Lord Kelvin's Machine - By James P. Blaylock Page 0,13
effect of making the bulk of his forehead disappear into his thin gray hair.
“Dr. Parsons!” cried St. Ives, getting in before him. “Your man at the gate is a disgrace. We sauntered in past him mumbling nonsense about the Atlantic cable and showed him a worthless letter signed by the Prince of Wales. He tried to shake our hands. You’ve got to do better than that, Parsons. We might have been anyone, mightn’t we?—any class of villain. And here we are, trooping in like so many ants. It’s the great good fortune of the Commonwealth that we’re friendly ants. In a word, we’ve come to offer our skills, such as they are.”
St. Ives paused for breath when he saw that Parsons had begun to sputter like the burning fuse of a fizz bomb, and for one dangerous moment St. Ives was fearful that the old man would explode, would pitch over from apoplexy and that the sum of their efforts would turn out to be merely the murder of poor Parsons. But the fit passed. The secretary snatched his quivering face back into shape and gave the three of them an appraising look, stepping across so as to stand between St. Ives and the machine, as if his gaunt frame, pinched by years of a weedy vegetarian diet, would somehow hide the thing from view.
“Persona non grata, is it?” asked St. Ives, giving Parsons a look in return, then instantly regretting the action. There was nothing to be gained by being antagonistic.
“I haven’t any idea how you swindled the officer at the gate,” said Parsons evenly, holding his ground, “but this operation has been commissioned by Her Majesty the Queen and is undertaken by the collected members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, an organization, if I remember aright, which does not count you among its members. In short, we thank you for your kind offer of assistance and very humbly ask you to leave, along with your ruffians.”
He turned to solicit Lord Kelvin’s agreement, but the great man was sighting down the length of a brass tube, tugging on it in order, apparently, to align it with an identical tube that hung suspended from the ceiling fifteen feet away. “My lord,” said Parsons, clearing his throat meaningfully, but he got no response at all, and gave off his efforts when St. Ives seemed intent on strolling around to the opposite side of the machine.
“Must we make an issue of this?” Parsons demanded of St. Ives, stepping across in an effort to cut him off and casting worried looks at Hasbro and Jack Owlesby, as if fearful that the two of them might produce some heinous device of their own with which to blow up the barn and exterminate the lot of them.
St. Ives stopped and shrugged when he saw Bill Kraken, grimed with oil and wearing the clothes of a workman, step out from behind a heap of broken crates and straw stuffing. Without so much as a sideways glance at his employer, Kraken hurried to where Lord Kelvin fiddled with the brass tube. Kraken grasped the opposite end of it and in a moment was wrestling with the thing, hauling it this way and that to the apparent approval of his lordship, and managing to tip St. Ives a broad wink in the process.
“Well, well,” said St. Ives in a defeated tone, “I’m saddened by this, Parsons. Saddened. I’d hoped to lend a hand.”
Parsons seemed mightily relieved all of a sudden. He cast St. Ives a wide smile. “We thank you, sir,” he said, limping toward the scientist, his hand outstretched. “If this project were in the developmental stages, I assure you we’d welcome your expertise. But it’s really a matter of nuts and bolts now, isn’t it? And your genius, I’m afraid, would be wasted.” He ushered the three of them out into the sunlight, smiling hospitably now and watching until he was certain the threat had passed and the three were beyond the gate. Then he called round to have the gate guard relieved. He couldn’t, he supposed, have the man flogged, but he could see to it that he spent an enterprising year patrolling the thoroughfares of Dublin.
LONDON AND HARROGATE AGAIN
It was late evening along Fleet Street, and the London night was clear and unseasonably warm, as if the moon that swam in the purple sky beyond the dome of St. Paul’s were radiating a thin white heat. The very luminosity of the moon paled