Against the Day (79 page)

“I have smelled something like this
before,” pondered Miles, “yet. . . not in this life. For
. . .
in the way that certain odors can instantly return us to
earlier years . . .”

“Nasotemporal Transit,” nodded the
savvy youth. “There’s a seminar on that tomorrow, over at Finney Hall. Or do I
mean day before yesterday?”

“Well, sir, this Smegmo concoction
here takes me back even
further
than childhood, in fact clear on back
into a previous life, to
before I was even conceived
—”

“Miles, for goodness’ sake,” Lindsay,
blushing and kicking his shipmate beneath the table, “T.A.L.P!” this being
Chums of Chance code for “There Are Ladies Present.” Indeed, a tableful of
florescent “coeds” nearby had been following the exchange with some interest.

“Oboy,
oboy,” Darby nudging Chick Counterfly, his longstanding partner in mischief.
“Them sure ain’t Gibson Girls, I betcha! Look at the hairdo on that blonde
there! Whoowee!”

“Suckling,” gritted Lindsay,
“although, in a career which has tended increasingly to the squalid, further
enormities without question await, none will prove to have been more
objectionable, morally speaking, than these current manifestations of a
diseased adolescence.”

“You ever get around to having your
own, let me know,” Darby replied, in tones which suggested an intention to
bite. “Maybe I can pass on a few tips.”

“Why, you insufferable little—”

“Gentlemen,” Randolph frowningly
grasping his abdomen, “perhaps you will find it possible to put off this no
doubt fascinating colloquy until a lesspublic occasion. And might I add, Mr.
Noseworth, that these constant attempts to strangle Suckling do our public
image little good.”

Later that morning, together with
Professor Vanderjuice, they piled into a motorcar to pay a visit to the
municipal dump at the edge of town, gray with perpetual smoke, its limits
undefined. “Walloping Wellesianism!” cried the Professor, “it’s just a whole
junkyard full!” Up and down the steeplypitched sides of a ravine lay the
pickedover hulks of failed time machines— Chronoclipses, Asimov
Transeculars, Tempomorph Q98s—broken, defective, scorched by catastrophic
flares of misrouted energy, corroded often beyond recognition by unintended
immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and built, so
hopefully, to prevail
. . . .
A strewn
field of conjecture, superstition, blind faith, and bad engineering, expressed
in sheetaluminum, vulcanite, Heusler’s alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum
vitae, platinoid, magnalium, and packfong silver, much of it stripped away by
scavengers over the years. Where was the safe harbor in Time their pilots might
have found, so allowing their craft to avoid such ignominious fates?

Though they took a careful inventory,
neither Chick nor Darby was able to find, assembled or in pieces, the model of
machine in which Dr. Zoot had dispatched them into that apocalyptic sweep of
masses which still troubled their moments of reverie.

“We must find this Meatman person,
whom the ‘Doctor’ mentioned,” declared Chick. “A visit to his local tavern
would seem in order.”

   
“The
Ball in Hand,” recalled Darby—“and say, what are we waitin for?”

   
As
the years had gone by, Earth making its automorphic way round the sun again and
yet again, the Candlebrow Conferences themselves had converged to a form of
Eternal Return. No one, for example, was ever seen to age. Those who, each
intervening year, might have, in some technical sense,

“died” outside the precincts of this enchanted campus, once
having drifted back through the gates, were promptly “resurrected.” Sometimes
they brought their obituary clippings with them, to share chucklingly with
colleagues. These were solid bodily returns, mind you, nothing figurative or
plasmic about them. Even to suggest that possibility had been known to fetch
more than one skeptic a “sock in the kisser” for its imputations of frailty and
unmanliness. The advantages to this genial revenance were apparent to all,
chief among them the pleasures of ignoring medical advice, indulging in strong
drink and lifethreateningly fatty foodstuffs, staying out after hours in the
company of the louche and demonstrably criminal, gaming on a scale and at odds
whose longitude might have produced apoplexy even in much younger and fitter
specimens of timescholar. And all of these diversions and more happened to be
available in profusion down along the river, on lower Symmes Street and the
alleyways adjoining, where the desperate men resorted, where heads were cracked
routinely by the stiffhatted security of the night, while only yards away
flowed the river tidied as the inside of an office, the wooden traffic rocking
at ease on its gaslit breast
. . . .
Some
Candlebrow conferees had claimed to see in this a parable for that otherworldly
flow, insulated from secular ills, which we know as the River of Time.

The boys found their way down to West
Symmes Street and into the Ball in Hand, which proved to be a particularly low
and disreputable haunt. Renegade carnival girls, some with Pygmy boyfriends
escaped from the St. Louis Fair, danced, with a scandalous flourishing of
petticoats, on the tabletops. A troupe of Polish comedians, each armed with his
personal
giant kielbasa sausage,
ran about trading blows from these
objects, principally to the head, with untiring vivacity. Negro quartets sang
old favorites in seventhchord harmonies. Faro and fantan were available in the
back rooms.

A young person of neglected aspect,
holding a bottle of some reddish liquid, accosted the boys. “You’re the ones
lookin fer Alonzo Meatman, I’ll bet.”

“Maybe,” replied Darby, reaching for
and grasping his regulationissue “preserver.” “Who wants to know?”

Their interlocutor began to shiver,
to look around the room with increasingly violent jerks of the head.

   
“They
. . .
they . . .”

“Come, man, get a grip on yourself,”
admonished Lindsay. “Who are this ‘they’ to whom you refer?”

But the youngster was shaking violently
now, his eyeballs, jittering in their orbits, gone wild with fright. Around the
edges of his form, a strange magentaandgreen aura had begun to flicker, as if
from a source somewhere behind

him, growing more intense as he himself faded from view, until
seconds later nothing was left but a kind of stain in the air where he had
been, a warping of the light as through ancient windowglass. The bottle he had
been holding, having remained behind, fell to the floor with a crash that
seemed curiously prolonged.

“Rats,” muttered Darby, watching its
contents soak into the sawdust, “and here I was hankering after a ‘slug’ of
that stuff.”

No one besides the Chums, in the
roomful of merrymakers, gave any sign of having noticed. Lindsay, queerly
distracted, was groping in the empty space but recently occupied by the
vanished youth, as if he had somehow chosen to become only invisible.

“I would suggest,” Miles drifting
toward the egress, “vacating these premises, before we meet a similar fate.”

Outside, Chick, who had remained
silent through the episode, approached Randolph. “Professor, be informed that I
am now invoking the Scientific Officer’s Discretionary, or S.O.D., Clause, as
provided for in our Charter.”

“Again, Mr. Counterfly? One assumes
you have properly filled in your Finding of Unusual Circumstances
Questionnaire?”

Chick handed over the elaborately
engraved document. “All in order, I hope—”

“Look here, Chick, are you quite
resolved in this? You remember the last time, over that Hawaiian
volcano—”

“Which was mutiny pure and simple
then,” interjected Lindsay, “as it is now.”

“Not in
my
legal opinion,”
chirped Darby, who had been scrutinizing the chit—“Chick’s S.O.D. here’s
just as kosher as Smegmo.”

“A somewhat hollow pronouncement,
given the alltoopredictable thickness of association between you and
Counterfly.”

“You want thick?” snarled Darby,
“here, try this.”

“Our operating altitude,” Chick
endeavored to explain, “and the presence of unknown volcanic gases, may have
affected my judgment then, it’s true. But this time I mean to remain on the
ground, with no dimensional issues.”

“Except for the Fourth, of course,”
warned Miles Blundell, his voice solemn as if issuing from mortal distances.
“Fifth, and so on.”

His shipmates having departed, Chick
entered the shadowy taproom once more, obtained a glass of beer, sat at a table
with a view of the entrance, and waited, a technique learned years before in
Japan, among the Zennist mystics of that country (see
The Chums of Chance
and the Caged Women of Yokohama
),
known as “just sitting.” It was during the same trip, Chick
recalled,

that Pugnax had confounded a Zennist
monastery, by answering the classic koan “Does a dog possess the Buddhanature?”
not with “Mu!” but with “Yes, obviously—was there anything else?”

Time did not so much elapse as grow
less relevant. At length Chick saw the recently vanished “contact” reappear
from vacant space, now bathed in hues of apricot and aquamarine.

   
“You
again.”

“Little trick of the trade. Had to
see how serious you were,” said Alonzo Meatman (for it was he).

“Maybe only lazier than my partners.
They had a night of hellraising to get on with, I just wanted to sit here and
relax.”

   
“Notice
you haven’t touched that beer, there.”

   
“Would
you?”

“Good point. Let me buy you
something—Horst can make whatever you’d like, nobody’s stumped him since
the F.I.CO.T.T., and then it was debatable.”

“Since the
. . .
?”

“First International Conference On
Time Travel, and say, what a hootnanny that was.” Everyone in the world of
science and philosophy had shown up— Niels Bohr was there, Ernst Mach,
young Einstein, Dr. Spengler, Mr. Wells himself. Professor J. M. E. McTaggart
of Cambridge, England, dropped by, to give a brief address dismissing
altogether the
existence
of Time as really too ridiculous to consider,
regardless of its status as a believedin phenomenon.

A brilliant gathering, you might say,
a collaboration of the best minds upon the difficult, indeed paradoxical issue,
sure to result in a working Time Machine (such was the Wellsian optimism of
that era), before the century was out. . . except that this was not how the
Proceedings proceeded. From initial bickering over what nonspecialists would
have to deem trivial matters, disputes had grown with astounding rapidity into
allout academic combat. Splinter groups proliferated. The celebrities in whom
so much hope was invested soon departed by steam train and interurban electric,
by horseback and by airship, usually muttering to themselves. Duels were
proposed, shown up for, and resolved, for the most part,
bloodlessly—except for the unfortunate affair of the McTaggartite, the
neoAugustinian, and the fatal steamed pudding. “Disputes as to the nature of
reality whose outcomes depend in any way on wagering,” as the County Coroner
expressed it, “have seldom been known to conclude happily, especially here, in
view of the vertical distance involved
. . .
.
” For days, while the illfated encounter remained a topic for gossip,
conferees were careful to find excuses not to walk too close to the Old
Stearinery Bell Tower, inspired by the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco in

Venice, and at 322 feet the tallest structure visible in any
direction out to the curve of the Earth, notorious locally for exerting a
fascination upon minds

healthy and disordered alike.

“
You’ve
been walking
, unaware, among them since you arrived,” Alonzo Meatman was
saying. “There’s no discovering them unless they choose so.”

“But for you they have chosen to—”

   
“Yes
and ‘do choose,’ and ‘will choose’—maybe even you, if you’re lucky—
what of it?”

Chick regarded young Meatman.
Clearly, classically, what a homeopathist would call “the
lycopodium
type.”
Somehow the Chums organization attracted these in large numbers. Fear written
in
every
cell. Fear of the
night, of being haunted, of failure, of other matters that may not too
routinely be named. First to get up into the rigging during a storm, not out of
bravery but in desperation, as the only remedy they knew for the cowardice they
feared ever crawling within. This Meatman specimen, it was clear, had climbed
very high into the night, into a vulnerability to the perils of the storm that
few could envy. “Stand easy, skybrother,” Chick replied, “I know only how much
it is costing me tonight to seek you out—further than which, my
bookkeeping does not extend.”

Young Meatman seemed mollified. “You
mustn’t think of it, you know, as betrayal
.
. .
or,
not only
betrayal.”

   
“Oh?
what more?”