Iain Pears - Stone's Fall

'Are you going to tell me what that great thing is over there?' I called out to him. He had wandered over to Luigi, and was discussing some problem, my presence perfectly forgotten. A strange way of talking he had, as well. A sort of pidgin English with smatterings of Italian thrown in. It was the lingua franca of the workshop, where conversations were conducted half in words, half in gestures and mime. All the technical words were in English, not surprisingly perhaps as none of the three Italians knew any of them before they came to Macintyre, and he did not know the Italian equivalents, even when they existed. The grammar was Italian, and the rest was a mixture of the two, with a lot of grunting thrown in to fill up space.

I had to wait for an answer; whatever the problem was it took some sorting and ended with Macintyre on his knees before the machine – some sort of drill, as far as I could discern – like a penitent at prayer, slowly twisting knobs to make fine adjustments, measuring distances with calipers, repeating the operation several times before an outburst of grunting suggested the problem was resolved.

'What was that?' he asked when he returned to my side.

'Your plumbing.'

'Ha!' He turned and led the way back to the lone machine lying clamped on a solitary workbench. 'What do you think it is?'

I looked carefully at the machine before me. It was a thing of some elegance, essentially a steel tube with wing-like projections along its length, tapering at the back and ending with a small three-winged propeller in shiny brass. At the other end, it stopped abruptly and open to the air, but a little way away was a continuation which obviously bolted on to the end to give a rounded shape.

'It obviously is designed to go through the water,' I said. I walked around and peered into the nose of the machine. It was empty. 'And this clearly holds something. Most of its length is taken up with machinery, which I take to be the engine, although there is no funnel, and no boiler. This empty piece must hold the cargo.' I shook my head. 'It looks a bit like a very big shell with a propeller attached.'

Macintyre laughed. 'Very good! Very good! A shell with a propeller. That is precisely what it is. A torpedo, to be precise.'

I was puzzled. A torpedo, I knew, was a long pole pushed from the front of a ship to impale an opponent, then explode. Hardly useful in the days of ironclads and ten-inch guns.

'Of course,' he continued, 'I merely borrow the word as I could think of nothing better. This is an automobile torpedo. A charge of explosive there,' he pointed at the nose, 'and an engine capable of propelling it in a straight line there. Aim it at the opposing ship, set it off and that's that.'

'So the front will be full of gunpowder.'

'Oh no. Gunpowder is too susceptible to damp. And something which goes underneath the surface of the water is liable to get wet, however well it is made. So I will use guncotton. And, of course I can make it myself; one part cotton wool in fifteen parts of sulphuric and nitric acids. Then you wash it, dry it. Look.'

He gestured to a series of boxes in the corner that rested on top of several vats.

'That's the guncotton?'

'Yes. Over the past few months I've made several hundredweight of the stuff.'

'Isn't it dangerous to have it lying around?'

'No, no. It's quite safe, if it's prepared properly. If it's not cleaned and dried as it should be, then it can easily go off all on its own. But this is perfectly safe. To make it explode, it will have to be compressed, then set off with a detonator made of mercuric fulminate. At the moment you could jump up and down on it all day and come to no harm. That's the dangerous stuff over there.' He pointed to another corner.

'What's that?'

'Gunpowder. I bought it before I realised it wouldn't do. It's useless now; I'm going to use it on Cort's pillar, if he can make up his mind what he wants.'

'So the explosive is in the front, it hits the ship and – bang.'

'Bang. Precisely,' he said approvingly.

'What size bang? I mean, how much explosive will you need to sink a battleship?'

'That will be determined by experiments.'

'You're going to fire off torpedoes at passing battleships until one sinks?'

'I don't think that will be necessary,' he said, with the air of one who would have loved nothing more. 'Detonating explosives against plates of armour will do.'

'I'm almost disappointed,' I said. 'But isn't a gun more reliable? Less chance of something going wrong, and less chance of the other ship getting out of the way? And cheaper?'

'Possibly so, but to send a shell of equivalent power on its way you need a gun weighing some sixty tons. And for that you need a very large ship. Which has to be armour-plated, and carry a large crew. With a few of these, a corvette of three hundred tons and a crew of sixty will be a match for the largest battleship in the world.'

'The Royal Navy will thank you for that, I'm sure,' I said ironically.

Macintyre laughed. 'They won't. This will neutralise every navy in the world! No one will dare send their capital ships to sea, for fear of losing them. War will come to an end.'

I found his optimism touching, if misplaced. 'That would kill off demand for your invention, would it not? How many of these could you sell?'

'I have no idea.'

I did. If it worked, and he could persuade one navy to buy them, then he would sell them to every navy in the world. Admirals are as discerning as housewives in a department store. They must have what everyone else is having.

'Does it work?'

'Of course. At least, it will work, when one or two problems are ironed out.'

'Such as?'

'It has to go in a straight line, as I say. That is quite straightforward. But it also has to propel itself at a constant depth, not rising and falling. Through the water, not over the top of it.'

'Why?'

'Because ships are plated above the waterline, but not so heavily below it. Shells burst when they hit the water, so there is rarely direct damage under sea level, and so little need to protect the hulls so far down.'

'How much does it cost to make these?'

'I've no idea.'

'And how much will you try to sell them for?'

'I haven't thought about that.'

'Where would you manufacture them? You could hardly do it here.'

'I don't know.'

'How much have you spent on developing it so far?'

All of a sudden the boyish look of enthusiasm which had animated his face since he began talking about his machine faded. He looked his age and more so, careworn and anxious.

'Everything I have, or had. And more.'

'You are in debt?' He professed to like direct questions. Normally I do not, except where money is concerned. There I desire absolute and unambiguous precision.

He nodded.

'How much?'

'Three hundred pounds. I think.'

'At what rate of interest?'

'I don't know.'

I was appalled. However skilled Macintyre was as an engineer, he was no businessman. In that department he was a naïve as a newborn babe. And someone, I could tell, was taking advantage of that.

I do not object to such practices. Macintyre was an adult and far from stupid. He had entered into an agreement fully conscious of what he was doing. If he did so, that was his fault, not the fault of the person who was so exploiting his unworldly nature. It turned out, so he told me, that he had needed money, both to pay the wages of his men, and to buy the material necessary for his great machine, and had assumed he would be able to pay it off with a job he had taken on designing the metal work for a new bridge to be thrown across the Grand Canal. But that project had collapsed, so no payment was forthcoming, and the debts had mounted up.

'I arrived in Venice with enough money, so I thought, to live indefinitely. But this machine has been more difficult than I could ever have imagined. The problems to be solved! You cannot believe it. Building the case and ensuring it is watertight, designing the engine, the detonator, coming up with an entirely new device to regulate depth. It takes time and money. More money than I have.'