Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [61]
"Well… I've never really thought about it–"
Lord Bendray pressed on, his wrinkled face tightening with excitement: "Provided – of course! – that you can determine the exact rhythm of pulsations to apply to the larger mass… Eh? What say you to that?" he concluded triumphantly.
I shrugged. "Sounds reasonable to me." Best to go on humouring him, I supposed.
He whirled about at the edge of the precipice, raising his arms in adoration of the stone pillars. "That, my boy, is the purpose of this, your father's magnum opus!"
The hairs at the back of my neck began to stand up, as I sensed a madness even greater than I had at first suspected.
Glancing over his shoulder, Lord Bendray read the awful surmise visible in my face. "Yes – you've got it – you've got it, my boy! Exactly so! The senior Dower was a master of that Science properly known as Cataclysm Harmonics. Just as the marching soldiers transmit the vibrations that bring the bridge tumbling into bits, so this grand construction–" He gestured towards the stone pillars stretching down into the pit. "Your father's greatest creation – so it is designed to transmit equally destructive pulsations into the core of the earth itself. Pulsations that build, and reinforce themselves – marching soldiers! Hah! Yes – until this world is throbbing with them, and shakes itself to its component atoms!" The vision set him all a-tremble. "The bridge collapses; the world disintegrates… Just so, just so." He nodded happily.
I stared up at the construction, appalled by the old gentleman's fervour. Could it be? I was struck with a dread certainty that he had spoken the truth. My father's creation… Surely there could be no doubting it. If such a thing were the product of his genius, then, for good or ill, it very likely was as potent as all else that had come from his hand and mind.
"But–" I looked to him, baffled. "What would be the purpose of such a destruction?" A terrible vision centred itself in my thoughts, of mountains splitting in twain, deserts shivering as the oceans welled up in their midst, the grinding of splintered stone and the shrieking of women. "What cause would it serve?"
He gazed at me with patient benevolence. "Why, that of which we were just speaking," he said. "That of contacting those wise, advanced beings on the other worlds. What possible signal could be better? Surely, creatures that are capable of shattering the world on which they live, would be perceived by those intelligences as beings worthy of respect and attention. It stands to reason."
His calm voice, speaking in measured tones of annihilation, echoed inside my skull. "But – but if what you say is true… there won't be any contacting these beings – or anything else! We'll all be dead!"
"Pooh! You worry yourself needlessly. Come over here." Lord Bendray strode away from the chasm's edge, towards another section of the laboratory. I followed behind him, glancing over my shoulder at the awesome machinery containing the earth's demise in its gears.
"Here we are." He slapped a curved wall of brass, that rang hollow beneath his hand. "The Hermetic Carriage I'm proud to say that this, at least, is all my own design."
I followed the direction of his gesture, and found myself gazing at a great riveted sphere, looming up to the stone ceiling. Various excrescences – round windows, lanterns, and incongruously, a large Union Jack on an articulated metal arm-studded the polished brass.
"Quite a thing, eh?" Lord Bendray beamed at me. "Come up here – this way."
Our boots clattered on a flight of metal steps that led to a platform halfway up the sphere's circumference. Lord Bendray tapped one of the small windows. "Observe," he said. I pressed my face close to the thick glass and saw a reduced version of a gentleman's sitting room: a thickly upholstered chair and ottoman, a wall of books close by, a humidor and small rack of bottles. The curved walls were clad in tooled morocco, the floor covered with an antique Tabriz. The only inappropriate notes, in this picture of comfort were various