The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (51 page)

“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
got
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 Commonwealth 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.

London and Harrogate Again

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 hisface 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 animatedly 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.

“My name, actually, is Penrod,” said St. Ives. “Jules Penrod. You’ve apparently mistaken me for someone else. I have one of the twelve common faces.”

Beezer’s companion burst into abrupt laughter at the idea. Beezer, however, seemed impatient at the interruption. “Face like yours is a pity,” he said, nudging his companion in the abdomen with his elbow. “Suits a beggar, though. I haven’t got a thing for you, Pappy. Go scrub yourself with a sponge.” And with that the two of them turned and made away, the second man laughing again and Beezer gesturing.

“One moment, sir!” cried St. Ives, pursuing the pair. “We’ve got a mutual friend.”

Beezer turned and scowled, chewing his cigar slowly and thoughtfully now. He stared carefully at St. Ives’s unlikely visage and shook his head. “No, we don’t,” he said, “unless it’s the devil. Any other friend of yours would’ve hung himself by now out of regret. Why don’t you disappear into the night, Pappy, before I show you the shine on my boot?”

“You’re right, as far as it goes,” said St. Ives, grinning inwardly.

“I’m a friend of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, in fact. He’s sent me round with another communication.” 

Beezer squinted at him. The word
another
hadn’t jarred him.

“Is that right?” he said.

St. Ives bowed, clapping a hand hastily onto the top of his head to hold his wig on.

“Bugger off, will you, Clyde?” Beezer said to his friend.

“That drink…” came the reply.

“Stow your drink. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll drink two. Now get along.”

The man turned away regretfully, despondent over the lost drink perhaps, and St. Ives waited to speak until he had crossed Whitefriars and his footsteps faded. Then he nodded to the still-scowling Beezer and set out on the sidewalk again, looking up and down the street as if to discern anything suspicious or threatening. Beezer fell in beside him. “It’s about the money,” said St. Ives.

“The money?”

“Narbondo fears that he promised you too much of it.”

“He’s a filthy cheat!” cried Beezer, eliminating any doubts that St. Ives might have had about Beezer’s having received Narbondo’s message, mailed days past from Dover.

“He’s discovered,” continued St. Ives, “that there are any of a number of journalists who will sell out the people of London for half the sum. Peabody at the
Herald
,
for instance, has agreed to cooperate.”

“The filthy scum-sucking cheat!” Beezer shouted, waving a fist at St. Ives’s nose. “Peabody!”

“Tut, tut,” admonished St. Ives, noting with a surge of anxious anticipation the darkened mouth of the alley some thirty feet distant. “We haven’t contracted with Peabody yet. It was merely a matter of feeling out the temperature of the water, so to speak. You understand. You’re a businessman yourself in a way.” St. Ives gestured broadly with his left hand as if to signify that a man like Beezer could be expected to take the long view. With his right he reached across and snatched the lapels of Beezer’s coat, yanking him sideways. Simultaneously he whipped his left hand around and slammed the startled journalist square in the back, catapulting him into the ill-lit alley.

“Hey!” shouted Beezer, tripping forward into the waiting arms of Jack Owlesby, who leaped in to pinion the man’s wrists. Hasbro, waving an enormous burlap bag, appeared from the shadows and flung the bag like a gill net over Beezer’s head, St. Ives yanking it down across the man’s back and pushing him forward off his feet. Hasbro snatched at the drawrope, grasped Beezer’s shoulders, and hissed through the canvas, “Cry out and you’re a dead man!”

The struggling Beezer collapsed like a sprung balloon, having an antipathy, apparently, to being a dead man. Jack clambered up onto the bed of a wagon, hauled open the lid of a steamer trunk, and, along with St. Ives and Hasbro, yanked and shoved and grappled the feebly struggling journalist into the wood and leather prison. He banged ineffectively a half-dozen times at the sides of the trunk, mewling miserably, then fell silent as the wagon rattled and bounced along the alley, exiting on Salisbury Court and making away south toward the Thames.

A half hour later the wagon had doubled back through Soho, St. Ives having set such a course toward Chingford that Beezer couldn’t begin to guess it out from within his trunk. Hasbro, always prepared, had uncorked a bottle of whiskey, and each of the three men held a glass, lost in his own thoughts about the warm April night and the dangers of their mission. “Sorry to bring you in on this, Jack,” said St. Ives. “There might quite likely be the devil to pay before we’re through. No telling what sort of a row our man Beezer might set up.”

“I’m not complaining,” Jack said.

“It was Dorothy I was thinking about, actually. We’re only weeks finished with the pig incident, and I’ve hauled you away again. There she sits in Kensington wondering what sort of nonsense I’ve drummed up now. She’s a stout woman, if you don’t mistake my meaning.”

Jack nodded, glancing sideways at St. Ives, whose voice had gotten heavy with the sound of regret. St. Ives seemed always to be on the edge of a precipice, standing with his back to it and pretending he couldn’t see that it was there, waiting for him to take an innocent step backward. Work furiously—that had become the byword for St. Ives, and it was a better thing, perhaps, than to go to pieces, except that there was something overwound about St. Ives sometimes that made Jack wonder if it wouldn’t be better for him to try to see into the depths of that pit that stretched out behind him, to let his eyes adjust to the darkness so that he might make out the shadows down there.