He said, “Electric lights are better than torches and candles down here, because they don’t leave smoke everywhere. Better than lanterns, because fuels like kerosene are heavy to carry around. And you don’t have to keep refilling the bulbs. You just change them out once in a while. ”
“Where do they get their power from?” Rector asked.
“The pump rooms, same as the air circulation. They run on coal. ”
“Coal’s heavy, too,” he pointed out.
“True, but we’re already using coal to power the air circulation. It was easy to rig up a generator and siphon off some of the energy. I’m telling you,” he said as he began to unpack the box, “electricity is the future. Before long, we won’t be using coal anymore, or any of the petroleum derivatives. ”
Houjin had just used two words in a row that Rector didn’t recognize, but Rector played along like this made perfect sense to him. “I like how they don’t smell like anything. ”
“They do have a smell,” Houjin argued lightly. “You notice it after a while. But it isn’t very strong, and that’s not why I brought you down here. This is what I wanted to show you. ”
He held up a device that appeared to be made mostly out of dynamite, with a handful of other things attached.
Both Zeke and Rector jumped back.
“Shit, Huey!” Zeke said. “Warn a guy before you start flashing that around!”
“It’s perfectly safe … for the moment,” he added, bouncing it gently in his hands. “Nothing to spark it off. You wouldn’t want to go playing catch with it, but it won’t blow us up,” he said with a grin.
Rector eyed the dynamite bundle with a mixture of horror and curiosity. “Is that … is that a clock you got tied to it?”
“Yes! Here,” he said, placing the odd contraption on the desk, beside its box. “It has an alarm—you can set it to strike at a certain time. ”
“Like … to wake you up? I’ve heard of those,” Rector said.
“To wake you up, to tell you to go to work … it doesn’t matter. The point is, it strikes. ”
“And what’s that thing next to it?” Zeke asked, pointing at a strange little device about the size of two thumbs pressed together.
“It’s a dry cell battery. ”
Rector didn’t have a clue what that meant, and a shared glance with Zeke told him he wasn’t alone. “Why’s it stuck on that board?”
The alarm clock and the battery were fastened to each other by a copper wire. A piece of brass was affixed to the clock’s alarm key, and all of the pieces were mounted with screws and bolts to a board which was a bit smaller than a loaf of bread.
“I don’t get it,” Zeke confessed.
“It’s … these, you see…” Houjin pointed at various spots on the board, settling on the two bits of brass. “These are the contact points, you understand? When the alarm rings, it sends an electrical current from the clock to the battery, just like the current in a hand-pump trigger. ”
Zeke eyed the clock with suspicion. “The alarm’s not going to ring, is it?”
“The clock’s wound down. It couldn’t strike if it tried. ”
Rector stared at the board and its weird components, then considered the dynamite, and the clock—and he thought of the enormous grandfather clock at the orphan’s home, and how it’d chime as told, every hour on the hour. And just like the spark that would jump between the connectors, the answer flickered between his ears.
He said, “This means you can tell the dynamite when to blow up. ”
“Yes!” Houjin exclaimed. “That’s it exactly! We can tell the dynamite to explode at five o’clock, or eleven o’clock, or whenever we like—but it explodes when we’re a long ways away from it. We’re going to surprise those tower men out of their skins! They’ll never know what hit them. If any of them survive, they’ll come looking for us—but we won’t be anywhere they can reach us, not by then. ”
“That’s … that’s genius,” Zeke said with naked awe.
“Thank you. I’m excited by it myself. Yaozu brought up the idea; he thought it was possible, but he didn’t know how to make it happen. But that’s Yaozu’s kind of genius,” he said as an afterthought. “He doesn’t know how to do everything, but he knows who to ask. ”
A knock on the door made everyone jump, but it was only a Chinese man in a rounded hat. He said something to Houjin, who nodded quickly and made a brief reply. The other man left, leaving the boy to explain. “Angeline is outside waiting for us. We should go. ”
They backtracked through the Station, and Rector marveled again at how beautiful it all was—practically the inside of a mansion, or how he’d always imagined a mansion must look. Every surface gleamed and glowed.