Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (27 page)

 
          
 
St. Ives was in the bell itself, making ready.
His was the dangerous work. He was going down without air, because a compressor
would have been pulled to pieces. But it was a shallow dive, and it wouldn't
take him long. That was his claim, anyway. “Give me eight minutes by the pocket
watch,'' he had told us, "and then pull me out of there. I can go down
again if need be. And," he said darkly, "if the rowboat starts to go
to pieces, or if there's trouble down below, cut the line and get away as quick
as you can."

 
          
 
Hasbro insisted at once on going with him, as
did I, neither one of us keen on getting away. But that wasn't St. Ives's
method and never had been. He was still in a funk because of the time he
thought we had wasted and because of the two ships that had gone down
needlessly. And there was the fact of his—as he saw it—having allowed the
machine to exist all these years, sitting placidly in that machine works, only
to be stolen and misused. He was the responsible party, and he would brook no
nonsense to the contrary. There was a certain psychological profit, then, in
his going down and facing the danger alone; his face seemed to imply that if
something went wrong and we had to leave him, well, so be it; it was no more
than he deserved.

 
          
 
Then there was the business of Alice, wasn't
there? It hovered over the man's head like a rain cloud, and I believe that I
can say, without taking anything away from his natural courage, that St. Ives
didn't care two figs whether he hved or died.

 
          
 
And although in truth I had no idea how much
air one working man would breathe at a depth of eight fathoms, I accepted his
assurances that two men would breathe twice as much and increase the dangers
accordingly. The controls were meant for a single man, too, and St. Ives had
been studying and manipulating them all the way out from Sterne Bay. Hasbro and
I would have been nothing but dangerous baggage, trying to demonstrate our
loyalty by our willingness to die along with him, if it came to that. He didn't
need any such demonstrations.

 
          
 
Down he went, into the dark ocean. One of the
handlike armatures of the bell held on to a bundle of explosives wrapped in
sheet rubber and sealed with asphaltum varnish. There was a timing device
affixed to it. St. Ives had never meant to "disarm" the machine at
all. He had meant all along to blow it to kingdom come, and he had stolen
Higgins's bell for just that purpose.

 
          
 
The Strait was blessedly placid—just a trace
of wind and a slightly rolling ground swell. Line played slowly out through the
oaken blocks, and we watched the bell hover deeper, down toward the vast black
shadow below. I hadn't expected quite what I saw—a sort of acreage of shadow
down there, but then I realized that what I saw wasn't merely the machine, but
was a heap of derelict iron ships clustered together, the whole heap lying, I
supposed, on a sandy shoal.

 
          
 
And that was why St. Ives hadn't done the
obvious— merely wrapped a hunk of iron into that package of explosives and
tossed it over the side. It might easily have affixed itself to the hull of a
downed ship and blown it up, leaving the machine alone. What the professor had
to do was drop onto the machine itself, or grapple his way to it by the use of
the bell's armatures, and plant the explosives just so; otherwise they were
wasted. Eight minutes didn't seem like such a long time after all.

 
          
 
But then the line went suddenly slack and
began to coil onto the top of the water. St. Ives had hooked on to
something—the machine, a ship. All of us studied our pocket watches.

 
          
 
You'd think that the minutes would have flown
by, but they didn't; they crept. The breeze blew, clouds slipped across the
sky, the loose circle of ships rolled on the calm waters, no one aboard them
suspecting who I really was in my beard and wig. Hasbro counted the minutes
aloud, and Uncle Botley stood at the winch. At the count of eight the three of
us put our backs into it. The line went quivering-taut, spraying droplets. The
blocks groaned and creaked. The bell very slowly swam into view, and in a rush
of ocean water it burst out into the air, St. Ives visible within, the
explosive package gone. He had either succeeded or failed utterly; it didn't
matter which, not at the moment.

 
          
 
Thunk went the bell onto the deck, and while
Uncle Botley lashed it down, Hasbro and I bent to the oars and had that barge
fairly skimming, if I do say so myself. There's nothing like a spot of work
when you know what the devil you're doing and, of course, when there's an
explosion pending.

 
          
 
A cheer went up from the ships waiting in a
circle around us, and I took my hat off and waved it in the air, my wig nearly
blowing away in the sea wind. I clapped the hat back down and gave up the
histrionics, hauling us through the chop, bang up against the hull of our
trawler. We clambered aboard, taking the barge in tow and setting out at once.

 
          
 
We didn't leave St. Ives in the bell, of
course. He climbed out at the last possible minute, taking the risk now of
being seen. "Let's go," he said simply, and into the cabin he went as
I took up the speaking trumpet and started to shout at the nearest ship, on
which
a half
-dozen men stood at attention along the
rail, and a captain or some such thing awaited orders. In my best Parsons
voice, helpfully disguised by the speaking tube, I gave him all the orders he
needed—that we had set into motion the disarming of the machine, but that its
excess electromagnetic energies would reach capacity just before she shut down.
Move away, is what I told him, for safety's sake, or risk going to the bottom!

 
          
 
That drew their attention. I think they would
have run for it even if my beard had been plucked off right then by a seagull.
Flags were run up; whistles blew; men scrambled across the decks of the several
ships, which began to make away another quarter of a mile, just as I told them,
where they would await orders. We kept right on going—steaming back toward
Sterne Bay. That must have confounded them, our racing off like that. For my
money, though, it didn't confound them half as much as did the explosion that
followed our departure. We were well away by then, on the horizon, but we saw the
plume of water, and then heard the distant whump of the concussion.

 
          
 
SO LORD Kelvin's machine was nothing but
sinking fragments, an instant neighborhood for the denizens of the sea. Dr.
Narbondo would continue his cold sleep until whatever it was that animated him
had played itself out. Parsons, poor man, wouldn't be at the helm of whatever
grand ship he had imagined himself piloting into the harbor of scientific fame.
His schemes were a ruin—blown to pieces. Even his victory over St. Ives had
been a short-lived one—toasted to with drugged water.

 
          
 
St. Ives wasn't happy with that part. He felt
guilty about Parsons, and he felt even worse that Narbondo would sleep through
what ought to have been his public trial and execution. Ah well, I was happy
enough. I wasn't fond of Parsons in the first place, and had rather enjoyed
parading around in the beard and wig. I wish there had been some way to let him
know about that, just to make him mad, but I guess there wasn't. He would hear
most of it, likely enough, but he probably wouldn't guess it had been me, and
that was too bad.

 
          
 
We landed in Sterne Bay, our business done.
And we parted company with Hasbro's aunt and with Uncle Botley. At the Crown
and Apple we found a note under St. Ives's door— the same note, in fact, that
St. Ives had left on Parsons's lap. The old man had scrawled on it the words,
"I'm on the afternoon train to London; you might have the kindness to see
me off "Just that. You would have expected more—some little bit of anger
or regret—given what St. Ives had revealed to him. But there was no anger, just
the words of a sad man asking for company.

 
          
 
We hurried down to the station to do his
bidding. It was the least we could do. His just giving in like that made the
business doubly sorrowful, and although I was tempted for a moment to wear
them, I left the beard and wig at the Apple.

 
          
 
The train was chuffing there on the track, the
passengers already boarded. We ran along the platform. St. Ives was certain
that there was some good reason for Parsons's having summoned him, and that it
was his duty, our duty, after exploding Parsons's dreams, to see what it was
that the old man wanted, what last tearful throwing-in-the-towel statement he
would utter. Let him complain to our faces, I thought, taking the long view. He
had been riding high just yesterday, astride his i

 
          
 
charger
, but now, as
they say, the mighty had fallen. The
race '

 
          
 
was
not always to the
swift. Parsons could have his say; I wouldn't begrudge him.

 
          
 
But where was he? The cars were moving along.
We trotted beside them, keeping up, out toward the empty tracks ahead, the
train chugging forward and away. Then, as the last car but one rolled past, a
window slid
down,
and there was Parsons's face
grinning out at us like a winking devil. "Haw! Haw! Haw!" he shouted,
apparently having run mad, the poor bastard.

 
          
 
Then he dangled out the window a bound
notebook, tattered and old-looking. Streaked across it in faded ink was the name
“John Kenyon,'' written in fancy-looking heavy script—the name, of course, of
Mrs. Pule's derelict father. Despite what was utterly obvious, and thinking to
put on a show of being interested in the old man's apparent glee, I was witless
enough to yell, "What is it?" as we watched the train pick up speed
and move away from us toward London.

 
          
 
And he had the satisfaction of leaning out
even farther in order to make a rude gesture at us, shouting in a sort of
satisfied whinny, "What the hell do you think it is, idiot?" Then the
damned old fool drew the notebook in and slammed the window shut, clipping off
the sound of his own howling laughter.

 
          
 
The train bore Parsons away to London, along
with—if the half-frozen doctor had only been aware of his victory, of this
renewed promise of resurrection—the gloating still-animate body of Ignacio
Narbondo.

THE TIME TRAVELER

 
          
 
AIR HISSED THROUGH rubber tubing like the
wheezing of a mechanical man. There was the odor of machine oil and metal in
the air, mixed with the damp aquarium smell of seawater seeping slowly past
riveted joints and rubber seals. The ocean lay silent and cold and murky beyond
porthole windows, and St. Ives fought off the creeping notion that he had been
encased in a metal tomb.

 
          
 
One of the bathyscaphe's jointed arms clanked
against the brass hull with a dull echo, a sound from a distant world. St. Ives
felt it in his teeth. He smeared cold sweat from his forehead and focused his
mind on his task—recovering Lord Kelvin's machine from the debris-covered
sandbar forty feet beneath the Dover Strait. The hulks of three ships lay
roundabout, one of them blown apart by the dynamite bomb that St. Ives had
dropped into its hold six months past.

 
          
 
He pulled a lever in the floor, feeling and
hearing the metallic ratchet of the pair of retractable feet that thrust out
from the base of the bathyscaphe. Laboriously, inch by inch, the spherical
device hopped across the ocean floor. Fine sand swirled up, obscuring the
portholes, and for the space of a minute St. Ives could see nothing at all. He
shut his eyes and pressed his hands to his temples, aware again of the swish of
air through tubing and of the sound of blood pounding in his head. He felt a
great pressure, all imaginery, but nonetheless real for that, and he began to
breathe rapidly and shallowly, fighting down a surge of panic.
The portholes cleared, and a school of John Dory lazied past, gaping
in at him, studying him as if he were a textbook case on the extravagances of
human folly . . .