Against the Day

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Against the Day Page 4

by Thomas Pynchon


  “That is between you and our National Office,” Randolph supposed. “For here at Unit level, our compensation may not exceed legitimate expenses.”

  “Sounds crazy. But, we’ll have our legal folks draw up some language we can all live with, how’s that?” He was peering at Randolph now with that mixture of contempt and pity which the Chums in their contact with the ground population were sooner or later sure to evoke. Randolph was used to it, but determined to proceed in a professional manner.

  “Of what exactly would our services consist?”

  “Got room on your ship for an extra passenger?”

  “We have carried up to a dozen well-fed adults with no discernible loss of lift,” replied Randolph, his glance not quite able to avoid lingering upon Mr. Privett’s embonpoint.

  “Take our man up on a short trip or two’s about all it’ll amount to,” the sleuth-officer now, it seemed, grown a bit shifty. “Out to the Fair, maybe down to the Yards, duck soup.”

  Strolling among the skyships next morning, beneath a circus sky which was slowly becoming crowded as craft of all sorts made their ascents, renewing acquaintance with many in whose company, for better or worse, they had shared adventures, the Chums were approached by a couple whom they were not slow to recognize as the same photographer and model they had inadvertently bombarded the previous evening.

  The sportive lensman introduced himself as Merle Rideout. “And my fair companion here is . . . give me a minute—”

  “You bean-brain.” The young woman directed a graceful kick which was not, however, altogether lacking in affection, and said, “I’m Chevrolette McAdoo, and mighty pleased to meet you fellows, even if you did nearly sandbag us into the beyond yesterday.” Fully attired, she seemed to have just stepped out of a ladies’ magazine, her ensemble this forenoon right at the vanguard of summer fashion, the current revival of the leg-of-mutton sleeve having resulted in a profusion of shirtwaists with translucent shoulders “big as balloons, all over town”—as Chick Counterfly, a devoted observer of the female form, would express it—in Miss McAdoo’s case, saturated in a vivid magenta, and accompanied by a long ostrich-feather boa dyed the same shade. And her hat, roguishly atilt, egret plumes swooping each time she moved her head, would have charmed even the most zealous of conservationist bird-lovers.

  “Nice put-together,” Chick nodded admiringly.

  “And you haven’t seen the turn she does down to that South Seas Pavilion yet,” declared Merle Rideout gallantly. “Makes Little Egypt look like a church lady.”

  “You are an artiste, Miss McAdoo?”

  “I perform the Dance of Lava-Lava, the Volcano Goddess,” she replied.

  “I greatly admire the music of the region,” said Miles, “the ukulele in particular.”

  “There are several ukulelists in my pit-band,” said Miss McAdoo, “tenor, baritone, and soprano.”

  “And is it authentic native music?”

  “More of a medley, I believe, encompassing Hawaiian and Philippino motifs, and concluding with a very tasteful adaptation of Monsieur Saint-Saëns’s wonderful ‘Bacchanale,’ as recently performed at the Paris Opera.”

  “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. Far-off 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 lifting-screws of strange hyperboloidal design for drilling upward through the air, and winged aerostats, of streamlined shape, and wing-flapping 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 running 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 cow juice 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 fine-looking little girl, sir,” Randolph, brimming with avuncularity. “You are the proud grandfather, of course.”

  “Ha! D’ye hear that, Carrot-head? 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 ninety-eight 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 sweet-sixteenth 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 Trouvé-screw 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.

  Lunch-time 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 rhinestone-encrusted 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 colorfully-dressed 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’ve been 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 good-hearted 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 old-fashioned 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 tobacco smoke, 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 small-caliber 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 air-cane, 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, Forty-seventh and Ashland. Right in the middle of the Stockyards and all—”

  “Say,” it occurred to a large and criminal-looking 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 small-talk 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.”

  “Expensive hobby,” marveled the P
rofessor. “Are there such people?”

  “You have to have some idea of the idle money out here. It can’t all be endowments to the church of one’s choice, mansions and yachts and dog-runs paved with gold or what have you, can it. No, at some point that’s all over with, has to be left behind . . . and still here’s this huge mountain of wealth unspent, piling up higher every day, and dear oh dear, whatever’s a businessman to do with it, you see.”

  “Hell, send it on to me,” Ray Ipsow put in. “Or even to somebody who really needs it, for there’s sure enough of those.”

  “That’s not the way it works,” said Scarsdale Vibe.

  “So we always hear the plutocracy complaining.”

  “Out of a belief, surely fathomable, that merely to need a sum is not to deserve it.”

  “Except that in these times, ‘need’ arises directly from criminal acts of the rich, so it ‘deserves’ whatever amount of money will atone for it. Fathomable enough for you?”

  “You are a socialist, sir.”

  “As anyone not insulated by wealth from the cares of the day is obliged to be. Sir.”

  Foley paused in his whittling and looked over as if in suddenly piqued interest.

  “Now, Ray,” admonished the Professor, “we’re here to discuss electromagnetism, not politics.”

  Vibe chuckled soothingly. “The Professor’s afraid you’re going to chase me off with radical talk like that. But I am not that sensitive a soul, I am guided, as ever, by Second Corinthians.” He had a careful look around the table, estimating the level of Scriptural awareness.

 

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