One evening about twilight, out of the corner of his eye, sailing past in the sky like one of the famous Giant Airships of 1896 and ‘7, Merle thought he saw the Inconvenience, and sure enough, a little later, down on West Symmes—
“Well, how are you, sir, I’ve thought of you often, and of course your lovely daughter, Miss Dahlia.”
Merle had to squint his way past the mustache but recognized Chick Counterfly all right. “She’s seeking a career in show business back east,” Merle said, “thanks for asking. What are you boys up to these days? Last I read, you were over in Venice, Italy, knocking down their Campanile, which I should point out is the model for the one up on campus there, that’s if you’re still in the bell-tower demolition business?”
“These days trying to get fixed up with some Hypops equipment. Have you met Roswell Bounce, by the way? Father of the Hypops Apparatus himself?”
“That’s me, get within ten foot of any of them units, start hearing ‘ese little voices, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ Why—it’s ‘at there Merle Rideout ain’t it.”
“Damn, Roswell, it’s sure been a while since Cleveland,” said Merle. “Followed that trial with great interest.”
“Oh, I went to court, had to, but you can imagine the kind of lawyers I was able to afford, whereas that Vibe sonofabitch had his Wall Street flunkeys Somble, Strool, & Fleshway all lined up against me.”
Bounce v. Vibe had proved reliable as a source of public entertainment and even made Roswell a sort of celebrity. Eccentric inventors were then enjoying in America a certain vogue as long-shot opponents of the mills of Capital. They were expected to lose, poignantly as possible, though now and then an educated side-bet on one winning might pay off big.
“Years go by, no satisfaction, I eventually develop litigious mania, ‘paranoia querulans,’ as the nerve croakers call it, even try to bring old Vibe to court over that, at least to recoup the mind-doctor fees, but as usual no dice.”
“Well you’re mighty cheerful,” it seemed to Merle, “for somebody with chronic P.Q.”
Roswell winked. “You know how there’s some have found Jesus? Well, that happened to me, too, only my Savior turned out to be more of a classical demigod, namely,” pretending to look furtively right and left, and lowering his voice, “Hercules.”
Merle, recognizing the name of a popular brand of blasting agent, twinkled back discreetly. “Powerful fella. Twelve Labors instead of twelve Apostles, ‘s I recall. . . .”
“There you go,” Roswell nodded. “So now it’s more like ‘paranoia detonans.’ The man may’ve stolen my patents, but I still know how to build my own gear. Buckle on that Hypops, move around underground carefree as a gopher in a garden till one day I’ll have the criminal bastard right overhead, and—well not to get too specific . . .”
“Kaboom, you might say.”
“Oh, you might, I’m just another nutty inventor, harmless as your grandma.”
NEXT AFTERNOON THE LIGHT took its deep yellowish turn, and here came that Thorvald again. Merle was rooting through the wagon looking through some of his old lightning-rod-salesman gear when Roswell showed up and stood gazing with interest. “You ain’t one of these Anharmonic Pencil folks?”
“Beats me.”
“What are you doin with that contraption?” indicating an arrangement of metal spikes, aimed upward in different directions, converging to a single common point at the bottom, fitted up with wires and connectors.
“Put this up on the barn roof, hook it on to your lightning rod—what in the trade we call an aigrette,” said Merle.
“You mean lightning hits it—”
“Damndest thing. Gives off a glow. Lasts awhile. First time you think you’re dreaming.”
“Geometry professors call that a Pencil. If you ran a transversal plane of some kind across this, so as to cut these spikes into different lengths? Put in insulators, you’d have different currents in the different segments, whose ratios could be harmonic or anharmonic depending—”
“How you moved that plane around. Sure. You make it movable—”
“Tune it basically—” Off they went, forgetting about the imminent cyclone.
Thorvald hovered over them for a moment, as if trying to analyze how murderous it might be feeling today, then, briefly slowing and resuming speed, this being the Tornadic equivalent of a shrug, moved on to more promising prey.
“I want to know light,” Roswell was confessing, “I want to reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul, take some in my hands whatever it turns out to be, and bring it back, like the Gold Rush only more at stake, maybe, ‘cause it’s easier to go crazy from, there’s danger in every direction, deadlier than snakes or fever or claim jumpers—”
“And what steps are you taking,” Merle inquired, “to make sure you don’t end up wandering around the badlands of our fair republic raving about lost mines and so forth?”
“I’m heading for California,” replied Roswell.
“That ought to help some,” said Merle.
“I’m serious. It’s where the future of light is, in particular the moving pictures. The public loves those movies, can’t get enough of ‘em, maybe that’s another disease of the mind, but as long as nobody finds a cure for it, the Sheriff will have to keep settling for traildust in my case.”
“There sure is projectionist work everyplace you look,” Merle said, “but the machinery itself, it’s dangerous, and somehow, I’m not sure why, but—more complicated than it needs to be.”
“Yes, it continues to puzzle me,” Roswell agreed, “this irrational worship of the Geneva movement, and the whole idea of a movie projector being built like a clock—as if there could be no other way. Watches and clocks are fine, don’t mistake my meaning, but they are a sort of acknowledgment of failure, they’re there to glorify and celebrate one particular sort of time, the tickwise passage of time in one direction only and no going back. Only kind of movies we’d ever get to see on a machine like that’d be clock movies, elapsing from the beginning of the reel to the end, one frame at a time.
“One problem the early watchmakers had was that the weight of the moving parts would affect the way the watch ran. Time was vulnerable to the force of gravity. So Breguet came up with the tourbillon, which isolated the balance wheel and escapement off on a little platform of their own, geared to the third wheel, rotating about once a minute, assuming in the course of the day most positions in 3-D space relative to the gravity of the Earth, so the errors would cancel out and make time impervious to gravity. But now suppose you wanted to turn that around.”
“Make gravity impervious to time? Why?”
Roswell shrugged. “It’s that one-way business again. They’re both forces that act in one direction only. Gravity pulls along the third dimension, up to down, time pulls along the fourth, birth to death.”
“Rotate something through space-time so it assumes all positions relative to the one-way vector ‘time.’”
“There you go.”
“Wonder what you’d get.”
Out came the patent pencils and, well, talk about being impervious to time—next thing they knew, they had wandered miles up the river and paused by an ancient sycamore. Above them its leaves all abruptly turned the other way, the tree brightening all over, as if another storm was about to break—as if it were a gesture of the tree itself, directed more to the sky and some sky-borne attention than necessarily intended for the diminutive figures beneath, who were now hopping up and down and shouting at each other in a curious technical patois. Anglers abandoned promising riffles to get up or downstream of the disturbance. College girls with their hair in Psyche knots and other swept-up arrangements and long floral dresses of zephyr gingham, lawn, and pongee paused in their strolling to gaze.
Usual thing. The day-by-day politics of this conference would’ve made an average recital of Balkan history seem straightforward as a joke told in a saloon. Over in the theoreticians’ shop, nobody, however wise-looking, was able to
avoid the combinations, coups, schisms, betrayals, dissolutions, misread intentions, lost messages, that writhed and crept below the cheery blandness of this midwestern campus. But the mechanicians understood each other. At the end of the summer, it would be these hardheaded tinkers with their lopsidedly-healed fractures, scars, and singed-off eyebrows, chronically short-tempered before the Creation’s irreducible cussedness, who’d come out of these time-travelers’ clambakes with any practical kind of momentum, and when the professors had all gone back to their bookshelves and protégés and intriguings after this or that Latinate token of prestige, it’d be the engineers who’d figured out how to keep in touch, what telegraphers and motor expressmen to trust, not to mention sheriffs who wouldn’t ask too many questions, Italian fireworks artists who’d come in and cover for them when the townsfolk grew suspicious of night horizons, where to find the discontinued part, the exotic ore, the local utility somewhere on Earth able to generate them current with the exact phase or frequency or sometimes simple purity that would meet their increasingly inscrutable needs.
ONE DAY THERE WAS a flurry of rumors that the famous mathematician Hermann Minkowski was coming over from Germany to give a talk on Space and Time. Lecture halls for the event kept being announced and then switched to larger ones, as more and more people heard about it and decided to attend.
Minkowski was a young man with a pointed mustache and curly black hair brushed in a pompadour. He wore a black suit and high collar and pince-nez, and looked like a businessman out for some fun. He gave the lecture in German but wrote down enough equations so people could follow it more or less.
After everybody else had left the hall, Roswell and Merle sat looking at the blackboard Minkowski had used.
“Three times ten to the fifth kilometers,” Roswell read, “equals the square root of minus one second. That’s if you want that other expression over there to be symmetrical in all four dimensions.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Merle protested, “that’s what he said, I’ve got no idea what it means.”
“Well, it looks like we’ve got us a very large, say, astronomical distance there, set equal to an imaginary unit of time. I think he called the equation ‘pregnant.’”
“Jake with me. He also said ‘mystic.’”
They rolled cigarettes and smoked and gazed at the chalked symbols. A student loitered in the back of the room, tossing a wet slate-sponge from hand to hand, waiting to erase the board.
“Notice the way the speed of light kept coming into it?” Roswell said.
“Like being back in Cleveland, all those Æther folks. We were all probably on to somethin then, didn’t know it.”
“Way I figure, all’s we need to do’s translate this here into hardware, then solder it all up, and we’re in business.”
“Or in trouble.”
“By the way, who’s the practical one here and who’s the crazy dreamer, again? I keep forgetting.”
Frank came one day back over into west Texas, splashing up droplets out of the muddy river which transmuted briefly to sunlight he could no longer in his heart appreciate much.
He kept to the river up through New Mexico to San Gabriel, picking up the old Spanish Trail, drawn westward, visited each night now by a string of peculiarly clear-edged dreams about Estrella Briggs. Till one day there he was in the McElmo country, and it was almost like emerging from a stupor he had fallen into years back. He was headed for Nochecita, or the spur line of his destiny was. Where else? Like asking a damn avalanche to run uphill.
In Nochecita, maybe owing to the troubles south of the border, he found a hardcase element had moved in. Not dangerous, though definitely, a number of them, illegal—sociable enough, yet not about to suffer fools for any longer than they had to. New buildings had gone up near Stray’s old place, so close sometimes that there remained only narrow slipways for the wind to pass, picking up speed, whereupon the pressure decreased, so much that as the unrelenting plateau wind passed through town, the flimsily braced older structure was actually being sucked to one side, then the other, all night long, rocking like a ship, ancient nails creaking, plaster apt to chip away if you looked at it for more than a second, walls of the rooms shedding soiled white flakes, a threat of collapse in some near future. The foundations had gone on crumbling back to pebbles and dust, and rain leaked in everywhere. Little or no heat in the place, floorboards not quite level. And yet the rent here, he heard people complain, kept getting higher each month, newer tenants continued to move in, earning more and eating better, as the place filled up with factory reps, real-estate salesmen, drummers of weaponry and medical supplies, linemen, water and road engineers, none of whom would ever quite meet Frank’s eyes, respond when he spoke, or recognize him in any but the most muted and shifty ways. He wondered if he could be his own ghost, and haunting these rooms and corridors, as if the nearly negligible fraction of his life spent here had remained here, somehow still proceeding, just past visibility—Stray, Cooper and Sage, Linnet, Reef as the careless young rounder he’d been, all were just “over there,” just like living in the world, changed from whoever they used to be, reluctantly allowing in more and more of the spirit-battering events of everyday, moved on, some of them, into colder places and harder times, bust, adrift, drawn west by those Pacific promises, victims of their own bad judgment . . .but Frank understood he was not to be any part of it.
Sometimes when he asked, one of the newcomers would try to tell him where Stray was, but he couldn’t understand them, the words didn’t fall into any kind of sense. The town abruptly became an unreadable map to him. Since Mexico he had been sorely conscious of borderlands and lines cross-able and forbidden, and the day often as not seemed set to the side of what he thought was his real life.
He kept thinking he saw her, Stray with her hair down and her baby in her arms, out in town running chores or riding away, always away from him, toward the hills. Yet later, say three or four in the afternoon, when everybody but Stray and the little one, or their shadows, would have cleared out—when, alone, he could return to the empty rooms, he knew that before too long, from the other side of whatever it was separating them, he would begin to hear her “getting ready for supper.” Frank stood at the flimsy kitchen door, with the papered-over glass, when the light came through, and listened, breathed, waited. He wondered if Stray, over on “her side,” alone during the deepening sadness of these daytime hours, might’ve begun to hear in other parts of the house routine sounds of his own presence—footsteps, water running or draining—as if from some phantom rooms amputated from the rest of the building and occupied, like it or not, by the dead? . . .
Frank couldn’t stand it for more than three nights, though by the time he left, it seemed like weeks. On the way out the street door, at the last minute, he ran into Linnet Dawes, who needed a minute or two to remember Frank. She was still a local belle, still teaching school, but had picked up a kind of glaze, as if part-timing now in more adult areas.
“Let me guess who you’re looking for,” Linnet said, coolly it seemed to Frank.
“Reef.”
“Oh. Well your brother, he came by last year sometime, maybe the year before, to pick up Mrs. Traverse”—even Frank could detect some sarcasm— ”and little Jesse, but they didn’t stay here more than another night. Thought I heard something about New Mexico, but neither of them was confiding in me, exactly.”
“It’s strange, I keep thinking I see Estrella here and there around town, just imaginin, I guess. . . .” Oh, was she flashing him a look here. “What? I pronounce somethin wrong?”
“That young lady,” shaking her head, “created more damned drama around here. Who needed an opera house when she was performing? You start off thinking she’s like one of these Oriental wise folks, far above all the pettiness and small potatoes, gazing down on the rest of us—instead, imagine our surprise to find out at last how large-scale of an egotist we’ve been dealing with, in fact so much of one that nobody ever took al
l of it in. Big mistake, poor suckers, all of us.”
“So is that her I keep seein? Or ain’t it—sorry, isn’t it?”
“You are not that same ‘cute mine-school boy I remember, looks like you’ve been through some educational activities, so maybe I don’t have to be too tender about your feelings. Your brother left the country, more to the point he left his wife and child. Estrella’s doing a good job with that little Jesse, credit where credit’s due, didn’t hurt any that her sister and her sister’s husband were usually within a day or two’s ride of her. It’s a small ranch outside Fickle Creek, New Mexico. She’s there sometimes.”
“For somebody you don’t like, you’re sure keepin a close eye.”
“Just professional reflexes. Your nephew is an engaging little customer, you’ll see.”
“If I’m down that way.”
She nodded, one side of her smile higher than the other. “Sure. Say hello.”
HE HIT THE PASS at the summit just about as Saturday night was settling in down in Fickle Creek, you could hear the gunshots and whoop-de-do from up here easy. From the toll station here, through ice-points falling, steeped in a cold, neutral green light far below, he could see a little city laid out around a plaza. Frank took a glass of red whiskey and bought a pocketful of cigars and started down.
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