Apologies for the delay.
This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
No part of the work may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.
Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
ionfyr.net
The next morning, despite it being late summer, was frigid. Pool, under his meagre tarp and wrapped fully clothed in his equally meager blanket awoke with ice on his mustache and beard, and a smear of dried blood on his septum.
His biscuit was dry and resisted the icy cold water meant to wash it down. The clink and clatter of ice could be heard inside the canteen. Unfortunately, there was no readily available supply of wood, or even dry alpine grass to burn for warmth or heat, for himself or his breakfast.
He warmed himself by quickly breaking camp, washing his face and relieving himself (not in the same spot), and heading upstream to yesterday’s discovery.
Once there, he waited a few moments, observing for signs of life, of which there were none, before approaching the structure.
Walking beneath the rusting beams, he wondered how long it would take the corrosion to set in in this high latitude and altitude. It will have been fairly dry, perhaps winter snow storms, but never the long rains of his own dreary Londbridge.
Mounds of rocks lined the paths, looking like graves.
There was a door. A frame, out of place in the rubbered-canvas giant tent, looked as iff it had been taken from the internal housing of the airship’s gondola. It had been fancy at one point, with decorative trim around the panels, painted a fake gold hue, over reddish stained wood. The brass nob was showing signs of weather, the edges becoming green.
Out of habit, more than concern, Pool knocked at the door, but would have been very surprised had it been answered.
After a polite minute, standing there with his pack and his hand comfortingly close to the hilt of his revolver in his jacket pocket, he gave in and opened the door.
The interior was dark and smelled of long ago dankness, as if it had housed a hermit of some sort, that unwashed clothes and body smell, that one finds in the cold-water tenements of Totenstone in Londbridge’s poorer wards, south of the river, especially in early spring, when people start opening their windows.
He left the door open and announced a feeble hello. There was, as expected no response.
Pool looked around.
There had been little attempt to divide the interior. There were divisions, but they were almost haphazard. Bits of the airship’s skin hung from jury-rigged rafters here and there and there did not seem to be any internal doors.
A table had been placed conveniently by the door to the bright outside. On it an antique oil lamp, still with a half-congealed liquid in its basin, and a greasy, dust-covered shroud. A box of safety matches lay next to it. When Pool lifted the box it left a clear rectangle imprint on the table’s surface.
Sliding the box cover a bit he took a match, then a second and then more. As the matches piled on the table, Pool relented and got out his steel from his pack and lit the entire pile of matches right on the table’s surface.
Encouraged by sparks from the steel, the matches burst aflame and the sudden flare cast eerie shadows around the tenuously defined room. With his fingertips, singing the faint hairs on his digits, he fished out a match and lifting the lamp’s glass shroud, made his first attempt to light the wick.
It did not light and he tossed the sputtering match onto the floor as it extinguished itself.
This time after cranking the wick first down slightly and swirling the oil around a bit, then turning it back up, Pool made another attempt, taking a new match from the box and lighting it from the little pile on the table.
This match did its work and once the wick was certain to stay lit, he replaced the cover, adjusting the height to preserve the wick at the same time providing sufficient light to the room.
Now, with the light, Pool could see more of his surroundings.
Near to the door was a coat rack–one of those upright posts with twisted wrought iron hooks in the midsection and a span from the top with the very pinnacle possessing smaller hooks for hats.
The entire thing was of iron, and a dusty, slightly moldy heavy wool coat hung on it. A single boot lay fallen over on the raked gravel of the floor.
The floor had been to some extent flattened and leveled, though here and there larger, less moveable boulders remained.
A gap in one of the walls, curtains, rather, designated a new room. So, to it Pool went. It was clear no on had been here for a long time.
As he pushed aside the heavy canvas “wall” he noticed light-tubes strung from room to room, their clear rubbery cords hanging and looping from position to position.
Light-tubes were a fairly recent invention, placing the demise of the airship not longer than ten or eleven years prior. These were a plastic, rubbery substance, revealed by science only 15 years before, and gaining popularity as a safer light source than the gaslights that most cities still used for street and interior lighting.
A gas, made luminous by a current passed into it, would fill the tubes and emit a great deal of light. Subtle chemical alterations would provide a variety of colors. They were inexpensive compared to the combustion of gas in the traditional way.
These tubes were strung from room to room, implying to Pool a power supply, perhaps a generator, perhaps an extension of the waterwheel, begrudgingly spinning outside.
That, Constable, would be a prime place to begin. he thought. Find the power supply. With luck, there would be heat. The days weren’t bad; the sun was warm enough and the rocks held their heat for several hours, but the chill end of the night, right before dawn, even after the sun has risen were frightfully cold. Pool could not comprehend what it would be in the winter dark, were it not for a time spent in Siberia.
Following the tubes he moved from room to room. Perhaps, “room” was a bit of a stretch; the canvas walls were barely anchored in place, hanging for the most part as curtains, and it was clear that at times strong winds had disrupted the entire place.
After fifteen minutes, Pool came across the generator. The driveshaft, which passed wall-through-wall in its path from the waterwheel outside, was connected in a sturdy, but also ramshackle way to the generator, itself likely a converted engine from the same dirigible that had been scrapped to produce everything else. The shaft still turned, producing a rasping, grating squeal, clearly thirsty for grease.
He looked at the mechanism, and decided rather quickly to try a prominent lever. With a woody pop and some more angry grinding of gears, the central spool spun to life. It was geared up, so that once, caught by the driveshaft, it spun rather fast, its outer edge becoming a blur, and casting off years of accumulated dust.
With the sudden animation the lazily dangling light tubes brightened, shedding an often disorienting mixture of bluish and yellow light, disorienting, none the less, due to the uneven and lengthy sources of light. Shadows cast, were wide or elongated in ways not possible with a point-source of light.
With the light came a mechanical clicking, like the winding of a clock from an adjacent room, a combination of a dull thrubbing sound in a low register, pulsing and whirring about once a second, with counterpoint at exactly six beats to the former one, of a higher, tinny tinging sound.
Pool could see the driveshaft rotating, and followed it to the fabric wall. He pulled the heavy curtain aside, the rubberized canvas against his fingers, much like a heavy tarp or waterproofed tent, but more so, thicker and heavier.
Behind the curtain, though used to surprises, Pool still gasped. My word, he said out loud, his mouth closing into a loose grin.
Before him stood an enormous machine, with gear after gear in rows turning at different rates, their fine teeth chattering, as if to talk. Interspersed were springs and levers, weights and counter weights, all oscillated to a rhythm incalculable to Pool.
The frame was made mostly from steel and wood (which the latter the high altitude and cold had preserved, though the steel was showing signs of rust on the corners and edges in particular.) Almost all of the gearwork was of brass, and this despite some touches of green here and there, still seemed uninhibited in its movement.
There was a case, not unlike a library’s card catalogue opposite, having a bundle of bright yellow light-tubes hanging low above it. The horizontal wood top, which stood roughly a meter off the floor, held a film of dust and had clearly not been touched in a very long time.
Pool calculated at least 800 drawers, ten tall by at least 80 from left to right. Each of these was labeled with a range of letters, in alphabetic order, most having three, but many also having only two in sequence. Inside were punch cards.
Approximately half of the cards were of a white substance, cut in to four by eight centimeter rectangles, each exactly the same dimensions as each other. Into these were drilled holes about two millimeters diameter, and none of these arrangements of holes matched those on any other card. At the top of each card was written in a random-seeming mix of media, a different word, and it was by these words that the catalogue was organized.
At first, he thought the cards were comprised of ivory, which would make the endeavor very expensive, but then after handling several he realized that the material was far too light to be ivory, and more likely some artificial material.
The nature of the cards was also not identical. A visual estimate suggested that more than half were of the white ivory-like material, but of the remainder, half of those were of metal, either brass or aluminium, and the other remaining half, were of simple wood, which had been sanded smooth and labeled and drilled in the same manner as the others. His very cursory looking over the catalogue suggested as well, that the ivory slabs were the first, due to the simpler concepts identifying them, followed by the metal ones, then by the wood ones, which were named things such as philology and porosity.
It was then he noticed a range of ten slots on the machine and he reasoned–calculating machines were not unheard of in the better universities–that the cards were used to program the machine to carry out a task.
Still in awe of the construction of the machine, which by now had spun off its dust and whirred along smoothly, though still issuing rapid strings of clicks and tings, Pool circled around to what he thought might be the back side.
There he found an interlinked kind of bed of large panels, 20 by 50 centimeters, being felt over by slender metal fingers, like typewriter arms, which clacked and clicked across them. There were hundreds and they moved with great speed and seemed to cover multiple rows and columns of the indentations on these plates.
And there, on the floor, next to the chattering machine were the mummified remains of a man.
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Ion Fyr 