“What was I doing in Cleveland in the first place?”
Which usually was how Dally got to hear about her mother, in these bits and pieces. One day Merle had read in the Hartford Courant about a couple of professors at the Case Institute in Cleveland who were planning an experiment to see what effect, if any, the motion of the Earth had on the speed of light through the luminiferous Æther. He had already heard in some dim way about the Æther, though being more on the practical side of things, he couldn’t see much use for it. Exists, doesn’t exist, what’s it got to do with the price of turnips basically. And anything that happened at the speed of light would have too many unknowables attached to begin with—closer to religion than science. He discussed it one day with his friend at Yale, Professor Vanderjuice, who, having just emerged from another of the laboratory mishaps for which he was widely known, carried as always a smell of sal ammoniac and singed hair.
“Small confrontation with the Töpler Influence Machine, nothing to worry about.”
“Guess I’d better go take a look. Probably that gear train again.”
They strolled among the elm-shadows, eating sandwiches and apples out of paper bags, “a peripatetic picnic,” as the Professor called it, slipping thereupon into his lecture-hall style.
“You’re quite right, of course, the Æther has always been a religious question. Some don’t believe in it, some do, neither will convince the other, it’s all faith at the moment. Lord Salisbury said it was only a noun for the verb ‘to undulate.’ Sir Oliver Lodge defined it as ‘one continuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate light . . . be sheared into positive and negative electricity,’ and so on in a lengthy list, almost like the Apostles’ Creed. It certainly depends on a belief in the waviness of light—if light were particulate, it could just go blasting through empty space with no need for any Æther to carry it. Indeed one finds in the devout Ætherist a propensity of character ever toward the continuous as against the discrete. Not to mention a vast patience with all those tiny whirlpools the theory has come to require.”
“Think this is worth going out to Cleveland for?”
“Mr. Rideout, we wander at the present moment through a sort of vorticalist twilight, holding up the lantern of the Maxwell Field Equations and squinting to find our way. Michelson’s done this experiment before, in Berlin, but never so carefully. This new one could be the giant arc-lamp we need to light our way into the coming century. I don’t know the man personally, but I’ll write you a letter of introduction anyway, it can’t hurt.”
Merle had been born and raised in northwest Connecticut, a region of clockmakers, gunsmiths and inspired tinkers, so his trip out to the Western Reserve was just a personal expression of Yankee migration generally. This strip of Ohio due west of Connecticut had for years, since before American independence, been considered part of Connecticut’s original land grant. So despite days and nights of traveling, Merle had an eerie sense of not having left Connecticut—same plain gable-front houses, white Congregational church steeples, even stone fences—more Connecticut, just shifted west, was all.
Merle arrived to find the “Forest City” obsessed by the pursuit of genial desperado Blinky Morgan, who was being sought for allegedly murdering a police detective while trying to rescue a member of his gang who’d been picked up on a fur-robbery charge. Newsboys cried the tale, and rumors flew like bugs in summer. Detectives swaggered everywhere, their black stiff hats shining like warrior helmets of old. Chief Schmitt’s bravos in blue were detaining and subjecting to lengthy and mostly aimless questioning anybody whose looks they didn’t care much for, which took in a wide piece of the population, including Merle, who was stopped on Rockville Street as he was heading out toward the Case Institute.
“What’s in the wagon, son?”
“Nothin much. You’re sure welcome to look.”
“Well this is refreshing, usually we get Blinky jokes.”
Merle went off into a long and confused description of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and his interest in it, which was not shared by the policemen, who began to grow distant, and presently truculent.
“Another candidate for Newburgh here, looks like.”
“Well, let’s do a check. Crossed eyes, protruding tongue, Napoleon hat?” They were talking about the Northern Ohio Insane Asylum, a few miles southeast of town, in which currently were lodged some of the more troublesome of the scientific cranks Cleveland these days had been filling up rapidly with, enthusiasts from everywhere in the nation and abroad for that matter, eager to bathe in the radiance of the celebrated Æther-drift experiment in progress out at Case. Some were inventors with light-engines that could run a bicycle all day but at nightfall stopped abruptly, causing the bike to fall over with you on it, if you weren’t careful. Some claimed that light had a consciousness and personality and could even be chatted with, often revealing its deeper secrets to those who approached it in the right way. Groups of these could be observed in Monumental Park at sunrise, sitting in the dew in uncomfortable positions, their lips moving inaudibly. There were diet faddists who styled themselves Lightarians, living on nothing but light, even setting up labs they thought of as kitchens and concocting meals from light recipes, fried light, fricaseed light, light à la mode, calling for different types of lamp filament and colors of glass envelope, the Edison lamp being brand new in those days but certainly not the only design under study. There were light addicts who around sunset began to sweat and itch and seclude themselves in toilets with portable electric lanterns. Some spent most of their time at telegraph offices squinting at long scrolls of mysteriously arrived “weather reports,” about weather not in the atmosphere but in the luminiferous Æther. “Yes it’s all here,” said Ed Addle, one of the regulars at the Oil Well Saloon, “Æther-wind speed, Ætheric pressure, there are instruments to measure those, even an analogy to temperature, which depends on the ultramicroscopic vortices and how energetically they interact. . . .”
Merle came back with another round of beers. “How about humidity?”
“Controversial,” said Ed. “What, in the Æther, would occupy the place of water-vapor in the air? Some of us believe it is Vacuum. Minute droplets of nothing at all, mixed in with the prevailing Ætheric medium. Until the saturation point is reached, of course. Then there is condensation, and storms in which not rain but precipitated nothingness sweeps a given area, cyclones and anticyclones of it, abroad not only locally at the planetary surface but outside it, through cosmic space as well.”
“There’s a U.S. Bureau in charge of reporting all this?” wondered Roswell Bounce, who was gainfully self-employed as a photographer, “a network of stations? Ships and balloons?”
Ed became guarded. “Is this just your usual wet-blanket talk, or do you really want to know?”
“If there was a reliable light-meter,” said Roswell, “it might make a difference to know about how the light was being transmitted, is all.”
It was a sort of small Ætherist community, maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church. They hung out in the saloons of Whiskey Hill and were tolerated by though not especially beloved of the regulars, who were mill hands with little patience for extreme forms of belief, unless it was Anarchism, of course.
Merle by then was also spending a lot of time, not to mention money, on a couple of sisters named Madge and Mia Culpepper, who worked at the Hamilton Street establishment of Blinky Morgan’s lady friend Nelly Lowry. He had actually glimpsed the flashily turned-out Blinky a couple of times coming and going, as had the police, most likely, because the place was under close surveillance, but attentiveness to duty being negotiable in those days, there were intervals of invisibility for anybody who could afford it.
Merle found himself more often than not the monkey in the middle, trying to calm the dangerously fervid, find work for those who ran short, put people up in the wagon when landlords got mean, trying meantime to stay reasonably unentangled with moneymaking schemes which, frankly, th
ough plentiful as fungi after the rain, verged all too often on the unworkably eccentric, “. . . amount of light in the universe being finite, and diminishing fast enough so that damming, diversion, rationing, not to mention pollution, become possibilities, like water rights, only different, and there’s sure to be an international scramble to corner light. We have the know-how, the world’s most inventive engineers and mechanics, all’s we need is to get far enough out to catch the prevailing flows. . . .”
“Airships?”
“Better. Psychical anti-gravity.” Ætherists possessed to this degree usually ended up for a stay in Newburgh, from which it became necessary to break them out, Merle after a while becoming known as the fellow to see, once he’d developed a relationship with elements of the staff out there who did not mind an escapee now and then, the work-load being what it was.
“Escaped!”
“Ed, they’ll hear you, try not to holler quite so—”
“Free! Free as a bird!”
“Shh! Will you just—” By which point uniformed guards were approaching at a clip you could call moderate.
SOMEHOW MERLE GOT the idea in his head that the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Blinky Morgan manhunt were connected. That if Blinky were ever caught, there would also turn out to be no Æther. Not that one would cause the other, exactly, but that both would be different utterances of the same principle.
“This is primitive hoodoo,” objected Roswell Bounce. “You might as well head for the deep jungle and talk this over with the trees, for in this town that kind of thinking won’t go, nosir not at all.”
“But you’ve seen his picture in the papers.” Each of Blinky’s eyes, according to press accounts, saw the world differently, the left one having undergone an obscure trauma, either from a premature detonation during a box job or from a naval howitzer while fighting in the Rebellion. Blinky gave out a number of stories.
“A walking interferometer, as you’d say,” suggested Ed Addle.
“A double-refractor, for that matter.”
“There you go. An asymmetry with respect to light anyway.” One day Merle had seen the astonishing truth of the case, though admittedly he had been most of the night working his way from one Whiskey Hill saloon to the next, drinking. Why hadn’t he seen it before? It was so obvious! Professor Edward Morley and Charles “Blinky” Morgan were one and the same person! Separated by a couple-three letters in name as if alphabetically double-refracted, you could say. . . .
“And they’ve both of ‘em got long shaggy hair and big red mustaches—”
“No, no couldn’t be, Blinky’s a natty dresser, whereas Professor Morley’s attire is said to exhibit a certain tendency to the informal. . . .”
“Yes yes but suppose, suppose when they split that light beam, that one half of it is Michelson’s and the other is his partner Morley’s, which turns out to be the half that comes back with the phases perfectly matched up—but under slightly different conditions, alternative axioms, there could be another pair that don’t match up, see, in fact millions of pairs, that sometimes you could blame it on the Æther, sure, but other cases maybe the light goes someplace else, takes a detour and that’s why it shows up late and out of phase, because it went where Blinky was when he was invisible, and—”
In late June, just about when Michelson and Morley were making their final observations, Blinky Morgan was apprehended in Alpena, Michigan, a resort town built on the site of an Indian graveyard. “Because Blinky emerged from invisibility, and the moment he reentered the world that contained Michelson and Morley, the experiment was fated to have a negative outcome, the Æther was doomed. . . .”
For word was circulating that Michelson and Morley had found no difference in the speed of light coming, going, or sideways relative to the Earth speeding along in its orbit. If the Æther was there, in motion or at rest, it was having no effect on the light it carried. The mood in the saloons frequented by Ætherists grew sombre. As if it possessed the substance of an invention or a battle, the negative result took its place in the history of Cleveland, as another of the revealed mysteries of light.
“It’s like these cults who believe the world will end on such and such a day,” Roswell opined, “they get rid of all their earthly possessions and head off in a group for some mountaintop and wait, and then the end of the world doesn’t happen. The world keeps going on. What a disappointment! Everybody has to troop back down the mountain with their spiritual tails dragging, except for one or two incurably grinning idiots who see it as a chance to start a new life, fresh, without encumbrances, to be reborn, in fact.
“So with this Michelson-Morley result. We’ve all had a lot of faith invested. Now it looks like the Æther, whether it’s moving or standing still, just doesn’t exist. What do we do now?”
“Taking a contrary view,” said O. D. Chandrasekhar, who was here in Cleveland all the way from Bombay, India, and didn’t say much, but when he did, nobody could figure out what he meant, “this null result may as easily be read as proving the existence of the Æther. Nothing is there, yet light travels. The absence of a light-bearing medium is the emptiness of what my religion calls akasa, which is the ground or basis of all that we imagine ‘exists.’”
Everybody took a moment of silence, as if considering this. “What I worry about,” said Roswell at last, “is that the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?”
“Unless,” Ed pointed out, “it is God.” Somehow this escalated into a general free-for-all, in which furniture and glassware didn’t come out much better than the human participants, a rare sort of behavior among Ætherists, but everybody had been feeling at loose ends lately.
For Merle it had been a sort of directionless drift, what Mia Culpepper, who was devoted to astrology, called “void of course,” which went on till mid-October, when there was a fire at the Newburgh asylum, where Merle happened to be that night, taking advantage of an inmates’ dance to break out Roswell Bounce, who had offended a policeman by snapping his picture just as he emerged from the wrong sporting establishment. The asylum was in chaos. Lunatics and keepers alike ran around screaming. This was the second major fire at Newburgh in fifteen years, and the horror of the first had not yet faded. Crowds of onlookers from the neighborhood had gathered to see the show. Sparks and coals blew and fell. Gusts of hot red light swept the grounds, reflecting brightly off desperately rolling eyeballs, as shadows darted everywhere, changing shape and size. Merle and Roswell went down to the creek and joined a bucket brigade, hoses were run from hydrants, and later some engines showed up from Cleveland. By the time the fire was under control, the exhaustion and confusion were too advanced for anyone to notice as Merle and Roswell slipped away.
Back in Whiskey Hill, they made a beeline for Morty Vicker’s Saloon. “What a hell of a night,” Roswell said. “I could’ve been in the chapel at that dance where the fire broke out. Guess you saved my fundament, there.”
“Buy the next round, we’ll call it even.”
“Better than that, my apprentice ran off when the coppers showed up. How’d you like to learn the deepest secrets of the photographer’s trade?”
Since Roswell had only been in the asylum for a day or two, they found his equipment untouched by local scavengers or the landlord. Merle was no hoosier on the subject, he had seen cameras before, even had himself snapped once or twice. It had always seemed like an idiot’s game, line them up, squeeze the bulb, take the money. Like anybody, of course, he had wondered what happened during the mysteriously guarded transition from plate to print, but never enough to step across any darkroom’s forbidden doorsill to have a look. As a mechanic he respected any straightforward chain of cause and effect you could see or handle, but chemical reactions like this went on down in some region too far out of anyone’s control, they were something you had to stand around and just let happen, which was about as interesting as waiting for corn to grow.
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“O.K., here we go.” Roswell lit a ruby darkroom lamp. Took a dry plate from a carrying case. “Hold this a minute.” Started measuring out liquids from two or three different bottles, keeping up a sort of patter meantime, hardly any of which Merle could follow—“Pyrogallic, mumblemumble citric, potassium bromide . . . ammonia . . .” Stirring it all in a beaker, he put the plate in a developing tray and poured the mixture over it. “Now watch.” And Merle saw the image appear. Come from nothing. Come in out of the pale Invisible, down into this otherwise explainable world, clearer than real. It happened to be the Newburgh asylum, with two or three inmates standing in the foreground, staring. Merle peered uneasily. Something was wrong with the faces. The whites of their eyes were dark gray. The sky behind the tall, jagged roofline was nearly black, windows that should have been light-colored were dark. As if light had been witched somehow into its opposite. . . .
“What is it? They look like spirits, or haunts or something.”
“It’s a negative. When we print this, it’ll all flip back to normal. First we have to fix it. Reach me that bottle of hypo there.”
So the night went on, spent mostly washing things in different solutions and then waiting for them to dry. By the time the sun rose over Shaker Heights, Roswell Bounce had introduced Merle to photography. “Photography, this is Merle, Merle—”
“All right, all right. And you swear this is made of silver?”
“Just like what’s in your pocket.”
“Not lately.”
Damn.
“Do one more.” He knew he sounded like some rube at the fair but couldn’t help it. Even if it was only some conjuring trick, purely secular, he wanted to learn it.
“Just what people have been noticing ever since the first sunburn,” Roswell shrugged, “which is that light makes things change color. The professors call it ‘photochemistry.’”
Merle’s all-night illumination prolonged itself into an inescapable glow that began to keep him awake. He parked the wagon out on a vacant patch in Murray Hill and set in to study the mysteries of light-portraiture as then understood, gathering information dip-fingered and without shame from everyplace he could, from Roswell Bounce to the Cleveland Library, which as Merle soon discovered had taken the revolutionary step some ten years before of opening up its stacks, so anybody could walk in and spend all day reading what they needed to know for whatever it was they had in mind to do.
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