The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (24 page)

Berwick thought about it. ‘Nah. I reckon that about caps it.’

Lyle realized he had been shouting. He sagged. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why did you run, Berwick?’ Moncorvo’s voice sounded like uncut stone.

The other man eyed him suspiciously and murmured, ‘Horatio, there’s some things you didn’t mention about your life.’

‘You too,’ conceded Lyle. ‘I’m not sure which of us is more surprised. But good God, why did you agree to build the damn thing?’

He shrugged. ‘It just had the scientific appeal of a good - no, a
brilliant
idea.’

‘That’s a terrible answer.’

‘It appealed to my vanity, nonetheless.’

‘
Why?
’

‘Horatio.’ Berwick’s eyes glowed. ‘The thing is beautiful. The science of it, the maths, the structure, the building of it, the perfect working function, the perfect form, the perfect effect - the Machine is beautiful.’

‘You and I need to talk,’ said Lyle.

 

And here is the Machine. Every part glows, honed, carved, polished to lock precisely into place with the next part. It is a giant clockwork maze, a thousand intricate little pins hooking into a million intricate little cogs which spin a billion chains and each one works, a perfect function. Even broken down on paper into lines, into pure mathematical formulae, the thing is perfect, every number clicking into place like beads on a rosary,
snap
equal zero
snap
equal one; nothing out of place, not a minus sign ignored, not a fraction inverted, but the whole as pure in conception as it is in construction. Even the colliers, who have no grasp of the science that has gone into the pistons that reach up thirty yards overhead, even the porters and the men who pull the handles to release the billows of steam when the pressure climbs too high, even the nimble-fingered women whose job it is to crawl underneath the main hub of the furnaces when the chains get tangled, can sense that it is a work of scientific genius, a work of mechanical art - the Machine is beautiful.

More to the point, as the last whirring hub falls silent and a few sparks drip from overheated wires, the Machine is ready.

CHAPTER 13

‘What is it?’ asked Lyle, turning the thing over in his hands. It was approximately a foot in length, tube-like, but with a strange bulge at either end that looked as though it fitted into something else. Inside, the thing was made of little gold wires that gleamed in the candlelight from the table at the end of the narrow bed in the small room. Impatiently Berwick waved the papers on which the thing had rested. ‘A regulator, a regulator!’ he exclaimed, and waited for the light of comprehension in Lyle’s face.

Lyle looked confused. As did Moncorvo. Berwick sighed. ‘It’s what they need to finish it: this is the final piece of the Machine.’

‘Well, yes . . .’ Lyle peered at the diagrams on the table, leafing through them. ‘Yes, fair enough, but what
is
it?’

‘It synchronizes the flow of the current and the detonation of the explosive so that they occur at precisely the same time, in the same space.’

‘
Right
.’ Lyle carefully put the long tube down and picked up the papers, turning them this way and that. ‘And this makes the Machine work . . . how?’

‘Horatio, I expected more of you,’ said Berwick. He pushed the gun aside, pointing out the interest of a particular drawing. ‘Observe - the precise nature of the timing requires construction of machinery so fine - not to mention an entirely separate circuit through which the control current can run, as a mere fraction of the energy being deployed, so that . . .’

‘This is a bomb,’ murmured Lyle, whose attention had already been seized by another paper. ‘A very, very
big
bomb.’

‘Take all the explosives of the Crimean War and compress them together and you wouldn’t have as much power as I do inside that chamber.’ Berwick’s face had lit up. ‘It took years to make this.’

‘Years? But you’ve been working on this for . . . what? Five months?’

‘Yes, but it’s been years since they started trying to make the Machine work. I’ve simply provided the key, the know-how, the knowledge of how to control the explosion so that the current passing around the detonation chamber flows at the exact moment of the blast, forcing the magnetic field to collapse and . . .’

‘You make the magnetic field collapse into the explosion and then push it back out again.’

‘Exactly! But bigger, much bigger; the original field is just the field around a current - and what a current! But by exploding it, we can force a wave of magnetism that can travel many miles before dissipating into the background field of the earth’s own magnetic field.’

Moncorvo, if he understood what was being said, showed no reaction. Lyle’s face, however, showed incredulity. ‘But that kind of power! No, and that kind of detonation, I mean . . . the thing must be
huge
! It must be ... well ... it must be ...
no
, and there’s no way you could get that kind of energy, it’d take ... oh . .. it’d require . . .
so much
, I mean just . . .’

‘Billions,’ agreed Berwick in a low, excited whisper. ‘Billions of coulombs, we store them in capacitors, thousands of them, it takes days to charge, each one bigger than a man, and the explosive is actually four and a half hundred explosives compressed together for the detonation. It’s ...’ He shook his head and let out a long breath, ‘beautiful.’

‘It’s a disaster in waiting.’

Berwick shrugged. ‘Maybe that too.’

‘And this regulator thing?’

Berwick picked it up again, and grinned. ‘Ah, well, yes, that’s where it was all going wrong for them, you see? That’s why Havelock needed me.’

‘Why? I’m guessing by the name “regulator” it’s involved in somehow . . . regulating . . . the whole process?’

‘Quite, quite! You see, we can generate a current big enough, we can store it while trying to extract the necessary charge, we can even construct and contain a big enough explosion, although I must admit even I was taken aback a little by the scale of the construction. But in order to collapse the magnetic field, we needed to ensure that the passage of charge through the coil around the detonation chamber is exactly synchronized with the explosion itself. That’s what this does.’

‘This thing?’ Lyle waved doubtfully at the slim tube.

‘Yes!’ Berwick looked quite offended. ‘I mean, obviously, it fits into the larger structure, has its place, but essentially . . . yes.’

‘Havelock asked you to make it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Five months ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you did?’

‘It was an adventure, Horatio, a challenge. How could I resist?’

Lyle hesitated, then shrugged - in one sense, he could understand Berwick’s response. ‘Willpower?’ he hazarded. He saw Berwick’s face and sighed. ‘Nevermind. When suggesting this idea to you, did he ever mention the Machine’s ultimate purpose? ’

‘No . . . not really. He said it was an experimental device for Her Majesty’s Government. I did think about the possible consequences, if that’s what you mean. Strangely enough, the idea that it was going to be used in a war waged against people with an intolerance for high magnetic fields and ferrous material generally, didn’t leap to mind.’

‘Surely not.’

‘You may be used to this world, my boy,’ said Berwick primly, ‘but believe me when I say that even as a child I regarded fairy-tales as simply another way to get me to eat cabbage.’

‘Scientists are a species unto themselves, aren’t they?’ asked Moncorvo. Lyle didn’t feel he expected an answer. He glared at Moncorvo, and turned back to Berwick. ‘I’m assuming you found out about the whole Tseiqin business?’

‘Oh yes. Very much so.’

‘
How?
’ Lyle’s voice was pained with the effort of restraint.

‘It all happened very fast. I was on Baker Street Station - there was a lab underneath Baker Street, you see. Havelock said it was better to keep the work secret . . .’

‘I’ve been there, flooded that.’

‘Oh, really?’ Berwick didn’t seem too bothered. ‘Well, I was on Baker Street Station, when, without any warning, this group of men ran at me. Just like that.
Poof!
I didn’t know what to do; I panicked, obviously. One second, perfectly fine; the next second, running people. I can’t really explain what happened - but they attacked me, and some other men came at them. Afterwards Havelock said they’d been set to look after me, but I hadn’t even realized until then that I merited a guard. There was shooting, shouting, all that - I hid under a bench.’

Moncorvo gave a derisory snort. Lyle frowned. ‘What then?’

Berwick hesitated, then said, in a precise, quiet voice, ‘I saw them die. All of them, all the men who’d run at me. I saw their faces on the floor next to mine, I saw them bleed. Their blood was white, Horatio - but I suppose you know about that. It didn’t react to the air, it didn’t turn red, it was just . . . white. And their skin was almost white, their eyes green, and . . . dead. I’ve never seen dead eyes before. They didn’t change in the light, they didn’t crinkle, they didn’t widen; they just stared, right at me, but not at me, through me, like . . . anyway, mustn’t give inanimate objects character, it’s a foolish habit. Havelock said I was in danger, that I couldn’t go home, that I couldn’t leave work, now that completion was so near.

‘I said, “In danger from whom?” He told me that there was an enemy, that my Machine . . . that the Machine was a weapon. He said it was a crusade, a holy war, a war of survival, and that I was the key. We were so close.’

‘Go on,’ murmured Lyle, when Berwick didn’t seem about to move.

Berwick’s eyes became focused on something beyond the room. ‘I am not a soldier. Havelock said that they weren’t human; and their blood . . . is not human, Horatio. But their eyes, when they were dead, were ... sad ... so sad. They . . . say those men were there to hurt me. I didn’t have time to see. They were probably right. I saw them die, they stared at me. Am I going to kill the rest of them? Havelock doesn’t even know how many there are in the city - he guesses hundreds . . .’ Another
hmph
from Moncorvo, but Berwick didn’t seem to notice. ‘. . . but what if there are more? All those unexplained bodies in the street, struck down by an invisible wave of magnetism, never knowing what the Machine was built for, what it was about. Dead bodies with dead eyes. Would you finish the Machine, Lyle?’

Lyle didn’t answer. Berwick smiled faintly. ‘You are part of this, I suppose.’

‘No,’ said Lyle coldly. ‘I’m not.’

‘Then why are you here?’

Lyle thought about it, then shrugged. ‘People just keep on breaking the bloody law.’

‘Is that it?’

‘It’s the best explanation I’ve got. Somebody shoots someone, somebody else decides to shoot back - how many bodies do you need before it stops being murder and becomes war? That’s about the extent of my reasoning: sorry, I haven’t really thought about it much.’

Berwick let out a sharp breath. ‘Ah. So you
are
here to stop the Machine.’

‘Pretty much.’ Lyle was surprised to find himself sounding so certain.

Berwick waved the regulator in Moncorvo’s direction. ‘Do you . . . trust these people?’

‘No!’

‘But you still want it stopped.’

‘It’s not science, it’s a crime,’ said Lyle impatiently. ‘You know that.’

Berwick was thoughtful. Eventually he smiled. ‘Fair enough, lad. But you see, I have this problem.’

‘Does the problem wear a top hat and have a voice like . . . oh, I don’t know, the sound silk would make if you polished an iceberg with it?’

‘You’ve met him.’

‘Oh yes—’ After a while Lyle added, ‘You know, not to be crude, but that means you’re right up to your neck in manure.’

‘How, exactly?’ Berwick looked confused.

‘Well, I could inform you that I can protect you from the wrath of Augustus Havelock and hide you and he need never find you despite your having betrayed him and his Machine by absconding with the final part and necessary information to complete it,
but
. . .’

‘It’d be a lie?’

‘You probably
can
evade him,’ said Lyle. ‘But I suggest that to do so you move away a lot further than back home to Aberdeen. And you’d never again be able to see or speak to any of your friends or family.’

‘Why’s that?’

Lyle met Berwick’s eyes and said, perfectly reasonably, ‘Because he’d kill them all if he thought you could know of it.’

‘I see.’ Berwick suddenly looked a lot smaller.

‘On the other hand,’ Lyle forced a grim smile, ‘he won’t just kill them out of pique; it’s all about you being aware, about you knowing that poor Aunty Maud was mown down in the street because of you, and nice Uncle Godfrey was drowned as punishment for your sins! There has to be that contact, that awareness.’

‘You’re not painting a pretty picture, Horatio.’