Against the Day (6 page)

“I am only an amateur, of course,”
Miles, though long a member of the prestigious International Academy of
Ukulelists, said modestly, “and get lost now and then. But if I promised to go
back to the tonic and wait, do you think they’d let me come and sit in?”

“I’ll certainly put in a good word,”
said Chevrolette.

Merle Rideout had brought a hand
camera with him, and was taking “snaps” of the flying machines, aloft and
parked on the ground, which were continuing to arrive and take off with no
apparent letup. “Some social, ain’t it! Why, every durn professor of flight
from here to Timbuctoo’s flying in, ’s what it looks like.”

The smoke from breakfast campfires
rose fragrantly through the air. Babies could be heard in both complaint and
celebration. Faroff sounds of railway traffic and lake navigation came in on
the wind. Against the sun as yet low across the Lake, wings cast long shadows,
their edges luminous with dew. There were steamers, electrics, Maxim whirling
machines, ships powered by guncotton reciprocators and naphtha engines, and
electrical liftingscrews of strange hyperboloidal design for drilling upward
through the air, and winged aerostats, of streamlined shape, and wingflapping
miracles of ornithurgy. A fellow scarcely knew after a while where to
look—

“Pa!” An attractive little girl of
four or five with flaming red hair was runpning toward them at high speed.
“Say, Pa! I need a drink!”

“Dally, ya little weasel,” Merle
greeted her, “the corn liquor’s all gone, I fear, it’ll have to be back to the
old cowjuice for you, real sorry,” as he went rummaging in a patent dinner pail
filled with ice. The child, meanwhile, having caught sight of the Chums in
their summer uniforms, stood gazing, her eyes wide, as if deciding how well
behaved she ought to be.

“You have been poisoning this
helpless
angel
with
strong drink?”
cried Lindsay Noseworth. “Sir, one must protest!” Dally, intrigued, ran over
and stood in front of him, peering up, as if waiting for the next part of some
elaborate joke.

Lindsay blinked. “This cannot be,” he
muttered. “Small children hate me.”

“
A finelooking little girl, sir,”
Randolph, brimming with avuncularity. “You are the proud grandfather, of
course.”

“Ha! D’ye hear that, Carrothead?
Thinks I’m your grandpa. Thank you, lad, but this here is my daughter Dahlia,
I’m proud to say. Her mother, alas—” He sighed, gazing upward and into
the distance.

“Our deepest sympathies,” Randolph
hastily, “yet Heaven, in its inscrutability—”

“Heaven, hell,” cackled Merle
Rideout. “She’s out there in the U.S.A. someplace with the mesmerizin variety
artist she run away with, a certain Zombini the Mysterious.”

“Know him, by gosh!” Chick
Counterfly, nodding vigorously. “Makes his molly disappear down a common
kitchen funnel!
‘
Imbottigliata!
’
ain’t
it? then he twirls his cape? Seen it down in New Orleans with my
own peepers! some awesome turn, you bet!”

“The very customer,” Merle beamed,
“and that beauteous conjuror’s assistant you saw’d likely be ol’ Erlys herself,
and say, you’ll want to close your mouth there, Buck, ’fore somethin flies into
it?”—the casual mention of adultery having produced in Randolph’s face a
degree of stupefaction one regrets to term characteristic. Chick Counterfly,
less affected, was alert enough to offer, “Well—an entirely admirable
lady, whoever she was.”

“Admiration noted—and you might
examine little Dahlia here, who’s the spit of her Ma, fulminate me if she
ain’t, fact if you’re ramblin by some ten, twelve years hence, why ride on
over, have another look, make an offer, no price too small or too insulting I
wouldn’t consider. Or if you’re willing to wait, take an option now to buy, got
her on special, today and tomorrow only, dollar ninetyeight takes her away,
heartbreakin smile and all. Yehp—there, lookit, just like ’at. Throw you
in an extra bonnet, I’m a reasonable sort, ’n’ the minute she blows that
sweetsixteenth birthday candle out, why she’s on them rails, express to wherever
you be.”

“Seems a little long to wait, don’t
it?” leered Chick Counterfly.

“—I could go age fifteen, I
guess,” Merle went on, twinkling directly at Lindsay Noseworth strangling with
indignation, “but you’d have to pay in gold, and come fetch her on your own
ticket
. . . .
But say now would you
mind if I got a snap of you all in front of this Trouvéscrew unit over here?”

The boys, fascinated as always with
modern sciences such as the photographic, were of course happy to comply.
Chevrolette managed to mollify even Lindsay by borrowing his “skimmer” and
holding it coyly in front of their faces, as if to conceal a furtive kiss,
while the frolicsome Darby Suckling, without whose spirited “clowning” no group
snapshot would have been complete, threatened the pair with a baseball bat and
a comical expression meant to convey his ingenuous notion of jealous rage.

Lunchtime arrived, and with it
Lindsay’s announcement of early liberty.

“Hurrah!” cried Chick Counterfly, “me
and old Suckling here being starboard liberty section will just head on over to
that Midway Plaisance, to have us a peep at Little Egypt and that Polynesian
exhibit, and if we can fit it in, why some of those African Amazons
too—oh, and don’t worry, lad, anything you need explained, just ask me!”

“Come on, boys,” Chevrolette McAdoo
gesturing with a cigarette in a rhinestoneencrusted holder, “I’m headed in for
work now, I can show you backstage at the South Seas, too.”

“Oboy, oboy,” Darby’s nose beginning
to run.

“
Sucklinggg?
”
screamed Lindsay, but to
no avail. Crowds of colorfullydressed aeronauts had swept between them, as
ships arrived and took off, and the great makeshift aerodrome seethed with
distractions and chance meetings
. . . .

In fact, just about then who should
arrive, aboard a stately semirigid craft of Italian design, but the boys’
longtime friend and mentor Professor Heino Vanderjuice of Yale University, a
look of barely suppressed terror on his features, desperately preoccupied
during the craft’s descent with keeping secured to his head a stovepipe hat
whose dents, scars, and departures from the cylindrical spoke as eloquently as
its outdated style of a long and adventuresome history.

“Galloping gasbags, but it’s just
capital to see you fellows again!” the Professor greeted them. “Last I heard,
you’d come to grief down in New Orleans, no doubt from packing away more
alligator
à l’étouffée
than that old
Inconvenience
quite had the
lift for!”

“Oh, an anxious hour or two,
perhaps,” allowed Randolph, his facial expression suggesting gastric memories.
“Tell us, Professor, how is your work coming along? What recent marvels
emerging from the Sloane Laboratory?”

“Well now, there’s a student of
Professor Gibbs whose work really bears looking into, young De Forest, a
regular wizard with the electricity
. . .
along
with a Japanese visitor, Mr. Kimura—but say, where can a starving
pedagogue and his pilot get a couple of those famous Chicago beefsteaks around
here? Boys, like you to meet Ray Ipsow, without whom I’d still be back in Outer
Indianoplace, waiting for some interurban that never comes.”

“Just missed you boys once, over
there in that Khartoum business,” the genial skyfarer informed them, “trying to
make it out of town a couple steps ahead of the Mahdi’s army—saw you
sailing overhead, wished I could’vebeen on board, had to settle for jumpin in
the river and waiting till the clambake subsided a little.”

“As it happened,”
 
Lindsay, the Unit Historian, recalled,
“we caught a contrary wind, and ended up in the middle of some unpleasantness
in Oltre Giubba, instead of down at Alex, where we had counted upon some weeks
of educational diversion, not to mention a more salubrious atmosphere.”

“Why and bless me,” the Professor
cried, “if that isn’t Merle Rideout I see!”

“Still up to no good,” Merle beamed.

“No need for introductions, then,”
Lindsay calculated.

“Nah, we’re partners in crime, from
back in the olden days in Connecticut, long before your time, fellows, I used
to do some tinkering for him now and then. Don’t suppose one of you boys could
get a snap of us together?”

“Sure!” volunteered Miles.

They went off to a steak house nearby
for lunch. Though reunions with the Professor were always enjoyable, this time
something different, some autumnal disquiet behind the climate of warm
celebration, produced psychogastric twinges Randolph had learned from
experience he could ignore only at his peril.

Having attended several useful
symposia for airship commanders on techniques for avoiding the display of hurt
feelings, Randolph could detect now that something was preying on the
Professor’s mind. In a curious departure from the goodhearted old fellow’s
usual “style,” his luncheon comments today were increasingly brief, indeed on
occasion approaching the terse, and no sooner had the pie
à la mode
made
its appearance than he had called for the check.

“Sorry boys,” he frowned, making a
show of pulling out and consulting his oldfashioned railroad watch. “I’d love
to stay and chat some more, but I’ve a little business to take care of.” He
rose abruptly, as did Ray Ipsow, who, shrugging sympathetically to the boys and
murmuring to Randolph, “I’ll keep an eye on him,” followed the eminent Yale
savant, who, once outside, lost no time hailing a carriage, holding out a
greenback and requesting top speed, and just like that they were off, arriving
at the Palmer House, where the functionary at the desk tipped a salute from a
nonexistent hat brim. “Penthouse suite, Professor, take the elevator over
there, it only makes one stop. They’re expecting you.” If there was a note of
amused contempt in his voice, Professor Vanderjuice was too preoccupied to
notice.

It swiftly became evident to Ray
Ipsow that his friend was in town to conclude a bargain with forces that might
be described, with little risk of overstatement, as evil. In the suite
upstairs, they found heavy curtains drawn against the festive town, lamps
sparsely distributed in a perpetual twilight of tobaccosmoke, no cut flowers or
potted plants, a silence punctuated only rarely by speech, and that generally
telephonic.

One could hardly have expected a
widely celebrated mogul like Scarsdale Vibe not to attend the World’s Columbian
Exposition. Along with the obvious appeal of its thousands of commercial
possibilities, the Chicago Fair also happened to provide a vast ebb and flow of
anonymity, where one could meet and transact business without necessarily being
observed. Earlier that day Vibe had stepped out of his private train, “The
Juggernaut,” onto a personally reserved platform at the Union Station, having
only the night before departed from the Grand Central depot in New York. As
usual, he was in disguise, accompanied by bodyguards and secretaries. He
carried an ebony stick whose handle was a gold and silver sphere chased so as
to represent an accurate and detailed globe of the world, and inside of whose
shaft was concealed a spring, piston, and cylinder arrangement for compressing
a charge of air to propel smallcaliber shot at any who might offend him. A
sealed motor conveyance awaited him, and he was translated as if by supernatural
agency to the majestic establishment defined by State, Monroe, and Wabash. On
the way into the lobby, an elderly woman, respectably though not sumptuously
dressed, approached him, crying, “If I were your mother I would have strangled
you in your cradle.” Calmly Scarsdale Vibe nodded, raised his ebony aircane,
cocked it, and pressed the trigger. The old woman tilted, swayed, and went down
like a tree.

“Tell the house physician the bullet
is only in her leg,” said Scarsdale Vibe helpfully.

No one had
offered to take Professor
Vanderjuice’s hat, so he held it in his lap, as an insecure young actor might a
“prop.”

“They treating you all right over at
the Stockmen’s Hotel?” the magnate inquired.

“Well actually, it’s the Packer’s
Inn, Fortyseventh and Ashland. Right in the middle of the Stockyards and
all—”

“Say,” it occurred to a large and
criminallooking individual who had been whittling an image of a locomotive from
a piece of firewood with one of those knives known throughout the prisons of
our land as an
Arkansas toothpick
,
“you’re not of the vegetarian persuasion, I hope.”

“This is Foley Walker,” said
Scarsdale Vibe, “in whom his mother claims to find virtues not immediately
apparent to others.”

“Guess you can hear that whole
hootenanny from where you are,” Foley went on. “Bet you there’s even guests
known to catch insomnia from it, eh? but there’s equally as many find it
strangely soothing. No different here at the Palmer House, if you think about
it. Racket level runs about the same.”

“Same kind of activities as well,”
muttered Ray Ipsow. They were gathered at a marble table in a sort of parlor,
over cigars and whiskey. The smalltalk had turned to surplus wealth. “I know
this fellow back in New Jersey,” said Scarsdale Vibe, “who collects railroads.
Not just rolling stock, mind, but stations, sheds, rails, yards, personnel, the
whole shebang.”