The Technologists (62 page)

“I’ll help in whatever way you want,” said Sloucher George, whom they had found in the foundry, nursing an injury to his head.

“For one, make certain Boss Hammond doesn’t flee—we need him,” said Marcus.

“Happily, Mansfield.” George cracked his knuckles.

“What in the devil goes on out there, Mansfield?” Albert demanded with a terrified expression. “What are we doing here? Does this have something to do with what you were doing when the carbon gas leaked?”

Marcus clasped his shoulder. “We’ll explain everything when there’s time, Hall. For now we’re going to try to avert a disaster, and we must put aside all of our differences. With the telegraph wires down, there will be no way to stop other trains from their routes—a train colliding with that burning freight would be so combustible it could obliterate hundreds of people in a single blast. Hammie, you and George trace the trajectory of the freight train on this map and find the first bridge it is going to cross that we can get to from here. While it is in flames nobody can get on that train to reach the brake, and if they could, it would still require a distance of a quarter of a mile to stop a train even with the engine shut off. Edwin: You, Conny, and Hall help me make a plan to blow up the bridge with materials we can find in the machine shop or the foundry or anywhere in the works we can access. Remember Squirty Watson’s models.”

“It would take weeks to draw up an effective plan to demolish a bridge,” Albert protested.

“We’re not at the Institute,” Marcus said. “This isn’t a thesis, Hall—it must be done
now
. Make haste! We don’t have a second to lose.”

By the time they had gathered an assortment of materials from around the works, Hammie had identified a bridge that would have to be their best chance. The student engineers were familiar enough with its structure to debate how they could most quickly bring the bridge down at the point of the keystone, or at the pier.

“If we can use this gunpowder to build two or three mines, and we can transport them safely … Marcus, do you think four charges of gunpowder will be sufficient?” Edwin asked.

“No, no, Hoyt, that won’t work on
that
structure,” Conny objected.

Marcus picked up the sledgehammer he had used on the window and became meditative. “Keep at it, men.”

Crossing over into the machine shop, Marcus tried Frank’s drawer
under their old workbench and found that it was locked. Swinging the hammer in three quick strikes, he cracked the lock and pulled out the large drawer. He found a ledger with gold-rimmed pages, just as Bob had described seeing in the South Boston laboratory. He thumbed through the volume, recognizing formulas and diagrams behind the catastrophes. Five or six pages after this had been torn out, pages that might have given them the key to what they were facing now. Also in the drawer were a group of sculptures in Frank’s style, each with faces Marcus knew well: Chauncy Hammond, Sr., William Barton Rogers, Roland Rapler, Sloucher George—all wearing military uniforms. Some were in fighting position, others cowering in fear as though facing a superior enemy or a firing squad. And there he himself was, Marcus Mansfield in miniature, held in the torment of the stocks, his broken spirit etched on his face, his head crushed. Marcus’s heart lurched at his misery—and Frank’s—made manifest.

“Marcus, what is it?” Edwin said, following him to the workbench.

Marcus took him by the arm. “Edwin, I don’t think this is it.”

“What?”

“The freight train!” Marcus cried. “I don’t think that’s the chief danger.”

“The train? Marcus, when that train collides with another—”

“It’s awfully dangerous—there’s no question—but I think he’s using it and whatever he did to poison those people as a distraction for something bigger. We—and the authorities—are supposed to be occupied with the runaway train, confused by the afflicted people. But the telegraph wires are down, and the newspapers have been reporting failing street lamps for weeks. Don’t you see? People once feared the idea of locomotive engines, steam shovels, factory machines, even as everyone would fear Hammie’s idea for a steam man, yet now they hardly notice the common technology around them—because they can see them in operation, they can watch the wheels and pistons. These disasters Frank has engineered all create a fear of science as an invisible face—a ghost and an unseen master that controls us without our knowing how or why or when—the compasses twisted by the air, the windows melted seemingly from the very particles within, the boilers blown apart by the very water running through them.”

Edwin thought about it, then paled. “The telegraph and lampposts—why, they’re both electrical circuits.”

“Circuits. I’d bet a year’s wages that Frank has been wiring the telegraph and street-lamp circuits into one massive circuit spanning the entire city—but for his own purpose. Currents that surround us, until we stop noticing them altogether: invisible yet everywhere. Remember, the lamps’ circuits aren’t yet complete.”

“The train … it’s going to complete the circuit!”

“And I think the circuit will set off explosions all over Boston—the city as we know it will be blasted away.”

“But how could he have engineered that by himself, to span the whole city?”

“If he located the chief points of the circuit to alter, he would have had little trouble. When the train reaches the right spot, he will finally bring on the doomsday he’s been working toward. Boston will go up in smoke.”

“Thunder and lightning!” Edwin grabbed Marcus’s arm. “The streetlight circuit was still being expanded along the outskirts, right? From front to back, the train will completely cover the area that was not yet completed. And with the speed we’ve estimated it is now moving, we have only forty minutes, forty-five at the most, before it happens!”

“We have to go now.”

“But the train will reach the end of the circuit before it reaches the bridge where we can intercept it. There’s nowhere to stop it before that!”

“Then I have to get to the origin point of the circuit instead,” Marcus replied.

“That could be anywhere!”

“Edwin, think of it. The telegraph wires’ circuit is too spread out to manipulate easily. The answer must be the streetlights. The Institute began the circuit outside our own building. That must be what he’d use to initiate the current. But even if I can stop it there, you’ll still have to stop the freight train before it collides with another train or the terminal station—you have to get to that bridge.”

“Edwin, we have it. A plan to throw down the bridge!” Albert interjected, running over with Whitney Conant, the rest of the group close behind them. “If we were able to bore a cylindrical hole two inches in
diameter with a strong drill, fill it with water, and plug it, one blow with a steam hammer might break it apart. Well, what do you think?”

“It might just work! But how could we have the power out there for the drill and hammer?” Edwin asked.

Albert looked down at his feet. “Well, we haven’t exactly … That is to say, perhaps …”

“We don’t have time for hypotheses, Albert!” Edwin cried.

“I think I know how to blow the bridge.” Sloucher George stepped forward. “Follow me!”

“Hurrah for George!” shouted the group in unison, falling in behind the machinist.

Edwin turned to Marcus with a look of solemn worry. “Where could Bob and Miss Swallow be?”

“They must not have received our messages,” Marcus said.

“You don’t think they could be … hurt?”

Marcus closed his eyes. “I don’t know, Edwin. But if they’re out there, they’re helping, one way or another.”

“Of course!” said Hammie, joining them. “They’re Technologists, after all.”

Frank Brewer has been working in the shoe manufactory a mile outside of Richmond for two weeks when Captain Denzler appears at his chamber. Denzler informs him that the Confederates are forming new regiments of engineers that Frank is to be part of, as Denzler’s own assistant instead of being a lowly servant to the shoe manufacturer. When Frank asks why he should go with him, Denzler gestures to the two soldiers behind him, one of whom has cocked his pistol and now aims it at him. “We will shoot you if not, and report a hair’s-breadth escape attempt.”

“I am a fast runner,” Frank finds himself saying
.

“But your friends in Smith haven’t anywhere to run,” says Denzler, smiling, as Frank’s defiant posture deflates. “If you escape, I assure you they will not, and I will personally bring them into the yard and watch them suffer.”

The engineering office at the top of Smith Prison, far removed from the sight of the prisoners, is only a little better than a cell for Frank, who still wears his Union colors and will be shot immediately upon any attempt to escape. At first, he is assigned to aid in drawing up plans to repair railroad tracks and improve the design of the floating bridges, as well as to prepare maps for distribution to Confederate soldiers. It is a surprise when Denzler asks Frank to carve a statuette of him and even offers to sit for the purpose. Denzler has found the little wood carvings Frank does in his spare time between assignments. Denzler has also begun to praise Frank’s sketches and maps. Denzler tells him about his family, his heritage: One ancestor was a great Hessian warrior during the American Revolution, and Denzler had always known he would one day fight for the noble cause of the United States. Frank’s mind is spinning around in
circles: Here is a man he hates with every drop of his blood, confiding in him and befriending him, and he hates himself for allowing it
.

Denzler even takes Frank into his confidence about secret assignments he has been given by the Confederate authorities. You are the only one in all the engineering corps with enough brains to assist me, he tells Frank. Denzler confers with him about a plan to spread smallpox using contaminated blankets; ideas to poison the water and food supply of major Northern cities; calculations to determine whether unmanned hot-air balloons could, as one scientist’s unproven theory insisted, attract meteorites to land at strategic points; and a plot, called “Request Number 44” in the official papers, to burn all of New York City to the ground and poison its main reservoir so that it could never be inhabited again. There is also the design of an exploding shell that would release a fatal mixture of chemical powders in quantities large enough that everyone in a small town would suffocate within an hour of its detonation. “You see, Frank, the principles in technology live even if we all die. That is the power of the engineer, to control everything around him without ever being seen. Technology lives, Frank!”

The engineering work Frank is forced to do contributes to improving the Southern army’s gunpowder by increasing the proportion of charcoal in it, and later he designs a more effective earthworks to be used as a fortification
.

He also devises a thousand ways in his head each and every week to murder Denzler using the chemicals and materials at his disposal. Each time, he becomes stuck on how he could escape after Denzler’s death. He also imagines the expression on Denzler’s face if he were to live long enough to know that Frank was responsible for a successful attack on him: Would Denzler feel betrayal? Nonsense, this man keeps him prisoner and tortured him and Marcus and their comrades!

Yet there is a palpable feeling of camaraderie when Denzler, disheveled and nearly in tears, tells him that the Confederate government has decided not to authorize the more destructive and brutal techniques they have been engineering. Request Number 44 and all the others are dead. But even their more modest endeavors together have done their work against the Union
.

And then one day, without ceremony, a guard comes to his small cell
.
“You, Ichabod, get your haversack and come with us. Make haste.” He is being released. Frank looks around for Denzler. When he does not see him, he calls out. His captor steps out from the corridor
.

“Your name is listed as part of a detachment being exchanged for a detachment of our soldiers being held in Union prisons,” Denzler explains. “I know you will not tell anyone what you have been doing, for they will hang you if you do. I am afraid I have no further say in the matter.”

“Then I am really going back to my family,” Frank says, astounded and afraid at the idea
.

“Your friend, what is his name?”

“Who?”

“With the Roman name and the Roman sense of heroism: Lucius? Nay, Marcus, isn’t it? Your friend who conspired with you here, snipping apart our machinery, the so-called chief of police of the basement. I am glad it was you here, instead of him.”

“Why?” Frank feels strangely touched at the comment
.

“Because he would have tried to kill me for enslaving him, if given all the chances you have had while here. I do not doubt that, even if it cost him his life. The boy became a warrior while under our watch. Yet, here I am alive, even flourishing, in my new position. I thank you, Brewer, for
you
have remained the same level-headed Yank you were before ever witnessing a single bloody battle. You will have a fine future one day as the foreman of a machine shop, I haven’t a doubt in my head.”