20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (6 page)

"Did they die in the Invasion, then?"

"Did who die?" asked Caroline.

"Messers Babbage and Boole."

"Naw, 'em blokes was pushin' up daisies long
before the tentacle-heads took a notion to pay us a visit,"
Caroline said. "But the TIA was keen on usin' Babbage's schematics.
Guess the chaps wanted something that was human built on the
ship."

Gemma frowned. "It sounds like most of the
credit belongs to Mr. Babbage instead of Mr. Boole, then."

"Well, there's Lady Lovelace, too," Caroline
said. "She was what's-his-name's daughter."

"Lord Byron," her companion said. "The
poet."

"Yeah, that's him! She worked with Babbage.
Knew all kinds of mathematics. Translated an article someone wrote
on his engine and added more of her own ideas that we're still
using! I think of her as the first true Boolean. But it's all in
the name. Lovelace ain't bad, but who wants to be called a Babbage?
I mean, honestly?"

Mr. Davies nodded. "True enough. I can only
imagine the ribbing we would take. Well, the additional ribbing, at
any rate." He turned to Gemma. "Rumour has it that you took the
last tender with the captain himself. So, what is your opinion of
our fearless leader?"

"He seems very--"

"He's just like Lancelot, isn't he?" Caroline
asked.

Mr. Davies returned to his book with a sigh
at that. Caroline continued chatting, and Gemma was more than happy
to let her. In the meantime, nodding at appropriate moments, Gemma
examined the rest of the mess hall. Posters and bills covered most
of the back wall in a wash of colour. One read "Lights of Blue, Go
to the Loo! Lights of Red, Keep Your Head!" Gemma wasn't sure she
wanted to know what that was about. An illustration of Sophie the
Steamfitter grinned down at them with a curve of seduction in her
lips. She informed the reader that "The TIA wants YOU to help
combat the Martian Threat!" The icon leaned against a smokestack in
her standard outfit: black corset, miniscule skirt, and garters
that held up long silk stockings.

Gemma wrinkled her nose. The corset barely
contained the woman's generous bosom as it pulled her waist into an
impossibly tiny circumference (even by Brightman standards). One
muscular leg bent to rest her foot flat against the smokestack
behind her. A bowler perched on her head at a rakish angle; her
hair was nearly as short as Caroline's. One of her eyes was frozen
in a permanent wink. Sophie brandished the welding torch like a
pistol with its barrel pointed overhead and a tiny flame poking out
the end. A rather scandalous and silly outfit, Gemma thought, for
such a powerful tool. Which, she supposed, was the point.

She had worn less, herself, in the Cirque du
Lune. It had been under a bit of duress -- she preferred to leave
the best of her bits to the imagination -- but she had accomplished
her task and gotten the attention of a certain professor of
chemistry, who had preferred dancers to computers. It was
unfortunate that she had been called away from that particular
venture. She had been in her dressing room when she had received
her summons to report back to Brightman. She had even had the
correct dose of sleeping powder for the job measured out into her
favourite hollow ring. She blinked when she realized that she
didn't remember where she'd left it once she'd changed into her
traveling clothes.

Too late to worry about that now
, she
thought.

That mission was done; there was no sense in
fretting over spilt absinthe, as Mrs. Brightman would have
said.

Gemma stared at Sophie again. Some of the
sailors stopped to kiss Sophie on their way out, and the poster was
slightly wrinkled from their attentions. Someone had posted a
newspaper clipping declaring the winner of a horse race from the
week before. Other bills simply cried "
Terra Vigila
" and
"The TIA - Defender of the Earth" to the passersby. Gemma also
noticed what was missing. She wore the only brown uniform in the
entire room.

"Mr. Davies, where are the other members of
the Cohort? Surely they eat as well."

"Oh, they tend to breakfast in their
conference room on the Research Deck. One of the cabin boys carries
pastries down there so they don't have to come by the galley."

"They don't frat with us much," Caroline
said. "Nice of you to come here to eat, though. Say, where are you
going to be during the launch? You busy?"

"Our first meeting is scheduled for after the
launch," Gemma replied.

"You don't have any rocks to look at yet,
then?"

"Um, no. Not yet. When is the launch,
exactly?"

"It's just under a couple of hours from now.
Oh, you can watch it with us!" Caroline offered. She looked at Mr.
Davies and bounced in her seat. "Oh, Nigel, can she come with us?
Please? It'd be wicked fun to watch it with a scientist. I can show
her the A.E.! Informatics is just off the bridge, with a window
that'll let us watch it all up close. You'll be in the front
row!"

Mr. Davies pulled out his pocket watch,
checked the time, and replaced it. "You are certainly welcome, Miss
Llewellyn. Caroline is right; you won't have a better view of
history in the making. I suggest we leave now, though, as we need
to get the rest of Informatics settled first."

"I would be delighted to join you," Gemma
replied.

Mrs. Brightman had charged her with watching
the captain. They were correct; this would be an enormous
opportunity. How kind of them to save her the trouble of contriving
a way to access the bridge.

Caroline led the way to the tray return.
Gemma realized with horror that the young lady was wearing true
trousers, not the convertible skirt that Gemma wore. She had seen
women in trousers before. But they were always wide-legged, and
their blouses always covered their backsides to avoid giving the
local Ministry of Culture consulate a complete conniption. Could
Caroline really prefer to look like a man?

The yeoman must have noticed that her legs
were the object of study. She pulled at the fabric on her
thigh.

"Oh, these. Just want to blend in with the
mates, love. You'll find out over time that they just make the job
easier. If they think of me as just another bloke, they don't get
distracted. Learned the hard way."

"Crumbs, Caroline," Mr. Davies said as he
pointed to some wayward bits of toast on her uniform.

Caroline chatted all the way down the
corridor and all the way up in the lift. Two decks later, they
walked down another long wide corridor, passing a window on the
left that opened onto a chamber filled with men in hunter green
busy with teletype keys. Mr. Davies pointed to it as they
passed.

"Wireless Operations," he said. "You'll want
to visit with them later."

A few yards away was a door guarded by two
crewmen, who greeted Davies with a sharp salute. He returned it and
waited for them to open the door. A second door loomed just inside
that one, but they did not enter it. The new corridor curved away
to either side, and they took the right passageway. It stopped at a
blank wall, with two doors on the right just before the end. He
opened the second door, labeled "Informatics", and gestured them
through.

The Informatics chamber certainly wasn't the
grand spectacle that Gemma had expected. It was small, about twice
the size of her stateroom. The ceiling felt low and close. Someone
had polished the wooden floors to a warm, fine sheen. A shelf ran
along the wall adjacent to the right of the door and continued to
the opposite side of the room. A row of modified Remington Electric
typewriters stood at attention on the shelf. One was typing along
by itself on a long banner of paper, as if a ghost were composing a
novel. Boxes of beige cards surrounded other such machines, and two
of the Booleans were using them to punch holes into the cards. A
young man in the corner of the room was in the process of packing a
set of these cards into a drawer. He too, wore hunter green, like
the rest of the men in the room. He picked it up, inserted it into
a slot in yet another wall of the chamber, and pulled down a
lever.

He turned to them and smiled; but his smile
quickly melted into a red-faced grimace when he laid eyes on Gemma.
She had to bite her tongue at the sight. Here was her accoster of
yesterday.

Caroline noticed the exchange. "Oh, I take it
you've met Mr. Humboldt already?"

"Just in passing," Gemma replied. She
narrowed her eyes at him and took distinct pleasure in his
squirming.

"Just yesterday," he stammered. He managed a
small bow. "Yeoman Roger Humboldt, at your service, Miss." He gazed
for a moment into the space beyond her shoulder, as if confirming
that Dr. Pugh was not there to shove him out the airlock.

"Pleased to meet you," she said with the
smooth monotone that she reserved for such situations, with just
the right undertone of ice to it.

He turned away, checked the hopper's
progress, and lingered there as Mr. Davies introduced her to the
other Booleans. The wall that held the young man's attention was
the true marvel here. The hopper itself was one of two drawers in
the wall, and next to them was a wide window. Beyond it was a large
rack of frames. Each frame contained a double stack of turning
wheels. A box on the far right held more cards, but the machine was
the one punching holes this time. Gemma walked up to the glass to
study it more closely.

"Ah, that is the Engine itself," Mr. Davies
said. "At least, that is part of it. We feed the data into it from
this location. This set of wheels performs some of the simpler
calculations. Some of the more complex mechanisms are on the deck
below us."

"We use these punch cards here," Caroline
said, "to talk to it. That top drawer holds the instructions. We
can use those over and over to run different sets of numbers. We
can put the numbers, them what varies, on cards in the other
one."

"I don't know how the gubbins works,
exactly," said Mr. Humboldt. He pointed to the moving wheels behind
the glass. "The care of the mechanical parts falls to another lot
down below. We can talk to 'em via the pipephone or send a note to
'em through the pneumatics." He pointed to a set of tubes that
emerged out of the far wall and terminated in a cluster of clear
boxes. Hollow cylinders lingered around on the table below them.
"We can send notes to several places around the ship through them.
The Cohort can also send their own punched cards for us to run
through the A.E. Saves a bit of shoe leather. It's off now, 'til we
launch, but it's right handy." He indicated the pipephone handset
on the wall. "Pipephone takes less power, though. Your voice makes
the energy for it as you talk, so use them when you can."

A loud grinding noise interrupted him. Mr.
Humboldt used a knob to slide open the pane of glass. He reached
into one of the frames and pulled out the crushed corpse of an
insect.

"Bugger!" he spat as he tossed it into the
rubbish bin. "More of those blasted beetles have escaped from the
Gardens again. It's like they're in the bloody walls! Now I'll have
to start the job all over again."

"Watch out when you debug like that,
Humboldt," Caroline said with a snort, "or you'll get your peckham
rye stuck in the machinery again."

"Bugs in me algorithm. What a bother," he
mumbled. "Well, I need to halt for launch, anyway. Mr. Davies, may
I beg a word with you?"

As the two men conferred in the corner,
Caroline tugged at Gemma's elbow. "Speaking of which, have you seen
the Gardens yet, Gemma?"

"No, actually, I haven't had an opportunity
to see much of the ship at all."

"Oh, you have to see 'em! Lovely bit'o'green
in the middle of the sky. The taters you ate this morning came from
there! And it's got lemons and limes growing, too, so we don't get
scurvy way up here."

"Truly?" Gemma asked with genuine surprise.
"My institute had me convinced that it would be hardtack and water
for the entire trip."

"I'd be glad to take you on a tour, Miss,"
Mr. Humboldt said with a grin as he and Mister Davies wandered back
over to them. The icy effects of her introduction had worn off
quickly.

"Not without a chaperone," Mr. Davies
countered. The room erupted into laughter as he glanced at the
clock on the wall.

"Quiet, you lot," he said. "Getting close to
time, now." He slid open the window to the bridge. Gemma was able
to observe the nerve centre of the ship for the first time.

The bridge was about twice the size of the
cozy Informatics chamber. Behind a raised chair stood Captain
Moreau, his hands clasped behind his back. He turned his head
slowly as he observed the rest of the deck and nodded his head from
time to time. She could see the same reassuring (yet naughty) smile
that he had given her yesterday just before their own launch. He
looked more like a lad of ten lording it over a shiny new toy train
than a ship's captain, despite his great stature.

He was handsome, at least by current social
standards. Tall and lean, his long face shone with hope. His wide,
warm smile infected the nervous crew. His spine was straight and
his gait was steady as he moved about the bridge. He was almost too
handsome, as if someone had carved him out of flesh, as Pygmalion
had once carved a woman out of ivory. He was so impossibly
good-looking that it was hard to believe that he was real and not
some heroic character in a penny dreadful, a bespoke hero. Gemma
allowed herself an inner smirk; handsome men always put her in a
cynical mood.

A ring of workstations surrounded the command
dais. At the front of the ring was a viewport similar to the
station's observation deck. It looked out upon a dark pool of
twinkling stars. It felt odd, seeing a night sky this time of
morning. It seemed that in space, the difference between day and
night took on a completely new definition.