The Technologists (40 page)

“I
heard
you.”

“Is there a gun in the house?”

“I …” She hesitated. “Mrs. Blodgett keeps one. I have seen the ammunition in the storage closet.”

Bob’s strides became longer as he headed toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Ellen demanded, following at his heels. “Are you going to steal her gun?”

“Keep at the telescope, Professor. I refuse to stand around with my hands in my pockets, and we don’t have the time for it. I’m going to find out who the experimenter really is.”

*   *   *

T
HE ONLY SOUL
Bob had seen around the chemists’ building that night as he watched through the telescope was the superintendent, who appeared to keep his lodgings on the first floor. He had seen the portly man lumbering in and out earlier that night, once all the offices and laboratories had emptied, and had earlier followed his steps through the telescope lens to the grog shop and back.

Bob rang the bell at the street door and waited, listening to the man stumble and curse as he lit the lamp inside his lodging and found his way into the front vestibule. He undid three separate locking mechanisms and then flattened his wide face against a grate in the door, asking Bob’s business.

“I know you,” the superintendent said, thinking it over sullenly.

“Yes,” Bob said, nodding. He’d hoped he’d remember. “I was here this morning, applying for a position with … my lovely wife.”

“Lovely!” the superintendent laughed.

“Lovely,” Bob repeated, dead serious. “She might seem a homely thing at first, I know. But in the right light—chemical light from a burning magnesium wire, for example—her little face looks almost healthy and downright beautiful, her lips not full, maybe, but soft and sure. That she’d think me a fool for saying so only speaks to her good sense and fine sarcasm.”

The superintendent was trying to straighten the folds in his vest before realizing the buttons were matched with the wrong holes. “Well? What do you want, boy? You were the one ringing and ringing this morning, weren’t you? Well, there’s certainly nobody here this hour. Say, didn’t you have a mustache?”

“Shaved … for my new position. You see, sir, later in the afternoon, after I spoke to you, I was hired by one of the chemists on the third floor. You know the one, on the southern side of the floor?”

The superintendent waved this away. “No difference to me. They don’t say good night or good morning to me, and I don’t need to know which one is which.”

Bob frowned at the lack of hoped-for information. This would have to be the hard way. He reached his hand into his coat. “Well, I thought I’d celebrate the new position with some of the fellows, just for an hour or two. You know? A real celebration?” Bob held up a half-filled bottle of wine by the neck, and pulled a second one from the other side of his coat.

“Good bottles.” The superintendent couldn’t help noticing, his eyes big and following the swinging object.

“I was supposed to go into the laboratory this evening and finish some work so it would be ready in the morning. How time flies with a bottle, sir! And here’s another one to spare!”

“Well, boy, bad luck for you. Anyway, I haven’t the keys to any of the chemists’ private laboratories.”

“Oh, I have that,” Bob said, showing him a heavy iron key. “I shall have to sacrifice the spirits. Or else I’ll be too tempted and lose my position the very first day. My little wife will have my head on a platter! I promise to be quiet!”

“You oughtn’t pour out two good bottles of wine, boy!” the superintendent chastised him as Bob started draining the first bottle into the gutter.

“No?”

The building’s guardian suggested that Bob instead deposit the wine with him while he made haste upstairs to do his work. This was heartily agreed to, with the superintendent opening the next door and disappearing into his rooms with the gifts.

On reaching the third floor, Bob put away the key to his boardinghouse and removed the gunpowder he had taken from Mrs. Blodgett’s closet. The door Bob stopped at had an even larger sign of caution

than the other private laboratories he’d seen. He carefully poured the powder into the key hole and lit a match, plugging it into the small opening,
and backing away as a dull explosion shook the inside of the door. No admittance? Not according to Bob. He’d hoped the superintendent was too busy draining the rest of the wine to hear, or too lazy to climb the stairs at this hour. In a building of private chemistry laboratories, the man was likely deaf to all manner of detonations.

Bob pried open the damaged door with ease, felt for a lamp and turned the flame. The black smoke and dust from the explosion made the laboratory too dense for several minutes—the longest three minutes of his life. Finally, it dissipated enough for him to look around at the gloomy vaulted chamber, which was suffused with even more than the usual laboratory odors of gas and vapor.

Bob sucked in his breath at what met his eyes. “I’ll be damned!” he cried. “God save us!”

“W
HERE IS HE
?”
Edwin asked as Bob turned up the lamp. They were both entering Bob’s rooms at Mrs. Page’s. “Mansfield? Where are you hiding?” Bob called out. After he had taken a quick visual inventory at the private laboratory, Bob had reported his remarkable discovery to Ellen, leaving her to keep watch for any sign of the experimenter from Mrs. Blodgett’s roof. Then he fetched Edwin to come with him back to Mrs. Page’s, in order to rouse Marcus. Now the two classmates stood in puzzlement over Marcus’s empty, rumpled bed. Both men’s eyes fell on the general disarray and on pieces of broken glass next to Marcus’s bed.

Edwin put his nose into the air. “Someone’s lit a fire here.” He picked up the iron poker from near the hearth. “The tip is still hot, Bob.”

“Look at that,” Bob said, pointing to the wall.

A Latin phrase had been burned into the wall above the fireplace:
Nil desperandum, Satano duce
.

“It’s a perversion of an ode of Horace’s. ‘No need to despair,’ ” Edwin translated, “ ‘with Satan as your leader.’ ”

“I know those words! I mean I’ve seen them before. Med Fac. Eddy, that’s the motto of Med Fac. They must have taken Mansfield!”

“Here’s another one!” Edwin said, discovering a second inscription behind the bed, this one composed in chalk.
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,”
Edwin read aloud, then: “ ‘You can get nothing from dead men but their bones.’ But the college had suppressed their society a few years ago, Bob!”

“It seems not so effectively.”

“Why would they snatch Marcus?”

Bob drummed his fingers on the table, biting his lip white as he thought about it. “They wanted me, Eddy. I mean, why else would they come to my rooms? They wouldn’t know he would be here. We’ve got to find Mansfield.”

“That’s impossible. Nobody knows where they meet, not even other Harvard men.”

“Edwin,” Bob said, “I know just what to do to find them!” But in his eyes there was an unfamiliar gleam of fear and self-doubt.

*   *   *

B
OB RANG THE BELL
three times and when there was no answer sat on the doorstep, counting to a minute. As he readied to pull the rope again, the door creaked from inside. A half-closed eye regarded him through the gap.

“Is the master of the house home?” Bob asked.

“Do you know the time?” Phillip Richards pushed aside the servant and threw open the door. “You’ll wake up the children.”

“Phillip, I’m awfully sorry, really, but—” Bob began.

“No, you’re not sorry, but I suppose you never cared about other people’s comfort,” interrupted his older brother, pulling his Japanese-patterned dressing gown tighter around his waist. “Come in and
try
to be quiet.”

The paler, plusher incarnation of Bob, twenty-six years old going on forty-five, led him inside. Bob tried to step lightly to follow the hushed example of his brother’s slippered feet. They walked through the cold, elegant house until reaching the study, where Phillip closed the door behind them. He halfheartedly offered a cigar.

“I need your help, Phillip. I haven’t time for any pleasantries.”

“Thank heavens for that, little brother.” Phillip followed this with an impatient sigh. “Now, what in the deuce—”

“I need to learn the meeting location of the Med Facs.”

Phillip snickered, lighting his own cigar and sitting back in his chair with a little more enjoyment playing on his face. “Oh, Robert. Are you serious?” He waited a moment before continuing, as if expecting Bob
to laugh and reveal the joke. “Robert! You still haven’t grown up at all, have you?”

Against his will, Bob’s hands fidgeted. “Please, Phillip, this time, only this time, you really must listen to what I say.”

Phillip shook his head. “The Med Fac was disbanded a few years ago. Apparently, there was some incident, supposedly someone was injured, and Harvard was wrongly led to believe the society presented a danger to the students. I thought you would have heard that.”

“And I’d bet a fifty-dollar overcoat that you know full well it was never disbanded—not really.”

Phillip laughed smugly, paying attention to the disposal of his cigar ashes away from the fine surface of his oak desk. “Not my concern. I’m a lawyer of some importance now, Robert, if you weren’t aware, not a collegey.”

“Once Med Fac, always Med Fac,” Bob said. “Isn’t that what they say? Please, Phillip.”

“Tell me, why would you deem this important enough to barge in here like an invading army?”

“A friend of mine is in trouble,” Bob said simply, his tone and posture softening. He had to make Phillip understand this wasn’t about any resentment against him or Harvard. “My friend Mansfield.”

“I’m sorry for it, brother,” Phillip said genuinely. “I am. But even if I could recall the last time I was there, and even if the Med Fac truly survives, they change meeting places every few years.”

“I’ll take the chance—just tell me, and I’ll leave you to sleep,” Bob pleaded. “You remember this, Phillip? I’m pleased that you’ve kept it all these years. May I?” Bob picked up a stone from a shelf of keepsakes and trinkets. He cradled it in his palm. “We found it together, across the river from the cove, that summer we spent in England.”

“I remember,” Phillip said curtly. “Don’t know why I still keep it, to be honest.”

“We thought the shells encrusted in it made it look like an owl’s head, and we were so proud of it. Do you remember that same summer we found the larvae of the galii caterpillar? We tried to guide one through the pupa to the moth stage, but never succeeded,” he said sadly. “Anyway,
Mother liked this stone enough that she allowed us to put it in the mineral cabinet when we returned home. You must remember that!”

Phillip stood and fixed himself a drink, making no offer to his kin. “No.”

“Truly?” Bob asked, surprised.

“I mean my answer to your request is no. I took an oath to honor my society,” Phillip said.

“Then Med Fac does survive.”

“That’s an oath of a gentleman, Robert. Perhaps that wouldn’t mean anything to you and your institute, or men like Mansfield.”

“What’s your meaning, Phillip?”

“Come! He’s the machine man, isn’t he? I heard you’ve tried to plant the grotesque seeds in dear Lydia Campbell’s mind that he could make a match with her.”

“What of it?” Bob demanded.

“He’s beneath her station! Her family would absolutely revolt.”

“She can think for herself about her choices without her family’s dictates, Phillip. Some of us do.”

“For the life of me, I cannot comprehend what you are doing with people like that, at that place.”

“ ‘That place’? If you refer to my college, to the Institute—”

“Yes, yes. That scientific school.”

“The Institute of Technology. Go ahead, call it by its name. You speak dismissively, but it is important as anything else to me.”

“And just like anything else, you’ll forget all about it when something new comes in on the breeze to make your fancy wander.”

“This is different. I’ve changed.”

“Since when?”

“Now. Since now! What it’s done for me, what in the last month I realized I will do to protect it, that’s changed me greatly,” he said, his voice strong but cracking with emotion.

“Has it, indeed? Well, if it ever were accepted by the public, that would be the end of your patience for it. It would be on to the next infatuation that could annoy your family and roil our society. Yes, I confess it, we collected rocks as boys. Boys! We played with toy wagons, as
well. But you are a man now, Robert, or should be. Time to leave all that behind. In fact, take that rock with you. Bury it.”

“Phillip, you
will
give me the name of the place before I leave here!”

“No! You can throw as many tantrums as you like, Robert, but I shall not betray my fellows. Damn it, little brother. You should be at Harvard. You should have taken your rightful place behind the rest of us.
You
should be Med Fac. You’ve insulted the whole family, forfeiting our reputation. I only pray my disapproval of you is known by all those acquainted with us.”