Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [19]
Griffith’s Oxford drawl cut across the younger man’s enthusiasm like a shark’s fin in a bathtub. “Perfectly charming, Angelos, utterly captivating, but people are producing electricity left and right everywhere you turn. Can’t throw a brick these days, can you, without hitting someone’s new toy, someone’s ee-lectro-whatsit, though what it’ll all come to in the end, I’m sure I can’t say. What makes your toy—ah—unique, distinctive? If I may ask?”
For a moment it seemed to Scheuch that Angelos might actually cry, not so much at Griffith’s words as at his tone, which deliberately, precisely and finally implied the insuperable distance between a Balliol College man (if not a graduate) and a Jewish medical student who would never quite lose his East End accent. Then Angelos said quietly, “Right. Quite right. Yes. I’ll show you.”
He reached into his coat pocket and removed a common stethoscope, of the sort that first-years at Christ’s Hospital aspired earnestly toward and wore like a badge of honor after its awarding. “Really a perfect machine, when you think about it,” he remarked, fondling it like a cherished pet. “I don’t imagine anyone’ll ever improve on old Cammann, I really don’t. No moving parts—nothing to break down—and no sound made by the human body has the least chance of escaping it. Seemed to me that it might work just as well when it came to . . . voices.”
“Voices.” Scheuch looked around at the other two men. “There, told you I thought I heard voices.”
“You have excellent hearing,” Angelos said. “Better than mine. It took me some while before I began to make sense of what I thought might even be mice, rustling in the corners late at night. Then I considered whether or not it might be static electricity of some sort, given the nature of my experiments. Finally . . . well. Judge for yourselves.”
He fitted the round end of the stethoscope into a clip on the generator frame, settling it carefully. “Had to fix this with soft solder, took me forever. I’m obviously not a dab hand at this type of thing . . . there, now the galvanometer . . . and off we go.” He began, slowly and rhythmically, to turn the crank.
“You don’t have to rotate it all that fast, that’s the remarkable thing. You just have to keep it going steadily, evenly. It takes a bit of a while—maybe some sort of charge has to build up. Something like a charge. I don’t really know. You’ll see.”
Griffith had been whistling thinly and idly as Angelos went on, toying with his watch and paying little attention to the demonstration. Scheuch and Vordran, however, were watching intently, with Vordran appearing especially rapt, as though he were staring at something beyond the rickety generator and its equally flimsy attachments. To Scheuch, the slow whir of the revolving disc became almost hypnotic, somewhat like the pulse of a sewing machine treadle. The air in the room was close and warm, and he felt himself swaying forward on Angelos’s old settee.
Vordran said, “What am I hearing?”
Even Griffith looked at him. Angelos said nothing, but only kept on rotating the copper disc. Vordran’s voice rose, the terror in it making his accent markedly more pronounced. “What am I hearing? Who is that speaking? Who is that speaking?”
The galvanometer needle was jerking on the dial, and Scheuch saw a few small sparks spitting off the edge of the disc, but he heard no voice beyond Vordran’s. It seemed to him that Angelos was turning the generator crank slightly faster than before, but the increased speed made no apparent difference to anyone but Vordran. He was out of the