Lord Kelvin's Machine (Langdon St. Ives) by James P. Blaylock

Author:James P. Blaylock [Blaylock, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780857689856
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2013-03-12T06:00:00+00:00

“Not with a revolver, she didn’t,” said St. Ives. “You were too far away for anyone to have brought off so close a shot. My guess is that it was a Winchester, and that it was your man Bowker who fired it. Clearly they and the Pules are working at cross-purposes, although both of them chase the same ends—which have little to do, I’m convinced, with drawing ships to their doom. That’s a peripheral business—quick cash to finance more elaborate operations.”

St. Ives emptied the bottle into Hasbro’s glass and waved at the waiter, ordering a second bottle of wine and another pint for me. I’m a beer man generally; red wine rips me up in the night. St. Ives studied his plate for a moment and then said, “It’s very largely a distraction, too, the ship business, and a good one. Godall seems to think that the Crown is on the verge of paying them what they ask, in return for their solemn assurance that they’ll abandon the machine where she lies. Imagine that. Those were Parsons’s words, ‘Their solemn assurance.’ The man’s gone round the bend. Now that we’ve found the machine, though, they’ll wait on the ransom. We’ve accomplished that much. The Academy has the area cordoned off with ships and are going to try to haul it up out of there.”

St. Ives drained his glass, then scowled into the lees, swirling them in the bottom. “If I had half a chance...” he said, not bothering to finish the sentence. I thought I knew what he meant, though; he had harbored a grim distrust of the machine ever since Lord Kelvin had set out to reverse the polarity of the earth with it. What were they keeping it for, if not to effect some other grand and improbable disaster in the name of science? I half believed St. Ives knew what it was, too—that there was far more to the machine than he was letting on and that only the principal players in the game fully understood. I was a pawn, of course, and resolved to keeping to my station. I’m certain, though, that St. Ives had contemplated on more than one occasion going into that machine works up in Holborn and taking it out of there himself. But he hadn’t, and look what had come of his hesitating. That’s the way he saw it—managing to blame himself from a fresh angle.

I tried to steer the subject away from the business of the machine. “So what do they want?” I asked.

“The notebooks, for the moment. The damnable notebooks. They think that they’re an ace away from immortality. Narbondo very nearly had it ten years ago, back when he was stealing carp out of the aquarium and working with Willis Pule. He was close— close enough so that in Norway Higgins could revive him with the elixir and the apparatus. For my money Narbondo was pumped up with carp elixir when he went into the pond; that’s what kept him alive, kept his entire cellular structure from crystallizing.

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