Chapter Two
Locke walked through the cramped
aisles of shelves groaning with bound newspapers, towards the clerk’s desk at
the rear. “I need a comprehensive
article or series about the history of vitalogy, and a biography of Dr.
Frankenstein,” he told the tall hoover at the desk. Perched on a stool itself five feet high, the
hoover’s boxy head almost brushed the ceiling.
The hoover looked down at Locke
from behind his desk (some eight feet from the floor – why so high?), silently
climbed down and made his heavy-footed way down one of the aisles, which held
not only the five-year print run of the Sun
but those of the Evening Register,
the Long Island Farmer, indeed every
noteworthy newspaper in the city’s recent history, as far back as Royal New-York Gazette, a collection Mr.
Day had bought at auction when the Commercial
Advertiser folded. There was every
newspaper, past and present, that Locke could recall having seen, besides the
Negro paper Freedom’s Journal.
The hoover unerringly found the
volume he wanted and carried it to a lectern of a more reasonable height where
Locke could stand and read it. The
hoover opened the book to the right page without even having to flip through
it, and even laid a finger at the top of the right-hand page, headed VICTOR CAROLUS
FRANKENSTEIN in old-fashioned newspaper type.
“I can read,” Locke snapped. He might have apologized, even to a hoover,
but the creature had merely turned away, without the slightest sign of
resentment, or even reaction, except to the implied dismissal. He climbed his stool and bent to his desk,
his quill pen scratching away.
Locke looked at the wastebasket
at the foot of the stool, surrounded by wadded sheets of paper and used quills
that had missed it. He had learned to
write with a quill pen, but in recent years he had only seen hoovers using
them. Next to the wastebasket was a
cylinder held together with a worn leather strap. Locke realized with a start that it was a
bedroll, presumably the clerk’s. Did the
creature sleep down here? But then, why not, he was only a hoover. Still, the idea of the hoover living down
here, possibly not having seen the light of day since he was brought down here
. . . .
Locke shook himself and looked at
the article the hoover had found for him.
Six decades before, in the same
year that a terrible fire destroyed a quarter of the city of New York, Adam
Smith published his essay on The Wealth
of Nations, and the United States declared their independence, a medical
student at Ingolstadt, Bavaria, discovered the elixir vitae, a transparent golden fluid which could animate dead
tissue.
Victor Frankenstein never
completed his studies at Ingolstadt. He
soon became busy with other matters, and never had time to return to
school. Many years later, he was granted
honorary doctorates by most of the universities of the world, and was created a
Baron of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in spite of remaining a Swiss citizen all
his life), but in the days when he began to transform the world, he was only
the half-educated son of a Geneva syndic.
Frankenstein never revealed how
he created that first batch of elixir
vitae, but once he had it, he could feed it on broths extracted from human
or animal tissues and grow as much of it as he needed. When the elixir
perfused dead tissue, muscles would move, nerves would conduct messages, brains
would awaken.
The elixir vitae might not have transformed the world as much as it
had, or as quickly, if Frankenstein hadn’t also advanced the art of surgery
amazingly. Most reanimated bodies would
have been little use as they were upon death: damaged muscles and bones would
be unable to function, damaged nerves would not be able to control a limb, and
the brain deteriorated rapidly after death.
Frankenstein learned to graft a healthy limb in place of a ruined one,
to join the severed ends of nerves so they would function, and to give a
healthy brain command over a body.
Even then, Frankenstein’s genius
might have languished for years. His
handful of reanimated animals might have been mere curiosities, and his first
disastrous attempt to copy the human form might have led a lonely
existence. It was Frankenstein’s
creation of conservante, the
transparent liquid which allowed him to preserve tissue against decay for
months, even years. That allowed Frankenstein
and his friend Henry Clerval to quickly begin producing the first ouvriers, a word which entered English
as “hoover”.
Much of this was long familiar to
Locke, but a good deal was new. As he
read, he felt a growing curiosity that he hadn’t had before, and wished he’d
taken the time to study vitalogy prior to this assignment.
It occurred to Locke that he
actually did have an “in” to the vitalogist community. Freddy Waldman, two doors down from his own
room at the Decatur, was an assistant to Dr. Saville, who had a little workshop
or surgery or whatever it was called that turned out some kind of fancy hoovers
for an upscale market. If he could get
Waldman to introduce him to Saville, he could interview the man, and gain
access to other vitalogists.
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