Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (8 page)

 
          
 
But the result would be, quite likely, the
immediate removal of Narbondo and Hargreaves to the environs of northwestern
Scandinavia
. The chase, thought St. Ives tiredly, would
be on. The comet loomed only a few days away, barely enough time for them to
accomplish their task.

 
          
 
A door slammed in the manor. St. Ives slipped
from his stool and looked out through the west-facing window of his
observatory, waving to Hasbro who, in the roseate Hght of an early dawn, dangled
a pocket watch from a chain and nodded to his employer. In a half hour they
were away, scouring along the highroad toward the station in Kirk Hammerton,
where St. Ives, Hasbro, and Jack Owlesby would leave for Ramsgate and the
dirigible that would transport them to the ice and tundra of arctic Norway. If
the labors of Bill Kraken were unsuccessful, if he couldn't sabotage Lord
Kelvin's frightful machine, they would all know about it, along with the rest
of suffering humanity, two days hence.

 
          
 
BILL KRAKEN CROUCHED in the willows along the
River Nidd, watching through the lacey tendrils the dark bulk of Lord Kelvin's
barn. The device had been finished two days earlier, the ironic result, to a
degree, of his own labor—labor he wouldn't be paid for. But money wasn't of
particular consequence anymore, not like it had been in the days of his squid
merchanting or when he'd been rescued from the life of a lowly peapod man by
the charitable Langdon St. Ives.

 
          
 
Kraken sighed. Poor St. Ives. There was
suffering and there was suffering. Kraken had never found a wife, had never
fathered children. He had been cracked on the head more often than he could
remember, but so what? That kind of damage could be borne. The sort of blow
that had struck St. Ives, though—that was a different thing, and Kraken feared
sometimes that it would take a heavy toll on the great man before they all won
through. Kraken wanted for nothing now, not really, beyond seeing St. Ives put
right again.

 
          
 
In a cloth bag beside him wriggled a dozen
snakes, collected from the high grass beyond the manor house. In a wire-screen
cage beneath the snakes was a score of mice, hungry, as were the snakes, from
days of neglect. A leather bellows dangled from his belt, and a hooded lantern
from his right hand. No one else was on the meadow.

 
          
 
The
Royal
Academy
had been glad to be quit of Ignacio
Narbondo, who had taken ship for
Oslo
to effect his preposterous machinations.
That was the rumor around Lord Kelvin's barn. The Academy would reduce his
threats to drivel now that the machine was built. Why Narbondo hadn't followed
through with his plan to alert the press no one could say, but it seemed to
Secretary Parsons to be evidence that his threats were mere bluff. And that
crackpot St. Ives had given up, too, thank God. All this had lightened the
atmosphere considerably. A sort of holiday air had sprung up around what had
been a business fraught with suspicion and doubt. Now the Academy was free to
act without impediment . . .

 
          
 
Kraken bent out from under the willows and set
out across the meadow carrying his bundles. It would do no good to run. He was
too old to be cutting capers on a meadow in the dead of night, and if he
tripped and dropped his mice or knocked his lantern against a stone, his plan
would be foiled utterly. In an hour both the moon and the comet would have
appeared on the horizon and the meadow would be bathed in light. If he was
sensible, he'd be asleep in his bed by then.

 
          
 
The dark bulk of the barn loomed before him,
the pale stones of its foundation contrasting with the weathered oak battens
above. Kraken ducked along the wall toward a tiny mul-lioned window beneath
which extended the last six inches of the final section of brass pipe—the very
pipe that Kraken himself had wrestled through a hole angered into the barn wall
on that first day he'd helped Lord Kelvin align the things.

 
          
 
What, exactly, the pipe was intended to
accomplish, Kraken couldn't say, but somehow it was the focal point of the
workings of the device. Beyond, some twenty feet from the barn and elevated on
a stone slab, sat a black monolith, smooth as polished marble. Kraken had been
amazed when, late the previous afternoon, Lord Kelvin had flung a ball peen
hammer end over end at the monolith, and the collected workmen and scientists
had gasped in wonder when the hammer had been soundlessly reflected with such
force that it had sailed out of sight in the general direction of
York
. That the hammer had fallen to earth again,
not a man of them could say. The reversal of the poles was to be accomplished,
then, by emanating toward this monolith the collected magnetic rays developed
in

 
          
 
Lord Kelvin's machine, thus both exciting and
deflecting them in a circuitous pattern, and sending them off, as it were,
astride a penny whirligig. It was too much for Kraken to fathom, but Lord
Kelvin and his peers were the giants of electricity and mechanics. A job like
this had been child's play to them. Their heads weren't like the heads of other
men.

 
          
 
Kraken squinted through the darkness at the
monolith, doubly black against the purple of the starry night sky, and wondered
at the remarkable perspicacity of great scientists. Here sat the impossible
machine, primed for acceleration on the morrow. Could Kraken, a man of
admittedly low intellect, scuttle the marvelous device? Kraken shook his head,
suddenly full of doubt. He had been entrusted with little else than the
material salvation of humanity . . . Well, Kraken was just a small man with a
small way of doing things. He had seen low times in his life, had mucked
through sewers with murderers, and so he would have to trust to low means here.
That was the best he could do.

 
          
 
He quit breathing and cocked an ear. Nothing
but silence and the distant hooting of an owl greeted him on the night air. He
untied the bellows from his belt and shook them by his ear. Grain and broken
biscuits rattled within. He shoved the mouth of the bellows into the end of the
brass tube and pumped furiously, listening to the debris clatter away, down the
tilted pipe. Long after the last of the grain had been blown clear of the
bellows, Kraken continued to manipulate his instrument, desperate to send the
bulk of it deep into the bowels of the apparatus. Haste would avail him nothing
here.

 
          
 
Finally satisfied, he tied the bellows once
again to his belt and picked up the mouse cage. The beasts were tumultuous with
excitement, stimulated, perhaps, by the evening constitutional, or sensing
somehow that they were on the brink of an adventure of powerful magnitude.
Kraken pressed the cage front against the end of the tube and pulled open its
little door. The mice scurried around in apparent amazement, casting wild
glances here and there, curious about a heap of shredded newspaper or the pink
ear of a neighbor. Then, one by one, they filed away down the tube like cattle
down a hill, sniffing the air, intent suddenly on biscuits and grain.

 
          
 
The snakes were a comparatively easy case. A
round dozen of the beasts slithered away down the tube in the wake of the mice,
anxious to be quit of their sack. Kraken wondered if he
hadn't
ought
to wad the sack up and shove it into the tube, too, in order to
make absolutely sure that the beasts remained trapped inside. But the dangers
of doing that were manifold. Lord Kelvin or some particularly watchful guard
might easily discover the stopper before Kraken had a chance to remove it. They
mustn't, said St. Ives, discover that the sabotage had been the work of men—thus
the mice and snakes. It might easily seem that the natural residents of the
barn had merely taken up lodgings there, and thus the hand of Langdon St. Ives
would go undetected.

 
          
 
It was very nearly within the hour that Bill
Kraken climbed into bed. But his dreams were filled that night with visions of
mice and snakes dribbling from the end of the tube and racing away into the
darkness, having consumed the grain and leaving nothing behind sufficient to
foul the workings of the dread machine. What could he do, though, save trust to
providence? The shame of his failure—if failure it should be—would likely be as
nothing next to the horrors that would beset them after Lord Kelvin's success.
God bless the man, thought Kraken philosophically. He pictured the aging lord,
laboring night and day to complete his engine, certain that he was contributing
his greatest gift yet to humankind. His disappointment would be monumental. It
seemed almost worth the promised trouble to let the poor man have a try at it.
But that, sadly, wouldn't do. The world was certainly a sorrowful and
contradictory place.

 
          
 
THE BRIGHT APRIL weathcr had turned stormy and
dark by the time St. Ives and Hasbro had chuffed into
Dover
, and the
North Sea
was a tumult of wind-tossed waves and driving
rain. St. Ives huddled now aboard the Ostende ferry, out of the rain beneath an
overhanging deck ledge and wrapped in an oilcloth, legs spread to counter the
heaving swell. His pipe burned like a chimney, and as he peered out at the
roiling black of the heavens, equally cloudy thoughts drew his eyes into a
squint and made him oblivious to the cold and wet. Had this sudden turn of
arctic weather anything to do with the experimentation of the
Royal
Academy
? Had they effected the reversal of the
poles prematurely and driven the weather suddenly mad? Had Kraken failed? He
watched a gray swell loom overhead, threatening to slam the ferry apart, only
to sink suddenly into nothing as if having changed its mind, and then tower up
once again overhead, sheets of flying foam torn from its crest and rendered
into spindrift by the wind.

 
          
 
His plans seemed to be fast going wrong. The
dirigible he had counted upon for transport had been "inoperable."
The fate of the earth itself hung in the balance, and the filthy dirigible was
"inoperable." They would all be inoperable by the end of the week.
Jack Owlesby had stayed on in Ramsgate where a crew of nitwits fiddled with the
craft, and so yet another variable, as the mathematician would say, had been
cast into the muddled stew. Could the dirigible be made operable in time? Would
Jack, along with the flea-brained pilot, find them in the cold wastes of arctic
Norway
? It didn't bear thinking about. One thing
at a time, St. Ives reminded himself. They had left Jack with a handshake and a
compass and had raced south intending to follow Narbondo overland, trusting to
Jack to take care of himself.

 
          
 
But where was Ignacio Narbondo? He must have
set sail from
Dover
with Hargreaves hours earlier, apparently under a false name—except
that the ticket agent could find no record of his having boarded the Ostende
ferry. St. Ives had described him vividly: the hump, the tangle of oily hair,
the cloak. No one could remember having seen him board. He might have got on
unseen in the early morning, of course . . .

 
          
 
It was conceivable, just barely, that St. Ives
had made a monumental error, or that Narbondo had tricked the lot of them, had
been one up on them all along. He might at that moment be bound, say, for
Reykjavik
, intent on working his deviltry on the
volcanic wastes of the interior of
Iceland
. He might be sitting in a comfortable chair
in
London
, laughing into his hat. What would St. Ives
do then? Keep going, like a windup tin soldier on the march. He could imagine
himself simply ambling away into Scandinavian forests, circling aimlessly
through the trees like a dying reindeer.

 
          
 
But then in Ostende the rain let up and the
wind fell off, and the solid ground beneath his feet once again lent him a
steadiness of purpose. In the cold station, a woman stirred a caldron of
mussels, dumping in handfuls of shallots and lumps of butter. Aromatic steam
swirled out of the iron pot in such a way as to make St. Ives light-headed.
"Mussels and beer," he said to Hasbro, "would revive a
body."