The Difference Engine (17 page)

Mallory took the name down.

A knock came at the door. Huxley swiped at the board with the dusty felt of an ebony-handled eraser. “Enter!” A stocky man in a plaster-spotted apron appeared. “You’ll remember Mr. “Trenham Reeks, our Assistant Curator.”

Reeks tucked a tall folio-binder under his arm and shook Mallory’s hand. Reeks had lost some hair and put on weight since Mallory had last seen him. “Sorry for the delay, sir,” Reeks said. “We’re having a time of it in the studio, casting those vertebrae. Astonishing structure. The sheer scale presents terrific problems.”

Huxley cleared a space on his desk. Noel tugged his father’s sleeve, and whispered something. “Oh, very well,” Huxley said. “Pardon us a moment, gentlemen.” He led Noel from the office.

“Congratulations on your promotion, Mr. Reeks,” Mallory said.

“Thank you, sir,” Reeks said. He opened the binder, then set a ribboned pince-nez on his nose. “And thank you for this great discovery. Though I must say, it challenges the very scale of our institution!” He tapped at a sheet of graphed foolscap. “As you may see.”

Mallory studied the sketch, a floor-plan of the Museum’s central hall, with the skeleton of the Leviathan superimposed. “Where’s its skull?” he said.

“The neck extends completely into the entrance-hall,” Reeks said proudly. “We shall have to move several cabinets . . . ”

“Do you have a side-view?”

Reeks plucked it from the sheaf of sketches. Mallory examined it, scowling. “What is your authority for this anatomical arrangement?”

“There are very few published papers on the creature, to date,” Reeks said, hurt. “The longest and most thorough is by Dr. Foulke, in last month’s Transactions.” He offered the magazine from within the folder.

Mallory brushed it aside. “Foulke has completely distorted the nature of the specimen.”

Reeks blinked. “Dr. Foulke’s reputation —”

“Foulke is a Uniformitarian! He was Rudwick’s cabinet-man, one of his closest allies. Foulke’s paper is a tissue of absurdities. He claims that the beast was cold-blooded and semi-aquatic! That it ate soft water-plants and moved sluggishly.”

“But a creature of this vast size, Dr. Mallory, this enormous weight! It would seem that a life in water, to support the mass alone . . .”

“I see,” Mallory broke in. He struggled to regain his temper. It was no use annoying poor Reeks; the man was a functionary, who knew no better, and meant well. “This explains why you have its neck stretched out limply, almost at floor-level . . . and it also accounts for the lizard-like — no, the amphibian — jointing of its legs.”

“Yes, sir,” Reeks said. “One envisions it harvesting water-plants with that long neck, you see, seldom needing to move its great body very far, or very swiftly. Except perhaps to wade away from predators, if there were anything hungry enough to tackle such a monster.”

“Mr. Reeks, this creature was not some great soft-bodied salamander. You have been made the victim of a grave misconception. This creature was like a modern elephant, like a giraffe, but on a far greater scale. It was evolved to rip out and devour the tops of trees.”

Mallory took a pencil from the desk and began to sketch rapidly and expertly. “It spent much of its time on its hind legs, propped on its tail, with its head far above the ground. Make a note of this thickening in the caudal vertebrae. A sure sign of enormous pressure, from a bipedal stance.” He tapped the blueprint, and went on. “A herd of these creatures could have demolished an entire forest in short order. They migrated, Mr. Reeks, as elephants do, over vast distances, and quickly, changing the very landscape with their devastating appetites. “The Brontosaur had an erect, narrow-chested stance, its legs quite columnar and vertical, for the swift, stiff-kneed stride of an elephant. None of this frog-like business.”

“I modeled the stance on the crocodile,” Reeks protested.

“The Cambridge Institute of Engine Analytics has completed my stress-analysis,” Mallory said. He stepped to his valise, pulled out a bound sheaf of fan-fold paper, and slapped it down. “The creature could not have stood a moment on dry land, with its legs in that absurd position.”

“Yes, sir,” Reeks said quietly. “That accounts for the aquatic hypothesis.”

“Look at its toes!” Mallory said. “They’re thick as foundation-stones; not the webbed feet of a swimmer. And look at the flanges of its spinal vertebrae. This creature levered itself up at the hip-joint, to reach great heights. Like a construction-crane! ”

Reeks removed his pince-nez. He began to polish it with a linen kerchief from his trouser-pocket. “This is not going to please Dr. Foulke,” he said. “Or his colleagues either, I daresay.”

“I’ve not yet begun with that lot,” Mallory said.

Huxley re-entered the office, leading his son by the hand. He looked from Reeks to Mallory. “Oh dear,” he said. “Already deep into it, I see.”

“It’s this nonsense of Foulke’s,” Mallory said. “He seems determined to prove that dinosaurs were unfit to live! He’s portrayed my Leviathan as a buoyed slug, sucking up pond-weed.”

“You must agree it hadn’t much of a brain,” Huxley said.

“It doesn’t follow, Thomas, that it was torpid. Everyone admits that Rudwick’s dinosaur could fly. These creatures were swift and active.”

“Actually, now that Rudwick’s no longer with us, there’s some revisionary thought on that topic,” Huxley said. “Some say his flying reptile could only glide.”

Mallory bit back a curse, for the sake of the child in the room. “Well, it all comes back to basic theory, doesn’t it,” he said. “The Uniformitarian faction wish these creatures to seem dull and sluggish! Dinosaurs will then fit their slope of gradual development, a slow progression to the present day. Whereas, if you grant the role of Catastrophe, you admit a far greater state of Darwinian fitness for these magnificent creatures, wounding as that may seem to the vanities of tiny modern-day mammals on the order of Foulke and his cronies.”

Huxley sat down. He propped one hand against his whiskered cheek. “You disagree with the arrangement of the specimen?”

“It seems Dr. Mallory prefers it standing,” Reeks said. “Prepared to dine upon a tree-top.”

“Could we manage that position, Mr. Reeks?”

Reeks looked startled. He tucked his pince-nez in a pocket behind his apron. Then he scratched his head. “I think perhaps we might, sir. If we mounted it under the skylight, and braced it from the ceiling-girders. Might have to bend its neck a bit . . . We could aim its head at the audience! It would be quite dramatic.”

“A sop to the Cerberus of popularity,” Huxley said. “Though I question the consequences to the fluttered nerves of paleontology. I confess I’m not at all at ease with this argument. I’ve not yet read Foulke’s paper, and you, Mallory, have yet to publish on the topic. And I shouldn’t care to add to the heat of the Catastrophist debate. ‘Natura non facit saltum.’ ”

“But Nature does leap,” Mallory said. “The Engine simulations prove it. Complex systems can make sudden transformations.”

“Never mind the theory. What can you make of the evidence directly at hand?”

“I can make a good case. I will, at my public lecture. Not a perfect case, but better than the opposition’s.”

“Would you stake your reputation as a scholar on it? Have you considered every question, every objection?”

“I could be wrong,” Mallory said. “But not so entirely wrong as they are.”

Huxley tapped his desk with a reservoir-pen. “What if I ask — as an elementary matter — how this creature could have eaten woody foliage? Its head is scarcely larger than a horse’s, and its teeth are remarkably poor.”

“It didn’t chew with its teeth,” Mallory said. “It had a gizzard, lined with grinding stones. Judging by the size of the ribcage, this organ must have been a yard long and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds. A hundred-weight of gizzard has more muscular power than the jaws of four bull elephants.”

“Why would a reptile need that quantity of nourishment?”

“It wasn’t warm-blooded per se, but it had a high metabolism. It’s a simple matter of surface-to-volume ratios. A bodily mass of that size retains its heat even in cold weather.” Mallory smiled. “The equations are simply calculated, requiring no more than an hour on one of the Society’s smaller Engines.”

“Dire trouble will come of this,” Huxley murmured.

“Are we to let politics stand in the way of truth?”

“Touche. He has us, Mr. Reeks . . . I’m afraid you must alter your painstaking plans.”

“The lads in the studio love a challenge, sir,” Reeks said loyally. “And if I may say so, Dr. Huxley, a controversy does wonders for our attendance.”

“One more minor matter,” Mallory said quickly. “The condition of the skull. Alas, the specimen’s skull is quite fragmentary, and will require close study, and a certain amount of conjecture. I should like to join you in the studio on the matter of the skull, Mr. Reeks.”

“Certainly, sir. I’ll see that you’re given a key.”

“Lord Gideon Mantell taught me everything I knew about the modeling of plaster,” Mallory declared, with a show of nostalgia. “It’s been too long since I last came to grips with that worthy craft. It will be a great pleasure to observe the latest advances in technique, in such exemplary surroundings.”

Huxley smiled, with a hint of dubiousness. “I do hope we can satisfy you, Ned.”

Mopping the back of his neck with a kerchief. Mallory unhappily contemplated the headquarters of the Central Statistics Bureau.

Ancient Egypt had been dead for twenty-five centuries, but Mallory had come to know it well enough to dislike it. The French excavation of the Suez Canal had been an heroic business, so that all things Egyptian had become the Parisian mode. The rage had seized Britain as well, leaving the nation awash with scarab neck-pins, hawk-winged teapots, lurid stereographs of toppled obelisks, and faux-marble miniatures of the noseless Sphinx. Manufacturers had Engine-embroidered that whole beast-headed rabble of pagan godlets on curtains and carpets and carriage-robes, much to Mallory’s distaste, and he had come to take an especial dislike to silly maunderings about the Pyramids, ruins which inspired exactly the sort of chuckle-headed wonderment that most revolted his sensibilities.

He had, of course, read admiringly of the engineering feats of Suez. Lacking coal, the French had fueled their giant excavators with bitumen-soaked mummies, stacked like cordwood and sold by the ton. Still, he resented the space usurped by Egyptology in the geographical journals.

The Central Statistics Bureau, vaguely pyramidal in form and excessively Egyptianate in its ornamental detail, squatted solidly in the governmental heart of Westminster, its uppermost stories slanting to a limestone apex. For the sake of increased space, the building’s lower section was swollen out-of-true, like some great stone turnip. Its walls, pierced by towering smokestacks, supported a scattered forest of spinning ventilators, their vanes annoyingly hawk-winged. “The whole vast pile was riddled top to bottom with thick black telegraph-lines, as though individual streams of the Empire’s information had bored through solid stone. A dense growth of wiring swooped down, from conduits and brackets, to telegraph-poles crowded thick as the rigging in a busy harbor.

Mallory crossed the hot sticky tarmac of Horseferry Road, wary of the droppings of the pigeons clustered in the web-work of cable overhead.

The Bureau’s fortress-doors, framed by lotus-topped columns and Briticized bronze sphinxes, loomed some twenty feet in height. Smaller, work-a-day doors were set into their corners. Mallory, scowling, strode into cool dimness and the faint but pervasive odors of lye and linseed oil. The simmering London stew was behind him now, but the damned place had no windows. Egyptianate jets lit the darkness, their flames breezily guttering in fan-shaped reflectors of polished tin.

He showed his citizen-card at the visitors’ desk. The clerk — or perhaps he was some sort of policeman, for he wore a new-fangled Bureau uniform with an oddly military look — made careful note of Mallory’s destination. He took an Engine-printed floor-plan of the building from beneath his counter, and marked out Mallory’s twisting route in red ink.

Mallory, still smarting from the morning’s meeting with the Nominations Committee of the Geographical, thanked the man rather too brusquely. Somehow — he didn’t know which devious strings had been pulled back-stage, but the plot was clear enough — Foulke had maneuvered his way onto the Geographical’s Nominations Committee. Foulke, whose aquatic theory of Brontosaurus had been spurned by Huxley’s museum, had taken Mallory’s arborivore hypothesis as a personal attack, with the result that an ordinarily pleasant formality had become yet another public trial for radical Catastrophism. Mallory had won his Fellowship, in the end, Oliphant having laid the ground too well for Foulke’s last minute ambush to succeed, but the business still rankled. He sensed damage to his reputation. Dr. Edward Mallory — “Leviathan Mallory,” as the penny-papers insisted on having it — had been made to seem fanatical, even petty. And this in front of dignified geographers of the first rank, men like Button of Mecca and Elliot of the Congo.

Mallory followed his map, muttering to himself. The fortunes of scholarly warfare, Mallory thought, had never seemed to favor him as they did Thomas Huxley. Huxley’s feuds with the powers-that-be had only distinguished him as a wizard of debate, while Mallory was reduced to trudging this gas-lit mausoleum, where he hoped to identify a despicable race-track pimp.

Taking his first turn, he discovered a marble bas-relief depicting the Mosaic Plague of Frogs, which he had always numbered among his favorite Biblical tales. Pausing in admiration, he was very nearly run down by a steel push-cart, stacked to the gunwales with decks of punch-cards.

“Gangway!” yelped the carter, in brass-buttoned serge and a messenger’s billed cap. Mallory saw with astonishment that the man wore wheeled boots, stout lace-ups fitted with miniature axles and spokeless rounds of rubber. The fellow shot headlong down the hall, expertly steering the heavy cart, and vanished around a corner.

Mallory passed a hall, blocked off with striped sawhorses, where two apparent lunatics, in gas-lit gloom, crept slowly about on all fours. Mallory stared. The creepers were plump, middle-aged women, dressed throat-to-foot in spotless white, their hair confined by snug elastic turbans. From a distance their clothing had the eerie look of winding-sheets. As he watched, one of the pair lurched heavily to her feet and began to tenderly wipe the ceiling with a sponge-mop on a telescoping pole.