Charles Sheffield - The Amazing Dr. Darwin

Crosse did not look up. “So be it,” he said at last. “So be it.”

Darwin held up a hand greasy with pork fat. “One moment, Joseph, before we rush to the law and the clumsy clutch of official justice. Mr. Crosse, I do not ask you to go beyond your own conscience. But I do ask you to come with me and listen to what I have to say. Colonel Pole and Mr. Faulkner will accompany us, under condition that they promise to remain silent on what they hear.”

“You are my guest, Erasmus, and you would swear me to silence in my own house!” But Faulkner was already on his feet. He led the way out, turning as he left to say, “Florence, this is the day for hot chocolate. Order for yourselves, would you, and have a pot brought through to us.” He glanced at Darwin. “A big one.”

The panelled study across the entrance hall was unheated, and cold enough for frost patterns to sit on the inside of the window panes. Faulkner shivered, gestured to the armchairs, and sat down hard himself on a stuffed ottoman. “Should I have the fire lit in here, Erasmus?”

“I think not. This will be brief.”

Faulkner rubbed his hands together. “Speak, then, before we all freeze.”

“Without delay.” Darwin turned to Richard Crosse. “I begin with a statement that might be considered more as personal opinion than fact. To men of inquiring minds, few elements of today’s natural philosophy excite so much interest as the experiments of van Musschenbroek of Leyden, von Kleist of Pomerania, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, and of our own Jesse Ramsden. Would you not agree?”

“You know all!” Crosse’s face went even paler, and his dark eyes widened.

“Far from it. I know a little, and I guess a great deal. But let me imagine a tale for you. Suppose that we have a young man, one of feverish imagination and genuine inventive powers, who reads of the findings that I mentioned, and becomes fascinated with the whole field of electricity . He reads Mr. Franklin’s great work, Experiments and Observations , and Mr. Joseph Priestley’s encyclopedic History of Electricity . And his own imagination is, to employ an appropriate term, sparked. He has original ideas. He himself begins to experiment—but secretly, because he is still unsure of where his own notions will lead him.”

“Dr. Darwin, you are a wizard! How can you know these things?”

“He’s right, ’Rasmus,” Pole added. “How the devil do you know?”

“I do not know . But events in this house gave sufficient reason for conjecture. Observe.” Darwin leaned across to the desk and picked up an amber paperweight. He rubbed it hard against his own rough jacket, then held it out toward one of Joseph Faulkner’s fur caps, perched on the arm of a chair. “See how the fur moves, to set each of its hairs separate from its neighbors. It is the oldest electric effect, already well known to the old Greeks—our very word, electricity , derives from their word for amber. When I heard that Florence Trustrum had reported her own hair standing separate on arms and legs, and odd sensations on her skin, within this very house, my thoughts turned idly to Leyden jars, and to electric sparkings. But I dismissed the idea as an irrelevance, and my musings went no further. Then last night I saw the underground vault, and within it the diverse but mysterious apparati of some electrical experimenter, copper wires and bars of iron and plates of lead. Yet still I made no connection! Only today, with the chandler’s report of materials delivered to this very place, did my brain offer its synthesis. I recalled the smell of Exhibition Hall when I arrived there—the very air itself held the whiff of electrical discharge. And, at last, I could offer a rational explanation of the hounds’ failure—or rather, to be fair to them, of their success. But who would have suspected it, that Daryush Sharani was last night one of our own company.”

“You would.” Richard Crosse had somewhat recovered his composure. With his secret revealed, a more thoughtful, fatalistic man emerged. “Your every suggestion is precisely right. So now I ask, knowing all, what do you want of me?”

“Knowing all?” Darwin started up in his chair. “Why, man, I know nothing of the most fascinating part of this whole business: what is your machine, that could render a would-be thief totally helpless, and how does it work? That’s what I want to know, not the details of glass rubies, stage magic, or deception.”

Crosse averted his eyes. “That I have sworn to myself I will never reveal. It has done enough damage already. If it were ever to be broadcast…”

“It would not be.” Darwin was wriggling in his seat with excitement. “Not by me, or Jacob, or Joseph. I swear that what you tell us will go no further. On that you have my word as a physician and a human.”

“What of the others?”

“Well, I suppose.” Faulkner glared at Darwin. “Damn it, Erasmus, don’t you think that Jacob and I ought to be allowed to make up our own minds? I know that to find out what’s going on here, you’d be quite happy to pawn our souls.” He turned to Pole. “What do you say, Jacob? I will go along with this, if you will.”

“Right.” Pole nodded to Richard Crosse. “Be assured of our silence, and speak on. Anything you say to us will never be breathed to another mortal. Though so far as I’m concerned, I’m as sure as a pig’s tail curls that I’ll not understand more than two words of your explanation.”

“I wish that were true. But it is elementary, at the same time as it is mysterious.” Crosse went to the desk and took out paper, pen, and inkwell. “I have results, but no sound basis for a scientific explanation. A turning wheel, like the waterwheel that you looked at last night, bearing magnets both fixed and moving, will produce a flow of electricity in loops of wire—the long copper lines, that you saw beneath the Exhibition Hall. And that flow, passed through other coils that I took out of the machine and threw into the river, becomes a force strong enough to bind a man immobile. I attached one wire to the metal plate around the pedestal holding the Heart of Ahura Mazda, and one to the metal rim of the protecting glass case, in such a way that I could disconnect it from the side of the pedestal itself without others seeing my action. It was connected thus.” He sketched a series of simple diagrams in black ink, labeling each one as he did so. His trembling hands grew steady as he worked. “I assure you, I had tested this machine a hundred times on myself. It freezes the subject, with an indescribable feeling both pleasant and unpleasant at once. Free movement is impossible, but when the flow ceases there are no harmful aftereffects, merely a continued tingling like pins and needles.”

“And that is what you did to the Earl of Marbury?” Darwin was peering at the sheet, his eyes alight.

“Exactly that—with no ill result afterwards, to him or to anyone else who tried the same. It seemed a perfect device for protecting the Heart of Ahura Mazda, the word of which would quickly spread all around London and assure the total success of the hoax. As soon as that game was over, I intended to explore the electrical effects that I had discovered until I had plumbed their deepest meaning. But after the death of the thief yesterday…” The face of Richard Crosse had filled with life and energy when he talked of his work. Now it clouded.

“I cannot explain why it proved fatal,” Darwin said softly. “But I can suggest several avenues of thought that should be followed. First, the thief was wearing shoes that were broken and wet. As you and I both know, damp increases electric flow. More important, I suspect, was the swollen and thaw-fed condition of the underground river. If the rate at which the waterwheel turns dictates the level of the charge received by the pedestal, our wretched thief could have received an impulse many times that of your earlier experiments. Enough to blister his hand, and enough to provide a fatal jolt to an already weakened heart.”