being sorry at having been made to come and started—amazingly—actually to enjoy herself.
At the acid works where the constituent parts of nitroglycerin were made, they learned that whereas glycerin—a natural byproduct of soap making, in which fats were boiled with wood ash or some other alkali—was quite safe to produce, nitric acid was extremely dangerous. It was manufactured in enormous steel retorts, six feet across and bricked up like ovens, from oil of vitriol shipped by canal from Laurieston and then combined with nitrate of soda. The acid was subsequently forced in the form of a suffocating reddish gas through an elaborate system of pipes to condense in jars on shelves. The liquid would then be pumped by compressed air into tanks at the top of the nitroglycerin hills, artificial grass-covered embankments (mostly conical, often sixty or seventy feet high) built to contain accidents.
The factory compound contained four of these hills, each with two separate nitrating houses, frail-looking white shingled cabins. The liquid nitroglycerin would flow back down the hill to the processing rooms, propelled only by the force of its own weight so as to minimize the risk of accidental detonation.
Security at the nitroglycerin hut was much tighter than anywhere they’d been so far. A guard at the entrance checked their visitor’s passes for a second time, and a female searcher examined each of them.
Mr. Petersen told them that even workers who came in and out of the building three or four times a day would be searched every time they passed through the door. Sophie thought him naïve for believing this—it was human nature to become lax—but she hoped everyone had been checked properly today, at any rate. Thinking about it made her feel slightly sick, her parents’ fate at the forefront of her mind.
Several of the other women seemed to share Sophie’s worries.
“Are you really sure none of these workers break the rules?” one of them asked.
The female searcher laughed. “It’s hardly in their own interest to break the rules, now, is it?” she said. “They’re the ones who’ll be blown up if they do. There’s a long list of prohibitions. The young women aren’t allowed to wear pins in their hair, metal corsets, or metal buttons; you can see they’ve all got their hair plaited and the ends fastened with elastic. A few years ago, a band came to play at a factory dance, and one of the musicians lit up a cigarette without thinking. There was practically a riot! I thought the girls would tear him to pieces—they had him on the ground in a flash, with his arms pinned so he couldn’t endanger anyone.”
Once everyone had been checked, they stepped into rubber overshoes provided by the company. NO SHOE THAT TOUCHES THE GROUND OUTSIDE MAY TOUCH THE FLOOR OF A DANGER DEPARTMENT, a sign warned, and Mr. Petersen explained that it was because the grit might produce friction and spark an explosion.
At the center of the nitroglycerin hut stood two lead cylinders, each five feet in diameter and six feet deep, sunk into the floor and protected with dome-shaped tops, the lead pipes curling in and out of them. By each tank, a scarlet-clad man watched the thermometer while sitting perched on one of the strangest contraptions Sophie had ever seen, a one-legged stool that would topple to the ground if the watcher relaxed his attention even for a second. Mr. Petersen explained that the special stools had been designed as a safety measure to stop the watchers from falling asleep and missing the kind of temperature fluctuation that would merit an evacuation.
What really caught Sophie’s imagination and made her skin crawl was the sheer volume of the liquid nitroglycerin. Thousands and thousands of gallons of it ran throughout the building in pipes that spewed out waterfalls of nitroglycerin, cream-colored streams shooting out of lead gutters into enormous tanks where the explosive rose to the surface to be skimmed off by young women wielding gigantic aluminum ladles like washbasins with handles. From there it was poured into tanks to be rinsed, first with cold water and then with warm water mixed with carbonate of soda.
One of the guards who’d checked them in appeared and took Mr. Petersen aside for a quick word. When he came back, he looked worried, though not excessively so.
“Will you excuse me, ladies?” he said. “I must take a telephone call. Many apologies.”
Fortunately the women of the NTWSA were so thoroughly immersed in learning about working conditions and the inequalities of pay between men and women that they hardly minded his going, particularly when one of the managers offered to take the next part of the tour.
“Sophie, would you mind coming with me?” Mr. Petersen said to Sophie while nobody was listening.
“If you like,” said Sophie, suddenly very nervous.
What was all this about?
FORTY
THE GUARD LED THEM around an obstacle course of hills and outbuildings to a place called the communications room. It struck Sophie as an awfully fancy name for a hut with a telephone switchboard, until they got inside and saw the row of telephone operators, girls as slick and professional-looking as one could imagine.
“Our telephonists are trained by the General Post Office in Glasgow,” said the guard, sounding very proud.
But Sophie thought they had that look, the look that said IRYLNS, and she shrank away from their glossy sameness.
“Your call should come through in about ten minutes,” said one of the operators, giving Sophie and Mr. Petersen an impersonal smile. “Perhaps you’d like to wait in the lounge next door. Can I fetch anyone a coffee?”
She showed Sophie and Mr. Petersen to the small lounge opening off one side of the shed, then brought them each a cup of coffee.
“I must admit this was a ploy on my part,” said Mr. Petersen once they found themselves alone together.
“What do you mean?” Sophie asked.
“I didn’t lie when I said we needed to come here to receive a phone call,” said Mr. Petersen. “But I’m afraid I was a bit cavalier with the truth, Sophie. The telepho
ne call’s not for me. It’s for you.”
Sophie felt the blood pound in her ears.
“It’s not—,” she began, then couldn’t think how to say it. “That is—”
“What?” said Mr. Petersen, setting down his coffee cup and looking at her with concern. “What’s wrong, Sophie?”
“It’s not a telephone call from a dead person, is it?” she asked.
Mr. Petersen looked startled.
“Why would you think I’d put you on the line with a dead person?” he said, sounding rather wary.
“It’s just that I seem to have had an awful lot of spirit communications recently,” Sophie confessed. “I thought this might be another one.”
Mr. Petersen did a double take.
“You mean the drawing that came over the pantelegraph wasn’t the only one?”
“Far from it,” said Sophie. It struck her that she could speak to him now almost as one adult to another. No trace of that painful crush remained. “At least the others made a bit more sense. The drawing—well, let’s just say I don’t have a clue as to who sent it or why.”
A little old lady in a flowered coverall came in and cleared away their cups, giving the table an aggressive wipe.
“We’ll have to look into this,” said Mr. Petersen. “I want to hear more about it, but now simply isn’t the time. Sophie, assuming the operator is able to put the call through, you’re about to receive a person-to-person call from Mr. Alfred Nobel.”
“Alfred Nobel?” said Sophie, now more perplexed than frightened. “You’re pulling my leg, Mr. Petersen, aren’t you? When people say Nobel, they mean the company, not the man. If Alfred Nobel were alive today, he’d be over a hundred years old. And in any case, alive or dead, what could he possibly want with me?”
The charwoman had come back in during Sophie’s speech—she must have been cleared by security, or Mr. Petersen would have prevented Sophie from saying anything in front of her—and she now surprised both Sophie and Mr. Petersen by looking up from polishing the side table and saying, “Oh, he’s not alive, dearie, not really. They say it’s his brain, sitting in a very superior jam jar somewhere in the countryside in Sweden!”
Mr. Petersen gave her a repressive look and she subsided, but not before a picture flashed into Sophie’s head of a brain in a jar, rigged up to a speaking trumpet from which the pronouncements of Alfred Nobel were broadcast to his underlings.
“I suppose the truth’s not so far off,” Mr. Petersen admitted.
Would he have said anything if the old woman hadn’t brought it up?
“Alfred Nobel exists in a kind of limbo,” the teacher continued. “He is highly selective these days about what business he attends to, but there are a few things he won’t let go of, including his dream that one day weapons will have become so advanced that two armies may mutually annihilate each other in a second. At that time, of course, the civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their armies, which will in turn lead to world peace. Here’s the thing, Sophie: The scientists who work for him are probably only months away from creating precisely the explosive he’s dreamed of, a bomb so powerful that the world’s great powers may abjure war for once and for all.”
Sophie had never quite accepted Theodor Herzl’s famous proposition that the man who discovered a terrible explosive would do more for peace than a thousand of its milder apostles, but Mr. Petersen certainly seemed to believe what he was saying. Could it be true? Why was Mr. Petersen telling her about it now?
“What does all this have to do with me?” she asked. “Me in particular, I mean, not me as a person who in general might like there to be world peace?”
“I’ve been privileged to serve as one of Mr. Nobel’s personal assistants,” said Mr. Petersen. “He has sworn an oath that he won’t die until certain conditions have been fulfilled, and my job is to help bring about those conditions, for Mr. Nobel is tired of life, Sophie, or rather of the half-life he now has. Without your help, nothing can go forward.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Sophie said.
“Sophie, what do I have to say to persuade you that your potential to affect the course of events in the Hanse is simply enormous?”
The girls and boys who experienced untoward events in storybooks always pinched themselves to make sure they were awake. Sophie gave herself a hard pinch now—somehow it was almost impossible to give oneself a really painful pinch—and found it altered nothing.
“Why me rather than anybody else?” she persisted. “There’s nothing special about me.”
“I was sent by Mr. Nobel to teach you and to protect you,” Mr. Petersen repeated. “Also to persuade you that you must leave Scotland for the next stage of your education.”
“You were sent?” Sophie said, seizing on the part of the pronouncement that made the least sense of all. Leaving Scotland, now, well, that sounded like an extremely sensible idea…. Was he really going to help?
Mr. Petersen sighed.
“Sophie, I really must apologize to you. Because of Miss Rawlins’s poor judgment, you’ve already gathered that I obtained my position at school under false pretenses. I’d been asked to do whatever was necessary to get the position, at the behest of my employer, Mr. Nobel.”
“Wouldn’t you have been more useful to him doing your real job than messing about teaching us chemistry?” said Sophie. Something about the way he spoke of Mr. Nobel annoyed her; it was almost worshipful. “Why did he want you in Edinburgh?”
“Why do you think?”
“To help the police prevent any more bombings?” Sophie guessed.
“At least you’ve given up the idea that I was the éminence grise running the Brothers of the Northern Liberties! You know, I was on the verge of telling you all this that day weeks ago before we were caught in the blast from the Canongate explosion, but I thought the better of it.”
It all would have been much easier if he’d told her everything then, but there was no point regretting it. Sophie didn’t believe in looking back and wishing things had gone differently. If only she had known Mikael’s real last name, she would have realized much sooner that Mr. Petersen could be trusted. All this put her in mind of the most urgent question. “Mr. Petersen, do you think you can get me an exit visa?”
“It may not be necessary,” said Mr. Petersen, looking mysteriously pleased with himself. “The main reason Mr. Nobel sent me to Edinburgh was to persuade you to come with me when I leave the country.”
“Me?” Sophie asked, by now completely stymied. She hadn’t even explained yet about IRYLNS, and here he was anticipating her request! “Why would he care about me? How did he even know I existed?”
“I still can’t tell you that, Sophie. But the telephone call we’re waiting for will reveal more. You’re about to talk to Mr. Nobel himself. It’s a very great honor—he hardly communicates with anyone outside the organization these days.”
At that moment one of the operators appeared and beckoned to Sophie to follow.
She looked back at Mr. Petersen as the young woman led her toward the main room, but he simply settled down more comfortably in his chair, crossed his arms across his chest, and smiled.
“Go on, Sophie,” he said. “It’s just a telephone call. It can’t hurt to talk.”
FORTY-ONE
WHEN THE FOLDING DOOR closed and she found herself alone in the mahogany-lined telephone booth, Sophie felt a wave of claustrophobia so intense she thought she might actually pass out. She leaned her forehead against one side of the booth—an electric light had come on overhead when the doors closed—and tried to collect her thoughts.
It was just a telephone call. What was she afraid of?
She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear.
“This is Sophie Hunter,” she said into the mouthpiece, hearing nothing but a mild hissing on the line. “Is anybody there?”
“Sophie,” a voice whispered. “I am so very glad that we are finally in touch with each other.”
&
nbsp; Nobel’s voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t think from where. Had she heard a speech of his on the radio? As she cast about for the memory, he continued to talk.
“I do not have much strength, and so we will not speak long. There is much, in any case, that I cannot say to you until we meet in person. My enemies have a long reach, and even a secure telephone line presents risks. When you come to me in Sweden, we will be able to talk freely.”
The country’s name gave her the clue she needed. She was so surprised, she blurted the words right out.
“You spoke to me already! Yours was the spirit voice that came through Mrs. Tansy that night in Heriot Row. You told me to be careful and to keep my own counsel, and you promised me a journey over water! How—? Why—?”
“I had my own reasons for contacting you in that way,” said the voice, sounding wearier and less hopeful than anything Sophie had ever heard in her life. “Reasons I mustn’t reveal until we meet in person. I spoke to you that night under quite peculiar circumstances. Obviously I am not dead, though I find myself in an equivocal state of embodiment these days. One of my agents—indeed, it was your Mr. Petersen—paid Mrs. Tansy a substantial sum to ingratiate herself with your guardian, serve as the medium for that night’s séance, and make sure you were involved from start to finish.”
“That was why she asked for me to come and see her checked beforehand!” Sophie said, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place.
The Explosionist Page 28
