The Technologists (22 page)

The professor handed him a pine strip twelve inches long and half an inch wide, and he broke it in half.

“Very good, Mr. Mansfield. You would make a fine backwoodsman. Now, come with me. Everyone, watch Mr. Mansfield and myself as we play seesaw.”

On the far side of his desk, Watson had constructed an isosceles triangle, using three sturdy pine strips, with a wire rod extending from the apex down to the base. A long strip of board was rested on top of the makeshift structure, which did not look trustworthy enough to support the weight of a small dog. Watson stepped up on one end and directed Marcus to stand on the other. The seemingly frail triangle supported both bodies without a problem.

A murmur of satisfaction filled the room, ejecting the well-honed cynicism of college seniors.

“Eh! I don’t want to see any expressions of surprise on your faces! That’s better. You see, Mr. Mansfield may break almost any stick in those strong hands of his. But remember when you write your examinations next month what I’ve said all year—in construction of a bridge, look for the placement of stresses. It is never about what
appears
strong or weak on the outside, but where the pressure falls. You won’t find this sort of demonstration at Harvard, by and by, with Agassiz and his pickled starfish. You can thank President Rogers for making demonstrations like this possible somewhere in America.”

To Marcus, the grating sound of pencils scratching could not cover up the forlorn, troubled note in the professor’s last comment. Everyone at Tech carried on as though Rogers were merely occupied in his office, and would be down any moment for his next lecture, his hand still on the tiller.

After class, the three conspirators hurried together down the hall. “What is the key?” asked Edwin.

“The answer,” Bob said, smiling mysteriously.

He led them down to the basement, near the location of Ellen Swallow’s private laboratory.

“Are we going to see Miss Swallow?” Marcus asked sarcastically. “It might be hard to believe, but unlike most of the belles in Boston, I’m not sure you can win her heart with a smile, Bob.”

“I hope we are not going to be meeting at the Temple,” said Edwin, looking worriedly at the entrance to the urinals located under the basement stairs.

Bob stopped at the next door down the corridor from Miss Swallow’s laboratory. With a wide grin and a grand flourish, he unlocked it.

“Welcome to the metallurgical and blowpipe laboratory!” Bob announced, swinging the door open. “No,” he said to his friends’ bemused expressions, “it’s not used very much. When the treasury ran out of money during the construction it was never fully completed. I didn’t know it was even here.”

Marcus looked around at the ill-lighted room. It had a gas furnace, a reverberatory furnace, three crucible furnaces, bean pots along the
shelves, a screw press, a forge, some crude ore-dressing equipment made of galvanized iron, and storage bins for charcoal, wood, and anthracite. It was dusty and had a stale odor.

“How did you get the laboratory key?” asked Marcus.

“Inside first, fellows, then I’ll tell you. Close the door behind you, Eddy,” Bob said. When the door was shut, he explained. “Two years ago, someone reserved this laboratory for the use of a society of students called the Technologists. I suppose some poor fellow wanted to emulate Harvard with their Rumford Society, the Hasty Pudding Club, and of course the Med Fac.”

“Med Fac … what’s that?” Marcus asked.

“Med Fac stands for Medical Faculty,” Edwin explained, “although it is actually Harvard students who call themselves that because they see their dark deeds as aiding the health of the students. It is the most secret of all Harvard’s secret clubs and to be initiated one must perform an act that could result in expulsion or even arrest—stealing the tongue of the college bell, shaving off a freshman’s mustache while he sleeps, or, if they wish to be an officer, blowing up part of a building.”

“Were you part of it before you left?” Marcus asked.

“Heavens, no! My time at Harvard was spent locked inside Agassiz’s dissection rooms. The Med Facs are notorious, and some say worship the devil.”

Bob laughed at the thought. “I hope not, since my brothers were all members. Harvard has suppressed them out of existence, anyway,” he added.

Marcus rolled his eyes, not as amused as Edwin and Bob by Harvard boys’ childish games. “This Technologist group must be very secretive itself. I’ve never heard of them.”

“That’s because nobody ever joined the society,” Bob explained gleefully.

“Some class feeling Tech has,” Edwin said, frowning. “Same problem as usual—too many brilliant ideas and not enough men.”

“Nobody joined—until now,” Bob corrected himself. “There are currently three members in good standing.”

“Robert Richards, Edwin Hoyt, and Marcus Mansfield,” Marcus said with a smile.

“We’re now signed up as the society’s entire membership. Which means we have this laboratory reserved, with our own key, for all times it is not in use by a metallurgy class—and you know the metallurgical professor this term is Eliot, who is too vain to give up time away from his lecturing.”

They shook hands all around and took their time admiring their headquarters.

“D
OWN BELOW, BOY,”
said a sailor busy coiling a rope, anticipating the visitor’s question.

Marcus nodded thanks and descended from the main deck into the cabin of the schooner, escaping the unpleasant mixture of rain and snow that had begun sometime during the morning. He hastily removed his hat when he reached what had the trimmings of a stateroom, where a man clearly in authority perched on a hard stool.

“Well, what do you want?” the officer snapped, turning his face only halfway.

“The bill posted, sir,” Marcus said. “Advertising for able-bodied seamen.”

“You can read, then, that’s a first all day. I am Captain Beal. This is the
Convoy
you stand in now, and I expect my men to remember the name of the vessel they sail in. So you have a taste for the briny?” He was older and thinner than Marcus had pictured the hero described by the old wharf rat, and he looked like he had fought his way to Hell and back again. His eyes were dark and sunken as they passed over Marcus, and he sat with his hands folded inside his sleeves.

“I have not gone on a voyage as a sailor before. My father, sir, was a merchant ship captain, for a time.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.” He would have said dead, but there was something about the captain’s face that warned against any deceit. Not that it would have been a lie, exactly—his father may well be deceased. Almost all he remembered of him was the large chair he used to sit in, on which was carved a motto:
He that wavereth is like the wave of the
sea driven with the wind and tossed; let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord
. When he was a small child, Marcus revered this object and liked to think that his father had carved the words himself, and so lived by them. The boy committed the words to memory and recited them to himself whenever he felt himself losing faith or confidence. Later, when his mother married again, he cursed his father’s absence and had to admit to himself the motto said everything that the man probably was not. This man in front of him, this bronze-faced captain, could be my father, thought Marcus, if he were a few years younger.

“I was born in Newburyport, sir,” continued Marcus, “around ships and water. I helped with many riggings in port, and I can splice a rope.”

“You helped your father?”

“No, sir.” He regretted having mentioned his family history at all as he saw the captain had taken hold of the topic hungrily and would not let go.

Beal nodded absently. “I suppose you’re the brave one of your friends, then.”

“Sir?”

“First, to lose your father to the water, in spirit or in body, you don’t say—no matter—but to lose him, sure enough. Yet still to want to ship out with us. Second, it is the rare young man right now in Boston who is looking to be shipping out at all, and in a vessel under my command.”

“Why, Captain?”

“You heard what happened here at the harbor, did you? Yes, I suppose you have, unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand. Everyone heard, everywhere around the world, because of the blasted telegraph. Messages sent from land to land across the water, like cannonballs that can’t be seen. Imagine, what name would an Arab give to that sort of black magic? Now look at me. Look at me.” When Marcus complied, Captain Beal slowly drew his hands from his sleeves. They were both wrapped in thick, red-streaked bandages. “That’s what a sailor is, boy! From pulling out some unlucky souls whose steamship caught on fire, burned on every finger by the steam. A ship captain with no hands to use for months to come—and not enough men to be my arms and legs for me. One day, boy, we all drown of our dead weight.”

“What of the crew of your old ship? The
Light of the East
?”

“You do read the newspapers. Aye, a rough set of fellows, as usual in a merchant ship. Most of them couldn’t read the articles of shipping they signed. They could take gales and disease and even a sea monster—but this? It makes shipwreck of their faith. What superstitions they concocted—half of them will never step onto the boards of another ship again, and the other half I wouldn’t want. A spooked seaman on deck is a man waiting for death.”

“They say the instruments were manipulated,” Marcus ventured. “In the newspapers,” he added quickly.

“The newspapers,” Beal repeated gruffly. He stood smiling, and awkwardly plucked an object from his table with his bandaged claw. He tossed it at Marcus, who caught it in midair. A pocket compass.

“Look at it,” Beal said.

He cautiously obeyed.

“It was the one I saved from the wreck. The rest are with the bones of the
East
on the ocean floor. The damned police officer wanted this, but I’ve had that one since I was younger than you. What do you see when you look upon it?”

“I see it is working,” the pupil answered quietly.

“Fourteen September, 1492. Do you know what happened on that date?”

“The voyage of Christopher Columbus.”

“Nah, that date was almost the
ruin
of his voyage, that’s what. It was the day Columbus, sailing westward, saw that the north point of his compass needle no longer indicated the polar star, and his men began to mutiny. In their fevered minds, if the compass could be wrong, they would never again be able to return to Spain. They had sailed off the map. Now Boston has been knocked off the map, too, and I don’t know if it can ever be put back where it was.”

Marcus studied the compass top to bottom.

“And if it could be explained?”

“By who?” the captain inquired skeptically. “You?”

He did not reply.

“If they understood it,” the captain said. “Is that what you mean?
Why, they’d be more alarmed than ever. They do not understand the science; they
rely
on it. Do you see? That instrument you hold wasn’t ‘manipulated,’ as you say, boy—it was the very air of Boston itself that was poisoned. A wise sailor shouldn’t be frightened of shipping out—he should be frightened of staying here! I wouldn’t go an inch past Castle Island if I ever return this way.”

Marcus looked up with interest. “Castle Island. Is that where your vessel was when the instruments went wild?”

“Aye, just beyond it. I understand we were the final vessel to be pulled in by the devil’s breath.”

“All of the compasses were affected at once?”

The captain bored of the topic. “If you can fetch five other able men by the end of the week to ship out with you, you can increase your rate of pay. No Irish, ’course. Well, those are all the terms. But heaven as my witness, you won’t be back.”

“Pardon me, sir?”

Beal stared at him. “I don’t know what you are, boy. You’re not a sailor.”

“I can learn,” Marcus insisted, as though he really were planning to go to sea.

“Aye, you can
learn
to sail but you’ll never be a sailor. True seamen won’t sail next to a man who is not like them; they can smell the difference. You have milk and water running through your blood. You’d be thrown into Davy Jones’s locker, you and your luggage, too.” Beal laughed harshly at his joke.

Marcus stiffened as if readying a protest. He realized how intently he had been gripping the compass and that the captain had noticed.

“Tell me why you’ve really come, boy,” growled Beal. “Speak, but speak advisedly! I wouldn’t trust you or your father with the simplest rigging on board.”

Marcus threw the compass down to the floor, smashing the glass case. Beal did not flinch, a silent grin fixing itself on his face, as though finally satisfied with his visitor.

“Maybe you could manage the sea, after all,” said the captain. “If they allow it.”

“If who allows it? Your crew?”

“No. Those demons who have you tied up in knots.”

Marcus turned his back to him and hurried out without another word. He found himself walking and walking along the water’s edge aimlessly, as if trying to escape the captain’s stinging voice. He went through less familiar parts of the harbor, but he did not mind feeling lost while he mastered his emotions. Then through the heavy weather he spotted Agnes Turner.