So there we were, sitting in St. Ives’s room, and him passing around opened bottles of ale, until he got to Parsons and said, “You’re strictly a water man, aren’t you?”
“You’ve got an admirable memory, sir. Water is the staff of life, the staff of life.”
“And I’ve got a bottle of well water right here,” said St. Ives, uncorking just such an object. Parsons was delighted. He took the glass that St. Ives gave him and swirled the water around in it, as if it were Scotch or Burgundy or some other drinkable substance. Then he threw it down heartily and smacked his lips like a connoisseur, immediately wrinkling up his face.
“Bitter,” he said. “Must be French. Lucky I’m thirsty after tonight’s little tussle.” He held out his glass.
“Mineral water,” said St. Ives, filling it up.
I was tempted to say something about “tonight’s little tussle” myself, but I put a lid on it. Hasbro had fallen asleep in his chair.
Parsons winked at the professor. He was as full of himself as I’ve ever seen him. “About revivifying Narbondo,” he said. “I’ve got a notion involving Lord Kelvin’s machine. You’ve read of Sir Joseph John Thomson’s work at the Cavendish Laboratory.”
St. Ives’s face betrayed what he was thinking, as if he had known that it would come to this, and here it was at last. “Yes,” he said, “I have. Very interesting, but I don’t quite see how it applies.”
This made Parsons happy. To hear St. Ives admit such a thing was worth a lifetime of waiting and plotting. He had the face of a man holding four aces and looking at a table mounded with coin. “Electrons,” he said, as if such a word explained everything.
“Go on,” said the professor.
“Well, it’s rather simple, isn’t it? They spin sphere-wise around their atom. An intense electromagnetic field yanks them into a sort of oval, rather like the shifting of tides on the earth, and in animate creatures causes immediate and unrestrained cellular activity. What if Narbondo were subjected to such a force — a tremendous dose of electromagnetism? It might — how shall I put it? — ‘start him up,’ let’s say, like turning over an Otto’s four-stroke engine.”
“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.