St. Ives set about constructing a bismuth spiral, which, for the reader unfamiliar with the mysteries of magnetism, is a simple snail-shell spiral of bismuth connected to a meter that reads changes of resistance in the spiral to determine intensities of magnetic fields. It’s a child’s toy, comparatively speaking, but foolproof. The very simplicity of St. Ives’s notion infuriated him even further. It was something that ought to have been accomplished a week earlier, in time to save those ten men.
He affixed the spiral to a pole that they could slip down through a small hiatus in the basket of the balloon, so as to suspend the spiral just above the waves, making the whole business of taking a reading absolutely dangerous — almost deadly, as it turned out — because it required their navigating the balloon perilously close to the sea itself. Why didn’t they use a length of rope, instead — play out the line while staying safely aloft? That was my question too; and the answer, in short, is that the science of electricity and magnetism wouldn’t allow for it: the length of wire connecting the bismuth to the meter must be as short as possible for the reading to be accurate — that was how St. Ives understood it, although his understanding was nearly the death of him.
He meant to discover where Lord Kelvin’s machine — the enormously powerful electromagnet stolen from the machine works in Holborn — lay beneath the sea, somewhere in the Dover Strait. He assumed that it rested on a submerged platform or on a shallow sandy shoal. Maybe it was anchored, but then again maybe it was slowly drifting at the whim of deepwater currents. He suspected the existence of a float or buoy of some sort, both to locate it and, perhaps, to effect its switching on and off.
The two of them were aloft within a day. It was doubtful that the ban on local shipping would last out the week; the economy wouldn’t stand it. The government would pay the ransom or get used to the notion of losing ships. The Royal Academy still denied everything, right down to the ground, while at the same time working furiously to solve the mystery themselves.
St. Ives and Hasbro scoured the surface of the sea, from Ramsgate to Dungeness. Hasbro, an accomplished balloonist — the blue-ribbon winner, in fact, of the Trans-European balloon races of 1883 — grappled with the problem of buoyancy, of keeping the basket above the licking waves in order not to drown St. Ives’s apparatus. The wind blew down out of the North Sea in gusts, buffeting them southward toward the coast of France, and it took all of Hasbro’s skill to steady their course at all. St. Ives had fashioned a sort of ballasted sea anchor that they dragged along and so avoided being blown across the coast of Normandy before discovering anything.
Even so, it finally began to seem as if their efforts were in vain — the Strait being almost inconceivably vast from the perspective of two men in a balloon. It was sometime late in the afternoon, when they were just on the edge of giving up, that they saw a sloop flying the ensign of the Royal Academy. St. Ives could see Parsons on the deck, and he waved to the man, who, after seeming to ascertain who it was that hailed him, replied with a perfunctory little nod and went immediately belowdecks. There was the chance, of course, that the Academy had already discovered the spot where the device had been sunk. And there was the chance that they were still searching. What would St. Ives do? What could he do?
They swept across her bow and passed her, St. Ives lowering the bismuth spiral one last time to take another reading. It registered some little bit of deviation, the needle swinging around fairly sharply as they drove along south and west, away from Parsons’s sloop.
They were two hundred yards off his port bow when the balloon lurched, throwing both the professor and Hasbro into the basket wall in a tangle of arms and legs. The basket tilted ominously, nearly pouring them into the sea. Hasbro hacked furiously at the rope holding the sea anchor, thinking that it had caught itself in something, while St. Ives held on to his pole and meter, which burst suddenly in his hands. That is to say the meter did — exploded — its needle whirling around and around like a compass gone mad, until it twisted itself into ruin,
St. Ives let go of the apparatus, which shot straight down into the water as the balloon strained at her lines, trying to tug the basket skyward, but having no luck. The basket, torn in the opposite direction by an unseen force, spun and dipped crazily, fighting as if it had been grappled by a phantom ship.
The crew of the sloop, including Parsons, lined the deck, watching the wild balloon and the two men clinging helplessly to her. It must have appeared as if she were being torn asunder by warring spirits — which she was, in a sense, for it was the powerful forces of hot air and magnetism that tugged her asunder. The ruined meter told the tale. St. Ives had found the sunken device right enough; the iron-reinforced base of the balloon basket was caught in its electromagnetic grip.
With a tearing of canvas and snapping of line, the basket lurched downward, almost into the ocean. A ground swell washed across them, and in an instant they were foundering. St. Ives and Hasbro had to swim for it, both of them striking out through the cold water toward the distant sloop, the nails in their bootheels prising themselves out. St. Ives fished out his clasp knife and offered it up to the machine in order that his trousers pocket might be saved. Finally, when they were well away from the snapping line and rollicking bag, they stopped swimming to watch.
For a moment their basket still tossed on the surface of the water. Then it was tugged down into the depths, where it hung suspended just below the surface. The still-moored balloon flattened itself against the sea, humping across the rolling swell, the gasses inside snapping the seams apart with Gatling-gun bursts of popping, the hot air inside whooshing into the atmosphere as if a giant were treading the thing flat.
Within minutes the deflated canvas followed the basket down like a fleeing squid and was gone, and St. Ives and Hasbro trod water, dubious about their obvious success. If it weren’t for the sloop sending a boat out after them, they would have drowned, and no doubt about it. Parsons, seeing that clearly, welcomed them aboard with a hearty lot of guffawing through his beard.
“Quite a display,” he said to St. Ives as the professor slogged toward a forward cabin. “That was as profitable an example of scientific method as I can remember. I trust you took careful notes. There was a look on your face, man — I could see it even at such a distance as that — a look of pure scientific enlightenment. If I were an artist I’d sketch it out for you…” He went on this way, Parsons did, laughing through his beard and twigging St. Ives all the way back to Dover, after leaving the area encircled with red-painted buoys.
At the very moment that they were aloft over the Strait, I was aloft in the dirigible, watching the gray seas slip past far below, and captain of nothing for the moment but my own fate. I was bound for Sterne Bay. The business of the icehouse had become clear to me while I lounged in Norway. Days had passed, though, since my confrontation with Captain Bowker, and in that time just about anything could have happened. I might rush back to find them all gone, having no more need of ice. On the other hand, I might easily find a way to do my part.
At the Crown and Apple I discovered that St. Ives and Hasbro hadn’t yet returned from their balloon adventure. Parsons was gone too. I was alone, and that saddened me. Parsons’s company would have been better than nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating a pint or two and a nap, wanting to escape my duty by going to sleep — drink and sleep being a substitute, albeit a poor one, for company. Sitting there reminded me of that last fateful knock on the door, though — reminded me that while I slept, no end of frightful business might be transpiring. Who could say that the door mightn’t swing open silently and an infernal machine, fuse sputtering, mightn’t roll like a melon into the center of the floor…