The Technologists Read Online Free Page B

to collect fees from poor souls who know no better.”
    One of the other agitators lunged at Hammie, who stumbled and nearly fell over. Marcus steadied him, but Hammie pulled away from him, dizzy and humiliated.
    “Hands off, Mansfield, I’ll—Officer, Officer! Assault!” Hammie cried out to a policeman who was approaching from Berkeley Street. The policeman stopped but did nothing.
    “You should know that officer’s brother is in the bricklayers’ union,” explained Rapler, the uniformed man, who, now that he was not shouting, spoke with an impressively urbane tone. He was missing what would have been his two front teeth. “We’ve asked him here to ensure our safety from easily excitable young men like you.”
    “You have all had your say,” Marcus said politely. “Look around. You see? People are leaving. Please follow their example.”
    Rapler studied him with interest. “What do
you
want? All of Boston’s jobs lost to machines, perhaps.”
    “We want nothing at our Institute except to find the truth,” said Marcus. “You might have heard President Rogers say that if you weren’t throwing your rocks.”
    “And how powerful must you become through it, laddie? Has not man already overstepped his maker, if he does not know where his power ends?”
    “It ends when mankind no longer needs the protections technology provides.”
    Rapler motioned to the men around him. “The men and women who join our cause are not anti-science. We simply see a science today set to run away with man. The machines you gentlemen—and one errant lady, as I understand it—at the Institute create will become so complicated that they will control us instead of our mastering them. Imagine a future when, with a single malfunction of your machines, man will live in the dark without memory of how to light a candle. He will be stranded without ability to transport himself with feet rather than steel rails. The machine is inanimate and heartless. Our unions respect the intelligenceof man to act, to make decisions
only
man is capable of. Otherwise, we become merely tools of our tools. How will you protect us from that?” The speaker seemed satisfied when Marcus decided not to prolong the confrontation. “Fall in!”
    Rapler locked arms with the other union men. They sang as they marched away.
                            
Resolve by your native soil
,
                            
Resolve by your fathers’ graves
,
                            
You will live by your honest toil
,
                            
But never consent to be slaves!
    “At least they’re gone,” Bob said a few moments later. “And they couldn’t stop us from demonstrating the circuit!” he crowed.
    “But the people who came will remember only that they broke our lamp,” Marcus said, “not that the lights went on.”

V

Positively No Admittance
    W HEN ONE ENTERED , one’s senses came under attack. An amalgam of odors hung in the air, fresh fumes mixing with old ones that never dissipated. A film of dust clouded the eyes—not from a lack of tidiness (though the place was wonderfully untidy), but from the shut-in quarters and microscopic particles, some crystalline, others incandescent, floating in the air.
    Touch a surface at one’s peril; it was likely to be burning hot or morbidly cold without warning. Four furnaces made of clay, brick, and stone sat in different locations, evidence of each one’s different purpose in the residue of its ash pan; tongs hung near each, ready to remove or adjust the smoldering contents.
    A congealed substance had melted over one portion of the floor and now sparkled like gold. On the wall behind it, the bricks had been charred black from an accidental explosion in the not distant past. A table in the center of the main room stood within a glass enclosure; on it sat a copper box filled with sand. A pipe entered the box from a burner, and