‘Even if they can’t hear themselves think,’ Liz remarked.
George was surveying the scene in front of him. ‘What are they doing?’ he wondered.
There were several dozen men working in the factory. So far none of them had noticed Sir William and his friends. But soon someone was sure to spot them, George realised. If there was anything to be learned here they needed to do it fast, and then get away. He pointed this out, and Liz nodded in agreement.
‘We need to get up higher,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘So we can see what they’re doing. Like seeing the stage from the gallery — you get a better view of the whole layout. It is easier to make out what is happening.’
‘Splendid idea,’ Sir William agreed. ‘What do you have in mind?’
There was a metal gantry running round the wall, perhaps twenty feet above their heads. A ladder led up to it from several yards away. Liz led them over to it, and George went first, then Liz, with Sir William bringing up the rear.
The ventilation Sir William had described was drawing the smoke and fumes up from the clanking machinery on the ground and high into the structure of the building to be vented through open skylights in the lower part of the sloping roof. Soon George found himself climbing through a moist, warm mist. Looking down, the foundry floor was wreathed in thin clouds of smoke. The huge iron machines rose up above the swirling fog, reminding George of the gravestones in the cemetery.
They reached the gantry, and George led them along to where they could get a good view out over the entire enormous space below. Slightly further on, another ladder led up to another gantry high in the roof space. There were dozens of the steam-driven engines on the floor below, each working away. Smoke and steam rose through the metal grille of the gantry, swirling round them as they watched. Pistons slammed in and out, and chains clanked as they were drawn through the machines, emerging with glowing metal components hanging from them like washing from a line. The glow dulled as the chains moved along and the metal cooled.
The chains seemed to link groups of the machines together, daisy-chaining them so that components manufactured by the first engine were modified by the next, refined by another, finished by a fourth. Finally, the chains all met and together were hauled through a huge vat of oily water. The metal hissed and spat as it sank into the churning depths, to emerge blacked and smudged with oil on the other side.
Here men took the metal components — rods, wheels, bolts, casings — and assembled them. George peered through the drifting steam in an effort to see what they were constructing.
‘It appears to be some sort of exoskeleton,’ Sir William said, pointing to the nearest group of assembly workers.
‘A what?’ Liz asked.
‘A frame, to hold something inside it together,’ George explained. It was difficult to make out the exact shape, but Sir William was right. There were dozens of the completed frames standing in lines at the side of the work area. ‘What can they be for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sir William confessed. ‘But I have several very unpleasant suspicions.’
‘Relating to that man’s head?’ Liz asked, remembering why they had come here.
‘I thought we were never going to stop him,’ George admitted. He was still shaken by the experience.
‘I think we are very lucky that we did,’ Sir William told them as he watched the activity below. ‘He was no ordinary thug. His cranium, as I say, had been plated with metal. The end result was so thick I doubt it left much space for the brain. And his limbs were lengthened and heavy. From a very quick analysis, and of course I am no expert, I would say that the man’s bones were larger and considerably more dense than human bones.’
‘He wasn’t human?’ George asked, trying to understand what Sir William was telling them.
‘I believe he was, once. But just as poor Albert Wilkes’s bones had been replaced, albeit in a somewhat rudimentary manner, here the transition was rather more advanced. The process had been completed.’
‘But what process?’ George asked.
Sir William nodded at the men toiling below the gantry. ‘A process to replace a man’s brain with something less sophisticated, something with a much reduced reasoning capacity. The ability perhaps merely to understand and carry out simple instructions.’
‘And the bones?’ Liz asked.
‘Intriguing, isn’t it?’ Sir William said. ‘A man whose bones had been replaced, I believe, with the bones of a long-dead dinosaur. But,’ he went on, ‘there is no reason why they should not be replaced by metal too. Or even,’ he added significantly, ‘by an entire metal frame.’
‘But why?’ Liz demanded. ‘What is he doing this for?’
‘I can only speculate,’ Sir William offered. ‘But everything here would seem to support my theory. He is, as we can see, an industrialist. He runs factories like these where workers manufacture goods, or smelt metal. How much more efficient if he could staff those factories with labourers each of whom has the strength of ten men, and who doesn’t have the mental capacity to complain about the working conditions, or demand more pay? Human machines.’
George was about to ask whether this was really possible when there was a shout from the floor below. One of the workmen was pointing up at the gantry — up at George and the others. More of the men turned to look. There was a stiffness to their movements. They seemed cumbersome, like the man who had attacked them in the park, George realised.
‘Time we were going,’ he said.
‘A little too late for that,’ Liz said. Her face was white as she pointed to where more of the men were already starting up the ladder towards the gantry.
‘There must be another way down,’ George said.
‘There is.’ Liz pointed further along the gantry.
But through the steaming yellow-tinged mist rising from the machines, George could see more workmen climbing that ladder too. ‘They’re coming at us from both sides,’ he realised. ‘We’re trapped.’
Chapter 19
Sir William shook his head. ‘There is one other way we can go.’
George and Liz both looked each way along the gantry. Men were now climbing on to it from the ladders, starting along the narrow metal walkway towards them.
‘I don’t see …’ George started. Then he stopped, realising that Sir William was pointing to the ladder just ahead of them. It led upwards, towards the roof. ‘You have to be joking,’ George finished.
Sir William raised his eyebrows. ‘If you have a better idea, young man, then I suggest you come out with it pretty sharpish.’
George looked at Liz. He looked at the men making their ponderous way along the gantry towards them. He looked at the ground, twenty feet below, and imagined being shoved over the flimsy guard rail that ran along the gantry. Then he looked back at the ladder. ‘I’ll go last,’ he said. ‘In case they try to follow us.’
‘And what do we do when we can’t go any higher?’ Liz demanded, following Sir William as quickly as she could up the ladder.
‘Don’t ask,’ George hissed back at her.
Sir William’s voice floated back to them through the thickening mist. ‘We climb out of one of the skylights and down the roof, of course.’ This time, George could tell he wasn’t joking. The skylights were level with the next gantry, wide open and sucking the smoke out into the cold night beyond. He hurried up the ladder after Liz and Sir William.
This ladder was much the same as the one they had already climbed. But higher up, it was full in the path of the rising steam. The bolts holding the ladder to the walls of the foundry were rough with rust, flaking away as the ladder strained against them under the weight. George watched black showers of corroded ironwork drop away from the bolts, the rungs, the sides of the ladder as he climbed. Looking down, he saw the first of their pursuers starting up the ladder after them. The ironwork creaked and groaned in protest and he shouted for Sir William to hurry.