This irritated her, and she snapped back at me, “And what of you, Ben Hobbes? What's your story? You bleat about the English, but did you fight the French on your own soil?"
I shrugged. “If you must know, I was taken captive after the siege of Baltimore. I was questioned brisk—the French inquisitors refined their techniques during the Terror, you know. I would not be alive now if they had not learned I had worked with Fulton. I was shipped off thence to Paris to work on the Nautilus and other designs."
But Fulton, an honorable man, had taken against his French customers the moment Napoleon set foot in New Orleans, and soon effected an escape to England. I, left behind, did whatever was asked of me, intent on staying alive.
Anne was curious, confused, angry. Well, it was a confused and angry time, an age when the highest ideals of liberty and brotherhood had been wrested by a monster, and you weren't sure who to fight. Yet my feelings at that moment were different. Her face, flushed with the cold and her strong feelings, her mouth softly open as her breath came rapid—it gave her a look of lust, not unlike the vibrant passion of the New Orleans whores who had once warmed my bed, and I imagined taking her there and then in that muddy English field! Dare I venture, she shared some of what I was feeling [I did not.—A.C.]. But she turned away, and the moment was past, and she walked briskly back to her father.
A fusilier not far from me, sawing steadily at the corns on his bare feet, shrugged at me and smiled as if to say, “Women! War's easy by comparison.” But I did not dignify his familiarity.
* * * *
IX
We jolted over more bruising roads, doing fifty or sixty or seventy miles a day. We stopped at Nottingham and Leeds, and joined the Great North Road, and it was clear to me we were outstripping most of Wellesley's forces and the deserters and all but the most panicky of refugees. Yet even here the country was in turmoil, for the news traveled even faster than we did, and there were ever more excited rumors of the approach of the Ogre, or of fresh French troops landing on the northern coasts.
On the fourth night we reached Darlington, yet another small town on yet another river. And here the pattern differed, for after one night in the town our party diverged from the main trunk road and headed off east, toward Stockton. We paused before we reached the town, our broughams and carriages pulling over from the rough road surface, the marines clambering down and blowing on their mittened hands, and the dog bounding off after rabbits. Collingwood, Clavell, Anne, and a number of the senior people formed up for a walk across the desolate country—and I was summoned too, for Collingwood said I was to meet his “Troglodyte genius of the mines."
And it was a mine I was taken down into, entirely to my surprise! We were met at a hut by a site manager, black in the face with coal dust, and we descended by ladders and galleries deep into the earth—down, down we went, more than three hundred yards below the crust. Men shuffled to and from their shifts at the faces, and I saw clanking carts dragged along iron rails by boys and ponies. In that cold, dank, dark place, nobody spoke or sang. A place of dismal subterranean labor!
And in one place I saw something that evoked unwelcome memories. Lying in a deep, shallow gallery cut into a seam was a kind of dome, shallow, downturned, its upper carapace milky. I could see no reason to encounter a Phoebean monster down here—perhaps this was a salt dome, or other geologic feature.
At last Collingwood paused, and his men gathered around, and I saw that we were poised above a pit. Men stood about, and the place was illuminated by lanterns suspended high from a beam, as if to shed light but little heat. Down in the pit, blocks of ice stood proud of heaps of straw. (I wondered from whence they got the ice.) And in the straw lay lumpy rocks, pale, rather like eggs, and I thought I saw something stir—small and furtive, like a mouse, yet it had a certain mechanical grace that was like no living thing. All this glimpsed in shadows.
It was evident we were waiting for somebody, and Collingwood grew impatient. “Mr. Watt? Are you here in the dark? ‘Tis Cuddy Collingwood come to call!” At last a fellow came lumbering out of the shadow, in his late sixties perhaps, short, heavy-set, and evidently not in the best of health, for he wheezed and coughed throughout. Collingwood introduced him to me with a kind of flourish. “I am sure an engineer like you, Hobbes, will have heard of James Watt! The steam engineer par excellence."
But I disappointed him in my non-recognition.
Watt, wiping oily hands, spoke with a Scotch accent so broad I could scarce comprehend it, and I offer only a rough translation here. “Ah, well, my days of glory with the steam are long behind me. Though, Hobbes, you may have heard of my work on the Newcomen engine—how I increased its efficiency manifold with my separated condenser, and, by applying it to steam pumps, vastly increased the depth to which mines such as this could be reached—no? But if I had not been diverted by my work on the Phoebeans—"
As if on cue there was a sharp crack from the pit, almost like a musket shot, and everyone turned. As I looked down I saw that one of those eggs had shattered into shards, like an over-heated pot.
Anne came to stand by me, close enough that I could smell her rosewater and powder. It was a welcome human closeness in that place of dank darkness and strangeness. She pointed. “I love to stand over such nurseries, and watch."
"Nurseries?"
"We collect the eggs from the big queens we have caged in the Highlands. Follow it for a few hours and you can see their ontogenesis, or part of it.... See, the egg fragments will recombine to form a disc, like that one.” And I saw it, like a telescope lens of smooth white ice nestling in the straw. “And then, if we are lucky—oh, look in the corner!” There was another disc. And I saw how a ring of pillars not a foot high, slim as pencils, shot up around the rim of the disc, and then the disc itself slid up, somehow supported by the pillars, until it roofed over them so it was like a toy of some colonnaded Greek temple. And then the pillars, still upright, slid back and forth under the lens-roof, and the whole assemblage slid through the straw—not mechanical, yet not like life—our kind of life, anyhow. It was closest to a crab of anything terrestrial, I suppose.
"That's how they're born,” Watt growled. “Let it loose in the stuff of the earth, the water and the rock, and it will grow as big as you like."
It was a nursery, I saw—a nursery of Phoebeans, there in the English ground! I demanded, “Why would you encourage the growth of such dangerous monsters? I thought you claimed to be at war with them, Admiral!"
Watt answered, “For their energy, sir—for their sheer power. You can control ‘em, you know, with a tickle of electric. And you can always bank a fire under them and let Newton's Calenture seize up their limbs. Use them right, use them as draught animals, and the energy they deliver far exceeds any steam engine I could dream up! And it's to this I've devoted my declining years."
Collingwood clapped me on the back. “And, Hobbes, it is by using their own energies against them that I intend to thwart the Phoebeans’ empire-building. Energy and empire, my lad! Those are the words that will characterize this new century of ours."
Anne pouted. “Not ‘liberty,’ father? Or ‘rights'?"
Once more I wondered to what insane adventure I was becoming committed.
Collingwood grasped the old engineer's slumped shoulders. “And I've come to collect you, James. It's time. I have Pitt's own instructions.” He patted his breast pocket. “You must come to Ulgham."
Watt looked troubled. “The Cylinder? But so much is untried.... Must we do this so soon?"
"I'm afraid so, for the French are on the way."
And that was the first a wide-eyed Watt had heard of Napoleon's invasion of England. It's the same with many an obsessive thinker, so I've learned—Fulton had something of it about him—his own work fills up the world for him, until the devil comes knocking at the door.
A runner came to find Collingwood. Lieutenant Clavell took the message, read it by lamplight, handed it to the Admiral, then gave me a tug on the s
leeve. “Come with me, Hobbes. We've a little scouting to do. It's the French. An advance party's been spotted."
"What use will I be?"
"There are naval officers among ‘em.... I'll make our apologies to the Admiral."
And so he led me away, and I looked back at Anne over her pit of Phoebean crab-babies, and wondered if I would see her again!
* * * *
X
A silent marine led Clavell and me and a couple of companions across the country about a mile, and brought us to a ridge of high ground. And here, lying on damp English grass, we gazed down upon the French party. They had been spotted by Collingwood's scouts, for, as small a force as he commanded, each time we stopped he had his men roam the country for signs of the French. And tonight that cautious strategy had paid off.
There might have been fifty of them, gathered around a handful of fires. Horses grazed where they had been tied beneath a copse of trees. There were no farm buildings nearby, but the field was roughly walled, and I saw they had stolen a couple of young sheep they were skinning with their knives. Their voices drifted on the night, coarse French jokes drifting across the north English country.
"Clearly a scouting party,” murmured Clavell, into my ear. “See how they've made ready for the night in that copse.” They had used loose branches and dead leaves to make shelters. “It's the way the French armies work, living off the land—you know that. If you're unlucky they'll take apart your house and your furniture to make their bonfires. It can't be a coincidence they've come this far and fast. After all, we're ahead even of Wellesley's advanced units. There are navy officers among ‘em. I hoped you might recognize them."
"It was a damn big flotilla that crossed the Channel, Lieutenant!"
"Nevertheless you were with it, and now you are here, and now they are here. Take a look."
He handed me his glass; I peered through the eyepiece. There was indeed at least one French navy officer among the gossiping troopers—and, to my shock, I knew him. “Gourdon. I was under his command on board the Indomitable—from which the Nautilus was launched. I'd recognize that bloated fool anywhere, and that ugly pigtail."
Clavell considered this. “Here's what I conclude, then. You must have been seen when you were picked up by the Terrier. The Ogre and his marshals are devils for detail, and they must have wondered why you are so important that the Royal Navy sought you out on the night England was invaded. Or perhaps they know something of Collingwood's project, and of his employment of Fulton, and Fulton's connection to you. There are spies everywhere! Either way they have risked this small party of men to track you down and find out what you're up to—and why you're so valuable.” He glanced at me, his eyes invisible in the dark as he whispered. “You're an important man, Hobbes."
"So it seems. Anyhow, either way, they've found us."
Clavell shook his head. “Our diversion to the mine has fooled them—they should have watched our tracks more carefully. Find us? Not yet, they haven't—"
And he was proved wrong in a devastating instant.
There was a roar, like thunder—but the sky, clouded, had contained no hint of a storm. I had been in a land war before, and I had heard rumors of the new technologies, and had an inkling of what was coming, and I ducked down against the ground, my arms wrapped over my head. Out of the corner of my eye I saw streaks of light scrawl across the sky, like miniature suns, or Phoebean comets, flying with a banshee wail. And then the shells fell around us. I felt the detonations shake the earth, and hot metal hailed, and men screamed. A barrage of Congreve rockets, the latest thing!
When it was over I got up, coughing. The air was full of smoke and the stink of gunpowder. Glancing at my companions, I saw that two men lay unmoving, another was little more than a bloody splash in a crater, and the last was hovering over Clavell, who lay on his back with a piece of blackened, twisted metal protruding from his gut. And I, lucky Ben Hobbes (or perhaps I was just the quickest to duck), was entirely unharmed!
Clavell spoke, and my ears were ringing so I had to bend close to hear. “Cleverer than us, Ben, the damn French! Split their forces, and their scouts saw us, and got us with a lucky shot."
"Nothing lucky about it,” I opened. “Rockets take some aiming."
"Probably one of our own batteries, stolen from the abandoned defenses of Portsmouth or Plymouth, for the French have nothing like ‘em...” He coughed, and groaned as the metal in his gut twisted.
The marine pulled at him. “Sir—we have to go. That main party will be coming for us.” He was an honest lad with an accent that was strange strangulated to my ears—a Newcastle boy he was, one of Collingwood's own “Tars of the Tyne."
Clavell feebly pushed him away. “No, Denham. Too late for me. Take Hobbes back to the mine, and warn the Admiral.” He eyed me, his face a bloody mask. “For you've won, haven't you, Ben? If there ever was a competition between us for the attention of Miss Collingwood ... and you have a chance, don't you? You could slip away. Denham here couldn't stop you. Go, seek your fortune elsewhere and leave the French and English to smash each other to pieces...."
I had a bubble of spite, even though he was evidently a dying man. “Maybe I have the right. You press-ganged me into this, remember."
"True. But if you don't help Collingwood finish his Cylinder, in the long run all of us will be lost, all our children...."
"I have no children."
"Nor I ... I have nephews ... I had hoped...” He peered at me, his eyes oddly milky. “Are you still here, or a bad dream? Go, man, if you're going...!” He coughed, and blood splashed from his mouth and over his tunic.
I hesitated for a further second. But if you are reading this manuscript, you know what choice I made. Damn my sentiment! [And God be thanked for the grain of honor that lodged in you, Ben Hobbes, for if you had made another choice, as poor Clavell said, all would have been lost.—A.C.]
* * * *
XI
We raced back to the mine. Over my shoulder, I could hear the French drums as they marched after us.
Collingwood's party, evidently drawn by the noise of the rocket fire, had come to the surface. Anne was at her father's side, that brave jaw stuck out, her eyes clear. Watt was with them, and the marines were preparing the carriages. Miss Herschel, who had chosen to stay in her brougham under a heap of blankets, peered out, curious and anxious by halves.
Collingwood took in our condition at a glance, and he could hear the French approach as well as I could. He said calmly to Denham, “The Lieutenant and the rest?"
"Lost, sir. I tried to make him come—"
Collingwood put his hand on the man's shoulder. “All right, Geordie. But the French are coming—Mr. Hobbes?"
"They are perhaps fifty. No artillery but well equipped with muskets and rifles from what I saw—"
"And Congreve rockets,” Anne murmured.
"Perhaps we can take shelter in the mine,” I said.
"And let them smoke us out, or starve us, or bayonet us in the dark like pigs in a sty? Not much of an option, Mr. Hobbes,” said Collingwood.
"But it need not come to that,” said James Watt. He stood, hands on hips, eyeing the country to the east, from which direction the French were marching. “As it happens we're planning a little open-cast mining just that way.... Mr. Hobbes, do you see the bent elm yonder? How long would it take for the French to reach that point, do you think?"
It took us a few seconds of estimation, for the French seemed to be walking at a comfortable pace, confident of trapping us. We settled on five minutes.
Watt grunted. “Not long to prepare. Admiral, do you have a decent timepiece on you? Count out the five minutes. When it's done, call down to me.” And with that he hurried off, back into his mine workings.
Anne frowned. “What's he up to?"
Collingwood allowed himself a grin. “I think I know.” He took his watch from his breast pocket and snapped it open. “Five minutes, then. In the meantime we should prepare for the event
uality that he fails.” He marched around the site, surveying the military potential of a handful of broughams and other conveyances, the ditches and shabby huts of the mine works, his few marines and their paltry firearms. He hefted his own musket. “Let's use what cover we have. Make sure we have a run back to the mine—we should not get separated.” The men, seeking cover, melted into the shadows of the vehicles and the workings. “Anne—"
"I will fight."
"If you must, you will, I know that, child. But for now, please take Miss Herschel into the safety of the mine.” He handed her his own musket. “It's an order, Miss Collingwood."
"Yes, sir.” And so they parted, without an embrace or a soft word, yet it was as tearful a moment as I can remember in my own soulless life. [The author exaggerates.—A.C.]
The Admiral turned to me. “We have spare firearms, at least.” He tossed one to me. “Do you know how to load it, Mr. Hobbes?"
"Learned it at my mother's knee,” I said, putting on the Yankee vowels.
"That must have been a formidable knee."
"But, Admiral—Mr. Watt's five minutes?"
"Lord!” He had entirely forgotten, and he checked his watch. “Thirty seconds left."
"Here they come!” cried Denham.
Seeking cover, I lay flat on the cold ground and crawled under a brougham. And I saw them come, silhouetted against the dim December afternoon sky, fifty men marching in step, and I heard their drums clatter and the brittle peal of trumpets. The French do like their music.
And as they started past that bent old elm, Collingwood called down: “Now, Mr. Watt!"
Nothing happened—not for long seconds. My own heart hammered, while the French unit marched as graceful as you please past that elm, and I saw them readying their muskets.
And then, for the second time that day, I heard a sound like thunder, but this time it came not from the sky but the ground. The drumming packed in, and the French stopped their march, and looked down at their feet, disturbed. Even at my distance, a good two hundred yards, I felt the ground shudder and the fittings of the brougham above me rattled and clattered.
Asimov's SF, February 2010 Page 17
