Dr. Phibes in The Beginning

by William Goldstein

  The engineers and builders of the Industrial Revolution depended on numerical tables to make their calculations. But these tables were error-prone thanks to mistakes in transcription and typesetting. Babbage wanted to eliminate these sources of human error and so he envisioned a mechanical calculator that could add and subtract, multiply and divide raw data and print out the results on paper strips or soft metal plates.

  Backed by a grant from Parliament, Babbage spent a decade on the design and development of the Difference Engine, only to have the project collapse following a dispute with his chief engineer. After advancing 17,000 pounds on what they now considered a failed project, Parliament withdrew their support. Babbage's drawings were packed away in the Science Museum to be joined there in 1832 by a demonstration model built by Joseph Clement, the former chief engineer.

  Phibes, a great walker and ’discoverer’ of cities, used today's transit to clear his head. Sophie was key to the rejuvenation of his beloved wife. The problem had to be solved.

  Phibes had checked and rechecked the plans before he set out to rebuild the replica of the Difference Engine. Its brass and steel parts were welded to exact tolerances and the finished machine was tested and retested to ensure reliable performance.

  The underground was cleaner than he remembered it. Its walls had been steam cleaned to a chalky white. The car's wheels didn’t screech anymore making for a quiet - almost too quiet - ride. The blue lamps along the roadway gave an overall Dutch cast to subterranean London.

  The car was crowded with working people. Young clerks, mostly women, filled the cane seats, their thin shoulders angularly draped by formless sweaters. The grays and dull pinks only added to the discolor of their wearers most of whom eschewed makeup of any kind. The lipsticked ones were plain beyond repair and the men in the center aisle, straining not to look at them, instead poured over the advertisements that concaved the airspace along the car's roof.

  Doan's Pills. Cedar Baume for Sleep. The Mesmer Academy for Psycho-tropism. Some of the elderly had clustered near the door in anticipation of the next station. Slowed to a crawl by arthritis, they were fearful of missing their stop as they’d so often done in the past. Already the area reeked of piss.

  Down at the far end of the car a young couple had crushed themselves against the wall in the very last seat. They couldn’t be more than eighteen and were kissing wildly in defiance of local conventions and clasping arms about one another like pythons. Phibes reached his stop just as the young man relaxed his grip on his companion's back and reached into her blouse.

  The Science Museum is an ancient stone pile on Exhibition Road. Founded by Queen Victoria, it's surrounded by those other great repositories of English society: Imperial College and the Natural History- and Victoria and Albert Museums. Over 300,000 items are collected here including the world's first typewriter and Puffing Billy, the world's oldest surviving steam engine.

  Phibes bought the building on Maldine Square for its size and for the privacy it had to offer. Its architecture was of no concern other than the fact that it blended in with the other 14 buildings on the Square. In 1930's London, Greater Bermondsey could hardly be more nondescript.

  He meant to live in the house and use it for his work place. There he would restore the bloom of life to his long dead wife; an impossible task but for this man who should’ve died in that fiery car crash on that icy Alpine road, not so impossible!

  #5 Maldine Square was all about remembrance. He and Victoria would dance together again in the ballroom while the Wizards played their favorites.

  So carefully did he construct these diminutive players that they could have held their own at Ciro's, the Copa, or Harry's Bar. But it was Sophie the Chantoozie, with more energy packed into her than a keg of dynamite, who was the real test of his skill. And his will!

  Next to turning lead into gold, raising the dead has been mankind's most fevered occupation. Altamira, dynastic Egyptian mummies, cryonic storage, the schemes and dreams of this yearning are as uncountable as they are unsuccessful.

  Phibes dismissed all of them. Instead, he decided to build Sophie from scratch. By perfecting her parts - bone, tissue, and organs - she would be more than her parts.

  Walking briskly, Phibes soon found himself at the museum's main portico on Exhibition Road. The Science Museum wasn’t like other museums. Compared to the paintings and sculpture and crockery that adorn the Tate and Le Hermitage, here was a collection of practicals. Engines and light bulbs and coke instead of the gorgeous and frivolously costly sunflowers of Van Gogh and Monet's water lilies. And why not?! Whole populations moved further and faster because of the steam locomotive and they didn’t have to live in their own filth thanks to copper plumbing and the sanitary loo.

  Inside, the high arched ceiling hollowed the noise of the crowd which was quite sparse this mid-morning. People tend to speak in hushed tones anyway when they're in museums, so even if there’d been a crowd, their mouthings would’ve been absorbed by the large volume of this space.

  Babbage occupied a place of honor halfway down the central aisle of the main floor. The demonstration model of the Difference Engine rested at its center atop a concrete platform, rebar-enforced to hold the weight. Its metal surfaces were spotless, a sign of good care. The placard announced that it was in perfect working order

  The large draftsman's cabinet to its rear contained most of Babbage's drawings. Phibes had full access thanks to his status as a career diplomat. It was from these plans that he built his replica of the Difference Engine, hiring a young engineering firm to fill in the gaps in Babbage's originals.

  18 months and 100,000 pounds later, Phibes had his own working model of the Difference Engine.

  With it he crafted the exact (to 10 decimal places) skeletal dimensions for every member of the band, including Sophie. Soon, they were playing like headliners and the project was right on schedule - until Sophie's failure.

  The curator nodded as Phibes entered the exhibit and settled into the study area behind the tall cabinet (and out of view of the visitors). He was poring through the second drawer of drawings when the source of Sophie's failure came clear. All of the musicians had been built to the same scale. But at 5’ even, Sophie was 2” shorter than the other players.

  Glad to have discovered the mistake so quickly, he folded the plans back into the drawer and returned it to the cabinet. Sophie could be rebuilt in a matter of months compared to the years it might have taken to correct a design flaw in the machine. But an error is still an error: the engineers would have to be notified.

  It was the noon hour by the time he left the exhibit and the museum had filled up with visitors. He was hurrying along the center aisle when a commotion erupted up ahead at the bookstore where a lot of little kids were milling about and chasing one another with canes and whistles. There were at least ten of the tiny terrors, who all looked like they were of the same family.

  When their parents came into view, Phibes pulled up short. For there, not 30 yards away, stood Frederic Overton, with a woman who most surely was his wife on his arm. Phibes hadn’t known that Overton was married, let alone the father of such a huge brood but he couldn’t risk being seen by his former tailor so he ducked down a side aisle. This was the Cosmos Wing of the museum. Newer and smaller than the others, it presented an intricate collection of rooms and alcoves, each with its own placard: The Moon, Comets, Jupiter, etc.

  The door to The Universe was slightly ajar. Phibes entered, glad for the respite.

  LOOK,

  UP IN THE SKY!

  It was a large expanse, benign blue patched with white puffs and sparked by the Sun during the day; a limitless black tangle of bears and lions, of snakes and warriors at night, all of it fearsome enough but the fuzzy ghosts stalking along its edges draped it in a deeper, more invasive mystery.

  To most people, the sky is Up. Folks beseech God or the gods up there and imagine themselves doted on by the squadrons of angels who patrol its vistas. But beyond Up
, the sky is down and to the side and all around us…except to the Flatlanders, who see Earth extending to the edges of the map, and beyond,

  More sensible is the notion that our globe is pulled around its orbit by the sun's gravity along with Mars and Venus and Jupiter and the other planets. This group, or 'solar system’ as it's called, is itself being tugged along by an array of suns (stars) reaching out as far as the telescopic eye can see.

  So we pray to the God or gods we know up there and look to the angels for protection and spin fanciful yarns about those bears and serpents and warriors, believing forlornly that they are somehow connected, these bumptious denizens of this big black nighttime space…to and from which the navigators of this world steered in and out of danger.

  Few people pay any attention to the sky other than during tornados and lightning storms. Like the mountains and the sea, the sky is a big distant backdrop to our more immediate demands of earning a living. Farmers and accountants, shepherds and shoe salesmen are all obligated to find their way without sinking into thievery.

  During one of his last tours of duty, Anton Phibes was called to Ankara to clean up the current round of trade negotiations, which had been stalled on a stubborn set of technicalities. Phibes, one of the most fastidious negotiators, was also the most tenacious.

  Ankara was blistering hot in July but dress code demanded that he suit up for the meeting with his Turkish counterparts. He bought a blue two-piece seersucker off the rack at Fortnum & Mason's and a square-fit Pima cotton shirt to give him enough breathing room. Overall, his outfit was cool and crisp in looks if not in fact but too pastel-bland for Phibes if he was to have any effect on those stagnating talks so he added a bright red, blue and gold rep tie to the ensemble; the entire bill coming in just inside his carefully crafted budget. Unlike the military, diplomats did not get a uniform allowance but were expected to pay for their wardrobes out of pocket, which is why Phibes had his black navy-last oxfords re-soled at the cobbler's instead of plunging for a brand new pair and going over budget.

  But what can you do?

  Ankara, the newly-minted capital of Turkey, was in the midst of a building boom. Phibes remembered the dust and clang of the new construction from the last time he was there and the thought of slogging along in footwear more suited to the still fogs of London was off-putting. But a public servant must serve the public.

  The thermometer outside Ankara Gan station read 94 degrees on the afternoon of his arrival. And for the next two weeks of his stay, the daytime temperature never fell below 90 degrees, requiring him to purchase two more shirts because of the need to launder them after just one day's wear. He wished that he’d shown more foresight because although the Turkish shirts were cheaper than those bought in London, their quality was too.

  On the Thursday before he was to return to London, Phibes received an invitation from Kemal Ataturk to join him at the Presidential Palace in Istanbul where ’the weather was cooler and the beaches on the Bosporus were a swimmer's paradise!’

  After a send-off of tea and marmalade with the embassy staff, Phibes took the night train to Istanbul, arriving in that city at dawn to the welcoming breezes flowing up from the Bosporus. A car was waiting for him outside the station, its motor running and the blue lamp above its luggage carrier glowing importantly.

  Travel through a city's early morning streets is a trip on the cusp. Last night's revelers and drunks are sleeping it off and the day workers and business people are catching a few last winks. The only ones about are the early shift bus drivers and the newspaper boys starting their routes.

  A special smell - clean and pungent - hangs over the city, over every city all around the world at the dawn hour: the ozone of expectancy, the aroma of chance.

  Phibes breathed it all in, gulping his first full breath in a fortnight as he climbed into the car.

  A subaltern greeted him at the palace gate and showed him to his quarters, a double room that overlooked the lush terraced gardens at the rear of the main building. There, a flight of geese had just descended onto one of the ponds, newcomers judging from their hungry pursuit of the local minnow population.

  A blue terrycloth was draped across the bed. Stuck to its lapel was a handwritten note that read: ’Take a dip. KA’.

  ***

  Phibes had the pool all to himself. He dove in for a quick ten laps but needed another ten before he felt free of the dust and grime of the past two weeks.

  He slept till noon. The porter's tap got him up with the train's onward rush still surging in his bones.

  Lunch was a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk, ice cold.

  There was another note from Ataturk on his tray. ’Be ready at two. We're going for a ride.’

  ***

  At 2:45 that afternoon Phibes found himself in the command center of the Sultan Selim. This German-built battle cruiser sailed with the High Seas Fleet under its original name, Goeben until it was sold to Turkey when that country entered the war on Germany's side.

  Ataturk greeted him with a hug as soon as the ensign ushered him into this heavily-armored enclosure that was brimming with brass and steel instruments. The man looked fine and fit in his battle fatigues, the same ones he wore when he commanded the 57th Division at Gallipoli. Except for the slight crow's feet around his eyes, he’d changed little since their last meeting.

  I wasn’t wearing this saddle then, Anton. I don’t know how you put up with it, he laughed.

  I don’t. It puts up with me!

  Easy for you to say. You're the ambassador.

  And you're the president.

  That I am. But I have to a answer to 14 million people. And you…

  I know. I know. The Prime Minister. But he's a handful and a half!

  Phibes glanced around at the instruments. They were all aglow with chamois swipe and brass paste, for even though the war had ended five years ago, Ataturk kept the fleet on alert. He trusted his neighbors’ greed more than he trusted their treaties.

  He was at the large telescope now, sweeping up and down the Bosporus where dozens of pleasure boats were at play. The absence of the big cargo vessels - it was the weekend - that usually crowded them out of this narrow channel set them to running like a bunch of kids let out of school early.

  One vessel in particular caught Ataturk's eye, a three-masted schooner whose rigging was crawling with deckhands. Phibes took the eyepiece at his host's urging and saw that the sails were being dressed quite handsomely by the deckhands, most of whom were women. Their ship appeared to be in the lead against several competitors, all of which had male crews.

  Dusk was falling, obscuring the farthest reaches of the Straits in mist. Ataturk turned his attention once more to the schooner as it plowed toward the finish line and smiled. For now most of the women had shed their blouses and were heaving at the lines with bared breasts and tautened muscles.

  They're going to win! he declared, spinning the scope for emphasis.

  The caught image startled Phibes. Not the schooner as he expected, although it was already too dark to see much of that ship.

  What is it? A star? But it's too big!

  A planet, Phibes. It's a planet.

  Puzzled, Phibes squinted through the eyepiece. Big and bulky. And quite bright if you allowed for the distance. And what was that around its center?

  Rings. You're looking at Saturn, Anton, and its rings!

  THE

  UNIVERSE

  After that first look through the eyepiece, Phibes paid scant attention to the night sky other than to organize his itineraries around night transits wherever possible so that he could be fresh during the day for meetings. The moon and the stars gave him enough light for his nighttime walks and an occasional meteor made for a bit of a surprise ‘up there’.

  None of this prepared him for the ’Universe” as presented by the Science Museum, an almost pitch-black expanse whose shadowy displays seemed to run together in the dimness and it was impossible to read the placards attached to th
em. From the echoes of his footsteps, the room was larger than it seemed. If there were other patrons there, they were swallowed up in the gloom.

  Surely the Museum could afford better lighting. Was this some sort of trick? A glance up at the ceiling confirmed that it was. The recessed lamps in the coving were quite capable of illuminating the room, so keeping it darkened was deliberate!

  When he was in the foreign service, reading the major dailies was a workplace necessity. To stay current in other fields he also read The Economist, Nature, Forward, etc. A recent series in Nature had asked how old is the Universe? Ten to fifteen billion years was the estimate at that time, with about a third of that span assigned to Earth.

  Such big numbers are hard to grasp but there was one that did stand out, namely: 500,000 years. That's how long the universe was dark! It had absolutely no light. Pitch black all around! Think Total Eclipse on the grand scale!

  ***

  Diplomacy is the calibration and re-calibration of relationships. Nothing is certain, nothing is static. Treaties are made, and made to be broken. Be nimble, be expedient are the common watchwords of the craft and Anton Phibes was the nimblest of the nimble!

  The build-up to the Great War, with its dreadnaught arms race and colonial wrangling all around the globe, soured international relations. The War threw them into chaos. Like hundreds of his colleagues at the Paris Peace Conference, Anton Phibes worked mightily to restore some semblance. It was, after all, the ’War to End All Wars’.

  After the Armistice, the changing seasons gradually softened some of the destruction on the Western Front and in the other war zones. Sun, moon, stars, rain, those perennial benchmarks, provided some much-needed stability. People again found grandeur in the sea, the mountains and the heavens: their calming vistas, their changelessness.

  Until now. Until the ‘Red Shifts’. Until Edwin Hubble, a young upstart doing meticulous work at California's Mt. Wilson Observatory, found that our Milky Way is but one of millions of galaxies. And that the more distant ones were moving away faster (from us) than the ones closer in.