Chapter 10: The Society's Records

Van Cleef kept his own records of the Society's meetings. This was not sanctioned — the Society's official position was that minutes were destroyed after each meeting, a practice Harwick had instituted when he took control of the commercialization faction. Van Cleef had continued to take notes privately, in a notation system of his own design that looked, to a casual observer, like technical specifications for mechanical components. He gave Crane the last eighteen months of notes. Crane spent an evening decoding them at his hotel. The picture that emerged was of an organization undergoing a hostile internal transition. The Society of Mechanists had been, for sixty years, a scientific fellowship — automata enthusiasts, engineers, the kind of amateur theorists who built extraordinary things in their spare time and corresponded about it with intense seriousness. Mrs. Farquhar had been one of its most respected members. Harwick had joined fourteen years ago. He was not a mechanist — he was an industrialist who had identified the Society's accumulated knowledge as commercially valuable and had spent fourteen years positioning himself to access it. The commercialization proposal was the culmination. Not just the production of mechanical servants — the licensing of the Society's complete technical library to several major manufacturing concerns, along with exclusive production rights. Harwick's consortium was positioned to acquire those rights at a price that reflected insider access rather than market value. Mrs. Farquhar had been the primary opposition. She had understood what the library licensing meant: the transfer of sixty years of independent research into commercial control, with no mechanism for the Society's members to continue their work independently. She had been documenting the financial arrangements. That was what she'd been afraid of. That was what had killed her. 'She had proof of the valuation manipulation,' Crane said to Van Cleef the following morning. 'The library is worth ten times what Harwick's consortium is offering,' Van Cleef said. 'The valuation report was produced by a firm with ties to the consortium. Emmeline knew this.'