The Technologists (60 page)

“Edwin—think,” Marcus said quietly, then with a burst of realization. “All the clues we discovered. The set of steamer trunks were owned by the Hammond
family
, it was the Hammond yacht that went out with the iron, it was Mr.
Hammond’s
laboratory building in South Boston. What if he isn’t protecting Hammie? What if he is protecting
himself
?”

“That’s impossible. Chauncy Hammond! He’s supported the Institute from the start.”

“He didn’t come here trying to protect Hammie,” Marcus said, now certain of it.

“I can’t follow it.”

“He wasn’t even looking for Hammie. He was distracting us, sending us on a mission to find Hammie because we were getting too close, while he was preparing to get away free and clear, and to destroy all traces of what he’d done.”

As they neared the machine shop again, the main engines were roaring at intervals, drowning out their conversation.

“I don’t believe it,” Edwin said finally. “I cannot”—the roar of the engines again, then a blast of cool air from the machine cooling the cylinders and wheels—“I will not believe it, Marcus, not in this lifetime!”

As they crossed the threshold into the shop, a solitary figure stepped forward. Chauncy Hammond raised the Whitfield at them with the target sight to his eye. There was no running—Edwin was too badly injured to move quickly enough, too easy a target.

“Get down!” Marcus shouted, shoving him to the floor and throwing himself on top, braced for the worst.

When he looked back up, Hammond had vanished completely from sight. Simply vanished.

“Where—”

“Up above!” Edwin called.

A whirring drew their gazes to the immense crane built to lift fifty tons of iron or steel at a time. Hanging from the hook by the collar, twenty feet
in the air, was Chauncy Hammond, who kicked and writhed and tried to keep a grip on the rifle until it slipped from his hands and crashed to the floor.

Marcus ran over to the controls and stared at their current operator.

“Now, who said I was too clever to ever be a good machinist?” asked Hammie, glaring at his father as he lowered him down to the floor. “Father, I believe it’s time we have a true talk.”

“Y
OU DESTROYED THE
I
NSTITUTE
where your own namesake was a student,” Marcus said in disbelief.

“It was Rogers who ruined it!” Hammond protested, then faltered as he looked back for his son. “Hammie, I was merely trying to find you—because if you were in Boston, you were in danger.”

Hammie unhooked his father, who was slightly bruised, from the grip of the crane. “You should have trusted me enough to tell me that you were investigating this, too, Mansfield!” Hammie said to Marcus, making no attempt to conceal his hurt pride. “I thought we were true friends. I brought you to Nahant so I could confide my suspicions about my father, and then you ran away.”

“No! Junior, listen to me, not these blackguards!” urged the senior Hammond. “I made Marcus Mansfield what he is and now he turns against both of us. You cannot take his side, son. Think of our family name—you’ll destroy it.”

“No, I will not,” Hammie replied. “Doing what I now must do, Father, is the only way left to salvage the name Chauncy Hammond. That’s my name, too. Not yours alone!”

“I cannot understand it, Hammie,” Edwin said, keeping his elbow close to his lacerated side as he picked up the rifle dropped by Hammond. “Why would your father have had anything to do with causing the disasters?”

Hammie frowned and swallowed hard. “I believe I’ve discovered the answer in the last weeks, Hoyt. During the war, the company received contracts to produce locomotive engines for the government, cannons and ammunition, so on. It was a lucrative time, and he gambled. Gambled
that the fighting would continue for several years longer by converting large parts of his locomotive works to war production. Investments were made accordingly. When the war ended, it all went to waste. The company stood in grave debt and remains so.”

“Junior, how dare you spread lies! You have it all wrong!”

“Father, don’t try fooling me! I have already thoroughly inspected the ledgers you were so eagerly casting into the furnace to hide your tracks! I know. I know you mortgaged the works to your creditors. I know how desperate you’ve become—I’ve seen the change in you. But still. That you would unleash a Frankenstein’s monster of technology … facilitate mayhem and murder, Father! And to think you are the one who has led to the breaking up of our Institute.”

“You said it was President Rogers’s doing,” Marcus said to the businessman. “What did you mean?”

Hammond’s eyes remained locked on his son. “Breaking up the Institute!” he repeated. “Break it. Why, I was the Institute’s greatest financial friend from the time Rogers incorporated on the very brink of the war! I allowed you, my only son, to be trumpeted as among its first pupils, for the world to see! But the Institute had enormous expenses and few students or supporters. It has permitted free scholars like you, Mr. Mansfield, and the young woman, Miss Swallow, to attend without the usual fees, and was crippled by the costs of its building. Even so, every invention produced by the Institute represented its own vast fortune. I offered to purchase and patent them, to sell them far and wide and share profits with the Institute. I was hardly the only one who recognized this opportunity for the Institute to thrive and for industry to be advanced. Your president stubbornly refused to sell anything to anyone. He wanted the inventions to be open and free for all; he refused to use them as means for profit, even as revenues for the college shrank. He was committing financial suicide and dragging your entire college down with him!”

Hammie removed a thick packet of papers from his coat. “These are applications for patents for inventions produced at the Institute. I found them several weeks ago in his office vault. Hundreds of them. Prepared by Father’s lawyer.”

“You wanted to discredit the Institute,” Edwin said in astonishment. “So that you could be the one to control all of its inventions!”

Hammond looked down petulantly. “You are all damned fools. Just like Roland Rapler and his agitators, every single day convincing more of the workers of the city to rebel—they are the true Frankenstein’s monsters, given life and force by our factories. How long before all industry finds itself bankrupt? Ten years from now, it will not be a question of how many men you employ, but only how many ideas you own. With the inventions to come, the railroad and the telegraph will seem as silly and prosaic to your sons as stagecoaches do to you.”

Hammie had handed the papers to Edwin. “You see, Hoyt, if the Institute closed, its inventions would become freely available—that is, until Father’s corporation claimed control over them before anyone else could do so.”

“How did he know that the Institute would be blamed for the disasters?” Marcus asked Hammie.

“Suspicions of the new sciences were already strong—this was a push over a cliff,” Hammie said. “Cyrus Hale and the other hack politicians in the legislature. They serve as the satellites of all big business, and are easily guided. Once Professor Agassiz was appointed to consult for the police, with his own private grudges against President Rogers, the Institute’s fate was written.”

“You would take lives for this? You would cause catastrophe in your own city to save your fortune?” Marcus demanded, looming over the man to whom he had owed so much.

“No, no! What Rogers dreamed of presented danger to every one of us. Imagine the public in control of the railroad. Imagine each citizen with a steam engine of his own, a telegraph wire at his disposal at his parlor table—the vast Pandora’s box that would be opened by the destructive decisions and incompetence. Corporations such as mine manage the forces of science for the benefit—for the safety—of all. To grant free access to technology: That is the fatal danger. I wanted to salvage our city—our country and its citizenry—from that doomsday!”

“You will answer for every life that has been lost,” Marcus said, unmoved.

“None of that is my fault,” Hammond complained; then, sheepishly, he added, “Not directly, I mean.”

“How can you expect us to believe that?”

“Because
my
modest plan was never enacted, Mr. Mansfield! I stand here ruined. But I have been your benefactor. If only for that reason, at least listen to what I have to say. Do you think I would blow my own locomotive works to pieces when I was trying with every fiber of my frame to restore its success? I have been trying to stop all of this, just like you! We fight on the same side!”

The students exchanged freshly confused glances.

The magnate, emboldened by having gained their attention, continued. “You have it all partially right. But my sole aim in all this was to shake the name of the Institute just enough that their fragile financial circumstances would convince them to grant me permission to control their inventions. Or if the Institute could no longer continue, so be it. The result would be the same; I would apply for the patents, and it would be a benefit to progress and man. I merely wished to demonstrate to the public the confusion that ensued when technology was spread without
clear
and
proper
control. It was never my plan to harm a single person!”

Marcus stared at Hammond, as realization, and a new dread, dawned. “You didn’t act alone.”

“Listen,” Hammond pleaded, losing the last trace of defiance. “That is what I am trying to say. I engaged an engineer to create a series of demonstrations. Mere
demonstrations
—harmless exercises, as a sort of counter to those the Institute arranged for the public. That was the beginning and end of my plan. I granted the engineer use of an empty laboratory that a failed commercial tenant had abandoned, leaving it fully equipped, and free use of our yachts and supplies, yes. I trusted him to follow my orders, as he had done in the past. But I hadn’t realized … his hatred, his bile … his actions were beyond my control from the very start, as soon as he had a taste. He said the project was his God-given ‘mission.’ … The manipulation of the compasses was intended merely to be reported by sailors to the police and the newspapers, but he chose to unleash it during a thick influx of fog, and the wreckage was beyond what I could have imagined. I thanked God that no one was killed. I visited the hospitals and paid the bills for the injured individuals. Then, when that poor young actress died on State Street, I was beside myself. Junior, you remember. My nerves grew to a perfect
pitch during that very week, and I could hardly hold a conversation or meeting without giving in to my temper. I ordered the madman to stop, demanded it, threatened him, even offered him money. But he refused. He said that if I dared to tell the authorities or anyone else about him he would present evidence to implicate me, and he would do personal harm to me and to Junior. And then, before I could think what to do, he went even further, created an even more horrific catastrophe, exploding the boilers across the city, including my own works!”

“Give us his name!” Marcus said. When Hammond remained silent, he demanded, “If anything you say is true, why protect him?”

“If I tell you—don’t you understand, this fellow knows no bounds. He could seek me out, he could find my wife. He could do harm to you, Junior, my greatest fear in the world! With all my resources, I cannot protect everyone at all times, not from him. We are all in danger, even now!”

For the first time in the encounter, Hammie looked chastened, shaken by the degree of his father’s concern for him.

Marcus grabbed Hammond by the shoulders. “The name! Now!”

“He’s falling to pieces!” Edwin said, dropping the rifle and pulling Marcus off.

Hammond opened his mouth to speak again but shuddered as a multitude of alarms rose outside in the distance. The magnate’s eyes rolled back and his body slumped to the floor.

“Stay with him,” Marcus said to Edwin as he eased the man’s head and neck to the floor. Then, to Hammie, “Can you shut off all of the machines?”

As Hammie complied, Marcus seized a sledgehammer from a rack on the wall and broke through a boarded window, revealing the suddenly blackening sky above Boston and the first signs of the new disaster that awaited them.