The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (55 page)

Once seated on a
velvet-covered chair in a large darkened amphitheatre with scores of others,
Wheatstone was treated to a show of magic-lantern slides accompanied by a very
entertaining speech given by one of the many trained actors who served as
guides to the fair. He thrilled once more to the famous tale of the castaways,
an abbreviated saga which was followed by an account of the subsequent thirty
years. The act of Congress in 1875 which had reluctantly but decisively allowed
the petition of the Iowans asking to secede from the rest of the United States;
the attempted invasion of the fledgling country by a cabal of European powers,
launched from their base in Canada, which had been efficiently and mercilessly
repelled by uncanny weapons of a heretofore unseen type. The signing of various
peace treaties and the establishment of Iowan hegemony in several areas of
international commerce and trade. The immigration policies which encouraged
savants from all corners of the globe to flock to Lincoln Island —

After this, Wheatstone
toured several exhibits, taking copious notes. From the Hall of
Gravito-magnetism to the Chamber of Agricultural Engineering; from the Arcade
of Electrical Propagation to the Gallery of Pneumatics — Finally, though, even
the exciting speculations failed to compensate for Wheatstone’s natural fatigue
after such a busy day, and, after consuming a light snack of squab and sausages
from a fairground booth, he returned reluctantly to his hotel room.

There, to his surprise,
a blinking light on the ordinator panel in his room signalled that a message
awaited him.

Triggering the output of
the electronic pen produced a cryptic sentence or two that lacked all
attribution of sender, as if such information had been deliberately stripped away.

Mr
Wheatstone — have
you noticed the absence of a certain name from these festivities? I refer to
the appellation of “Nemo.”Would you know more? Meet me this evening after
midnight at the Gilded Cockerel.

As a journalist,
Wheatstone was used to such anonymous “tips.” In the majority of cases, they
led precisely nowhere. But every now and then, such secret disclosures did
produce large stories of consequence. The young reporter could feel his blood
thrill at the possibility that he would bag such a “scoop” from this message.
This was an outcome he had hardly dared hope for when he had received his
current assignment. But if he could manage to distinguish his reportage from
all the other laudatory profiles that would be filed from this dateline, both
he and the
Boston Herald
would benefit immensely. And proprietor William
Randolph Hearst could be most generous to his successful employees.

Checking his pocket
watch, Wheatstone determined that he could snatch a few hours’ sleep before
making the rendezvous with the mysterious informant. But before he stretched
himself out, he fired off an ordinator message of his own, to his ladylove back
in the land of the bean and the cod.

Dear Matilda — I have
arrived safely in Lincoln Island and already find myself embroiled in matters
of some significance. If I succeed in making my name as I suspect I will with
this assignment, perhaps you and I may finally get married. As you well know,
my resolve not to ride on the Lodge family coat tails necessitates my obtaining
a certain stature within my chosen profession before any nuptials can proceed.
Please send all your kindest thoughts my way.

Having dispatched this
message, Wheatstone stripped down

to his undergarments,
set the alarm clock by his bed to sound at 11:30 p.m., and was soon deeply
asleep.

The clanging of the
alarm seemed subjectively to occur almost simultaneous with his descent into
the realm of Morpheus, and Wheatstone awoke with a start. Yet it was but a
matter of minutes for him to refresh himself, dress, and descend to the lobby
of the Hotel Amiens. There, he inquired of the concierge the address of the
Gilded Cockerel. The rigorously circumspect fellow looked askance at
Wheatstone, as if his query were somehow improper, but supplied the address
nonetheless.

Outside, the thronged
streets of Lincolnopolis were well-lighted not only by the permanent electric
standards, but also with numerous strands of coloured bulbs celebrating the
exposition. Wheatstone had no trouble hailing a jitney, and soon found himself standing
outside the door to the Gilded Cockerel.

Judging by its exterior,
the tavern, situated in a shadowy, mirey lane totally incongruous with the rest
of Lincolnopolis’s civic splendour, seemed somewhat louche. But Wheatstone had
been obliged to frequent worse places, and he entered boldly.

The interior of the
establishment confirmed Wheatstone’s original estimation. Gimcrack decorations
could not conceal the shoddiness of the furnishings. Odours of spilled ale and
less savoury substances clogged Wheatstone’s nostrils. Raucous laughter and
shouts indicated a total lack of public decorum. But what was more off-putting
than any of the sensory assaults were the figures of the patrons of the Gilded
Cockerel. To a man — and there were no females present — the customers were
clothed as total fops. The amount of lace and brocade present would have
outfitted the vanished court of Louis the Fourteenth.

Wheatstone knew
instantly that he had fallen in with sodomites. Their generic resemblance to
the infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde was indisputable.

Bracing his spine,
careful not to make any physical contact with the seated, simpering deviants,
Wheatstone advanced toward the barkeep, a burly chap whose sleeveless shirt
afforded a view of his numerous tattoos.

“I am supposed to meet
someone here tonight.”

The barkeep’s
mellifluous voice was utterly at odds with his appearance. “What’s your name,
honey?”

“Mr Bingham Wheatstone.”

“Ah, of course. Your
date’s awaiting you in one of the private rooms. Last door on the right, dearie.”

The nominated door
opened to Wheatstone’s touch and he stepped inside. Not electricity, but a
single candle illuminated the small room: rickety table, two hard chairs, an
uncorked, half-full bottle of wine and a single glass. A man stood with his back
to the door. At his feet bulked a large carpetbag.

Hearing Wheatstone’s
entrance, the man turned, and Wheatstone could not suppress his exclamation.

“Harbert Brown!”

“Quiet, you dolt! I
trust everyone here, but there’s still no need to announce my presence to the
world. Now, have a seat.”

Wheatstone took one of
the chairs, using the time to study the familiar yet altered face of Brown. The
man’s lips appeared to be painted, and his eyelids daubed with kohl. Taking a
moment now to light a slim cigar, Brown exhibited a limp-wristed effeminacy.
Although the youngest member of Lincoln Island’s ruling council, Brown was
still middle-aged, with all the attendant sagging flesh of that stage of life,
having been an adolescent stripling during the castaways’ adventures, and today
his unnatural airs reeked of a jaded degeneracy.

Wheatstone ventured to
paint the picture presented by Brown’s appearance in the most charitable light.

“Sir, you have adopted a
most convincing disguise —”

“Oh, you know as well as
I do that’s stuff and nonsense, Mr Wheatstone. This is the real me. It’s when I
appear in public as a moral and responsible politician that I am actually in
disguise. And what a trial it has been, maintaining that facade all these
years. Little did I imagine when I became Pencroff’s catamite as a youth that I
was embarking on a tedious charade that would last decades.”

Wheatstone felt his mind
whirling in a tornado of overturned conceptions. “But what are you implying?”

Brown languidly expelled
a cloud of cigar smoke. “Need I spell it out for you. Mr Wheatstone? What kind
of relationship did you suspect existed between a lusty sailor and a young boy
who inexplicably accompanied him everywhere? Pencroff and I were lovers during
our imprisonment in Richmond, Virginia, and we remained so for three years on
Lincoln Island after our balloon escape. In fact, in the absence of females, I
was able to provide carnal solace to all our little band during that period.
Although none of the other men were bent that way originally, they all gladly
succumbed to my charms when their natural urges reached a certain crisis point.”

“But, no, this can’t be
—”

“Oh, don’t be so
shocked, Mr Wheatstone. It’s not becoming in a supposedly seasoned reporter.
And anyway, this is not the matter I invited you here to discuss. The sexual
habits of Lincoln Island’s rulers have little import outside the narrow
confines of our tiny elite. No, the topic today is the very future of human
progress. You see, Mr Wheatstone, I fear that Lincoln Island has become a
positive blockade to technological advancement, and that its continued
dominance in the global scientific arena will eventually doom mankind and
actually induce a long, hard fall back to savagery.”

“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.”