if you wanted to wave the bloody shirt.”
“I rather believe,” said St. Ives, grimacing at the raucous climax of an unidentifiable bit of orchestration, “that we should pay this man Beezer a visit. We can’t do a thing sitting around Dover. Narbondo has agreed to wait four days for a reply from the Academy. There’s no reason to believe that he won’t keep his word — he’s got nothing to gain by haste. The comet, after all, is ten days off. We’ve got to suppose that he means just what he claims. Evil begets idiocy, gentlemen, and there is no earthly way to tell how far down the path into degeneration our doctor has trod. The next train to London, Hasbro?”
“Two-forty-five, sir.”
“We’ll be aboard her.”
The Bayswater Club, owned by the Royal Academy of Sciences, sat across from Kensington Gardens, commanding a view of trimmed lawns and roses and cleverly pruned trees. St. Ives peered out the window on the second floor of the club, satisfied with what he saw. The sun loomed like an immense orange just below the zenith, and the radiant heat glancing through the geminate windows of the club felt almost alive. The April weather was so altogether pleasant that it came near to making up for the fearful lunch that would at any moment arrive to stare at St. Ives from a china plate. He had attempted a bit of cheerful banter with the stony-faced waiter, ordering dirt cutlets and beer as a joke, but the man hadn’t seen the humor in it. What he
St. Ives sighed and wished heartily that he was taking the sun along with the multitudes in the park, but the thought that a week hence there mightn’t be any park at all — or any multitudes, either — sobered him, and he drained the bottom half of a glass of claret. He regarded the man seated across from him. Parsons, the ancient secretary of the Royal Academy, spooned up broth with an enthusiasm that left St. Ives tired. Floating on the surface of the broth were what appeared to be twisted little bugs, but must have been some sort of Oriental mushroom, sprinkled on by a chef with a sense of humor. Parsons chased them with his spoon.
“So you’ve nothing at all to fear,” said Parsons, dabbing at his chin with a napkin. He grimaced at St. Ives in a satisfied way, like a proud doggy who had fetched in the slippers without tearing holes in them. “The greatest minds in the scientific world are at work on the problem. The comet will sail past us with no commotion whatsoever. It’s a matter of electromagnetic forces, really. The comet might easily be drawn to the earth, as you say, with disastrous consequences. Unless, let’s imagine, if we can push ourselves so far, the earth’s magnetic field were to be forcibly suspended.”
“Suspended?”
“Shut off. Current interruptus.” Parsons winked.
“Shut off? Lunacy,” St. Ives said. “Sheer lunacy.”
“It’s not unknown to have happened. Common knowledge has it that the magnetic poles have reversed themselves any number of times, and that during the interim between the establishing of new poles, the earth was blessedly free of any electromagnetic field whatsoever. I’m surprised that a physicist such as yourself has to be informed of such a thing.” Parsons peered at St. Ives over the top of his pince-nez, then fished up out of his broth a tendril of vegetable. St. Ives gaped at it. “Kelp,” said the secretary, slathering the dripping weed into his mouth.
St. Ives nodded, a shiver running up along his spine. The pink chicken breast that lay beneath wilted lettuce on his plate began, suddenly, to fill him with a curious sort of dread. His lunches with Parsons at the Bayswater Club invariably went so. The secretary was always one up on him, simply because of the food. “So what, exactly, do you intend? To
“Not at all,” said Parsons smugly. “We’re building a device.”
“A
“To reverse the polarity of the earth, thereby negating any natural affinity the earth might have for the comet and vice versa.”
“Impossible,” said St. Ives, a kernel of doubt and fear beginning to sprout within him.
“Hardly.” Parsons waved his fork with an air of gaiety, then scratched the end of his nose with it. “No less a personage than Lord Kelvin himself is at work on it, although the theoretical basis of the thing was entirely a product of James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell’s sixteen equations in tensor calculus demonstrated a good bit beyond the idea that gravity is merely a form of electromagnetism. But his conclusions, taken altogether, had such terrible and far-reaching side implications hat they were never published. Lord Kelvin, of course, has access to them. And I think that we have little to fear that in such benevolent hands, Maxwell’s discoveries will lead to nothing but scientific advancement. To more, actually — to the temporary reversal of the poles, as I said, and the switching off, as it were, of any currents that would attract our comet. Trust us, sir. This threat, as you call it, is a threat no more. You’re entirely free to apply your manifold talents to more pressing matters.”
St. Ives sat silently for a moment, wondering if any objections would penetrate Parsons’s head past the crunching of vegetation. Quite likely not, but St. Ives hadn’t any choice but try. Two days earlier, when he had assured his friends in Dover that they would easily thwart Ignacio Narbondo, he hadn’t bargained on this. Was it possible that the clever contrivances of Lord Kelvin and the Royal Academy would constitute a graver threat than that posed by the doctor? It wasn’t to be thought of. Yet here was Parsons, full of talk about reversing the polarity of the earth. St. Ives was duty-bound to speak. He seemed to find himself continually at odds with his peers.
“This…device,” St. Ives said. “This is something that’s been cobbled together in the past few weeks, is it?”
Parsons looked stupefied. “It’s not something that’s been
“So he’s had the lifelong ambition of reversing the polarity of the earth? To what end? Or are you telling me that he’s
“I’m not telling you either of those, am I? If I chose to tell you the truth about the matter, which I clearly don’t choose to do, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. It would confound you. Suffice it to say that the man is willing to sacrifice ambition for the good of humanity.”
St. Ives nodded, giving his chicken a desultory poke with the end of his finger. It might easily have been some sort of pale tide-pool creature shifting in a saline broth on the plate. Ambition…He had his own share of ambition. He had long suspected the nature of the device that Lord Kelvin tinkered with in his barn in Harrogate. Parsons was telling him the truth, or at least part of it. And what the truth meant was that St. Ives, somehow, must possess himself of this fabulous machine.
Except that the idea of doing so was contemptible. There were winds in this world that blew a man into uncharted seas. But while they changed the course of his action, they ought not to change the course of his soul. Take a lesson from Robinson Crusoe, he told himself. He thought about Alice then, and of the brief time they had spent together. Suddenly he determined to hack the weeds out of her vegetable garden, and the thought buoyed him up. Then, just as suddenly, he was depressed beyond words, and he found himself staring at the mess on his plate. Parsons was looking contentedly out the window, picking at his teeth with a fingernail.
First things first, St. Ives said to himself. Reverse the polarity of the earth! “Have you read the works of young Rutherford?” he asked Parsons.
“Pinwinnie Rutherford of Edinburgh?”
“Ernest Rutherford. Of New Zealand. I ran across him in Canada. He’s done some interesting work in the area of light rays, if you can call them that.” St. Ives wiggled loose a thread of chicken, carried the morsel halfway to his mouth, looked at and changed his mind. “There’s some indication that alpha and beta rays from the sun slide away along the earth’s magnetic field, arriving harmlessly at the poles. It seems likely, at a hasty glance, that without the field they’d sail in straightaway — we’d be bathed in radioactivity. The most frightful mutations might occur. It has been my pet theory, in fact, that the dinosaurs were laid low in precisely that same fashion — that their demise was a consequence of the reversal of the poles and the inherent cessation of the magnetic field.”
Parsons shrugged. “All of this
