The Technologists

  Who were they, really? Just a handful of students styling themselves Technologists, grandly thinking they could rescue their college and defend Boston against an invisible enemy. Knowledge of scientific arts did not give them the power of clairvoyance. Yet, if there was a chance they were right … Torn, Marcus gave the lamppost a swift kick as Agnes, her eyes now wide with concern, took his arm.

  There was a rumbling noise before the ground trembled beneath them. It was as though the earth held in its laughter. Then, a low hissing. It all came together in his mind now, the secret experiment, the frozen mercury, Monday morning.…

  As sophomores, they had made a study in metallurgy about metals expanding unequally. One of the basic causes of such an expansion was a contrast in temperatures—which could be caused most quickly by the introduction of cold water to a hot metal.

  The first things to start in the commercial metropolis of Boston on a Monday morning would be the boilers in the mills, the foundries, all the places of industry that had arisen across the city in the last twenty years.

  “Boilers!” he cried.

  If the feed water were too cold, with the steam heat pumping in at the same time, the metal would expand at different rates in different parts. Every apparatus in that condition could explode.

  Right underneath where they stood in the Public Garden and Commons were the main water pumps connected throughout the city—the danger, once introduced into the pipes from the reservoirs, would be on its way, rumbling past them.

  “Out with it, Marcus!” she demanded.

  “I have to warn them,” Marcus said. “Frank … Mr. Hammond … the locomotive works. Everyone, everywhere. I have to get to them.” He took her by the shoulders. “Stay here, Aggie, in the garden, away from the buildings, do you understand?”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Forget the garden, actually. Find the middle of the Common—stay along the center mall, as far from the streets and buildings as you can. You’ll be safe! I’ll find you when it’s over!”

  “What’s happening, Marcus? Where are you going?”

  “Remember, stay in the middle,” he said, guiding her quickly onto the lawn. “It’s not too late for me to do something.”

  * * *

  “DID YOU WITNESS the incidents when they occurred?”

  “Well, not exactly,” said Edwin.

  “Do you know who perpetrated the incidents? This … ‘experimenter,’ as you say.”

  “No, not by name. As to being witnesses, we did visit State Street after we heard what had happened. And we saw the laboratory building in South Boston collapse up close—why, we were almost crushed by it,” Edwin pointed out. He was sitting across the desk from a patrolman in the public area of the police station. Bob tapped his fingers against the wall and his foot against the floor. He was standing behind his friend, bursting with impatience.

  The patrolman gave a long-winded sigh. “Tell me again why you are here?”

  “Because we know more than you do,” Bob said. “The whole city is in danger, and you sit on your hands!”

  “We have the finest experts studying these strange phenomena, I assure you—”

  “Ha! Agassiz and his shell collectors? You’re not listening!” Bob interrupted. “There must be some relative of mine in a superior position to you somewhere here.”

  “Bob, please,” Edwin admonished him, then turned back to the irritated patrolman. “Sir, if I may—”

  “What profession did you say you were in?” the patrolman said, screwing his face into a skeptical expression.

  “We’re only college students.”

  “College students!”

  “Yes, but you see, we’ve made a thorough study, and—”

  “College students!” the patrolman interrupted Edwin. “Do you see all those people you pushed past on your way to my desk?” He indicated the churning mass of people who crowded the central police station. “Each one is here to try to tell us that they saw a mysterious man practicing black magic that caused all the ships to lose their way in the harbor, or that all the engines and machines have come alive and are in rebellion against us. Every day more fairy tales. Now, the two of you come in here acting as if you possess some vital secret, waving about schoolboy essays you wrote on the subject as if this were one of your classrooms—”

  “Two of us?” Edwin asked. He and Bob turned around.

  “I can’t count, is that it?” the patrolman said.

  “Where’s the professor, Eddy?” Bob said.

  “She was standing behind you,” Edwin said.

  “Next, please!” the patrolman called to two women with heavily feathered hats addressing each other in hushed tones.

  Bob looked on in disgust before turning away. “Professor!” he called. “There she is.” She was standing at the threshold to the station house.

  “Miss Swallow, they simply won’t listen to a word we say,” Edwin said as they joined her. “Perhaps you can convince them.”

  “I heard something,” she said to them, staring out into the street. “Like an explosion.”

  “Well, it could have been anything,” Bob said.

  Then, an alarm bell sounded at one of the electromagnetic telegraph stands inside the station, a call from another station in the city. The dial spun around and around to indicate a numerical signal of distress. Ellen, Bob, and Edwin all turned to look at one another as they listened. Then another telegraph stand brought word from another station, and another, another, another, another, and another.

  * * *

  MARCUS CROSSED IN AND OUT of traffic until he reached the walkway to a brass foundry. He shouted as he ran through the door: “Shut off the feeds to your boiler room, get everyone out! Shut off the machines! Shut everything off!”

  Those close enough to hear him over the din of the machines looked as though a madman had burst into their midst. Marcus’s heart sank. He knew, because he had been them once, what he must have looked like in their eyes—a fancy collegey who had no place there, probably playing some dodge on them. But he pushed forward, still shouting, until a burly workman blocked him, spinning him around by the shoulders.

  “Listen, please,” he sputtered, as the man picked him up by the collar and thrust him toward the entrance, shoving him out into the road and shouting for Marcus to tell the unionists they wouldn’t shut their machines down and lose wages.

  Marcus picked himself up and hurried toward a mill several hundred yards away. He shouted at everyone he saw along the way to get clear of the building.

  An enormous roar stopped him in his tracks. He watched as in a nightmare while a fragment of a gigantic boiler tore through the wall of the main building of the mill and flew at least a hundred feet into the air. The second and third floors were blown in, and the mangled remnants of the boiler were propelled into the side of a wooden building across the street. Shouts of terror from the workers trapped inside filled the air as the mill building and the wooden structure simultaneously collapsed. Behind him, a wall folded in at the foundry from which he had just departed and its steam whistle howled.

  He was too late.

  Marcus covered his face with his arm as debris shot everywhere and he was thrown backward by the force. He felt as if the whole city were spinning around him. He wanted to stop and help ease the screams, but he had to keep going. He had to save Frank; if nothing else, he would move heaven and earth to do that.

  With his arms and legs pumping madly, the ground seemed to rise up to meet each stride. Yet he felt he was standing completely still, with Boston flowing past him, catastrophe after catastrophe unfolding casually around him as scores of boilers burst. Each time, the ground shook like an earthquake. The giant chimney of the sugar refinery shot into the air, showering its bricks down. Windows of surrounding houses were shattered by the debris. Marcus ducked and swerved as debris and timber dropped from the sky and shot through the air from all sides. Three or four times he was knocked down and pulled himself up again. br />
  At a hat factory, a section of the boiler crashed through the boiler house, taking out most of that wall. Victims were screaming for help from inside the rubble. Another section of the boiler had shot through the chimney, sending the shattered metal parts, along with bricks and hats, flying two hundred feet into the air. A group of street urchins ran in circles, catching the hats or collecting them where they fell. Marcus had to jump over the ten-foot-long warped piece of another boiler that had been thrown more than a hundred yards from the rubber manufactory.

  Another object was blown through the air as a second boiler exploded out of the hat factory. As it was propelled over a five-story building, Marcus gasped to see the projectile was a man, who landed across the street, his brains scattered over the wall and roof of a house. The body was burned black by the steam shot from the boiler. Another workman, his head and arms scalded, ran along the street screaming for help. At the nail factory and iron works, employees dove out the windows as the fragments of boilers exploded through the walls of the building. An arsenal of nails pierced the air, just missing Marcus. Fire bells, whistles, screams of agony, and raw shouts for help joined the chaos.

  At last, Harrison Avenue. A wall had already been blown through the Hammond Locomotive Works, with workingmen scrambling everywhere for safety. Marcus charged in and up the stairs to the machine shop, calling for Frank.

  Near his old workbench, a figure was sprawled flat on the ground, covered in a thick layer of blood from head to toe. Marcus saw again an image of a devil breaking Frank’s Ichabod Crane into pieces. He threw himself on the floor next to his fallen friend.

  “Marcus?” the prostrate man groaned. “What are you doing here?”

  “You’re alive!” Amazed, Marcus felt blood dripping onto the back of his neck. He looked up and saw the body of a worker, no older than eighteen, who had been thrown and impaled on top of one of the taller machines. The blood saturating his friend was not Frank’s. He seized Frank and dragged him to his feet, wiping blood from his head with his sleeve.

  “All right,” Frank said wearily, hanging on Marcus’s shoulder. “I think I’m all right, Marcus! I think—I was thrown against the wall. How did you get in here? What is all this?”

  “I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you before.”

  “You know what’s happened here?”

  “Yes, but I can’t explain right now. It looks like your leg twisted around pretty badly. Can you stand on your own?”

  “I think so.” He cried in pain as Marcus pulled him up.

  On the mezzanine above them, a prone Chauncy Hammond was being lifted by two of the bigger men and the supervisor, who was bleeding from one of his ears. Hammond came to consciousness with a start, struggling against his men. “What happened? My property! I built this! I won’t let it be ruined! Scoundrel! Let me go!”

  Damaged ceiling rafters started to crumble.

  “Well, I guess it’s a good thing I am ready to move on from the old machine shop to be a Tech man, isn’t it, Marcus?” Frank joked weakly as he surveyed the wreckage and blown-out windows. “There might not be much of it left.”

  “You must get away from here, Frank. Get onto clear ground. The rest of the boilers could blow to pieces at any moment. Tell as many of the others as you can.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going to try to shut them down, then warn more places.”

  “More …? What in the devil is …” Frank looked around at the chaos. “Do it, Marcus. Go now! I’ll manage.” Putting on his soldierly face, Frank doggedly limped into the shop, holding on to the nearest machines for support, ordering the other workers to run to the exit.

  * * *

  HE HAD BEEN TOO LATE to stop anything, even with his voice now shredded from shouting. The frigid water had made its way through the system and exploded nearly every working boiler being operated in the city that morning. Now the world shrank for Marcus to the whereabouts and well-being of his friends. He had to find enough strength in his aching muscles to bring Agnes to safety and locate the rest of his friends.

  Marcus dodged through shrieking, weeping crowds on his way back. Rain fell in light spurts. He passed Roland Rapler in the streets, directing his men in the assistance of the injured and the rescue of survivors, looking every inch the great commander in his uniform. Their eyes met and they nodded at each other. The air smelled like ashes.

  When Marcus reached the Common, she was not where he had left her. His heart raced. He called out for her hoarsely, then ran to the deer park, where the animals were frantically trying to find a way out of their pen, and then on to the Frog Pond.

  “Agnes!” he shouted again, pausing to listen for her voice in response, hearing instead only his own rough breathing.

  A commotion had begun across from the Common near the State House, and somehow he knew. He moved toward the crowd, dread rising in his throat. As he tried to push his way through, he could just glimpse the legs of a fragile figure in yellow lifted from near a pile of bricks. Not her. Anyone but her.

  A dark fog enveloped him. He could not reconcile the crumpled form with Agnes Turner laughing, Agnes Turner splashing with the children, her eyes alive with curiosity and warmth and faith. He heard indistinctly snatches of breathless conversation, bystanders repeating the story of two children, a boy and a girl, their clothes soaked, running toward a building that was swaying dangerously, a young lady chasing after them before a large wood plank came twirling through the air, smashing against her head.

  He tried again to get closer but policemen held him back. He shouted and struggled and called out for her, but then she was carried inches from his face.

  Into the sea of people he dropped, down to his knees.

  XLV

  Nil Desperandum

  WILL BLAIKIE WINCED as he raised his arm to the knocker. Could they not install a doorbell, with all their bloated grants from the legislature? In the morning’s catastrophe, Blaikie had been walking down Washington Street when a mob marinated in panic had trampled him. His wrist nearly snapped under the weight of one man’s heel. His anger at the unknown trampler mixed together with his already burning rage at the Tech boys who had assaulted him on the Charles, had humiliated him in front of the Med Fac, and had, if he were to hazard a guess, been the ones to run up a bill at the shop of a tailor who was dunning him for payment for three suits that were too large for him.

  Blaikie had been wronged. Blaikie was a man not to wrong.

  “Well? What do you want?” the great man himself asked as he opened his office door.

  “Professor Agassiz,” Blaikie said. “I wish to have a word, if you please.”

  “Tell me again, if you have told me before, you are …?”

  “William Blaikie, sir, Harvard Class of ’68. President of the Christian Brethren.”

  “Oh! Mr. Blaikie, how excellent of you,” Agassiz said, beaming. “Come in, come in and sit down.” Blaikie was ushered into the scientist’s veritable palace of bugs. By now, he was well aware of Agassiz’s appointment as consultant to the police, and sure enough, behind the professor was one of the police officers he had seen walking through the college yard with Representative Hale. He had also heard that all the theories Agassiz had produced for the police so far, having to do with changes in the chemical and magnetic composition of the earth below Massachusetts—or something of the kind—had come to naught since the latest disaster.

  “We need more societies like yours at Harvard—not that dreadful Med Fac, which I understand was involved in some secret disturbance just the other night. In the middle of the night, when good Christians sleep!”

  “Sir,” Blaikie agreed halfheartedly.

  “They should abolish such rubbish, and ship out anyone who feels the need to create a life of fantasy instead of the grand world of nature placed before us. You have come to discuss, I presume, my request that your society assist in refuting the monstrous notions of Darwinism. You know, Blaikie—is it Blaikie?—fanciful t
heories are merely conjectural, and not even the best conjecture. It is by looking at the great complex of the animal world that we shall reach its hidden meaning. I have recently received the skeleton of a racehorse; would you like to examine it for yourself?”

  “I have the evidence you need.”

  “Evidence refuting the Darwinites?” Agassiz asked with a condescending laugh.

  “No, Professor Agassiz,” Blaikie said. “Regarding what has happened in Boston.”

  The police officer looked over at the newcomer with sudden interest. Blaikie held up the sack he had brought with him, and then emptied it onto a table, revealing scraps of iron and several well-used compasses, magnets, and compass needles, as well as what appeared to be long lists of chemical compounds.

  “These were taken from the rooms of a student from the Institute of Technology.”

  “Whose rooms?” Sergeant Carlton asked.

  Blaikie paused. “They were brought to me anonymously, in my position as the president of our Society of Christian Brethren, Officer.” He could have given a name—insufferable Plymouth Richards or that poseur Mansfield, who thought himself enough of a swell to be seen at the opera, the high-handed savage! But he had sworn to himself the night of the Med Fac debacle that he would find a way to bring down the whole Institute of Technology, not just one or two of their deluded boys. He would fire his best shot, and then relish watching their feathers fly.

  “The Institute has aimed to produce controversialists, not observers,” Agassiz said, bristling. “I have long feared science will ultimately suffer most in the hands of its devotees.”

  “You will notice some of these pages are stamped with the seal of the Institute, I believe. I am a scholar, not a scientist, not a policeman. But I believe these might show a connection with the catastrophic events perpetrated in the city, Professor. Those are the facts.”

  “Facts,” said Agassiz, “are stupid things, Mr.—Blake?—stupid things until brought into connection with general laws. Do not snatch a crown before you have fought and won your battle.”