James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“It might,” said St. Ives darkly. “It might do a good deal more. I’ll get directly to the point here; this isn’t a matter for dalliance. The Academy undertook to start that damnable machine once, and to be straight with you, I had my man sabotage it. Do you remember?”

Of course Parsons remembered. It had been the incident of Lord Kelvin’s machine that had caused the deepening of the chasm between the two men. Parsons looked almost sneery for a moment and said, “He loaded the contrivance with field mice, if I remember aright. Very effective, if a little bit — what? — primitive, maybe.”

“Well,” continued St. Ives, going right on, “some few of those field mice lived to tell the tale, as my friend Jack might put it. I carried on a study of them for almost two years in the fields round about the manor, until I was certain, finally, that the last of those poor creatures was dead, and what I discovered was a remarkably horrendous syndrome of mutations and cancers. It’s my theory quite simply that this ‘unrestrained cellular activity,’ as you put it, is more likely ungovernable cellular growth. Your engine analogy may or may not apply. It doesn’t matter. You simply cannot start the machine for any purpose, especially for something as frivolous as this. Leave Narbondo’s fate in the hands of the Almighty, for heaven’s sake.”

“Frivolous!” shouted Parsons. “I don’t give a rap for Narbondo’s fate. Imagine, though, what this will mean. Here’s poor Higgins, who has devoted a lifetime to the study of cryogenics. Here’s Narbondo and a lifetime’s study of chemistry. He was a monster, certainly, but so what? You must be a pitifully shortsighted scientist if you can’t see the effect the sum total of their work will have on the future of the human race. And it’s Lord Kelvin’s machine that will usher in that future. To put it simply, my ship is putting in and I mean to board her.” Parsons struck the arm of his chair with his fist to punctuate his speech. Then his eyes half closed and his head nodded forward. He shook himself awake and mumbled something about being suddenly sleepy, and then his head fell against his chest and straightaway he began to snore through his beard, having said, apparently, all he had to say.

The sight of him sleeping so profoundly put me in mind of my own bed, and I was just yawning and starting to say that I would turn in too, when St. Ives leaped to his feet, dropped an already-prepared letter into Parsons’s lap and cried out, “It’s time!” Then he roused Hasbro, who himself leaped up and headed straight for the door.

“Coming or not, Jacky?” asked the professor.

“Why, coming, I suppose. Where? Now?”

“To the Dover Strait. You can sleep on board.”

With that he rushed into Parsons’s room, coming back out with a bundle of the man’s clothes, and I found myself following them through the night — out the backdoor of the inn, down along the seawall, and clambering into the tethered rowboat. Hasbro unshipped the oars and we were away, through the patchy fog, dipping along until the shadowy hull of a small steam trawler rose out of the mists ahead of us. We thunked into the side of her and clambered aboard, then winched up the rowboat after us. Up came the anchor, and I found myself saying hello to Hasbro’s stalwart Aunt Edie and to the grizzled Uncle Botley, pilot of the trawler. Roped onto a little barge behind us rested the diving bell that we had stolen earlier that very night from the icehouse.

St. Ives had drugged poor Parsons. The water bottle had been doctored, and Parsons, in the joy of his victory, had swallowed enough of it to make him sleep for half a day. We would get into the Strait before him, towing the bell, and when we did…

We found the waters around the submerged machine alive with a half-dozen ships, all of them at anchor a good distance away. They had attached a buoy directly to it, to track it so as to avoid either losing it or coming too near it. We showed no hesitation at all, but steamed right up to the line. That was where I played my part, and played it tolerably well, I think.

Up onto the deck I came, wearing an enormous white beard and wig and dressed in Parsons’s clothes, which St. Ives had stolen from his room at the Apple. St. Ives stayed hidden; his face would excite suspicion in any of a number of people. He coached me, though, from inside a cabin, and together we bluffed our way through that line of ships with a lot of what sounded to me like convincing talk about having learned how to “disarm” the machine and having brought along a diving bell for the purpose.

Anyway, certain that I was Parsons, they let us through right enough, and we navigated as close to the buoy as we dared, then set out in the rowboat, towing the barge with the bell standing straddle-legged atop the deck, the jib crane attached to the barge now with brass carriage bolts, its chain pulled off and replaced entirely with heavy line. We would have to be quick, though. Uncle Botley had removed as much iron from the rowboat and barge as he could manage, but there was still the chance that if we didn’t look sharp, the machine would start to tug out nails and would scuttle us.

Hasbro and I manned the oars — work that I was admirably suited to from my days of punting on the Thames. They must have been surprised, though, to see old Parsons hauling away like that, given that he was upward of eighty-five years old. The idea of it amused me, and I pulled all the harder, watching over my shoulder as we drew slowly nearer to the buoy.

St. Ives was in the bell itself, making ready. His was the dangerous work. He was going down without air, because a compressor would have been pulled to pieces. But it was a shallow dive, and it wouldn’t take him long. That was his claim, anyway. “Give me eight minutes by the pocket watch,” he had told us, “and then pull me out of there. I can go down again if need be. And,” he said darkly, “if the rowboat starts to go to pieces, or if there’s trouble down below, cut the line and get away as quick as you can.”

Hasbro insisted at once on going with him, as did I, neither one of us keen on getting away. But that wasn’t St. Ives’s method and never had been. He was still in a funk because of the time he thought we had wasted and because of the two ships that had gone down needlessly. And there was the fact of his — as he saw it — having allowed the machine to exist all these years, sitting placidly in that machine works, only to be stolen and misused. He was the responsible party, and he would brook no nonsense to the contrary. There was a certain psychological profit, then, in his going down and facing the danger alone; his face seemed to imply that if something went wrong and we had to leave him, well, so be it; it was no more than he deserved.

Then there was the business of Alice, wasn’t there? It hovered over the man’s head like a rain cloud, and I believe that I can say, without taking anything away from his natural courage, that St. Ives didn’t care two figs whether he lived or died.

And although in truth I had no idea how much air one working man would breathe at a depth of eight fathoms, I accepted his assurances that two men would breathe twice as much and increase the dangers accordingly. The controls were meant for a single man, too, and St. Ives had been studying and manipulating them all the way out from Sterne Bay. Hasbro and I would have been nothing but dangerous baggage, trying to demonstrate our loyalty by our willingness to die along with him, if it came to that. He didn’t need any such demonstrations.

Down he went, into the dark ocean. One of the handlike armatures of the bell held on to a bundle of explosives wrapped in sheet rubber and sealed with asphaltum varnish. There was a timing device affixed to it. St. Ives had never meant to “disarm” the machine at all. He had meant all along to blow it to kingdom come, and he had stolen Higgins’s bell for just that purpose.