The Explosionist (16 page)

W
AKING BLEARY-EYED
on Saturday morning, Sophie drank a huge mug of tea and ate a piece of toast in the kitchen, then took her schoolbooks into the dining room, where she worked doggedly through a huge pile of homework. Peggy was away for the weekend at her second cousin’s wedding in Kirkcaldy, both maids had been given the day off, and Sophie was in charge of meals.

After a supper of scrambled eggs and toast, Sophie climbed the stairs to her room, where she turned the key to lock the door and then retrieved the elements of the crystal set.

She thought she’d learned as much as she could from poor dead Andrew Wallace, and besides, she couldn’t bear the idea
of disturbing him again. The man who’d set off the bomb in Princes Street was a twenty-three-year-old engineering student called Malcolm Black, and Sophie had a few clippings and one of the dead flowers from the memorial (the one she’d picked up that day with Jean outside the electric showroom) to focus her tuning.

This time it wasn’t nearly so easy, and she started to wonder if her success the night before had been beginner’s luck. She focused like mad on Malcolm Black, repeating the name to herself until the syllables stopped making sense. She had a faint perception of presence, but it was as if the bomb had pulverized Malcolm Black’s psyche along with his body.

More than half an hour passed before Sophie began to detect a pattern to her failures. Both times that she’d almost reached Malcolm, the same voice had cut in over his, a voice whose timbre and accent suggested a working-class man, perhaps middle-aged or even elderly.

There was something familiar about it, she thought. Could this be the voice of someone she had actually met? Someone who wanted to speak to her now?

She put aside all thoughts of Malcolm Black and concentrated on the new voice.

With a little adjustment, she found the place on the Marconi spectrum where it came through most clearly. Holding the tuner in place, she sent her own psychic
energy to the unknown spirit.

Suddenly the words snapped into focus, no longer garbled. “Ma money,” the voice said. “Where’s ma money?”

And in a flash, Sophie knew who it was. It was the Veteran, who had been asking Sophie for money for years, every Friday afternoon, until he’d been taken away the week before, and who had called out something very similar as he attacked the minister at Waterloo Day.

But the Veteran wasn’t dead! He was very much alive, held in a cell at the Castle. Could being imprisoned in a dark cell let a spirit fly free of its body?

She decided to venture a question.

“What money?” she said. “Was it your pension? Or did you get paid to kill the medium? Why were you at the Balmoral, and who paid you to murder Mrs. Tansy?”

“Ma money,” the voice repeated. “Where’s ma money?”

“Who paid you to kill the medium?” Sophie said.

“They took away my pension, and they said I’d not regret it,” the voice said, falling into a four-beat line like something out of a poem.

“Who?” Sophie said impatiently. “Who was it who said you’d not regret it?”

“They said I’d not regret it,” the voice said, sounding less certain than before. “They took away my pension. They gave me an assignment.”

“What was it?” Sophie asked.

“They gave me an assignment, and they said I’d not regret it,” said the voice, words falling into the same four-beat rhythm as before.

“What assignment?” she said.

“They told me the Balmoral,” said the voice.

The promptness and precision of the response took Sophie so much by surprise that she lost hold of the tuner and had to fiddle about for a few agonizing seconds before finding the place again.

“—told ’em I was skint, and neither of ’em wanted to know,” said the voice.

Sophie could have kicked herself. She’d missed the whole substance of his answer, with no guarantee she’d be able to get him to repeat it!

“And I said to him,” the voice went on, in full flow, “‘But where’s ma money? Where’s ma bloody money? You’ve no idea what it means these days, to live from week to week on a fixed income.’ And so I took the other lady down, till they had to tear me off her and carry me awa’.”

“Who wanted the medium dead?” Sophie asked, hoping to prompt the voice back to its earlier topic.

But it was no good.

“Ma money,” whispered the voice, fading even as Sophie listened. “All I asked for was ma money….”

And try as Sophie might, she couldn’t find the voice anywhere on the spirit frequencies. It was all regular old everyday radio pirates blethering on about how to set up an illegal still or weatherproof a roof.

She listened for a few minutes to Dr. Freud rabbiting away about the Daedalus Complex: men inventing machines that caused the deaths of young people who ignored constraints on how the technology should be used. Before too long, though, she let go of the tuner and turned away from the apparatus in disgust.

She put away all the equipment and changed into her pajamas, got into bed, and turned out the light. But there was something she couldn’t get out of her mind.

Sophie’s crystal set picked up the voices of the dead at certain wavelengths, as well as living people broadcasting on the frequencies in between. Obviously she’d somehow tuned in to the Veteran’s thoughts as well. But how would that work? The Veteran was alive and well.

It was just about possible that the force of the Veteran’s obsession with the money had given his voice a special telepathic carrying power.

But wasn’t it more likely that the Veteran, too, was now dead?

Sophie got up the next morning at half past six, hours before the usual time on a Sunday, and put on her slippers and
dressing gown before creeping downstairs to retrieve the newspapers from the front doorstep.

Having lit the range and put a large kettle on the stove, she sat down at the kitchen table and spread the papers before her.

Half an hour later, the kettle had long since boiled and was now releasing clouds of steam, but Sophie didn’t even notice, her whole attention fixed on a story in the left-hand column of the front page of the
Scotsman
:

The Veteran was dead.

He’d spoken to Sophie from beyond the grave.

And she had no doubt—despite the paper’s bland assurances—that the death had been arranged, probably by the same person who hired the Veteran to kill the medium in the first place. Someone who feared that under interrogation the man might reveal what he knew and implicate his employer in that terrible crime.

What kind of person had access to a prisoner locked up in the country’s securest stronghold?

Were Sophie and Mikael in danger?

B
ETWEEN WORRYING ABOUT
murderers, IRYLNS, and the everyday threat of terrorism, Sophie felt like she was on the verge of a complete breakdown. And IRYLNS was almost the worst of it. It was shocking how different the city looked to Sophie after having been to IRYLNS.

The young women were everywhere. Sophie spotted more than a dozen of them before she’d even got halfway to school on Monday morning: the girl in the pink jacket on the tram, the girl wearing the plaid tam-o’-shanter and modest ankle-length skirt, the handsome young woman with black bobbed hair buying a cup of coffee from the stall at the corner of Waterloo Place. All their faces were as smooth and blank as wax.

In contrast, the girls in first-period English looked reassuringly ordinary. Even Harriet Jeffries couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a real (horrible) living breathing human, especially when she caught Sophie staring and shot her an evil grimace, then resumed her usual butter-wouldn’t-melt expression before the teacher noticed.

But though the girls looked just as they should, Sophie still had a strange cloudy feeling of cobwebby things hanging at the edge of her vision. Half a dozen times that morning she felt a tap on her shoulder and jerked around to find nothing there, so that when Nan came to fetch her to lunch, Sophie ignored her until the others began laughing at her absentmindedness.

Over lunch in the refectory—greasy little pellets of mince like rabbit droppings, dun-colored mashed potatoes, and turnips—Sophie caught up on the weekend’s news. Having received special furlough from the headmistress on account of war preparedness needs, the others had gone home to Nan’s family’s house for a marathon session of driving lessons.

“Nan’s brother’s lovely,” said Priscilla.

Nan beamed at her.

Jean put down her knife and fork.

“How’s he doing with the prosthesis?” Sophie asked. It would be interesting to have a mechanical limb; it would make
one into a kind of human-machine hybrid.

“Pretty well, I think,” said Nan, though she didn’t sound confident. “The worst of it is that he didn’t lose the leg in combat. It was a Scottish mine that blew up the truck. When he first got home, he wouldn’t do anything but sit in Father’s armchair drinking whisky. But once they fitted him with the new leg, he began to feel much better. The best news is that there’ll still be a position for him in his old regiment. Not just a desk job, either: he’ll fight alongside everybody else. That’s cheered him up no end.”

Sophie privately found this perverse, but it would not do to say so.

“I daresay it cheered him up even more to have Priscilla hanging all over him,” Jean said, sounding so bitter that Sophie looked at her with surprise. “I found it quite disgusting.”

“They were just dancing,” Nan said, rising at once to her brother’s defense. “I thought it was lovely. If it cheered Tom up, what’s wrong with that?”

“I certainly enjoyed myself,” said Priscilla. She sounded almost angry. “Tom’s a wonderful dancer. Nan, do you think he has a girlfriend?”

“No,” Nan began, “he was engaged, but—”

The rest of the sentence was drowned out by Jean smashing her teacup down onto her tray so hard that the saucer cracked
in two. She pushed back her chair and ran from the room.

Sophie looked around to see if any teachers had noticed, but there wasn’t a single adult in sight.

What had happened? Usually at least two or three of them supervised at lunch.

Priscilla followed her train of thought without effort.

“Miss Henchman’s called all the teaching staff to a special meeting,” she told Sophie. “It’s supposedly something to do with the government bill about the school learning age and war preparedness. It sounds as though certain programs will be able to pick which girls they want and—”

“It’s wicked of you to tease Jean like that,” Nan interrupted. “She can’t bear it that people like you so much, and that you’re so, well,
nice
to them all.”

“By
people
, I suppose you mean boys?”

“Well, yes, but I didn’t want you to think I was being rude,” Nan said.

They didn’t see Jean again until they arrived in Mr. Petersen’s classroom after lunch and were greeted by three words on the chalkboard:
POWER IN POWER
, the motto of the Hanseatic League.

“Our topic for the day,” said the teacher when all the girls had taken their seats, “is the relationship between science and politics. Everybody knows there’s a pun in the Hanseatic slogan. Paraphrased and expanded, it might read ‘Political
power depends on the effective harnessing of new technologies and natural resources.’”

Oh, for goodness’ sake, a man with this knack for making everything long-winded and tedious simply
couldn’t
be in bed with the terrorists! Sophie began drawing an elaborately decorated letter P in her notebook.

“Speaking simply of the forms of power that actually make machines run,” Mr. Petersen continued, “what are the traditional preferences of the Hanseatic states?”

Nobody answered.

“We generally prefer electricity to fossil fuels,” Sophie said, feeling the rest of the class go stiff with boredom. “We’ve developed highly efficient technologies partly because of our relative lack of natural resources. Countries that’ve got a lot of coal tend to be almost
profligate
with steam power; it’s precisely because we can’t afford to use up all our supply running trains that we’ve developed ways of using electrical power to move vehicles far in advance of anything they have in Europe or the Americas.”

“Part of what Sophie’s saying,” said Mr. Petersen approvingly, “is that human ingenuity can do a great deal to counteract so-called natural disadvantages. In Scotland, for instance, engineers have developed superb new technologies that quite make up for the fact that coal’s in such short supply. And at the international level, the Nobel Consortium has been able to
use its monopoly on top-quality armaments to secure political autonomy for the Hanseatic states. Weapons equal peace.”

At the word
armaments
everyone groaned. Even Sophie wasn’t sure she agreed with Mr. Petersen. Weren’t explosives responsible for more evil than good in the world? Sophie remembered crying when she first learned about the seals trained to drag harnesses of explosives to blow up tankers. The poor creatures died in the service of a cause they didn’t even understand, and that couldn’t be right, could it?

“No, no, hear me out,” the teacher said. “This weapons business is really important. What’s the classic example of science directly affecting politics?”

“The establishment of the state of Israel,” Fiona said. “Chaim Weizmann traded the secret of the acetone process—which lets you turn corn into acetone for manufacturing cordite—for the European Federation’s support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.”

“Very good, Fiona,” said Mr. Petersen. Sophie was
bursting
with jealousy. “Of course, politics can have very direct results on science and technology as well. The outcome of America’s War of Secession depended very heavily on access to explosives. At the war’s outset, almost all the gunpowder mills were located in the Northern states. The Northerners would have won and the United States of America would still exist as a single entity if Delaware hadn’t seceded to join the
Southern cause. Why was Delaware so important?”

Everyone knew the answer to that.

“Delaware had the DuPont munitions factories,” Jean said. Her eyes were still a bit red, Sophie noticed, but she didn’t sound upset anymore. “Once the Southerners got hold of them, the Northerners had to let them secede.”

“Mr. Petersen?” said Fiona, raising her hand.

“Yes, Fiona?”

“Weren’t we supposed to do an experiment today? We’ve used up more than half our class time already.”

Mr. Petersen looked at the clock and did a comical double take when he saw the time.

“We’ve not a moment to lose!” he said.

It turned out that Mr. Petersen had got hold of an old but functional pair of Caselli pantelegraphs, which allowed a person at one end to transmit an image to a receiver at the other. The sender wrote a message with nonconducting ink on a sheet of tin, which was then fixed to a curved metal plate and scanned by a needle. Telegraph wires carried the electrical message to the receiving machine, where it was transcribed in Prussian blue onto paper soaked in potassium ferrocyanide.

This was
fun
, Sophie thought, watching each set of lab partners take their turn to send a message, with much wrangling over who got to have the final product as a keepsake. Sophie and Leah were the last ones in line, and when their
turn came, only minutes before the end of class, Leah took the sender’s station and Sophie manned the receiver.

“I’m going to send you my famous drawing of a camel,” Leah said, scraping earnestly at the tin with the writing instrument.

She came to join Sophie once she’d finished drawing and positioned the needle to do its work. As the clean blue marks began to appear on the paper, the two girls leaned over to watch, holding their breath.

“Look!” Leah said, jumping up and down and pointing. “There’s the crescent moon in the background!”

Leah’s camel posed in silhouette against a desert horizon, complete with palm tree and oasis and moon sliver. They watched with excitement as the triangular leaves of the palm tree and the camel’s skinny head and neck began to emerge at the top of the page.

About a quarter of the way down, though, the line experienced a disruption. The stylus dug deep into the paper, racing back and forth.

“What’s happening?” Leah asked Sophie.

The machine had gone haywire. After a minute the needle began to behave again, falling into its regular back-and-forth movement. But something was clearly awry. Beneath the horizontal strip of desert landscape with camel was a slice—growing even as they watched—of something quite different.

“What is it?” Leah asked Sophie, who shrugged again and shook her head.

“Some kind of a technical drawing?” one of the other girls said.

“Yes,” said Sophie with impatience, “but what’s it a drawing
of
?”

Leah peered at the line of text along the bottom. Parts of the diagram were labeled as well.

“Oh!” she said. “At first I thought the letters had come through all fuzzy because of the needle, but they’re not even real letters!”

When Sophie looked, though, she saw something
quite
surprising: the letters were real, but they were in the Cyrillic rather than the Roman alphabet.

Beginning to puzzle out the words, she’d caught nothing more than the place and date lines—Sankt Peterburg, 21-02-23—and the words
serdtsevina
and
reaktor
when a hand snatched the page out of the calipers holding it in place. The stylus began whirring, and a wisp of smoke drifted from the guts of the machine.

Sophie looked up to see Mr. Petersen, his face pale and his hands shaking.

“What’s wrong?” Leah said. “Mr. Petersen, why did you take our facsimile? We hadn’t finished looking at it—do you know what went wrong?”

“Does the machine have a mechanical memory that it stores pictures in,” Nan asked, “and could it have sent an old one by mistake?”

“No,” said Mr. Petersen blankly, “there’s no memory. I can’t imagine what happened. Some kind of a misfire, I suppose.”

“Oh,” said Leah. “Will we get full credit for the experiment, even though it didn’t work properly?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Petersen, a little color coming back into his face. He had rolled up the malformed image and tucked it into his breast pocket. “Full credit for the practical part, at any rate. I won’t make any guarantees about your marks for the report. It depends on how well you write everything up; better than last time, Leah, I hope!”

The bell rang. Sophie lingered as the others left the classroom.

“I’m sure it was a technical drawing of some kind,” she said to Mr. Petersen. “Had you any idea what it might be for?”

Mr. Petersen gave her a wary look. “Had you?” he countered.

Sophie shook her head. It was strange, but she could have sworn he seemed relieved.

“Do you think I could take it with me, and see if I can work out what it is?” she asked.

“No,” said Mr. Petersen in a loud voice. “I need to hold
on to it,” he added semiapologetically, “to help me learn what went wrong.”

“All right,” said Sophie, though she couldn’t see how it would help him. In any case she remembered the drawing perfectly well.

Her first impression was that it was some kind of fortified chamber, something one might build to test a high-powered explosive reaction, but the real mystery was where it had come from. In spite of Mr. Petersen’s dismissive answer to Nan’s question, could the machine have retained the memory of something transmitted in the past?

It was an intriguing puzzle, one consuming enough that Sophie barged straight into Miss Chatterjee in the corridor outside the chemistry classroom.

“Sophie!” said Miss Chatterjee, using a handkerchief to wipe the hot coffee off her front.

“Really, Sophie,” added Miss Hopkins, who had been walking alongside Miss Chatterjee, “you could hardly be more careless.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Chatterjee,” said Sophie, feeling like the worst person in the world.

“
Sorry
doesn’t put dinner on the table,” Miss Hopkins commented. “Sophie, get the mop and bucket from the janitor’s cubby and clean up that spill before someone slips and hurts herself.”

“Yes, Miss Hopkins,” Sophie said, not bothering to mention that mopping would make her late for her next class.

Of course it took ages to find the bucket, fill it with hot water and Nightingale fluid, and go back to clean up the mess. By then Sophie was mopping so frantically that it took her a minute to realize she was hearing a three-way conversation between Mr. Petersen, Miss Hopkins, and Miss Chatterjee in the classroom behind her.

“Are we protecting the girls,” said Miss Chatterjee in her unmistakable cut-glass accent, “or are we simply protecting the country?”