The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (50 page)

“Suspended?”

“Shut off
.
Current interruptus.” Parsons winked.

“Shut off? Lunacy,” St. Ives said. “Sheer lunacy.”

“It’s not unknown to have happened. Common knowledge has it that the magnetic poles have reversed themselves any number of times, and that during the interim between the establishing of new poles, the earth was blessedly free of any electromagnetic field whatsoever. I’m surprised that a physicist such as yourself has to be informed of such a thing.” Parsons peered at St. Ives over the top of his pince-nez, then fished up out of his broth a tendril of vegetable. St. Ives gaped at it. “Kelp,” said the secretary, slathering the dripping weed into his mouth.

St. Ives nodded, a shiver running up along his spine. The pink chicken breast that lay beneath wilted lettuce on his plate began, suddenly, to fill him with a curious sort of dread. His lunches with Parsons at the Bayswater Club invariably went so. The secretary was always one up on him, simply because of the food. “So what, exactly, do you intend? To
hope
such an event into existence?”

“Not at all,” said Parsons smugly. “We’re building a device.”

“A
device
?”

“To reverse the polarity of the earth, thereby negating any natural affinity the earth might have for the comet and vice versa.”

“Impossible,” said St. Ives, a kernel of doubt and fear beginning to sprout within him.

“Hardly.” Parsons waved his fork with an air of gaiety, then scratched the end of his nose with it. “No less a personage than Lord Kelvin himself is at work on it, although the theoretical basis of the thing was entirely a product of James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell’s sixteen equations in tensor calculus demonstrated a good bit beyond the idea that gravity is merely a form of electromagnetism. But his conclusions, taken altogether, had such terrible and far-reaching side implications hat they were never published. Lord Kelvin, of course, has access to them. And I think that we have little to fear that in such benevolent hands, Maxwell’s discoveries will lead to nothing but scientific advancement. To more, actually—to the temporary reversal of the poles, as I said, and the switching off, as it were, of any currents that would attract our comet. Trust us, sir. This threat, as you call it, is a threat no more. You’re entirely free to apply your manifold talents to more pressing matters.”

St. Ives sat silently for a moment, wondering if any objections would penetrate Parsons’s head past the crunching of vegetation. Quite likely not, but St. Ives hadn’t any choice but try. Two days earlier, when he had assured his friends in Dover that they would easily thwart Ignacio Narbondo, he hadn’t bargained on this. Was it possible that the clever contrivances of Lord Kelvin and the Royal Academy would constitute a graver threat than that posed by the doctor? It wasn’t to be thought of. Yet here was Parsons, full of talk about reversing the polarity of the earth. St. Ives was duty-bound to speak. He seemed to find himself continually at odds with his peers.

“This…device,” St. Ives said. “This is something that’s been cobbled together in the past few weeks, is it?”

Parsons looked stupefied. “It’s not something that’s been
cobbled
together at all. But since you ask, no. I think I can safely tell you that it is the culmination of Lord Kelvin’s lifelong work. All the rest of his forays into electricity are elementary, pranks, gewgaws. It’s this engine, sir, on which his genius has been expended.”

“So he’s had the lifelong ambition of reversing the polarity of the earth? To what end? Or are you telling me that he’s
anticipated
the comet for the past forty years?”

“I’m not telling you either of those, am I? If I chose to tell you the truth about the matter, which I clearly don’t choose to do, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. It would confound you. Suffice it to say that the man is willing to sacrifice ambition for the good of humanity.”

St. Ives nodded, giving his chicken a desultory poke with the end of his finger. It might easily have been some sort of pale tide-pool creature shifting in a saline broth on the plate. Ambition…He had his own share of ambition. He had long suspected the nature of the device that Lord Kelvin tinkered with in his barn in Harrogate. Parsons was telling him the truth, or at least part of it. And what the truth meant was that St. Ives, somehow, must possess himself of this fabulous machine.

Except that the idea of doing so was contemptible. There were winds in this world that blew a man into uncharted seas. But while they changed the course of his action, they ought not to change the course of his soul. Take a lesson from Robinson Crusoe, he told himself. He thought about Alice then, and of the brief time they had spent together. Suddenly he determined to hack the weeds out of her vegetable garden, and the thought buoyed him up. Then, just as suddenly, he was depressed beyond words, and he found himself staring at the mess on his plate. Parsons was looking contentedly out the window, picking at his teeth with a fingernail.

First things first, St. Ives said to himself. Reverse the polarity of the earth! “Have you read the works of young Rutherford?” he asked Parsons.

“Pinwinnie Rutherford of Edinburgh?”

“Ernest Rutherford. Of New Zealand. I ran across him in Canada. He’s done some interesting work in the area of light rays, if you can call them that.” St. Ives wiggled loose a thread of chicken, carried the morsel halfway to his mouth, looked at and changed his mind. “There’s some indication that alpha and beta rays from the sun slide away along the earth’s magnetic field, arriving harmlessly at the poles. It seems likely, at a hasty glance, that without the field they’d sail in straightaway—we’d be bathed in radioactivity. The most frightful mutations might occur. It has been my pet theory, in fact, that the dinosaurs were laid low in precisely that same fashion—that their demise was a consequence of the reversal of the poles and the inherent cessation of the magnetic field.”

Parsons shrugged. “All of this
is
theory, of course. But the comet is eight days away, and
that’s
not at all theory. It’s not a brontosaurus, my dear fellow, it’s an enormous chunk of iron that threatens to smash us into jelly. From your chair across the able it’s easy enough to fly in the face of the science of mechanics, but I’m afraid, sir, that Lord Kelvin will get along very well without you—he has in the past.”

“There’s a better way,” said St. Ives simply. It was useless to lose his temper over Parsons’s practiced stubbornness.

“Oh?” said the secretary.

“Ignacio Narbondo, I believe, has showed it to us.”

Parsons dropped his spoon onto his lap and launched into a choking fit. St. Ives held up a constraining hand. “I’m very much aware of his threats, I assure you. And they’re not idle threats, either. Do you propose to pay him?”

“I’m constrained from discussing it.”

“He’ll do what he claims. He’s taken the first steps already.”

“I realize, my dear fellow, that you and the doctor are sworn enemies. He ought to have danced his last jig on the gallows a long time ago. If it were in my power to bring him to justice, I would, but I have no earthly idea where he is, quite frankly, and I’ll warn you, with no beating about the bush, that this business of the comet must not become a personal matter with you. I believe you take my meaning. Lord Kelvin sets us all an example.”

St. Ives counted to ten very slowly. Somewhere between seven and eight, he discovered that Parsons was very nearly right. What he said was beside the point, though. “Let me repeat,” St. Ives said evenly, “that I believe there’s a better way.”

“And what does a lunatic like Narbondo have to do with this ‘better way’?”

“He intends, if I read him aright, to effect the stoppage of certain very active volcanoes in arctic Scandinavia via the introduction of petrifactive catalysts into open fissures and dykes. The subsequent detonation of an explosive charge would lead to the eruption of a chain of volcanic mountains that rise above the jungles of Amazonian Peru. The entrapped energy expended by such an upheaval would, he hopes, cast us like a Chinese rocket into the course of the comet.”

“Given the structure of the interior of the earth,” said Parsons, grinning into his mineral water, “it seems a dubious undertaking at best. Perhaps…”

“Are you familiar with hollow-earth theory?”

Parsons blinked at St. Ives. The corners of his mouth twitched.

“Specifically with that of McClung-Jones of the Quebec Geological Mechanics Institute? The ‘thin-crust phenomenon’?”

Parsons shook his head tiredly.

“It’s possible,” said St. Ives, “that Narbondo’s detonation will effect a series of eruptions in volcanoes residing in the hollow core of the earth. The stupendous inner-earth pressures would themselves trigger an eruption at Jones’s thin-crust point.”

“Thin-crust point?” asked Parsons in a plonking tone.

“The very Peruvian mountains toward which our man Narbondo has cast the glad eye!”

“That’s an interesting notion,” muttered Parsons, coughing into his napkin. “Turn the earth into a Chinese rocket.” He stared out the window, blinking his eyes ponderously, as if satisfied that St. Ives had concluded his speech.

“What I propose,” said St. Ives, pressing on, “is to thwart Narbondo, and then effect the same thing, only in reverse—to propel the earth temporarily out of her orbit in a long arc that would put the comet beyond her grasp. If the calculations were fined down sufficiently—and I can assure you that they have been—we’d simply slide back into orbit some few thousand miles farther along our ellipse, a pittance in the eyes of the incalculable distances of our journeying through the void.”

St. Ives sat back and fished in his coat for a cigar. Here was the Royal Academy, unutterably fearful of the machinations of Ignacio Narbondo—certain, that is, that the doctor was not merely talking through his hat. If they could trust to Narbondo to destroy the earth through volcanic manipulation, then they could quite clearly trust St. Ives to save it by the same means. What was good for the goose, after all. St. Ives took a breath and continued. “There’s been some study of the disastrous effects of in-step marching on bridges and platforms—military study mostly. My own theory, which abets Narbondo’s, would make use of such study, of the resonant energy expended by a troop of synchronized marchers…”

Parsons grimaced and shook his head slowly. He wasn’t prepared to admit anything about the doings of the nefarious doctor. And St. Ives’s theories, although fascinating, were of little use to them here. What St. Ives wanted, perhaps, was to speak to the minister of parades…

Then there was this man Jones. Hadn’t McClung-Jones been involved in certain ghastly lizard experiments in the forests of New Hampshire? “Very ugly incident, that one,” Parsons muttered sadly. “One of your hollow-earth men, wasn’t he? Had a lot of Mesozoic reptiles dummied up at a waxworks in Boston, as I recall, and insisted he’d found them sporting in some bottomless cavern or another.” Parsons squinted shrewdly at St. Ives. It was
real
science that they would order up here. Humanity cried out for it, didn’t they? Wasn’t Lord Kelvin at that very moment riveting together the carcass of the device that Parsons had described? Hadn’t St. Ives been listening? Parsons shrugged. Discussions with St. Ives were always—how should one put it?—revealing. But St. Ives had gotten in out of his depth this time, and Parsons’s advice was to strike out at once for shore—a hearty breaststroke so as not to tire himself unduly. He patted St. Ives on the sleeve, waving the wine decanter at him.

St. Ives nodded and watched the secretary fill his glass nearly to the top. There was no arguing with the man. And it wasn’t argument that was wanted now, anyway. It was action, and that was a commodity, apparently, that he would have to take with his own hands.

***

St. Ives’s manor house and laboratory sat some three quarters of a mile from the summerhouse of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. The River Nidd ran placid and slow between, slicing neatly in two the broad meadow that separated the grounds of the manor from the grounds of the summerhouse. The willows that lined the banks of the Nidd effected a rolling green cloudbank that almost obscured each house from the view of the other, but from St. Ives’s attic window, Lord Kelvin’s broad low barn was just visible atop a grassy knoll. Into and out of that barn trooped a platoon of white-coated scientists and grimed machinists. Covered wagons scoured along the High Road from Kirk Hammerton, bearing enigmatic mechanical apparatus, and were met at the gates by an ever-suspicious man in a military uniform.

St. Ives watched their comings and goings through his spyglass. He turned a grim eye on Hasbro, who stood silently behind him. “I’ve come to a difficult decision, Hasbro.”

“Yes,
sir.”

“I’ve decided that we must play the role of saboteur, and nothing less. I shrink from such deviltry, but far more is at stake here than honor. We must ruin, somehow, Lord Kelvin’s machine.”

“Very good, sir.”

“The
mystifying thing is that I thought it was something else that he was constructing in that barn. But Parsons couldn’t have lied so utterly well. He isn’t capable of it. We’ve got to suppose that Lord Kelvin will do just what he says he will do.”

“No one will deny it, sir.”

“Our sabotaging his machine, of course, necessitates not only carrying out the plan to manipulate the volcanoes, but implies utter faith in that plan. Here we are setting in to thwart the effort of one of the greatest living practical scientists and to substitute our own feeble designs in its stead—an act of monumental egotism.”

“As you say, sir.”

“But the stakes are high, Hasbro. We
must
have our hand in. It’s nothing more nor less than the salvation of the earth, secularly speaking, that we engage in.”

“Shall we want lunch first, sir?”

“Kippers and gherkins, thank you. And bring up two bottles of Double Diamond to go along with it—and a bottle or two for yourself, of course.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hasbro said. “You’re most generous, sir.”