Friday, September 6, 2024

Friday Fiction: American Prometheus (Bob's Book Chapter Four, Part I)


Chapter Four: The American Prometheus

 

     We passed through the last stormy days of January, and February saw the cold settle in and make itself at home. Business was very slow in the Bureau at that time of year, mostly because travel was difficult, but there was still much for an apprentice to do.

For one thing we were at the beck and call of anyone in the agency who needed assistance beyond the functions of the ordinary pages.  There was an enormous system of files, containing mail from citizens asking for help and reports from agents in the field that arrived at irregular intervals, and we had to learn the ins and outs of that. There were continuing talks with Mr. Williams on various aspects of the Bureau.

But there were also vast deserts of time when we just sat around in the waiting room, which never seemed quite adequately heated. There we would kick our heels, just in case we were wanted, until it was time to go home. This was when I found out about the departmental Library.

The postman routinely brought his daily deliveries to the main desk in the lobby. This was one of the few moments of mild interest that we could count on; speculation on the amount and origin of the packages and letters they received was always worth at least a few moments of amusement. Most of the mail went into the pigeonholes behind Mr. DeMullins desk – we became quite expert on the various agents’ positions on the grid - but every now and then one of us might be tasked to deliver an urgent missive to one office or other.

One day early in the month the postman came dragging in a bit later than usual, his pack slouched over his hunched shoulders. Rose looked up from her knotwork as he passed.

“Looks a bit heavier than usual,” she observed.

Howard took his newly lit pipe from his lips.

“I did hear there was a packet ship come in from Europe. That could explain it.”

“Are there agents there?” Rose asked idly, hooking another stitch.

“A few, I understand,” he confirmed. “Some are attached to our ambassadors abroad. Not in the capacity of agents, as such. Secretaries, mostly; but with an eye out for the extranatural.”

“Fancy that.” She paused. The carrier was emptying his bag on Mr. Demullins’ desk, and our eyes watched the unpacking with the mildest of interest. “I wonder if we shall ever be sent overseas.”

Howard cut his gaze over at her and blew a stream of smoke through tight lips. The postman walked past us and left; his steps were considerably unburdened. Howard chuckled.

“One of us might,” he said, looking wry. “Remember, there can only be one agent chosen.”

“Hm. I’ll send you a card when I get there,” Rose said airily. Her eyes never left her work.

Howard snorted in a skeptical sort of way and went back to his pipe, staring as the manager sorted the mail into its cubbies.

“I wonder which of us it shall be?” I murmured sleepily.

“Bob Bellamy!” Mr. Demullins called.

I jumped up, jerked out of my drowsy wandering.

“Yes, sir!” I barked automatically and began stumbling over stiffly to the desk on legs half-asleep with sitting. The manager watched me with amused impatience as I came to stand before him at rather bedraggled attention.

“Bob,” he said briskly, “I want you to take this parcel to the Library and deliver it to Mr. Hackett.” He handed me a hefty bundle wrapped in brown paper. My arms sagged as I accepted the weight.

“Yes, sir, the Library,” I said smartly, then hesitated. “Uh … where would that be again?”

“It is on the second floor, in the back,” he snapped. “Wake up, Bob! Surely you have seen the Library?”

“Not so as to go in, sir,” I said uncertainly.

“You cannot fail to find it,” he pronounced, already turning to other work, his eye on the clock. “Now go; it is even now almost three.” He looked up to where I stood. “Go!”

I peeked back at Rose and Howard for a fleeting second, then scuttled off to the stairwell. I really wanted to ask for more definite directions, but then I didn’t want to look stupid to them. After all, if I could not even find my way around the Bureau, how would I make it out in the field?

I clattered up the stairs and found myself on familiar ground at first, with Mr. Williams’ room front and center and the offices we passed every day on either side. But taking the turn down a corridor in search of the back soon landed me into unfamiliar territory. I tended to avoid this part since our first day at the Department; it contained many of those ‘forbidden rooms’ that Saunders had pointed out to us. I didn’t want to accidentally wander into one of those. There was no telling what trouble I could find.

The package got heavier and heavier under my arms as I wandered the halls, carefully checking the name and number of each room as I passed. The subdivision and outlay of the floorplan made no logical sense, which made it hard to keep a clear idea of where I was or where I had been. Once or twice I found myself at some puzzling crossway or other and had to figure out which direction I had already explored. Every moment I was aware of the time ticking away.

At last I found myself at just such another bewildering nexus and I gave up trying to figure it out. Instead, in frustration, I simply dropped the map I had been trying to keep in my head and stared around, listening to my instincts, I guess. It came to me that I should pick the least likely direction to explore, on the theory that I had chosen the likeliest before I turned down the corridor, and suddenly found myself standing in a hall with a door at the end that was plainly marked “Library of Historical Culture and Research.”

I rushed over to it in relief and knocked eagerly. There was no immediate answer, so I tried the knob. It was still unlocked; I was still in time. I opened it warily, knocking again as I did so. “Hello?” I called out cautiously.

I jumped back with a gasp as a large gray-striped cat came shooting silently past my feet and down the hall. I watched it disappear around the corner. I paused, wondering what it was doing there, then I dismissed the thought and went on in.

As I pushed the door farther open, I was struck by a wave of smell, of old leather and paper and cedar wood. The room was smaller than I had expected and crammed from floor to ceiling with towering, overladen bookshelves with barely enough room between them for a man to pass through sideways. Its one dim window, half covered by a rising shelf, let in a feeble shaft of sunlight. In front of this a man sat with his long legs crossed on top of a tiny desk, absorbed in his reading.

As I approached him respectfully, he seemed unaware of my presence, so I had some time to study his unusual appearance. With his extended thin limbs and potbelly, he resembled nothing so much as a human spider. A mop of grey hair circled his head and merged into a frizzy rounded beard that shook slightly as he mumbled over the heavy book in his hand. One eye, a pale milky blue, was drawn nearly shut in a squint, while the other, clear as a summer sky, was fixed moving rapidly over the text before him. But the most unusual thing about him was the hook attached where his right hand should have been. With a delicacy I had never seen before he took the tip of its curve and turned a page.

I stood still a moment in front of him until it became clear that he wasn’t aware of me at all. Finally, I cleared my throat and asked, “Mr. Hackett?”

He looked up at me mildly, neither startled nor annoyed.

“Hm?” he asked curiously. “Is it time to go home already?”

“No, sir.” I proffered the bundle. “Mr. Demullins asked me to bring you this.”

“Oh. Oh! Thank’ee lad. I thought –.” He chuckled. “Well, sometimes I get so caught up I forget the time. Then they send a lad to prod me, like Mr. Swift’s Laputans and their flappers. Got locked in once or twice, reading by moonlight. No fire in here you know,” he added severely.

He took the parcel from me and weighed it in his left hand as he perused the address.

“Ah, from our man in Germany. Feels like book proofs. That’s always interesting, boy. You get to see the odd things people put in before they think better of it.” He began to slice open the wrapping with the hook with a precisely meticulous motion that I watched with fascination.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” he said distractedly as he went on busily slicing. “Starting as a page?”

“Trying to train as an agent,” I said. “Bob Bellamy, sir.”

He set the loosening bundle down and reached out his good hand to shake.

“Roger Hackett,” he said, flipping the wrapping paper open. A pile of loose, slippery papers tried to escape. He pinned them with his hook, but so gently that I couldn’t even see a nick on the page.

De Phanomenologie des Geistes, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Sounds promising. Let’s see …” He started grabbing the pages in hanks of about ten and turning them over rapidly, scanning the pages of German text with amazing speed. “Oh, dear … oh, no … mm-hm.”

I shifted my feet a bit, waiting for him to dismiss me, but he was obviously absorbed in the task at hand. He lifted his shaggy head suddenly and looked up.

“I’m afraid that fool agent has gotten rather muddled,” he said severely. “Geistes is not ghosts here, it’s minds or spirits. This isn’t a book about spooks; it’s a metaphysical treatise. They should really send people more familiar with the language of the country. Now that I think about it, this Hegel does sound rather familiar; some kind of philosopher. This sort of thing doesn’t really belong here.”

“Are you going to throw it out?” I asked. It struck me that it might be the sort of thing Howard would be interested in. Perhaps I could scrounge it for him.

“No, no,” he said hurriedly, crouching protectively over it. “It still might prove interesting.” He straightened the loose stack of pages. “I’ll probably bind it up. I do that, you know; bind books. Part of my job, but also a sort of hobby.”

“You read German, sir?” I asked, trying to get his attention. He appeared to have already forgotten me, fascinated, apparently, by the weight and quality of the paper.

“Oh, yes, oh yes, and French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and a smattering of Greek and law Latin. Well, I had to learn them; Mr. Franklin had me learn, when I worked for him, and it’s come in very useful, very useful indeed.”

“Mr. Franklin?” I asked. “Mr. Benjamin Franklin? The electrical-fluid man?”

He chuckled.

“That’s one way to remember him. Worked for him as a lad, I did. Part of the reason Mr. Frobisher gave me this job. They were friends, you see, back in the old days; he was what you might call Mr. Franklin’s protégé, he was, and I henched for Mr. Franklin for decades, so he knew my quality. I don’t have any of the degrees, but I know a thing or two.” He took off the first leaf and with a deft motion started folding the pages meticulously in half.

I realized right then that I could go without asking his leave; he didn’t really care about the formalities, that he was more or less just talking to himself. I also realized that I couldn’t; not right away, anyway.

I have always been fascinated by the Founding Fathers, as they’re called. The Revolution was a few handfuls of years before I was born, and folks like me were still trying to figure out what it was to be American. I could not resist listening about these rebels and their actions. There were fewer of them every year and there were fewer people who even knew them every year, with myths blooming and memories fading. Ben Franklin I had always found particularly elusive and intriguing. And here was Mr. Hackett, who had worked for the man, so he said, for years. He was obviously a rare resource, a big fish. I had to reel him in.

“So, you knew Benjamin Franklin,” I said. I could barely keep the eagerness out of my voice but tried to hold my tone neutral. I didn’t want to put him on his guard. “What was he like?”

Hackett laughed, one short sharp bark. His eyes never left his task.

“Oh, he was a mad fellow, maggoty-headed as we used to say. Ideas flew in and out of his brain, and some of them perched with claws like iron. He used to take what he called air baths. Do you know what that is?”

“Can’t say as I do, sir.”

“He would take off all of his clothes – all of them, mind you – and walk around in a room with the windows open until all the nooks and crannies had dried out, if you know what I mean. And it worked! Ben had quite a number of … eh … lady friends and he told me none of them ever complained. He said there was something in the free air that counteracted human stink.”

“Really? He was a ladies’ man?” I’d seen many pictures of Mr. Franklin and he seemed a wise but plump dumpling of a man with an enigmatic smile. It was a novel idea to me, but maybe it explained the smile.

“He was more of what the French call a bon vivant.” Mr. Hackett squinted at his work. “A fascinator, a charmer. The ladies thought he was ‘safe’, God help them, elderly, friendly, a genius, wise, and oh so kind and interested in their opinions. Not all of them found themselves in his bed, but quite a few were surprised when that’s where they wound up.”

“Well, that’s certainly not in the textbooks,” I smiled. “Printer, scientist, statesman – a libertine, not so much.”

“Aye. Plenty about Liberty, though. There’s a fine line atween the two, but the Doctor would keep stepping around it.”

Hackett laughed, a strange husky wheeze, never taking his eyes off his task at hand.

“There wasn’t much in Heaven and Earth old Ben wouldn’t go poking his nose into. Got him into trouble a fair number of times, too. What this here Hegel is saying about the mind and the body reminds me of one of the worst times, at that.”

My eyes went wide.

“You mean you’re reading that book? In German? At the rate you’re folding over the pages?”

“Yeah. Can’t say I’m getting all the fine points, but the general gist of it’s pretty clear.” He turned over another page.

“But that’s amazing!”

“’Tain’t nothing I’m doing on purpose. I was just born that way, I guess. That’s one of the reasons old Ben hired me when he found out. The hard part was learning the languages.”

“And this philosopher reminds you of Mr. Franklin how?” I asked, eager to collect a good anecdote. “What sort of bad scrape did he get into?”

“Well, Mr. Hegel here seems to have some peculiar philosophical ideas about the body and soul. If he had some of the Doctor’s practical experience, he might reach some quite different conclusions. But then very few people have Ben’s lack of restraint when it comes to connecting ideas and overstepping certain boundaries when he couldn’t see the right reason. But sometimes when you go stepping over a fence you meet the bull it was put up for.”

I could take it no more. The request came clanking out of my mouth, like a horseshoe falling to the floor.

“Could you tell me about what happened? About Mr. Franklin?”

He looked up from his work, a little startled.

“What? Eh? ‘Bout what this book recalls to me of his adventures? Oh, sure, if you have the time.” He squinted at the shadowy winter light in the windows.

“Yes, please.” I looked around for a seat, and finally settled onto a big stack of folios, all attention on the old man as he continued his task, scarcely missing a beat.

“Well, it was like this,” he began, and he launched into his tale.

 

The real point of the story, Hackett began, was in 1763. He had already been working for old Ben for some time, and knew about all his hobbies and interests, his chemical experiments, his interest in electricity, and even (what was not that well known) the human anatomy, and what made it go. Ben was in England at the time, trying to mediate between the colony and the crown. You can tell how well that worked out by outbreak of the War of Independence, a decade or so later.

While they were there, to fill in the corners of his time, Ben kept in touch with most of the best natural philosophers of his day, medical men, some of them, but others who were following a more speculative track. There was Mister Erasmus Darwin, who was working on the origins of life, and Lord Monboddo, who believed that wearing clothes caused a host of diseases and that we would be happier going back to the habits of the orangutans, who seemed obviously to be our brothers.

Notes
Having spoken of the 'Franklinstein' story I thought I would put up 'American Prometheus' what would have been Chapter Four of Bob's Book 2. I thought the title apt, echoing the subtitle 'The New Prometheus' of Frankenstein, and the idea of Franklin 'stealing fire from heaven' with his electrical experiments; they would both combine that with the idea of creating a new man as trespassing on God's prerogative, and a subtle hint that the Founding Fathers created a new sort of man with a new sort of country ("We've spawned a new race here, Mr. Dickinson. Rougher, simpler; more violent, more enterprising; less refined. We're a new nationality. We require a new nation." - 1776).

The writing of this chapter fell into three separate phases; this bit is the first. Looking back I can see why it eventually stalled before I could finish it: I was writing it 'long style', as if it were a book, rather than in a more telegraphic style, as if it were a chapter (or short story, which is how I was producing my chapters). I think the same circumstance might be what is bedeviling Thrand.

I have a batch of notes, about the historical details of the story. You can see the ideas about 'evolution' were circulating and developing long before Charles Darwin (Erasmus Darwin's grandson), and it's suggested 'materialism'. I'll attach those notes to Part II of the tale, coming soon.




 


 

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