“‘Ere then, Luigi, where’re we off to in such a grea’ rush?” as a constable, popping up out of the marblework unexpectedly, now attempted a sort of sliding football tackle upon the agile Mediterranean, who slowed down long enough to snarl,
“For God’s sake, Bloggins, it’s me, Gaspereaux, and if you’ll be kind enough to—”
“Oh. Sorry, guv, didn’t—”
“No, no, don’t touch your cap, Bloggins, I’m in disguise, can’t you see, yes and what I actually need you to do, now, quickly as ever we can, is to pretend to put me under arrest—take me upstairs, without quite so much friendly nudging if possible—”
“(Got you, guv.) All right then, allegro vivatchy, my good man, we’ll just-a put-a these-a lovely bracelets on shall we, as a formality only of course, oh this is my young Police Constable colleague who’ll take charge of your interesting bag there as soon as he stops staring at it quite so fixedly, won’t you Constable yes there’s a good chap. . . .” Escorting the prisoner, for whom handcuffs did not noticeably interfere with his ethnic gesticulations, up a side staircase to a hallway milling with uniformed guards, and beneath an imposing archway into the offices of Internal Security.
“I say it’s old Gaspereaux, what are you doing with that cheap grease-paint all over your face? Not to mention that beastly hat?”
“Only way I could find a moment to chat with you, Sands, eyes and ears everywhere sort of thing—” Across the room a cylinder of gutta-percha carrying a pneumatic message now arrived in its “D” box with a sort of jingling thud.
“Probably for me—” removing the form and scanning it. “Right. . . . Damned Suffragettes again I shouldn’t wonder. Oh sorry, Gasper, you were saying?”
“Sands, you know me. The meaning of what I have seen, if I spoke of it, I would not understand, and if I understood it, I could not—”
“Speak, yesyes well of course then if you wouldn’t mind sharing a hack down to Holborn—”
“Not at all, they’ll be wanting this costume back in Saffron Hill anyway.”
“Perhaps we might even find time for a pint somewhere.”
“I know just the place.”
Which turned out to be the Smoked Haddock, one of Gaspereaux’s many locals, in each of which he would be known, Sands expected, by a different identity.
“Evening, Professor, all in order I trust?”
“Not if I can help it,” Gaspereaux genially replied, in a tone higher, and with a coloring more suburban, than Sands had yet heard from him.
“Now then what is all this, my son, not a touch of the old occupational grandiosity I hope—”
“Sands, I most desperately need—”
“No prologues among us, Gasper, tantum dic verbo isn’t it.”
“Well then.” He recited as dispassionately as he could what he had escaped, and what he feared had befallen H.M.S.F. Saksaul. “It is the old Shambhala business again. Someone, perhaps even one of ours, has found it at last.”
“How’s that?”
Gaspereaux repeated the fragments he’d heard. “And the place is . . . intact. Other sub-surface ruins out there are filled with sand, of course, but in Shambhala the sand is being held away, somehow, by some invisible sphere of force like a gigantic air bubble—”
“So anyone who knows where it is—”
“Can enter and occupy it, with no need for special equipment.”
“Well this is splendid news, Gasper.” But Gaspereaux was staring back with stricken eyes. “I meant, a—a shining moment for England, I should have thought—”
“We are not the only ones there, Sands. At this moment all the Powers present in the region are bringing in their forces. Frigate actions like the Saksaul’s are only the opening feints. Chances increase day by day for some sort of sustained conflict over possession of the city, in regimental strength if not larger.”
“But I’ve constant telephonic connection with Whitehall—why hasn’t anyone ever mentioned this?”
“Oh because I’m mad, I suppose, and it’s been all no more than a madman’s phantasy.”
“That’s just it, my boy, by now I know that your most deranged utterances are only conventional history prematurely blurted.” He produced a half-sovereign case in the shape of Mr. Campbell-Bannerman’s head. “Need to find a telephone box, I suppose. Ohdearohdearohdear.” Off he went. The dim blessed local, which when crossing the desert Gaspereaux had quite given up on ever seeing again, slowly, sympathetically, drew him into its cherished inability to imagine anything clearly beyond Dover.
The day Dally left for New York, Merle, pretending to himself he’d lost his spectacles, had gone rooting around through everything he could think of, opening boxes, looking under counterpanes and behind the framing of the wagon, till he caught sight of a stuffed old doll, Clarabella, the one who’d joined them, as Dally liked to put it, years back in Kansas City, just lying now in the housedust, and he was surprised to find himself with emotions somehow not his own, as if the forlornness were old Clarabella’s there, all abandoned in the full light of day, with no more little girl to pick her up. One look at that face, and the way the paint was worn out, and it sure made a man’s damn valves start in to dribbling, if not unseat completely.
He waited till after the next bullion day and then quit the amalgamator job at Little Hellkite, packed up developing chemicals and photographic plates and a few pictures he was content to hold on to after giving the rest away. A few of those he kept might have been of Dally. He found a couple of good horses and proceeded down the San Miguel and up over Dallas Divide and up through Gunnison and down the great long eastern slope to Pueblo, something at the back of his mind convinced that years ago on the way west to Colorado he had missed something essential, some town he hadn’t seen, some particular piece of hardware that unless he found it again and put it to use, might even cross off a good part of the meaning of his life so far, is how important it was. Heading east, he was aware that Dally was someplace a thousand miles in front of him, but it wasn’t as if he was planning on going all the way back east. Only as far as he had to.
One Saturday evening Merle rolled into Audacity, Iowa. It was just after suppertime, some light still in the sky, a few farm wagons heading back out of town into a haze that made the little oak trees look round and flat as lollipops, and he noticed a small crowd shifting and muttering and about to turn boisterous out in front of a flat-roofed clapboard building with multicolored gas lamps, already on before the streetlighting, spelling out against the fading day the name of the local moving-picture house, DREAMTIME MOVY. Merle parked the wagon and wandered over to join the crowd.
“Looks like some excitement.” He noticed that, like a lot of these country theaters, this one had been converted from a church of some persuasion too small at last to support a minister. Made sense to Merle, who didn’t see much difference between movie audiences and crowds at tent-meetings—it was the same readiness to be carried into some storyteller’s spell.
“Third week in a row,” he was promptly informed, “the blamed thing won’t work, and we’re waiting for Fisk to come out and give us the usual hooey.”
“Worst possible place it could’ve happened, she’s hangin on to this log in the river—”
“—bein swept down to this waterfall off this big cliff—”
“—current’s too strong for her to swim, he just found out, ridin hard to get there in time—”
“And ever’thin just goes all discombobulated! Fisk don’t know how close he is to bein run out of town.”
“Here he is now, the miserable coot.”
Merle moved over so as to put a little space between the woefully upset Fisk and the crowd. “How do, lens-brother, what’s the problem, film break, carbons burn out?”
“Picture won’t stay put. Sprocket and gear, near ‘s I can tell.”
“I’ve run one or two of these rigs, mind if I have a look? What’ve you got, a Powers movement?”
“Just a regular G
eneva.” He led Merle to the back of the shadowy little ex-church and up some stairs to what had been the choir loft. “It’s about all I can do to get it threaded in right, usually Wilt Flambo, who’s the watchmaker in town, knows this rig inside out, I inherited the job when Wilt run off with that feed clerk’s wife, and now he’s off in Des Moines or someplace sending everybody picture postals about how much fun he’s having.”
Merle took a look. “Well this Geneva movement’s fine, it’s your sprocket tension’s gone a little strange, is all, probably the shoe needs to be . . . there, O.K., light her off now, what’re these, gas burners?”
“Acetylene.” It worked fine now, and the two of them stood a minute and gazed at the screen as the lip of the perilous cascade drew ever closer. “Guess I’d better wind this back again to the beginnin of the reel. You sure saved my caboose, friend. You can have the honor of givin them all the good news.”
“Frankly,” Fisk admitted later over a friendly glass of beer, “it has always scared the hell out of me, too much energy loose in that little room, too much heat, nitro in the film, feel like it’s all going to explode any minute, the stories you hear, if it was only the light it’d be one thing, but these other forces . . .”
They gave each other the sour, resentful tightlip smiles of professionals who have learned the dimensions of the payback for whatever magic is keeping the tip out front in their happy stupor—in this case the sheer physical labor of cranking the projector and the demonic energies a man was obliged to stand way too close to.
Merle got the job for a week or two while Fisk went back to tending his wagon-parts store and resting up. After a while, as he’d done before, Merle found himself withdrawing from the story on the screen, cranking the projector along and contemplating the strange relation these moving pictures had with Time, not strange maybe so much as tricky, for it all depended on fooling the eye, which was why, he imagined, you found so many stage-magicians going into the business. But if the idea was for still pictures to move, why there had to be a better way than this elaborate contraption of gear-trains and multiple lenses and matching up speeds and watchmaker’s fancywork to get each frame to stop a split-second and all. There had to be something more direct, something you could do with light itself. . . .
ONE DAY UNDER A SKY of a certain almost-familiar shade of yellow, he came to the bank of a river on which young people were canoeing, not in high spirits or carefree flirtation but in some dark perplexity, as if they were here from deeper motives but couldn’t just then remember what those were. He recognized the state of mind as if it were a feature of the landscape, like an explorer discovers a mountain or a lake, simple as coming up over a ridge-line—there it was, laid out neat as could be like a map of itself. He had found Candlebrow, or, if you like, it had found him—he drove in through the dilapidated portals of the campus, and recognized the place he’d been looking for, the one he’d missed first time around, streets lined with bookstores, places to sit and talk, or not talk, cafés, wood stairs, balconies, lofts, feasting outside at tables, striped awnings, crowds milling, night falling, a small movie show, lemon-white neon outside. . . .
The land here had a gentle roll to it. No voice, outside a playing field, was ever more than conversationally loud. Horses grazed in the Quadrangle. Field-scent percolated everywhere—purple clover, honeysuckle, queen-of-the-prairie. Picnickers brought with them horseshoes and ukuleles, baskets full of sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, pickles, and bottled beer, down to the banks of Candlebrow’s tranquil and famously canoeable river, the Sempitern. Every other afternoon thunderheads appeared to the westward and began to pile up, and the sky darkened to a biblically lurid yellow-gray by the time the first winds and raindrops arrived.
The conferees had gathered here from all around the world, Russian nihilists with peculiar notions about the laws of history and reversible processes, Indian swamis concerned with the effect of time travel on the laws of Karma, Sicilians with equal apprehensions for the principle of vendetta, American tinkers like Merle with specific electromechanical questions to clear up. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries.
“Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon—the Earth’s own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything—”
“Um, Professor—”
“—‘funnel’ of course being a bit misleading, as the pressure in the vortex isn’t distributed in anything so simple as a straight-sided cone—”
“Sir, excuse me, but—”
“—more of a quasi-hyperboloid of revolution which—say, where’s everybody going?”
Those in attendance, some at quite high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing to explain why. As if the Professor had lectured it into being, there now swung from the swollen and light-pulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie “twister,” lengthening to a point, about to touch down, approaching, it seemed all but consciously, the campus which lay in its direct path, at a speed not even the swiftest horse could hope to outrace.
“Hurry—this way!” Everyone was converging upon McTaggart Hall, the headquarters of the Metaphysics Department, whose storm-cellar was known throughout the region as the roomiest and best-appointed such refuge between Cleveland and Denver. The mathematicians and engineers lit gas-mantles and storm-lamps, and waited for the electric light to fail.
In the storm-cellar, over semiliquid coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the topic of periodic functions, and their generalized form, automorphic functions.
“Eternal Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more secular, more physical expressions.”
“Build a time machine.”
“Not the way I would have put it, but, if you like, fine.”
Vectorists and Quaternionists in attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up known as the Lobatchevskian, abbreviated Lob, as in “Lob a,” by which, almost as a by-product, ordinary Euclidean space is transformed to Lobatchevskian.
“We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no longer ‘passes,’ with a linear velocity, but ‘returns,’ with an angular one. All is ruled by the Automorphic Dispensation. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly.”
“Born again!” exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.
Above, the devastation had begun. And now here one might have noted an odd thing about this tornado. It was not simply “a” tornado which descended upon Candlebrow with such distressing regularity but indisputably always the same tornado. It had been photographed repeatedly, measured for wind speed, circumference, angular momentum, and shapes assumed over time of passage, and from visit to visit these had all remained uncannily consistent. Before long the thing had been given a name, Thorvald, and propitiatory offerings to it had begun to appear heaped outside the University gates, usually items of sheet metal, which had been noted in particular as one of Thorvald’s dietary preferences. Human food, while not so common, was represented by various farm animals live and slaughtered, though occasionally entire thresher dinners had also been known to’ve been laid out cooked and ready to eat, on long picnic tables, where it then required a level of indifference to fate quite beyond this carefree undergraduate body to risk actually stealing from, let alone inserting into one’s face.
“Superstition!” screamed certain professors. “How are we supposed to maintain any scientific objectivity around here?”
“And yet suppose we did try to communicate with Thorvald—”
“Oh, it’s ‘Thorv
ald’ now, my my quite chummy aren’t we.”
“Well, it is cyclic after all, so some kind of signaling might be possible using wave-modulation—”
There were in fact a couple different designs for a Thorvaldic Telegraph to be found for sale down on West Symmes, where Merle had begun to loiter for an hour or so a day. Here, each summer at Candlebrow, for miles up and down the riverside, a huge population of jobbers and operators appeared running pitches in a bazaar of Time, offering for sale pocket-watches and wall clocks, youth potions, false birth certificates duly notarized, systems of stock-market prediction, results of horse races at distant tracks well before post time, along with telegraphic facilities for placing actual wagers on the fates of these as-yet-unaccelerated animals, strangely gleaming electromechanical artifacts alleged to come from “the future”—”You say, now, the live chicken goes in this end here—” and above all instruction in the many forms of time-transcendence, timelessness, counter-time, escapes and emancipations from Time as practiced by peoples from all parts of the world, curiosity as to which was assumed to be the true unstated reason for attendance at these summer gatherings. Not surprisingly, a higher-than-average number of these more spiritual-type programs were being run by charlatans and swindlers, often wearing turbans, robes, shoes with elongated toes that concealed a “gaff” of some sort, as well as strangely modified hats serving the same purpose, and except for the out-and-out hopeless greed cases, Merle found most of them worth chatting with, especially those with business cards.
Soon enough, quicker than he would’ve thought, he became a fixture at the summer get-togethers. The rest of the year, it was like one day job after another just so for a month during the summer he could enter a realm of time-obsession and share it with others of the breed. It never occurred to him to question how this preoccupation had come about, whether by way of photography and its convergence of silver, time, and light or just with Dally out of the house finding Time so heavy on his hands that he was obliged to bring it a little closer to his face, squint at it from different angles, maybe try to see if it could be taken apart to figure how it might actually work. From here on, the alchemy, the tinkering, the photography would be relegated to day jobs of one kind or another. The nights, the flights and journeys proper to night, would be dedicated to the Mysteries of Time.
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