The Technologists (56 page)

“Mother and Father heard all that has happened at the Institute, and that I rejected a chance to return to Harvard. Naturally, they think I am suffering from some kind of nervous attack,” he continued, smiling. “They hoped the waters here would improve my health. Come, we’ll continue talking out there.”

“Where are you going now, Edwin?”

“To have breakfast on the piazza. Do join us. My family is dull, but the seed cakes are fine.”

“Would they mind if you skipped breakfast?”

Edwin’s expression turned unaccountably sad. “I suppose they wouldn’t mind, in fact. Is it very important, Marcus?”

“I risk being seen if I sit outside. I must speak to you right now.”

“Marcus, something new has happened, hasn’t it? You must tell me.”

“I will. I should also not want your family to become too curious, my friend. Breakfast with them. But eat quickly.”

When Edwin rejoined Marcus fifteen minutes later, they continued their conversation in the hotel library with the door closed.

“Brace yourself, Edwin. Hammie is far more ingenious than any of us knew. He has become a sort of technology vampire. He even built a submarine vessel. It does not work, but it’s damned impressive nevertheless and he did it on his free time. You know how he always seemed bored at Tech? Well, he was. I think he had a constant need to find additional ways to occupy his mind.”

Edwin fidgeted at Marcus’s obvious awe of Hammie’s intelligence, but couldn’t disagree. “When we were sophomores, I chanced to come upon Hammie while attending the opera. There he was, Marcus, attending the performance and at the same time busy with his notes and his schoolwork. Then, another time, when Bob dragged me into one of his preferred parlor houses, there was Hammie again, a young girl in disordered dress on one side, and a scientific book on the other. I knew no matter how industrious I was, how many hours I studied, I could never surpass a fellow doing three-dimensional analytical geometry between acts of
Fra Diavolo
or, well, more involved pastimes. What is it you’ve discovered, exactly?”

“Remember Joseph Cheshire?”

“Yes.”

“It was Hammie who was with me the day he came to the Institute. Besides Runkle, he was the only other one who heard Cheshire’s threats against our group.”

“But he wouldn’t have known what meaning Cheshire’s words contained, or who the fellow was.”

“I thought not at the time. But last night, when I was at the cottage, Hammie said his name.”

“Whose?”

“Cheshire’s. Cheshire never told us his name.”

“Hammie could have read about him in the newspaper after Chesire died, as you did.”

Marcus admitted the point. “Only I don’t think that’s it, Edwin. And Hammie was in Runkle’s private study before I was—and Runkle, or ‘Uncle Johnny,’ as Hammie calls him, revealed to him that he had also heard Cheshire’s words. All of that, the same day as Runkle’s drawer exploded, almost taking our heads clean off.”

“You don’t think Hammie would have …” Edwin stopped himself, shook his head. “Why?”

“To protect himself from Cheshire’s inquiries. In his attic compartment in the Hammond cottage, I found his notes from Tech—pages and pages with formulas and chemical combinations related to how all three of the disasters were engineered. Edwin: The traveling trunk he had in his attic was identical to the trunk we found holding the pieces of iron with the electromagnetic wires on the seabed! Then, in an outbuilding, I came upon his steam man: You remember—Hammie had the idea to build a machine in the shape of a man to perform heavy labor.”

Edwin listened, his mouth agape. “Yes, I do. But what does that have to do with it?”

“Because parts of its covering were made from the machine suits we built for our diving expedition. He was the one who took the suits!”

“No!”

Marcus nodded, continuing. “I’ve been over it all night. On the side of his yacht, the
Grace
, there are these scrapings, the same kind that would be made by lowering a trunk so filled with heavy cargo—like
iron—that it could not be lowered straight down even by a strong grappling hook. Edwin.”

“Yes?”

Marcus seemed uncomfortable. “Edwin, I was wrong to turn my back on all of you in our laboratory. On the Technologists. I am sorry to have abandoned you.”

“Sometimes you must let go of the reins of your team, before they run away with you.”

At that moment, the telegraph operator knocked, and, upon being admitted, handed Marcus a message, bowing to Edwin, the rightful hotel guest.

“What is it, Marcus?” Edwin asked, watching as his friend unfolded the message, then closed his eyes, his expression grim.

“It’s him. It is. It’s
Hammie
,” he said, the enormity of the words belied by his tone of quiet astonishment. “Hammie is the experimenter.”

“What do you mean? What does it say?”

Marcus told Edwin how after first having left a brief note for Hammie that he had to return to Boston, he had sent a wire to Daniel French, the freshman at Tech he had coached. He asked French to look into a question of the ownership of the private laboratory that had collapsed around them.

“But we tried to find that already,” Edwin said.

“No. We’d tried—unsuccessfully—to find the name of the
tenant
, thinking what mattered was who occupied that laboratory. I asked Mr. French to inquire at the city records into the ownership of the
building
itself. Hammie would have been able to see exactly which laboratories were vacant and exactly when—because that building as well as several other properties in that district are owned by the Hammond Corporation.”

Edwin stared at the message himself as he reflected on everything he had been told. “Why?”

“We can speculate. He felt isolated from other students, bored to the point of madness by his classwork, chastened by his father, and replaced by a factory hand—my own Frank—during a war where he thought he could have proven his worth and heroism. Why would he do it all? To
prove he could do more than anyone expected. To prove to all of Boston and the world and especially to his father that knowledge was power, and that he had more of it than anyone imagined—that he held the power to conjure a tempest in a teapot.”

“And if you’re right, Marcus, then what? What should we do?”

“If he was the one who harmed Agnes, then heaven save Chauncy Hammond, Jr., from me.”

T
HE BUILDING WAS A DECAYING ANCIENT CASTLE
this muggy morning, Back Bay a scorched desert island robbed of life, at least in his eyes. Bob leaned back on the granite front steps, where only two weeks earlier, dozens of students had eaten their midday meals, laughing and gossiping, and did his best to conjure the cheerful images that somehow seemed so distant.

“A game of football? Very well, fellows,” Bob agreed, juggling a ball that he had found abandoned on the grounds. “Hurrah! Three cheers for Tech.” He kicked the ball away hard. In the distance, the muddy tide was washing into its inlet. Not far away, Bob spotted the old organ grinder who liked to play his music outside their windows while his monkey climbed up to collect coins from the students.

“Maurice! Say, Maurice, how about some melodies?” Bob called out. The musician gathered up his monkey and hurried in the other direction. “How is that for loyalty?” Bob pondered to himself. “What do you say, Bacon? Come, Newton. Heathen Archimedes, stop drawing in the sand and put your head together with old Mr. Franklin to solve our little problems.” The names invoked were chiseled in raised stone along the granite frieze that ran above the grand Corinthian columns on the face of the building.

He found his own name represented—much smaller—as initials carved into the brick foundation along the outside of the basement when the building was under construction. His freshman year had been a time of trepidation, adjustment, and excitement; the second and third years comfortable and fulfilling, as though he had been here forever and would stay forever. Senior year, from the very start, had had the feeling
of something momentous and, perhaps, impossible to fully realize. He practically shouted, “What should we do with all this now?”

“I’d always hoped they’d plant more trees and flowers in front of the building. I suppose nobody would stop us now.”

He wheeled around at the sound of the voice. “Professor Swallow!”

Ellen sauntered slowly toward the steps. She wore her usual long black dress and plain black bonnet, which had to be stifling in the sun, though she did not show it.

“Professor, but what are you doing here?”

“The same thing as you.”

“Remembering,” Bob said, nodding thoughtfully. She sat on the other end of his step, which somehow made things better, as though the old gathering place were again populated by the usual fellows—even though she wasn’t really a “fellow.”

“Do you know the gymnasium on Eliot Street, Professor Swallow? Oh, it is filled with the usual parallel and horizontal bars, clubs, wall weights, you know. Whitney Conant was always there, and of course I’d convinced Mansfield and Eddy to come. Conny, he was experimenting with photographs then, and he took a photo of Mansfield, Eddy, and myself as a human pyramid, with me on my hands on top of their backs, feet in the air! We had to be completely still, Professor, for a full eleven seconds! Can you imagine headstrong old Mansfield that way? That settles it. I’m going to throw myself into exercising again, maybe try fencing again.”

After he located the appropriate stick to represent a foil, Bob shouted, “Guard!” and pointed his weapon upward so the tip was level with his chin. Ellen wasted no time in finding her own branch and assumed perfect posture opposite him.

“You, a fencer?”

“I have studied many of the arts usually reserved for men, you know.”

“Care to try?” asked Bob agreeably.

“Advance!” she declared, and they went through several movements and parries, laughing and shouting the command words as they did.

“Do you know where he is now?” she asked in the middle of their match.

“He?” Bob thrust his branch forward and she stepped back.

“Mr. Mansfield,” she said softly.

He lowered the branch. “Where, indeed. I suppose we grew too warm at each other after everything that happened.”

“He did seem out of spirits.”

“He left a note at Mrs. Page’s and took his things with him. He’s gone out of the city, I think. I suppose you must summer and winter with a man before you know him, as they say. It is a hard punishment for me to take. I was drawn to Mansfield the first time I saw him. But for these four years, I have never looked at the old fellow without a pang of shame.”

“Why?”

“You will think me cowardly,” Bob said with uncharacteristic bashfulness.

“I will not, Robert.”

He liked the sound of her saying his name. He owed her something for it, so he sat down and began his story. “Marcus Mansfield was in the Union army, you see. I wasn’t. I wasn’t chosen in the draft, mind you, but I also did not volunteer. Only one of my four brothers served, in fact. Baby brother Harry was too young. The oldest and next oldest paid for substitutes to go in their places, and I waited. And waited. How I wanted to fight more than anything!”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I tell you I was a chicken-heart. Every time I imagined being in uniform, I thought, What if a man in my regiment was in danger and I failed him? I was too much of a coward to take that risk. I wasn’t ready.”

“Not volunteering does not make you cowardly.”

“No? Then what?”

“Patient.”

He laughed. “I patiently waited until Lee’s surrender. Mansfield, meanwhile, was rotting in a prison camp. I tell you, there is stuff in that quiet fellow. The other prisoners appointed him their ‘police chief,’ giving him charge of protecting the weaker ones and punishing the wicked ones. I’d have given worlds to have been there by his side. One can only imagine—well, perhaps I always felt I owed him something for that. Though he never talked about it to me but once, when he had too much drink. Do you know, Saturday is decreed the first Decoration Day? They will have it every year from now on, I hear, on the thirtieth of May, to honor the soldiers. There will be parades, music festivals, plays, jubilees.
Wreaths will be placed at cemeteries on the soldiers’ graves. I had asked Mansfield to go with me.”