The Technologists (54 page)

Dagger at the ready, Marcus stopped at a young tree, grabbed the lowest branch strong enough to hold him, pulled himself up, and cut down the charred straw figure of William Rogers. With the Institute emptied, and a fair number of the building’s windows broken over the last few days, the mobs were apparently content enough with the damage they had done to go on their way, at least for now.

“You’re still here?” Hammie approached forlornly, his hands digging in his pockets, as Marcus stood staring at the once-gleaming building. “I’m guilty of the same crime, obviously. What’s your excuse?”

“I suppose I’m not certain where to go,” Marcus said.

“I thought you were chumming with Richards at his boardinghouse?”

“No. Not anymore.”

“I see. Mansfield, you can chum with me for a while, if you’d like.” He didn’t reply.

“I am just on the wing for our cottage in Nahant, actually,” Hammie went on. “There is plenty of space and it’s quiet, if you wish to come. Perhaps it will be a relief to loaf a little away from the city.”

“I can imagine that.” Just weeks earlier, he really wouldn’t have considered it a relief to strand himself with Hammie. But then again, everything had changed.

“There’s sailing, and the cook is handy preparing clam suppers. The sea serpent even comes to the beach to eat the fish in our bay every few years,” Hammie said with a grin. “What do you say?”

“I might be needed here.” Marcus was staring in the direction of Notre Dame.

“Well, Nahant is only half an hour from Boston, maybe a little more.”

“I do not wish to be a pest.” But he knew a quiet watering place was by far a better option than going back to Newburyport to face the scrutiny of his mother and stepfather, who would have been reading the newspaper reports that confirmed all the general suspicions they had gathered about the Institute over the last four years—that its purpose was unnatural, artificial, and risky and, worst of all, a waste of time for a young man who could be earning a steady wage breaking his back.

“You think me very unsocial,” Hammie said.

Marcus considered the strange comment, but could muster only a shrug.

“Father always says I ought to have more guests of my own. Besides, the Technologists Society must stay together, somehow, don’t you think?”

The truth was that Hammie’s eccentric detachment was far preferable at the moment to Bob’s rootless optimism, which no longer had anything to latch on to; Edwin’s profound despondency, which had carried him back to Harvard; or Ellen’s doomed brilliance. All of it only reminded him of his own powerless rage for all that had gone wrong, for Agnes.

“The Technologists, Hammie, are no more.” He heaved the straw-stuffed mock-up of Rogers up into the air, far away from their onetime sanctuary.

“T
HE WATER WARMEST FOR SWIMMING
is that way,” Hammie said, pointing with his fishing rod. “You do like swimming?”

Marcus said he did. Hammie smiled broadly, obviously relieved. “Sometimes, Mansfield, the water in Nahant during the summer season can be practically boiling. The waves come in violently on the coasts. Visitors have even been swept under! No need to worry, though, since you’re with me,” he said earnestly.

Marcus said he was glad for it.

They had taken the thirty-minute train together north from Boston about twelve miles and then hailed a coach at the Lynn terminal to drive to the rocky peninsula. The Hammond family kept a cottage near the fashionable east end of Nahant, and Mr. Hammond was due to come from the city to join them in a few days, depending on his business obligations, which had been multiplied this week after the damage to his buildings from the ghastly boiler explosions.

Hammie and Marcus had gone out almost immediately after arriving for a sail on the smaller of two pleasure yachts berthed near the cottage. Marcus was surprised by just how pleased Hammie seemed by his somber and moody company, but it occurred to him that simply having company here was enough of a novelty to Hammie to count as amusement.

“See there, Mansfield?” His host was pointing to a row of flat rocks jutting out into the water. “When I was a child, I was an awful bore. Do you believe it? Nothing could coax me away from books.”

“Not so different today.”

Hammie erupted in his gurgling laugh. “My parents would
make
me go outside. So I would. I would sit on those slippery rocks, but I’d smuggle out a book in my clothing in spite of them, usually two, in case I finished the first one. One day, sitting right on that very rock there in the middle, I overheard one of the servants say that I wasn’t expected to survive past ten years old, because I was so weak and pale and refused to eat meat, and only read my books and sorted postage stamps and coins. I cleaned each coin in my collection with a stiff toothbrush and a good solution of oxalic acid.”

He paused for a reaction. Marcus nodded, which seemed approval enough for the odd companion.

“I never said anything about what I heard. The servant would surely have been summarily shipped away had I done so. I didn’t want that to happen. I wanted him to eat his words. I began to sail, to climb, and to work on my grandfather’s farm. I ate even the most exotic meat with the greatest of relish. Then do you know what happened?”

“What?”

“Why, I lived, Mansfield,” he said, smiling broadly. “When they completed the telegraph cable across the Atlantic, I led a procession of all my cousins in a circle around the farm in commemoration. Do you know what? I was the last one of us to tire of the marching. Last summer, I spent ten days climbing the White Mountains.”

Hammie described an incident when he was a boy and went with schoolmates to see a lecture by Professor Fowler, one of two brothers who were popularizing the pseudoscience of phrenology. Calling him up on the stage, the demonstrator ran his fingers through little Hammie’s untamed hair and said, “This boy has the engineering head, with which one day he will set the river on fire.” Not long after, Hammie chased down a lost dog through half of Nahant, knowing it would yield at least a five-dollar reward from the grateful family. Without telling his father, he purchased a box filled with glass tubes and flasks and started a small laboratory in the attic of their cottage.

“That was my true start in science. What about you, Mansfield?”

“My aunt owned a boardinghouse in Lawrence and arranged for me to be on a tour of one of the mills when I was a boy. I separated from the group and discovered that when I held my fingers near one of the main
belts, I could draw a stream three or four inches long of electric fire. When I moved my hand, the electric stream moved, too. The foreman came running and grabbed me away, but I had known that I was in control, not the machine. I never forgot how that felt.”

“Didn’t you fight in the War of Rebellion?”

The cliff-lined scenery of Nahant had succeeded in keeping Marcus’s mind off bleaker topics. He had no intention of talking of war.

Taking the silence as a yes, Hammie nodded his head in pensive camaraderie. “Father would not allow me to consider volunteering. He said I was too young and too frail, and paid your friend Frank as a substitute to go in my place so that I could never be drafted. But whenever there was a train to Boston bringing back wounded men, I would watch them being lifted out, and would not close my eyes, no matter their condition and disfigurement. Whenever my cousin was on furlough I would try on his uniform, and I tell you it fit me as if it were tailored for my body. He let me keep it after the war. Say, is it true, what they say about you?”

“What?”

“That your father abandoned you when you were just a lad. Sad feeling that must be, Mansfield, being alone in the world.”

Marcus stared at him.

“Say, I bet you don’t know how many gills there are in fifty-five gallons.” Before Marcus could respond, Hammie answered himself: one thousand seven hundred and sixty.

Marcus understood more than ever why the other Tech students felt it difficult to do anything with Hammie beyond attend class. On their train ride out of the city, Hammie had counted the rails to himself for nearly an hour. But the quixotic way he had about him did not irk Marcus as much as it did many of the others; even bringing up Marcus’s father was done not with malicious intent, but only as more observation of data. It was as challenging to remain angry with Hammie as it was to stay friendly. He was genuine and highly intelligent, at least, and those were qualities that made Marcus tolerant.

Hammie excitedly reeled up three fish, and released each of them back into the water, as well as those Marcus caught. Then, after an hour
of vigorous swimming, Hammie climbed up on a large black rock that darkened the sea.

He shook the water from his thick hair. “Go back on the boat for a minute, Mansfield.”

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t follow. Understand?”

Hammie climbed over a jagged bridge of rocks into the mouth of a cave but Marcus did not feel like returning to the boat. After waiting in the refreshing water for what felt like twenty minutes, he climbed onto the rock for a better view. The tide had risen, and within a few seconds the mouth of the cave was almost entirely flooded, splashing salty water into his mouth. The breeze played in his wet hair and he felt a thousand miles from everything.

“Hammie!” he called. “All right in there?”

His voice echoed back but there was no answer. He moved closer to the cave. He considered swimming into it, but the water was still rising. “Hammie!”

The surf crashed into the rocks, drowning out his calls. Maybe Hammie knew another way out from the cave. Marcus dove back into the water and, though dragged by the current the opposite way, swam to the anchored boat. He’d try to sail around the back of the cave to look for him.

As he clambered up the ladder hanging over the yacht’s rail, he admired the beauty of the vessel, its immaculate appointments. The only sign of wear and tear were a series of scrapes marring the paint along the side. Even the lettering of its name was exceptionally stylish.
Grace
. That suited the small yacht.

After several minutes preparing the yacht, Marcus looked over at the cave, which had been completely flooded by this point, and decided to ring the distress bell aboard. But another sound interrupted him before he could. Out of the cave, a rush of foam and bubbles churned in a straight line. A large whitish hump broke through the surface of the water, which streamed down its strangely ridged skin.

As he stared, the shape swerved and slowed, drifting to a stop alongside the boat. With a metallic sound, a hatch in the hump began
to revolve. The iron lid slowly lifted and his classmate craned his neck out.

“Surprised?” Hammie asked, as the whirring of motors and propellers rose up from below him. “I always surprise everyone I meet before it’s over and done.”

“I
T TOOK ME TWO YEARS
,
and five or six trial designs,” Hammie explained. “I purchased a torpedo boat that was built during wartime but had never functioned, and based my new design on the ones I have read about from Germany and France. Only with great improvements, of course.”

“It can stay underwater?” Marcus marveled at the audacious machine bobbing up and down in the water.

“Almost three hours!” Hammie crowed as he lashed the vessel to the yacht. “It is thirty feet long and weighs five tons. Can you believe it?”

“We could have used this recently,” he said, as much to himself as to Hammie, who paid no attention.

“Come aboard,” Hammie called out, beaming. “You’ve never seen a boat like this. I had planned on christening it
Brobdingnag
, but instead I call it the
White Whale
after
Moby-Dick
.” When he showed no sign of recognition, Hammie added, “Herman Melville. It was published when we were boys. Most writers in these modern times are just jugglers of words, but not Mr. Melville.”