Closing the portmanteau, he stood. He carefully slid the bundle of cards into his coat-pocket, then bent over a crate and tugged out a thick glass tube. He blew dust from the tube, then gripped one end of it with a special pair of pincers. The glass cracked open with an airtight popthere was a fresh block of lime in the tube. Mick slid it loose, humming to himself. He tamped the lime gently into the socket of a
limelight burner, a great dish-shaped thing of sooty iron and gleaming tin. Then he turned a hose-tap, sniffed a bit, nodded, turned a second tap, and set the candle to it.
Sybil yelped as a vicious flash sheeted into her eyes. Mick chuckled at her over the hiss of blazing gas, dots of hot blue dazzle drifting before her. "Better," he remarked. He aimed the blazing limelight carefully into the stage-mirror, then began to adjust its cranks.
Sybil looked around, blinking. It was dank and ratty and cramped under the Garrick stage, the sort of place a dog or a pauper might die in, with torn and yellowed bills underfoot, for naughty farces like That Rascal Jack and Scamps of London. A pair of ladies' unmentionables were wadded in a corner. From her brief unhappy days as a stage-singer, she had some idea how they might have gotten there.
She let her gaze follow steam-pipes and taut wires to the gleam of the Babbage Engine, a small one, a kinotrope model, no taller than Sybil herself. Unlike everything else in the Garrick, the Engine looked in very good repair, mounted on four mahogany blocks. The floor and ceiling above and beneath it had been carefully scoured and whitewashed. Steam-calculators were delicate things, temperamental, so she'd heard; better not to own one than not cherish it. In the stray glare from Mick's limelight, dozens of knobbed brass columns gleamed, set top and bottom into solid sockets bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright and fine. It smelled of linseed oil.
Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy in a queer way, the way she might feel about a fine lovely horse, say. She wantednot to own it exactly, but possess it somehow
Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. She started. "Lovely thing, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's lovely."
Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. "It makes you feel something, doesn't it?"
His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. "Yes, Mick," she said obediently, quickly. "I do feel it something."
He tugged her bonnet loose, to hang at her neck. "You're not frightened of it, Sybil, are you? Not with Dandy Mick here, holding you. You feel a little special frisson. You'll learn to like that feeling. We'll make a clacker of you."
"Can I do that, truly? Can a girl do that?"
Mick laughed. "Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister's daughter, and the very Queen of Engines!" He let her go, and swung both his arms wide, coat swinging open, a showman's gesture. "Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage, father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our modern age!"
She gaped at him. "But Ada Byron is a ladyship!"
"You'd be surprised who our Lady Ada knows," Mick declared, plucking a block of cards from his pocket and peeling off its paper jacket. "Oh, not to drink tea with, among the diamond squad at her garden-parties, but Ada's what you'd call fast, in her own mathematical way " He paused. "That's not to say that Ada is the best, you know. I know clacking coves in the Steam Intellect Society that make even Lady Ada look a bit tardy. But Ada possesses genius. D'ye know what that means, Sybil? To possess genius?"
"What?" Sybil said, hating the giddy surety in his voice.
"D'ye know how analytical geometry was born? Fellow named Descartes, watching a fly on the ceiling. A million fellows before him had watched flies on the ceiling, but it took Ren6 Descartes to make a science of it. Now engineers use what he discovered every day, but if it weren't for him we'd still be blind to it."
"What do flies matter to anyone?" Sybil demanded.
"Ada had an insight once that ranked with Descartes' discovery. No one has found a use for it as yet. It's what they call pure mathematics." Mick laughed. " 'Pure.' You know what that means, Sybil? It means they can't get it to run." He rubbed his hands together, grinning. "No one can get it to run."
Mick's glee was wearing at her nerves. "I thought you hated lordships!"
"I do hate lordly privilege, what's not earned fair and square and level," he said. "But Lady Ada lives and swears by the power of gray matter, and not her blue blood." He slotted the cards into a silvered tray by the side of the machine, then spun and caught her wrist. "Your father's dead, girl! 'Tis not that I mean to hurt you, saying it, but the Luddites are dead as cold ashes. Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and suchfine talk, girl! But Lord Charles Babbage made blueprints while we made