Hasbro and I manned the oars — work that I was admirably suited to from my days of punting on the Thames. They must have been surprised, though, to see old Parsons hauling away like that, given that he was upward of eighty-five years old. The idea of it amused me, and I pulled all the harder, watching over my shoulder as we drew slowly nearer to the buoy.
St. Ives was in the bell itself, making ready. His was the dangerous work. He was going down without air, because a compressor would have been pulled to pieces. But it was a shallow dive, and it wouldn’t take him long. That was his claim, anyway. “Give me eight minutes by the pocket watch,” he had told us, “and then pull me out of there. I can go down again if need be. And,” he said darkly, “if the rowboat starts to go to pieces, or if there’s trouble down below, cut the line and get away as quick as you can.”
Hasbro insisted at once on going with him, as did I, neither one of us keen on getting away. But that wasn’t St. Ives’s method and never had been. He was still in a funk because of the time he thought we had wasted and because of the two ships that had gone down needlessly. And there was the fact of his — as he saw it — having allowed the machine to exist all these years, sitting placidly in that machine works, only to be stolen and misused. He was the responsible party, and he would brook no nonsense to the contrary. There was a certain psychological profit, then, in his going down and facing the danger alone; his face seemed to imply that if something went wrong and we had to leave him, well, so be it; it was no more than he deserved.
Then there was the business of Alice, wasn’t there? It hovered over the man’s head like a rain cloud, and I believe that I can say, without taking anything away from his natural courage, that St. Ives didn’t care two figs whether he lived or died.
And although in truth I had no idea how much air one working man would breathe at a depth of eight fathoms, I accepted his assurances that two men would breathe twice as much and increase the dangers accordingly. The controls were meant for a single man, too, and St. Ives had been studying and manipulating them all the way out from Sterne Bay. Hasbro and I would have been nothing but dangerous baggage, trying to demonstrate our loyalty by our willingness to die along with him, if it came to that. He didn’t need any such demonstrations.
Down he went, into the dark ocean. One of the handlike armatures of the bell held on to a bundle of explosives wrapped in sheet rubber and sealed with asphaltum varnish. There was a timing device affixed to it. St. Ives had never meant to “disarm” the machine at all. He had meant all along to blow it to kingdom come, and he had stolen Higgins’s bell for just that purpose.
The Strait was blessedly placid — just a trace of wind and a slightly rolling ground swell. Line played slowly out through the oaken blocks, and we watched the bell hover deeper, down toward the vast black shadow below. I hadn’t expected quite what I saw — a sort of acreage of shadow down there, but then I realized that what I saw wasn’t merely the machine, but was a heap of derelict iron ships clustered together, the whole heap lying, I supposed, on a sandy shoal.
And that was why St. Ives hadn’t done the obvious — merely wrapped a hunk of iron into that package of explosives and tossed it over the side. It might easily have affixed itself to the hull of a downed ship and blown it up, leaving the machine alone. What the professor had to do was drop onto the machine itself, or grapple his way to it by the use of the bell’s armatures, and plant the explosives just so; otherwise they were wasted. Eight minutes didn’t seem like such a long time after all.
But then the line went suddenly slack and began to coil onto the top of the water. St. Ives had hooked on to something — the machine, a ship. All of us studied our pocket watches.
You’d think that the minutes would have flown by, but they didn’t; they crept. The breeze blew, clouds slipped across the sky, the loose circle of ships rolled on the calm waters, no one aboard them suspecting who I really was in my beard and wig. Hasbro counted the minutes aloud, and Uncle Botley stood at the winch. At the count of eight the three of us put our backs into it. The line went quivering-taut, spraying droplets. The blocks groaned and creaked. The bell very slowly swam into view, and in a rush of ocean water it burst out into the air, St. Ives visible within, the explosive package gone. He had either succeeded or failed utterly; it didn’t matter which, not at the moment.
Thunk went the bell onto the deck, and while Uncle Botley lashed it down, Hasbro and I bent to the oars and had that barge fairly skimming, if I do say so myself. There’s nothing like a spot of work when you know what the devil you’re doing and, of course, when there’s an explosion pending.
A cheer went up from the ships waiting in a circle around us, and I took my hat off and waved it in the air, my wig nearly blowing away in the sea wind. I clapped the hat back down and gave up the histrionics, hauling us through the chop, bang up against the hull of our trawler. We clambered aboard, taking the barge in tow and setting out at once.
We didn’t leave St. Ives in the bell, of course. He climbed out at the last possible minute, taking the risk now of being seen. “Let’s go,” he said simply, and into the cabin he went as I took up the speaking trumpet and started to shout at the nearest ship, on which a half-dozen men stood at attention along the rail, and a captain or some such thing awaited orders. In my best Parsons voice, helpfully disguised by the speaking tube, I gave him all the orders he needed — that we had set into motion the disarming of the machine, but that its excess electromagnetic energies would reach capacity just before she shut down. Move away, is what I told him, for safety’s sake, or risk going to the bottom!
That drew their attention. I think they would have run for it even if my beard had been plucked off right then by a sea gull. Flags were run up; whistles blew; men scrambled across the decks of the several ships, which began to make away another quarter of a mile, just as I told them, where they would await orders. We kept right on going — steaming back toward Sterne Bay. That must have confounded them, our racing off like that. For my money, though, it didn’t confound them half as much as did the explosion that followed our departure. We were well away by then, on the horizon, but we saw the plume of water, and then heard the distant whump of the concussion.
So Lord Kelvin’s machine was nothing but sinking fragments, an instant neighborhood for the denizens of the sea. Dr. Narbondo would continue his cold sleep until whatever it was that animated him had played itself out. Parsons, poor man, wouldn’t be at the helm of whatever grand ship he had imagined himself piloting into the harbor of scientific fame. His schemes were a ruin — blown to pieces. Even his victory over St. Ives had been a short-lived one — toasted to with drugged water.
St. Ives wasn’t happy with that part. He felt guilty about Parsons, and he felt even worse that Narbondo would sleep through what ought to have been his public trial and execution. Ah well, I was happy enough. I wasn’t fond of Parsons in the first place, and had rather enjoyed parading around in the beard and wig. I wish there had been some way to let him know about that, just to make him mad, but I guess there wasn’t. He would hear most of it, likely enough, but he probably wouldn’t guess it had been me, and that was too bad.
We landed in Sterne Bay, our business done. And we parted company with Hasbro’s aunt and with Uncle Botley. At the Crown and Apple we found a note under St. Ives’s door — the same note, in fact, that St. Ives had left on Parsons’s lap. The old man had scrawled on it the words, “I’m on the afternoon train to London; you might have the kindness to see me off.” Just that. You would have expected more — some little bit of anger or regret — given what St. Ives had revealed to him. But there was no anger, just the words of a sad man asking for company.