Ghosts of Engines Past (3 page)

While he sat behind his desk, I unpacked my chemicals. I uncorked a bottle and poured a little solution into a glass, then opened a jar of dark purple crystals. I dropped one into the glass, where it began to bubble with great vigor.

“Permanganate of potash added to peroxide of hydrogen will release oxygen,” I explained as we watched the reaction turn the liquid to a greenish purple froth.

“I know t'reaction,” he replied.

I now laid out drawings before him.

“I wish to have a reactor built. Peroxide will be fed in here, potash here. Oxygen will be released into this pipe as they react, and when they are spent, the solution will be vented through this tap before fresh materials are introduced to give off more oxygen.”

He examined the drawings, scratching his head from time to time, but generally nodding. At last he looked up.

“Can be built, but what end for it? There's oxygen all about.”

“I have an application that calls for pure oxygen. An industrial application.”

“Ah.”

“How much to build it, and how long?”

“Summat busy for present... thirty pounds. Just now there's batches of valves for Mister Stevenson's new engine fleet... a fortnight?”

“Done! Put my contract on your books.”

My reactor looked viable in principle, but the only way to test it was by means of a flight. That was risky. Still, it was worth the risk.

My father had two sayings that I lived by.
Luck is opportunity recognized,
was sensible enough, except that opportunity generally eluded me.
That which is too good to be true is never true,
was a little less positive, yet it had kept me out of trouble on many occasions. Gainsley and his schemes seemed too good to be true, yet he paid generously enough.

I was returning from Sheffield, and was within ten miles of Gainsley's manor house when a rain storm swept over the countryside. Because it was late in the afternoon, I decided to spend the night at a small inn on the edge of a hamlet. I was dining on a pork pie when a bearded man approached me. He was dressed as an itinerant laborer, but that illusion vanished as soon as he began to speak.

“So, you are Gainsley's latest balloonist,” he said in a soft, almost conspiratorial voice with a French accent.

“I do not know you, sir,” I responded warily.

“My name is Norvin, and I know you to be Harold Parkes.”

Clearly he had something serious to discuss. I gestured to a chair.

“You said I was Lord Gainsley's latest balloonist, yet the baron never flew before I took him aloft.”

“He has had four balloonists. Routley, he died in a mysterious duel in 1831. Sanderson died of food poisoning, two years later. Elders fell from the carriage of a train in 1837, and was found beside the tracks with his neck broken. I would wager my last pound that it was broken before he fell.”

I felt a stab of alarm, but the stranger showed not a trace of hostility.

“You said four balloonists,” I prompted.

“I was on a fishing boat, supposedly being taken back to France. One mile out to sea, I was padlocked to a length of iron rail and heaved over the side.”

“Yet here you are, alive.”

“When on hard times I supplemented my income by liberating goods guarded by padlocks. Thus my pickwire is always upon my person. It was a near thing, picking a lock in darkness, under water.”

I was aware that those balloonists he had named had died, for we are a small fraternity. Now I speculated.

“The balloonist Edward Norvin was French, and a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He vanished in 1836.”

“So I did, Monsieur Parkes. The seventeenth day of July at one hour before midnight. One does not forget days like that in a hurry. I grew a beard and developed a new identity.”

“Can you prove that Gainsley was involved?”

“Can
you
prove that Gainsley and yourself have had
any
business dealings?” he asked in turn.

I raised my finger and opened my mouth to reply... but said nothing. All of our dealings had been in cash. My men Kelly and Feldman now lived on the Gainsley estate, as did I. Nobody knew. The color quite probably drained from my face. Norvin smiled and took a sip from his tankard.

“You are having dreams and visions, Monsieur Parkes,” he continued. “The visions begin to tumble through your mind when ascending with Gainsley and Angelica. They begin at about ten thousand feet, the altitude at which the fox woman's mind becomes more clear. It is as if she were emerging from a drunken stupor, raving randomly.”

“But she has never said a thing.”

“She is not like us. She speaks with her mind, her words are images of thoughts. I would say that you have said nothing of this to Gainsley as yet.”

“Why?”

“You are still alive.”

I did not want to hear any of this, yet it seemed true.

“I saw landscapes that were all red and green under a violet sky,” Norvin continued. “There were cities of silver crystal, their streets strewn with bodies although the buildings were intact. It looked like a scene of plague. My perspective was odd. It was as if I were being dragged about, being made to look at the bodies. The only moving figures were wearing helmets and coveralls that resembled a Seibe diving suit—except that the helmets were made of glass and had no air hoses.”

Now I began to feel really frightened. Norvin was describing precisely what I had seen, both in the ascent visions and in my dreams. I decided to be honest, in order to gain his trust.

“I have also had dreams filled with vast, gleaming things that floated in blackness against constellations of unfamiliar stars,” I confessed.

Norvin nodded. “I have had similar dreams and visions. Tell me more.”

“I—I cannot describe the gleaming things because they are like nothing in my experience, yet they moved with the stateliness of huge ships. They blossomed into white fire that yellowed, then became twinkling, gleaming clouds of fragments.”

“Warships of the air, perhaps, fighting at night. I saw great crowds cheering Angelica. There had been a battle. She was a hero. She was their leader.”

“A woman as leader? Preposterous.”

“Why so? The young Queen Victoria is currently monarch of your vast empire. In the Sixteenth Century Queen Elizabeth ruled you, and she was indeed a warrior queen. In France we had Joan of Arc.”

Again we sat in silence. By now I was in a cold sweat, in spite of the fire roaring in the hearth.

“It is my opinion that Angelica came from somewhere very, very high,” Norvin speculated. “Perhaps from Tibet, in regions that have never been explored. Regions that cannot be explored, because we cannot breathe there. I have studied maps, such as they exist. I have read accounts by the explorers Celebrooke and Webb. They reported mountains five miles high. I think that
our
visions are of cities high in those mountains. It is a region the size of France of which we know nothing. What of the bodies in the visions? What is your thought on them?”

“A plague. Angelica fled for her life. Down, out of the cool, pure air. Down into the thick, warm, soporific atmosphere of humans. For her it would have been like lying in a bath of warm whiskey. Her brain is permanently addled by the dense air. Back in the mountains she would be restored, but in my balloon, four miles above this tavern, her mind also begins to clear in the thin air.”

“No plague,” said Norvin. “I have had four years to think about the content of my visions. Angelica was not fleeing a plague, she was
exiled.
There was a war. She was their Napoleon, and she lost.”

“That is just too fantastic—” I began.

“Gainsley hopes to learn the secrets of her people's weapons and crafts by listening to the babblings of her mind. As her mind clears, she speaks delirious visions in the minds of all those nearby.
That
is why he employs you. He wants to learn secrets that could change the world. He has sketched machines and weapons that he does not yet understand, and each flight allows him to gather more fragments from her mind. His problem is that he must always have a balloonist with him, because he is prone to faint in thin air. That is why he killed the others. He does not want anyone to accumulate as many of Angelica's visions as he has. You told him nothing about the visions, so perhaps he assumes you have a deafness of the mind.”

Now I laughed.

“This is preposterous! What would Napoleon or Wellington know about metalworking, cannon manufacture, flintlock mechanisms, or even weaving cloth for uniforms? It is artisans who know those things, not generals.”

“Really? How do you make gunpowder?”

“Why, take sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre, and mix them in proportions suited to the usage. Sixty percent saltpetre...”

Suddenly I realised what he meant. Some important secrets were very, very simple. Again I shivered in the warmth of the room.

“One single breakthrough can change a world, Monsieur Parkes. Simple ideas, simple enough for even generals and monarchs to understand. Gunpowder can win wars. Invent the bond market, and you can finance wars more easily. Have you ever thought about how accounting changed the world? What about replacing a ship's steering oar with a rudder? All of those things can be comprehended by any idiot—or politician.”

“But surely not all of those things lead to war.”

“Think again. Suppose you were a governor of some colony, and you were brought word that the local natives were being taught to cast cannons and build warships. What would you do?”

“Why send a fleet of gunboats before any ship was launched.”

“Precisely. Angelica's people will not take kindly to us if we catch up with their sciences. They will put us back in our place, make no mistake, and they will destroy our civilization to do it. Good day to you, Monsieur Parkes.”

He stood up to go. I stood too.

“Wait! What are you proposing?”

“To you, sir, I am proposing nothing.”

“Then why speak with me?”

“Why, Monsieur Parkes? Because when I do what I have to do, I want at least one person to know that I acted out of honor.”

I had not told Norvin everything. I was actually the first balloonist in the employ of Gainsley to use an altitude barometer. On no other flight had Angelica been able to point to eight miles on the scale, because my predecessors did not have barometers. Eight miles. Much of the Earth is unexplored, but we do at least know that mountains do not rise to forty two thousand feet. Not on our world, anyway. If Angelica were adapted to such a height, it meant that she had once lived on another world. Mars, perhaps. It was a small planet, so its air might be thin.

I did a lot of research in libraries. Polar caps and seas had been observed on Mars in the mid-Seventeenth Century, and in 1665 the Italian astronomer Cassini had measured its day to be not much different to that of Earth. It was a world like our own, I quickly established as much. Now I turned to the literature of the fantastic. Godwin's
The Man in the Moon
had been published over two hundred years earlier, introducing us to the idea of travel between worlds, and the great Voltaire made use of the idea in
Micromegas.
Clearly planets were other worlds, possibly with inhabitants. If a suitable ship could be built... but perhaps it already had.

For me the conclusion was inescapable: the whole of our planet was Angelica's island of exile, her Elba.

We had been to half of the height that she was adapted to. Her mind had cleared, but not to any great extent. What might she reveal when fully conscious, with a mind as sharp as a newly wrought cavalry saber? Eight miles. It was a very long way up. The balloon could do it, but I could not. Not without my new oxygen reactor. My oxygen reactor that had only ever been tested at sea level.

Then there was Gainsley. Had Norvin been telling the truth? Had Gainsley killed those other balloonists? Anyway, what to do about Gainsley? Eight miles was double the altitude that was causing him distress. Even with pure oxygen, I would be pushing my own powers of endurance to the very limit. Gainsley had no place on the flight, and I told myself that I had to exclude him for his own good. In case he was also as dangerous as Norvin had said, I decided to take my father's old Tower flintlock pistol on the next flight.

The day of the next ascent began perfectly. The air was calm, and the balloon stood tall and stately above the gasworks. The first flights had all been from the privacy of Gainsley's estate, and had been in hot air balloons. Our initial flight from the gasworks had been done unannounced, and had taken everyone by surprise. This time we had crowds, and the newspaper people were there. Gainsley announced to the public that he would ascend alone, so Angelica and myself had been hidden in the wicker car during the night. We remained crouched down as the balloon filled and the sky lightened.

The people of northern London seemed determined to make a big occasion of the flight. Gainsley had declared that the ascent was purely scientific, and that he intended to chart the properties of the atmosphere at extreme altitudes. He would measure wind direction, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and even the intensity of sunlight. A band began to play, and people cheered. As Gainsley began speaking about the importance of science and progress, I heard two workmen nearby say that the balloon was full, and that the hydrogen lead should be tied off.

Gainsley had had the balloon tied down to the roof of the gasworks. One of his trusted men was ready beside a release lever, and pulling upon this would send us on our way. The rope passed through the base of the wicker car, however, and was secured to the main ring at the base of the gas bag. Unknown to everyone, I had brought a butcher's cleaver aboard.

Three blows severed the rope.

The balloon ascended with the speed of a sprinting man. For some moments the band struck up a triumphant march, but above the music I could hear Gainsley's cries of outrage. A large part of the crowd seemed to think that the launch had gone according to plan, so cheering erupted. I remained crouched down, out of sight. Angelica was as passive as ever.