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In the Palace of Science (Part 1 of 2)

By Chris Campbell

Track One–

 

If you’ve found this recording, two things can be said for certain. The first is that I have passed my greatest test as a man and, in doing so, have passed from this world. The second is that if this message entombed with me survives, a grave danger to humanity most assuredly survives with it.

To my listener, I urge you to lift the needle from the gramophone, return this plate to the hole where you found it, and dig no further into the ruins where once stood Professor Thomas Washington Kelly’s Palace of Science.

However, as with most of those driven to dig beneath the surface to uncover the hidden past, I expect your curiosity to exceed your wisdom. Therefore, assuming that a simple warning will not suffice to turn you away from disaster, I engrave my last testament with a diamond-tipped stylus into this fantastic metal so that my warning might endure. I pray it is sufficient to convince whoever comes upon it to succeed where I failed and bury my story and the danger that sleeps with me deep enough that our shared grave will never be disturbed again.

As these will be my final words, I’ll tell the story as I wish and start not where it began, for where it began is shrouded by the mists of time and far beyond the ken of man. No, I will start with the small part I played in the events, with a meeting or, to be precise, a series of meetings.

 

 

Track Two–

 

I first met the Professor through a letter of introduction handed to me by his manservant, the genial Mr. Ochi. As a fellow Black man, Mr. Ochi dressed with enough flair and style to catch my attention regardless of circumstance. A crisp black jacket that looked like it could be fresh from Savile Row and a pair of equally fine yet mismatched gray pants that marked him as a servant, although clearly one of an incredibly wealthy household.

Despite his sartorial splendor, the fact that he was directed to my desk at the Electro-Dynamic Light Company of New York by the company’s owner, Mr. Sawyer, is why I believed the letter was genuine and not a fanciful distraction from some bored dilettante pretending to be the reclusive genius.

Like most men of science in my era, what I’d heard of the professor was only in  passing and often contradictory. On the rare occasion that his name, Thomas Washington Kelly, was spoken, it was with the grave intonations one associated more with a whispered prayer than a name. If it wasn’t for the fabulous riches the professor accrued as the silent partner for more patents than even Edison held, I might have written off his existence entirely. Due to his almost ephemeral nature, many presumed he was more of a semi-mythic muse to the sciences than a man in flesh, some aspect of a researcher’s anima invoked for inspiration. Others suggested he was the nom de guerre assumed by a conspiracy of scientists whose secretive motives could only be guessed at, for how could a single man have attained so much knowledge across the breadth of fields he was accounted to be an expert in? Among the elite practitioners of our noble calling, however, there was no doubt that he was indeed a living man whose insight and intelligence rivaled the greatest minds of previous generations, with abilities perhaps even surpassing Newton and Archimedes.

One scientist after another, in fields that varied from physics to biology, could attest to giving a lecture or publishing a paper outlining some great discovery they were attempting to make—where they explained some heretofore irresolvable difficulty, only to receive a letter from the professor, often just weeks later, proposing a partnership while providing tantalizing evidence that he already held the answers they sought. All the more reason that I, with no published papers and just a handful of patents, found it hard to believe the professor would send his manservant to seek me out if not for Mr. Sawyer facilitating our introduction.

The letter, written in crisp economical handwriting, was an invitation to the professor’s estate, urging me to call on him at my convenience. It included a twenty-dollar silver certificate to cover my expenses and any lost wages. A generous invitation, the sum equal to my weekly salary, while the train to his location, a little more than an hour’s ride, would cost a dollar fifty there and back.

I’d long practiced retaining a stoic demeanor while within the confines of the workplace. It was a lesson my father taught me, and a useful skill for any Black man, regardless of station. Doubly so in my chosen field, where my skin marked me as an exotic intruder. If not for this habit, I might have hung slack-jawed in response to the letter’s contents and the twenty-dollar bill that slid from its folds onto my lap. Mr. Ochi, surely a student of the same school of practical stoicism, watched impassively, showing nothing while he waited. Mr. Sawyer, on the other hand, did nothing to hide his eagerness for me to reveal the contents of the letter from the august personage to his most junior draftsman.

I gathered my wits for a moment before I answered, but only a moment. A man of the professor’s station wasn’t one to keep waiting, and it wouldn’t be unusual if Mr. Ochi considered himself an extension of his master when acting as his agent. I also knew that it would be unwise to make the gentleman professor wait overly long for me to call on him, and, seeing as we were at the end of the week, I surmised that attending to his summons the first thing Saturday would be sufficiently respectful.

“Thank you, Mr. Ochi, for bringing me this letter.”

It was my father who also taught me that it was most wise to treat servants with a full measure of courtesy. He knew the subtle power held by those who open doors before you enter and handle the food before you eat. He’d spent the first half of his life in service as a slave to a Southern family. Then as a freeman serving the same household when they relocated to Boston until he returned to the South during Reconstruction, where he staffed a newly elected congressman, only to disappear a few years later.

“Please convey to the professor how humbled and honored I am to receive his invitation.” I continued. “It would be my pleasure to meet with him. I can take the first train tomorrow and be at his estate and service before noon should the train run on time.”

I thought I noticed something flash in Mr. Ochi’s eyes, but his affable smile returned before I could determine what.

“Of course, that would be wonderful. The professor would be quite pleased to meet with you tomorrow. However, if Mr. Sawyer is amenable to you taking leave early, I drove here with the professor’s locomobile.”

Mr. Sawyer, although typically an over-the-shoulder type taskmaster, was all too eager to agree with the manservant’s proposal. During the next few minutes, Mr. Ochi gracefully maneuvered around any possible objections toward leaving the city abruptly. Including his assurance that I’d no need to pack, as I would be furnished with anything I might want for at the estate, and that someone would be sent around to my landlady to inform her of my absence. Between Mr. Sawyer’s desire to please his scientific benefactor and the dab-hand Mr. Ochi maneuvered me with, it is a wonder I remembered to grab my hat before I found myself on the street below in front of a locomobile quite unlike any I’d seen before.

Where I’d expected to find a simple condensation cylinder behind the seats was a set of fins that bore an uncanny resemblance to French horns. While the front of the carriage extended a good meter and a half beyond the dashboard to make room for three large canisters arranged in a row.

I made it all the way to the side of the locomobile and had one shoe on the footplate when my inspection of the contraption brought me to a dead stop.

“I know its design may appear novel, but you need not worry, Mr. Carruthers—the modifications the professor made to the locomobile are completely safe. He travels using this vehicle himself.”

“Worry?” It took me a beat to parse the man’s words between my examination of the vehicle. “Worry, no, not at all. I’m fascinated. Tell me, Mr. Ochi, are these magnificent fins for cooling?”

The manservant paused before answering with a smile. “I’m sure you would know better than I do. The professor tries to explain these things to me, but I have no mind for the sciences. I’m sure he will answer any question you might have about the carriage after we arrive.”

Enamored by the vehicle, I spent the first portion of the ride slowly trundling through the city streets, lost in conjecture—time I should have spent tactfully interrogating Mr. Ochi about the professor’s nature and the treatment a Black person in his employ might expect. Once we arrived at the turnpike, the locomobile accelerated to a truly blistering pace, and I realized my chance to engage the manservant had passed for now. Any words would disappear under the thundering gravel below us.

Mr. Ochi was the one, it turned out, who broached the subject of the professor’s temperament when conversation became feasible after we exited the turnpike onto a dirt road some ten miles west of Bridgeport.

“Mr. Carruthers, as I said, the professor will be delighted you responded to his invitation. If this first meeting goes well, I expect you will find an offer of employment under most generous terms. Although if you are the man the professor suspects, it is the nature of the work and not the wage that will inspire you. However, I must warn you that the professor is a very private man with a reclusive nature. Please don’t be offended when he doesn’t greet you in person. It has been some years since he engaged with any but myself.”

With this revelation, what open questions I had about the professor’s temperament closed indefinitely.

Shortly after this conversation, my eyes set upon the professor’s extraordinary Palace of Science. The first glimpse I caught was of its tower rising to nearly twice the height of the majestic chestnuts of the forest surrounding the estate. Topped with the unmistakable dome of an astronomical observatory, its copper cladding sparkling in the sun without a hint of green tarnish.

The rest of the building came into view when the locomobile wheeled into its clearing. A grand neo-gothic mansion that would have been in place in the English countryside—if not for the numerous metallic chimneys of different shapes and sizes, antennas of various designs, and an eclectic assortment of meteorological equipment that crowded the building’s burnished copper roofing.

It took but one look to understand that the awesome sight before me was not simply the home of a scientist. It was a home for science.

I spent some time lost in thought, trying to divine the nature of each of the various instruments adorning the roof and several other subtle but curious features of the house, when I found Mr. Ochi standing beside me to help me from the carriage.

When I started for the servants’ door, Mr. Ochi, who was still standing near,  coughed for my attention.

“If you would, sir,” he said, pointing me toward the main entrance. Taking advantage of my confusion to gain a few steps allowed him to reach the grand metal doors, which he opened wide with hardly a hint of effort to welcome me.

When I passed through the doors, what I’d taken for copper under the sun’s glare appeared to be something else entirely. Inside, the light flashed off the curious alloy with glints of both red and gold.

“Would you like to get yourself settled? I could show you to your rooms.” Mr. Ochi asked once we entered the main foyer.

“I wouldn’t want to keep the professor waiting,” I answered.

“Then please follow me to the library, sir.”

With that, Mr. Ochi led me on a circuitous route that took me through a sitting room and then a study before arriving at the grand library that occupied the first three floors of the tower. Although the room was quite large, its appearance suggested that the owner found the space at least somewhat constraining to the size of his collection. The shelving around the room’s perimeter used all three stories of the stone walls, where inter-locking circular stairs and walkways around the circumference provided easy access to the tallest shelves. The floor of the room had row after row of bookcases arranged in a spiraling pattern. Toward the center, the bookcases were below chest height, allowing clear sightlines between the various doorways and the windows, while toward the perimeter of the room, they were tall enough to tower over me, and each included an attached rolling ladder.

Mr. Ochi guided me toward the center of the library and a tanker desk with comfortable leather chairs on either side. A stack of papers awaited me on the desk, each page written in the same crisp economical handwriting as the letter I’d received that morning.

The papers started by asking for advanced mathematical and geometric calculations, followed by questions of cutting-edge physics and chemistry. Making my way through the stack, quickly at first and then more slowly, as I moved deeper, a picture came into focus, hinting toward an entirely new branch of physics. Following a path from Leibniz’s disreputable theory of relativity to the shocking implications that the professor teased out of the strange motion observed by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown.

At some point, as I consumed the data before me and was consumed by the challenges the professor laid out in the pages, day turned to night and back into day again.

When I finished, I found an untouched plate of dinner sitting next to me and an empty carafe of coffee, and Mr. Ochi standing patiently beside me.

“Magnificent,” I managed to stammer. Rising to my feet, I took Mr. Ochi by the hand, shaking it vigorously. “Thank you, thank you so much for bringing me here, Mr. Ochi, and pass my thanks to the professor. I can’t begin to express how much this means to me–no, how much it means to the world; we stand at the precipice of a new age.”

“It is always my pleasure to be of service,” Mr. Ochi replied. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting, the professor asked to see these as soon as you were finished. Although, from what he told me, he didn’t expect you to be done in less than a handful of days. If you are as keen as you are quick, I expect he will be quite pleased.”

With that, the manservant swept the papers up into a neat stack and left me with my mind still swirling at the magnitude of the discoveries the professor had made in secret. Now, for the first time, it made sense to me how this mysterious figure that loomed so large from the shadows seemed to always be one step ahead of the rest of the scientific community. It’s easy to appear one step ahead when you are, in fact, leagues beyond.

I tried to eat some of the untouched food on the platter beside me, but my stomach was in turmoil awaiting the professor’s judgment. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes later when I heard the manservant’s heels clicking against the marble floors approaching me.

“The professor has instructed me to congratulate you, Mr. Carruthers, and extend his warmest invitation to join us here.”

 

Track Three–

 

I spent nearly a year working under the remote supervision of the reclusive professor before our second first meeting.

I was in the library at the large tanker desk when Mr. Ochi approached with a stack of diagrams I’d sent to the professor for his approval earlier. On most days, after delivering a set of papers, Mr. Ochi would turn to leave while I busied myself inspecting any notes or the rare corrections sent down. Today, I’d had enough.

“Mr. Ochi, please wait a moment.”

“Of course, sir, as always, I am at your service.” He replied with a warm smile on his lips.

“I suspect not,” I answered.

“Begging your pardon.” Mr. Ochi replied, his eyebrows furrowed at the unexpected turn in the conversation.

“Perhaps I’m the one that should beg your pardon, since you must have your reasons,” I continued, screwing up my courage to say what I’d been meaning to for months. “However, I think it is well past the time we drop this façade of your pretending to be aught than who you are and my pretending not to know it. The work must come first.”

Professor Thomas Washington Kelly eyed me closely, the mask he wore of the affable Mr. Ochi slipping away in an instant.

Although I suspected the truth, I was still caught off guard by the hawk-like eyes I found examining me. Looking over me like I would a mathematical proof.

“How long.”

“How long have I known?”

“Yes, boy, don’t play dense now.” Professor Kelly said, unbuttoning his waistcoat to sit across from me on a chair that had waited empty for the last year. The final remaining edifice of the butler, Mr. Ochi, crumbled away with his casual bearing and slouching shoulders.

“Well, I hope you won’t be offended, but I’ve suspected since the beginning,” I said, trying to take the temperature of the man before me, now a stranger.

“Then why did you press me on it today?”

“I need to see what you’re building, what we’re building.”

“And why should I trust you?”

“That’s the simplest question you’ve ever asked me, sir, because you already do.”

The professor’s eyes narrowed, and he pursed his lips. “Perhaps I do, to some degree. Enough, I would say, for now.”

With that, he stood and walked away, beckoning me to follow after his back was turned. In my mind, I’d come to terms with the fact that Mr. Ochi was but a fabrication, yet it was still unsettling to see the man I’d grown to respect completely disappear, subsumed into the professor’s alien mannerisms. But that is what I’d asked for, no, demanded, and nothing comes without a price. What was the loss of the false Mr. Ochi when measured against the truths I would receive?

The professor’s path took him to the mantle of one of the library’s twin fireplaces. With a twist of a flower carved into the corbel below its mantel, the bookshelf next to the fireplace shifted downward ever so slightly before pivoting inward to reveal a staircase that served as a passage from the private rooms in the tower above to the secret laboratory hidden below. Three stories below, to be precise, beneath both the basement and the cellar that housed the professor’s extensive wine vault.

The laboratory was as grand as anything else in the Palace of Science. Made of interjoining rooms, each with a distinct purpose and whose combined total footprint was nearly as large as the home above.

There was a room devoted to chemistry and analysis filled with beakers, titration tubes, and caches of sand and water positioned for quick deployment should there be an accident.

A chamber devoted to fabrication, its furnaces burning blue with the methane pumped from the surrounding bedrock–this geological feature had determined where the professor built his home, allowing him both greater secrecy and self-sufficiency.

Another space for high voltage experiments, its floors made using a treatment of vulcanized rubber, and its air filled with an audible crackling and the scent of ozone.

Finally, the lab contained another smaller study with a work desk made for two. Half its shelves filled with journals written out in the crisp economical handwriting I’d come to recognize so well, the other half with phonograph recording disks the professor used to document the experiments that left him without free hands to write his notes.

Engrossed as I was, the notion that the professor only “trusted me enough, for now,” had already begun to fester in the back of my mind. Quite done with games, I asked him flat out.

“What do you mean enough for now?”

“Do you know why men fear monsters? Why we find them in our oldest myths and endlessly reimagine them?”

I was surprised by this turn in the conversation. Although I’d only known the professor in person for minutes, our correspondence over the year had given me the picture of a man with little interest or patience for fabulism and the other nonsense people distract themselves with. However, regardless of the topic, it’s rare for me to be caught flat-footed, and I thought about Freud and his new branch of near sciences for an answer.

“I think perhaps what men fear at the edge of darkness is the manifestation of our inner darkness, shadows cast by the evils that live in our hearts. We don’t fear monsters truly; we fear we are the monsters.”

“I’ll give you half points for that, son, but half points only. You need to investigate the new horizons in the math I have shown you and find what’s lurking there.”

It was clear from his answers that if I wished to learn more, I’d need to discover what fearsome things he’d found before he would trust me with more of his secrets.

 

Track Four–

 

It took another two years to puzzle out the monsters the professor mentioned, and he trusted me enough.

Years of discovery but also frustration, as I could not ignore that regardless of everything he shared after dropping the Mr. Ochi act, he was still keeping things from me. And, unlike before, when it was merely a matter of personal safety in a country where being both Black and excellent begged for danger. Now it was impossible for me to forget that the only reason he kept these final secrets was that, in his eyes, I was still unworthy.

The first only took a few months to find. The amount of energy the division of an elementary particle would release and how it might be weaponized. Including a small but nonetheless real chance that a weapon built along these principles deployed at an exact altitude might set off a chain reaction that could set the planet’s atmosphere ablaze.

The professor concurred with this finding. For the first time, I truly understood why he only intervened in the scientific explorations of others once they’d drawn close enough to a discovery that the final steps toward it were all but assured to come soon. His love was in learning, not in taking credit. As a Black man, he knew firsthand how power over the natural forces manifested within the unnatural power structures built by humanity. He confessed his certainty that if ever the white man made an atomic bomb, it would be some brown people whose bones first burned, leaving nothing behind but ash and shadows on the ruined walls of buildings reduced to rubble.

I hope his prediction proves false still in your time, but I fear, as was so often the case, the professor’s theories will be proven true.

It took me another year to discover the next monster, or perhaps I should call her the mother of monsters, for it was from this discovery the other horrors I discovered emerged. The singularity.

The math was irrefutable; it spoke of holes in the fabric of space and time where the scale of energies, mass, or gravity undid the very concept of measurement. From my calculations of this feature, I discovered the final beast lurking, the one I named hypo-dimensionality.

Where the power of the atom bomb and the nature of the singularity were shocking to the senses, they were distant threats. This final beast, hypo-dimensionality, posed an intimate danger, as it broke down my fundamental sense of reality. Proof after proof brought me back to the conclusion that the world I perceived as three-dimensional was little more than an illusionary projection of a two-dimensional reality encoded on the surface of a singularity, either infinitely far or infinitely near yet forever unreachable from what we perceive as the true Universe around us. That our reality was not entirely unlike an orchestral movement encoded onto a recording disk. Not entirely unlike how, to you, my voice could be a man full of life speaking from the next room when, in fact, I am now long dead.

This curious finding that we may all be projections led to a number of other de-ductions, each more disturbing than the next. First among these is the notion that the fabric that held our reality together could not be woven unless time existed as an independent series of traversable vectors, and our perception of linearity was a manifestation of our limitations.

This in turn suggested the existence of incomprehensible ecologies, possibly inhabited by vast consciousnesses without our limitations, making them beyond any measure of reason. Creatures that would perceive the grand scope of the cosmos across space and time like we might the four walls of a sitting room. Their motives and morality wholly foreign to our own, built upon a framework for knowledge entirely alien and forever unknowable. If the Universe is like a recording disk, what can we know of the being who plays it? What becomes of us if they tire of the music? Or even scratch a single track?

I was looking over the final proof, trying to convince myself that beneath this layer of mathematics, a deeper layer would emerge to reconfirm our three-dimensional nature. Yearning for some clue that the Universe might not exist as little more than an abstraction–when my façade of stoicism finally crumbled, leaving only wild panic behind. It was then the professor took notice of the crisis brewing behind my eyes.

“You have the look about you.” He spoke from across the desk we shared. Gesturing toward the pile of papers, I clutched it in a shaking fist.

“What look?” I asked, mustering the will to hand the papers over. Hoping he would find the error in my calculations that could set my mind at ease. He took his time to answer, first flipping through the pages while I waited.

“The look of a man afraid enough to trust with what is next. This is work that demands someone sane enough to fear it.”

The professor stood, walked to the gramophone player, and adjusted a series of knobs before lifting the needle in three distinct movements, resulting in a click from the bookcase beside us. The professor pushed the case slightly. When he released the pressure, the case swung forward, revealing the hidden latch in the floor of his secret laboratory that led to the super-secret laboratory dug deep beneath the bedrock of the Palace of Science.

It was there, tucked into the very bowels of Earth, that I first met what the professor had so carefully hidden from the world, his magnificent automaton.

(Continued in Part 2…)

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Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was part one of In the Palace of Science by Chris Campbell. The story will be concluded next week.

The very opening of this novelette warns us even as it beguiles us: be bold, be bold, but not too bold. Turn back from the brink, or face certain doom. Science fiction has not always been entirely prescient–we’re still waiting for our flying cars, right? But what it has always captured is a spirit of exploration, experimentation, a craving for knowledge that explains the inexplicable and grants us ever-growing power over ourselves and the world around us. It has also always examined the actions taken to satisfy that craving and the dark consequences that often come of it. Sometimes ignorance of history leads to bad outcomes, the repetition of ill-fated choices; sometimes the warning not to invent the Torment Nexus becomes a hubristic challenge that makes its invention inevitable. What will happen to our humble narrator in this particular tale? You’ll find out soon enough.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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And our closing quotation this week is from Thomas Washington Talley, who said: “…we must learn the most possible about the past if we would most wisely give direction to our future.”

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.