The Difference Engine

"Damme," said a man on the bench behind him, his voice thick with self-assurance and drink. "This false start will take the pressure down. Simple matter of specific heat. It means the biggest boiler wins surely."

"Which one's that, then?" said the man's companion, perhaps his son.

The man ruffled through a racing tip-sheet. "That'll be the Goliath. Lord Hansell's racer. Her sister-craft won last year… "

Mallory looked down upon the hoof-beaten track. The driver of the Italian racer was being carried off on a stretcher, having been extricated with some difficulty from the cramped confines of his pilot's station. A column of dirty steam still rose from the rent in the Italian boiler. Racing-attendants hitched a team of horses to the disabled hulk.

Tall white gouts rose briskly from the stacks of the other racers. The crenellations of polished brass crowning the stack of the Goliath were especially impressive. It utterly dwarfed the slender, peculiarly delicate stack of Godwin's Zephyr, braced with guy-wires, which repeated in cross-section the teardrop formula of line-streaming.

"A terrible business!" opined the younger man. "I do believe the burst took that poor foreigner's head clean off, quite."

"Not a bit of it," said the older man. "Fellow had a fancy helmet."

"He's not moving, sir."

"If the Italians can't compete properly in the technical arena, they've no business here," the older man said sternly.

A roar of appreciation came from the crowd as the disabled steamer was hauled free by the laboring horses. "We'll see some proper sport now!" said the older man.

Mallory, waiting tensely, found himself opening the rosewood box, his thumbs moving on the little brass catches as if by their own volition. The interior, lined with green baize, held a long stack of milky-white cards. He plucked one free from the middle of the stack. It was an Engine punch-card, cut to a French specialty-gauge, and made of some bafflingly smooth artificial material. One corner bore the handwritten a

Mallory tucked the card carefully back into place and shut the box.

A flag was waved and the gurneys were off.

The Goliath and the French Vulcan lurched at once into the lead. The unaccustomed delay—the fatal delay. Mallory thought, his heart crushed within him—had cooled the tiny boiler of the Zephyr, leading no doubt to a vital loss of impetus. The Zephyr rolled in the wake of the greater machines, bumping half-comically in their deep-gouged tracks. It could not seem to get a proper traction.

Mallory did not find himself surprised. He was full of fatal resignation.

Vulcan and Goliath began to jostle for position at the first turn. The three other gurneys fell into file behind them. The Zephyr, quite absurdly, took the widest possible turn, far outside the tracks of the other craft. Master second-degree Henry Chesterton, at the wheel of the tiny craft, seemed to have gone quite mad. Mallory watched with the numb calm of a ruined man.

The Zephyr lurched into an impossible burst of speed. It slipped past the other gurneys with absurd, buttery ease, like a slimy pumpkin-seed squeezed between thumb and forefinger. At the half-mile turn, its velocity quite astonishing, it teetered visibly onto two wheels; at the final lap, it struck a slight rise, the entire vehicle becoming visibly airborne. The great driving-wheels rebounded from earth with a gout of dust and a metallic screech; it was only at that moment that Mallory realized that the great crowd in the stands had fallen into deathly silence.

Not a peep rose from them as the Zephyr whizzed across the finish-line. It slithered to a halt then, bumping violently across the gouged tracks left by the competition.

A full four seconds passed before the stu

The crowd suddenly burst into astonished outcry—not joy so much as utter disbelief, and even a queer sort of anger.

Henry Chesterton stepped from the Zephyr. He tossed back a neck-scarf, leaned at his ease against the shining hull of his craft, and watched with cool insolence as the other gurneys labored painfully across the finish line. By the time they arrived, they seemed to have aged centuries. They were, Mallory realized, relics.

Mallory reached into his pocket. The blue slips of betting-paper were utterly safe. Their material nature had not changed in the slightest, but now these little blue slips infallibly signified the wi

Mallory heard a voice ring in his ears, amid the growing tumult of the crowd. "I'm rich," the voice remarked calmly. It was his own voice.

He was rich.

This image is a formal daguerreotype of the sort distributed by the British aristocracy among narrow circles of friendship and acquaintance. The photographer may have been Albert, the Prince Consort, a man whose much-publicized interest in scientific matters had made him an apparently genuine intimate of Britain's Radical elite. The dimensions of the room, and the rich drapery of its back-drop, strongly suggest the photographing salon that Prince Albert maintained at Windsor Palace.

The women depicted are Lady Ada Byron and her companion and soi-disant chaperone. Lady Mary Somerville. Lady Somerville, the authoress of 'On the Co

Lady Ada, her arms bare save for a signet-ring on her right forefinger, places a laurel wreath about the brow of a marble bust of Isaac Newton. Despite the careful placement of the camera, the strange garb does not flatter Lady Ada, and her face shows stress. Lady Ada was forty-one years old in late June 1855, when this daguerreotype was taken. She had recently lost a large sum of money at the Derby, though her gambling-losses, common knowledge among her intimates, seem to have covered the loss of even larger sums, most likely extorted from her.

She is the Queen of Engines, the Enchantress of Number. Lord Babbage called her "Little Da." She has no formal role in government, and the brief flowering of her mathematical genius is far behind her. But she is, perhaps, the foremost link between her father, the Great Orator of the Industrial Radical Party, and Charles Babbage, the Party's grey eminence and foremost social theorist.

Ada is the mother.

Her thoughts are closed.