The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

has in the past.”

“There’s a better way,” said St. Ives simply. It was useless to lose his temper over Parsons’s practiced stubbornness.

“Oh?” said the secretary.

“Ignacio Narbondo, I believe, has showed it to us.”

Parsons dropped his spoon onto his lap and launched into a choking fit. St. Ives held up a constraining hand. “I’m very much aware of his threats, I assure you. And they’re not idle threats, either. Do you propose to pay him?”

“I’m constrained from discussing it.”

“He’ll do what he claims. He’s taken the first steps already.”

“I realize, my dear fellow, that you and the doctor are sworn enemies. He ought to have danced his last jig on the gallows a long time ago. If it were in my power to bring him to justice, I would, but I have no earthly idea where he is, quite frankly, and I’ll warn you, with no beating about the bush, that this business of the comet must not become a personal matter with you. I believe you take my meaning. Lord Kelvin sets us all an example.”

St. Ives counted to ten very slowly. Somewhere between seven and eight, he discovered that Parsons was very nearly right. What he said was beside the point, though. “Let me repeat,” St. Ives said evenly, “that I believe there’s a better way.”

“And what does a lunatic like Narbondo have to do with this ‘better way’?”

“He intends, if I read him aright, to effect the stoppage of certain very active volcanoes in arctic Scandinavia via the introduction of petrifactive catalysts into open fissures and dykes. The subsequent detonation of an explosive charge would lead to the eruption of a chain of volcanic mountains that rise above the jungles of Amazonian Peru. The entrapped energy expended by such an upheaval would, he hopes, cast us like a Chinese rocket into the course of the comet.”

“Given the structure of the interior of the earth,” said Parsons, grinning into his mineral water, “it seems a dubious undertaking at best. Perhaps…”

“Are you familiar with hollow-earth theory?”

Parsons blinked at St. Ives. The corners of his mouth twitched.

“Specifically with that of McClung-Jones of the Quebec Geological Mechanics Institute? The ‘thin-crust phenomenon’?”

Parsons shook his head tiredly.

“It’s possible,” said St. Ives, “that Narbondo’s detonation will effect a series of eruptions in volcanoes residing in the hollow core of the earth. The stupendous inner-earth pressures would themselves trigger an eruption at Jones’s thin-crust point.”

“Thin-crust point?” asked Parsons in a plonking tone.

“The very Peruvian mountains toward which our man Narbondo has cast the glad eye!”

“That’s an interesting notion,” muttered Parsons, coughing into his napkin. “Turn the earth into a Chinese rocket.” He stared out the window, blinking his eyes ponderously, as if satisfied that St. Ives had concluded his speech.

“What I propose,” said St. Ives, pressing on, “is to thwart Narbondo, and then effect the same thing, only in reverse — to propel the earth temporarily out of her orbit in a long arc that would put the comet beyond her grasp. If the calculations were fined down sufficiently — and I can assure you that they have been — we’d simply slide back into orbit some few thousand miles farther along our ellipse, a pittance in the eyes of the incalculable distances of our journeying through the void.”

St. Ives sat back and fished in his coat for a cigar. Here was the Royal Academy, unutterably fearful of the machinations of Ignacio Narbondo — certain, that is, that the doctor was not merely talking through his hat. If they could trust to Narbondo to destroy the earth through volcanic manipulation, then they could quite clearly trust St. Ives to save it by the same means. What was good for the goose, after all. St. Ives took a breath and continued. “There’s been some study of the disastrous effects of in-step marching on bridges and platforms — military study mostly. My own theory, which abets Narbondo’s, would make use of such study, of the resonant energy expended by a troop of synchronized marchers…”

Parsons grimaced and shook his head slowly. He wasn’t prepared to admit anything about the doings of the nefarious doctor. And St. Ives’s theories, although fascinating, were of little use to them here. What St. Ives wanted, perhaps, was to speak to the minister of parades…

Then there was this man Jones. Hadn’t McClung-Jones been involved in certain ghastly lizard experiments in the forests of New Hampshire? “Very ugly incident, that one,” Parsons muttered sadly. “One of your hollow-earth men, wasn’t he? Had a lot of Mesozoic reptiles dummied up at a waxworks in Boston, as I recall, and insisted he’d found them sporting in some bottomless cavern or another.” Parsons squinted shrewdly at St. Ives. It was real science that they would order up here. Humanity cried out for it, didn’t they? Wasn’t Lord Kelvin at that very moment riveting together the carcass of the device that Parsons had described? Hadn’t St. Ives been listening? Parsons shrugged. Discussions with St. Ives were always — how should one put it? — revealing. But St. Ives had gotten in out of his depth this time, and Parsons’s advice was to strike out at once for shore — a hearty breaststroke so as not to tire himself unduly. He patted St. Ives on the sleeve, waving the wine decanter at him.

St. Ives nodded and watched the secretary fill his glass nearly to the top. There was no arguing with the man. And it wasn’t argument that was wanted now, anyway. It was action, and that was a commodity, apparently, that he would have to take with his own hands.

* * *

St. Ives’s manor house and laboratory sat some three quarters of a mile from the summerhouse of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. The River Nidd ran placid and slow between, slicing neatly in two the broad meadow that separated the grounds of the manor from the grounds of the summerhouse. The willows that lined the banks of the Nidd effected a rolling green cloudbank that almost obscured each house from the view of the other, but from St. Ives’s attic window, Lord Kelvin’s broad low barn was just visible atop a grassy knoll. Into and out of that barn trooped a platoon of white-coated scientists and grimed machinists. Covered wagons scoured along the High Road from Kirk Hammerton, bearing enigmatic mechanical apparatus, and were met at the gates by an ever-suspicious man in a military uniform.

St. Ives watched their comings and goings through his spyglass. He turned a grim eye on Hasbro, who stood silently behind him. “I’ve come to a difficult decision, Hasbro.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve decided that we must play the role of saboteur, and nothing less. I shrink from such deviltry, but far more is at stake here than honor. We must ruin, somehow, Lord Kelvin’s machine.”

“Very good, sir.”

“The mystifying thing is that I thought it was something else that he was constructing in that barn. But Parsons couldn’t have lied so utterly well. He isn’t capable of it. We’ve got to suppose that Lord Kelvin will do just what he says he will do.”

“No one will deny it, sir.”

“Our sabotaging his machine, of course, necessitates not only carrying out the plan to manipulate the volcanoes, but implies utter faith in that plan. Here we are setting in to thwart the effort of one of the greatest living practical scientists and to substitute our own feeble designs in its stead — an act of monumental egotism.”

“As you say, sir.”

“But the stakes are high, Hasbro. We must have our hand in. It’s nothing more nor less than the salvation of the earth, secularly speaking, that we engage in.”

“Shall we want lunch first, sir?”

“Kippers and gherkins, thank you. And bring up two bottles of Double Diamond to go along with it — and a bottle or two for yourself, of course.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hasbro said. “You’re most generous, sir.”

“Very well,” mumbled St. Ives, striding back and forth beneath the exposed roof rafters. He paused and squinted out into the sunlight, watching another wagon rattle along into the open door of Lord Kelvin’s barn. Disguise would avail them nothing. It would be an easy thing to fill a wagon with unidentifiable scientific trash —