The Revolutions Read online

  She was appalled to hear that he intended to go in search of Mr Gracewell, to try to get his job back.

  “Look, Josephine—a little while longer, that’s all. That’s all we need.”

  “I don’t like Gracewell; I don’t like Atwood. We don’t need the money that badly.”

  “It won’t be long; and it will make all the difference in the world.”

  “Arthur—what if … What if they pay so much because what they’re doing is…” She seemed to be struggling for the right word. “… something wrong somehow?”

  “Then I’ll find out what it is, and go to the police. But first I must find out. I’ll be careful, I promise.”

  She stared down at her feet and said nothing. She looked angry.

  “But I don’t even know where Gracewell’s got to, that’s the thing. What about Atwood? Atwood must know. But how do I get ahold of Atwood? Does he still come to meetings of the, what were they called, the Order V.V. whatever it was?”

  “Oh no—he was far too fashionable to stay there long. Men of his sort get bored very quickly.”

  “Hah. Yes, that would be altogether too easy, wouldn’t it? Where’s the challenge in that? What rotten luck. Oh well.”

  * * *

  Mr Gracewell’s enterprise lay in ruins. The fire had spread to some nearby buildings, too, and caused God only knows what expense and waste and loss of life.

  The building’s walls were mostly gone now, so that one could see the whole structure of the thing laid out as if in a diagram. The second storey had fallen in. White gulls perched on black timbers and dogs nosed among the ashes. Otherwise it was abandoned. There wasn’t even enough left for vagrants to take shelter in. Arthur entered carefully, alert for the warning sounds of further collapse, and even more alert for the sounds of Dimmick. He heard only gulls taking flight, the wind from the river whistling through the building’s bones, and the usual noises of ships.

  In two places, he came across wrecked machines. These were large columns of steel and brass and wood that once had intricate parts, levers and cylinders, like typewriters or telegraphs, but were now ruined—melted and broken and fused. They lay like fallen asteroids. He thought they had been on the upper floor, and had dropped through when it collapsed. They were in the heart of the ruins, which was perhaps why no thief had scavenged them. Or perhaps they were just too heavy to move.

  No bodies. No bones.

  What little paper had survived the fire had been ruined by rain. Arthur found what he thought were the filing cabinets from Gracewell’s office, but someone else had already emptied them. Dimmick, perhaps; creeping back at dawn, streaked with soot like a savage, to steal away the evidence under the very noses of the police …

  Probably the police had already been and gone. No trail, no clues. He poked around until it started to rain, then went home.

  He asked at Guy’s Hospital and at St. Thomas’s after a student by the name of Simon, nervous fellow, recently unwell. No luck.

  He went out to Shadwell, in search of Mr Vaz. It was a fool’s errand. He was lost at once. He asked after Vaz in half a dozen pubs. Never heard of him, the landlords said, or I know a dozen by that name. Sailors come and go. But if you want to hire some men, there’s a load of ’em out in the garden playing skittles … In the bleak concrete garden around the back of the Sovereign, a dozen dark young men halted their game, froze stiff as their skittles, glaring at him. He made them uneasy. It was possible that they thought he was a policeman, or an agent of the shipping companies.

  Mr Vaz had very probably saved his life, and for all Arthur knew the man was dead; dead, and London had already quite forgotten him.

  He asked at the docks after the Viceroy, on which Vaz said he’d once sailed. It had departed London. Nobody could tell him about its crew.

  * * *

  The Registrar of Companies had no record of a Gracewell & Co., or any other company of similar name.

  * * *

  He went with Josephine to a Theosophical lecture in Hampstead. A very tall American woman by the name of Mrs Bloom talked for an hour. Perhaps it was interesting, but Arthur didn’t listen to a word of it; he was busy scanning the packed hall for Mr Atwood. No luck. Afterwards he struck up conversations with some likely looking people and tried to steer them round to the subject of Atwood, but nobody seemed eager to gossip.

  Dear Mr Sidgwick,

  My name is Arthur Archibald Shaw. I am a writer, lately employed by The Monthly Mammoth, and I have lately taken an interest in some of the goings-on among the spiritualist & occultist fraternities of London. I have read in the newspapers that your Society for Psychical Research has done sterling work exposing some of the fraud & humbug of that world. I write to you, in hope of your confidence, to inquire if, in the course of your invaluable investigations, the name of a “Mr Gracewell” has come to your attention. I hope you will forgive me if at present I can say no more.

  Yours in confidence,

  A. A. Shaw

  Dear Mr Shaw,

  The name “Gracewell” is not one with which Mr Sidgwick is familiar, nor is it found in the records of the S.P.R. If you believe that the S.P.R. should open an investigation into this person’s activities, all I can suggest is that you offer a fuller account of them.

  Yours sincerely,

  Roger M. Morley,

  Secretary to Mr Sidgwick,

  President of the S.P.R.

  P.S. I regret the demise of The Monthly Mammoth.

  He missed the Work. That was the truth. He hardly understood what it was, yet it had been the biggest and most important thing that had ever entered his life—well, apart from Josephine, of course, he reminded himself. He performed the operations in his sleep; he muttered them to Josephine when she was trying to talk about something else. He couldn’t help it. At dinner with his uncle George and George’s wife, Agnes, when George tried to talk to him about work (there were a multitude of magazines that would employ him, George promised, a multitude!) he couldn’t listen; instead, he traced the symbols of the Work with his soup-spoon. Out at dinner with his friends Waugh and Heath, Arthur fell silent in a corner and let the conversation drift away from him, until Waugh reached out and snapped his fingers in front of Arthur’s eyes.

  “Hypnotised, Shaw? Mesmerised? The sweet sleep of the poppy?”

  “I was thinking, Waugh.”

  “Thinking, is it? Day-dreaming, more like it. Heath, you bored him into a coma, poor chap.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “You were dreaming of Josephine.”

  “I was thinking about work.”

  “Good God, why?”

  He couldn’t explain.

  * * *

  He searched for the name Gracewell in the hundred and one thick blue volumes of the index of the British Museum Reading Room. He found the author of a fifty-year-old medical treatise, the author of a positively ancient book of theology, and a few other blind alleys. He also found several references to a Doctor Norman Gracewell, Lecturer in Mathematics, Kings College.

  This Dr Gracewell had published a note in the Proceedings of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1873. Some predictions regarding the 1874 Transit of Venus, which had turned out to be wrong, if Arthur remembered correctly. After that the same man had published a series of very complicated-looking papers on life insurance, and, in 1883, a monograph, General Theory of an Analytical Engine. It was dedicated to the Duke of Sussex and to the Countess of Lovelace.

  In the past half-century a handful of ingenious engineers have, following the path set out by Mr Charles Babbage, created working models of a simple difference engine, for the calculation of logarithmic tables. Mr Babbage’s far greater achievement, the general-purpose analytical engine, remains merely theoretical. I am not alone in considering this one of the few great failures of British science. I hope that this humble volume may bring us some small measure closer to achieving its creation, in an economical and practicable fashion. I propose three methods by which t
he operations of the engine might be simplified. First …

  An analytical engine. Was that what Gracewell’s Engine was supposed to be?

  He read on, but the rest of the volume was incomprehensible. Equations ran across the pages, and diagrams of circular, looping, and utterly obscure processes.

  Gracewell’s last publication, according to the catalogue of the Reading Room, was a short volume dated 1883. It was entitled The Final Analysis of the Method of Analysis. It was dedicated to Kether, and Yesod, and Yaldabaoth. It began:

  Last winter I was contacted by an Intelligence from outside the Cosmic Sphere in which we conduct our ordinary lives. The first of several such contacts occurred while I was walking on Blackheath—beside a lamp-post, & in the company of a dog. I have since determined to call the Intelligence in question Yaldabaoth—though it gave me no name for Itself, having no need for names in Its Sphere of existence—which is the Sphere (it encloses our own, as I will explain) that lies beneath ours in the Cosmic Ordering. We know it in the sky as the Red Planet. In conversation with this and other Intelligences from the Red Planet I learned the futility & triviality of all our modes of thought & mathematical analysis. Subsequently I was dismissed from my post, depriving the young scholars of Kings of the benefit of my discoveries—& I have learned to keep these discoveries to myself. In this final volume (published at my own expense) I shall confine myself to a demonstration that mathematics as it has hitherto been understood and as it is practiced by the faculty of Kings College is nothing but a snare & a delusion. There are one hundred & twenty-two proofs of this undeniable fact.

  Arthur’s heart sank at the prospect of reading 122 proofs of anything. Before the Reading Room closed that evening, he read ten proofs, all of which were gibberish. The man had gone mad. Yet someone had believed in him enough to back whatever it was he’d built in Deptford.

  On the way out of the Reading Room, Arthur noticed an advertisement pinned up by the door promising a free public lecture, not far away, on the methods and the latest discoveries of Mr Pickering’s Arequipa Observatory in the Andes. Arthur had nothing better to do with his evening, and the lecture was interesting enough, as it turned out, though quite technical, and often interrupted by questions from the audience about canals and life on the red planet and so on. When the lecture was done, Arthur remained in his seat for a little while, thinking about his day, so by the time he got up to leave, he nearly missed catching a glimpse of Norman Gracewell filing out from the lecture-hall, opening his umbrella as he stepped out into the dark.

  * * *

  Arthur followed. He hung back, resisting the urge to run, to tap Gracewell on the shoulder. He wasn’t quite sure what to say. He thought about perhaps striking up a conversation about astronomy.

  Gracewell moved faster than his heavy-footed trudge would suggest. He was heading north-east, towards St. Pancras.

  Quite suddenly, Gracewell stopped, searched his pockets, then turned and stepped into a railway ticket-office.

  Arthur ran up to the ticket-office, fumbling for the money to pay the clerk. The earth beneath him rumbled as he ran downstairs into the Underground. Across a dim and cavernous platform thick with steam and the stink of coal he glimpsed the windows of the train whipping past, a string of lights disappearing one by one into the dark of the tunnel, taking Mr Gracewell with them. As the last window passed, he thought he saw a fellow he recognised from Room 12—a big, silent, florid-faced German fellow; he didn’t remember his name. Reading a newspaper. Quite possibly on Gracewell’s trail too, and ahead of Arthur—of course, he wouldn’t be the only one, would he?

  * * *

  All through the next morning Arthur waited outside the station. In the afternoon, when Gracewell emerged, Arthur folded up his newspaper and followed him. He watched Gracewell purchase a newspaper of his own, then proceed east into a small brick building near St. Pancras Station.

  It appeared to be an office. A plaque beside the door read THE EUROPA COMPANY.

  Arthur waited at the corner of the street. He scratched absent-mindedly at his newly clean-shaven face. He bought some peanuts.

  Gracewell emerged, putting out his hand to test for rain—there was only a slight dampness in the air. Then he stepped out into the street and walked briskly west. He stopped in at a grocer’s shop on the Euston Road, and came out carrying a parcel. He entered a tobacco-shop on the Marylebone Road. When he exited, fiddling with his pipe, two men stepped out of a waiting cab, grabbed him by his arms, put a hand over his mouth, and dragged him towards the cab’s open door.

  Arthur nearly choked on a peanut.

  Then he shouted “Hello!” and charged in.

  It was a busy London street, on a sunny mid-afternoon. It simply didn’t occur to him to be afraid.

  He shouted again, and hit one of Gracewell’s assailants in the jaw. It hurt like blazes, but the bugger recoiled.

  Arthur shook his hand, thinking that it was rather a pleasure to hit someone, after the last two months of frustration and headaches.

  Arthur took a good look at them both. They were pale; almost as white as paper. Arthur thought he’d hit them hard, but not hard enough to account for that sickly pallor. What’s more, he could swear that their eyes were inky-black under the shadow of their hat-brims. One of them wiped black blood from his nose with his sleeve.

  They spread out, so that Arthur couldn’t quite keep his eye on both of them at once.

  There was a third one up on the driver’s seat of the cab, watching the proceedings.

  Arthur stepped back. Gracewell had dropped his pipe when they grabbed him, and Arthur crunched it underfoot. The two pale men now flanked him, one on either side. Now it occurred to him to be afraid. He tried not to show it.

  Gracewell leaned against the wall, fumbling in his pockets, as if for a weapon.

  Arthur called out for help, and some passers-by came running up.

  “You,” said the man on top of the cab, pointing at Arthur, “will die far from home.”

  The other two jumped into the cab, and the driver whipped the horse into motion.

  Someone put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder and asked him what all that was about.

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  Gracewell whistled up a cab. He climbed half-way into it, then turned back to Arthur. “Come on, then, if you’re coming.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Mr Gracewell, I—”

  “Shaw, isn’t it? You were one of—ah, that’s right, one of Mr Irving’s, in Room Twelve.”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen, then. Well, I can’t remember everything. Now listen—what do you want? Were you following me?”

  “Yes. I was hoping to ask you about the Engine.”

  Gracewell looked somewhat reassured. “Hah,” he said. “You want work? It’ll be months before we can rebuild. Months. All in disarray.”

  “It was a sort of difference engine, wasn’t it?”

  The cab rattled down a street of red-brick houses, at the end of which a great traffic light stood idle and unlit.

  “Yes,” Gracewell conceded. “More or less. More precisely, no. But yes.”

  “With men instead of mechanical parts.”

  “Yes.” Gracewell sighed. “More precisely in addition to.”

  He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at a cut on his lip. He gave Arthur a long look, and seemed to reach a decision. “Ahem. Hah. Now, a difference engine is a toy, Shaw—a mere adding machine. More precisely, it operates by repeated addition. Crank the handle, and it adds; that’s all it does. Thus it can generate tables. Nothing you or I couldn’t do, though less prone to distraction and error. Now! An analytical engine is a more interesting notion. A hundred variables, a thousand variables—a thinking machine of universal purpose, subject to instruction, capable of all of the functions of mathematics and logic. The equal in reasoning to a man. His superior for precision, reliability, and complexity of calculation. Moreover, men are expensive, unrelia
ble, and nosy.” He glared at Arthur, then dabbed fresh blood from his lip. “Ow. I think I’ve a tooth loose.”

  “Hmm,” Arthur agreed, gently rubbing his swollen knuckles.

  “Still, though man is inferior in some respects, there’s more to life than mathematics, more to the mind than logic. No merely mechanical engine can ever perform all the functions of which a man is capable.”

  The driver shouted at someone in traffic.

  “An engine,” Gracewell said, “of which each critical variable is a man, who can therefore perform not only simple operations of addition and multiplication and division, but can also apply to his task the vital forces. The whole much greater than the sum of its parts, capable of resolving psychic operations too vast for one mind.”

  He paused dramatically.

  “Babbage proposed a thinking machine. What I’ve made is a perceiving machine.”

  “It’s a—some sort of an occult engine, then.”

  “A Vital Engine, if you must give it a name. This is science, Mr Shaw, the modern science. You look sceptical.”

  “And the headaches and—”

  “Never enough men, that was the problem. Too many faltered. The Work made unusual demands on the spirit. Uncharted territory, calculating the revolutions of the spheres. It called for intuition, perception, what Atwood’s lot call clairvoyance. So we recruited fortune-tellers, mediums, poets, that sort of person. At first, at least. When we ran out we found insurance clerks worked adequately. Atwood says the Sight can’t be taught, but I believe that you can drum anything into a man’s head if he’s hungry enough.”