The Curiosity Machine (27 page)

Ruby looked down at the butler, appalled at what she'd done. ‘I am so sorry,' she said to Mrs Rutherford. ‘I didn't recognise him from behind. I was so caught up in the idea of chloroforming someone that I sort of lost control.'

Sam sniffed at the sock and recoiled. ‘You really didn't need the chloroform,' he said, his eyes watering. ‘This thing is feral.'

Ruby snatched the sock from her brother. She took a sly sniff of it, and swallowed back a dry retch.

Mr Fry groaned and rolled to his side. He groaned even louder when he opened his eyes and found Sam's face staring at him. ‘This day gets better and better,' he said.

Mrs Rutherford gathered up Ruby and Felicity in
her arms. ‘Let me have a look at you all,' she said. ‘We were so worried when we heard what happened on the helicopter.'

‘You mean the way
Sinjin
here dumped us into shark-infested waters?' Sam said. ‘Yeah, that worried us a bit too.'

Mr Fry was about to respond when Felicity came to his defence. ‘Ignore him, Mr Fry,' she said. ‘You were positively heroic.'

The butler bowed his head. ‘You are most kind to say so.' He glanced at Mrs Rutherford through hooded eyes. ‘Others have been less gracious.'

The housekeeper pursed her lips. ‘All I said was that it was a peculiar way to be treating the master of the house: dumping him into the ocean. Most strange, if you ask me.'

Gerald had the feeling that Mr Fry may have been on the receiving end of a lengthy dressing down from his housekeeper, and he couldn't hold back a grin at the thought of it. ‘I don't understand,' he said to Mrs Rutherford. ‘What are you two doing wandering free? Doesn't Mason Green have you all locked up somewhere?'

‘We are all locked up, Master Gerald, but I don't know what Sir Mason has to do with it. That dreadful Mr Ursus is in charge. He's always walking around and making his presence felt, giving orders and such. But he keeps a radio on his belt and is constantly talking into it, so we suspect that someone else is holding the reins. But
none of us has seen Sir Mason Green since we got here.' Felicity and Ruby helped Mr Fry to his feet. ‘So what are you doing in this hut?' Felicity asked.

‘We're helping—' Mr Fry said.

‘Helping!' Sam was outraged. ‘After everything that has happened? Hijacking. Kidnapping.'

Mr Fry levelled a glare of undiluted scorn at Sam. ‘If I could be allowed to finish,' he said. ‘We are helping Professor McElderry. Ursus threatened not to feed any of us if we didn't. That is the only reason.'

Gerald looked at Ruby. ‘That settles it, then. Green said the professor was helping him so this must be Mason Green's island.' He turned to Mrs Rutherford. ‘What has the professor got you doing?'

Mrs Rutherford lifted two large brown bottles from the shelf and placed them on the trolley. ‘Professor McElderry asked specifically for Mr Fry and me to be his assistants, the poor man,' she said. ‘He looks terribly stressed. There are plenty of guards he could have used but he wanted us. He says with us he doesn't have to repeat himself when he wants something done. Like now, for instance: he asked us to bring him a list of chemicals and such from in here.' She turned to Mr Fry and tapped a finger on her wristwatch. ‘And we had best hurry up or he'll be wondering what is taking us so long.'

Mr Fry nodded and lifted more bottles onto the trolley. ‘We've tried to find a radio or some way to communicate with the outside world, but everything is
locked tight,' he said.

Ruby pulled on her sock and laced her shoe. ‘Surely there's something we can do,' she said. ‘Ursus doesn't know we're here, so can you at least show us where the main building is and maybe we can sneak in and find a phone.'

‘Or maybe we could help everyone break out,' Felicity suggested.

Gerald shook his head. ‘There's nowhere to escape to, so breaking out is pointless. Our best bet is getting a distress call out. Otherwise our only hope is negotiating with Mason Green.'

Mr Fry placed the last of the bottles on the trolley. ‘Superb,' he said. He spat the word out like a rotten walnut. ‘Just superb.'

Sam jerked his head to the side, almost wrenching his neck. ‘That's the answer,' he said, staring at Mr Fry with wide eyes. ‘The butler has done it.'

‘What are you talking about?' Ruby said.

‘Superb,' Sam said. ‘Or, EPIRB at least. There's an EPIRB on the
Archer
. Ella told me about it when she was getting the catamaran rigged. Or was it Irene? They both look so alike. Twins, hey?'

‘What are you talking about?' Felicity said. ‘What's an EPIRB?'

‘It stands for Emergency Position something Radio Beacon,' Sam said. ‘Basically, you push a button and it shoots out an emergency message to a satellite that can
be picked up anywhere in the world. Then you just sit back and wait to be rescued.'

Ruby's eyes lit up. ‘Brilliant!'

‘And we've still got the perpetual motion machine to trade as a back-up plan,' Gerald said. He clapped Sam on the shoulder. ‘Nice work.'

‘If you can just point us in the general direction of the
Archer
,' Sam said to Mr Fry, ‘we'll be on our way.'

Mr Fry raised an eyebrow and studied Sam's self-satisfied grin. ‘That may just work,' the butler said, his voice riddled with surprise. ‘They only have one guard on the yacht at a time and if you go in under the cover of darkness…' He turned to Mrs Rutherford. ‘They can follow us back to the hangar and then take the low path to the stream. That will be the quickest way.'

Mrs Rutherford nodded and ushered everyone towards the door, pushing the trolley in front of her. They made quick time along the boardwalk, the cargo of bottles rattling over the bumps and cracks in the timbers.

Gerald was last in line as they snaked through vine-tangled trees. There were so many questions he wanted to ask Mrs Rutherford and Mr Fry, but there just wasn't time. Why would anyone go to all this trouble of setting up a zoo on a South Pacific island? And most importantly, what was the curiosity machine and what did it do that could possibly be worth a trillion dollars? This last question weighed heavily on Gerald's mind.

The bush ahead opened up to a broad clearing.
Through the surrounding branches Gerald could see the outline of an enormous aircraft hangar. The Archer corporate jet would have easily fitted inside, with another two Airbuses stacked on top.

‘Why—' Gerald started, but a sharp wave of Mrs Rutherford's hand returned him to silence. But the question demanded an answer. Why was there a massive aircraft hangar on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific?

Mr Fry beckoned everyone in close and pointed along a section of boardwalk that branched through a tangle of scrub. ‘You go down there and it will take you to a stream. Cross the bridge and you'll see a sandy path—it's the one we followed to get over this side of the island when the
Archer
first arrived here. That will take you to the beach and the yacht. From there it's up to you.'

Mrs Rutherford cast an anxious glance further along the boardwalk. ‘Come along, Mr Fry. We best hurry.' She gave each of the children a quick hug. ‘Good luck, Master Gerald,' she said, clasping his cheeks in her hands. ‘Make us proud.' The housekeeper and the butler then bustled on, pushing the trolley in front of them.

Gerald hitched his thumbs under the straps of his backpack and adjusted the load on his shoulders. ‘Let's get going then,' he said, ‘just as soon as I've had a peek in here.' Gerald ignored Ruby's hissed plea to stop as he scooted down the timbers to the hangar. He eased the door open and slipped through the gap. After the
glare outside, it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness inside the building. ‘Will you look at that,' he breathed.

Gerald, Ruby, Felicity and Sam lined up like laughing clowns at a country show, eyes wide, mouths open. They were all struggling to take in the complexity, the beauty, the sheer enormity of what stood before them.

Sam pointed. ‘Is that,' he asked, ‘is that the curiosity machine?'

Chapter 26

Adevice of labyrinthine intricacy rose above them, winding almost to the top of the iron rafters high up in the shadows. Pipes and coils, springs and cogs, wheels and tubes wound and twisted, looped and spiralled in a fantastical contrivance of the most baffling convolution. It looked like a monster arthritic spider that might collapse at the slightest touch.

‘That is the most ridiculous thing that I have ever seen,' Sam said.

Gerald was lost for words. He drifted across to a control console, which consisted of a set of levers and a large hand-turned crank. ‘This must be where the perpetual motion machine plugs in,' he said, running his fingers around a semi-spherical hollow in the stainless
steel console top. His gaze brushed across a line of rivets and a tiny cross-shaped hole in the metal. He scanned a huge bank of pigeonholes to his right. Each one contained a different rock or mineral or crystal. It was a collection of thousands of multi-coloured specimens that must have taken years to assemble.

‘It's amazing.' Sam stood gobsmacked at Gerald's side. ‘What do you think happens when you turn this?'

Before anyone could stop him, Sam took hold of the crank with both hands and worked it around like he was trying to start a vintage car.

The hulking contraption rattled to life. A convulsion rolled through its framework of bolts and bars like an asthmatic wheeze through an iron lung.

‘You bozo!' Ruby rushed to her brother and pulled his hands from the crank. ‘You'll attract every guard on the island.'

‘We should get going,' Felicity said, joining them. But no one moved. They couldn't take their eyes from the hypnotic whir of gears and the spin of flywheels that Sam had set in motion. The platform of pigeonholes vibrated like a colossal kitchen sifter. ‘Look,' Ruby said, pointing at the grid of boxes, ‘it's grinding them into dust.'

A rainbow of multi-hued mineral sand showered out of the bottom of the pigeonholes and was collected in a conical tray underneath. Gerald watched, transfixed, as the dust was swept into a flask and a mechanical arm jammed a cork stopper into the neck. Then from
nowhere a bamboo jib swooped down, snatched the flask and swung it high into the fizzing circus of grinding gears and spinning sprockets above their heads.

‘It's emptying the dust into that wooden cask,' Ruby said. A gush of bright pink liquid surged through corkscrew glass-piping and emptied into the side of the cask. The stout little barrel launched into a spinning blur as the container rotated like a centrifuge before coming to a jarring stop. A thick glittering slurry emptied out the bottom into a funnel, coursing along a spiral tube like blood through a vein.

Gerald was getting dizzy trying to keep track of where the goop was going as springs sprung and pistons pumped. Finally, there was a strangled whirring
fluuush
, and a small glass ampoule shot into a slot on the side of the control console. Gerald fished it out and held it up to the light. The tiny sealed tube, no larger than a pencil stub, contained a sparkling purple liquid that seemed to glow in the cool of the hangar interior.

‘What do you think it is?' he asked, jiggling the ampoule between finger and thumb.

Felicity took hold of Gerald's elbow and tugged. ‘We really need to get out of here,' she said. ‘This can wait.'

‘I bet it has something to do with this,' Sam said.

Gerald shrugged off Felicity's hand and went to Sam, who stood by a large perspex box, the size of a tea chest. ‘See? There's a bunch of empty little glass tubes here, just like that one.'

Fixed to the top of the perspex box was a pistol-like contraption. The barrel pointed down at an angle and disappeared through what appeared to be an airtight hole in the top of the box.

‘What on earth is that thing inside?' Ruby asked in disgust. ‘It's hideous.'

A massive millipede was stretched out at the bottom of the container.

Felicity shivered. ‘This island doesn't do things by halves, does it?' she said. ‘That thing's enormous.'

‘Enormously revolting,' Ruby said. She took a step closer to peer through the side of the box. ‘Is it alive?' She gave the perspex wall a light tap with the toe of her shoe. The millipede sprang up as if it had been electrocuted. Ruby threw herself sideways with a squeal and landed hard on her back as the creature slammed into the side of the box, hundreds of feet scrabbling and scratching against the transparent wall.

‘Yes,' Sam said. ‘It's alive.'

Gerald couldn't take his eyes from the gun mechanism on the top of the box. He found his hand was drawn to the opening in the chamber; it was exactly the size of the small glass tube in his fingers. He dropped the ampoule in place. It slotted in perfectly.

‘Gerald?' Ruby said. ‘What are you doing?'

Gerald didn't answer. He wrapped his hand around the pistol grip, and his finger around the trigger.

‘Gerald?' Ruby said.

Her words had no impact. Gerald's eyes widened as he stared at the pistol in his hand, then at the writhing millipede in the box beneath.

‘Gerald!' Ruby flung a hand towards him, trying to knock his grip clear of the gun. But too late.

Gerald pulled the trigger. The hammer fell. The ampoule shot into the chamber at lightning speed and a fine mist exploded from the barrel, filling the box with a purple haze.

Ruby gasped as the millipede stopped its writhing, and moved its head left and right as the fog enveloped it. A hundred sets of legs jerked outwards as if every limb had suddenly developed a cramp. Then the creature curled itself into a tight ball and gave a shudder.

Ruby blinked down at the millipede, then tilted her head to the side. ‘Did that thing just cough?' she said.

The millipede unwound itself and returned to the position where they had first seen it, reclining across the bottom of the box.