The Technologists (20 page)

C
RAMMED INSIDE THE BASEMENT STOREROOM
of the Institute, the three students arranged blocks of iron and a variety of compasses of different sizes around the shelves.

“Where did you get all this?” Edwin asked.

“I purchased the compasses from a warehouse near the Navy Yard,” Bob said.

“Edwin, you remember the lectures on nautical navigation sophomore year?”

“Excellent lectures,” Edwin answered Marcus, feeling himself gain some energy after being roused in the middle of the night and ushered into a carriage. “Yes, I remember. Bob, you wore one of those sailor’s caps slouched over your face, to annoy the professor.”

“Ha! Exactly right!” Bob recalled fondly. “Let us remember the earth is magnetic. Really you might say the earth is one giant magnet, and since magnetic poles of opposite charge attract each other, the north point of a compass needle is actually a south pole, since it is attracted by the north pole of the earth. Likewise, the south point of a compass needle is a north pole. Edwin, hold that bar of iron horizontally—east to west, I mean. Thank you. Now, Mansfield, place that compass at the very end of it.”

They did as Bob directed.

“The needle is not disturbed at all,” Edwin said.

“Edwin, try raising the far end of your bar one degree—right … there, stop,” Marcus said.

“The south point of the needle is attracted!” Edwin declared.

“And if you lower that same end, just a little,” Bob said, nodding to Edwin, who complied.

“Now the north point jumped,” Edwin reported.

“At any angle with the compass needle, soft iron attracts each pole of the needle with almost equal force,” Bob said.

Marcus nodded. “Shipbuilders take this carefully into account so that the proximity of a nautical compass to the ship’s materials remains a neutral factor.”

“There would be a magnetism, too, with the iron in the earth,” Edwin added.

“Exactly. Watch this. You may wish to plug your ears.” With Edwin taking Marcus’s advice and Bob inclining his head as if to dare the noise to disturb a Richards eardrum, Marcus brought a sledgehammer down onto one of the bars of iron. Edwin stumbled backward. Upon the hammer’s impact, the needles of all the compasses twitched.

“Wait another second,” Marcus said, the noise ringing in their ears. “And another second … Now, Bob!”

Marcus tossed the bar of iron at Bob. He caught it, and all the needles of the compasses followed the bar. Bob swung the bar around like a baseball bat, the needles moving with it.

“Of course,” Edwin declared after a moment’s thought. “The hammering increases the level of magnetism that would, under normal circumstances, hardly register, after the compasses had been in the magnetic meridian. The iron’s inductive magnetism now controls the
permanent
magnetism of the compasses.”

“What I believe we will find in testing the different classes of iron Frank secured from the works,” Marcus said, “is that the softer the iron, the greater degree of influence on the magnetism when it is hammered or disturbed.”

At that point, Bob asked for the softest piece of iron fresh from the Hammond foundry. He stirred the basin until it became a small whirlpool, then dropped the iron into the water. When the iron hit the water’s surface, the needles leaped into another frenzy.

“The waves,” Edwin remarked. “If the iron is soft enough, the action of the waves on the solid will induce even greater magnetism. The
waves were harnessed, as though by Neptune himself, to become tools of sabotage. Remarkable!”

Marcus put his hand on Edwin’s shoulder and let it rest a moment before he spoke. “Edwin, you know you do have a choice.”

“No, he doesn’t!” Bob took his other shoulder with a hearty laugh.

“You do, Edwin,” Marcus repeated. “Rogers had just begun this work before he collapsed and his notes are not more than a start. We have no allies in this. It will be no easy task. It is your choice whether to join in or not. What do you say?”

“Marcus,” Edwin replied, stopping to take a deep breath, “I think we should be getting to the harbor to make a round of inspections at first light.”

*   *   *

E
DWIN
H
OYT LOOKED OUT
at the cloud-covered sunrise. While the tide encroached against the piles, he marked the rhythm to himself and he shifted his glance to the islands along the entrance to the harbor, so singularly protected against invasion or attack. Not far from where he had paused were the wharves that had been decimated, two almost completely and one partially. Occasionally, wooden piers still floated by in fragments, clogging the channel. Two weeks after the event that overtook the harbor, the police were still removing wreckage from water and land and grappling for evidence.

Being a true Bostonian meant having a respect for the order of the world, for the position of the authorities and the citizens. This all-too-real experiment would be unlike any they had encountered. But the police had already sank in place, as soon as those ships went down in flames, hadn’t they? As soon as they hitched themselves to Louis Agassiz.

“I have been thinking more about it,” Edwin said when he caught up with his companions, who were now making their way through the eerie quiet of the wharf. “I still can’t puzzle it out.”

“What do you mean, Eddy?” asked Bob.

“Your experiments with the compasses in the storeroom are most impressive, Bob,” Edwin continued. “But that was in a confined space. Look out there—look at the expanse of the damage. The amount of tonnage
of iron needed to replicate the experiment out there, and in exactly the right position, without being seen by so many witnesses … I simply cannot imagine how it might be done!”

“Well, walking around the harbor in circles isn’t going to tell us enough to answer it,” Marcus said. “We need to know more about what happened. More than what has been in the newspapers, but without speaking to the police.”

“Ha! I’d venture to say the police do not know what we already do,” Bob said brightly. “There is another force of men present from whom we will learn more. Look!”

Marcus and Edwin both looked up and down the harbor.

“I don’t see anyone,” said Edwin.

“Who do you mean, Bob?” asked Marcus.

“Rats!” Bob said.

“Rats? Are you serious?” Edwin asked.

“Of course,” Marcus said with a smile. “The wharf rats.”

Scattered around the harbor were the so-called wharf rats, impoverished old scavengers who haunted the piers looking for scraps of food or discarded cargo.

“I saw a few huddled in blankets, half asleep, as we entered the harbor,” said Marcus, taking to the idea. “How would we know which ones to speak with?”

“Well, we’d want to find the ones who are most curious, watchful, who stay on their toes with one eye open at all times, even when asleep,” Bob said. “I think I know how we can start. Wait for me.”

Bob sauntered between several warehouses, then along a row of cotton bales, then across the quays. All the while, he was jingling the coins in his pocket until, ten minutes later, there sidled out with a lead-footed step a wobbly stranger who had been sitting, unseen, at the center of a circle of pungent fish barrels.

“I will give you some of these,” Bob began even before turning around, holding the coins out in his open palm tauntingly, “if you answer a few questions.”

“Say, that is a dirty trick,” the man complained when Bob was facing him. The man’s bright-red face was wholly unprotected from the
elements by the fragments of his crushed velvet cap. “I’d rather pick an honest pocket. It’s extortionate, that’s what!”

“I’ll make it worth your time, I vow it,” said Bob. He whistled the signal for Marcus and Edwin, who soon caught up to them. Then Bob turned to face their new acquaintance again. “Tell us what you saw the morning of the disaster.”

“Me! Why ask me, lad?”

“Simple.” Marcus stepped forward. “Why make your home along these damaged wharves, instead of one that wasn’t damaged, unless you did so before the catastrophe?”

“Foofaraw! Bull!” the old man proclaimed with irritation.

After some further prodding, the wharf rat confessed almost with pride that he had been there when it happened, that it was the most stupendous and terrible thing he ever saw, and that his moral sensibilities were too shocked even to try to salvage anything from the water for almost half an hour afterward. The chaos of ships crashing into piers and into one another had grown worse with every passing moment. He indicated for them the basic boundaries of the event, and told how he watched the marvelous vessel
Light of the East
as it was abandoned and saw its captain, whom he’d heard later was a man named Beal, save some steamship passengers who had been sucked under the water.

“Before it began, did you see anything or anyone suspicious, anything unusual or different around?” Marcus asked.

The old wharf rat considered Marcus, then shook his head no. “But since then, the whole harbor has been
different
.”

“How do you mean? Quieter?” Marcus proposed.

The wharf rat shook his gray head again. “Aye, but more than that. Sailors haven’t shown up for their posts. The wharf masters say passengers with tickets for the steamships have stopped coming, too. The warehouses are empty of cargo to pilfer. Why, I’ve barely eaten, I haven’t! I once had the makings of a gentleman, you know, when I was your age.”

“Here, old fellow,” Bob said, dropping the coins into the man’s hand. “Buy yourself some chowder. Our united thanks for your help.”

“From the area of the damage, then, it appears the event extended
from here—the Custom House, and Central Wharf—to there,” Edwin concluded as they left the wharf rat behind.

“That’s Long Wharf,” Bob said.

“Edwin is right,” said Marcus. “The combination of soft iron and the motion of the waves would have to generate an area extending to those three or four wharves and out to sea, where the magnetism would have interfered with all navigational instruments in that region. How is it possible an amount of iron that large could be in position to do this without being seen?”

Edwin peered up and down the wharves with an unsettling sense of the true magnitude and difficulty of the task they had undertaken. Not only to discover what transpired, but to persuade others. They were trained in understanding events in scientific terms, not in convincing unscientific minds to do the same. “We need to find evidence.”

“They’ve been removing the debris,” Bob said. “The evidence won’t be anywhere up here.”

Edwin peered down doubtfully into the vast expanse of the harbor and listened to the sounds of the tide. As if speaking for the deep, mysterious currents, Bob put his arm around his friend’s shoulder and pointed with his other hand. “Out there, Eddy. There’s proof somewhere out there!”

“Now we merely have to walk underwater to find it!”

For once, Bob had no answer.

“Fellows, over here!”

Edwin and Bob followed Marcus, who was studying a circular tacked onto a telegraph pole.

“What is it, Mansfield?” Bob asked.

“What do we do with it, Marcus?” Edwin asked after he read it.

“Follow the directions,” Marcus replied. “And begin to collect our answers.”

*   *   *

W
HARF RATS
, like the ubiquitous rodent from which they received their name, moved from hole to hole for shelter. After eating his chowder at one of the dingy restaurants on the harbor, the red-faced wharf rat climbed into the fish house, where excess portions of the day’s catch were stored, and where he’d often gone for shelter, especially these days, with the police swarming around. He was startled when his wrist was grabbed as he was stepping through the creaky doors.

“Honor bright, I’ve had enough of you!” he cried, thinking it was one of those collegies come back.

He turned to find himself in the grip of a fever dream, staring at a ghoulishly disfigured face that seemed to ripple and peel as he shrank back in horror. The hood that partially shaded it did nothing to obscure the fiery glare of its miserable owner, which burned above sunken, cadaverous cheeks and an unnatural, almost incandescent orange mustache. Behind the apparition was a taller fellow in a checkered waistcoat and bowler hat, with a stoic, sleepy demeanor that contrasted almost comically with his companion.

“I understand from some of your fellow worthless vagabonds that you’re known to frequent Central Wharf picking up rags and other rubbish. I’d like you to tell me what you saw at the time of the disaster on the fourth of April.”

“I just told ’em!” the wharf rat protested, then regretted it.

“Who? Who did you tell, you old fool?” demanded the hooded stranger, shaking him violently.

“Those nosy collegies a few hours ago—they looked like collegies, anyway. They were here asking about it, I vow it! I think they went toward Long Wharf. Ask around—they were putting their noses everywhere—if you don’t believe me!”