Excerpt: Spyglass / Rara Avis

1 December 1883 (done/1,491)
The parallel rows of tracks on Commercial Road were skinned with ice, and the yellow of the street lamps shone down on the pavement as though through clouded crystal. Avery Quaintance was the only soul on the street, his footfalls the only sound. He felt that he would wake all of London with the beating of his heart; his breath steamed as though he were a mechanical engine.
Turning onto Jane Street, he glanced over his shoulder, but no one was following him. He had scarcely seen movement since leaving the dingy little house in Whitechapel. It was difficult to suppress a premature sense of elation: he wanted to whistle or sing, and kick up his heels on the icy pavement. His face felt flushed but his fingers were numb with cold, no matter how he shoved them into the pockets of his greatcoat.
The building which housed his laboratory was the only one on Jane Street that looked well-maintained, and the street's only lamp stood outside his window. Its cold yellow light peered in speculatively through the glass, picking up hundreds of tiny glints of light in the darkness. It was impossible to say how they would come together in the light. Avery shut the curtains before he switched on the electric lamp.
The laboratory was by no means small, but it was almost entirely filled by a single, extraordinary machine. There was no central design, none of the ideal symmetry that one usually saw in a Quaintance engine. Avery had sacrificed form to function, and the resultant machine sprawled over the room like a drunken beast, bold enough even to thrust an exhaust pipe through the exterior wall near the ceiling. It had shoved all the room's other furniture to the edges of the room; without the machine, these book shelves and display cases would have delighted the eye of the visitor, crammed as they were with all manner of marvelous designs: scale models of airships and gliders, incubators with large glass bell-jars, clockwork beetles of the type now jeweled and sold to the ladies of Grosvenor Square; plus biological specimans preserved in fluid, ranged vials of colored chemicals and powders-- it was, in short, a true scientist's lair. But everything else looked abandoned, compared to the massive machine.
Avery made his way around to the boiler, at one point squeezing between the wall and a range of brass pipes. He had left everything ready: the fuel only wanted his lit match. He shut the boiler door, listening with satisfaction to the quiet, organizational rustling of the fire, the first pings of heat moving through cold valves.
He crossed to the drafting table near the door, upon which had been stacked a pile of foolscap half a meter high. The top sheet was crammed with complex calculations in a meticulous hand, and concluded with the words "22 September 1881," which had been circled twice, triumphantly. Avery added to the table the contents of his pockets: his keys, his billfold, his hat and goggles, a leather journal, a cheap and badly scratched pocket watch. The last item, pulled from an interior pocket, was a substantial-looking pistol, which Avery paused to examine. The pistol was a thing of beauty: he had bought it and its twin years ago, for the simple delight of its balance and its elegant gold scrolling along the barrel. He had taken it apart and reassembled it, as was his habit with mechanical things, and discovered that the trigger was poorly designed; it would not always fire when pulled. He hadn't bothered to fix it, as he had no intention of ever discharging a firearm at that time.
Fortunately, the pistol had done its work in spite of its flaws.
Avery set it down with an air of satisfaction and turned back to the machine. The heat in the boiler must be growing. He put on his goggles and picked up the stack of papers and, after a moment's pause, his journal, and carried them to the boiler door. Two years' worth of notes, plans, setbacks, and calculations went onto the fire, topped by his more private speculations and doubts. He watched the leather of the journal's cover blacken before closing the door.
It would be difficult for them to follow him even if they had access to his plans, but Avery was not interested in giving pursuers any kind of advantage. He supposed someone clever enough-- Marcus Bellamy, perhaps, or one of the other engine-men from the Company-- could figure out how to reset the machine; Marcus, being his friend, might even be able to deduce where Avery had gone; but the odds were favorable that the main engine block would crack upon the machine's firing. Sheer brute power had been Avery's first obstacle to time travel, but it would also seriously slow anyone interested in tracking him down.
There was also a possibility, small but difficult to eradicate, that the machine would level everything from London Docks to Bethnal Green upon discharging. Avery was not fussed about this for his own sake: if he didn't manage to escape the present day, he was a dead man anyway.
His previous sense of exultation had left him: goggles pushed up his forehead, sleeves rolled up, he moved around the room, checking dials, peering in on the machine's interior functions, all attention. His plans were perfect, but they were still just paper plans; a test run was unfortunately impossible, as he would necessarily be returning to a time when the machine did not exist and he would have to build it all over again. As pressure built within its pipes the roar of the fire rose, and the needles on all the dials climbed steadily.
As the pressure gauge climbed toward a yellow line drawn on its face, he nodded to himself and opened a rectangular door onto a metal alcove. It was riveted together from thick plates of steel in hopes of protecting him from any ravages of the machine's discharge. But he had not put any thought toward comfort, and he was jammed awkwardly into the small space, elbowed by pipes on all sides. The radium-illuminated face of the pressure gauge stood inches from his nose. He set his hand on the lever near the floor, watching the needle edge higher.
When it passed the yellow line, he squeezed the lever and pulled it toward him. There was a satisfying clunk and the engine's pistons began to fire. A steady rumbling added to the fire's roar, building rapidly in pitch and volume as the engine built up momentum. The pressure gauge jumped, wobbled, and began to round the curve toward a green line drawn on the glass. The machine's vibrations came from all around, and the pipe near his low back had grown hot. That thumping had risen to a continuous thrum; Avery felt as though his heart was keeping pace with it. The thought passed through his head, fleetingly, that the whole neighborhood would wake at the sound, but it was too late to worry about that.
The pitch of the engine became almost unbearable; all around him he could hear little signs that the machine was straining to contain the power it had built. The needle came fifteen, ten degrees from the green line. Avery pulled down his goggles and returning his shaking hand to the lever. As the needle reached the green line, the machine shrieked like a steam engine's whistle, Avery took a deep breath in, and he pulled the lever into its final position.
The last thing he saw was the shattering of the glass on the dial before him; there was a sound like an indrawn breath, and then darkness.
All over the East End, people woke with an immense sound like cannon-fire ringing in their ears. Dogs barked. The building on Jane Street jumped in its foundations, and a torrent of steam and oily exhaust rushed out the pipe above Avery Quaintance's window. The two police officers, summoned to investigate a gunshot on Nelson Street, Whitechapel, looked up at the sound just before discovering the body of a preacher inside, his wounds not an hour old.
A haze of steam hung over the Jane Street laboratory, but the time machine quickly wound down, sputtering and whirring and clanking with the attitude of a beast winded and exhausted by the chase. The steam had been released from the bronze pipes, several of which had cracked under the immense pressure. Every weak place in the machine's architecture had been revealed; half a dozen wounds bled steam and oil. The alcove had not been immune; its two-inch-thick steel had cracked like an eggshell, and the dark interior stood open in the dissipating steam. It was empty but for a twisted brass lever, and a sprinkling of glass on the floor, glittering like diamonds.
Silence and cold resumed their nocturnal reign over London.