The Difference Engine

  “Haven’t seen a real factory-crowd since we got here. Well—let’s eat!” And with that, Helen America bent to the task. Dinner-conversation, Oliphant gathered, was not highly valued in Red Manhattan.

  She left the cardboard “dishes” utterly devoid of scraps or crumbs, contriving to sop up the last dross of gravy with a chip she had carefully retained for this purpose.

  Oliphant took out his notebook. Opening it, he removed a plain white card stippled with Florence Bartlett’s Bow Street portrait. “Are you familiar at all with Flora Barnett, the American actress, Miss America? She’s enormously popular in Manhattan, or so I was recently told.…” Oliphant displayed the card.

  “She’s no actress, mister. Nor an American either. She’s a Southron, if you can even call her that; next thing to a damn’ Frenchie. The People Risen don’t need her kind. Hell, we’ve already hung our share of ’em!”

  “Her kind?”

  Helen America met his gaze with a defiant stare. “In a pig’s eye, you’re a journalist.…”

  “I’m sorry if—”

  “Sorry like the rest of ’em. You give just about that much of a damn.…”

  “Miss America, please, I wish only to—”

  “Thanks for the feed, mister, but you can’t pump me, understand? And that brontosaur, that’s got no damn’ business over here in the first place! You got no right to it, and one day it’ll sit in the Manhattan Metropolitan, for it belongs to the People Risen! And what makes you limeys think you can come digging up the People’s natural treasures?”

  And in through the door, as if on cue, marched the very formidable Clown of the Manhattan Women’s Red Pantomime Troupe, her bald pate hugely bonneted in polka-dot gingham, and her Chickamauga boots even larger than Helen America’s.

  “Coming right this minute, Comrade Clystra,” Helen America said.

  The Clown fixed Oliphant with a murderous glare, and then the two were gone.

  Oliphant looked at Mori. “A peculiar evening, Mr. Mori.”

  Mori, apparently lost in contemplation of the Autocafé’s clatter and bustle, took a moment to respond.

  “We will have places such as this in my country, Oriphantsan! Clean! Modem! Rapid!”

  Bligh, upon Oliphant’s return to Half-Moon Street, followed him upstairs to the door of the study. “May I come in for a moment, sir?” Locking the door behind them with his own key, Bligh crossed to a miniature parquet bureau that supported Oliphant’s smoking-things; unsealing the top of a humidor, he reached inside and removed a squat little cylinder of black-japanned tin. “This was brought ’round to the kitchen door by a young man, sir. He wouldn’t give his name, when asked. I took the liberty of opening it myself, sir, recalling some of the more heathen attempts, abroad.…”

  Oliphant took the cannister and unscrewed its lid. Perforated telegraph-tape.

  “And the young man?”

  “A junior Engine-clerk, sir, to judge by the state of his shoes. Aside from the fact that he wore a clerk’s cotton gloves, which he didn’t remove.”

  “And there was no message?”

  “There was, sir. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘that we can do no more, there is great danger, he mustn’t ask again.” ’

  “I see. Would you mind bringing up a pot of strong green-tea?”

  Alone, Oliphant set about removing the heavy glass from his personal receiving-telegraph, a matter of loosening four brass wing-screws. Placing the tall vitrine-like dome out of harm’s way, he spent some minutes consulting the maker’s instructional manual. After rummaging through several drawers, he located the requisite implements: a walnut-handled brass hand-crank and a small gilt screw-driver embossed with the monogram of the Colt & Maxwell Company. He located the knife-switch at the base of the instrument and severed the electrical connection with the Post Office. He then used the screwdriver to make the necessary adjustments, carefully threaded the end of the tape onto the bright steel sprockets, locked the guide-plates into position, and took a deep breath.

  He was all at once aware of the beating of his own heart, and of the night’s silence pressing in from the darkness of Green Park, and of the Eye. He took up the crank, thrust its hexagonal tip into the mechanism’s socket, and began, steadily but slowly, to turn it clockwise. The character-hammers began to rise and fall, rise and fall, deciphering the punch-code of the Post Office tape. He refused to look at it, as it emerged from the slot.

  It was done. With scissors and paste-pot, he assembled the message on a sheet of foolscap:

  DEAR CHARLES COMMA NINE YEARS AGO YOU PUT ME TO THE WORST DISHONOR THAT A WOMAN CAN KNOW STOP CHARLES COMMA YOU PROMISED ME THAT YOU WOULD SAVE MY POOR FATHER STOP INSTEAD YOU CORRUPTED ME COMMA BODY AND SOUL STOP TODAY I AM LEAVING LONDON COMMA IN THE COMPANY OF POWERFUL FRIENDS STOP THEY KNOW VERY WELL WHAT A TRAITOR YOU WERE TO WALTER GERARD COMMA AND TO ME STOP DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FIND ME COMMA CHARLES STOP IT WOULD BE USELESS STOP I DO HOPE THAT YOU AND MRS EGREMONT WILL SLEEP SOUNDLY TONIGHT STOP SYBIL GERARD ENDIT

  Only barely aware of Bligh arriving with the tea, he sat unmoving for the better part of an hour, the message before him. Then, after pouring himself a cup of luke-warm tea, he gathered stationery, took out his reservoir-pen, and began to compose, in his flawless diplomat’s French, a letter to a certain Monsieur Arslau, of Paris.

  Flash-powder still stank in the air.

  The Prince Consort turned, with his full Teutonic gravity, from an elaborate stereoptic camera, of Swiss manufacture, and greeted Oliphant in German. He wore aquamarine spectacles, their circular lenses no larger than florins, and was draped in a photographer’s smock of spotless white duck. His fingers were stained with silver nitrate.

  Oliphant bowed, wishing His Highness a good afternoon in what amounted to the Royal Family’s language of choice, and pretended to examine the Swiss camera, an intricate creation whose stereoptic lenses, like eyes, stared from beneath a smooth brass brow. Like the eyes of Mr. Cart, the Consort’s muscular Swiss valet, they struck Oliphant as being set rather too widely apart.

  “I’ve brought Affie a little gift, Your Highness,” Oliphant said. His German, like the Prince Consort’s, had the accent of Saxony—the legacy of a prolonged and delicate mission Oliphant had undertaken there at the behest of the Royal Family. Prince Albert’s Coburg relatives, ever ingenious at the ancient craft of marriage-politics, were eager to expand their tiny domain—a delicate matter indeed, when the policy of the British Foreign Office was to keep the German mini-states as fragmented as politically possible. “Has the young Prince concluded his day’s lessons?”

  “Affie is ill today,” Albert said, peering through his tinted spectacles at one of the camera’s lenses. He produced a small brush and lightly whisked at the surface of the lens. He straightened. “Do you think the study of statistics too much a burden for a tender young mind?”

  “My opinion, Your Highness?” Oliphant said. “Statistical analysis is indeed a powerful technique.…”

  “His mother and I disagree on the matter,” the Prince confided mournfully. “And Alfred’s progress in the subject is far from satisfactory. Nevertheless, statistics is the key to the future. Statistics are everything in England.”

  “Does he progress well in his other studies?” Oliphant hedged.

  “Anthropometry,” the Prince suggested absently. “Eugenics. Powerful fields of learning, but less taxing, perhaps, to the youthful brain.”

  “Perhaps I might have a word with him, Your Highness,” Oliphant said. “I know the lad means well.”

  “He is in his room, no doubt,” the Prince said.

  Oliphant made his way through the drafty glamor of the Royal Apartments to Alfred’s room, where he was greeted with a whoop of glee, the Prince scrambling in bare-feet from mounded bedclothes and hopping nimbly across the tracks of a most elaborate miniature railway. “Uncle Larry! Uncle Larry! Brilliant! What have you brought for me?”

  “Baron Zorda’s latest.”

  In Oliphant’s pock
et, wrapped in green tissue and smelling strongly of cheap fresh ink, was a copy of Paternoster the Steam Bandit, by one “Baron Zorda,” the third volume in the popular series, young Prince Alfred having expressed his unbridled enthusiasm for the two previous numbers, The Skeleton Army and Wheelmen of the Tsar. The book’s garishly colored cover depicted the daring Paternoster, pistol in hand, climbing from the cabin of a hurtling vehicle one took to be a gurney in the latest style—sheathed in tin, bulbous at the prow, and very narrow in the rear. The frontispiece, which Oliphant had examined in the Piccadilly news-agent’s where he had purchased the volume, offered Baron Zorda’s raffish highwayman in rather more detail, particularly in regard to his dress, which included a broad belt of studded leather and bell-bottomed trousers with buttoned vents at the cuffs.

  “Super!” The boy eagerly tore the green tissue from Paternoster the Steam Bandit. “Look at his gurney, Uncle Larry! It’s line-streamed like sixty!”

  “Nothing but the swiftest for wicked Paternoster, Affie. And see the frontispiece. He’s got up like Smashjaw Ned.”

  “Look at his narrow-go-wides,” Alfred said admiringly. “And his bloody great belt!”

  “And how have you been, Affie,” Oliphant asked, ignoring the boy’s lapse in language, “since my last visit?”

  “Very well, Uncle Larry”—and a shadow of anxiety crossed the young face—“but I’m afraid I—I’m afraid she—she’s broken, you see—” The Prince pointed to where the Japanese tea-doll slumped disconsolately against the foot of the massive four-poster, surrounded by a tumbled sea of lithographed tin and painted lead. A long sharp sliver of some translucent material protruded grotesquely from her gorgeous robe. “It’s the spring, you see. I think it was wound too tightly, Uncle Larry. It sprang right out, on the tenth turn.”

  “The Japanese power their dolls with springs of baleen, Affie. ‘Whale-whiskers,’ they call the stuff. They haven’t yet learned from us the manufacture of proper springs, but soon they shall. When they do, their dolls shan’t break so easily.”

  “Father says you’re too keen on your Japanese,” Alfred said. “He says you think them the equal of Europeans.”

  “And I do, Affie! Their mechanical appliances are presently inferior, due to their lack of knowledge in the applied sciences. Some day, in futurity, they may lead civilization to heights yet untold. They, and perhaps the Americans …”

  The boy regarded him dubiously. “Father wouldn’t like that at all, what you said.”

  “No, I rather doubt he would.”

  Oliphant then spent half-an-hour, down on his knees upon the carpet, watching Alfred demonstrate a toy French Engine—operated, as was its cousin the Great Napoleon, by compressed air. The little Engine employed lengths of telegraph-tape, rather than cards, reminding Oliphant of his letter to M. Arslau. Bligh would have taken it ’round to the French Embassy by now; very likely it was already on its way to Paris by diplomatic pouch.

  Alfred was connecting his Engine to a miniature kinotrope. There came a ceremonious rattle at the door-knob; the doors of Buckingham Palace were never knocked. Oliphant rose, and opened the tall white portal, to discover the well-known face of Nash, a palace valet-de-chambre, whose unwise speculations in railway shares had briefly made him the unwilling intimate of the Metropolitan Fraud Bureau. Oliphant’s politesse had successfully smoothed the matter—a kindness well-invested, he saw now, by Nash’s unfeigned air of respectful attention. “Mr. Oliphant,” Nash announced, “a telegram has come, sir. Most urgent.”

  The velocity of the Special Branch vehicle contributed in no small part to Oliphant’s general sense of unease. Paternoster himself could have asked for nothing faster, or more radically line-streamed.

  They flew past St. James’s Park with the speed of dream, the bare black branches of the lime-trees flashing by like wind-driven smoke. The driver wore leather goggles with round lenses, and plainly relished their headlong flight, periodically sounding a deep-throated whistle that sent horses rearing and pedestrians scurrying. The stoker, a burly young Irishman, was grinning maniacally as he shoveled coke into the burner.

  Oliphant had no idea of their destination. Now, as they neared Trafalgar, the traffic caused the driver to yank the whistle-cord continually, steadily, setting up a mournful bellowing ululation, like the grief of some marine behemoth. The traffic, at this sound, parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Helmeted policemen saluted smartly as they sped past. Urchins and crossing-sweepers turned cartwheels of delight, at the sight of a sleek tin fish racketing down the Strand.

  The evening had grown quite dark. As they entered Fleet Street, the driver applied the brake and worked a lever that released a mighty gout of uprushing steam. The line-streamed gurney bumped to a halt.

  “Well, sir,” the driver commented, raising his goggles to peer through the fretted glass of the vehicle’s prow, “would you look at that.”

  Traffic, Oliphant saw, had been halted completely by the erection of wooden barricades hung with lanterns. Behind these stood grim-faced soldiers in combat drab, Cutts-Maudslay carbines unslung and at the ready. Beyond them, he saw sheets of canvas, loosely hung from raw timber uprights, as though someone were attempting to erect stage-scenery in the middle of Fleet Street.

  The stoker swabbed his face with a polka-dot kingsman. “Something here the press aren’t meant to see.”

  “They’ve put it in the wrong street, then,” the driver said, “haven’t they?”

  As Oliphant climbed from the gurney, Fraser came walking quickly toward him. “We’ve found her,” Fraser said glumly.

  “And seem to have attracted considerable publicity in the process. Perhaps a few less infantry would be in order?”

  “It isn’t a matter for levity, Mr. Oliphant. You’d best come with me.”

  “Is Betteredge here?”

  “Haven’t seen him. This way, please.” Fraser led the way between a pair of barricades. A soldier curtly nodded them past.

  Oliphant glimpsed a mustachioed gentleman in urgent conversation with two Metropolitans. “That’s Halliday,” he said, “chief of Criminal Anthropometry.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fraser said. “They’re all over this one. The Museum of Practical Geology has been broken into. The Royal Society is angry as a nest of hornets, and bloody Egremont will be in every first-edition, calling it a Luddite outrage. Our only bit of luck would seem to be that Dr. Mallory is well away in China.”

  “Mallory? Why is that?”

  “The Land Leviathan. Mrs. Bartlett and her cohorts attempted to make away with the thing’s skull.”

  They rounded one of the makeshift barriers, its coarse fabric stamped at intervals with the broad-arrow mark of the Army Ordnance Department.

  A cab-horse lay on its side in a great pool of darkening blood. The cab, a common one-horse fly, was overturned nearby, its dull black-lacquered panels stitched with bullet-holes.

  “She was with two men,” Fraser said. “Three if you count a corpse they left behind in the Museum. The hack was driven by a Yankee exile called Russell, a bully-rock bruiser living in Seven Dials. The other man was Henry Dease of Liverpool, quite the accomplished cracksman. I’d our Henry in dock ten times, when I was on the force, but no more. They’re laid out there, sir.” He pointed. “Russell, the driver, evidently got into a shouting match with a real cabman, over who should give way. A Metropolitan on traffic-duty attempted to intervene, at which point Russell produced a pistol.”

  Oliphant was staring at the overturned cab.

  “The traffic officer was unarmed, but a pair of Bow Street detectives happened to be passing.…”

  “But this cab, Fraser …”

  “That’s the work of an Army-gurney, sir. The last of the temporary garrisons is just by the Holborn viaduct.” He paused. “Dease had a Russian shotgun.…”

  Oliphant shook his head in disbelief.

  “Eight civilians taken to hospital,” Fraser said. “One detective dead. But come along, sir—best we g
et this done with.”

  “What is the meaning of these canvas screens?”

  “Criminal Anthropometry ordered them.”

  Oliphant felt as though he were moving through a dream, his limbs numb and without volition. He allowed himself to be led to where three canvas-draped bodies were arranged upon stretchers.

  The face of Florence Bartlett was a hideous ruin.

  “Vitriol,” Fraser said. “A bullet shattered whatever container she employed.”

  Oliphant turned quickly away, retching into his handkerchief.

  “Sorry, sir,” Fraser said. “No point in you seeing the other two.”

  “Betteredge, Fraser—have you seen him?”

  “No, sir. Here’s the skull, sir, or what remains of it.”

  “The skull?”

  Perhaps half-a-dozen massive fragments of petrified bone and ivory-tinted plaster were neatly arranged atop a varnished trestle-table. “There’s a Mr. Reeks here, from the Museum, come to take it back,” Fraser said. “Says it isn’t as badly damaged as we might think. Would you like to sit down, sir? I could find you a folding-stool—”

  “No. Why does there seem to be fully half of Criminal Anthropometry about, Fraser?”

  “Well, sir, you’re in a better position to determine that than I,” Fraser said, lowering his voice, “though I’ve heard it said that Mr. Egremont and Lord Galton have recently discovered they’ve much in common.”

  “Lord Galton? The eugenics theorist?”

  “Lord Darwin’s cousin, that is. He’s Anthropometry’s man in the House of Lords. Has a deal of influence in the Royal Society.” Fraser brought out his notebook. “You’d best see why I thought it urgent you come here, sir.” He led Oliphant back around the ruin of the cab. Glancing about for possible observers, he passed Oliphant a fold of blue flimsy. “I took it from the Bartlett woman’s reticule.”

  The note was undated, unsigned:

  That which you so persistently desire has been located, albeit in a most peculiar hiding-place. I am informed, by our mutual acquaintance of the Derby, Dr. Mallory, that it has been sealed up within the skull of his Land Leviathan. I would hope that you will consider this crucial intelligence a full repayment of all my debts to you. I am in some peril now, from recent political developments, and certainly I am observed by elements of Government; pray consider that in any further attempt to communicate. I have done all that I can, I swear it.