by Jerry
Enzo had long known that if he brushed his hand across certain materials, such as fur or wool or silk, an electric charge accumulated, so that if he then reached for a piece of metal a spark would jump from his finger to the metal, giving him a tiny shock. In his tailor shop he had noticed that he was able to get a particularly large spark by drawing wool cloth across the brass yardstick which formed the end of his cutting table, so he planned a machine with a broad continuous belt of thick wool looped tightly between two brass rollers and, of course, at one end there would be a large hollow copper sphere, pierced with a hole so that one of the rollers could be fixed inside.
10
The sky was blue and the air warm when Lydia next visited the tailor’s shop. The clothing dummy in the window—the top half of a cheerful man who had worn a Harris tweed jacket all winter—now wore a white jacket with bright azure stripes; furthermore, he had a straw boater on his head and his stiff hands were holding a cardboard sign (On Vacation! Will return in future. ) The door was unlocked, so Lydia walked through the shop and out to the garden where Enzo, in his shirt sleeves, was bent over a gleaming brass roller at least a yard long. His back was toward her, so she called out, “Mr. Capellino, hello.”
He straightened up and turned around, smiling. “You make my name sound so beautiful,” he said. “Please call me Enzo.”
“And you may call me Lydia, if you wish,” she replied.
“Lydia, I’ll get us something cool to drink.” He dashed up a rickety flight of outdoor stairs and entered the floor above the shop. Lydia looked around at the curved sheets of metal which lay here and there, and at the tangled garden which was just beginning to come into blossom. Enzo returned with a painted tray bearing a bottle and two glasses half-filled with ice.
“You are actually building an actual time machine,” Lydia said, clearly surprised.
“Actually, yes.” He poured something as dark as coffee from the bottle into one of the glasses and handed it to her.
“Now, I hope you will accept this,” Lydia said, handing him a large flat parcel. While Enzo unfolded the wrapping paper, she told him, “The librarian from Harvard says that the bookcase behind my father’s desk has a number of valuable books about botany and horticulture. Dwight—he’s the librarian—knows about these things, about how valuable the books are. Right down to the penny. He’s afraid somebody might steal one of the volumes, so we should give them to Harvard for permanent safekeeping. He’s not concerned about this one and he let me take it from the house. It’s my father’s garden diary, all about the flowers in back of our house. Twenty years of notes and drawings.”
Enzo gently opened the worn volume. “This is wonderful, truly wonderful,” he murmured. “It’s a treasure and it should remain in your family. I appreciate your thinking of me,”—he was pressing the notebook to his chest as he said this—“but this journal should remain in your family, in your hands,” he said, giving it back to her. “Your father was a great botanist. He loved his plants almost as much as he loved you.”
Lydia’s eyes glistened and there was an awkward silence. Enzo raised his glass. “To you,” he said cheerfully and he drank.
Lydia raised her glass. “To you,” she echoed. The beverage was like liquid fire and not sweet. “Well!” she said, gasping from the drink. “Well, well, well. Please tell me about your machine.”
Enzo described how he was building a hollow metal tube which would be about four feet in diameter and stand about twenty feet tall. Inside, at the bottom of the tube, was a brass roller driven by an electric motor. A broad belt of wool ran from the bottom roller, up the tube and over another brass roller, then down the tube to the bottom roller again. And at the top of the tube there would be a great hollow metal sphere to gather the electric charges which would fly from the cloth, he explained. “That’s the hard part,” he added.
“The electric charges?”
“No. The hard part is getting the sphere to rest just right at the top of the tube. It’s already fallen down twice. I think I’ve misplaced some pieces.”
“It’s best to keep everything in its place, because then there’s a place for everything. That’s what Dwight says.”
“Oh, yes. Dwight,” murmured Enzo. “Would you like a little more wine?”
“Is it legal to drink this?”
“Oh, yes. My father made this many, many years ago. Before Prohibition. He loved to make wine. Shall I refill your glass?”
Lydia began to laugh—a remarkably rich musical laugh. “Ah, Enzo, please, do,” she said, holding out her glass. She was, Enzo realized, just the slightest bit drunk. The days were getting longer and they enjoyed each other’s company until twilight, when Lydia said good-bye.
11
Under the hot Sun Enzo had stripped to the waist and was working on the starter switch of the time machine when Lydia walked into the garden. “Hello, Enzo,” she said. “I received your invitation and here I am.” The 1920s fashion for women was all flatness and no curves, which struck Enzo as comically wrong, yet as she came walking in her sleeveless dress, one hand swinging the long strand of large green beads she wore around her neck, she was the most desirable woman in the world. As for Lydia, she wondered why she was there, saying hello to this short bronze man whose shoulders glistened with sweat and whose thick chest hair—well, Enzo had already snatched up his shirt and was buttoning it while she took in the great time machine. It stood erect in the center of the small garden, a thick twenty-foot column topped by a sphere which had been beautifully proportioned to the shaft but, as Enzo explained to Lydia, it had fallen a few times and was now somewhat reshaped. Indeed, it resembled a blunt arrowhead pointing skyward. “What do you think?” Enzo asked her.
Lydia shaded her eyes with her hand and gazed up at his apparatus. “It reminds me of something. I can’t think what. It’s rather like—Oh!—It does look rather like a, or like the—” Lydia hesitated, searching for the proper term. “Yes, like a stamen, the stamen of a great flower.”
Enzo stood beside her, also looking up at it. “Ah, I had not thought of that,” Enzo said slowly. “But, yes, I suppose it does.”
“And it will make lightning?” she asked him.
“Yes, at the top. I’m sure of that.”
“And the lightning will tear the fabric of space-time, make a little rip in it?”
“Yes, I’m sure of that, too.”
“And you’ll be able to leap forward into next year or the year after that?”
“Ah,” Enzo sat down on a small garden bench. “I’m not so sure of that. I’ve been working without sleep for the past five days. But I hope so.” Indeed, he did look tired.
“I hope so, too,” Lydia said.
“I’ll get us a cool drink,” Enzo said. He went up the wobbly flight of outdoor stairs and into his rooms above the shop and came back down with a basket of ice which cradled two large bottles of wine and two glasses. The day was warm and there was an uncertain breeze that blew strongly one moment and vanished the next, leaving only a dry stillness. Lydia sat on a cast-iron garden chair and Enzo sat on the small wood bench and they drifted in a long winding conversation as they drank the cool wine.
Lydia asked him about the metalwork at the top of the outdoor stairway. “It looks like a big bird cage,” she said.
“Ah, that’s a protective cage,” Enzo said. “After starting the machine, I’ll go up those stairs and get inside it. At that height I’ll be level with the top of the lightning machine and close to it, but the lattice of metal will protect me from being hit.”
Lydia looked worried. “Are you sure you’ll be safe? Won’t you be electrocuted?”
Enzo smiled. “I’ll be safe. My only worry is that the rip in the fabric of space-time won’t be big enough for me to slip through.”
Lydia looked at the metal column with its banged up arrow-head crown. “How strange,” she said reflectively. “Here you are on an ordinary Monday afternoon. You’re about to leap forward in time,
and no one knows.”
“You’re here, and that’s the world to me. Now it’s time I tested it.” Enzo strode to the machine and pressed the starter button. The motor began turning the brass roller so the great wool belt began to move, rising up inside the tall metal cylinder, passing over the roller inside the metal sphere and down again. Little by little the speed of the rollers increased, the belt blurred, and the air was filled with a humming rattle. Enzo drank off the last of his wine, tossed the glass over his shoulder—he discovered that he could make these gestures with complete confidence so long as Lydia was nearby—and mounted the trembling stairway to the lattice cage. He stepped into the cage and looked down to the garden to discover that Lydia’s chair was empty. She was running up the stairs. She called to him, but the humming of the machine had grown louder.
“The librarian is going to ask me to marry him,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I haven’t been able to sleep for days.”
“I can’t hear you,” cried Enzo from inside the cage, plainly shocked at what he had heard.
“He wrote me a letter last week, saying he was going to ask me this evening.”
“The librarian!”
“Yes, Dwight has a schedule, and this evening he’s going to ask me to marry him. What do you think—”
“I think he’s an unpronounceable clump of consonants,” Enzo shouted over the growing thunder of the machine.
“Dwight says the future is known to people who make schedules.”
“Will you marry a man who has a place for everything and everything in its place? A time for everything and everything in its time?”
“I’m forty-one years old and no one has ever proposed marriage to me,” she said, lifting her voice against the crackle of sparks.
“I’m forty-three and have never dared propose marriage to anyone. I’ve achieved nothing!”
A bluish glow hovered over the row of phonograph needles which were fixed a hairsbreadth from the flying surface of the belt, and long thread-like sparks began to flare from the bent edges of the sphere atop the machine.
“You have made this wonderful machine,” she cried.
“But it may work no better than I have!”
Enzo threw open the lattice door and started out to meet her just as Lydia started in, the two clutching each other as the first lightning bolt unfurled and snapped overhead like a colossal whip. The hair on Enzo’s chest burst into flame, scorching Lydia’s breasts. The world overflowed with light as every nail and rivet, every garden tool, the cast iron garden chair and even the garden itself surged toward them, all the while flaring apart, coming undone. “Yes!” Lydia thought—or maybe she actually cried aloud—“Yes! We’re at the front edge of now and these are the raveled threads of space-time.” And everything melted like a meteor into the rising dark.
12
When Enzo opened his eyes he was flat on his back in the garden. He realized that his arms were around Lydia, her arms over his shoulders and her eyes closed in sleep. The collapsed remnants of the lattice cage lay upon them like a shredded blanket. Lydia opened her eyes and sat up. She looked at the blue sky, glanced down at her singed dress and the string of melted beads, then looked at Enzo. “We’re alive and it’s a beautiful day,” she said.
“Yes,” said Enzo, looking at his pocket watch whose fused hands said three o’clock. “And I wonder which day it is.”
They went through the shop and out the front door to the street to ask the first passerby what day it was and what time of day. It was three in the afternoon on Tuesday, May 22, 1928, precisely twenty-four hours ahead of where they had been.
“You’ve worked wonders, Enzo. We’ve jumped a day ahead and we’re free to make whatever we want of our time.”
“I propose marriage,” he said, smiling up at her.
“I accept,” she said, returning his smile.
Then they set off to get dinner, because they both felt wonderfully hungry, quite famished in fact, as if they had been asleep and had not eaten for a whole day.
13
In June of 1928 a man buying a seersucker jacket asked Enzo what the equipment in the back yard was for. When Enzo told him that it was a machine for generating lightning bolts, the man became extraordinarily interested and asked so many questions that Enzo, in a burst of confidence, began to tell him about the fabric of space-time, upon which the man gave a short laugh and said the tailor didn’t know what he was talking about.
In 1929, a year after Enzo and Lydia had made their jump forward in time, Robert Van de Graaff built a small electrostatic generator at Princeton University, capable of producing around eighty thousand volts. Later, at the inaugural dinner of the American Institute of Physics, he demonstrated an improved version of the same apparatus. It resembled in all essentials the very much larger and more powerful machine which had stood behind Capellino’s shop. In 1931 Van de Graaff joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began assembling a double generator composed of two twenty-three-foot-high columns, each containing two belts and supporting an aluminum sphere six feet in diameter. This machine, capable of generating fifty million electron volts, was housed in its own building at MIT and, after some changes, was used as an atom smasher. In the 1950s MIT donated it to the Boston Museum of Science and in 1980 the Museum installed it in the Thomson Theatre of Electricity, where it currently produces spectacular demonstrations of man-made lightning.
14
Enzo and Lydia were married on Saturday, June 23, 1928, and their daughter, Abigail Santuzza Capellino, was born in autumn of the following year. They lived in the large square house on Kirkland Street, and Enzo continued to work as a tailor for some months, then sold his shop in order to devote himself to the extensive Chase gardens, which were succumbing to overgrowth and weeds. Old Professor Chase’s collection of works by Charles Downing led Enzo and Lydia to an interest in pomology, and they became quite expert in that field, publishing a number of papers on apple species of New England and New York.
Although they wrote for scholarly horticultural journals and for garden club magazines, neither Enzo nor Lydia ever published anything about their time transit. They remained silent about the event partly because they enjoyed their privacy, and partly because they came to know how dangerous the experiment had been. They were lucky to have awakened with nothing worse than hunger pangs, as if they had merely been asleep for a day, but they feared some other experimenter might not survive. Despite the protective metal latticework, technically known as a Faraday cage, the couple were fortunate not to have been electrocuted—much as Ben Franklin, flying his kite into an electrical storm, had been fortunate. Still, a lightning flash during a summer storm always remained a happy sight for the couple. It was a great pleasure for Lydia and Enzo to take their grandchildren to the Museum of Science in Boston to witness the lightning bolts thrown off by that machine which is called a Van de Graaff generator.
Most encyclopedias have an entry for Robert Jamison Van de Graaff (1901-1967) and, if the encyclopedia is large enough, there maybe one for Augusto Righi (1850-1920), a figure better known in Italy where there is, indeed, a school named for him. But virtually no one has heard of Enzo Augusto Capellino (1885-1970) or Lydia Prescott Capellino (1887-1971). I wish to thank Abigail Capellino Beauchemin, the daughter of Enzo and Lydia, who has generously made available to me her father’s notes and diagrams, and her mother’s diary for the years 1927 and 1928.
2004
THE OCEAN OF THE BLIND
James L. Cambias
By the end of his second month at Hitode Station, Rob Freeman had already come up with eighty-five ways to murder Henri Kerlerec. That put him third in the station’s rankings—Josef Palashnik was first with one hundred forty-three, followed by Nadia Kyle with ninety-seven. In general, the number and sheer viciousness of the suggested methods was in proportion to the amount of time each spent with Henri.
Josef, as the primary submarine pilot, had to spend upward of thirty hours eac
h week in close quarters with Henri, so his list concentrated on swift and brutal techniques suitable for a small cockpit. Nadia shared lab space with Henri—which in practice meant she did her dissections in the kitchen or on the floor of her bedroom—and her techniques were mostly obscure poisons and subtle deathtraps.
Rob’s specialty was underwater photography and drone operation. All through training he had been led to expect he would be filming the exotic life forms of Ilmatar, exploring the unique environment of the remote icy world and helping the science team understand the alien biology and ecology. Within a week of arrival he found himself somehow locked into the role of Henri Kerlerec’s personal cameraman, gofer, and captive audience. His list of murder methods began with “strangling HK with that stupid ankh necklace” and progressed through cutting the air hose on Henri’s drysuit, jamming him into a thermal vent, abandoning him in midocean with no inertial compass, and feeding him to an Aenocampus.
Some of the others on the station who routinely read the hidden “Death To HK” board had protested that last one as being too cruel to the Aenocampus.
Rob’s first exposure to killing Henri came at a party given by Nadia and her husband Pierre Adler in their room, just after the support vehicle left orbit for the six-month voyage back to Earth. With four guests there was barely enough room, and to avoid overloading the ventilators they had to leave the door open. For refreshment they served melons from the hydroponic garden filled with some of Palashnik’s home-brew potato vodka. One drank melon-flavored vodka until the hollow interior was empty, then cut vodka-flavored melon slices.
“I’ve got a new one,” said Nadia after her third melon slice. “Put a piece of paper next to Le Nuke for a few months until it’s radioactive, then write him a fan letter and slip it under his door. He’d keep the letter for his collection and die of gradual exposure.”