The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (64 page)

And now his tram was
slowing as they approached the launching site. Looking forward, Brian realized
the site was hidden in a valley tucked away in the endless scrubby grass of the
moor. They shuddered to a halt by a wooden platform. Other workers were
disembarking, pulling out their work dockets. Brian did the same.

He walked down —the
slippery wooden surface of the platform, one of a mass of people, dispensed by
the yellow wooden trams that rolled in over the horizon from all directions. A
man stood by a turnstile at the end of the platform checking dockets.

“Electrocotton,” he said
with grudging respect. “First time here, eh? Okay, Staircase 11. Hangar 3.” He
stamped the docket and Brian found himself on a gravel road that ran along the
line of the top of the valley. He walked along until he came to a sign bearing
the number eleven and joined the queue that took him on to an enormous moving
staircase that ran down the side of the hill to the valley below.

If ever he had doubted
the vision and the commitment of the English, he did so no longer. Now he could
see down into the wide floor of the valley, and he gasped at the sight of a cleared
area through which strode mechanical men the size of the Eiffel-Citroën tower.
Huge mechanisms, carrying great wooden crates from the hangars to the launch
bore that lay near the centre of the area: a circular hole plunging deep underground.
Yellow tractors and land trains ran across the churned earth, corrugated metal
buildings rose from the sea of mud. Workmen moved busily back and forth beneath
the face of a great white clock erected near the centre of the site on a metal
tower. The hands ticked backwards, counting down to the next launching. One
hour and twenty minutes.

One hour and twenty
minutes to save the Earth.

Brian Chadwick had
practised on what electrocotton the American government could afford to buy,
but it hadn’t been enough. It was inferior stuff, pale yellow, not like this
dark green cloth that unspooled from the great reels that
hung in the roof space of Hangar 3. This cotton smelled different:
richer, heavier. It was a little greasy and wider. There also seemed to be a
lot more of it than Brian had been expecting. The reels were almost twice as
thick as he had been led to believe they would be. Durham’s intelligence was
not what it should have been.

At least the packing
case was just as he expected: a yellow wooden cuboid the size of a large house.
The electropacker just finishing his shift climbed up a wooden ladder from
inside the case and shook Brian’s hand. His eyes glowed oddly behind the blue
lenses of his electrogoggles.

“Hey pal. It’s all
yours. I’ve been following an alternate diagonal pattern and I’m having trouble
figuring out how to make the eighth perpendicular.” He pushed a clipboard into
Brian’s other hand. “I’ve marked off where we’re up to on the chart there, sign
here to show you accept the changeover.” A pencil was shoved at him and a
lanolin covered finger pointed to a place on the chart “. . . and here,”
continued the man as Brian signed, “. . . and here. Okay, it’s all yours. Good
luck!”

With that the
electropacker wiped his hands on a yellow duster, pulled off the big white
woollen socks that covered his shoes, pulled on his raincoat and marched across
the floor of the hangar beneath the great wooden reels of electrocotton
brooding above.

Brian took a deep breath
and dipped his hands into the nearby tub of lanolin. He rubbed them slowly,
taking care to cover the skin. He took a deep breath, and felt the prickly
silence of the hangar fall around him and then he descended the wooden steps of
the ladder, slippery with more lanolin, and walked out on to the green expanse
that filled the bottom quarter of the box. The dark green electrocotton hung
down from the wooden reel above, and with a deep breath he took hold of it. He
felt a tingling deep within his hands as he walked backwards up the left hand
side of the case, laying the electrocotton in a neat stripe as he did so. It
was important to be careful because although it did not feel it, such was the
force of repulsion from material, the cotton was
only
one molecule thick. If handled incorrectly, it could slice into flesh without
you noticing it. At the end of the case, he turned the cloth through ninety
degrees, making a dog-ear shape in the corner of the box and continued along
the top. At the next corner he tried the same, but he felt the pressure of the
charge in the cotton already laid down beneath his feet fighting his move and
so he reversed, going back the way he had come. A yellow length marker came by
signalling he had only thirty feet until he reached the perpendicular, where he
would have to fold the cloth through a series of shapes so that it unwound
correctly when released into space.

Thirty feet. That would
be the hard part. He was already sweating as he ran the cotton diagonally from
one corner to another and . . . trouble! He gasped as the potential lurking there
threw his hands back with a force that wrenched his shoulders. Sweating, he
regained his composure. He had been lucky. If the potential there had been
negative, it could have pulled the cotton in his hands down causing a flash
back.

“You okay there?” asked
a passing supervisor looking down from the top of the case “Fine,” said Brian. “Fine.”

He took a deep breath
and continued packing. The twenty foot marker passed, then the ten foot marker.
And then it was time for the knot. This was the tricky part. Brian began the
complicated pattern. Gradually he relaxed. It was easier than it seemed.
Folding the cotton over itself repeatedly, he formed the pattern that would
cause the cloth to unravel at the perpendicular.

Brian continued to fold.
Eventually, the knot was finished. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then
looked up to see if he was being watched. No one. There were a lot of packing
cases in the enormous hangar. Now he did the job that he was here for.
Sabotage!

He did the knot again.

No one noticed. He went
on packing until the sirens sounded for the launch.

The workers made their
way along the paths to the shelters and blast walls that ringed the launch
site. There was a crackle of a tannoy.

“Launch in three
minutes.”

“Bloody good job,” said
the man on Brian’s right. “Sooner they’ve launched, the sooner we’ll be out of
this rain. Let it fall on bloody Germany instead.”

The other men in the
group laughed and Brian joined in.

They took shelter behind
a wedge-shaped piece of concrete. Most of the men lit up cigarettes or pulled
out one of the day’s electrosheets.

“I see that the
Americans are protesting about the launches again,” said one man.

“One minute,” said the
tannoy.

“Let them bloody whinge,”
said another.

Brian accepted a
cigarette offered by one of the other men. He took a drag, smelling the sweet
lanolin on his hands. The tobacco was good, surprisingly smooth. A lot better
than the stuff available in the USA nowadays.

“Ten seconds.”

Brian leant out from the
side of the shelter. He could see nothing.

“Get back in here, you
bloody idiot,” said one of the other men, good naturedly.

“Why not watch?” said
the man who had offered the cigarette. He was sitting with his back to the
wall, enjoying his smoke. “I don’t even know why they bring us out here now
They might as well leave us to work. Nothing ever happens at a launching.”

Brian peeked around the
corner of the wall. He had a good view down a wide road made of concrete
squares to the raised lip of the bore hole. A yellow green haze danced in the
light drizzle above the launch bore, rain drops sparkling as they fell into the
electrocotton lined pit. The launch cylinder would be rifled in electrocotton
to set it spinning as it travelled up through the bore hole . . . Brian felt
the shock in the ground, a thumping at his feet as the explosive charge was
detonated, he saw the yellow green haze brighten tremendously and form a ruled
line into the sky piercing the clouds above, and then he heard the noise of the
explosion.

It wasn’t that loud, but
oh! he felt the power. Vibration seemed to fill his entire body, it set his
heart and soul resonating ... but to the rest of the workers it was
commonplace. Already men were returning to their work, and after a moment’s
hesitation Brian followed them, but with a growing sense of awe. Only the
English. Only the English could have thought up such a scheme. It was
well-known, it had been reported in the electrosheets so often it had become
commonplace, but to stand here at the edge of a launching filled one with awe
at their sheer daring, their exuberance, their audacity! For the past fourteen
months the English had been launching projectiles stuffed with electrocotton
into space.

As he trudged back to
work through the drizzle the latest cylinder was soaring higher and higher
until it reached the discharge point. A current would be activated and the
thousands and thousands of miles of invisibly thin electrocotton within the
crates would spool out, twisting under its own charge to form a great loop in
the heavens. A loop larger than the Earth, one of many arranged in series
around the orbit of the Earth, an enormous electromagnetic cannon that
stretched out 584 million miles in length. Already the Earth’s magnetic field
was interacting with electrocotton launched a year ago. As the planet sailed
through the great loops its axis of rotation was gently tilted around. It was a
bold plan.

Brian couldn’t help
smiling.

Not any longer. The
damage of the last year was done, but the American government had done its
calculations, and done them well. With the subtle changes Brian and others like
him were making to the folding pattern, the Earth would not be tilting much
further in that direction. His smile broadened into a grin that quickly faded
as he made it back to the warehouse.

Arthur Salford was
waiting there for him. He was dressed in a smart grey suit.

“Good morning Mr Fuller,”
he said. “I see you took my advice and bought a raincoat.”

Max stood despondently
on the balcony, looking out over the Paris skyline. The sun shone down from a
brilliant blue sky, fresh white clouds scudding across its face.

“Cheer up Mr Fuller,”
said Miss Scrobot, pouring coffee into a little white cup. “Surely you can
enjoy this sunny morning with me?”

She held out the coffee
and Mr Fuller accepted it. He took a sip. It was very good, he grudgingly
thought.

“Oh Miss Scrobot,” he
said. “It’s just the feeling of frustration. That all our plans should have
come to nothing. That they were doomed from the very outset. The English have
been on to Durham and his amateurish set-up for years.”

Miss Scrobot came close
and took his hand in her warm metal grip. Max looked down in surprise. It was
not like her to be so forward.

“Never mind, Mr Fuller,”
she said. “At least you tried. You gave it your best shot. That is what your
sex demands, is it not?”

“Ah, Miss Scrobot, but
my best was not enough! And the English are so polite about it. That’s what
galls me! They were such gentlemen, they caught me and treated me so well, as
if it were all a game. They treated me to a decent lunch and then had me put on
a train with that Mr Salford to travel back here. We talked about cricket and
the Proms all the way back. And here I am again and still the world tilts.”

Miss Scrobot gave a little giggle.

“I think not,” she said.

Mr Fuller looked down at her.

“Miss Scrobot, charming
though you are, I think it best that you do not make jokes at a time like this.
Serious matters such as these are best attended to by my sex.”

Miss Scrobot gave a laugh.

“Oh Mr Fuller, will you
ever learn to take my sex seriously? I hesitate to say this for fear of
damaging your ego, but you would have found out eventually. Don’t you see; your
mission was nothing but a diversion? It has always been thus. In this new age,
physical force can play its part, but it will always be subordinated by the
application of the mind. Long before you set out for England, far more subtle
plans were at work. It does not take the mass application of saboteurs such as
yourself to set the world aright, but rather the simplest stroke of a pen.”

Max looked at Miss
Scrobot, his expression one of deepening anger.

“What do you mean, Miss
Scrobot? Explain yourself?”

“It was necessary, Mr
Fuller! The English must never suspect their scheme has been undone before it
was even started. Two years ago, I was invited to visit the Royal Society.
There, inspired by the example of my namesake, Miss Scorbitt, I set about
atoning for the mistakes of my sex, all those years ago. All it took was an
understanding of Mathematics, and the insertion of a simple digit.”

“Which digit, Miss Scrobot?”

“The number two, Mr
Fuller. The electrocotton the English have placed in space is twice the amount
required. The Earth will not just tilt, it will perform a loop! They will end
up back where they started!”

Max stared at Miss
Scrobot, his expression slowly altering to one of understanding, then
admiration, then joy. He squeezed the mechanical woman’s hand tighter.