Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (19 page)

 
          
 
Curiously, he hadn't taken Narbondo inside the
hostel to thaw him out: he had set up camp in the stables instead, insisting
that Xarbondo's recoven,- must be a slow business indeed, and for the first two
nights Xarbondo slept on his table without so much as a blanket for covering.
Higgins fed him nothing but what he said was cod-liver oil, but which he
referred to as "elixir." And once, when Xarbondo began to moan and
shudder, Higgins said that he was "coming round too soon," and he
hauled Xarbondo out into the freezing night and let him stiffen up some.

 
          
 
The stableboy who told me all of this was a
bright lad, who had smelled something rotten, as it were, and it wasn't the
fish oil, either. He had a sharp enough eye to recognize frauds like Higgins
and Bowker, and he watched them, he said, through a knothole when they thought
he was asleep. It was on the founh night that Xarbondo awakened fully, if only
for a few seconds. Higgins had set up some son of apparatus—
hoses,
bladders, bowls
of yellow liquid. Throughout the night he had sprayed the
doctor with mists while Captain Bowker snored in the hay. An hour before dawn,
Xarbondo's eyes blinked open in the lamplight, and after a moment of looking
around himself puzzled at what he saw, he smiled a son of half-grin and said
the single word, "Good," and then lapsed again into unconsciousness.

 
          
 
I knew by then what it was I had come for, and
I had learned it in about half an hour. St. Ives had been right to turn around;
it didn't take three men to talk to a stableboy. After that I was forced to
lounge about the village, eating vile food, wondering what it was that my
companions were up to and when my dirigible would arrive, and worrying finally
about one last bit of detail: the frozen man, according to my stable-boy, had
had milky-white hair and pale skin, like a man cared out of snow or dusted
with frost; and yet Xarbondo had had lanky black hair, just going to gray, when
he had catapulted into that tarn.

 
          
 
The phrase "dusted with frost"
wasn't my own; it was the awful creation of my stableboy, who had lived for ten
years in
York
and might have been a writer, I think
,
if he had put his mind to it. Here he was mucking out
stables. It made me wonder about the nature of justice, but only for a moment.
Almost at once it brought to mind the letter we had read in Godall's
shop,
the one signed H. Frost, of
Edinburgh
University
.

 
          
 
MEANWHILE, Langdon St. Ives and Hasbro arrived
back in
Dover
without incident—no bombs, no gunfire, no
threats to the ship. I believe that our sudden disappearance from
Sterne
Bay
had confounded our enemies. Perhaps they
thought that the fruit-basket bomb had frightened us away, although Narbondo—or
Frost—knowing St. Ives as well as he did, shouldn't have made that mistake.
Anyway, in
Dover
, St. Ives arranged for the dirigible to
fetch me out of
Norway
, and then set about hiring a balloon for himself and Hasbro. They
didn't wait for me—they couldn't—and I'm narrating their exploits as accurately
as I can, having got the story secondhand, but straight from the horse's mouth,
of course.

 
          
 
St. Ives set about constructing a bismuth
spiral, which, for the reader unfamiliar with the mysteries of magnetism, is a
simple snail-shell spiral of bismuth connected to a meter that reads changes of
resistance in the spiral to determine intensities of magnetic fields. It's a
child's toy, comparatively speaking, but foolproof. The very simplicity of St.
Ives's notion infuriated him even further. It was something that ought to have
been accomplished a week earlier, in time to save those ten men.

 
          
 
He affixed the spiral to a pole that they
could slip down through a small hiatus in the basket of the balloon, so as to
suspend the spiral just above the waves, making the whole business of taking a
reading absolutely dangerous—almost deadly, as it turned out—because it
required their navigating the balloon perilously close to the sea itself. Why
didn't they use a length of rope, instead—play out the line while staying
safely aloft? That was my question too; and the answer, in short, is that the
science of electricity and magnetism wouldn't allow for it: the length of wire
connecting the bismuth to the meter must be as short as possible for the
reading to be accurate—that was how St. Ives understood it, although his
understanding was nearly the death of him.

 
          
 
He meant to discover where Lord Kelvin's
machine—the enormously powerful electromagnet stolen from the machine works in
Holborn—lay beneath the sea, somewhere in the
Dover
Strait
. He assumed that it rested on a submerged
platform or on a shallow sandy shoal. Maybe it was anchored, but then again
maybe it was slowly drifting at the whim of deep-water currents. He suspected
the existence of a float or buoy of some sort, both to locate it and, perhaps,
to effect
its
switching on and off.

 
          
 
The two of them were aloft within a day. It
was doubtful that the ban on local shipping would last out the week; the
economy wouldn't stand it. The government would pay the ransom or get used to
the notion of losing ships. The
Royal
Academy
still denied everything, right down to the
ground, while at the same time working furiously to solve the mystery
themselves.

 
          
 
St. Ives and Hasbro scoured the surface of the
sea, from Ramsgate to Dungeness. Hasbro, an accomplished balloonist —the
blue-ribbon winner, in fact, of the Trans-European balloon races of
1883—grappled with the problem of buoyancy, of keeping the basket above the
licking waves in order not to drown St. Ives's apparatus. The wind blew down
out of the
North Sea
in gusts, buffeting them southward toward
the coast of
France
, and it took all of Hasbro's skill to steady their course at all. St.
Ives had fashioned a sort of ballasted sea anchor that they dragged along and
so avoided being blown across the coast of
Normandy
before discovering anything.

 
          
 
Even so, it finally began to seem as if their
efforts were in vain—the Strait being almost inconceivably vast from the
perspective of two men in a balloon. It was sometime late in the afternoon,
when they were just on the edge of giving up, that they saw a sloop flying the
ensign of the
Royal
Academy
. St. Ives could see Parsons on the deck,
and he waved to the man, who, after seeming to ascertain who it was that hailed
him, replied with a perfunctory little nod and went immediately belowdecks.
There was the chance, of course, that the Academy had already discovered the
spot where the device had been sunk. And there was the chance that they were
still searching. What would St. Ives do? What could he do?

 
          
 
They swept across her bow and passed her, St.
Ives lowering the bismuth spiral one last time to take another reading. It
registered some little bit of deviation, the needle swinging around fairly
sharply as they drove along south and west, away from Parsons's sloop.

 
          
 
They were two hundred yards off his port bow
when the balloon lurched, throwing both the professor and Hasbro into the
basket wall in a tangle of arms and legs. The basket tilted ominously, nearly
pouring them into the sea. Hasbro hacked furiously at the rope holding the sea
anchor, thinking that it had caught itself in something, while St. Ives held on
to his pole and meter, which burst suddenly in his hands. That is to say the
meter did—exploded—its needle whirling around and around like a compass gone
mad, until it twisted itself into ruin.

 
          
 
St. Ives let go of the apparatus, which shot
straight down into the water as the balloon strained at her lines, trying to
tug the basket skyward, but having no luck. The basket, torn in the opposite
direction by an unseen force, spun and dipped crazily, fighting as if it had
been grappled by a phantom ship.

 
          
 
The crew of the sloop, including Parsons,
lined the deck, watching the wild balloon and the two men clinging helplessly
to her. It must have appeared as if she were being torn asunder by warring
spirits—which she was, in a sense, for it was the powerful forces of hot air
and magnetism that tugged her asunder. The ruined meter told the tale. St. Ives
had found the sunken device right enough; the iron-reinforced base of the
balloon basket was caught in its electromagnetic grip.

 
          
 
With a tearing of canvas and snapping of line,
the basket lurched downward, almost into the ocean. A ground swell washed
across them, and in an instant they were foundering. St. Ives and Hasbro had to
swim for it, both of them striking out through the cold water toward the
distant sloop, the nails in their bootheels prising themselves out. St. Ives
fished out his clasp knife and offered it up to the machine in order that his
trousers pocket might be saved. Finally, when they were well away from the
snapping line and rollicking bag, they stopped swimming to watch.

 
          
 
For a moment their basket still tossed on the
surface of the water. Then it was tugged down into the depths, where it hung
suspended just below the surface. The still-moored balloon flattened itself
against the sea, humping across the rolling swell, the gasses inside snapping
the seams apart with Gatling-gun bursts of popping, the hot air inside
whooshing into the atmosphere as if a giant were treading the thing flat.

 
          
 
Within minutes the deflated canvas followed
the basket down like a fleeing squid and was gone, and St. Ives and Hasbro trod
water, dubious about their obvious success. If it weren't for the sloop sending
a boat out after them, they would have drowned, and no doubt about it. Parsons,
seeing that clearly, welcomed them aboard with a hearty lot of guffawing
through his beard.

 
          
 
"Quite a display," he said to St.
Ives as the professor slogged toward a forward cabin. "That was as
profitable an example of scientific method as I can remember. I trust you took
careful notes. There was a look on your face, man—I could see it even at such a
distance as that—a look of pure scientific enlightenment. If I were an artist
I'd sketch it out for you ..." He went on this way. Parsons did, laughing
through his beard and twigging St. Ives all the way back to
Dover
, after leaving the area encircled with
red-painted buoys.

 
          
 
AT THE VERY MOMENT that they wcrc aloft over
the Strait, I was aloft in the dirigible, watching the gray seas slip past far
below, and captain of nothing for the moment but my own fate. I was bound for
Sterne
Bay
. The business of the icehouse had become clear
to me while I lounged in
Norway
. Days had passed, though, since my
confrontation with Captain Bowker, and in that time just about anything could
have happened. I might rush back to find them all gone, having no more need of
ice. On the other hand, I might easily find a way to do my part.

 
          
 
At the Crown and Apple I discovered that St.
Ives and Hasbro hadn't yet returned from their balloon adventure. Parsons was
gone too. I was alone, and that saddened me. Parsons's company would have been
better than nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating a pint or two
and a nap, wanting to escape my duty by going to sleep—drink and sleep being a
substitute, albeit a poor one, for company. Sitting there reminded me of that
last fateful knock on the door, though—reminded me that while I slept, no end
of frightful business might be transpiring. Who could say that the door
mightn't swing open silently and an infernal machine, fuse sputtering, mightn't
roll like a melon into the center of the floor . . .