Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (6 page)

 
          
 
St. Ives nodded and watched the secretary fill
his glass nearly to the top. There was no arguing with the man. And it wasn't
argument that was wanted now, anyway. It was action, and that was a commodity,
apparently, that he would have to take with his own hands.

 
          
 
ST. IVES ' s manor house and laboratory sat
some three quarters of a mile from the summerhouse of William Thomson, Lord
Kelvin. The River Nidd ran placid and slow between, slicing neatly in two the
broad meadow that separated the grounds of the manor from the grounds of the
summerhouse. The willows that lined the banks of the Nidd
effected
a rolling green cloudbank that almost obscured each house from the view of the
other, but from St. Ives's attic window. Lord Kelvin's broad low barn was just
visible atop a grassy knoll. Into and out of that barn trooped a platoon of
white-coated scientists and grimed machinists. Covered wagons scoured along the
High Road from Kirk Hammerton, bearing enigmatic mechanical apparatus, and were
met at the gates by an ever-suspicious man in a military uniform.

 
          
 
St. Ives watched their comings and goings
through his spyglass. He turned a grim eye on Hasbro, who stood silently behind
him. "I've come to a difficult decision, Hasbro."

 
          
 
''Yes, sir."

 
          
 
"I've decided that we must play the role
of saboteur, and nothing less. I shrink from such deviltry, but far more is at
stake here than honor. We must ruin, somehow, Lord Kelvin's machine."

 
          
 
"Very good, sir."

 
          
 
"The mystifying thing is that I thought
it was something else that he was constructing in that barn. But Parsons
couldn't have lied so utterly well. He isn't capable of it. We've got to
suppose that Lord Kelvin will do just what he says he will do."

 
          
 
“No one will deny it, sir."

 
          
 
"Our sabotaging his machine, of course,
necessitates not only carrying out the plan to manipulate the volcanoes, but
implies utter faith in that plan. Here we are setting in to thwart the effort
of one of the greatest living practical scientists and to substitute our own
feeble designs in its stead—an act of monumental egotism."

 
          
 
"As you say, sir."

 
          
 
"But the stakes are high, Hasbro. We must
have our hand in. It's
nothing more
nor less than the
salvation of the earth, secularly speaking, that we engage in."

 
          
 
"Shall we want lunch first, sir?"

 
          
 
"Kippers and gherkins, thank you. And
bring up two bottles of Double Diamond to go along with it—and a bottle or two
for yourself, of course."

 
          
 
"Thank you, sir," Hasbro said.
"You're most generous, sir."

 
          
 
"Very well,'' mumbled St. Ives, striding
back and forth beneath the exposed roof rafters. He paused and squinted out
into the sunlight, watching another wagon rattle along into the open door of
Lord Kelvin's barn. Disguise would avail them nothing. It would be an easy
thing to fill a wagon with unidentifiable scientific trash—heaven knew he had
any amount of it lying about—and to dress up in threadbare pants and coat and
merely drive the stuff in at the gate. The guard would have no inkling of who
he was. But Lord Kelvin, of course, would. A putty nose and false chin whiskers
would be dangerous things. If any members of the Academy saw through them
they'd clap him in irons, accuse him very rightly of intended sabotage.

 
          
 
He could argue his case well enough in the
courts, to be sure. He could depend on
Rutherford
, at least, to support him. But in the
meantime the earth would have been beat to pieces. That wouldn't answer. And if
Lord Kelvin's machine was put into operation and was successful, then he'd
quite possibly face a jury of mutants—two-headed men and a judge with a third eye.
They'd be sympathetic, under the circumstances, but still . . .

 
          
 
THE VAST INTERIOR of Lord Kelvin's barn was
awash with activity—a sort of carnival of strange debris, of coiled copper and
tubs of bubbling fluids and rubber-wrapped cable thick as a man's wrist hanging
from overhead joists like jungle creepers. At the heart of it all lay a plain
brass box, studded with rivets and with a halo of wires running out of the top.
This, then, was the machine itself, the culmination of Lord Kelvin's life's
work, the boon that he was giving over to the salvation of mankind.

 
          
 
The machine was compact, to be sure—small
enough to motivate a dogcart, if a man wanted to use it for such a frivolous
end. St. Ives turned the notion over in his mind, wondering where a man might
travel in such a dogcart and thinking that he would gladly give up his entire
fortune to be left alone with the machine for an hour and a half First things
first, he reminded himself, just as three men began to piece together over the
top of it a copper pyramid the size of a large doghouse. Lord Kelvin himself,
talking through his beard and clad in a white smock and Leibnitz cap, pointed
and shouted and squinted with a calculating eye at the device that piece by
piece took shape in the lamplight. Parsons stood beside him, leaning on a brass-shod
cane.

 
          
 
At the sight of Langdon St.
Ives standing outside the open door.
Parsons's chin dropped. St. Ives
glanced at Jack Owlesby and Hasbro. Bill Kraken had disappeared. Parsons raised
an exhorting finger, widening his eyes with the curious effect of making the
bulk of his forehead disappear into his thin gray hair.

 
          
 
''Dr. Parsons!" cried St. Ives, getting
in before him. ''Your man at the gate is a disgrace. We sauntered in past him
mumbling nonsense about the Atlantic cable and showed him a worthless letter
signed by the Prince of Wales. He tried to shake our hands. You've ^0/ to do
better than that.
Parsons.
We might have been anyone,
mightn't we?—any class of villain.

 
          
 
And here we are, trooping in like so many
ants. It's the great good fortune of the Commonweahh that we're friendly ants.
In a word, we've come to offer our skills, such as they are."

 
          
 
St. Ives paused for breath when he saw that
Parsons had begun to sputter like the burning fuse of a fizz bomb, and for one
dangerous moment St. Ives was fearful that the old man would explode, would
pitch over from apoplexy and that the sum of their efforts would turn out to be
merely the murder of poor Parsons. But the fit passed. The secretary snatched
his quivering face back into shape and gave the three of them an appraising
look, stepping across so as to stand between St. Ives and the machine, as if
his gaunt frame, pinched by years of a weedy vegetarian diet, would somehow
hide the thing from view.

 
          
 
''Persona non grata, is it?" asked St.
Ives, giving Parsons a look in return, then instantly regretting the action.
There was nothing to be gained by being antagonistic.

 
          
 
"I haven't any idea how you swindled the
officer at the gate," said Parsons evenly, holding his ground, "but
this operation has been commissioned by Her Majesty the Queen and is undertaken
by the collected members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, an organization, if
I remember aright, which does not count you among its members. In short, we
thank you for your kind offer of assistance and very humbly ask you to leave,
along with your ruffians."

 
          
 
He turned to solicit Lord Kelvin's agreement,
but the great man was sighting down the length of a brass tube, tugging on it
in order, apparently, to align it with an identical tube that hung suspended
from the ceiling fifteen feet away. "My lord," said Parsons, clearing
his throat meaningfully, but he got no response at all, and gave off his
efforts when St. Ives seemed intent on strolling around to the opposite side of
the machine.

 
          
 
“Must we make an issue of this?" Parsons
demanded of St. Ives, stepping across in an effort to cut him off and casting
worried looks at Hasbro and Jack Owlesby, as if fearful that the two of them
might produce some heinous device of their own with which to blow up the barn
and exterminate the lot of them.

 
          
 
St. Ives stopped and shrugged when he saw Bill
Kraken, grimed with oil and wearing the clothes of a workman, step out from
behind a heap of broken crates and straw stuffing. Without so much as a
sideways glance at his employer, Kraken hurried to where Lord Kelvin fiddled
with the brass tube. Kraken grasped the opposite end of it and in a moment was
wrestling with the thing, hauling it this way and that to the apparent approval
of his lordship, and managing to tip St. Ives a broad wink in the process.

 
          
 
"Well, well," said St. Ives in a
defeated tone, "I'm saddened by this.
Parsons.
Saddened.
I'd hoped to lend a hand."

 
          
 
Parsons seemed mightily relieved all of a
sudden. He cast St. Ives a wide smile. "We thank you, sir," he said,
limping toward the scientist, his hand outstretched. "If this project were
in the developmental stages, I assure you we'd welcome your expertise. But it's
really a matter of nuts and bolts now, isn't it? And your genius, I'm afraid,
would be wasted." He ushered the three of them out into the sunlight, smiling
hospitably now and watching until he was certain the threat had passed and the
three were beyond the gate. Then he called round to have the gate guard
relieved. He couldn't, he supposed, have the man flogged, but he could see to
it that he spent an enterprising year patrolling the thoroughfares of
Dublin
.

 
          
 
IT WAS LATE evening along Fleet Street, and
the London night was clear and unseasonably warm, as if the moon that swam in
the purple sky beyond the dome of St. Paul's were radiating a thin white heat.
The very luminosity of the moon paled the surrounding stars, but as the night
deepened farther away into space, the stars were bright and thick enough to
remind St. Ives that the universe wasn't an empty place after all. And out
there among the planets, hurtling toward
earth,
was
the vast comet, its curved tail comprising a hundred million miles of showering
ice, blown by solar wind along the uncharted byways of the void. Tomorrow or
the next day the man in the street, peering skyward to admire the stars, would
see it there. Would it be a thing of startling beauty, a wash of fire across
the canvas of heaven? Or would it send a thrill of fear through a populace
still veined with the superstitious dread of the medieval church?

 
          
 
The shuffle of footsteps behind him brought
St. Ives to himself. He wrinkled his face up, feeling the gluey pull of the
horsehair eyebrows and beard, which, along with a putty nose and monk's wig,
made up a very suitable disguise. Coming along toward him was Beezer the
journalist, talking animatecQy to a man in shirtsleeves. Beezer chewed the end
of a tiny cigar and waved his arms to illustrate a story that he told with
particular venom. He seemed unnaturally excited, although St. Ives had to
remind himself that he was almost entirely unfamiliar with the man—perhaps he
always gestured and railed so.

 
          
 
St. Ives fell in behind the two, making no
effort to conceal himself. Hasbro and Jack Owlesby stood in the shadows two
blocks farther along, in an alley past Whitefriars. There was precious little
time to waste. Occasional strollers passed; the abduction would have to be
quick and subtle. "Excuse me," St. Ives said at the man's back.
"Mr. Beezer is it, the journalist?"

 
          
 
The two men stopped, looking back at St. Ives.
Beezer's hands fell to his side. "At's right. Pappy,"
came
the reply. Beezer squinted at him, as if ready to doubt
the existence of such a wild figure on the evening street.