The Technologists (19 page)

“Mine?”

“That’s not me, being under the thumb of someone else’s judgment,” he said wistfully, nodding to the statue, “and I want you to keep it in case I ever need a reminder once I take the plunge at Tech.”

“What’s that one?”

There was another head sticking out from Frank’s bag. “Oh, this! I thought you might have a laugh about this one. Do you recognize him?” Frank removed the figure and held it up.

“Why, it’s Hammie!” Marcus exclaimed after a moment of study. The miniature sculpture showed the unmistakable figure of Hammie in a soldier’s uniform with one leg thrust forward, as if taking a step into battle. “In a soldier’s dress.”

“Imagine that. Mr. Hammond asked that I sculpt his family, and requested that I show Hammie in military garments, I suppose to placate the spoiled brat’s giant ego, though he never came close to volunteering. But when your employer asks for a sculpture …” Frank’s line of thought drifted away.

Marcus could tell how bothered Frank was by Hammond’s directive. “Well, I thank you for the Ichabod Crane. I’ll treasure it especially.”

“Two beers!” Frank called out loudly to the girl. “You remember this fellow at the piano? He sings quite well—about girls left behind on the Galapagos Isle, that sort of balderdash. Stay. We’ll play a game of cards, just you and me, ex parte, like during our dinners at the machine shop. Which game do you favor these days?”

Marcus shook his head. “I shouldn’t, if I am to be prepared for class in the morning. There is one other thing, Frank. I wanted to apologize if I seemed cool toward you when I came into the machine shop.”

His face coloring, Frank said, “No, I called attention to your bad
hand in front of your friends, Marcus. I didn’t think first—as usual. I’m to blame. Did Mr. Hammond say anything to you when he spoke to you after that? You don’t think he heard me telling you I was ready for something better than working for him? After arriving late that day to the shop, I don’t look to call down more of his ire, at least not until he finds out I’m through there.”

“No, I don’t think he heard,” Marcus said, knowing his friend must have been severely troubled by the prospect for the last week. He didn’t want to repeat Hammond’s remark about Frank being born to be in a machine shop. “He mostly spoke about Hammie, actually.”

“Hammie!” The return to that topic creased Frank’s brow. “I think you should keep your guard around that fellow. Mr. Hammond is a strong man; he sees into the future everywhere he looks. But he sees not his own son. He is like a father to us at the shop, and we are his sons more than Hammie can ever be. That fellow … well, don’t believe the mask, Marcus.”

“Hammond might expect Hammie to be someone that is not possible for him, Frank.”

“I suppose that is the way with fathers sometimes. Not mine, though. Ha! He always expected me to accomplish nothing, just like him. You are lucky, in a way, my friend. You could imagine yours however you wished, rather than having to answer to a man who could not understand you, even on the day he died.”

“I suppose,” Marcus answered quietly.

“I wanted to ask you about something but …” Frank waved his own comment away. “You’ll think I’m stark-raving distracted. Just me and my phantasms.”

“Tell me.”

“Sometimes, Marcus, in the streets and crowds around Boston I look out and see … his face, savage, watching me, warning me. I convince myself he found me.”

“He? You mean Denzler.” Marcus said the name with a shudder. They never talked about Denzler or Smith Prison, not since the early weeks after returning, when Frank helped secure Marcus a place at the locomotive works. It was an unspoken pact to trust the future would be better than the past.

Frank looked down at the floor, which was covered in sawdust boot-prints. “Yes, Marcus. I mean Denzler.” His voice broke on the word. “I see him at a distance, or think I do. My heart flies, I feel danger all around. I try to give chase, but he always vanishes before I reach him.”

Denzler still occupied Marcus’s nightmares sometimes, and so did the ghosts of their fellow prisoners who did not survive, or survived as shadows of themselves. But to speak about it aloud seemed to invite its control over his nights. “I heard he fled to Germany to escape any trials,” Marcus said, as though repeating a newspaper report distant from his own life.

“I heard that, too. But what if it is not true? It sets my teeth on edge to think of him, even the possibility that he could walk among us. It makes a man want to do something more, while there’s time enough. You know … I’m going to do it, Marcus!” he said with the excitement of a new idea.

“What do you mean?”

Frank scooped up the statue of Hammie, glared at it, then stood and tossed it into the open stove in the corner with a big laugh.

“Frank,” Marcus said as his friend sat down again, smiling with satisfaction. “What did you just do? What about Hammond?”

“Boss Hammond!” Frank called mockingly. “Why, Marcus, I tell you, you’ve been an inspiration, and the Institute, too. I’m not going to be pinned down by him anymore and live my life in sackcloth.”

Marcus was still beholden to Hammond, whose financial arrangement had allowed him to attend Tech, and Frank would need some similar arrangement even as a charity student. But he did not say that. Instead, he raised his glass to the notion of Frank’s freedom.

“You will come to Inspection Day to see the Institute,” Marcus said, urging him in a more practical direction.

“I count the hours, Marcus! Three cheers for the Institute!”

They finished their beers and Marcus stood up from the table. Even before he heard his name called, the unmistakable odor had reached him: a mixture of grease, soot, and sweat.

“Marcus Mansfield! You must have made a wrong turn.”

Four young bucks from the Hammond Locomotive Works. Two of them he knew from the machine shop, and the other two he’d seen working
in the wheel room and the pattern shop. The speaker, in the center of the group, was a man he remembered was called Sloucher George. He was known as a lovely singer around the works, but generally had a rough voice and crude manner.

“Why would some collegey show himself here?”

“Because he is drinking with me, George,” Frank said, rising swiftly from the table. Frank, though his body was more sinewy than muscular, was tall enough to make most other men insecure.

“He doesn’t belong here, Brewer,” Sloucher George said, jabbing the air with his finger.

“Come. You know what’s what. You forget he’s one of us.”

“I ain’t forgetting,” Sloucher George replied, hitting a table with his fist. “Maybe he was one of us once, when his throat was filled with iron dust. Or maybe you want to be what he is, Brewer? A collegey, with the airs of a false gentleman.”

“What if I do at that?” replied Frank.

“He’s no companion of yours, Brewer, nor any of ours.”

“I was about to go,” Marcus said. Sloucher George had probably wanted to start a row long before walking into the beer hall and seeing him. The truth was, the machinist’s punch was said to be harder than a sledgehammer, and Marcus did not like the prospect of a set-to. “Good night, Frank.”

George put his hand out to stop Marcus, then gestured with a grin to the bar. “Aren’t you at least going to shout?”

“I haven’t money, George,” replied Marcus. “You’ll have to buy your own beer.”

“No money—is that right? You weren’t paid to gawk at us with the other collegey scum visiting the machine shop Friday last? What’s in there?” Sloucher George pulled at the handle of the bag Frank had handed Marcus. Marcus, alarmed, grabbed George’s wrist and held on tightly.

“Let go of that,” Marcus said.

“You better let my wrist free and let me see inside,” George growled. “Whatever it is feels awful heavy.” Frank stepped to Marcus’s side.

“This ain’t your concern, Brewer! Step away!”

Frank snatched a glass from the tray of a waitress passing nearby and dashed the wine into George’s face. “It’s my concern now, Sloucher George,” he said coolly, as the big man released the bag and wiped his eyes.

The other workmen gasped. Nobody ever called the brute by his nickname to his face. For mild Frank Brewer to have done it, in front of a crowd of peers, while dousing him with a glass of wine, was a shock. The silence that ensued seemed interminable, as a flush spread over George’s big purple-stained cheeks, and perspiration formed a floating bridge over his brow. “Four beers!” he screeched to the waitress, suddenly intent on finding a table.

Marcus, awed and a bit startled by his friend’s actions, whispered to him, “You should leave with me.”

“Why?”

“He’s a real whaler, Frank!”

Frank smiled, breathing heavily, but exhilarated. “You don’t have to protect me here, Marcus! All his wrath comes out the little end of the horn. Sloucher George is a big man and he takes pride in his work, and that is the one way he can be injured: to hear that his habits at the machine are slow. Go on your way, Marcus. And Godspeed—for whatever it is you’re doing. Remember, you are representing a thousand fellows like me who might one day be thought good enough to be collegies themselves.”

“I never forget it,” Marcus said.

*   *   *

M
ARCUS WENT BACK
to Bob’s rooms to pack up his belongings. He was hoping Bob might be sleeping at his mother’s, or out for the night, so he could just write out a note explaining, but he was there.

“Mansfield, what are you doing?” Bob came out in his usual shabby silk dressing gown, chosen out of a wardrobe filled with newer ones, and carried a dumbbell.

“I thought I might have woken you.”

“I was doing my lifting. What’s this? You’re leaving?”

“You are right that what I’m doing can call down trouble. If I go wrong and I’m staying with you, you might go overboard with me, Bob. I won’t risk dragging you down.”

Marcus expected Bob to argue, either that he should stay or that he should give up his whole folly, but he listlessly stretched his long limbs out on the sofa and watched with vague attention as Marcus collected his things. “If it must be this way,” he said finally.

“It must,” Marcus said, a little sad at the lack of protest.

“Oh, Mansfield, I have something for you before you go. There.”

There was a bulging potato sack on the floor in the corner of the room Marcus had not noticed.

“What is that?”

“Have a look for yourself,” Bob said nonchalantly.

“Not another soph stuffed inside, is it?” He walked around from the other side of the table and bent down. Loosening the strings, he found in the sack an assortment of compasses and navigational tools. Marcus rummaged through them. “Bob, I need all this for the experiments! But yesterday you said …” He looked up in astonishment.

“Oh, damn what I said, Mansfield! That was yesterday. I was in a fix.”

“You were entirely sober.”

“Yes, and now I’m a little liquored up and see everything clearly! If there is a time to build our own castles, this must surely be it.”

Marcus tried to gauge his seriousness. “Do you mean it, Bob? You’re willing to help?”

Bob was rubbing the palms of his hands together. “Of course. This is just the ticket. Yes, of course. Of course we must go onward! We’ll show Blaikie and those Harvard scrubs what Tech is worth! It’s decided. Put down your bags—you’re not going anywhere. We rescue Boston and Tech … together!”

“Bob, remember our position. If we run into trouble, Rogers is in no position to help us now.”

“You told me the Institute was yours, ours, Mansfield. Well, you’re right. The Institute is mine, too. I was also there in the first golden days when it was but three dusty rented rooms, when there were nearly the same number of students as instructors. Every Richards in history has gone to Harvard, and I’ll show them that what I’m doing is worth every bit of that stuff and more. You will need more pairs of eyes if you are not to be exposed. If droll old Albert Hall finds you out, or Squirty Watson or Eliot or any of the faculty members, it will be over in a flash. And
there’s Tilden, who would relish nothing more than to see you sacked from the college for violations, and don’t forget that goblin Miss Swallow, who is everywhere and nowhere. I owe Rogers as much as you do for giving me my place at Tech. Your hand, Mansfield. Do you have a plan yet? Mansfield, your hand!”

The machine man and the scion of Beacon Hill grasped hands and shook heartily, their grips strong, their smiles equally fierce and determined. “The start of a plan,” Marcus said. “By my count, the first step is to find out exactly how these two disasters were engineered, using Rogers’s notes as a beginning. I thought I would use the storeroom in the basement of the Institute, since I have a key.”

“First rate! But we’ll need a better space to conduct our investigation properly, probably in one of the laboratories.”

“Why would they permit us to use a laboratory?”

“I don’t know yet. It will be an obstacle. But have no fear. Resourceful Bob Richards will find a way. Come, hand me that sack—we’ll decide more on the drive there.”

“Drive?”

“To Eddy’s. We’ll need Tech’s best physicist on hand, of course!”