Against the Day (11 page)

Cheerfulness, once taken as a
condition of life on the
Inconvenience,
was in fact being progressively
revealed to the boys as a precarious commodity, these days. They seemed held
here, as if under some unconfided spell. Autumn deepened among the desolate
city blocks, an edge appeared to the hum of life here, invisible sometimes and
furtive as worn bootheels vanishing round the corners of the stately arcades
where the boys resorted, in great shabby rooms, among the smells of stale
animal fat and ammonia on the floor, with glassroofed steamtables offering
three choices of sandwich, lamb, ham, or beef, all heavy on the fat and
gristle, stale odors, frownlined women slapping together meat and bread, a
shaken spoon that smacked the flourheavy gravy on like plaster, eyes cast
downward all day long, behind them in front of the mirror rising a pyramid of
cheap miniature bottles, known hereabouts as “Mickeys,” holding three choices
of wine, red, white, and muscatel.

When not reeling about quite as
uncontrollably as drunkards, the boys would gather to dine on these horrible
wetanddry sandwiches, drinking the lowpriced wine and noting with clogged humor
how swiftly each seemed to fatten before the gazes of the others. “Hang it,
fellows,” Randolph expostulated, “we’ve got to try to pull out of this!” They
began to imagine, jointly and severally, some rescuer entering the crew spaces,
moving among them, weighing, choosing, a creature of fantasy to bring them back
each to his innocence, to lead him out of his unreliable body and his unique
loss of courage, so many years in the making—though, much as he enjoyed
unanimous admiration from the crew, it had not turned out to be Lew Basnight.
He had moved on, as had so many in their lives, and they continued in a
fragmented reverie which, they had learned, often announced some change in the
works.

And sure enough, one morning the boys
found, wedged casually between two strands of mooring cable, as always unconnected
with any action they might’ve been contemplating, orders silently delivered in
the night.

“Bear east is pretty much all it
says,” Randolph in quiet consternation. “East by south.”

Lindsay pulled out charts.
Speculation began to fill the day. Once it had been enough to know the winds,
and how they blew at each season of the year, to get a rough idea of where they
might be headed. Presently, as the
Inconvenience
began to acquire its
own sources of internal power, there would be other global streamings to be
taken into account—electromagnetic lines of force, Ætherstorm warnings,
movements of population and capital. Not the ballooning profession as the boys
had learned it.

Later
, after closing day, as autumn
deepened over the corrupted prairie, as the illfamed Hawk, miles aloft,
invisibly rehearsed its Arctic repertoire of swift descent, merciless assault,
rapture of souls—the abandoned structures of the Fair would come to house
the jobless and hungry who had always been there, even at the height of the
season of miracle just concluded. The Colorado Silver Mining Camp, like the
other former exhibits, was occupied now by drifters, squatters, mothers with
nursing infants, hellraisers hired for the run of the Fair, now, their market
value having vanished, returned to the consolations of drink, dogs and cats who
preferred the company of their own species, some who still bore memories of
Pugnax and his conversation, and excursions they had been out on. All moving in
closer to the fires of Fair debris, once the substance of wonder, as the
temperature headed down.

ot long after Erlys had gone off with
Zombini the Mysterious, Merle Rideout dreamed he was in a great museum, a
composite of all possible museums, among statues, pictures, crockery,
folkamulets, antiquated machinery, stuffed birds and animals, obsolete musical
instruments, and whole corridors of stuff he would not get to see. He was there
with a small party of people he didn’t know, but in the dream was supposed to
know. Abruptly, in front of a display of Japanese weapons, an official person
in ragged plainclothes, unshaven, mistrusting and bitterly humorless, who may
or may not have been a museum guard, grabbed hold of him on suspicion of having
stolen some small art object, and demanded that he empty out his pockets,
including a bulging and dilapidated old cowhide wallet, which the “guard”
indicated was to be emptied, too. A crowd had gathered around, including the
familiarunfamiliar group he’d come here with, all silently staring. The wallet
was itself a sort of museum, on a smaller scale—a museum of his life,
overstuffed with old ticket stubs, receipts, notes to himself, names and
addresses of halfor sometimes totally forgotten folks from his past. In the
midst of all this biographical litter, a
miniature portrait of her
ap
peared. He woke up, understanding
at once that the whole purpose of the dream was to remind him, with diabolical
roundaboutness, of Erlys Mills.

Her name was never far from the
discourse of the day. Since about the minute she could talk, Dally had been
good for all kinds of interesting questions.

“And, so, what first attracted you to
her?”

“Didn’t run away screaming when I
told her how I felt.”

“Love at first sight, something like
that?”

“
Figured there was no point trying to
hide it. Minute and a half longer, she’d’ve figured it out anyway.”

“And . . .”

“What was I doing in Cleveland in the
first place?”

Which usually was how Dally got to
hear about her mother, in these bits and pieces. One day Merle had read in the
Hartford
Courant
about a couple of professors at the Case Institute in Cleveland who
were planning an experiment to see what effect, if any, the motion of the Earth
had on the speed of light through the luminiferous Æther. He had already heard
in some dim way about the Æther, though being more on the practical side of
things, he couldn’t see much use for it. Exists, doesn’t exist, what’s it got
to do with the price of turnips basically. And anything that happened at the
speed of light would have too many unknowables attached to begin
with—closer to religion than science. He discussed it one day with his
friend at Yale, Professor Vanderjuice, who, having just emerged from another of
the laboratory mishaps for which he was widely known, carried as always a smell
of sal ammoniac and singed hair.

“Small confrontation with the Topler
Influence Machine, nothing to worry about.”

“Guess I’d better go take a look.
Probably that gear train again.”

They strolled among the elmshadows,
eating sandwiches and apples out of paper bags, “a peripatetic picnic,” as the
Professor called it, slipping thereupon into his lecturehall style.

“You’re quite right, of course, the
Æther has always been a religious question. Some don’t believe in it, some do,
neither will convince the other, it’s all faith at the moment. Lord Salisbury
said it was only a noun for the verb ‘to undulate.’ Sir Oliver Lodge defined it
as ‘one continuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate light. . . be
sheared into positive and negative electricity,’ and so on in a lengthy list,
almost like the Apostles’ Creed. It certainly depends on a belief in the
waviness of light—if light were particulate, it could just go blasting
through empty space with no need for any Æther to carry it. Indeed one finds in
the devout Ætherist a propensity of character ever toward the continuous as
against the discrete. Not to mention a vast patience with all those tiny
whirlpools the theory has come to require.”

“Think this is worth going out to
Cleveland for?”

“Mr. Rideout, we wander at the
present moment through a sort of vorticalist twilight, holding up the lantern
of the Maxwell Field Equations and squinting to find our way. Michelson’s done
this experiment before, in Berlin, but never so carefully. This new one could
be the giant arclamp we need to light our way into the coming century. I don’t
know the man personally, but I’ll write you a letter of introduction anyway, it
can’t hurt.”

Merle had been born and raised in
northwest Connecticut, a region of clockmakers, gunsmiths and inspired tinkers,
so his trip out to the Western Reserve was just a personal expression of Yankee
migration generally. This strip of Ohio due west of Connecticut had for years,
since before American independence, been considered part of Connecticut’s
original land grant. So despite days and nights of traveling, Merle had an
eerie sense of not having left Connecticut—same plain gablefront houses,
white Congregational church steeples, even stone fences—more Connecticut,
just shifted west, was all.

Merle arrived to find the “Forest
City” obsessed by the pursuit of genial desperado Blinky Morgan, who was being
sought for allegedly murdering a police detective while trying to rescue a
member of his gang who’d been picked up on a furrobbery charge. Newsboys cried
the tale, and rumors flew like bugs in summer. Detectives swaggered everywhere,
their black stiff hats shining like warrior helmets of old. Chief Schmitt’s
bravos in blue were detaining and subjecting to lengthy and mostly aimless
questioning anybody whose looks they didn’t care much for, which took in a wide
piece of the population, including Merle, who was stopped on Rockville Street
as he was heading out toward the Case Institute.

“What’s in the wagon, son?”

“Nothin much. You’re sure welcome to
look.”

“Well this is refreshing, usually we
get Blinky jokes.”

Merle went off into a long and
confused description of the MichelsonMorley experiment, and his interest in it,
which was not shared by the policemen, who began to grow distant, and presently
truculent.

“Another candidate for Newburgh here,
looks like.”

“Well, let’s do a check. Crossed
eyes, protruding tongue, Napoleon hat?” They were talking about the Northern
Ohio Insane Asylum, a few miles southeast of town, in which currently were
lodged some of the more troublesome of the scientific cranks Cleveland these
days had been filling up rapidly with, enthusiasts from everywhere in the
nation and abroad for that matter, eager to bathe in the radiance of the
celebrated Ætherdrift experiment in progress out at Case. Some were inventors
with lightengines that could run a bicycle all day but at nightfall stopped
abruptly, causing the bike to fall over with you on it, if you weren’t careful.
Some claimed that light had a consciousness and personality and could even be
chatted with, often revealing its deeper secrets to those who approached it in
the right way. Groups of these could be observed in Monumental Park at sunrise,
sitting in the dew in uncomfortable positions, their lips moving inaudibly.
There were diet faddists who styled themselves Lightarians, living on nothing
but light, even setting up labs they thought of as kitchens and concocting
meals from light recipes, fried light, fricaseed light, light
à la mode,
calling
for different types of lamp filament and colors of glass envelope, the Edison
lamp being brand new in those days but certainly not the only design under
study. There were light addicts who around sunset began to sweat and itch and
seclude themselves in toilets with portable electric lanterns. Some spent most
of their time at telegraph offices squinting at long scrolls of mysteriously
arrived “weather reports,” about weather not in the atmosphere but in the
luminiferous Æther. “Yes it’s all here,” said Ed Addle, one of the regulars at
the Oil Well Saloon, “Ætherwind speed, Ætheric pressure, there are instruments
to measure those, even an analogy to temperature, which depends on the
ultramicroscopic vortices and how energetically they interact
. . . .
”

Merle came back with another round of
beers. “How about humidity?”

“Controversial,” said Ed. “What, in
the Æther, would occupy the place of watervapor in the air? Some of us believe
it is Vacuum. Minute droplets of nothing at all, mixed in with the prevailing
Ætheric medium. Until the saturation point is reached, of course. Then there is
condensation, and storms in which not rain but precipitated nothingness sweeps
a given area, cyclones and anticyclones of it, abroad not only locally at the
planetary surface but outside it, through cosmic space as well.”

“There’s a U.S. Bureau in charge of
reporting all this?” wondered Roswell Bounce, who was gainfully selfemployed as
a photographer, “a network of stations? Ships and balloons?”

Ed became guarded. “Is this just your
usual wetblanket talk, or do you really want to know?”