The Technologists

  “Has it, indeed? Well, if it ever were accepted by the public, that would be the end of your patience for it. It would be on to the next infatuation that could annoy your family and roil our society. Yes, I confess it, we collected rocks as boys. Boys! We played with toy wagons, as well. But you are a man now, Robert, or should be. Time to leave all that behind. In fact, take that rock with you. Bury it.”

  “Phillip, you will give me the name of the place before I leave here!”

  “No! You can throw as many tantrums as you like, Robert, but I shall not betray my fellows. Damn it, little brother. You should be at Harvard. You should have taken your rightful place behind the rest of us. You should be Med Fac. You’ve insulted the whole family, forfeiting our reputation. I only pray my disapproval of you is known by all those acquainted with us.”

  Bob now spoke more softly, his words catching up with the raw feelings. “Mother supports my pursuits.”

  “Ha! ‘Be to his virtues ever kind, be to his faults a little blind.’ Mother’s silly motto, not mine. Your faults have been coddled long enough, as far as I’m concerned.” Phillip returned to his chair and clutched his temple. “How I will ever go to sleep with this headache now …? Little brother, kindly show yourself out.”

  Bob pulled his arm back and launched the stone across the room. It whirred just over Phillip’s head and shattered a vase above the fireplace.

  “You are mad!” Phillip cried, having thrown himself to the floor, his arms shielding the top of his head. “Are you trying to injure me? You think that will make me accede to you?”

  “Not at all. As much as I’d like to knock your teeth in right now, Phillip, you are my blood and I cannot. But I will start smashing everything in this room, until your sons come running to see, and you will have to explain to those trusting, well-reared bright-eyed little boys that the uncle who shares their blood is a madman. I will then keep smashing every last object in your house until the neighbors come knocking at the door and see your own brother Bob has become unhinged and, worse even, disturbed their sleeping. What do I care about it? I’m a Technology man, after all, with no future to speak of. But I’d wager you’ll not step foot on Pinckney Street for at least a month without burning in humiliation.”

  “Ha! Nice try, Bob!” Phillip boomed, reminding Bob of his own big voice, though there was a tremor in his brother’s that failed to convince.

  Detecting it, Bob knew he’d won. He picked up the stone again and turned his gaze to a shelf filled with awards.

  “No!” yelled his brother, holding both hands out. “Wait! Let us only talk calmly and resolve this. Calmly, brother!”

  “Calmly. But quickly,” Bob added, scooping up Phillip’s drink from the desk. He gulped it down and the burn coated his throat.

  XXXIV

  The Police Chief of Smith Prison (Sequel)

  HERE THEY WERE, perhaps mere hours away from identifying the perpetrator of the most mysterious chain of disasters in Boston history, and Marcus was caught in the middle of a petty schoolboy vendetta for Bob’s sodium trick at the river! He almost laughed, thinking of his days as a prisoner during wartime, now at the mercy of these bored swells, somewhere in a comfortable college room made intentionally dismal. Though bound, though alone, he found himself feeling much more in control of the situation, with a key advantage over his captors: knowledge.

  One of the beasts walked up behind him and began pulling out single strands of his hair, one by one, counting to twenty-seven.

  At the end of the count, Marcus said, “Which one of you is Will Blaikie? The stroke oar of Harvard. The president of the Christian Brethren.”

  All of the beast masks turned to Marcus when he said it. But it was only the man behind the devil mask itself who seemed to flinch.

  “Greetings, Blaikie,” Marcus said, bowing his head a little.

  The three-faced devil stood and pointed with his jewel-encrusted scepter. “You are charged with chumming cozily with an enemy of the godly society of the Med Fac. Do you confess?”

  Marcus did not reply.

  “Do you confess?”

  “I confess nothing to you.”

  The devil’s hand made a slight flick. The dragon carried a sack to the center of the room and emptied it onto the floor.

  “These are material possessions captured from your trivial existence,” said the devil, waving his hand over the spilled pile of objects. “We will destroy them one by one until you confess.”

  Responding to his leader’s signal, the dragon stomped on the pile. With a sledgehammer, he smashed Frank’s Ichabod Crane statuette into two. Then he grabbed the notebook pages Marcus had been compiling—his and Edwin’s report on the disasters, as well as Rogers’s stack of notes and research. These were thrown straight into the fireplace, which flashed as it turned them into ashes.

  Marcus stirred a little in his seat but said nothing. “You’re too stupid to know what you’ve just done,” he said.

  “Now tell me, who made the first advances between the two of you, Robert Richards or you? No? More!”

  Marcus stared at the decapitated head of the Ichabod Crane, the face that really did look like Frank himself, which he had humbled himself to carve as a gift for Marcus, as an offering to a better future.

  “I will come back. I will find all of you. Fair warning.”

  Marcus’s words were followed by guffaws of laughter and cries of “Burn the rebel! Squash the Tech worm! Punish him! He has blasphemed His Majesty!” The cries seemed to come from every corner of the chamber. The beastly masks rendered the sounds of the chorus muffled and as otherworldly as the grotesque disguises.

  “Read the punishment, brother!” the devil screamed.

  The witch took a step forward, waving its hands ceremoniously. “Whoever shall speak evil against the Medical Faculty of Harvard University shall receive the punishment of air, fire, water, or earth.”

  “Let the punishment of water be inflicted,” the leader hissed. “Execute the law, brothers. I command it be so!”

  Two of the beasts seized Marcus. He began to fight, shouting, writhing, and trying to kick. With the help of three more captors they forced him into a large box. The lid was closed and he felt the container being carried across the room. From the mutterings of the beasts changing positions, he surmised that the coffin was being lifted and then pushed out an open window. Suddenly, he and the coffin were in a vertical position. What sort of lunatics are Harvard fellows? The coffin dropped down little by little and he could hear the cranking of a windlass.

  They are lowering me out the window, he thought, with partial relief that he would be away from their grim chamber. Then he heard a splash and felt water on his feet and around his ankles. Inch by inch the coffin was lowered, water slipping through the narrow slots in the wood, now up to his knees. Marcus felt the first stirrings of panic. The ropes cut into his wrists as he strained against them.

  “That’s enough. Pull him up!” he heard from above.

  “No!”

  “The rope isn’t strong enough, Your Majesty! Pull him up!”

  “No, brother!” the voice commanded again. “He profaned the society! An accursed Technology boy, of all people! I warned them. He will find us, he says? Dowse him good!”

  * * *

  THE WATER IN THE COFFIN reached Marcus’s waist. They can’t afford to let someone die, no matter what demented game they are playing. Can they? He considered Blaikie’s volatility, the rage Bob predicted had brewed in Blaikie upon seeing Marcus at the opera, the humiliating discovery that his comrades had seized the wrong man. I should have given him their silly confession and dealt with them later, Marcus thought, vexed at his inability to pretend and for having surrendered to his anger instead. There are matters more important to settle than this, an entire city to protect! But nothing Marcus could have said would have prevented this, no ascendancy to the title of gentleman could have stopped the stroke oar’s vendetta. Blaikie was taking too much pleasure in his powe
r. Anyway, it was too late for obliging them, and as for himself, the only thing he wanted more than to be freed from this box was to feel his hands around Blaikie’s throat. Everything else mattered less: Boston, Tech, his friends, even Agnes.

  His eyes closed as he concentrated on quelling his emotions. They’d want him to scream, they’d be listening for it—then they’d probably pull him back up briefly, then dowse him again or go on to the next torment. Screaming might divert them, but it would not liberate him.

  Down into a dark tunnel of memory, he escaped.

  * * *

  In the barren courtyard of the prison, the August heat burns the back of his head and neck. His right hand was caught in a twisted position during the night and now throbs with an unfamiliar pulse that sounds in every molecule of his body. The young man is locked into the standing stocks, an infamous device of Captain Denzler’s making. Holes for the neck, arms, and legs are fixed by movable bars. The punished cannot move in the slightest, can do nothing but bleed in the sun and scream. The man suffering and starving there, that summer in 1862, is Marcus Mansfield. Breathe deeply, breathe hard, breathe quickly. One of the other prisoners told him that, saying if he practiced, he could render himself entirely motionless for almost four minutes at a time so the guards would not bother him, because if he struggled they would strike him.

  It had started with the fireplace he and Frank had labored on months earlier, using the tobacco press bolts, in order to warm the sickest and weakest of the prisoners during the winter.

  “Those sick men may live now because of you,” a prisoner from Illinois had said to Marcus one morning, with a strange tone of bitterness.

  On the man’s forehead a T imprinted in needles and India ink marked him as a thief, a mark made by other prisoners here or perhaps those in another, earlier prison camp. Marcus nodded and turned away.

  Then Thad grabbed his arm. “I want you to do something for me now, Mr. Police Chief. You are a clever mechanic. And so is your skinny friend. What is his name? You do have a tongue in your head, boy?”

  “My friend’s name is none of your concern, and neither am I.”

  “You will both help me.”

  “I don’t know you.” Marcus pulled away.

  “But you will know, Chief. Or I will tell the secesh guards what you’ve been doing.”

  Marcus knew that if the thief informed the guards of their invention, the sick men who were using the fireplace would be punished, and the device removed. In their condition they would be unlikely to survive.

  T’s assignment was challenging. He wanted a drill made from the machine parts, and it wasn’t difficult to guess why.

  “Everyone must be able to escape,” Frank had said after the plan, and the extortion, was explained to him. “That is our condition.”

  “We are in the basement,” replied T forcefully. “Any day, we could be moved onto a higher floor, and shall lose our only chance at freedom. You provide a drill that works, then we can build a tunnel big enough for two men side by side to stand up. Every man on this floor well enough to stand can make it to Union lines.”

  “And what of the sick ones?” Marcus had asked.

  T had shrugged. “Either way they die.”

  “We carry them,” Frank had insisted, purple with offense. “We carry them out, too, or we will not help you.”

  “Empty the whole prison, if you wish,” T had countered. “It’s no concern of mine. But I will walk through the tunnel first, and I won’t be looking back for dead men!”

  Using saws that they’d fashioned from sheet iron out of the raw materials of the tobacco presses and then hardened with heat, Marcus and Frank engineered the requested drill from case knives, needles, and bars. By placing weight on a bar, the drill would revolve down, while raising the bar would make the drill return to its starting place. After several trials over the course of four months, they had made five drills and began the tunneling. The remarkable inventions were used only for a week before another prisoner, in return for a single plug of tobacco, reported to the guard having seen Marcus Mansfield and Frank Brewer taking parts from the presses.

  Twenty-four hours in the standing stocks having passed, Marcus is removed from the contraption. Unable to stand without support, his entire body quivers and he crumples to the burning sand. The first thing he does when he has the strength is to turn his head to see if his scorched neck is still usable. He can hardly feel that his right hand is still there, until it wakes with a pain that floods his insides.

  Ten or fifteen other men are being kept in the courtyard in various forms of punishment under the watch of guards. Marcus looks around for Frank but does not see him. Surrounding the yard is a ditch, with a berm of dirt on the other side known as the “dead line.” Any prisoner who crosses or steps on the dead line is shot without warning.

  Captain Denzler steps over three prostrate men on his way to Marcus. He has a comb and is using it to groom his bushy, rough beard into some order.

  “Yank,” Denzler says, “you seem smarter than most of your kind. You wish to say what it was you were making with the parts you took from the tobacco presses?”

  “We made spoons and some toothpicks,” Marcus says, surprised he can even speak.

  “You know I am an engineer myself? Did you know? Do you like this invention?” He lifts his hand to the standing stocks and rubs it as if it were his pet. “I think it an ingenious design and I shall make a point to register it with the Confederate patent office. I have examined the scavenged presses myself, and I think you have been making more than spoons and toothpicks. Do you want to go back into the stocks?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What do you think I will do with you?”

  They have not found the drills, which means they have not found the other men who had become involved with their plan of escape. Marcus wants to ask where Frank is, but does not want to put him at greater risk by revealing that they are not only co-conspirators but also friends.

  When he remains silent, Denzler laughs. “You know you have the eyes of a minister I once knew back home? Yes, exactly his eyes.” He presses the thick steel toe of his boot down on Marcus’s throbbing hand. Marcus emits an inhuman scream. “You may be able to use your carving hand again—one day. Who knows?”

  Denzler digs the toe into Marcus’s hand, grinding it into the dirt as he screams again. At last, Denzler turns away, instructing the guards to keep him outside in the yard for four days, with half rations only every other day. “Between you and the skinny one, whoever speaks first has a chance to live. The other will be killed,” Denzler says over his shoulder. “You will talk to me.”

  Marcus is surprised at first not to be placed back in the standing stocks. He thinks they have forgotten. After a while, he regains enough freedom of movement in his neck to take in the whole yard. There he finally sees Frank, bucked, with his hands tied in front of his knees. Marcus can see other prisoners bound to balls and chains or in other devices of torture built by Denzler. Later, maybe much later, he sees a group of well-dressed Southern merchants, so they seem to his eyes, touring through to look at the Yankee prisoners.

  Then he realizes what Denzler has done by releasing him from the stocks. His punishment was not reduced. He has given him the tantalizing choice of suicide on the dead line, to literally die by inches. He tries to lift his arm to signal a guard; he will tell Denzler everything, at least about his part in the affair, on the condition that Frank is protected, though deep down he knows that might be impossible. Whatever he does, he may not be able to prevent Frank from dying. The poison of these thoughts sends a wave of exhaustion through him and he is soon in a deep slumber. He is awakened when dragged to his feet by two guards. His eyes open on the blank expression of Captain Denzler.

  “I will tell you,” Marcus is about to try to say, but doesn’t have the chance.

  “Get him out of here,” Denzler says.

  “Where are you taking me?” He looks around and sees that F
rank is no longer in the same place in the yard. His blood runs cold.

  “You are going back inside the prison,” Denzler says, as if this were a gift. “Your friend has ended this.”

  Then Frank has talked? Impossible!

  After being tossed back into the basement, he crawls from prisoner to prisoner until he finds one who heard something about Frank.

  “They say some Southern businessmen came here and your friend overheard one speaking of the troubles in their factories with so many of the workers away in the war. He shouted out that he would work for one of them—a shoemaker, I think—on the condition that you were both freed from further punishment. The guards began beating him, but the shoemaker, laughing at the spectacle as if it were Punch and Judy, put a stop to it and agreed to Frank’s conditions.”

  Marcus tries not to believe it, but does not have the strength to investigate further. He sleeps for what seems three days straight. The next time Denzler is in the basement, he stops at Marcus’s haversack and shakes him awake. “If it had been my choice,” he says, “I would have left you both in the courtyard to die. But those were important merchants, and they must be pleased. No fear. I will still have my satisfaction, one way or another.”

  “Frank,” Marcus whispers to himself. It was true. He has turned himself into the one thing worse than being a prisoner: a slave.

  “It is just like a Yankee worm,” Denzler says.

  “What?”

  “To barter for his life like a Jew, instead of dying like a man. My lame leg might keep me out of the field, but I could destroy you Yankees with my brain, if only I am ever given the chance.”

  * * *

  “TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT?” Bob whispered, kneeling down on the rooftop of the Harvard building, bracing himself against the strong wind.

  “Yes, Richards. You will see soon enough,” Hammie said, grinning widely.

  “You’re certain?” Bob asked.

  “Yes!” Hammie nodded impatiently. In his lap was an iron container that looked like a skillet, and inside that several tin bottles he was removing from their paper wrappings. “I devised it with my own hands, Richards. It will work, upon the word of a Technologist! Anyway, it worked for the Constantines. Now this—this is what we should be doing more of with our little society, curse your blasted curriculum.”