“I’ll have to work quickly.”
“Fast enough to beat all other comers, but slow enough to be sure it’s done right,” he countered. “I’ve hired two teams before you, thinking that maybe they might find it. They didn’t; they just came up with the same sort of boring and uninspired code that you ridiculed the day we met.”
“And you think I can do better than them?”
“Mrs. Smith.” He looked down at her. “You’re not a maybe in my mind. You’ve already come further than them. You can do this.”
She bit her lip. “You said you wouldn’t be staying in Shanghai long.”
Yes, and thank God. “I’ll be off laying the second section of a transpacific line.”
“Oh. The second section?” She turned to him. “Of course. You’re doing it in sections. I read a bit about the transatlantic cables. It took everything they had to complete those two, and they were under two thousand miles long. The Pacific Ocean is…” She gestured outward at said ocean. “So much bigger. So of course you’re segmenting it. But where are you putting the middle bits? You’re not just dropping the ends and dredging for them, are you?”
Her eyes were shining with interest, and for a moment, he couldn’t help but smile back at her.
“We’re doing a northerly route—northern Japan to Myriad Island, then from Myriad down to Moresby, on the coast of British Columbia, and from there down to Seattle. We’ve already laid the Moresby to Seattle segment.”
“I’ve never heard of Myriad Island.”
“It’s just a name we gave to what amounts to a barren rock we discovered in the northern Pacific. We’re laying the section from Japan to Myriad early this fall, and then the final segment, Myriad to Moresby, the year after that.”
He could see her taking all of this in, nodding. “This fall and the next, a year later?” She frowned, chewing her lip. “In September? It must be because of the sea ice then. Is Myriad very far north?”
“Exactly. It may be possible to lay earlier than that, but the more we have to dodge icebergs, the less even the cable. And we have to keep strict records on cable location because if anything needs repair, we’ll need to be able to find it again.”
“What’s it like, laying cable?” she asked. “It sounds exciting.”
“Very dull,” he replied with a smile. “The ship moves very slowly while the cable pays out. Every ten miles or so, you stop and let the cable settle. You test the circuit—”
Her eyes grew even rounder. “You have a live electrical circuit as you lay the cable?”
“We keep batteries on board to establish one. Sometimes the cable will nick a rock on the ocean floor, or the pressure of the deep ocean will expose a fault, or a megalodon will take a chomp on the way down—”
God, what was he doing? Business, he’d told himself. All business. It had taken ten minutes, and he was already teasing her, smiling at her while she looked up at him with those wide eyes.
Grayson straightened and tugged his jacket into place. “That is to say, if we didn’t test as we went, we’d discover the line was bad a thousand miles into the journey with no notion of where the fault lay. So we let the cable settle and make sure we’ve always got current running every so often. If not, we track back, hauling the cable up as we go, until we find the fault. Then we cut it out, splice the cable, and start forward all over again. It’s very boring. That’s why I told you I needed someone who would have to work independently. I’ll be unavailable for months.” He had to emphasize that. Distance. They would be very distant.
“Well, that makes no sense. Why would you be unreachable?”
“At sea?” He gestured to the waters around them. “In the middle of thousands of miles of ocean? Nobody’s trained a pigeon yet that could deliver that message.”
“Nonsense. You just said you tested electrical current. That means you have a circuit between your ship and the shore as you lay the cable. If you have a circuit, you have a telegraph. Why can’t you send and receive messages?”
He blinked. “Ah. Um.”
“Come to think of it,” she mused, “if every ship could just trail a cable behind it, nobody would ever be lost at sea. We could always communicate with them at any time.”
“Absolutely,” Grayson said. “If every ship had an enormous cargo hold large enough to carry thousands of miles of cable, a budget of a million pounds for copper cabling and enough gutta percha to insulate it from the depths of the ocean, and an itinerary so devoid of any temporal pressure as to justify a maximum speed of ten knots on a good day.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “You’re making fun of me.”
“Just a little,” Grayson said. “But going back to what you said. You’d have to talk to Mr. Lightfoot. He’s my telegraph engineer. It’s my understanding that while the cable is settling, the current is unstable. You wouldn’t be able to tell if the current was interrupted by a settling error or if it was part of the telegraphic signaling. And there may be some issues with battery capacity.”
“Hmm.” She frowned, looking out over the sea. “You know, if you could generate a slow, evenly timed signal, repeatable without variance… And you could run the current with a battery from shore, upon signal…”
He tilted his head and turned to her. “What?”
He wasn’t sure if she heard him. She was nodding, looking off on the horizon. “You’d need a stable sea, so you could use the galvanometer to trace the results… With thin paper, you could overlay them, which would give you something like an average. The error would fall out with enough repetition. But how would you distinguish between error and the start of the message? You’d need an unmistakable start and end signal, or perhaps a designated time of day in which to send and receive messages? Yes, that might be easier, and yet wouldn’t allow for communication in the event of emergencies.”
He waved a hand in front of her face. “Mrs. Smith, where have you gone?”
She blinked once, then twice before turning to focus on him. “I have an idea. Give me a few days and I’ll work it out.” Her eyes seemed to be trained in his direction, but already he could tell her mind had drifted elsewhere.
He recognized the look on her face. That faraway dreamy look, starry-eyed, fixed on some internal vista.
At least, he thought dryly, she’s not tempting you by looking at you.
A storm was coming, and it was worse than he feared. He couldn’t even pretend that what he felt was a reflection of her own feelings. She seemed to have forgotten that he existed.
And here was the truth. He liked her. He liked talking to her about the telegraph. He liked teasing her. He liked the way her eyes shone, and he even liked the way she found a problem and then completely forgot that he existed. He liked everything about her, and it was going to be a issue.
“Mrs. Smith. I didn’t hire you to work out the mechanics of sending telegraphic messages at sea.”
She jerked back into the present moment with a visible shake of her head. “Oh of course.” She seemed embarrassed. “I was just thinking it out for the fun of it. It’s all right. I do tend to get diverted.” She made a face. “I’m sorry.”