Stone's Fall

'I am a better judge of men, more like. And more able to command them. When I see Mr Cort at work, I feel like grabbing him by the neck and giving him a good shake.'

He snorted in disgust, in a way which spoke volumes. Macintyre was thinking what he would have accomplished if he had had the advantages of Cort's birth and opportunities. There are many such men in our industries; I have made it my business to find them and give them their chance.

'Yet you assisted him the other week?'

'Oh, that. That was nothing. It took no time at all, and I was getting heartily sick of listening to his despair. At least he has decided to take my advice. He is even prepared to contemplate blowing the column out with explosives. There may be a man of sense in there after all. His trouble is that he has been trained to do things the way they are done, not the way they should be done.'

'Are you going to tell me what that great thing is over there?' I called out to him. He had wandered over to Luigi, and was discussing some problem, my presence perfectly forgotten. A strange way of talking he had, as well. A sort of pidgin English with smatterings of Italian thrown in. It was the lingua franca of the workshop, where conversations were conducted half in words, half in gestures and mime. All the technical words were in English, not surprisingly perhaps as none of the three Italians knew any of them before they came to Macintyre, and he did not know the Italian equivalents, even when they existed. The grammar was Italian, and the rest was a mixture of the two, with a lot of grunting thrown in to fill up space.

I had to wait for an answer; whatever the problem was it took some sorting and ended with Macintyre on his knees before the machine – some sort of drill, as far as I could discern – like a penitent at prayer, slowly twisting knobs to make fine adjustments, measuring distances with calipers, repeating the operation several times before an outburst of grunting suggested the problem was resolved.

'What was that?' he asked when he returned to my side.

'Your plumbing.'

'Ha!' He turned and led the way back to the lone machine lying clamped on a solitary workbench. 'What do you think it is?'

I looked carefully at the machine before me. It was a thing of some elegance, essentially a steel tube with wing-like projections along its length, tapering at the back and ending with a small three-winged propeller in shiny brass. At the other end, it stopped abruptly and open to the air, but a little way away was a continuation which obviously bolted on to the end to give a rounded shape.

'It obviously is designed to go through the water,' I said. I walked around and peered into the nose of the machine. It was empty. 'And this clearly holds something. Most of its length is taken up with machinery, which I take to be the engine, although there is no funnel, and no boiler. This empty piece must hold the cargo.' I shook my head. 'It looks a bit like a very big shell with a propeller attached.'

Macintyre laughed. 'Very good! Very good! A shell with a propeller. That is precisely what it is. A torpedo, to be precise.'

I was puzzled. A torpedo, I knew, was a long pole pushed from the front of a ship to impale an opponent, then explode. Hardly useful in the days of ironclads and ten-inch guns.

'Of course,' he continued, 'I merely borrow the word as I could think of nothing better. This is an automobile torpedo. A charge of explosive there,' he pointed at the nose, 'and an engine capable of propelling it in a straight line there. Aim it at the opposing ship, set it off and that's that.'

'So the front will be full of gunpowder.'

'Oh no. Gunpowder is too susceptible to damp. And something which goes underneath the surface of the water is liable to get wet, however well it is made. So I will use guncotton. And, of course I can make it myself; one part cotton wool in fifteen parts of sulphuric and nitric acids. Then you wash it, dry it. Look.'

He gestured to a series of boxes in the corner that rested on top of several vats.

'That's the guncotton?'

'Yes. Over the past few months I've made several hundredweight of the stuff.'

'Isn't it dangerous to have it lying around?'

'No, no. It's quite safe, if it's prepared properly. If it's not cleaned and dried as it should be, then it can easily go off all on its own. But this is perfectly safe. To make it explode, it will have to be compressed, then set off with a detonator made of mercuric fulminate. At the moment you could jump up and down on it all day and come to no harm. That's the dangerous stuff over there.' He pointed to another corner.

'What's that?'

'Gunpowder. I bought it before I realised it wouldn't do. It's useless now; I'm going to use it on Cort's pillar, if he can make up his mind what he wants.'

'So the explosive is in the front, it hits the ship and – bang.'

'Bang. Precisely,' he said approvingly.

'What size bang? I mean, how much explosive will you need to sink a battleship?'

'That will be determined by experiments.'