The Stolen Bacillus and Other IncidentsWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science fiction, English; Short stories, English
When Azuma-zi saw Holroyd die in the grip of the Great Dynamo he had
been a little scared about the consequences of his act. Yet he felt
strangely elated, and knew that the favour of the Lord Dynamo was upon
him. His plan was already settled when he met the man coming from the
station, and the scientific manager who speedily arrived on the scene
jumped at the obvious conclusion of suicide. This expert scarcely
noticed Azuma-zi, except to ask a few questions. Did he see Holroyd
kill himself? Azuma-zi explained he had been out of sight at the
engine furnace until he heard a difference in the noise from the
dynamo. It was not a difficult examination, being untinctured by
suspicion.
The distorted remains of Holroyd, which the electrician removed from
the machine, were hastily covered by the porter with a coffee-stained
tablecloth. Somebody, by a happy inspiration, fetched a medical man.
The expert was chiefly anxious to get the machine at work again, for
seven or eight trains had stopped midway in the stuffy tunnels of
the electric railway. Azuma-zi, answering or misunderstanding the
questions of the people who had by authority or impudence come into
the shed, was presently sent back to the stoke-hole by the scientific
manager. Of course a crowd collected outside the gates of the yard--a
crowd, for no known reason, always hovers for a day or two near the
scene of a sudden death in London--two or three reporters percolated
somehow into the engine-shed, and one even got to Azuma-zi; but the
scientific expert cleared them out again, being himself an amateur
journalist.
Presently the body was carried away, and public interest departed with
it. Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace, seeing over and
over again in the coals a figure that wriggled violently and became
still. An hour after the murder, to anyone coming into the shed it
would have looked exactly as if nothing remarkable had ever happened
there. Peeping presently from his engine-room the black saw the Lord
Dynamo spin and whirl beside his little brothers, and the driving
wheels were beating round, and the steam in the pistons went thud,
thud, exactly as it had been earlier in the evening. After all,
from the mechanical point of view, it had been a most insignificant
incident--the mere temporary deflection of a current. But now the
slender form and slender shadow of the scientific manager replaced the
sturdy outline of Holroyd travelling up and down the lane of light
upon the vibrating floor under the straps between the engines and the
dynamos.
"Have I not served my Lord?" said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his shadow,
and the note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear. As he looked
at the big whirling mechanism the strange fascination of it that had
been a little in abeyance since Holroyd's death resumed its sway.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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