“Lotta nice college ‘nooky’ around, though,” commented Darby, leeringly.
“Another of your vulgarisms, Suckling, with which I must confess myself, no doubt mercifully, unfamiliar.”
“An ignorance likely to continue,” prophesied Miles Blundell, “until the year 1925 or thereabouts.”
“You see!” Lindsay somewhat louder than necessary, “it’s beginning! I imagined, naïvely it seems, that we had come here to discover, if we could, some purpose to these ever-more-dangerous expeditions out upon which we are ordered, our unreflective participation in which someday must surely, unless we begin to take steps to promote our safety, end in our dissolution.”
“Assuming that this Dr. Zoot hasn’t sent us here on a fool’s errand,” Randolph St. Cosmo reminded them, “from not entirely respectable motives of his own.”
“Durn lunatic,” Darby scowled.
Inside the campus athletic pavilion, a vast dormitory space had been created, aisled and numbered, accessible by way of complicated registering procedures and color-coded tickets of identification. . . . After lights-out, a space no longer entirely readable, forested with shadows, full of whispering, murmuring, glowing white lamp-mantles by bedsides, ukulelists playing and singing in the dark. . . . Soft-voiced pages recruited from among the children of the town circulated among the sleepers all through the night watches, with telegraphic messages from parents, sweethearts, time-travel societies in other towns. . . .
Meals were served throughout the day and night, according to a mysterious timetable and system of menu changes, in the dining-hall of the enormous student commons, reached not by way of the ceremonial entrance lobby and front desk but via semi-secret flights of stairs deep in the back regions, softly carpeted conduits which led ever downward to the serving line, where impatient mess staff allowed latecomers very little slack in following the correct sequence of doors and hallways, resulting at best in a stray flapjack or the dregs of a coffee urn and, as a penalty for arriving “too” late—a flexible concept around here—nothing at all.
The boys, having conscientiously mastered the intricacies of access and scheduling, proceeded now with their breakfast-laden trays into a cafeteria full of dark brown light, wood chairs and tables, glowingly waxed.
Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar, and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. “Say, what is this stuff?”
“Goes with everything!” advised a student at a nearby table. “Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My dorm-mates comb their hair with it! There’s a million uses for Smegmo!”
“I have smelled something like this before,” pondered Miles, “yet . . . not in this life. For . . . in the way that certain odors can instantly return us to earlier years . . .”
“Nasotemporal Transit,” nodded the savvy youth. “There’s a seminar on that tomorrow, over at Finney Hall. Or do I mean day before yesterday?”
“Well, sir, this Smegmo concoction here takes me back even further than childhood, in fact clear on back into a previous life, to before I was even conceived—”
“Miles, for goodness’ sake,” Lindsay, blushing and kicking his shipmate beneath the table, “T.A.L.P.!” this being Chums of Chance code for “There Are Ladies Present.” Indeed, a tableful of florescent “co-eds” nearby had been following the exchange with some interest.
“Oboy, oboy,” Darby nudging Chick Counterfly, his long-standing partner in mischief. “Them sure ain’t Gibson Girls, I betcha! Look at the hair-do on that blonde there! Whoo-wee!”
“Suckling,” gritted Lindsay, “although, in a career which has tended increasingly to the squalid, further enormities without question await, none will prove to have been more objectionable, morally speaking, than these current manifestations of a diseased adolescence.”
“You ever get around to having your own, let me know,” Darby replied, in tones which suggested an intention to bite. “Maybe I can pass on a few tips.”
“Why, you insufferable little—”
“Gentlemen,” Randolph frowningly grasping his abdomen, “perhaps you will find it possible to put off this no doubt fascinating colloquy until a less-public occasion. And might I add, Mr. Noseworth, that these constant attempts to strangle Suckling do our public image little good.”
Later that morning, together with Professor Vanderjuice, they piled into a motorcar to pay a visit to the municipal dump at the edge of town, gray with perpetual smoke, its limits undefined. “Walloping Wellesianism!” cried the Professor, “it’s just a whole junkyard full!” Up and down the steeply-pitched sides of a ravine lay the picked-over hulks of failed time machines—Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph Q-98s—broken, defective, scorched by catastrophic flares of misrouted energy, corroded often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and built, so hopefully, to prevail. . . .A strewn field of conjecture, superstition, blind faith, and bad engineering, expressed in sheet-aluminum, vulcanite, Heusler’s alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum vitae, platinoid, magnalium, and packfong silver, much of it stripped away by scavengers over the years. Where was the safe harbor in Time their pilots might have found, so allowing their craft to avoid such ignominious fates?
Though they took a careful inventory, neither Chick nor Darby was able to find, assembled or in pieces, the model of machine in which Dr. Zoot had dispatched them into that apocalyptic sweep of masses which still troubled their moments of reverie.
“We must find this Meatman person, whom the ‘Doctor’ mentioned,” declared Chick. “A visit to his local tavern would seem in order.”
“The Ball in Hand,” recalled Darby—“and say, what are we waitin for?”
As the years had gone by, Earth making its automorphic way round the sun again and yet again, the Candlebrow Conferences themselves had converged to a form of Eternal Return. No one, for example, was ever seen to age. Those who, each intervening year, might have, in some technical sense, “died” outside the precincts of this enchanted campus, once having drifted back through the gates, were promptly “resurrected.” Sometimes they brought their obituary clippings with them, to share chucklingly with colleagues. These were solid bodily returns, mind you, nothing figurative or plasmic about them. Even to suggest that possibility had been known to fetch more than one skeptic a “sock in the kisser” for its imputations of frailty and unmanliness. The advantages to this genial revenance were apparent to all, chief among them the pleasures of ignoring medical advice, indulging in strong drink and life-threateningly fatty foodstuffs, staying out after hours in the company of the louche and demonstrably criminal, gaming on a scale and at odds whose longitude might have produced apoplexy even in much younger and fitter specimens of time-scholar. And all of these diversions and more happened to be available in profusion down along the river, on lower Symmes Street and the alleyways adjoining, where the desperate men resorted, where heads were cracked routinely by the stiff-hatted security of the night, while only yards away flowed the river tidied as the inside of an office, the wooden traffic rocking at ease on its gaslit breast. . . . Some Candlebrow conferees had claimed to see in this a parable for that otherworldly flow, insulated from secular ills, which we know as the River of Time.
The boys found their way down to West Symmes Street and into the Ball in Hand, which proved to be a particularly low and disreputable haunt. Renegade carnival girls, some with Pygmy boyfriends escaped from the St. Louis Fair, danced, with a scandalous flourishing of petticoats, on the tabletops. A troupe of Polish comedians, each armed with his personal giant kielbasa sausage, ran about trading blows from these objects, principally to the head, with untiring vivacity. Negro quartets sang old favorites in seventh-chord harmonies. Faro and fantan were available in the back rooms.
A young person of neglected aspect, holding a bottle of some reddish liquid, accosted the boys. “You�
�re the ones lookin fer Alonzo Meatman, I’ll bet.”
“Maybe,” replied Darby, reaching for and grasping his regulation-issue “preserver.” “Who wants to know?”
Their interlocutor began to shiver, to look around the room with increasingly violent jerks of the head.
“They . . . they . . .”
“Come, man, get a grip on yourself,” admonished Lindsay. “Who are this ‘they’ to whom you refer?”
But the youngster was shaking violently now, his eyeballs, jittering in their orbits, gone wild with fright. Around the edges of his form, a strange magenta-and-green aura had begun to flicker, as if from a source somewhere behind him, growing more intense as he himself faded from view, until seconds later nothing was left but a kind of stain in the air where he had been, a warping of the light as through ancient window-glass. The bottle he had been holding, having remained behind, fell to the floor with a crash that seemed curiously prolonged.
“Rats,” muttered Darby, watching its contents soak into the sawdust, “and here I was hankering after a ‘slug’ of that stuff.”
No one besides the Chums, in the roomful of merrymakers, gave any sign of having noticed. Lindsay, queerly distracted, was groping in the empty space but recently occupied by the vanished youth, as if he had somehow chosen to become only invisible.
“I would suggest,” Miles drifting toward the egress, “vacating these premises, before we meet a similar fate.”
Outside, Chick, who had remained silent through the episode, approached Randolph. “Professor, be informed that I am now invoking the Scientific Officer’s Discretionary, or S.O.D., Clause, as provided for in our Charter.”
“Again, Mr. Counterfly? One assumes you have properly filled in your Finding of Unusual Circumstances Questionnaire?”
Chick handed over the elaborately engraved document. “All in order, I hope—”
“Look here, Chick, are you quite resolved in this? You remember the last time, over that Hawaiian volcano—”
“Which was mutiny pure and simple then,” interjected Lindsay, “as it is now.”
“Not in my legal opinion,” chirped Darby, who had been scrutinizing the chit—”Chick’s S.O.D. here’s just as kosher as Smegmo.”
“A somewhat hollow pronouncement, given the all-too-predictable thickness of association between you and Counterfly.”
“You want thick?” snarled Darby, “here, try this.”
“Our operating altitude,” Chick endeavored to explain, “and the presence of unknown volcanic gases, may have affected my judgment then, it’s true. But this time I mean to remain on the ground, with no dimensional issues.”
“Except for the Fourth, of course,” warned Miles Blundell, his voice solemn as if issuing from mortal distances. “Fifth, and so on.”
His shipmates having departed, Chick entered the shadowy taproom once more, obtained a glass of beer, sat at a table with a view of the entrance, and waited, a technique learned years before in Japan, among the Zennist mystics of that country (see The Chums of Chance and the Caged Women of Yokohama), known as “just sitting.” It was during the same trip, Chick recalled, that Pugnax had confounded a Zennist monastery, by answering the classic koan “Does a dog possess the Buddha-nature?” not with “Mu!” but with “Yes, obviously—was there anything else?”
Time did not so much elapse as grow less relevant. At length Chick saw the recently vanished “contact” reappear from vacant space, now bathed in hues of apricot and aquamarine.
“You again.”
“Little trick of the trade. Had to see how serious you were,” said Alonzo Meatman (for it was he).
“Maybe only lazier than my partners. They had a night of hell-raising to get on with, I just wanted to sit here and relax.”
“Notice you haven’t touched that beer, there.”
“Would you?”
“Good point. Let me buy you something—Horst can make whatever you’d like, nobody’s stumped him since the F.I.C.O.T.T., and then it was debatable.”
“Since the . . .?”
“First International Conference On Time Travel, and say, what a hootnanny that was.” Everyone in the world of science and philosophy had shown up—Niels Bohr was there, Ernst Mach, young Einstein, Dr. Spengler, Mr. Wells himself. Professor J. M. E. McTaggart of Cambridge, England, dropped by, to give a brief address dismissing altogether the existence of Time as really too ridiculous to consider, regardless of its status as a believed-in phenomenon.
A brilliant gathering, you might say, a collaboration of the best minds upon the difficult, indeed paradoxical issue, sure to result in a working Time Machine (such was the Wellsian optimism of that era), before the century was out . . .except that this was not how the Proceedings proceeded. From initial bickering over what non-specialists would have to deem trivial matters, disputes had grown with astounding rapidity into all-out academic combat. Splinter groups proliferated. The celebrities in whom so much hope was invested soon departed by steam train and interurban electric, by horseback and by airship, usually muttering to themselves. Duels were proposed, shown up for, and resolved, for the most part, bloodlessly—except for the unfortunate affair of the McTaggartite, the neo-Augustinian, and the fatal steamed pudding. “Disputes as to the nature of reality whose outcomes depend in any way on wagering,” as the County Coroner expressed it, “have seldom been known to conclude happily, especially here, in view of the vertical distance involved. . . .” For days, while the ill-fated encounter remained a topic for gossip, conferees were careful to find excuses not to walk too close to the Old Stearinery Bell Tower, inspired by the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and at 322 feet the tallest structure visible in any direction out to the curve of the Earth, notorious locally for exerting a fascination upon minds healthy and disordered alike.
“YOU’VE BEEN WALKING, unaware, among them since you arrived,” Alonzo Meatman was saying. “There’s no discovering them unless they choose so.”
“But for you they have chosen to—”
“Yes and ‘do choose,’ and ‘will choose’—maybe even you, if you’re lucky—what of it?”
Chick regarded young Meatman. Clearly, classically, what a homeopathist would call “the lycopodium type.” Somehow the Chums organization attracted these in large numbers. Fear written in every cell. Fear of the night, of being haunted, of failure, of other matters that may not too routinely be named. First to get up into the rigging during a storm, not out of bravery but in desperation, as the only remedy they knew for the cowardice they feared ever crawling within. This Meatman specimen, it was clear, had climbed very high into the night, into a vulnerability to the perils of the storm that few could envy. “Stand easy, sky-brother,” Chick replied, “I know only how much it is costing me tonight to seek you out—further than which, my bookkeeping does not extend.”
Young Meatman seemed mollified. “You mustn’t think of it, you know, as betrayal . . . or, not only betrayal.”
“Oh? what more?”
He might have hesitated, but not quite long enough to sound unpracticed. “The most extraordinary offer of Deliverance to be tendered us since—that other Promise made so long ago. . . .”
Chick had a momentary vision of a ship’s passageway somewhere, perhaps inside a giant airship of the future, crowded with resurrected bodies of all ages, dazed smiles and tangled bare limbs, a throng of visitors newly arrived from all periods of the past two millennia, who must somehow be fed, clothed, sheltered, and explained to, not to mention away—an administrative nightmare largely fallen to him to resolve. He had a kind of newfangled speaking trumpet in his hand. “Has it come to this?” His voice sounded unfamiliar to him. He could think of nothing further to say. They were all watching him, expecting something.
Now, at the Ball in Hand, he only shrugged. “Guess I’m game.”
“Come along.” Alonzo led Chick out of the tavern and up across the night campus, then through a looming Gothical gate, and downhill again into the
northern purlieus of the University, a region of inexpensive student housing adjoined by an unlit sweep of aboriginal prairie, the streets into which they passed becoming narrower and lit by gas, rather than the electric lamps of the more “respectable” parts of town, which at each step were receding, it strangely seemed, disproportionately farther as the young men went on. At length they came to a street of ungainly row-houses, already halfway to self-demolition, the tattered millwork testifying to the spirit of haste and greed in which they had been erected but scant years before. Asphalt shingles lay fallen and broken. Fragments of window-glass sparkled in the dim light. Somewhere close, feeder lines to the interurban fretfully hummed and spat, while farther up the street, a pack of dogs swarmed into and out of the humid penumbræ of the streetlamps.
Alonzo seemed to expect a remark about the neighborhood. “We don’t want that much attention, see, not just yet. When enough people find that they need us and start seeking us out, maybe then we’ll move someplace bigger, closer to town. Meanwhile—”
“Discretion,” Chick supposed.
The youth’s face returned to its accustomed petulance. “Hardly necessary. They are not afraid of anything ‘this’ world may confront them with. You’ll see.”
Afterward Chick could not rid himself of an impression, lying deeper than he cared, or was able, to go, of having been psychically interfered with. In the event, somehow—as if positive expressions of silence and absence were being deployed against him—he could not escape the conclusion that, despite conventional signs of occupancy, these rooms were all, in fact, vacant. He found himself oppressed by a clearly visible veneer of disuse, not only of dust, which lay over everything, but also of a long stillness, perhaps of years, without a living voice, a strain of music, the not-quite-even percussion of human footfalls. The chill suspicion grew on him, further, that in here what seemed to be lamplight was not—that through some nonearthly means his optic sensorium was being locally addressed and systematically deluded, without disturbing the reign of an unresponsive darkness. Even more unsettling in its way was the change that had come over his companion the moment they stepped across the doorsill—a relaxation young Meatman did not bother to conceal, as if, having delivered Chick, he might now retreat unmolested into the quiescence of a tool returned at task’s end to its crib, a state he seemed almost to prefer to the troublesome demands of the quotidian.
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