Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks, centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillation columns in both the Glynsky and Le Bel-Henninger formats, serious girls with their hair in snoods entered numbers into log-books, and pale gnomes, patient as lock-pickers, squinted through loupes, adjusting tremblers and timers with tiny screwdrivers and forceps. Best of all, somebody in here somewhere was making coffee.

  Dr. De Bottle had led them back into a distant bay, where technicians were working at tables covered with homemade bombs in different stages of disassembly. “Our theory was to begin with devices confiscated from various failed bomb attempts and then kindly passed along to us, and, by careful analysis of each device, to return, step by step, to its original act of construction. Which proved usually to’ve been carried out in such appallingly primitive conditions that one began actually to feel sympathy for these wretches. They blow themselves up at a quite alarming rate you know, ignorance of proper solvent procedure alone accounting for dozens of Anarchist lives each year, just here in London. One must indeed suppress the missionary urge to go out among them . . . perhaps distributing inexpensive pamphlets, outlining for them even the simplest principles of lab safety . . . it would do ever so much good, don’t you think?”

  Lew, suppressing a reflexive lift of the brows, would have welcomed here any sort of smart remark from Neville or Nigel, but both had gone off apparently to inhale fumes of various sorts. “I’m not sure I follow the logic,” Lew said—“saving bombers’ lives, if each one you save could mean hundreds of innocent ones lost later down the line.”

  The Doc chuckled and inspected his shirt cuffs. “Innocent bourgeois lives. Well . . . ‘innocent.’”

  An assistant arrived with a wheeled cart bearing coffee in an Erlenmeyer flask, cups, and a plate of strange muffins. “You might not as an American appreciate this, but among the last surviving bits of evidence that a civilization once existed on this island is the game of cricket. For many of us, a cricket match is a sort of religious observance. Breathless hush in the close tonight sort of thing. ‘Innocent’ as it gets. And yet even here we have—” He gingerly held up a cricket ball, which all but glowed beneath the electric lighting. “For some time now, county pitches throughout England and Wales have been visited by a mysterious figure in white flannels, known around this shop as the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly, after the only known photograph of him with the usual cricketer’s bag slung from one shoulder, inside which he carries a number of spherical hand-bombs disguised as cricket balls. This is one that we’ve managed to recover intact. Rubbing it against one’s trousers will activate the arming device inside. You’ll notice, perhaps, that it’s far shinier and rather more tightly stitched than a British ball, rather like the Australian ball, or ‘kookaburra.’ And as the Ashes is currently in progress, and passions apt to be running high, Australians, with whom we are somewhat overrun at the moment, may be serving as an unwitting species of cover for the old G.B. of H., as well as easy targets of blame.”

  “He throws bombs during cricket games?”

  “We try not to say ‘bomb,’ actually, it’s more of a poison-gas grenade. And he does usually wait for tea.”

  “‘Poison gas’?” A new one on Lew. But Dr. De Bottle had taken on a somber look.

  “Phosgene.” Something about the way he pronounced it. “More of a French term. Phosgène. We prefer to call it carbonyl chloride. Less . . . disquieting somehow. The trouble for the police is that, depending on the dispersal cloud, too often the victims aren’t aware at all of having been gassed. And then suddenly, mysteriously as the newspapers say, forty-eight hours later, they’re dead. Why are you looking at that muffin that way?”

  “What? Oh. The color, I guess.”

  “Lovely shade of purple, isn’t it, boiled logwood I believe, chef puts it in everything—go on, it won’t poison you, bit of tannin, perhaps, if that.”

  “Well, and then these, um . . .” holding up a fragment of this muffin and pointing to a number of inclusions in some vivid, unmistakably turquoise shade.

  “For pity’s sake Lewis, don’t eat them all!” cried Neville, followed closely by his co-adjutor, both of them traveling along in some curious exhilaration, inches above the floor.

  “And see what we’ve found!” Nigel producing a sort of dinner pail with a quantity of beige substance in it which Lew recognized immediately.

  “Happy Birthday!” they all but screamed in unison.

  “Whose bright idea—”

  “Come come Lewis, you are a Gemini, that’s obvious, and as for the precise date, why, Madame Eskimoff knows all.”

  “Speaking of whom—”

  At their last meeting Dr. De Bottle had asked Neville and Nigel plaintively when, if ever, Britain would get the Ashes back, and the boys had agreed to consult the ecstatica.

  “Next year,” Madame Eskimoff had replied, “but only if they’ve the sense to select this Middlesex spinner, young Bosanquet, who’s been working on an absolutely fiendish ball, which looks as if it will be a leg-break but then goes the other way. Amazing physical dynamics, virtually uninvestigated. Said to be an Australian invention, but they’ll be utterly confounded at finding a Pom who knows how to bowl it.”

  “I shall run to my bookmaker,” Dr. De Bottle assured the boys graciously.

  IT WAS DECIDED that Lew should go up to Cambridge with the Cohen to meet Professor Renfrew.

  “Oh, I get it. You want me along for muscle.”

  “No, actually, here comes our protection now.” A gent of average height and unthreatening appearance was approaching them with a watercress sandwich in a gloved hand. “Clive Crouchmas. You may recall his voice from Madame Eskimoff’s séance the other night.”

  This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken.

  “Basically wishing long life and prosperity,” explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.

  Earlier in his career, Clive Crouchmas had been your bog-standard public official, unreflectively ambitious but not yet as greedy as he would soon find it possible to be. He worked at the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, an international body which the Turkish Sultan had authorized some years before to collect and distribute tax revenue, as a way of restructuring the debt of his overextended Empire. In theory the PDA. took the taxes on sales of fish, alcohol, tobacco, salt, silk, and stamps—the so-called “Six Indirect Contributions”—and passed the money on to various bondholders in Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Holland. No one acquainted with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, however, would have expected a perfect transfer of funds—some of those Turkish pounds would always be lost in the process, creating opportunities it would have taken someone much farther along the ill-marked path to sainthood than Clive Crouchmas to pass up.

  Ordinarily, Crouchmas had little to do with metaphysics, would not, indeed, recognize any appearance of the metaphysical even in the act of morsus fundamento. It was as alien to him as frivolity, of which there was plenty at these functions he seemed to be haunting these days. “Oh, Clivey!” three or four female voices at the edge of self-induced laughter would sing out in unison across the palm-abundant reaches of some hotel ballroom. Crouchmas was not even willing to say “What?” in reply. It would open doors allowing too many creatures of farce to commence running in and out.

  But, oddly, he had been resisting material temptation. As the Eastern Q
uestion degenerated into an unseemly scramble for the vast wealth of the Ottoman Empire, expressed most vividly in the intrigues over which nation would end up getting the “Bagdad” Railway Concession, Clive was observed at Chunxton Crescent, silent, robed, for all the world like someone seeking a more spiritual path, though according to gossip—a secular force the T.W.I.T. would never transcend—he was there out of a mute fascination with Miss Halfcourt, welcoming any excuse to share her company, since he had mastered as yet few of the arts of moneyed lechery, being in that phase of his career where work still claimed priority over leisure pursuits.

  For over a decade, the P.D.A. had also been collecting local tithes earmarked specifically for railway guarantees, to be paid yearly at so much per kilometer of track, to various European railway companies, before anyone else, even the Turkish government, got to see a piastre. This had not escaped the attention of a cabal within the P.D.A., which included Crouchmas. Pseudonymously and in carefully under-defined relation to the Imperial Ottoman Bank group of Paris, they had set up a small firm of their own designed to deal mainly with rogue bond issues, deemed by the Bank’s advisory committees too unstable to get involved with, or indeed touch with a barge-pole.

  “It’s too good to pass up,” he groaned aloud to Grand Cohen Nookshaft, his spiritual adviser. “Isn’t it?”

  “I’m thinking,” said the Cohen, whose money had been in three-percent consols for longer than he could remember, or remember why, “I’m thinking.”

  “I’ve never understood,” said Clive Crouchmas, “why, with all the precognitive talent around this place, no one has ever . . .” He paused, as if seeking a diplomatic way to go on.

  “Some serious dissonance between psychical gifts and modern capitalism, I’d imagine,” said the Cohen, somewhat shortly. “Mutually antagonistic, you’d have to say. We also do try not to become too mental, like some in your own shop, over this railway Concession.”

  “Were I not out here walking free amongst you all,” declared Clive Crouchmas, “I should be Best Boy at Colney Hatch. The other night, for just half a second, I saw . . . I thought I saw . . .”

  “It’s all right, Crouchmas, one hears this sort of thing all the time.”

  “But . . .”

  “Enlightenment is a dodgy proposition. It all depends how much you want to risk. Not money so much as personal safety, precious time, against a very remote long shot coming in. It happens, of course. Out of the dust, the clouds of sweat and breath, the drumming of hooves, the animal rises up behind the field, the last you’d’ve expected, tall, shining, inevitable, and passes through them all like a beam of morning sunlight through the spectral residue of a dream. But it’s still a fool’s bet and a mug’s game, and you might not have the will or the patience.”

  “But suppose I did stick it out. I’ve been curious for some time—as members here move closer to enlightenment, is there any sort of discount on the dues we pay?”

  IT WAS RAINING when Lew arrived in Cambridge. Newspaper headlines announced—

  ANOTHER ENCYCLICAL FROM PROF. MCTAGGART VATICAN’S STRONGLY WORDED PROTEST

  G. H. HARDY UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT

  “Multi et Unus”—Complete Text Within

  Chalked up on the ancient walls were graffiti such as CREATE MORE DUKES and EXPROPRIATE CHUCKERS.

  After they had left Yashmeen at the Girton gatehouse, Lew and Clive Crouchmas proceeded to the Laplacian, a relatively remote mathematicians’ pub beside a canal, where they were to meet with Professor Renfrew.

  “Trinity people here, mostly,” Crouchmas said. “No one’s likely to recognize him.”

  “Why should that bother him?” Lew wondered aloud, but Crouchmas ignored the question, nodding out the door into the onset of evening.

  Slowly, through the impure fen-light, the Professor’s face became distinct, exhibiting a brightness . . . no, a denial of ordinary vision . . . a smile that would never break forth from any interior cordiality.

  After three obligatory rounds of the dense, warm, unaerated product known on this island as beer, Crouchmas went off on mischief of his own, and Lew and the Professor made their way to Renfrew’s rooms at one of the lesser quadrangles. When they had lit cigars and allowed a pulse of watchful silence to elapse, Renfrew spoke.

  “You are acquainted with the ward of Auberon Halfcourt, I believe.”

  Lew guessed that Crouchmas in his fascination had been unable to keep from bringing her name up. He shrugged. “Routine chaperoning job, up and back, Mr. Crouchmas thought I should have a look in, was all, say howdy, so forth.”

  Which did not quite exempt him from a suspicious squint. “Poor Half-court. The man simply does not understand how things are done. Worse than Gordon at Khartoum. The desert has created in him fantasies of power which in Whitehall, mercifully, are felt to be impractical. And you have no idea how the girl’s protectors at the T.W.I.T. have again and again blighted my life. One cannot make the slightest move, however innocent, without attracting their, I must say, zealous attention.” It seemed to Lew that Renfrew’s upper and lower jaws were moving independently, like those of a ventriloquist’s figure. The voice at times did seem to come from somewhere else.

  “They have one or two peculiar ways, I guess. But they pay good.”

  “Ah. You’ve worked with them before.”

  “Pickup and delivery—one or two, whatever you folks call them . . . musclejobs.”

  “Do they have you under any sort of contract?”

  “Nope. One chore at a time, and cash on the barrelhead. Better for everybody, see.”

  “Hmm. Then if, for example, I wished to engage you . . .”

  “Would depend on the work, I guess.”

  “Young Crouchmas says you can be confided in. Come. Tell me what you think.”

  Pinned to a cork board on the wall Lew saw a photograph of a shadowy figure in white with a cricketer’s bag, posed against one of those noteworthy arrays of cloud the Headingly ground was known for. The face was blurred, but Lew took a few steps back till it came more in focus.

  “You recognize him?”

  “No . . . thought for a minute I might.”

  “You recognize him.” Slyly nodding as if to himself.

  Lew had a gastrically dismal feeling but saw no reason to confirm the Professor’s guess. Instead he sat through the same story he’d heard from Coombes De Bottle about the mystery gas-bomb thrower.

  “You want me to find him? Collar him, hand him over to the police?”

  “Not directly. Bring him to me first, if at all possible. It would be of the keenest importance that I speak with him, face-to-face.”

  “Suppose he was right in the middle of carrying out one of those phosgene attacks?”

  “Oh, there would be a hazardous-duty bonus, I’m sure. I can’t pay you that much, you see how reduced things are around here—it’s as if my life had been subjected to its own sort of gas outrage—but others would be most generous, if you delivered him safely.”

  “So it’s not what you’d call personal.”

  “Larking about at the seaside with Mrs. Renfrew sort of thing . . . so sorry, no . . . afraid not. . . .” The expression on his face was one Lew had noted from time to time among the British, a combination of smugness and self-pity, which he still couldn’t explain but knew enough to exercise caution around. “No, a bit more, hm, general in scale. Which is why you might run into a spot of uproar with the police. They’ve been round more than once to tell me to keep out of it. Came all the way up from London, in fact, to inform me that the ‘subject’ is theirs alone to deal with.”

  “I can ask around at the Yard, see what that’s all about.” Then, unable to resist, “Your German colleague, what’s his name, Werfner—is he as interested in this bird as you are?”

  “No idea.” Renfrew’s reaction might have included as much as a blink, but too quickly for Lew to be sure, “though I really doubt Werfner knows a bosie from a beamer. Oh but haven’t you met yet? I say wh
at a treat you’ve in store!”

  He motioned Lew to a smaller room, where a globe of the Earth hung gleaming, at slightly below eye-level, from a slender steel chain anchored overhead, surrounded by an Æther of tobacco smoke, house-dust, ancient paper and book bindings, human breath. . . . Renfrew took up the orb in both hands like a brandy snifter, and rotated it with deliberation, as if weighing the argument he wished to make. Outside the windows, the luminous rain swept the grounds. “Here then—keeping the North Pole in the middle, imagining for purposes of demonstration the area roundabout to be solid, some unknown element one can not only walk on but even run heavy machinery across—Arctic ice, frozen tundra—you can see that it all makes one great mass, doesn’t it? Eurasia, Africa, America. With Inner Asia at its heart. Control Inner Asia, therefore, and you control the planet.”

  “How about that other, well, actually, hemisphere?”

  “Oh, this?” He flipped the globe over and gave it a contemptuous tap. “South America? Hardly more than an appendage of North America, is it. Or of the Bank of England, if you like. Australia? Kangaroos, one or two cricketers of perhaps discernible talent, what else?” His small features quivering in the dark afternoon light.

  “Werfner, damn him, keen-witted but unheimlich, is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course, but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material—and flows of power as well, expressed, for example, in massive troop movements, now and in the futurity—he styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkeit, or railworthiness, each and every accommodation to the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s unwritten equation. . . .” He was lecturing. Lew lit another cigar and settled back.