The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (30 page)

‘Nothing,’ said Scuttle simply. ‘Just more tunnels an’ a brick wall.’

Tate kept barking. Lin stepped carefully into the tunnel, reached into a pocket and pulled out a very small bronze knife. Tess stepped back instinctively. ‘It’s hotter down here,’ murmured Lin. ‘And I feel . . . strange. More than just a brick wall.’

Tess scowled and turned to Thomas. ‘Have you noticed how it’s always you an’ me what have to go an’ save Mister Lyle from all the silly things what he’s gone an’ got caught up in, bigwig?’

‘Well, I suppose on occasion . . .’

‘An’ do you know he only gives me five shillin’s a week pocket money?’

‘You have pocket money?’

‘Yes. What do you get?’

‘Well . . .’ he hesitated. Somehow he didn’t think Tess expected to hear, ‘I don’t get anything, I just tell the butler to go and buy it for me, but when I’m eighteen I’ll get an allowance and part of Wiltshire.’

But Tess had already moved on. ‘An’
now
we gotta go an’ save him
again
an’ this is you an’ me followin’, with all due respect, miss, this lady what has evil green eyes an’ ain’t like normal people, an’ a lad what refused to give up his special blanket ’til he was nine . . .’

‘Oi! You said you weren’t tellin’!’ squeaked Scuttle.

‘. . . an’ a doggy-woggy with big ears!’ Tate growled. ‘So what I’m sayin’, bigwig, is as how you an’ me gotta be real clever an’ all to make up for this, or maybe how it’s me what’s got to be clever, an’ save the day against overwhelmin’ type odds!’

‘Oh. Yes.’ Thomas thought about it, straightened up proudly, banged his head, hunched again but repeated nonetheless, ‘Yes! That sounds about right!’

Tess grinned. ‘Just checkin’. Let’s do the adventurin’ bit, then.’

They marched off, into the darkness.

 

The tunnel was long, featureless and hot. As they walked, it got hotter and darker, and the walls became narrower; and still the temperature kept climbing - until, without warning, Lin stopped dead and murmured, ‘I can’t go further.’

Tess and Thomas turned. Even Tate stopped his insistent snuffling to stare at her. Scuttle raised the lamp, and in the dull glow Lin had turned white. She was swaying slightly, leaning against a wall, seemingly oblivious of the slime. ‘Oh God,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

‘It’s a bit hot?’ suggested Tess.

‘Miss, are you all right?’ ventured Thomas. He’d always secretly hoped a lady would swoon in his presence, so that he could leap valiantly to her rescue. Now, however, deep in a sewer, with a woman who filled him with apprehension, his dream was suffering from malign circumstance.

Lin gave them a look of disbelief, then forced a smile. ‘The future leaders of mankind,’ she sighed. ‘How do you get by?’

‘I think she’s bein’ mean about us,’ muttered Tess in Thomas’s ear.

‘You’re very, very close to it,’ murmured Lin. ‘It’s ... a sickness ... a coldness, an acidity, right ahead. That way, keep going,’ she said, pointing with her chin down the tunnel. ‘The closer we get, the more it hurts.’

‘What? What what what what what?’ demanded Tess, bouncing on the spot.

‘The Machine,’ Lin replied. ‘Berwick didn’t say, Lyle didn’t say, but I can feel it. It gives off a magnetic field, it’s like ... walking across broken glass, and the feeling’s been growing all the way down this tunnel. I can’t go any closer. If I do, I’ll die.’

Tess looked at Thomas, who looked helplessly at Lin. He said, ‘Will you be all right, miss?’

‘Just make it stop,’ she hissed. ‘That’s all, just make it stop.’ Then a thought struck her and she added, ‘And get Lyle out alive. And please don’t tell him I said that.’

‘But it seems like a
nice
thing -’ began Tess.

Thomas nudged her and said, ‘Right, yes, of course, Miss Lin, naturally.’

‘But . . .’ Tess tried again.

‘We’ll just be off.’

‘We will?’ piped Scuttle.

‘Yes,’ said Thomas, sticking out his chest defiantly. ‘We will.’

For a moment, just a moment, Tess looked at him in awe. She murmured, ‘You ain’t takin’ charge, are you, bigwig?’

‘Uh . . .’ Thomas wavered.

‘Seein’ as how you’re oldest an’ all,’ she added.

‘Well ...’

She patted him on the shoulder. ‘I think it’s sweet as how you’re tryin’.’ Then to Lin, ‘Goodbye, miss! Don’t go an’ do anythin’ evil while we’re gone, right, ’cos that’ll be
bad
an’ I’ll sulk an’ you wouldn’t want to see that.’

‘Oh, she’s ’orrid when she sulks,’ said Scuttle. His tone made Thomas feel, just for a second, alarmed and protective, and he wondered why.

‘Come on!’ boomed out Thomas in the voice he hoped generals used when marshalling their troops. The three of them, and Tate, went on down the tunnel, leaving Lin alone in the darkness.

 

Havelock stood behind Lyle’s chair. He was watching everything Lyle did. So did others. Men and even a few women, from the dimness away from the candle on the table, all observed Lyle, as he worked at slipping wires into frames or twisting circuits together. They took in every movement, every breath. Each time one of them didn’t follow his reasoning
exactly
, they’d call a halt, to study what he’d done, interrogating him about every twist and turn, until finally the voice of dissent would say, ‘Ah, I think I see what he’s trying to achieve.’ There was to be no error.

There was, however, a suspicion growing at the back of Lyle’s mind, that these very, very clever brains - these exceptionally well-educated scientists watching his every movement, studying his every thought as he twisted infinitesimally small circuits into being at the heart of the Machine - might just be the kind of people to miss the Obvious Thing.

 

The tunnel stopped. It ended at a brick wall down which water dribbled in black rivulets defined by almost five years of seepage. Tate sat on his haunches and glared at it. Tess folded her arms and said, ‘I ain’t impressed by this, bigwig.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Teresa,’ Thomas heard himself say.

‘Well, don’t just say that,
do
summat!’ snapped Tess.

‘What do you want me to do, miss?’

Tess stared at him as though he were an idiot. ‘You’re carryin’ most of Mister Lyle’s kitchen, bigwig.’

Thomas noticed again the weight of the bags across his shoulders.

‘Blow it up or summat! There’s gotta be summat in there what’ll go “Bang”!’

‘Aren’t we supposed to avoid things that go “Bang”?’ asked Thomas in a pained voice.

‘I won’t tell if you don’t,’ she replied briskly.

‘Are you both always like this?’ asked Scuttle.

Thomas was thinking. ‘Maybe . . .’ he felt stupid as he said it, ‘there’s a secret door?’

Tess stared at him in despair. ‘You takin’ the pi . . . I mean, you havin’ a laugh, bigwig?’

‘I’m just saying, if perhaps we searched . . .’

‘You just think people go round buildin’ secret doors everywhere, do you? There’s always this book you push that makes the shelf come out, or a bit of string you pull or a brick you kick or summat? ’Cos I’m tellin’ you, as someone what knows about gettin’ into places where you don’t belong . . .’

Thomas kicked a brick hopefully. ‘Ow!’ He hopped up and down, clinging to his foot.

Tess grinned. ‘
Hah
. Told you.’

Overhead, something went
thunk
. Somewhere near by, something else started whirring. Tess’s face fell. ‘I ain’t never gonna be able to talk proper sense to you again, am I?’

Thomas’s face had broken into a huge grin. He gazed expectantly at the brick wall. Nothing happened. At his feet, something went
shurlp.
He looked down. So did Tess. Seeing them do so, Tate also looked down - then started barking furiously as, beneath his feet, a small section of floor started to move, creaking back while slime oozed over its edge into the darkness below.

The thing opened up into a dark shaft. The lamplight gave no clue as to whether there was a floor below. But there were the rungs of a ladder, and they looked clean and fresh. Tess said, ‘I just get this feelin’ as how we’re gonna ’ave to go down there.’

Scuttle looked green. ‘Er . . .’ he began.

‘Yes?’ asked Thomas politely.

‘You wanna go
down
there?’ Scuttle squealed.

‘Yes,’ said Thomas, in the same tone of uncomprehending goodwill. ‘Do you think we shouldn’t?’

The only answer was a little noise of distress.

Tess scowled. ‘
Men
,’ she hissed. Snatching the lantern from Scuttle, she started to climb.

 

Lyle put down the last piece and studied the thing in front of him. It wasn’t as neat or as finished as Berwick’s piece of work, but it would do. Hammered together from scraps, it would serve the purpose for which it was made.

Havelock leant over Lyle’s shoulder. ‘Very good. Yes, I think I see what you’ve done.’

‘You claim to be a scientist, Augustus,’ Lyle coldly replied. ‘But I doubt you have any idea of what I’ve done.’

Havelock’s eyebrows twitched; his mouth tightened. He reached out and wrenched Lyle’s face round so he could see into his eyes. ‘Are you going to double-cross me, Horatio Lyle?’ he hissed. ‘Would you dare?’

His fingers dug into Lyle’s skin, dragging red marks across his cheek and jaw. Lyle tried to shake himself free, but the grip tightened. ‘Would you let so many die to save your enemies?’

‘It works!’ said Lyle quickly. ‘I swear - I swear it works, I swear.’

And as he swore, just one wire under his fingers, one tiny piece a bit too long, that he bent back on itself to shorten to the correct length, ready to snap - bent back and
round
, a hook under his fingers ...

‘Please stop,’ he whispered. ‘Please . . .’

Tying positive to negative, and all eyes were on Havelock, and Havelock’s eyes were on Lyle’s, and it didn’t seem to occur to him that fingers can work by touch alone. ‘Please . . .’ Or that you can have
more
than what you need to build a thing.

Havelock let go. Lyle lapsed forward, clasping the new, strange, lumpy regulator, not nearly as neat or shiny as Berwick’s device, but just as well informed. Havelock took it carefully from Lyle’s hands and turned it over, examining it with narrowed eyes, then scrutinizing Lyle, and Lyle decided that Havelock read faces better than he did machines, and that under different circumstances that might almost be an irony.

Havelock smiled. It was his first genuine smile that Lyle had seen, full of satisfaction and triumph, almost childish in its glee. ‘I choose to let you live, Horatio Lyle,’ he said. ‘At least, for now.’ He straightened up and said briskly, ‘Let’s finish this, shall we?’

 

Lyle followed Havelock without a word, without being told to and without being told not to. He followed him from the workroom beneath the furnaces, across bridges spanning rivers of cable, down flights of stairs, and along passages that smelt of burnt metal and coal, through caverns piled with nothing but soot and wood, metal and wire, across gantries where the workers with black-stained faces watched the Machine waiting below, through billows of venting steam and past walls of fat pipes that hummed and hissed like a breeze gusting through a rusted organ. At the hall of capacitors, thousands of them that grew around him like trees in a forest, Lyle thought he saw a shadow move, and dismissed it. Then, at the start of the metal casing that stretched five hundred yards ahead and contained, somewhere inside, more explosives than the mind could comfortably conceive - even a mind as well adjusted to explosions as Lyle’s - he thought he heard a footstep somewhere overhead, a familiar pattering. For a moment, he nearly smiled. At the circuit-breakers, giant switches spun on a handle that took five men to move and snapped like a crocodile’s jaws when the connectors were swung into place, he felt almost ready for what he knew was about to come.

He watched with no sign of emotion as Havelock disappeared into a small shed built within the cavern. Through this there passed a giant’s thickness of arm, composed entirely of cabling, each individual cable fatter than Lyle’s wrist, and hundreds of them to boot, carrying the regulator. He waited without particularly caring that he couldn’t see while men wired in the regulator, and briefly met the eyes of the scientists as they struggled to make his cruder device fit the area that had been designed for Berwick’s. That took nearly half an hour. He waited patiently, sniffed the air and smelt . . . brass, gold, bronze, iron, coal, smoke, dust, static, sweat, sewage, stagnant water, soot, salt, sugar and perhaps, somewhere close by, the tiniest, tiniest hint of ammonia, where there shouldn’t have been anything of the sort.

Havelock emerged, without the regulator in his hand. Everyone stood well back.

Lyle said, ‘Is there a lever marked “Bang”?’

Havelock didn’t grace him with a reply. He waved up at a man on a gantry. The man on the gantry waved at someone down on the floor. Someone down on the floor waved at someone else in the red-black haze of darkness. Somewhere, very far off, a piston went
umph. Umph. Umph. Umph umph umph umphumphumphumph
... A whistle blew. Lyle looked up and heard the sound of venting gas, the familiar
eeeesssshhheeekkk!
as it poured from a hundred different, overly stressed pipes. Little cogs started to click; somewhere a turbine went
duummmduuummmmmduuummmmmm
...

Teams of men started pushing the circuit-breakers shut, huge twists of metal clacking into place. If it was possible for the temperature to rise, it did, and so did the light as fires were stoked and sparks began to flash, little white-blue flickers in the darkness and a rising redness that crept surreptitiously towards the top of the cavern underneath the city. In the streets above, pigeons scattered; underneath Lyle’s feet, the ground hummed, a resonance that passed right up through his stomach and rattled around his teeth and head. Metal shook and strained.