The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (51 page)

“How can you assert such an impossibility, sir? It contradicts everything I know.”

Brown sighed, took a seat, poured himself some wine without offering Wheatstone any, sipped, then said, “Ah, that is the problem, Bing. May I call you ‘Bing’? You most assuredly do not know everything. What, for instance, do you make of the name of Captain Nemo?”

“This is the name you mentioned in your message to me. Well, I seem to recall that a brigand once roved the seven seas under that
nom de guerre,
harrassing shipping and so forth. Were his quixotic campaigns not chronicled in some musty old volume early in this century?
Beleaguered Below the Seas,
or some such title? If this is the fellow you refer to, his relevance is not immediately apparent.”

“Indeed, you recall the broad, distorted outlines of Nemo’s career. I’m surprised you apprehend even that much. During our Robinsonade upon Lincoln Island, Nemo had already been absent from the public scene for thirty years. Nowadays he is hardly even a phantom. And much of that public nescience regarding him and his works is deliberate, fostered by us here. Yet such was not the case three decades ago, when his name was still on the lips of the cognoscenti. You can imagine our surprise when we discovered this notorious criminal genius to be a fellow resident of our little island.”

“He was cast away, like yourselves, then?”

“Not at all. He had retreated to the island purposefully, to spend his final bitter days in peace and seclusion. We witnessed his death from natural causes, and buried him there.”

“How then can his name play any part in the current discussion?”

“Nemo was a wizard, Bing. And he was buried in his wizardly craft, the
Nautilus,
a submersible vessel. We sank it with his corpse, as per his last wishes. But the trouble — the trouble is, the
Nautilus
did not remain sunk.”

“I am beginning to see the vaguest hints of the direction in which your story is heading. Pray, proceed.”

Harbert Brown took a long meditative swig of wine before continuing. The guttering candle caused shadows to warp eerily across his bleary-eyed visage.

“Can you envision the ambitious dreams and lofty expectations which the six of us repatriated survivors held, once we were transplanted to Iowan soil, Bing? On primitive Lincoln Island we had struggled against all odds and created a semblance of civilization out of nothing but our wits and the abundant raw materials present. True, we had benefited from the secret interventions of Nemo at certain crucial junctures. And even now, with his final gift of a casket of riches, he was underwriting our mainland venture. But despite his bolstering, we had firm faith that we six alone could still establish a beacon of superior living in the midst of these United States. Imagine then how our hopes were dashed when so much went wrong in the first few years. Crop failures, natural disasters, cut-throat competition from neighbours, prejudiced merchants who refused to deal with us because of the presence of Negroes such as Neb, governmental restrictions, a poor quality of lazy immigrant workers from the sewers of Europe — all these factors and more conspired to render our Utopia a stillborn shambles. And at the head of it, our leader, Cyrus Smith, despondent and despairing for the first time in his life. Now you must realize one thing, Bing. Cyrus is not the genius the world thinks him. He is clever, and well-versed in engineering lore. But he hasn’t an original bone in his body. He can re-create, but not create.”

“But all the flood of inventions that have come from his fertile brain —”

“They did not come from Cyrus Smith’s brain, Bing! They came from Nemo’s!”

“You mean — ?”

“Yes! In eighteen-seventy, using the last of our wealth in a desperate gamble, we mounted an expedition back to the site of the vanished Lincoln Island, back to that small remnant crag of rock from which we were rescued. We sent a primitive submersible down to the sea floor — providentially shallow — and found the
Nautilus,
miraculously intact. Pencroff in his undersea suit entered through her open hatch, and managed to get her miraculous engines going again. Luckily, the indestructible machines had shut themselves down in a programmed fashion when we scuttled her. We crewed the
Nautilus
and brought her back to the East Coast. There, we lifted her into drydock, sundered her into sections, and carted her back to Iowa. Then began in secret the plundering of her real wealth, all the marvellous inventions she contained.”

“Suppose I credit this tale, Mr Brown. What of it? You have disclosed the ignoble reality behind the myth of Cyrus Smith’s genius. I suppose we could concoct a three-day scandal out of such material and sell a few extra papers. But how does this revelation materially affect the grandeur of what you Iowans have achieved? And how can you possibly deduce the end of civilization from your tawdry tale?”

Brown leaned forward intently, all foppishness banished by earnestness. “Are you the same fellow who wrote that series of articles entitled ‘Some Thoughts Toward the Manifest Destiny of Our Arriving Twentieth Century’? That’s why I picked you, Bing, because of the speculative acumen you exhibited in those writings. You seemed to recognize that the continued success of our present planetary culture is based on a perpetual flow of advancements. There can be no such thing as holding still. The growing interconnectedness of the world, the demands of a surging population, the rising expectations of the common man as to what life will bring him — all these factors and more conspire to demand a flood of fresh inventions from the world’s laboratories. And the world looks to Lincoln Island to lead the way. If we were to stagnate, the worldwide system would collapse in a Malthusian disaster of rioting, starvation and savagery.”

“Agreed. But surely the risk of stagnation is next to nil —”

Brown banged a fist upon the table, sending his tumbler of wine toppling. “Don’t you get it, Bing? We’ve copied and slightly improved all of Nemo’s technology. If I may coin a term, we applied ‘reverse-engineering’ to his devices. Smith’s talents were perfectly adequate for that. But we don’t understand the first principles of any of it. We’ve engaged scores of brilliant men from around the globe — Edison, Bell, Ford, Michelson, the Curies, and many more whom I could name — and none of them have had an ounce of success at unriddling, say, gravito-magnetics. We’re like primitive witch-doctors recreating effects by following formulae passed down from the gods.”

“Surely you judge yourself too harshly,” Wheatstone protested.

“Not at all! It’s taken every iota of ingenuity we possess just to translate Nemo’s devices into automobiles and trains and such. That’s why large-scale manned flight has baffled us. Nemo’s engines were never designed for such applications. And we’ve just about reached the limit of what we can mine from the last scraps of the
Nautilus.
But what’s even worse is how we’ve fatally detoured the destined course of scientific history. By futilely investing generations of talent in following Nemo’s bizarre avenues, we’ve allowed the foundations of science circa 1870 to crumble and moulder. The world of 1898 is not what it should have been. There is no organic path left for us to follow from here out. To re-organize the scientific establishment that existed thirty years ago is nigh impossible. Yet our only hope for the future is to attempt such a thing. But we cannot even make such a last-ditch effort until we first tear down the sickly monster we have erected. And your help is essential for that task.”

Wheatstone felt torn between a host of contradictory impulses. His affection for what Lincoln Island had created vied with his desire to make a journalistic splash. His belief in Brown’s sincerity — the man appeared to truly believe everything he had said — warred with his incredulity at the enormity of the long-standing hoax.

“How can I accept what you tell me without some kind of proof, sir?”

Brown got tipsily to his feet and secured the neglected carpetbag from the corner of the room. He hoisted it to the tabletop, unclasped it, and reached within. From the bag he lifted a fantastical helmet with thick glass plate for a visor, bearing an ornate capital N. This he thumped down on the table.

“Here is one of the diving helmets from the
Nautilus.”
Brown examined the headgear with interest. “Intriguing, sir. But this could be something intended to deceive me.” “Thought you might say that.” Brown reached again into the bag and removed another exhibit.

Wheatstone’s knowledge of human skeletal anatomy had been buffed by various professional interviews with leading anthropologists. The skull now flaunted before him displayed odd configurations of bone that seemed to hint at larger mental proportions than the human norm.

“Yes,” Brown confirmed, “this is Nemo’s very skull. The fishes had picked him quite clean by the time we returned. He claimed to be an Indian prince, but I suspect that he was much more. Perhaps a visitor from the future, perhaps a stranded traveller from another star. Or perhaps a human sport, a forerunner of some species of mankind yet to come. In any case, he possessed qualities of mind the likes of which are all too seldom encountered.”

The skull formed a shocking weight in the pan of the scales that favoured Brown’s story. But still Wheatstone hesitated. So much was riding on his decision —

Brown sensed this hesitancy. “Damn it, man! I had been hoping to avoid this, but I can see I’ve got no choice. Come with me. I’m taking you to see the carcass of the
Nautilus
itself!”

Brooking no resistance, Brown grabbed Wheatstone’s sleeve with one hand and his bottle of wine with the other, and they departed the Gilded Cockerel. Outside, they strode off, Brown leading. He continued to swig from his bottle, muttering all the while.

“We’re rotten at the core, Wheatstone! Nemo was the worm in the apple of the original Lincoln Island, and he remains so today. Our whole existence is predicated on a lie!”

Wheatstone refrained, wisely he thought, from either agreement or dissent.

After half an hour of progress through the deserted streets of a manufactory district, the pair arrived at an innocuous warehouse. Brown pulled Wheatstone down an alley and around to a side door.

“No one comes here anymore. The
Nautilus
was stripped long ago, its components distributed to various laboratories. We should be perfectly safe venturing inside.”

“I take it then that you are playing a lone hand. You have no fellow conspirators to rely on?”

“Hah! Who among those self-satisfied drones wants to rock the boat? They’re all frightened old men. But poor little Harbert Brown, the baby of the group, still has some hot blood in his veins! They’ll all be dead soon, the duffers! Not me! And I don’t want to live in a desolate future. That’s why I’m doing this, Bing!”

After employing a key on the padlocked door, Brown led Wheatcroft into the stygian interior. “There should be an electric-light switch somewhere near this entrance — Ah-ha!”

The blaze of illumination that flooded forth following Brown’s simple action caused Wheatcroft to fling up an arm across his face against the glare. When his eyes had adjusted, he lowered his limb.

The vast open floor of the warehouse held just what had been promised. Like a slaughtered whale strewn across a beach, the segments of Nemo’s wonder-vessel reared ceilingward. Steel arches and ribs trailed bits of truncated wiring and pipes and bits of decoration. The shattered pieces of the
Nautilus’s
staterooms — slabs of mahogony and tile, broken chandeliers and armoires — were heaped in a corner. The whole panorama was morbid and desolate in the extreme.

Wheatstone moved forward for closer inspection, but was arrested in his tracks by a shout.

“Stop right there! We are from the council!”

Across the room, framed in another doorway, stood a short, gnarled yet feisty old man surrounded by quadrumanes. The surly apes wore not the vests of their servant cousins but rather leather brassards, and carried truncheons belligerently.

“Pencroff!” exclaimed Harbert Brown.

“Yes, you cocksure little fool. Did you actually think your plotting went unnoticed? We’ve known all along about your treacherous scheme. And now you’ll have to face the consequences. Secure them, boys!”

At Pencroff’s command the apes bounded forward and cruelly pinioned Wheatstone and Brown. Within seconds the prisoners had been placed in the claustrophobic back of a Black Maria wagon, which motored off.

Brown was too devastated to speak, and Wheatstone found himself similarly dejected. How had he come to such a fix? Ambition had undone him. He could not delude himself that high-minded principles had played any part in his involvement.

Their windowless conveyance eventually came to a stop. The rear doors opened, and a rough-handed quadrumane escort hustled Brown and Wheatstone out and into a new building. Inside, the conspirators were separated. Soon, much to his surprise, Wheatstone found himself deposited in a spacious library. His animal captors left him then, and he collapsed into a chair.

Not many minutes passed before the library door clicked open. Wheatstone shot quivering to his feet and found himself face to face with the president-for-life of Lincoln Island.

At age seventy-eight, Cyrus Smith still possessed all the charisma of his youth. His stern, bearded countenance radiated a patriarchal aura not unmixed with a sly humour. He smiled at Wheatstone, and extended a hand.

“Come, come, Mr Wheatstone, you’re not among ogres here. If at all possible, no harm will come to you. I think you’ll find us more than reasonable when it comes to straightening out this imbroglio you’ve stumbled into.”

“Sir, you have foisted an imposture upon the world!”

“Have I, Mr Wheatstone? Yes, I suppose I have. But consider the benefits that have accrued thanks to my little charade. The living standards of much of the world’s population are higher than they’ve ever been before. Cowed by the weapons we have liberated from the
Nautilus,
the nations of the globe have learned to value diplomacy over aggression. The Sons of Ham are fully enfranchised and valued, both in North America and elsewhere. I venture to say that this version of 1898 is, on the whole, a more just and admirable one than any other merely hypothetical branch of history that would have resulted had Lincoln Island never existed.”