Peculiar Tales

by Ron Miller

  All of this was enormously expensive, of course—far beyond even the combined means of a pair of spiritualist newspaper editors, a second-rate medium and their families. But there always seemed to be money available when they needed it. As word spread through the community, donations began to trickle in. Then from across the state, then from all of New England, and eventually from everyone in the Union who had heard of Spear and believed in what he was doing.

  And eventually, nine months to the day from the beginning of the great project, the New Motive Power stood complete. There’s no record, sadly enough, of what went through Reverend Spears’ mind as he contemplated the machine, nor that of any of his colleagues. We can only imagine what they thought as they stood in a circle around the table in the center of the lamp-lit parlor. For on the table was the Engine. From its middle rose two polished brass columns, connected at the top by a horizontal steel shaft. In the middle of this and at right angles was another steel rod. At its ends were a pair of hollow steel spheres, each containing a powerful magnet. Beneath the columns and the spheres was a complex apparatus, an inexplicable mass of wires, magnets, coils, rods, spheres, gears, pinions, ratchets, bars, asbestos sheets, rubber tubes and glass jars filled with bubbling liquids. Sandwiching all of this were broad plates of zinc and copper. From the plates extended finger-like conductors that Spear (or Franklin) intended to draw electrical current directly from the atmosphere. Somewhere below the table spun a large flywheel as well as a pair of bellows that inhaled and exhaled slowly and with considerable dignity.

  After inspecting the Machine and making certain that all was as had been dictated, Spear climbed into a kind of metallic cage, not unlike those that used to hang at the city limits of medieval villages, containing the rotting corpses of the lawless and disobedient. This was, of course, a little higher-class than those instruments of torture, being meticulously and beautifully constructed of contrasting metal strips, crystal and gemstones. As the cage drew energy from the great Machine, Spear fell into a deep trance and a thin, undulating stream of light, a ghostly, electrical umbilicus, grew between his cage and the whirling gears of the New Motive Power.

  Another nine months passed with little news for the faithful from High Rock cottage. But when the news came—in banner headlines in the New Age and New England Spiritualist—it was sensational. The New Mary, they reported, had appeared before the New Messiah as directed by the Electricizers for the final stage of their experiment. She was in the final stages of pregnancy.

  Spears gave his place in the metal cage to the woman; switches were thrown, clutches engaged and the great Machine began to stir.

  The only witnesses were Spears and his disciples and they could only speak of light and terrible noises, but when darkness and quiet returned to the Hutchinson’ parlor the New Mary was no longer pregnant.

  From that moment on, the New Mary tended the Machine as though it were her own child. She tended it, cared for it and nursed it—some said with the milk from her own breasts. Whether this was true or not, no on can deny that the New Motive Power had become transformed, that in some indefinable way had become animate. For Spears it was unequivocal. “The Thing moves!” he declared. “The time of deliverance has come at last, and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward—a mighty noble and a Godlike career! It is the coming of the New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man, New Creation, Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, Philosopher’s Stone, Art of all Arts, Science of all Sciences, the New Messiah!”

  And he was right.

  2. Now

  I’m not normally a very religious man. I mean, I rotate the Holy Rheostat 271 degrees every day at 9:15, 12:21 and 10:32 (Eastern Holy Time) exactly and say the Electronomicon and speak the Words of the Great Spear pretty faithfully and I wear my Magnet of Spiritual Revelation right where I’m supposed to. Everyone does those things, of course. What I mean to say is that I don’t go overboard for all this religious stuff.

  Oh, yeah, and I fear God, of course, but then what right-thinking person doesn’t? I’ve seen what He can do and I know for sure it doesn’t pay to cross Him. So, okay, maybe I don’t have to paint my left index fingernail with mercury amalgam, but who wants to take chances? Like I said, I’m not very religious but neither am I a fool.

  You probably haven’t forgotten last month when that little Bobby Iverson kid asked his teacher if God ever wound down like a watch and lightning hit the school that same afternoon and burned the whole thing to the ground, little Bobby Iverson, his classmates, teachers and all? Or when Luella Snart erupted in cancers the size of cauliflowers when she failed to wear her Magnet of Spiritual Revelation over her left third rib like everyone knows you’re supposed to? Or that week in ‘52 when the atmospheric oxygen in Lynn was reduced by 60 percent after the manager of the Odeon showed that foreign movie with the woman in it who revealed her -nkl-s? The motion picture studio itself was consumed by an earthquake that same day, I am given to understand. But then, people will flaunt the laws of the Messiah so you can hardly feel sorry for what happens to them.

  And I have to admit to a certain pride in living in Lynn, Massachusetts. I guess it’s like those folks who used to live in places like Jerusalem or Mecca or Salt Lake City. When those places were still around, I mean.

  The company I work for, Amalgamated Theoengineering, Inc., is one of only half a dozen contractors licensed to maintain the Messiah. Some of these work on the electrical components, others the chemical. ET, Inc. specializes in the mechanical arrangements and in doing so employs some of the finest engineers and machinists in the country...if I do say so myself.

  The last day (as it turned out to be, though of course no one knew this at the time) was supposed to have been nothing more than a regularly scheduled service and maintenance call. I very much enjoyed these. Not because the work was easy—there was never anything much more to do than a little greasing, cleaning and tightening. The New Motive Power has been clicking along splendidly for over 150 years and there appeared to be no reason for it not to continue to do so forever. No, not because the work was easy, but because of the honor attached. I was, after all, one of the select attendants to God Itself.

  I packed up my tool kit, bundled it into the trunk of my new Ford Spunkster Runabout, fired up the boiler and, as soon as I’d gotten a good head of steam, headed for High Rock. I had only a little difficulty as my machine climbed the long grade into town and I found my clutch beginning to slip, but a quick prayer to Saint Henry soon put that to rights.

  It was a beautiful Spring day...though they have all been so since 1853, of course...and the streets of Lynn were crowded. There were even a few women about, properly attired in their black plywood boxes. I was glad that the reformers who had made so much noise last year, campaigning to allow the boxes to be constructed of one-half inch plywood instead of three-quarter inch, had not had their way. Nor the ones last Winter who wanted to raise the edge of the box to a full two inches above the pavement. It’s unlikely that any such will have their way in the future, either, given that their predecessors had been vaporized each and every one of them. My wife and daughter were among the heretics, I’m sad to say. I do miss them a great deal, of course, but, after, we can’t have women shamelessly showing their -nkl-s in broad daylight on a public highway. What would come next? Removing the iron buckets that cover their heads?

  I pulled the car over to the curb. That’s what happens when one’s mind starts wandering. As soon as I’d thought the word

  “-nkl-s” a disturbingly vivid mental picture of that anatomical hinge came to mind. I immediately pulled my well-worn copy of the Good Book from the glove compartment and read aloud from it until the shameful image was thoroughly purged from my thoughts.

  “Things which equal the same thing are equal to one another. If equals are added to equals, then the sums are equal. If equals are subtracted from equals, then the remainders are equal. Things which coincide with one another are equ
al to one another. The whole is greater than the part. Amen.”

  That made me feel a great deal better and, putting aside any further sinful thoughts, I threw the Spunkster into gear and continued up the road to High Rock.

  The priests at the Holy Cottage smiled and waved me through the gate. They all look pretty much alike, being every one of them direct descendants of the New Mary and Saints Spear, Hutchinson, Hewitt or Newton. Fortunately, I have always been spared the embarrassment of needing to address any of them by name.

  The New Motive Power was where it always was and looking pretty much as it always did...yet being in the presence of God always made me feel humble and awed.

  “In equal circles equal circumferences are subtended by equal straight lines,” I said, genuflecting before Its gleaming, well-oiled Holiness. “If in a right-angled triangle a perpendicular be drawn from the right angle to the base, the triangles adjoining the perpendicular are similar both to the whole and to one another. Amen.”

  Then I opened my tool kit and got to work.

  It typically requires about three hours to give the New Motive Power a thorough inspection, something which had years before become little more than well-practiced routine. After all, beyond a little cleaning and oiling, what else could God possibly require? So I went into a kind of automatic mode, putting full trust in my basal ganglia, while my mind happily wandered among the anticipated events of the coming week. Not the least of which would be the weekend of the Annual Festival of the Great Age of the Machine, which not coincidentally coincided with the birthday of his Holiness, John Murray Spear. Sister Mary Pinion had promised to be there and I looked forward to seeing her with—I admit—an eagerness I hoped the New Motive Power would understand and forgive. Still, even within the Holiest place in the universe, where my thoughts should have by all rights been nothing less than the Holiest, I found myself recalling the insouciance with which Sister Mary canted her bucket when listening to me read from the Good Book. Only a degree or two from the vertical, mind you—she was no hussy—but enough to noticeably increase my metabolic rate. Indeed, thoughts of Sister Mary’s saucily tipped bucket increased my metabolic rate even now.

  This is why I was surprised that I noticed anything wrong at all.

  I’m not sure what attracted my attention to that one particular cam—out of the many thousands that were imperceptibly turning on the hundreds of shafts in the case before me—but there was certainly something about it that did not seem quite right. Throwing out the clutch that temporarily disconnected that line of cams from God’s chassis, I pried it from its shaft and took note of its registration number: 12,349,973. That didn’t seem right so I checked the numbers on the cams to either side. The one on the left was 12,349,971 but the one on the right was 12,349,972. It was patently obvious what had happened. A century and a half ago, when the New Motive Power had been originally assembled, cam 12,349,973 and cam 12,349,972 had been transposed. I was about to correct their placement when I paused... What, I asked myself, did this mean? The New Motive Power had obviously been running perfectly for generations in spite of the cams being misplaced. Had any harm been done? The world was as perfect as it could possibly be. In fact, wasn’t this perfection itself a sure indication that the transposition of the cams in fact made no difference at all? In a sense, I thought, this small imperfection only proved the ultimate perfection of the New Motive Power, didn’t it?

  But still...it was an imperfection, after all, small and insignificant as it might be. I certainly would not be doing my job as a licensed theoengineer nor my duty to the New Motive Power were I to replace the cam where I’d found it, close the hood and forget about it. After all, if the cam did no harm in the wrong place, it could hardly do any harm if placed in the position it was meant to occupy. And, as hard to imagine as it might be, the perfect world might become that little bit more perfect.

  But then—was I being presumptuous in thinking that a mere theoengineer could in some way improve on the New Motive Power and the world it had created? What if what I perceived as a fault—infinitely minor though it may be—was in fact an intentional anomaly, one planned by the Machine itself for itself? Who was I to assume it had no purpose? Or that I could even understand what that purpose might be? What if the transposed cam, in its small way, was responsible for some part of the world’s perfection?

  There are no books any more—other than the Good Book of St. Euclid, of course—but people still tell tales of what the world had been like before the coming of the New Motive Power, tales passed down from father to son for five generations. How in the old days women and the other inferior races had laughably thought themselves the equals of men. How women had gone naked in public, shamelessly exposing their faces, necks, wrists and -nkl-s. How unbelievers, heathens and heretics had gone unpunished, how they had actually been allowed to not only hold their blasphemous beliefs but to express them without fear of instantaneous disintegration. Hard to believe as it may be, there had even been different varieties of humans, called “races” or “breeds”. If the stories can be credited, there were once humans of all sort of different colors: red, yellow, brown and even purple, for all I know. They were even shaped differently, with odd-looking noses, eyes and hair. These old tales were probably inspired by the useful anthropoids or demi-humans which the New Motive Power has, in its intelligence, made our servants. Indeed, they do resemble the descriptions of many of the “races” described in the stories, but any resemblances to true humans are—of course—merely superficial. These creatures are merely being a variety of dumb beast, hardly any different than, say, a horse, dog or sheep.

  Instead of a half-hour’s rain every other Thursday, the weather had been utterly unpredictable...often disastrously so, with not only rain but horrors such as snow, sleet, hail, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes occurring entirely at random. One day a person might find themselves broiling and the next freezing. When I think of the perpetual, well-regulated Spring provided by the New Motive Power, I cannot even begin to imagine how the human race survived in its primordial days. But beyond providing a clockwork Nature, the New Motive Power enforced proper morality and right thinking among the people of the world.

  The more I thought about it the more I became convinced that repairing the misplaced cam was the right thing to do. How could it possibly be otherwise? It beggared sense, logic and theology that the New Motive Power would allow anything harmful to come to either it or the ideal world it had created. If anything, it was just conceivable that there might perhaps be some small imperfection somewhere on the planet, as unlikely as that might sound—perhaps a snail that was near-sighted or a postage stamp with inferior adhesive—and this repair would clean up that final, remaining detail of Creation. This made imminent sense to me. To not switch the cams would, I decided, be a distinctly unholy thing to do.

  It took but a moment.

  I have to admit that I was still a little worried when I left Holy Cottage, but I was soon reassured. Everything seemed no different than it had before. If the repair had resulted in any changes they were obviously small ones, so I felt considerable relief in the knowledge that I’d done the right thing.

  The Odeon cinema at the bottom of the hill was still showing Devil Sluts With Chainsaws and the old head shop next door was apparently still doing the same brisk business it had back when I was in college. I waved to Chung Liu as he opened the Curry-in-a-Hurry in anticipation of the lunch crowd. He and I are on the committee to get Andrew Jackson Mbondolo re-elected mayor. He was running on a pro-abortion ticket and was a shoe-in for the office.

  Everything was as it had always been and I can hardly tell you how relieved I was.

  It was a beautiful day—with only a few scattered showers—so I took my time driving home. I was glad I did, too, since young Mary Pinion was sunbathing in her yard, though I really knew that she was only showing off her new monokini. I gave her an appreciative whistle as I passed and she laughed and shouted out a cheery �
�Good morning!” It was just a harmlessly flattering game of flirtation we played—I certainly had no designs on her nor her upon me. Besides Miss Pinion already had her full share of enthusiastic boyfriends and I had my adored wife, Ethelberta.

  She was pleased to see me home so early...and I was no less pleased to see her. My job too often takes me away from home for long hours, so it was a real treat to have most of a day to spend with her. She looked lovelier than usual, too, her brief red playsuit showing off her long tanned limbs to the greatest advantage. I felt a sudden surge of affection for my beautiful Ethelberta and as I embraced her our tentacles slowly entwined in that complex macramé of blue flesh that I knew spelled nothing other than True Love.

  MS FOUND AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  P.T. Barnum’s prize elephant Jumbo was killed September 15, 1885, crossing railroad tracks in St. Thomas, Ontario. The collision derailed the train, and 150 people were required to haul the elephant’s body up an embankment.

  Day I

  When God retired in the year 2173, no one but the most mean-spirited begrudged him that. After all, had the human race been less of a pain in the ass, the poor fellow surely would not have been forced into a premature dotage at a time when most other gods are just entering their prime. His retirement threw the churches for a loop, of course, once prayers started coming back with “Address Unknown” stamped on them. The Bible Belt had a fit, naturally, since everyone expected Satan and his minions to run riot over the Earth as soon as God had packed up and left, but it turned out that there was no such thing as the devil or demons or even hell for that matter. God had invented them all from scratch.