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Against the Day

Page 135

by Thomas Pynchon


  It proved a struggle after that, for the wind desired them to go south, and numberless standard cubic feet of engine propellant were wasted against the northerly imperative before Randolph, calculating that they had exceeded their energy allotment, gave up the ship’s immediate future to the wind, and they drifted thus over the Río Bravo, and into the skies of Old Mexico. So they were borne onward, before winds of obscure sorrow, their clarity of will fitful as the nightly heat-lightning at their horizon.

  It was just at that moment of spiritual perplexity that they would be rescued, with no advance annunciation, here, “South of the Border,” by the Sodality of Ætheronauts.

  How could they have ever crossed trajectories? Afterward none of the boys could remember where it happened, during which toxic ascent, amid what clamor of bickering by now grown routine, they had blundered into this flying-formation of girls, dressed like religious novices in tones of dusk, sent whirling, scattering before the airship’s star-blotting mass, their metallic wings earnestly rhythmic, buffeting, some passing close enough for the boys to count the bolts on gear-housings, hear the rotary whining of nitronaphthol auxiliary power-units, grow rigidly attentive to glimpses of bared athletic girl-flesh. Not that these wings, with their thousands of perfectly-machined elliptical “feathers,” even in this failing, grime-filtered light, could ever have been mistaken for angels’ wings. The serious girls, each harnessed in black kidskin and nickel-plating beneath the inescapable burdens of flight, each bearing on her brow a tiny electric lamp to view her control panel by, regrouped and wheeled away into the coming night. Were glances, even then, cast back at the lumbering, engine-driven skycraft? frowns, coquetries, indistinct foreknowledge that it was to be among themselves, these sombre young women, that the Chums were destined after all to seek wives, to marry and have children and become grandparents—precisely among this wandering sisterhood, who by the terms of their dark indenture must never descend to Earth, each nightfall nesting together on city rooftops like a flock of February chaffinch, having learned to find, in all that roofs keep out, a domesticity of escape and rejection, beneath storm, assaults of moonlight, some darker vertical predation, never entirely dreamed, from other worlds.

  Their names were Heartsease and Primula, Glee, Blaze, and Viridian, each had found her way to this Ætherist sorority through the mysteries of inconvenience—a train arriving late, a love-letter mistimed, a hallucinating police witness, and so forth. And now here were these five boy balloonists, whose immediate point of fascination was with the girls’ mode of flight. There were great waves passing through the Æther, Viridian explained, which a person could catch, and be carried along by, as the sea-wind carries the erne, or as Pacific waves are said to carry the surfers of Hawaii. The girls’ wings were Æther-ærials which sensed in the medium, all but microscopically, a list of variables including weighted light-saturation index, spectral reluctance, and Æther-normalized Reynolds Number. “These are in turn fed back into a calculating device,” said Viridian, “which controls our wing parameters, adjusting them ‘feather’ by ‘feather’ to maximize Ætheric lift. . . .”

  “It would have had to be an Ætherist,” Chick whispered to himself.

  “Fumes are not the future,” declared Viridian. “Burning dead dinosaurs and whatever they ate ain’t the answer, Crankshaft Boy.”

  She immediately began to instruct him in the Ætherodynamics that made it possible for the girls to fly.

  “The Æther,” Viridian explained, “like the atmosphere around a skyship, may produce lift and drag on the Earth as it moves through space. As long ago as the Michelson-Morley Experiment there’s been speculation about a boundary layer.”

  “Which the planet’s irregular surface,” Chick began to see then, “mountains and so forth, creates vortices to keep from separating—”

  “And we also know that its thickness is proportional to kinematic viscosity, expressed as area per second—making Time inversely proportional to viscosity, and so to the boundary-layer thickness as well.”

  “But the viscosity of the Æther, like its density, must be negligible. Meaning a very thin boundary layer, accompanied by a considerable dilation of Time.”

  Darby, who happened to be listening, wandered away at last shaking his head. “Like Sidney and Beatrice Webb around here.”

  “As well as a very rapid rise,” Viridian had continued, “from zero to whatever the speed of the prevailing Æther-wind is. So that to encounter it in its full force, one would not have to venture far from the planetary surface. In our own case, not much higher than rooftop level.”

  Chick and Viridian would turn out to be the most problematical, or off-and-on-again, of the five pairings. Chick acted sometimes as if his heart were still back at the scenes of previous adventures, and Viridian’s day was itself not without lapses into the sentimental pluperfect.

  Lindsay Noseworth, the diagnosed gamomaniac, would be hit hardest of all, at no more than the first sidelong smudge of Primula’s appearance. “Primula Noseworth,” he was soon discovered whispering over and over, “Primula Noseworth . . .” no part of the ship nor moment of the day being exempt from this confounded mooning. The audible equivalent of a sailor’s tattoo.

  As for Miles, “Oh Glee,” she was playfully admonished, “you always were such a goose when it came to the deep ones!” (Miles’s spoken feelings, though recorded, were not readily made sense of.)

  It was Heartsease, meanwhile, who became fascinated by the somewhat distracted Randolph (her genius for cookery and herbal knowledge, patiently exercised, would eventually cure his dyspepsia).

  Blaze and Darby were a furiously passionate “item” right from the beginning, the former mascotte finding himself, for the first time in the company of a woman, not even tongue-tied, no, in fact dizzyingly aloft, through aerial resources which appeared to be entirely his own. “Have I lost my common sense,” Blaze wondered, “here unchaperoned like this, with the likes of you and all?” Her gaze attending him narrowly but not unkindly, framed by the roof-tiles of her night’s lodging spilling away in what might as well be infinite regress, the corroded splendor of the late sky deepening as they stood and, it seemed to Darby, waited, though for what exactly was beyond him. As stoves were lit invisibly beneath their feet, woodsmoke began to seep and blow from the chimney tops, cries of newsboys ascended from the streets below, piercing as song. Arpeggios of bells, each with its own long-cherished name in the local dialect, joined in. Great disks of day-wearied birds tilted and careened above the squares big and small, brushed with penultimate light one moment, shed of it the next.

  By morning, with all the girls aboard, the wind had shifted. As Lindsay had confirmed three extra times, it would now take them within a few minutes of arc to their California destination.

  That was how they flew northwest and one night looked down and beheld an incalculable expanse of lights, which according to their charts was known as the City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. “My heavens,” exclaimed Heartsease, “Where on Earth is this?”

  “That’s sort of the problem,” Chick said. “That ‘on Earth’ part.”

  WHILE CROSSING THE CONTINENT the boys had expressed wonder at how much more infected with light the night-time terrains passing below them had become—more than anyone could ever remember, as isolated lanterns and skeins of gas-light had given way to electric street-lighting, as if advanced parties of the working-day were progressively invading and settling the unarmed hinterlands of night. But now at last, flying in over southern California and regarding the incandescence which flooded forth from suburban homes and city plazas, athletic fields, movie theatres, rail yards and depots, factory skylights, aerial beacons, streets and boulevards bearing lines of automobile headlights in constant crawl beyond any horizon, they felt themselves in uneasy witness to some final conquest, a triumph over night whose motive none could quite grasp.

  “It must have to do with extra work-shifts,” Randolph guessed, “increasingly scheduled, that
is, beyond the hours of daylight.”

  “So much additional employment,” Lindsay enthused, “as to suggest the further expansion of an already prodigious American economy, is certainly good news for us, considering the hardly negligible fraction of our capital invested therewithin.”

  “Yep groundhog sweat, misery and early graves,” snarled Darby, “that’s what keeps us flying around up here in style all right.”

  “You have certainly been treated well enough, Suckling, by a corporate system any of whose trivial shortcomings with which you still find yourself obliged to quibble must remain, for the rest of us, mercifully obscure if not indeed incomprehensible.”

  Darby blinked innocently. “Eeyyhh, Noseworth?”

  “Don’t say it. I am as fond of the subjunctive mood as any, but as the only use to which you ever put it is for a two-word vulgarism better left unuttered—”

  “Oh. Then how about ‘Long live capitalism’? same thing basically, ain’t it.”

  As if enabled by the absorption of a critical quantity of that unrelenting light, Miles spoke, his voice all but breaking beneath some emotion difficult to make out. “Lucifer, son of the morning, bearer of light . . . Prince of Evil.”

  Lindsay, as Ship’s Theological Officer, helpfully began to explain how the early church fathers, in their wish to connect Old and New Testaments at as many points as possible, were trying to correlate Isaiah’s epithet for the King of Babylon with Christ’s vision, according to Luke, of Satan falling like lightning from heaven. “Complicated further by the ancient astronomers’ use of the name Lucifer for Venus when she appears as the morning star—”

  “That is etymology,” said Miles as politely as he could. “But as for persistence within the human heart, immune to time—”

  “Excuse me, what,” Darby pretending to raise his hand, “ . . . areyoupeo-pletalkingabout?”

  Randolph looked up from a chart, and compared it with the crawling lightscape below. “There appears to be an airship facility around Van Nuys that might do the trick. Gentlemen, set the special sky detail.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the check sent by the lawyers bounced and their mailing address, upon investigation, did not exist. The boys found themselves for the moment without employment in a peculiar corner of a planet that might or might not be their own.

  “Another damn fool’s errand,” Darby growled. “When are we gonna learn?”

  “You were all in such a hurry,” Lindsay replied smugly.

  “Think I’ll just wander around today,” Chick said, “and take in the sights.” Around noontime, strolling in Hollywood and finding himself suddenly hungry, he went to stand in line outside a bustling hot-dog emporium called Links, where whom should he run into but his father, “Dick” Counterfly, whom he hadn’t seen since 1892 or thereabouts.

  “Great Scott,” exclaimed the elder Counterfly, “ain’t we a long ways from Thick Bush, Alabama.”

  “Nearly thirty years.”

  “Thought you’d be taller by now.”

  “Looks like you’re doing well, sir.”

  “Call me Dick, everybody in the world does, even the Chinese. Hell, they’d better. That state of Mississippi deal was the beginning of both our fortunes. See that rig over there?”

  “Looks like a Packard.”

  “Ain’t she a beauty? Come on, we’ll go for a spin.”

  “Dick” was living in a Beaux-Arts mansion out on West Adams with his third wife, Treacle, who was Chick’s age and possibly younger, and seemed unusually attentive to Chick.

  “Another gin fizz, Chick?”

  “Thanks, already got one,” said Chick, adding, “Treacle,” in a lower voice.

  “What’s with the eyelashes, cupcake? You look like you’re old enough to know the score.”

  “Get a load of this,” “Dick” motioning them into a dim adjoining room, where a huge piece of machinery, dominated by a rapidly-spinning metallic disk, six feet high and full of round holes in spiraling patterns with a very bright arc light behind it, and a bank of selenium cells that covered one entire wall.

  “Dick” went to a panel of switches and palely-lighted gauge faces, and began to crank the contraption up. “Not that I invented any of this really, all the pieces were already out in the market, why that Nipkow scanner there’s been around since 1884. I just happened to see how it could all fit together in a package, you’d say.”

  Chick gazed with great scientific curiosity at the shimmering image which appeared on a screen across the room from the spinning disk, as what looked like a tall monkey in a sailor hat with the brim turned down fell out of a palm tree onto a very surprised older man—the skipper of some nautical vessel, to judge by the hat he was wearing.

  “I pick this one up every week around this time,” said “Dick,” “though sometimes it seems to come from, well you might think it’s odd, but somewhere not on the surface of the Earth so much as—”

  “Perpendicular,” Chick suggested. He noticed that Treacle was sitting unusually close to him on the sofa, had undone several buttons of her dress, and seemed in an agitated state. And instead of watching the dots of light, revealed faster than the human eye could follow, blinking on and off at different intensities one after the other to create a single framed moving picture, she was watching Chick.

  Chick waited until the end of the transmission, whatever it had meant, and excused himself for the evening. Treacle rolled up his necktie and kissed him on the mouth. The next day “Dick” was at the balloon-field in Van Nuys before reveille, gunning the engine of the Packard impatiently.

  “Like you to come meet a couple of fellas.”

  They sped out toward the ocean, and about halfway along the curve of Santa Monica Bay found a complex of galvanized sheds and laboratories, just above the beach, which turned out to be a research facility run by two elderly eccentrics, Roswell Bounce and Merle Rideout.

  “Hi, Roswell, what’s with the shotgun?”

  “Thought you were somebody else.”

  “Those same heavies, back again, eh?” said “Dick,” with a worried expression.

  “You mentioned if we ever needed some muscle, there was somebody you could recommend,” Merle said.

  “And the time is damn sure upon us,” Roswell said.

  “Yes. Well there’s a whiz of a detective downtown,” said “Dick,” “who’ll know just what to do. Got him on retainer myself. Keeps an eye on that Treacle for me.”

  Chick gave his father a quizzical look. He was about to remark how cheerful and sociable a girl she seemed to be, but somehow thought better of it.

  “And if some, say, firearm situation should arise?” muttered Roswell.

  “It’s his condition,” Merle in a stage whisper. “Old-time form of paranoia.”

  “Better’n goin around thinkin I’m bulletproof.”

  “Well, packing or not, Lew Basnight’s your man.” From a dilapidated wallet “Dick” took out a wad of business cards, and flipped through. “Here’s his telephone number.”

  INSIDE THE SHOP, Chick stared in amazement. It was the lab of every boy’s dreams! Why, the place even smelled scientific—that long-familiar blend of ozone, gutta-percha, solvent chemicals, heated insulation. The shelves and benchtops were crowded with volt-ammeters, rheostats, transformers, arc lamps whole and in pieces, half-used carbons, calcium burners, Oxone tablets, high-tension magnetos, alternators store-bought and home-made, vibrator coils, cut-outs and interruptors, worm drives, Nicol prisms, generating valves, glassblowing torches, Navy surplus Thalofide cells, brand-new Aeolight tubes freshly fallen from the delivery truck, British Blattnerphone components and tons of other stuff Chick had never recalled seeing before.

  Merle and Roswell led them to the back of the lab and through triple-locked doors into a small shop space occupied by a mysterious piece of machinery, over whose safety they had been losing some sleep lately, for it had attracted the attention it seemed of some dark criminal enterprise, based, the inventors were all but c
ertain, up in Hollywood.

  “See, every photographic subject moves,” Roswell explained, “even if it’s standing still. It breathes, light bounces off, something. Snapping a photograph is like what the math professors call ‘differentiating’ an equation of motion—freezing that movement into the very small piece of time it takes the shutter to open and close. So we figured—if shooting a photo is like taking a first derivative, then maybe we could find some way to do the reverse of that, start with the still photo and integrate it, recover its complete primitive and release it back into action . . . even back to life . . .”

  “We worked at it off and on,” Merle said, “but it wasn’t till old Lee De Forest added that grid electrode to the Fleming valve that everything began to make sense. Then it seemed clear enough that with a triode valve, an input resistor and a feedback condenser, for instance, you could breadboard a circuit that if you chose your resistance and capacitance right, you could put in a simple alternating voltage onto the grid—call it ‘sine of t’—and get minus cosine of t for an output.”

  “So that in theory the output,” Chick grasped, “can be the indefinite integral of any signal you put on the grid.”

  “There you go,” Roswell nodded. “Better look out for this one, ‘Dick.’ Any case, electricity and light being pretty much the same thing, just slightly different stretches of the spectrum really, we figured if we could work this integration effect with electricity, then we should also be able to do it using light, should we not?”

  “Heck, you’ve got my permission all right,” exclaimed ‘Dick’ Counterfly.

  For the professorial of temperament the next step would then’ve been finding analogies in the world of optics for the De Forest triode, the feedback capacitor, and other physical components of the circuit in question. But with Roswell there was his strikingly advanced case of paranoia querulans to be taken into account. You could see his ears twitching, always a sure sign in him of mental activity, but his mind was not, it had occurred already to Merle, working in anything like a straightforward manner. Fragments of former patent applications, modulated by defectively remembered court appearances, bloomed and streamed kaleidoscopically in and out of his attention. Faces of lawyers he had grown less than fond of, indeed entertained phantasies about murdering, even from years before, swam now distortedly through his thoughts. Not to mention inspiration to be drawn, not always explicably, from the pieces of hardware that kept finding their ways, more and less legally, into the shop. One of the pair of mad inventors would ask, “What the hell we ever gonna do with that,” the other would shrug and say, “You never know,” and up it would go onto some shelf or into some cabinet, and sure enough, one day they’d need something that would turn infrared light to electricity, or double-refract it at a particular angle of polarization, and there, invisible under a pile of stuff accumulated since, would be the very item.

 

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