The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) by Catherine Webb Read Free Book Online Page B

scientist who’s stolen every idea he ’s had from better people, a scientist who bullies and threatens and buys his way into power. Everything he ’s ever done that’s been in any sense original work has all been about power; power is the end of learning, he learns for wealth and ambition and studies for greed and personal gain and reads to use what he knows, to manipulate it and ...’
    ‘That don’t sound bad.’
    ‘Teresa, he will only study the ocean if he’s sure there’s buried treasure under it. He will only study the stars if he thinks he needs to navigate, he will only study the soil if he thinks it can be tilled to grow a cheaper kind of tobacco.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘He has never once looked at the stars and . . . and just stopped . He has never once thought that the moon is beautiful and that the sky at night is a marvel. He has never once looked at the ocean when the sun is coming up across it and thought it would make a picture. He has never once looked at the mathematics of a pine cone and seen an infinite regression of numbers, a dance of numbers in nature, and smiled to think that there is something more we do not understand, smiled to realize that there is more to learn, more to see, more to marvel at, he . . . he does not marvel at it. There is no beauty in the sun unless it is warming his crops, there is no miracle in the maths unless it is winding the spindle on the loom, there is no joy in the stars unless they are falling to earth to be counted and sold again. Everything he does is for himself. He is nothing but . . . coldness. Calculating, dispassionate coldness.’
    ‘Is that why he . . . wanted stuff stolen from you? ’Cos you and him . . . are all grrry an’ all?’
    ‘Teresa, he wanted my plans for a . . .’ Lyle froze. ‘Oh my goodness.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘He told you to steal the papers in the study, didn’t he? Top left shelf, behind the silver nitrate?’
    ‘So? An’ remember, it ain’t my fault an’ all an’ how I’m all nice really an’ you promised not to turn me in ’cos . . .’
    ‘Teresa, those were preliminary designs for a capacitor bank.’
    ‘A whatty?’
    ‘A tool for storing charge, but I mean a lot of charge, I mean millions and millions and millions of coulombs of charge, billions - do you know what a billion is?’
    ‘No. What ’s that?’
    ‘It ’s a number with nine zeros after it.’
    ‘An’ ... that’s big?’
    ‘All right, put it another way. If everyone in Britain and France and probably Italy too all came to London and stood shoulder to shoulder, they would fill every street of the city to the very, very edge, and there would be no space to move, no space to breathe, every house and every floor of every street in the city full of people, yes?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Now take about eighty Londons full of all these people and put them all shoulder to shoulder and you have roughly a billion people.’
    Tess thought about it. Finally she said, ‘That’s ... big, right?’
    ‘You’re there.’
    ‘So ... this big, big number ... what ’s it doin’ exactly?’
    ‘That was what the drawings were about. So much energy, all locked up in one place, ready to be discharged at any moment. They were only preliminary plans, of course, I don’t think it could really have been built, the resource needs were too high, not to mention the gold, but . . .’
    ‘Gold?’
    ‘. . . but Berwick expressed interest in the designs too . . .’
    ‘You said somethin’ ’bout gold . . .’
    ‘My God, what ’s he got himself involved with?’
    ‘Dunno.’
    ‘Thank you, Teresa.’
    ‘Just tryin’ to be helpful.’
    ‘I’ve got to find him.’
    ‘ Really? ’ She saw his face and let out a pained little sigh. ‘Right. ’Course. What we needs is a clue. Oh oh oh oh . . . maybe!’
    ‘Maybe?’ asked Lyle hopefully.
    ‘Erm ... no. I don’t think it’s going to work.’
    ‘Fantastic.’
    ‘How’s about ...’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Erm ... uh . . . maybe