"Will," the President said softly, "you're a big man . . . in every sense. Don't let this get to you."
Taft threw Mr. Roosevelt a sharp look. "You've got some notion of what's going on, then? You seem to be taking it mighty coolly."
"Well, now, Will, it's a grave matter, and calls for calmness. What is it Kipling says, 'If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs'?"
Taft looked at him again before replying. "If you're in the mood for poetry, Theodore, I'll tell you that I feel like that line in 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'—'"We are lost!" the captain shouted as he staggered down the stairs.' Rhymes with yours, too, come to think of it."
"Just what's happened, Will?" the President asked him. "What did these fellows who came to see you want?"
"I suspect you've got a pretty clear idea of that. These . . . astronauts here"—he threw us a glance bright with dislike—"have thrown a monkey wrench into the whole damned election. Bryan's all for having 'em exorcised or lynched or such, and our crowd's saying that I'm not the man to handle 'em so as to get something useful out of 'em. And the party feels that our line has got to be that we've got a candidate who can do just that. And, by God, they've got on the telegraph and polled a quorum of the delegates to the convention—the same fellows that nominated me on the first ballot last month!—and got 'em to agree to 'accept my withdrawal if offered.' "
"Ah, Will," the President said, laying his hand on the big man's shoulder. "It's a heavy load to bear, but for the good of the country . . . And look at it this way: the presidency was always a second choice for you, I know. You wanted a place on the Court more than anything—well, I'll be able to see to that for you, by George! That business about not running again, well, that can't apply now, not with . . ." He gestured toward us—with, I noticed, his right hand. I was pleased that he would apparently be able to accomplish his goal without sacrificing that useful member.
Taft looked up at him, then, impressive as a force of nature, rose from his seat until he stood, looking slightly downward at the President, seeming to dominate the room by his very bulk and gravity. "Theodore," he said, "you've only got the half of it. You're not going to be the one putting up Supreme Court appointments to the Senate, any more than I am. The National Committee, well, they've been talking with some of the fellows in industry and finance, and they've all pitched on someone they think can work the best with our visitors—someone who knows science and so on—a man who—"
"Confound it, Will! What the devil are you trying to say?"
"Oh, Lord!" Oxford said behind me. "They can't be—but, oh, sweet spirits of ammonia, it makes an awful kind of sense . . ."
"I have the honor to inform you, Mr. President," Taft said bitterly, but not without a note of satisfaction in his tone, "that the delegates to the Republican National Convention for the year 1908, electrically reconvened, are prepared to designate as their candidate Mr. Thomas Alva Edison."
The President's teeth and eyeballs shone vividly as both were bared by a sudden contraction of his facial muscles, but there was a dead silence in the room until Wells broke it with an awed murmur: "Gorblimey!"
10
After the picture-taking, which was conducted in a subdued mood—I noted later that the results were quite striking, as the President bore an uncharacteristic expression of savage gloom—we returned to New York to prepare for our tour. On the way, Oxford and Wells animatedly discussed the startling political developments. We did not participate, but at one point Oxford said to me, "This'll smooth things for you. It was going to be a pretty dull campaign 'til this happened, and now it'll be a humdinger. The public will be grateful to you for gingering it up. You'll be as popular on the road as John L. or Christy Mathewson."
And so it proved. Wherever we went during the next months, we were greeted with enthusiasm, mixed with a certain derisive affection; evidently the Americans had in the main concluded that, whatever our supposed mission, our actual function was to provide them with some novelty and distraction. We—usually I, as it was agreed that Dark was too apt to say alarming things, that Ari had little interest in communicating anything except Metahistorical data, and that Valmis was still too high-strung—addressed crowds from the rear platform of our train, at banquets in cities and small towns, at picnic grounds, at county fairs; we shook hands, wrote our names in native characters and our own script in albums designed for the purpose; posed for pictures with local dignitaries, sometimes partly garbed in regional costume; spoke well of prominent features of the landscape and whatever manufactured or agricultural products characterized the area; threw out the first ball at baseball contests and threw curved pieces of iron, normally intended to protect the feet of work animals, at uprights set in the ground. All of this was recorded by a picture-taker accompanying us, written up at great length by Oxford and telegraphed each night to the Hearst newspapers in New York and San Francisco; and, as he told me, resulted in a substantial rise in circulation for what he called "the whole chain."
It took us from the beginning of August to the middle of October to complete the tour, which seemed to me an excessive length of time for the benefits that might be expected, and I told Oxford so. "We're dragging it out a little," he admitted, "but Teddy—and Edison, when he got into it—held out for that. They want you off the board for most of the campaign, and while you're whistle-stopping around like this, you aren't in any one place long enough for folks to get excited about you for more than a day. If you were where the news-hawks and politicians could get at you, there's no telling what you might say or what someone might pull, and the whole applecart could turn over. As it is, it's going fine. Edison's line in the campaign is to ignore Bryan, and it looks like the voters are doing that, too. Edison mostly sits out in Menlo Park and talks about the wonders of the future, and when he does stir to make a speech, it draws the crowds like flies. Bryan's making a fool of himself, pounding away on the same note—send you back where you came from and don't contaminate our pure old Earth with heathen ideas—and all he gets is half-empty halls, with the audience shuffling its feet and wishing he'd get back to Free Silver."
Our quarters—a three-car private train—were a good deal more spacious than Wanderer, but the journey was so extended and filled with repetitions of essentially the same events that I found myself unable to retain any clear impression of the whole or to form any picture of the nation through which we were paraded, and could afterward recall only a few striking incidents.
I do remember our first stop, only a few miles from New York City, at Mr. Edison's establishment. Though the inventor was absent, to Dark's disappointment—he was, we later learned, in Washington, conferring with the President and his party leaders and at that very hour agreeing to accept the hastily offered nomination—we were shown about with great courtesy. It was somewhat tedious for Ari, Valmis and myself, as our interests did not encompass machinery, to which the place seemed to be devoted, but Dark was fascinated.
"This electricity stuff," he told me, "that's all very well, but it's really a pretty crude way of working with something they already knew about. What's really impressive is that talking machine thing—d'you know Edison thought it all up himself? Now that's inventiveness, that is. Of course, it's all wrong," he said to one of the staff, who stood nearby.
The man stiffened. "Wrong?"
"Well," Dark explained, "you aren't going to get really accurate sound reproduction by working mechanically, you see. No matter what you do, you're limited by the fact that you've got one solid thing bouncing off another. It's awfully clever, but it's like trying to get into space travel by shooting off explosives—you can make a start at the idea, but it won't get you far. What you want to do is, you want to get down the electric impulses, and then reproduce those."
"But . . . huh," the man said. "Say, you folks mind if Charley here takes you the rest of the way round? I've got something I want to get at."
Dark chatted in the same manner with a succession of guides, apparent
ly boring them greatly, as each tended to pass us on to another on the plea of work to be done.
Certain other happenings of the tour remain with me, though it would be hard to say when or where they took place. I recall that Oxford was most impressed when we met with an ancient native, who was apparently held in great honor and affection because, in the course of conducting warfare on behalf of his nomadic tribesmen against the dominant culture, he had slaughtered a great number of Oxford's people and achieved a reputation for cruelty. It may be that I missed some element of Oxford's explanation that would have made it more logical.
The old man studied me keenly. "Your people sending a war party after you?" he asked. I assured him that this was not so, and he appeared disappointed.
"I saw the white men come with their trains and telegraph wires and fences, and the Indians vanished like mist. Wasn't their soldiers that ended us, but the things they had and the way they lived. I saw that—me, Geronimo. Saw it and fought it but couldn't stop it. Nobody could. I'd like to see the same thing happen to the white man while I'm still alive. Be a damn good joke."
I noticed that after this interview Oxford and Wells looked at me uneasily from time to time.
It was a constant habit of the natives to escort us about such of their industrial establishments as were located conveniently near our stopping places, and we developed the custom of relegating this duty to Dark, as he was the only one of us capable of at least appearing interested in such matters. This generally worked well, but led to one unfortunate incident.
He and Oxford had gone off on one of these excursions, which we expected would take at least two hours. Wells, Ari, Valmis and I were taking our ease in the lounge car when we were surprised to see the vehicle in which they had left returning at a high speed. It stopped next to our car, and Oxford fairly dragged Dark from it and thrust him onto the train, then turned to an individual in a blue uniform who remained in the vehicle and shoved a sheaf of currency at him.
"Thanks, Chief," I heard him call. "This should help you keep a lid on what happened, right? And, say, listen, would you tell the engineer to pour on the steam and get us the hell out of here right now?"
"Surest thing you know, Mr. Oxford," the uniformed man said respectfully, quickly thumbing through the bills.
In a moment, Oxford and Dark entered our car, stumbling as the train suddenly started into motion. Dark had a bruise under one cheekbone, and his native jacket had a tear at the collar.
"Whatever's been going on?" Ari asked, peering at him.
Oxford glared at Dark. "Your friend here suddenly took a notion to cut loose and start beating up our hosts. Is he subject to fits or something? It cost me a lot of W. R.'s long green to square things with the police there, but I guess they'll handle it. What the hell did you think you were—"
"I couldn't help it," Dark said. "It just got to me. Listen, Raf, do you know what these people do?"
"All sorts of things, I expect," I replied.
"No, I mean—look, I know I don't get out as much as you fellows when we're—"
I broke in, for in his agitation he appeared to be about to say more than I thought prudent about our actual work, Exploration—it was still vital to keep up the fiction of being a diplomatic advance guard. "Oxford, Wells—would you mind if we discussed this alone? I promise you we'll get at this, but Dark's a bit upset just now, and I think we'll find out what's wrong more easily if we have him to ourselves."
When the two Earthmen had gone, Dark resumed. "You see, I stick with the ship mostly, while you three go out and sniff around the natives of whatever planet it is. So maybe it's that I don't get to see so much of what goes on in different places. But I tell you, this . . . I couldn't believe it!"
It appeared that he and Oxford had been taken on a tour of a factory engaged in producing textiles. There were a great many machines of commendable ingenuity, all creating a great noise and filling the air with an unwholesome dust composed of fibers of the material being processed. The work, Dark observed, was carried out by small creatures, perhaps half the size of the natives, who performed it quite nimbly. These he supposed, to be certain members of a class of creatures known as primates, some of which, distant evolutionary cousins of the humans, we had seen in cages in a park in New York, assiduously trained for tasks which the natives themselves would find distasteful or perilous.
"That didn't set too well with me, for I could see that the job would wear the beasts out pretty quickly. But, after all, that's the way it is with sentient races; the ones further down the ladder are going to be used for something by the fellows on top." What had really made Dark uneasy was what seemed to him the rather nasty-minded humor involved in removing the creatures' facial hair and dressing them in clothing similar to, though of poorer quality than that worn by the natives, so as to make them resemble their masters.
His disapproving comment on this was received with incomprehension by those conducting him through the factory, and he was finally given to understand that the workers were not what he had supposed, but rather were in fact juvenile humans.
"And it wasn't even as if they were being punished," he said to us wonderingly. "Their own children, put out to work like that. They didn't look like humans any more, really—all sort of dried up, and some of them coughing . . ."
As Dark told it, once this had sunk in, he had given a yell of outrage, struck out wildly, and felled two or three of those nearest him; only Oxford's quick action in removing him from the scene and "squaring" the chief of police had averted an extremely awkward scene.
"I am afraid you do get a narrow view, being confined to the ship," Ari observed. "Certainly, according to our own standards, what you observed is distressing, even outrageous. But there are practices among other humanoid races which we, as Explorers, have been obliged to witness calmly, beside which this pales into insignificance. I recall particularly the Pththn, who—"
Valmis and I recalled them as well, and begged Ari not to go into any detail.
"Well," Dark said, glowering, "it's all very well to keep up a detached attitude about these natives and what they do to each other. But I'm damned if it's going to worry me any more, this business of messing around with their culture; they could use some pretty drastic changes!"
Normally our encounters along the way were conducted with prearranged care and formality, but there was an amusing instance somewhere in the middle of the country, after our departure from a town, village or place called Dayton, when Oxford appeared in the lounge car, marching two natives before him. These were lanky, solemn-looking individuals, who looked at us with a sort of feverish eagerness.
"Stowaways," Oxford said grimly. "Nipped on board while the crowd was surging around you and hid under some seats up forward."
I was feeling pleasantly relaxed, having been treated during our halt to some few glasses of a local fruit drink known, I believe, as applejohn, and I spoke to the intruders in a friendly manner. "You wanted our autographs, then, my good men? You needn't have gone to all that trouble to—"
"They're not interested in souvenirs," Oxford said. "These chaps claim to have built an airship—"
"Heavier-than-air," the taller of the two said indignantly. "There's a difference. And it ain't a claim—Wilbur and I, we've flown it, shown it around, even demonstrated it to the Army, but nobody'll pay it any mind, not even you newspaper fellows, that'll write up a two-headed calf as if 'twas the biggest news since Richmond fell. Now, from what everyone says, these foreign gentlemen here, they've got the President's ear, and Wilbur and me, we think that if they was to tell him—"
"Ah, now, look," Oxford said. "This is that sort of kite thing you flew in North Carolina five years back? Now, I remember that; it got a line or so in the metropolitans, but what's so great about it?"
"Hey," Dark said. "You say you got something up in the air without, um, floating it? And you don't have gravity repulsion here, that's for sure—how did you manage that?"
As the two
brothers explained it, they had joined together the unrelated concepts of a kind of airborne toy, a propulsion mechanism intended for boats, and a power plant used in road vehicles to construct their machine.
"My word," Dark said, "that's quite something. And you worked out the airflow stuff all on your own?"
He and the two strangers repaired to a corner of the car and talked earnestly for some time, all three of them frequently making swooping motions in the air with their hands.
At our next stop, about an hour later, Dark saw them off the train before our ritual greeting by the town's dignitaries. "You're on the right track," he called after them. "You've got to look for better power sources, d'you see, and ways to lose weight. All the rest follows, if you're going that way. You can't do much that's worthwhile unless you get hold of antigravity, of course, but that'll do to get on with. Really remarkably clever for natives," he added, turning to me, "but I tell you, it's discouraging to think that that's the best they've come up with. It's all very well for them to find ways to potter around in their atmosphere, but it's no indication that we're going to get these people licked into any kind of shape to help us out with Wanderer."
As I have said, the middle of the time period known as October found us back in New York City, and we spent two weeks recovering from the effects of our journey, undertaking nothing more in the way of exertion than short walks and one excursion to the statue about which we had been questioned at the news reporters' interview in August. This was a large structure of metal, shaped almost as if to represent a native female, located on an island near the city, positioned so as to dominate another island nearby, on which persons wishing to enter the country were detained for some time. The intent, both of the detention and the location of the statue, appeared to be to intimidate the newcomers and prevent them from causing any inconvenience to those already resident. This insight, which I arrived at almost intuitively, was borne out by an inscription at the base of the statue, which referred to the arrivals from other places as "wretched refuse." Though striking me as strong—it was admittedly difficult for me, at this point, to distinguish between one sort of native and another—the designation appeared to reflect accurately the opinion held by more established inhabitants of those who passed through what the same inscription mysteriously referred to as "the golden door."
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