Asimov's SF, February 2010 (23 page)

"True. But if you don't help Collingwood finish his Cylinder, in the long run all of us will be lost, all our children...."

"I have no children."

"Nor I ... I have nephews ... I had hoped...” He peered at me, his eyes oddly milky. “Are you still here, or a bad dream? Go, man, if you're going...!” He coughed, and blood splashed from his mouth and over his tunic.

I hesitated for a further second. But if you are reading this manuscript, you know what choice I made. Damn my sentiment! [
And God be thanked for the grain of honor that lodged in you, Ben Hobbes, for if you had made another choice, as poor Clavell said, all would have been lost.—A.C.
]

XI

We raced back to the mine. Over my shoulder, I could hear the French drums as they marched after us.

Collingwood's party, evidently drawn by the noise of the rocket fire, had come to the surface. Anne was at her father's side, that brave jaw stuck out, her eyes clear. Watt was with them, and the marines were preparing the carriages. Miss Herschel, who had chosen to stay in her brougham under a heap of blankets, peered out, curious and anxious by halves.

Collingwood took in our condition at a glance, and he could hear the French approach as well as I could. He said calmly to Denham, “The Lieutenant and the rest?"

"Lost, sir. I tried to make him come—"

Collingwood put his hand on the man's shoulder. “All right, Geordie. But the French are coming—Mr. Hobbes?"

"They are perhaps fifty. No artillery but well equipped with muskets and rifles from what I saw—"

"And Congreve rockets,” Anne murmured.

"Perhaps we can take shelter in the mine,” I said.

"And let them smoke us out, or starve us, or bayonet us in the dark like pigs in a sty? Not much of an option, Mr. Hobbes,” said Collingwood.

"But it need not come to that,” said James Watt. He stood, hands on hips, eyeing the country to the east, from which direction the French were marching. “As it happens we're planning a little open-cast mining just that way.... Mr. Hobbes, do you see the bent elm yonder? How long would it take for the French to reach that point, do you think?"

It took us a few seconds of estimation, for the French seemed to be walking at a comfortable pace, confident of trapping us. We settled on five minutes.

Watt grunted. “Not long to prepare. Admiral, do you have a decent timepiece on you? Count out the five minutes. When it's done, call down to me.” And with that he hurried off, back into his mine workings.

Anne frowned. “What's he up to?"

Collingwood allowed himself a grin. “I think I know.” He took his watch from his breast pocket and snapped it open. “Five minutes, then. In the meantime we should prepare for the eventuality that he fails.” He marched around the site, surveying the military potential of a handful of broughams and other conveyances, the ditches and shabby huts of the mine works, his few marines and their paltry firearms. He hefted his own musket. “Let's use what cover we have. Make sure we have a run back to the mine—we should not get separated.” The men, seeking cover, melted into the shadows of the vehicles and the workings. “Anne—"

"I will fight."

"If you must, you will, I know that, child. But for now, please take Miss Herschel into the safety of the mine.” He handed her his own musket. “It's an order, Miss Collingwood."

"Yes, sir.” And so they parted, without an embrace or a soft word, yet it was as tearful a moment as I can remember in my own soulless life. [
The author exaggerates.—A.C.
]

The Admiral turned to me. “We have spare firearms, at least.” He tossed one to me. “Do you know how to load it, Mr. Hobbes?"

"Learned it at my mother's knee,” I said, putting on the Yankee vowels.

"That must have been a formidable knee."

"But, Admiral—Mr. Watt's five minutes?"

"Lord!” He had entirely forgotten, and he checked his watch. “Thirty seconds left."

"Here they come!” cried Denham.

Seeking cover, I lay flat on the cold ground and crawled under a brougham. And I saw them come, silhouetted against the dim December afternoon sky, fifty men marching in step, and I heard their drums clatter and the brittle peal of trumpets. The French do like their music.

And as they started past that bent old elm, Collingwood called down: “Now, Mr. Watt!"

Nothing happened—not for long seconds. My own heart hammered, while the French unit marched as graceful as you please past that elm, and I saw them readying their muskets.

And then, for the second time that day, I heard a sound like thunder, but this time it came not from the sky but the ground. The drumming packed in, and the French stopped their march, and looked down at their feet, disturbed. Even at my distance, a good two hundred yards, I felt the ground shudder and the fittings of the brougham above me rattled and clattered.

And the crust of the earth broke, just as if a mighty fist had punched upward and out of it, and I saw pillars of ice slide into the air. Then the dome rose, the icy carapace of a Phoebean soaring upward along its slim legs. So this was how James Watt used the Phoebeans—this was how they made his mines for him! But this beast had erupted right beneath the French party, and they were raised up and scattered, and when they fell those wretches hit hard with screams and the crack of bone.

Denham shouted: “At ‘em, lads!” And the marines dashed over the English mud, muskets and sabers ready, to finish off the Phoebean's work.

But I thought I saw a French naval officer, burly and pigtailed, running off into the dark.

XII

We returned to the Great North Road, passing through Durham and Gateshead and on to Newcastle, where the Roman route cuts through the city walls to cross the river Tyne. We arrived just six days after leaving London. By now every town and village we saw was in a ferment of preparation and evacuation, and that was nowhere more true than in Newcastle, where that late December Thursday a row of ships of the line were moored at the Quayside, their sails neatly reefed, and they were being unloaded of their guns.

We did not stop, but we were inevitably slowed by the bustle, and I looked around with some curiosity, for this was the site of my own ancestor's escapades during the Ice War—where the main force of Phoebeans, marching south around a tremendous Queen, was resisted by the townsfolk. I saw the ruins of the castle, smashed to splinters by a Phoebean. Collingwood himself pointed this out to me, for he was traveling with me in my battered London cab now that my companion Clavell had been left in his grave at Darlington—and Collingwood, it turned out, had been born in that city, in a cut not far from the Quayside. Well, that day the city was battening down for another siege, with every man and woman carrying guns or powder pouches or barrels of provisions, and small boys knocking holes in house walls with broom handles.

But Newcastle was also the eastern terminus of the Wall that the Romans built to span the neck of the country and keep out the hairy Caledonians. And when we left the city, following the road through a northern gate, Collingwood bade me look to the west to see what I could of the preparations being made there. Since the Ice War, the Wall, which was now called the Geordie Wall, had been extended and heightened, and turned into a mighty barrier against the advance of any Phoebeans who might come strolling this way from the north. The old Roman mile forts had been turned into gun towers and ammunition dumps, and before the Wall's northern face the Roman vallum, a huge ditch and earthwork, had been deepened and spiked with blocks and iron bars. All this was decades old and dilapidated, but now frantic work was going on all along the Wall.

Collingwood said, “They're turning the Wall around. Can you see? They have stripped the ships on the river of their big guns, and are fixing them here to replace the rusting veterans of the Ice War. They're digging out a new vallum before the southern face, too. It's here that Wellesley plans to make his stand—or specifically further west of here, near a fort called Housesteads, where the Romans built their Wall to follow a natural ridge. Wellesley believes in using the land as an ally, and in that, evidently, he has the instincts of the Caesars’ generals."

"There are worse plans, no doubt,” I murmured. “But I can see one obvious flaw—which is that if I were Napoleon, I would try to flank Wellesley by sending a corps or two through the Wall's obvious weak point—Newcastle itself !"

Collingwood nodded soberly. “The man will surely have a go. But he won't find much of a welcome in Newcastle, any more than in London. The Geordies will fight, Hobbes—every wall will be loopholed to facilitate musket fire, every street barricaded, every house will hide an assassin. We have learnt the lesson of you Americans and how you have resisted the French. Now it is our turn.” He said this with a cold certainty, all the more impressive for its lack of passion—I reminded myself that this area was Cuddy's own, and he knew the grit of the people.

But we, intent on our own mission, pressed on north.

In the country north of Newcastle I saw more evidence of the Ice War of ‘20. The ground was slashed by a vallum they called Newton's Dyke, but it was overgrown now and bridged to take the road. And the ground here was cratered, as if mighty rockets had fallen; these pits had been left by Phoebeans, birthed in the ground and bursting thence. It must have been a tremendous sight!

And we passed through another town in a ferment of preparations, called Morpeth—where Collingwood had his home, and I imagined how Anne's heart would skip a beat at the closeness of her family. But even here we did not stop. Instead we followed a minor track out of town to the north-east, until we came to a village called Ulgham, a little rural place with nothing remarkable to it but an inn run by the local blacksmith. And from here we turned down a lesser track yet toward what appeared to be the head of a small coal mine.

That name, by the way, which I prevailed upon Anne to spell for me, is pronounced “Uff-am,” and it comes from a rather lovely Saxon phrase meaning “a vale haunted by owls.” And you might remember it, unless I and Collingwood and Miss Caroline Herschel are all incinerated in the next few hours, for by the time you read this it has probably become the most famous name in the world.

For it is here, in that small mine, that Collingwood had built his Cylinder.

We clambered down from our carriages, relieved to have stopped moving. Miss Herschel seemed barely conscious, and poor rheumatic Collingwood could hardly walk, but he went stomping off in search of managers and staff—and William Herschel, who should have been here.

We had already completed a long journey. But when I was taken into the installation—guided by an enthusiastic James Watt, who would not allow me to rest before seeing his works—I learned that a much longer jaunt was planned.

I call it an “installation.” What word would you have me use? Was it a mine? Shafts had been dug into the earth, and indeed a little coal extracted, but the pits were needed for their subterranean climate of cool and damp—and, it seems, to contain the tremendous explosions that were to be generated here.

Was it a factory? It had the trappings of one, with workshops for the working of metal and rubber and glass and the manufacture of engines, and stores of provisions such as sheet metal and iron ore, and rutted trails where wagons had repeatedly passed, and a multitude of workers who dwelled in poor-looking huts, and young women working as clerks and secretaries in the offices. Watt introduced me to more toiling troglodytic engineers here, with names with which you may be familiar if you are a student of such industries: Richard Trevithick, the Cornishman who had once built a road carriage pulled by a steam engine, and John Wilkinson, known as “Iron Mad,” said Watt, the ironmaster who made the first iron boat, and would be buried in an iron coffin! Thus, so Watt said, the industrial genius of the nation had been concentrated in this place.

And Watt proudly showed me an engine that made ice, with a series of pumps that expanded and compressed vapors, thereby removing heat from a volume—a process, he said, he had got from an American engineer called Oliver Evans, who I met once, but who unfortunately did not patent his work before he shared it with Watt! Manufacturing and engines, then—but clearly this place was not just a factory.

Was it a farm? Watt took me along galleries that overlooked pits where Phoebean eggs nestled and ice crabs scraped, watched over by boys with sticks in case any of those unearthly beasts began to grow unwieldy. Watt himself had his main office here, with a wall of windows overlooking the largest pit. Yes, a farm of Phoebeans.

But it was only as James Watt led me toward the heart, babbling in his rich Scots brogue, that I saw the true nature of the place.

One last gallery opened out into a pit, tall, roughly cylindrical, wide, with ladders fixed to its faces, and a disc of December sky above. And here stood an engine—or so I thought of it at first glance. Picture the boiler of some great steam engine, sat on its end; it was perhaps three yards wide and six tall. I could see it was constructed much as the hull of my
Nautilus
had been, of copper sheeting laid over ribs of iron, and there was the hand of Fulton. It was capped by a conical section, crudely welded in place, and metal vanes protruded from the lower hull. The walls were pierced by discs of glass, securely bolted. And at the cylinder's waist were hatches, almost like gun ports. All this buried in the earth!

Watt, not a natural orator, directed my attention to points of detail. “The nose cap is to deflect the flow of the air, much as the nose of your
Nautilus
pushed the water around her slim body. Of course it will only be necessary for the first miles of the ascent, and then may be discarded to afford a fresh observation port, forward-looking. The vanes too will act like rudders during those crucial first minutes, but will have little utility later, in the outer void—"

"What ‘outer void'?” But I already knew the answer. “This isn't a steam engine, is it, Mr. Watt?"

"No, Ben, she is not,” said Anne Collingwood, and she slipped her hand in mine; I had not noticed her approach, so absorbed had I been. “I think you know what she is—don't you?"