The Steampunk Trilogy Read Free Page A

GRANDSTAND WAS draped with gay bunting in gold and blue. Local personages of note, politicians and members of the railroad corporation, sat in orderly rows on the wooden platform, the women in their full bombazine skirts protecting themselves from the summer sun with frilly parasols. A brass band played sprightly tunes. Birds trilled counterpoint from nearby branches. A crowd of farmers and merchants, their wives and children, filled the broad meadow around the grandstand. Peddlers hawked lemonade and candy, flowers and souvenir trinkets.
    The place was the small village of Letchworth, north of London; the year, 1834, shortly after the passage of the Poor Law, which would transform the rural landscape, sequestering its beggars into institutions. The occasion was the inauguration of a new rail line, a spur off the London-Cambridge main.
    A few yards from the grandstand lay the gleaming new rails, stretching off to the horizon. The stone foundation of the station, its brick superstructure only half-completed and surrounded by scaffolding, stood south of the scene.
    On the rails—massive, proud, powerful—rested an engine of revolutionary design. Not far off nervously hovered its revolutionary designer, Cosmo Cowperthwait, age twenty-one.
    Next to Cowperthwait stood a fellow only slightly older, but possessed of a much greater flair and obvious sense of self-confidence. This was the twenty-eight-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel, son of the famous architect and inventor, Marc Isambard Brunel, genius behind the Thames Tunnel, the first underwater construction to employ shield technology.
    The association between the Cowperthwaits and the Brunels went back a generation.
    Clive Cowperthwait, Cosmo’s father, had been engaged to the lovely Constance Winks. Not long before their scheduled nuptials, at a ball thrown by the Royal Association of Engineers and Architects, Clive had chanced upon his fiancée in a compromising position with the elder Brunel, in a niche partially occupied by a bust of Archimedes. The offended man—doubly incensed by the joint desecration of both his bride-to-be and the ancient philosopher—had immediately issued a challenge to duel. Brunel had accepted.
    However, in the interval between the challenge and the event, the two men had chanced to discover the mutuality of their interests. At first frostily, then more warmly, the men began to discourse on their shared vision of a world united by railroads and steamships, a world shrunken and neatly packaged by the magnificent inventions of their age. Soon, the duel was called off. Clive and Constance were married as planned. Marc Brunel became both Cowperthwait’s business partner and frequent house guest, bringing his own wife and young son along. Upon Cosmo’s birth, he and little Isambard Kingdom (“I.K.,” or “Ikky”) had been raised practically as brothers.
    Now the young Cowperthwait turned to his companion and said, “Well, Ikky, what do you think? She’s keeping up a full head of steam, with only a few ounces of fuel. Is it a miracle, or is it not? Stephenson’s Rocket was nothing compared to this.”
    Ever practical, Ikky answered, “If this works, you’re going to put an end to the entire coal-mining industry. I’d watch my back, lest it receive some disgruntled miner’s dirty pickax. Or what’s even more likely, the silver table-knife of a mine-owner.”
    Cosmo grew reflective. “I hadn’t thought of that aspect of my discovery. Still, one can’t retard progress. If I hadn’t chanced upon the refinement of Klaproth’s new metal, someone else surely would have.”
    In 1789, Martin Heinrich Klaproth had discovered a new element he named “uranium,” after the recently discovered celestial body, Uranus. Other scientists, among them Eugène-Melchior Péligot, had set out to refine the pure substance. Cosmo Cowperthwait, inheritor of his father’s skills, raised in an atmosphere of practical invention, had succeeded first, by