by Iain Pears
“Nearly ready?” I asked when I had seen enough of birds and got up to walk back to the middle of the ship.
He grunted.
“I will take that to mean ’No, it needs to be stripped down and rebuilt entirely,’” I said. “Macintyre, the damned thing is either going to work, or not. Bung it in the water and see what happens.”
Macintyre glowered at me.
“But it’s true,” I protested. “I’ve been watching you. You aren’t doing anything important. You’re not making any real changes. It’s as ready as it will ever be.”
Bartoli nodded behind him, and lifted his eyes to heaven in despair. Then Macintyre sagged as he accepted that, finally, he could do no more; that it was time to risk his machine in the water. More than that: to risk his life, for everything that made him what he was he had embedded into the metalwork of his torpedo. If it failed, he failed.
“How does it move, anyway?” I asked. “I see no funnel or anything.”
There was nothing quite like a stupid remark to rouse him. Immediately, he straightened up and stared at me with withering contempt. “Funnel?” he snarled. “Funnel? You think I’ve put a boiler and a stack of coal in it? Or maybe you think I should have put a mast and a sail on as well?”
“I was only asking,” I said. “It has a propeller. What makes it turn?”
“Air,” he replied. “Compressed air. There’s a reservoir with air at three hundred and seventy pounds per square inch pressure. Just here.” He tapped the middle of the torpedo. “There are two eccentric cylinders with a sliding vane to divide the volume into two parts. In this fashion the air pressure causes direct rotation of the outer cylinder; this is coupled directly to the propeller, you see. That way, it can travel underwater, and can be ready for launch at all times, at a moment’s notice.”
“If it works,” I added.
“Of course it will work,” he said scornfully. “I’ve had it running dozens of times in the workshop. It will work without fail.”
“So? Show me,” I said. “Chuck it over the side and show me.”
Macintyre straightened up. “Very well. Watch this.” He summoned Bartoli and the others, and they began to put ropes round the body of the torpedo, which was then rolled carefully to the side of the boat, and lowered gently into the water. The ropes were then removed, and the torpedo floated, three-quarters submerged, occasionally bumping softly against the side of the boat. Only a single, very thin, piece of rope held it close by, attached to a small pin at the rear. That, it seemed, was the firing mechanism.
Macintyre began rubbing his chin with anxiety. “No,” he said. “It’s not right. I think I’d better take it out and check it over again. Just to make sure…”
Bartoli began to shake his head in frustration. “Signor Macintyre, there is nothing left to check. Everything is just fine.”
“No. Just to be on the safe side. It will only take an hour or…”
Then I decided to intervene. “If I may be of assistance…” I said.
Macintyre turned to look at me. I grabbed the thin piece of rope in his hand and gave a sharp tug.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he screamed in shock. But it was too late. With a quiet ping, the pin popped out of the torpedo, which immediately gave off a whirring, gurgling noise as the propeller began to spin at high speed.
“Whoops,” I said. “Sorry. Oh, look, off it goes.”
True enough. The torpedo accelerated at an impressive speed in a straight line at a slight angle to the boat.
“Damned interfering fool,” Macintyre muttered as he pulled out his watch and started staring at the torpedo as it grew smaller and smaller in the water. “My God, it works! It really works. Look at it go!”
It was true. Macintyre told me later (he spent much of the trip home poring over a piece of paper, working out his calculations) that his torpedo accelerated to a speed of about seven knots within a minute, that it travelled with only a 5 per cent deviation from a perfectly straight line, and that it was capable of going at least fourteen hundred yards before running out of power.
At least? Yes. I had been a little hasty in my desire to force Macintyre to get on with the business of testing. I should have made sure there was nothing in the way first of all.
“Oh, my God,” Bartoli said as he looked out, appalled. The torpedo, still clearly visible, was now at maximum speed, all five hundred pounds of it, travelling a few inches underwater, heading straight for a felucca, one of the little vessels used often enough for fishing, or transporting food around the lagoon. The crew could be seen quite clearly, sitting in the stern by the rudder, or leaning on the side, admiring the view as the sail billowed in the light wind.
A peaceful scene; one that painters travelled many hundreds of miles to capture on canvas, to sell to romantically inclined northerners desperate for a bit of Venice on their walls.
“Look out!” Macintyre screamed in horror, and we all joined in, jumping up and down and waving. The sailors on the felucca looked up, grinned, and waved back. Crazy foreigners. Still, a pleasant morning, why not be friendly?
“How much gunpowder is in that thing?” I asked as I jumped up and down.
“None. I put fifty-four pounds of clay in the head instead. And it won’t use gunpowder. It will use guncotton.”
“Yes, you told me.”
“Well, remember it. Anyway, I can’t afford to waste it.”
“That’s lucky.”
The felucca kept going, the torpedo as well; it was going to be a close-run thing. Another quarter of a knot and the boat would pass over the torpedo’s course entirely and it would miss. All would be well, if only the boat would go faster or the torpedo would slow down.
Neither obliged. It could have been worse, so I assured Macintyre later. Had the torpedo hit amidships, then something of that weight and that speed would undoubtedly have stove a hole right through the thin planking, and it would have been hard to pretend that a fourteen-foot steel tube wedged in their boat was nothing to do with us.
But we were lucky. The boat was almost out of the torpedo’s path; almost but not quite. Macintyre’s invention clipped the end of it; even at a distance of four hundred yards, we heard the cracking, breaking sound as the rudder gave way, and the boat lurched under the impact. The sails lost the wind and began flapping wildly, and the crew, a moment ago waving cheerfully and idling their time away, launched into stunned action, trying to bring their vessel back under control and work out what on earth had happened. The torpedo, meanwhile, went silently on its way, and it was clear no one on the felucca had seen it.
Bartoli was brilliant, I must say. Naturally, we steered towards the stricken boat, and he had a quick word with the crew. “Never seen anything like that before,” Bartoli called in Venetian. “Amazing.”
“What was it? What happened?”
“A shark,” he replied sagely. “Really big one, travelling fast. I saw it clearly. It must have clipped the end of your boat, bitten the rudder off. Never seen a beast like that in the lagoon before.”
The crew was delighted; this was much better than rotten wood or some ordinary accident. They would dine out on this for weeks. Bartoli, after expressing surprise that they hadn’t noticed the fin sticking out of the water, offered assistance, which made Macintyre fretful. He wanted to go and get his torpedo back; he had no real idea what its range was, and it could be anywhere by now. It was his most treasured possession, and he did not want it to fall into the hands of some spy or rival, for he was convinced that all the governments and companies of the world were desperately trying to steal his secrets.
He need not have worried; Bartoli was too skilled for that. He knew quite well that no Venetian sailor would submit to being towed ignominiously into harbour by a bunch of foreigners. They were duly grateful, but turned the offer down. Then they rigged up a makeshift rudder from an oar, poking over the back rather as on a gondola, and after half an hour of enjoyable conversation, they set of
f again.
We all—and Macintyre in particular—breathed a sigh of relief when the felucca disappeared into the early morning mist; then we turned to the business of recovering his invention. I thought that the time had come to apologise.
“I think I had better find some way of compensating those sailors as well,” I ended. “I imagine repairing that rudder will cost something.”
But no apologies were really necessary; Macintyre was transformed. From the anxiety-ridden fusspot of an hour or so ago, he was like a man who had just been told he had inherited a fortune. He positively beamed at me, his eyes sparkling with excitement.
“Did you see it?” he exclaimed. “Did you see it? Straight as an arrow. It works, Stone! It works! Exactly as I said. If there’d only been some explosives in the nose I could have blown that boat to kingdom come. I could have sunk a battleship.”
“It would have been difficult to blame that on a shark,” I pointed out. But Macintyre waved my objections aside and ran up to the prow of the boat with a pair of field glasses.
We searched for about an hour for, although Macintyre was convinced it had gone as straight as an arrow, in fact it had a tendency to veer to the left a little. Not by much, but over several hundred yards, this made quite a difference. Also it had settled low in the water, only just visible on the surface, and that also made the search more difficult.
But we tracked it down eventually, embedded in a mudbank in water too shallow for us to approach in the boat.
“Now what do we do?” I asked as we gazed at it, some twenty yards away from us off our starboard bow, not daring to go any closer lest our boat also got wedged in the mud.
We spent half an hour throwing a hook tied to a rope towards it, hoping to hook the thing and then drag it towards us, but with no luck whatsoever. There was no point waiting for the tide to change, as there was none.
“Can anyone swim?” I asked.
A general shaking of heads, which I found extraordinary. It didn’t surprise me that Macintyre couldn’t, but I was amazed that none of his employees—brought up surrounded by water as they were—could either. I wondered how many Venetians drowned every year if this was normal amongst them.
“Why?”
“Well,” I said, now suddenly reluctant, “I thought—just an idea, you know—that one of us could try to swim over to it. The water might be deep enough.”
“If you got stuck in the mud you’d never get out again,” Bartoli said. I didn’t like that “you.”
“Good point,” I said.
But Macintyre thought my untimely death would be a worthwhile price to pay. “Take two ropes,” he said. “One for the torpedo and another for you. Then we could pull both out. You can swim, can’t you?”
“Me?” I said, wondering whether my father would have considered lying justifiable in these particular circumstances. On the whole he disapproved strongly of the practise. “Well, a little.”
“Excellent,” Macintyre said, his worries all over. “And I am deeply grateful to you, my dear sir. Deeply grateful. Although as it’s your fault that the torpedo is there in the first place…”
Point taken. Very reluctantly I began to take off my clothes and peered over the side. I would have to let myself into the water very slowly, for fear of sinking down and becoming embedded in mud before I even started. It was cold and the water looked even colder.
Bartoli tied two ropes around my waist and grinned at me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We will not leave you there.”
And then I lowered myself gently into the water. It was even colder than I had feared, and I began shivering immediately. But, nothing to be done now; using a gentle breast stroke, I set off for the torpedo, trying to keep my legs as high in the water as possible.
The only danger came when I got close to the torpedo and had to stop. Then the water was only about three feet deep and my feet had slid across the mud several times; as I manoeuvred into position, I had to push down and I felt them slip into the mud properly. When I tried to hang on to the torpedo and drag them out, I realised they were stuck hard.
“I can’t move,” I shouted to the boat.
“Tie the rope onto the torpedo! Stop pushing it further into the mud,” Macintyre shouted back.
“What about me?”
“We’ll pull you out afterwards.”
Well, thank you, I thought bitterly. Still, he was right. That was what I was there for. I was so cold now that I could barely untie the knot, let alone push the rope through the propeller casing and tie it securely. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably by the time I was finally done.
“Excellent,” Macintyre shouted. “Pull away.”
It took some effort by the people on the boat, but eventually the torpedo began to move, and once the suction was broken it slipped rapidly past me and into deeper water. Macintyre was all but dancing up and down in joy.
“Now get me out of here!” I shouted.
“Oh, very well,” came the reply, and I felt the rope tighten around my chest as they began to tug. Nothing happened. I moved a few inches, but the moment the pressure was relaxed, I sank back down even deeper than before. I was now getting frightened.
“Don’t stop!” I shouted. “I’m going lower. Get me out of here!”
Nothing happened. I glanced round and saw Macintyre staring at me and stroking his chin. Then he talked to Bartoli. For a fraction of a second I was convinced he was going to abandon me there.
But no. Although what he planned was nearly worse. As he explained afterwards, the suction from the mud was too strong for them. All they were doing was pulling the boat itself into danger. They needed more power.
I saw Bartoli pulling up the sails, and Macintyre pulling up the anchor, and one of his men manning the oar to turn the ship. I realised with horror what they had in mind. They were setting sail, and were going to use the full power of the boat and the wind to try and dislodge me.
“You’ll pull me apart!” I yelled.
“Don’t do that.”
But Macintyre just waved cheerfully. The boat began to move, and I felt the rope tighten once more, until it was as taut as a bowstring and the pressure on my chest, the rubbing of the rough cord, unbearably painful. It was all I could do not to scream. I certainly remember thinking that if I was still in one piece at the end of this experiment I would thump Macintyre on the nose.
It got more and more painful; I could feel my body stretching as the mud refused to let me go, and that seemed to go on forever. Then, with the most disgusting slurping sound, it gave me up; my legs and feet were belched out of the mud in a huge cloud of foul-smelling water, and I floated free, trailing behind the boat as it headed towards Venice.
It took another five minutes to haul me in, and by then I could not move; I was shivering so badly I couldn’t control my arms or legs; my chest had the beginnings of a bright red weal across it, my spine felt as though it was several inches longer than it had been, and my legs still smelled unspeakably foul.
And Macintyre paid me not the slightest bit of attention. Instead, he was busily clucking over his lump of iron while Bartoli wrapped me in a blanket, and brought me some grappa. I drank it from the bottle, then rolled over in the blanket until I began to recover.
“It’s fine,” Macintyre said, as though certain that his torpedo would be uppermost in my mind. “No damage at all. Although the cowling bent from the way you attached the rope to it.”
I ignored him. He didn’t notice.
“But no matter. That can be hammered out. Apart from that, it is in perfect condition. All I have to do now is clean it, dry it and make a few minor adjustments and it will be ready for the big test next week.”
“May I say that I would not have cared had the damnable thing sunk to the bottom of the lagoon, never to be seen again?”
Macintyre looked at me in astonishment. “But, my dear Stone,” he cried, “just look at you! I am so sorry, I haven’t thanked you enough. What you did just now wa
s generous. Generous and a mark of true kindness. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”
I was somewhat mollified by this, but only somewhat. I kept on drinking the grappa, and slowly felt some warmth creep back into my body. Everyone made a fuss over me, said how wonderful I had been. That helped. If one is to behave selflessly and courageously it is pleasing to have it recognised. I wrapped myself in blankets and encomiums all the way home, and lay there dreaming of Louise by my side. I even felt almost content by the time the boat finally docked just by the workship three hours later. But I did not help unload the torpedo. I had had enough. I left them to it, Macintyre shouting, everyone else working, and walked back to my lodgings. There I demanded a bath with limitless hot water immediately, and would not take no for an answer. I had to wait another hour before it was prepared, by which time everyone in the house had been told that the idiot Englishman had fallen into the lagoon. Well, what do you expect from foreigners?
CHAPTER 14
The next morning, a note was delivered to my room, from Marangoni, of all people. “I stand corrected,” he wrote, and I could almost see the smile on his face as I read. “It seems that Mr. Cort’s Venetian really does exist. Come and meet him, if you wish; he is a fascinating creature.”
I had as leisurely a breakfast as Venetian habits allow and decided that, as I had nothing better to do that morning, I would take up the invitation and go to San Servolo. The island lies between San Marco and the Lido, a handsome-enough place from a distance; you would never know that it was an asylum for the insane—certainly it is very unlike the grim prisons which England was then throwing up all over the country to incarcerate the lunatics which all societies produce in abundance. Marangoni hated the place, and would have preferred a modern, scientific establishment, but I think his real objection stemmed from his determination to detach his profession from any taint of religiosity. Otherwise, the old Benedictine monastery would have been a beautiful place to spend his time. Apart from the inmates: there is something about madness which casts a pall on the loveliest of buildings; the clouds always seem to hover above such places, no matter how brightly the sun shines. And, of course, no one spends much money on lunatics; they get the leftovers, after the more astute and agile have taken what they want. San Servolo was in a pitiable state, crumbling, overgrown and depressing. The sort of place you wish to get away from; the sort of place that might easily send even a perfectly healthy person insane.
