The Technologists: A Novel Read online

  “We are doing things far more important—things you wouldn’t begin to understand, Blaikie.”

  “Just how many of you Technology boys are there?”

  Throwing out his chest, Bob answered, “Fifteen men in the Class of ’68. About thirty-five in the other three classes, and we expect more than ever in the next freshman group.”

  “Fifty. Fifty men and it is called a college! I call that cheek!”

  “Mock if you like. When we are graduated on that glorious day of June the fifteenth, you can follow us in the newspaper columns as pathfinders.”

  Marcus was moved to see Bob align himself with his classmates instead of the fellows whom he’d grown up alongside in the snug parlors of Beacon Hill.

  “If you’re to be graduated,” Blaikie said.

  “What do you mean by ‘if,’ Blaikie?” Edwin asked.

  “You hold your tongue, grayhead. You had your chance with us.”

  Edwin slouched in the boat, his hand reflexively moving to touch the light spot in his hair.

  “You might want to hold your tongue now and then yourself, friend,” Marcus said.

  “What did he say to me?” Blaikie turned to his team, then to Marcus, as if noticing him only now. When their eyes met, Blaikie’s shoulders tightened and he subtly recoiled. Marcus had that effect. His muscular frame was well built and solid. His thick brown hair and old-fashioned crescent mustache made his intense green eyes stand out. Most of all, the poise of an engineer clung to him, made him seem in control of any circumstance. “Who is this?” Blaikie asked.

  “My name is Marcus Mansfield.”

  “Marcus … Mansfield …” Blaikie repeated speculatively, shrugging. He looked back at his men, who returned his shrug. “Sorry to disappoint. Never heard the name. Well, my men have much actual rowing to do, Plymouth. Some of the other sixes are too afraid to take their shells out because of the turn of events overnight at the harbor. They say there was a flash of fire, then ten, fifteen ships were crashing, and burning, sinking. Can you imagine what in the deuce those superstitious fools think of it? Black magic, perhaps.”

  “The city is in a panic about the whole thing, the industries scrambling to prevent losses. I’ve never heard of so many ships wrecking at once—the number of arrivals must have been too great in the fog,” speculated Edwin.

  “Too great!” Bob said. “There are more than two hundred wharves and docks in our harbor that would add up to more than five miles if placed end to end, Eddy. Even in much worse fog than that, our capacity for commerce—”

  “Oh, who cares a fig!” broke in the Harvard captain. “It is not my business. But whatever it was, I’m not about to let it stop us from our practice, if we are to whip Oxford like we did Yale. Give me your hand, Plymouth. Godspeed to you Technology fellows.”

  “Godspeed, Harvard.” Bob reached out to shake.

  On Blaikie’s nod, his team rammed their shell into the side of the Tech boat. As Marcus grabbed their shell’s sides to steady it, Bob went headfirst into the ice-cold water with a splash. Edwin, flailing to stop Bob’s fall, followed him overboard.

  “Cold day for bathing, Plymouth!” Blaikie shouted, as he and the Crimson pirates exploded with laughter.

  Marcus grabbed his oar like a bat, ready to defend their boat from further indignity. Blaikie glared at Marcus, daring him to strike.

  After another moment Marcus loosened his grip and let his instincts go quiet.

  “Wise fellow,” Blaikie said with an approving nod. “Being a gentleman isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, is it, old salt?” Then, to his men: “Three cheers and a tiger for Harvard Class of 1868! Sixty-eight forever!” A trio of “rahs” were followed by a guttural whoop before their oars swept through the water again. Marcus watched the perfect unison of the other team as the shell took the curve of the river ahead.

  “Bob’s right—those scrubs will see; we’ll be the true pathfinders!” Edwin yelled, knocking water out from his ear.

  “Oh, damn what I say, Eddy,” Bob said. He shook out his hair as he floated back to their boat. “Come on, Mansfield, stop your gaping and fish us out!”

  III

  The Boston Police

  AT WHAT REMAINED of one of the damaged wharves on Saturday, Sergeant Lemuel Carlton of the Boston Police paced along the cracked piers and the splintered docks. The fog had lifted by now, but it was still cloudy and colder than it should have been at this time of year. The best that could be said was it was a respite from the rain that had plagued the last wretched week in March.

  “You!” he said to a patrolman who caught him by surprise. “About time you’re back, man. What did the captain of the Gladiator say?”

  “I’ve spoken to him, sir.”

  “I chose the past tense ‘did’ on the presumption of that very thing,” Carlton noted in disgust.

  “He testified that … well, the very same thing as the others, sir! The very same!”

  “That so? He hadn’t been on a spree—a bit cup-shot? He mustn’t be ashamed to admit being a sot to the police,” Carlton added, scratching his strong chin sagely.

  “I questioned him thoroughly and he vowed he hadn’t had a drop, and I didn’t find any liquor upon his person or notice any in his rooms. Nor any of the others who were witnesses.”

  Carlton bowed his head and sat down on a barrel at the edge of the pier, staring at loose planks that were floating past him below. His head throbbed with the echoes of all the futile conversations since the morning with his patrolmen, unnerved sailors, angry shipowners, crying passengers. He dismissed his inferior to assist the rest of the men with the debris. The Harbor Police had encircled the wharf with their boats and were steering incoming vessels away, including a small fishing boat weaving in and out with a heavy-duty net, looting lost booty.

  Boots thumped aggressively on the planking behind him, and he was rising to attention before he even turned.

  “Chief Kurtz,” he said, bowing. “I believe you will find we have the situation in hand.”

  “Indeed!” responded Kurtz with surprise, pulling at one end of his bushy mustache and inclining his head toward the destruction. “Tell me, Sergeant Carlton, what is this situation? What I see are two of the most important commercial wharves of our city in tatters.”

  “Three ships sunk, four others damaged or otherwise destroyed, with losses in excess of twenty-four thousand dollars. Fifteen individuals injured to varying degrees, mostly broken arms and legs, and burns, with loss of life avoided only by the great exertions of several experienced sailors.”

  “But how?” Kurtz demanded after Carlton finished the report. “How did this happen?”

  “That is the very question,” Carlton said, raising a single eyebrow, and clearing his throat assiduously.

  “Hem! Haw! Go on!”

  “Chief. I have spoken to several captains and navigators who were on the vessels involved and have instructed the patrolmen to interview as many others as we can locate. Each one, to a man, reports that their instruments failed—were deranged in their readings—all in the space of the same few minutes.”

  “How is it possible?”

  “It is flagrantly not possible, sir! You need not believe me alone. The captain of the Harbor Police says that it is emphatically and categorically not possible for so many compasses and what-you-will to fail at once.”

  Kurtz stared ominously into the harbor. “Sabotage?”

  “Chief,” the sergeant began, then hesitated before going on. “Chief, all the instruments were on ships from different destinations with distinct schedules, some arriving, some departing. How it could be sabotage, well, I have wrangled with that question with the same success Joseph had with the angel.”

  “Then what, Sergeant Carlton? Necromancy? The devil? That’s what some of the sailors are squawking about, and that means ships avoiding our ports, and tens of thousands of dollars lost. If the mayor and the legislature sink their teeth into this, it will touch off a volcano under my
feet. What do you propose doing about that?”

  “We shall remove the debris as best and as quickly as we can manage, so the city engineers can begin to rebuild.”

  Jaw clenched, Kurtz took off his hat and tossed it into the harbor. “There’s one more piece of debris to fish out, Sergeant!”

  “Very well, Chief,” replied the officer obediently. “I will have my best man do it straightaway.”

  Kurtz rolled his eyes. “You can return my hat to me in my office when you know what caused those ships to lose their direction. Until then, I’d rather not see that thunderstruck phiz of yours back at the station house.”

  “But, Chief, perhaps the Harbor Police should lead this investigation.”

  “They swallow too much of our funds already, and they would crave any excuse to siphon off more. No. Over my dead body, Carlton.”

  “Then perhaps I ought to consult with some of the professors at that new college in Back Bay. They are experts in all the new sciences, and if the usual reasons for accidents do not fit, perhaps they could advise us where to turn.”

  Kurtz pulled him away from the patrolmen who were milling around them. “Have you gone mad, Carlton?”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t rile me! The Institute of Technology? You know the reputation of that place. Their sciences are seen as practically pagan. Just speaking to them will draw fire against us. Try the harbormaster if you need more help! Try the city engineer!”

  “I have! All baffled! We need to find someone capable of understanding how this could happen, or we shall not advance one whit!”

  “The single place with the finest intellects in the nation sits just across the river. What about that?”

  “Harvard.”

  “Yes! Go there and find someone smarter than you, and without delay! We are here to protect this city. I will not suffer another embarrassment like this!”

  “Right away, Chief Kurtz. Chief, wait! You’re still …” But there he went without a look back, stomping all the way to his waiting carriage, the chief of police of the city Carlton loved, hatless for all Boston to see.

  IV

  Circuits

  ALMOST ANYWHERE MARCUS LOOKED as he stood outside the splendid Boylston Street building was unused land of the Back Bay, or the “new land,” as it was known. Only a few years before it had been marshland and was still so a few streets west, where rows of steam shovels fed by freight cars of gravel and sand continued the filling. Besides the Institute, there were a few other places—including the asylum for aged blacks and the Catholic academy for girls—that preferred distance from the rest of the city. The area was a perfect setting for the improbable college.

  Scholars should be surrounded by quiet, but President Rogers had always said technological scholars should be surrounded by the progress of man. The Back Bay presented surroundings that were grandly artificial, where the pupils would observe the way in which civil engineering could turn malodorous swamp—what had been a bubbling caldron of noxious filth poured out from the city, though they were too young to have seen it at its worst—into a landscape of wide streets that would alleviate the crowding of an old Boston, now flooded with so many new residents from rural towns and foreign nations that one could hardly move. It would be the latest example of modern architecture and commercial and industrial progress—at least, that was the hope for the still young, mostly still uninhabitable Back Bay.

  “Come on already,” Bob was saying, “at this rate, we’ll be graduated before we finish the preparations.”

  If you’re to be graduated.

  Marcus was carrying equipment outside with Bob. “Two steps behind you, Bob.”

  In the five days since, the Harvard stroke oar’s taunt out on the Charles River had slowly wormed its way into Marcus Mansfield’s thoughts with parasitic tenacity. On the one hand, a sort of childish superstition rose inside Marcus, without any particular legs to its logic, that he would not be graduated. Even after he had swapped the machine shop floor for the classrooms and laboratories of the Institute, he had feared deep down that a man like him had no right to be a college man and would, through the last-minute intervention of fate, be deprived of the title.

  On the other hand, Marcus’s more practical cause for concern was that he and the other members of ’68 were to be the first to be graduated from the Institute of Technology, and until a thing had happened it could not rightly be proven that it could happen. They had been taught that from the first hour at Tech.

  No doubt Bob Richards would have laughed away his worries, which was why Marcus did not bring them up with him as they finished preparing the equipment for the evening’s public demonstration. Bob seemed to have been born with the ability to sleep off any problem in the way other men sleep off beer. But Marcus’s thoughts swirled around and around the stroke oar’s venomous jeer. When he should have been entering a stage of intense concentration on his studies as graduation crept closer (If you’re to be graduated), he instead felt unmoored and a little wild—and for that he blamed the obnoxious Harvard men he’d likely never see again.

  Only a handful of students gathered for the demonstration besides Marcus and Bob. This close to the end of term, most of the students raced home after five o’clock each evening to prepare for examinations and final papers. Marcus noticed Chauncy Hammond, Jr., gazing up at the cloudy sky. Hammie’s jet-black hair was parted smartly, impervious to the breeze, but his bulbous forehead and gourdlike chin, inexpertly shaved, overshadowed his otherwise bland facial features, which seemed to have been left unfinished by their creator. A contender, along with good-hearted Edwin Hoyt, for First Scholar, Hammie generally floated along in his own rarefied world of figures and formulas. Standing near the front steps was that busybody Albert Hall, writing in a ledger held in the crook of his arm, maybe recording the names of students present (or, more likely, listing those not present, underlined by his pencil with spite), and next to Albert was Bryant Tilden, arms crossed petulantly across his tree-trunk chest.

  Ellen Swallow was on her own at the outer fringe of the gathering. As the only female pupil at the Institute, Miss Swallow was taught separately from the others, so a sighting of her was rare. Her quick eyes darted around and caught his. He lifted his hand to his hat, but she simply looked the other way with a crimson bloom tainting her pale cheeks.

  President Rogers was slowly approaching the podium at the front of the building. He was steadied on one arm by Darwin Fogg, the Institute janitor, and on the other by a petite chambermaid. She held on to her employer gingerly but with an unmistakable protectiveness. Marcus looked upon the condition of their college president sadly, remembering him in days of much better health.

  Along the way, Rogers removed his eyeglasses from his vest and lost his grip on them; they bounced off his arm and, with one hand, the chambermaid caught them before they could hit the ground and returned them without waiting for any credit.

  “Is she dark or blond under that cap?” Bob, sneaking up behind him, asked in a whisper.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The pretty little nymph you’re staring at as if her eyes were fully charged electromagnets—the Irish servant girl propping up Rogers. Never mind her. Have I told you this summer there will be dozens of balls thrown by good Boston society where you will make a fine prospect as a college graduate? Those ladies are so well bred they would rather be dead than not make an appearance at a public affair. Do not smooth your mustache like that—I cannot tell what expression you’re wearing. Do you laugh or sneer at my plans?”

  “Rogers is about to begin the demonstration. Do you have the circuit ready?”

  “Sneer! No, wait. You do laugh!”

  “Never at you, Bob.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome,” President Rogers began when the clock reached eight. Despite his weakened condition, his voice easily cascaded through the gathering with authoritative calm. “The people of Massachusetts have always been a mechanical people and our age will se
e many wonders. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is our sincerest hope that our zeal for new invention is as infectious outside the college as inside our walls, where we endeavor to invigorate the observing and logical faculties of young minds, by asking each day: What limit of knowledge will man yet reach?” He stopped, put his paper down on the podium, and looked at the sky as he wiped his eyeglasses. “It is growing dark, isn’t it? I’m embarrassed, I confess. I can hardly read my own jottings.”

  He nodded in their direction—that rugged face with the soft smile. Bob tapped a spring on a box. After about fifteen or twenty seconds, the lampposts lining Boylston Street flickered, then lit up simultaneously in a long procession of softly glowing orbs. At the pop of the lanterns, there was a collective gasp and a palpable excitement.

  Rogers waited out the applause before he explained that Boston had five thousand streetlamps and spent over $42,000 each year on employing men to light them, not counting the wasted gas in the first lamps each night that had to be lighted earlier than necessary so the men could complete their rounds by nightfall. The Institute’s invention, developed through the collective effort of students and faculty in four years of engineering studies, used wires connected through a circuit—a course that allowed the electricity to flow from one body to another, the professor said—from a box at each gaslight to a central location, where they could be activated at one time. Marcus opened the central box. Inside, a notched wheel powered by electricity was connected to a series of coils.

  “This is what we call a ‘circuit breaker,’ ” Rogers said. “When the spring is tapped, as Mr. Richards, one of our seniors, has shown us, it revolves around halfway, closing the valve for electricity, to turn off the wheel and extinguish the lamps—or ‘break’ the electric flow. When tapped once more, it revolves again, this time opening the valve and lighting our streets at night. Even as we gather right now, this system is being installed across the city.”