Thirty Strange StoriesWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
Thirty Strange Stories
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Fantasy fiction, English; Science fiction, English; Short stories, English
The distorted remains of Holroyd, which the electrician removed from the
machine, were hastily covered by the porter with a coffee-stained
table-cloth. 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 any one 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, 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.
Never had Azuma-zi seen a man killed so swiftly and pitilessly. The big,
humming machine had slain its victim without wavering for a second from
its steady beating. It was indeed a mighty god.
The unconscious scientific manager stood with his back to him,
scribbling on a piece of paper. His shadow lay at the foot of the
monster.
“Was the Lord Dynamo still hungry? His servant was ready.”
Azuma-zi made a stealthy step forward, then stopped. The scientific
manager suddenly stopped writing, and walked down the shed to the
endmost of the dynamos, and began to examine the brushes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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