Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (5 page)

 
          
 
"Not at all," said Parsons smugly.
"We're building a device."

 
          
 
''A device?''

 
          
 
"To reverse the polarity of the earth,
thereby negating any natural affinity the earth might have for the comet and
vice versa."

 
          
 
"Impossible," said St. Ives, a
kernel of doubt and fear beginning to sprout within him.

 
          
 
"Hardly."
Parsons waved his fork with an air of gaiety,
then
scratched the end of his nose with it. "No less a personage than Lord Kelvin
himself
is at work on it, although the theoretical
basis of the thing was entirely a product of James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's
sixteen equations in tensor calculus demonstrated a good bit beyond the idea
that gravity is merely a form of electromagnetism. But his conclusions, taken
altogether, had such terrible and far-reaching side implications that they were
never published. Lord Kelvin, of course, has access to them. And I think that
we have little to fear that in such benevolent hands, Maxwell's discoveries
will lead to nothing but scientific advancement. To more, actually—to the
temporary reversal of the poles, as I said, and the switching off, as it were,
of any currents that would attract our comet. Trust us, sir. This threat, as
you call it, is a threat no more. You're entirely free to apply your manifold
talents to more pressing matters."

 
          
 
St. Ives sat silently for a moment, wondering
if any objections would penetrate Parsons's head past the crunching of
vegetation. Quite likely not, but St. Ives hadn't any choice but try. Two days
earlier, when he had assured his friends in
Dover
that they would easily thwart Ignacio
Narbondo, he hadn't bargained on this. Was it possible that the clever
contrivances of Lord Kelvin and the
Royal
Academy
would constitute a graver threat than that
posed by the doctor? It wasn't to be thought of
Yet
here was Parsons, full of talk about reversing the polarity of the earth. St.
Ives was duty-bound to speak. He seemed to find himself continually at odds
with his peers.

 
          
 
"This . . . device," St. Ives said.
"This is something that's been cobbled together in the past few weeks, is
it?"

 
          
 
Parsons looked stupefied. "It's not
something that's been cobbled together at all.
But since you
ask, no.
I think I can safely tell you that it is the culmination of
Lord Kelvin's lifelong work. All the rest of his forays into electricity are
elementary, pranks, gewgaws. It's this engine, sir, on which his genius has
been expended."

 
          
 
"So he's had the lifelong ambition of
reversing the polarity of the earth? To what end? Or are you telling me that
he's anticipated the comet for the past forty years?"

 
          
 
"I'm not telling you either of those, am
I? If I chose to tell you the truth about the matter, which I clearly don't
choose
to
do, you wouldn't believe it anyway. It would
confound you. Suffice it to say that the man is willing to sacrifice ambition
for the good of humanity."

 
          
 
St. Ives nodded, giving his chicken a
desultory poke with the end of his finger. It might easily have been some sort
of pale tide-pool creature shifting in a saline broth on the plate. Ambition .
. . He had his own share of ambition. He had long suspected the nature of the
device that Lord Kelvin tinkered with in his barn in
Harrogate
. Parsons was telling him the truth, or at
least part of it. And what the truth meant was that St. Ives, somehow, must
possess himself of this fabulous machine.

 
          
 
Except that the idea of doing so was
contemptible. There were winds in this world that blew a man into uncharted
seas. But while they changed the course of his action, they ought not to change
the course of his soul. Take a lesson from Robinson Crusoe, he told himself. He
thought about
Alice
then, and of the brief time they had spent together. Suddenly he
determined to hack the weeds out of her vegetable garden, and the thought
buoyed him up. Then, just as suddenly, he was depressed beyond words, and he
found himself staring at the mess on his plate. Parsons was looking contentedly
out the window, picking at his teeth with a fingernail.

 
          
 
First things first, St. Ives said to himself.
Reverse the polarity of the earth! "Have you read the works of young
Rutherford
?" he asked Parsons.

 
          
 
"Pinwinnie Rutherford
of
Edinburgh
?"

 
          
 
"Ernest Rutherford.
Of
New Zealand
.
I ran across him in
Canada
. He's done some interesting work in the
area of light rays, if you can call them that." St. Ives wiggled loose a
thread of chicken, carried the morsel halfway to his mouth, looked at it, and
changed his mind. "There's some indication that alpha and beta rays from
the sun slide away along the earth's magnetic field, arriving harmlessly at the
poles. It seems likely, at a hasty glance, that without the field they'd sail
in straightaway —we'd be bathed in radioactivity. The most frightful mutations
might occur. It has been my pet theory, in fact, that the dinosaurs were laid
low in precisely that same fashion—that their demise was a consequence of the
reversal of the poles and the inherent cessation of the magnetic field."

 
          
 
Parsons shrugged. "All of this is theory,
of course. But the comet is eight days away, and that's not at all theory. It's
not a brontosaurus, my dear
fellow,
it's an enormous
chunk of iron that threatens to smash us into jelly. From your chair across the
table it's easy enough to fly in the face of the science of mechanics, but I'm
afraid, sir, that Lord Kelvin will get along very well without you—he has in
the past."

 
          
 
"There's a better way," said St.
Ives simply. It was useless to lose his temper over Parsons's practiced stubbornness.

 
          
 
"Oh?" said the secretary.

 
          
 
"Ignacio Narbondo, I believe, has showed
it to us."

 
          
 
Parsons dropped his spoon onto his lap and
launched into a choking fit. St. Ives held up a constraining hand. "I'm
very much aware of his threats, I assure you. And they're not idle threats,
either. Do you propose to pay him?"

 
          
 
"I'm constrained from discussing
it."

 
          
 
"He'll do what he claims. He's taken the
first steps already."

 
          
 
"I realize, my dear fellow, that you and
the doctor are sworn enemies. He ought to have danced his last jig on the
gallows a long time ago. If it were in my power to bring him to justice, I
would, but I have no earthly idea where he is, quite frankly, and I'll warn
you, with no beating about the
bush, that
this
business of the comet must not become a personal matter with you. I believe you
take my meaning. Lord Kelvin

 
          
 
St. Ives counted to ten very slowly. Somewhere
between seven and eight, he discovered that Parsons was very nearly right. What
he said was beside the point, though. "Let me repeat," St. Ives said
evenly, "that I believe there's a better way."

 
          
 
"And what does a lunatic like Narbondo
have to do with this 'better way'?"

 
          
 
"He intends, if I read him aright, to
effect the stoppage of certain very active volcanoes in arctic
Scandinavia
via the introduction of petrifactive
catalysts into open fissures and dykes. The subsequent detonation of an
explosive charge would lead to the eruption of a chain of volcanic mountains
that rise above the jungles of Amazonian Peru. The entrapped energy expended by
such an upheaval would, he hopes, cast us like a Chinese rocket into the course
of the comet."

 
          
 
"Given the structure of the interior of
the earth," said Parsons, grinning into his mineral water, "it seems
a dubious undertaking at best. Perhaps ..." |

 
          
 
"Are you familiar with hollow-earth
theory?" '

 
          
 
Parsons blinked at St. Ives. The corners of
his mouth twitched.

 
          
 
"Specifically with that of McClung-Jones
of the
Quebec
Geological Mechanics Institute?
The 'thin-crust phenomenon'?"

 
          
 
Parsons shook his head tiredly.

 
          
 
"It's possible," said St. Ives,
"that Narbondo's detonation will
effect
a series
of eruptions in volcanoes residing in the hollow core of the earth. The
stupendous inner-earth pressures would themselves trigger an eruption at
Jones's thin-crust point."

 
          
 
"Thin-crust point?" asked Parsons in
a plonking tone.

 
          
 
"The very Peruvian
mountains toward which our man Narbondo has cast the glad eye!"

 
          
 
"That's an interesting notion,"
muttered Parsons, coughing into his napkin. "Turn the earth into a Chinese
rocket." He stared out the window, blinking his eyes ponderously, as if
satisfied that St. Ives had concluded his speech.

 
          
 
"What I propose," said St. Ives,
pressing on, "is to thwart Narbondo, and then effect the same thing, only
in reverse—to propel the earth temporarily out of her orbit in a long arc that
would put the comet beyond her grasp. If the calculations were fined down
sufficiently—and I can assure you that they have been—we'd simply slide back
into orbit some few thousand miles farther along our ellipse, a pittance in the
eyes of the incalculable distances of our journeying through the void."

 
          
 
St. Ives sat back and fished in his coat for a
cigar. Here was the
Royal
Academy
, unutterably fearful of the machinations of
Ignacio Narbondo—certain, that is, that the doctor was not merely talking
through his hat. If they could trust to Narbondo to destroy the earth through
volcanic manipulation, then they could quite clearly trust St. Ives to save it
by the same means. What was good for the goose, after
all.
St. Ives took a breath and continued. "There's been some study of the
disastrous effects of in-step marching on bridges and platforms—military study
mostly. My own theory, which abets Narbondo's, would make use of such study, of
the resonant energy expended by a troop of synchronized marchers ..."

 
          
 
Parsons grimaced and shook his head slowly. He
wasn't prepared to admit anything about the doings of the nefarious doctor. And
St. Ives's theories, although fascinating, were of little use to them here.
What St. Ives wanted, perhaps, was to speak to the minister of parades . . .

 
          
 
Then there was this man Jones. Hadn't
McClung-Jones been involved in certain ghastly lizard experiments in the
forests of
New
Hampshire
? "Very ugly incident, that one," Parsons muttered sadly.
"One of your hollow-earth men, wasn't he? Had a lot of Mesozoic reptiles
dummied up at a waxworks in
Boston
, as I recall, and insisted he'd found them sporting in some bottomless
cavern or another." Parsons squinted shrewdly at St. Ives. It was real
science that they would order up here. Humanity cried out for it, didn't they?
Wasn't Lord Kelvin at that very moment riveting together the carcass of the
device that Parsons had described? Hadn't St. Ives been listening? Parsons
shrugged. Discussions with St. Ives were always—how should one put
it?—revealing. But St. Ives had gotten in out of his depth this time, and
Parsons's advice was to strike out at once for shore—a hearty breaststroke so
as not to tire himself unduly. He patted St. Ives on the sleeve, waving the
wine decanter at him.