Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [6]
The purpose and function of some of the devices brought to me were unfathomable, and an odd secretiveness prevailed among my father's former clients. Amateur scientific pursuits had long been a preoccupation with serious-minded gentlemen of property and leisure, but the ones who came to me were often as uncommunicative as the devices they wished to be repaired. Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use – all of these had in time been brought into the shop. With Creff's assistance I had managed the simpler repairs, a hair-thin chain slipped from its proper place or a minute cogwheel grown toothless and replaceable with a duplicate from the vast jumble of parts and half-assembled machines left in my father's workroom. The well-heeled clientele for whom I performed these services paid handsomely enough. Other devices, where the malfunction was as mysterious as the function, I was forced to return to the distraught owners with my apologies. I fear it was from the growing number of these admissions of inadequacy that my trade had fallen off, the word passing among the cognoscenti that the son was not the equal of the father. The disastrous episode of the Patented Clerical Automata, who completion and setting into motion in a London church I had undertaken while my confidence in dealing with my father's creations had not yet been sufficiently discouraged, had been suppressed from public notice, else the notoriety would have ended my trade once and for all.
Such were the well-worn reveries that weighted my thoughts as I bent over the cabinet. As needful as my personal accounts were of replenishing, I feared that this was not to be an occasion of profit. I turned the flame up on the bracket behind the counter and, while my visitor continued to regard me with his slitted stare, bent over the device with magnifying glass in hand.
My study revealed nothing of the machine's purpose, though any question of its origin was dispelled. Under the glass I discovered the floating escapement with ratcheted countervalences that my father had invented, though in this instance of a smaller size than I had ever encountered before, and linked in parallel to a train of duplicates disappearing into the brass innards. Other features were of such minuteness that the magnifying glass, no matter how I squinted through it, failed to yield the details of the device's workings. One section, brighter than the rest, appeared to be made of finely hammered gold leaf, the sheets of which were folded upon themselves in various asymmetrical patterns. Simple set-screws in the corners of the box showed where the device could be removed from its mahogany housing. A number of incomplete linkages around the sides, with signs of wear marking the collars at the ends of protruding shafts, indicated where the workings could be connected to other, larger devices.
"It appears to be some sort of regulatory mechanism," I mused aloud. I looked up to see the Brown Leather Man's eyes still fastened upon myself. I shrugged, made uneasy by his intent scrutiny. "For a clock, perhaps, with various other functions combined?" I knew that the device