The Difference Engine Read Online Free PDF Page A

sockets bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright and fine. It smelled of linseed oil.
    Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy in a queer way, the way she might feel about . . . a fine lovely horse, say. She wanted — not to own it exactly, but possess it somehow . . .
    Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. She started. “Lovely thing, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, it’s . . . lovely.”
    Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. “It makes you feel something, doesn’t it?”
    His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. “Yes, Mick,” she said obediently, quickly. “I do feel it . . . something.”
    He tugged her bonnet loose, to hang at her neck. “You’re not frightened of it, Sybil, are you? Not with Dandy Mick here, holding you. You feel a little special frisson. You’ll learn to like that feeling. We’ll make a clacker of you.”
    “Can I do that, truly? Can a girl do that?”
    Mick laughed. “Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister’s daughter, and the very Queen of Engines!” He let her go, and swung both his arms wide, coat swinging open, a showman’s gesture. “Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage, father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our modern age!”
    She gaped at him. “But Ada Byron is a ladyship!”
    “You’d be surprised who our Lady Ada knows,” Mick declared, plucking a block of cards from his pocket and peeling off its paper jacket. “Oh, not to drink tea with, among the diamond squad at her garden-parties, but Ada’s what you’d call fast, in her own mathematical way . . . ” He paused. “That’s not to say that Ada is the best, you know. I know clacking coves in the Steam Intellect Society that make even Lady Ada look a bit tardy. But Ada possesses genius. D’ye know what that means, Sybil? To possess genius?”
    “What?” Sybil said, hating the giddy surety in his voice.
    “D’ye know how analytical geometry was born? Fellow named Descartes, watching a fly on the ceiling. A million fellows before him had watched flies on the ceiling, but it took Ren6 Descartes to make a science of it. Now engineers use what he discovered every day, but if it weren’t for him we’d still be blind to it.”
    “What do flies matter to anyone?” Sybil demanded.
    “Ada had an insight once that ranked with Descartes’ discovery. No one has found a use for it as yet. It’s what they call pure mathematics.” Mick laughed. ” ‘Pure.’ You know what that means, Sybil? It means they can’t get it to run.” He rubbed his hands together, grinning. “No one can get it to run.”
    Mick’s glee was wearing at her nerves. “I thought you hated lordships!”
    “I do hate lordly privilege, what’s not earned fair and square and level,” he said. “But Lady Ada lives and swears by the power of gray matter, and not her blue blood.” He slotted the cards into a silvered tray by the side of the machine, then spun and caught her wrist. “Your father’s dead, girl! ‘Tis not that I mean to hurt you, saying it, but the Luddites are dead as cold ashes. Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and such — fine talk, girl! But Lord Charles Babbage made blueprints while we made pamphlets. And his blueprints built this world.”
    Mick shook his head. “The Byron men, the Babbage men, the Industrial Radicals, they own Great Britain! They own us, girl — the very globe is at their feet, Europe, America, everywhere. The House of Lords is packed top to bottom with Rads. Queen Victoria won’t stir a finger without a nod from the savants and capitalists.” He pointed at her. “And it’s no use fighting that anymore, and you know why? ‘Cause the Rads do play fair, or