A Bloodsmoor Romance (38 page)

He erased the blackboard, and attempted diagrams of the time- and perpetual-motion machine, far more detailed than the models on the desk, and in some cases radically differing from them. Little Nahum at such times was greatly absorbed with his teacher's monologue: he squirmed and writhed in his desk, he waved his hand frantically in the air, and, if not called upon (for Mr. Zinn was much absorbed in his own theorizing), dared to interrupt, and to speak out with a suggestion of his own; which Mr. Zinn, testifying to the charity of his nature, and his innate modesty, accepted with all respect, as if it had issued from an equal. The diagrams grew in complexity, and were abruptly erased with swipes of Mr. Zinn's large hand. And then they blossomed forth again, perhaps with an assistance from Nahum, to last a day or two: and then they were erased again, as being “unworkable.”

At such times, John Quincy gave no evidence of minding that certain of his students were yawning rudely, or passing forbidden notes, or jabbing one another with their pens; that a plump German girl, whose seat was near the stove, had fallen asleep and was snoring faintly, to the vast amusement of her classmates; or that one of Nahum's older brothers was lazily digging mud off his boots with a penknife.

(A pity it was, that during these last weeks John Quincy neglected to return to his earlier lessons, in order to reestablish patterns of learning in his pupils: for children forget rapidly acquired skills rapidly, and, undisciplined, tend to revert to their animal ways—charming enough, it may be, under certain restraints, but unruly indeed. So it was that his replacement in the school, a husky, strong-willed, and not overly sensitive widow of Dutch and English ancestry, who had been a Sunday school teacher for many years, found to her bewilderment and gradual anger that Mr. Zinn's alleged star pupils knew but a farrago of unconnected facts and wispy theories; and that the rest of the class—of all ages, sizes, temperaments, and abilities—were “ignorant as savages, and as badly behaved.”)

John Quincy Zinn may have sensed that he was losing ground with the majority of his students, even as he gained ground with the precocious little Nahum, whom, indeed, he treated rather like a younger brother, sometimes rubbing his head in play, or stroking his slender shoulder; he may have convinced himself that the passionate pursuit, day by day and week by week, of the elusive machines, would in the end brilliantly justify itself, and silence local opposition—the members of the board of education, and the troublesome Reverend Tidewell above all. He may have told himself, too, that the
imprinting
of certain truths upon impressionable minds was perhaps the most he could hope for, in this backwoods community, where, after all, farming skills were the highest value, and book learning of any sort was looked upon with suspicion. So he strode about the classroom, a tall and somewhat disheveled figure, stroking his beard, clapping his hands softly together, interrupting his own monologue on the history of science and invention from Galileo onward (observations which, not a year later, would strike intellectual Philadelphia as simply brilliant—worthy of a lecture series in themselves), interrupting his own monologue to cast out small glittering gems, to be gathered up by those alert to their value: “The perfecting of a type of object
mechanically,
we must remember, is evidenced by its attainment of
Beauty,
” and “The mass of the Universe is living matter which constantly grows from within, its spiritual gravity necessarily increasing, until such time as it must implode, having no other recourse—and revert to the original fireball of Life, the
Spirit that pervades all things.
”

In the late afternoon, the rest of the students having departed, John Quincy and Nahum labored on the time-machine, in silence for the most part, rarely needing to consult with each other. The machine had now grown to a size of approximately five feet by three, and was set on the floorboards, boxlike in design, and deceptively simple when viewed from the outside. Inside, however, it was a veritable nest of wires, coils, magnets, cogs and wheels and small hammers, and cylindrical mirrors. The principle of
time
being fluid, as John Quincy believed, and having much to do with invisible radiant energies in the atmosphere, contained within the earth's motion as it turned ceaselessly on its axis, the principle of
time-travel
would then involve a resistance to this motion, or an acceleration of it, within, of course, well-defined limits. (For John Quincy and Nahum could not reason how any object could be sent to travel a great distance in time, at least with their present model; nor did they anticipate that any living thing might be sent upon a time-journey, let alone a human being.)

So they labored, and corrected their original diagram, and added to the model, and hours might pass before a rock was thrown up on the roof, to roll noisily down the shingles: a sign, primitive enough, that one of Nahum's brothers had been sent to fetch him, and that he must leave at once. His narrow face at such moments registered a truly adult regret: and he often backed away from their work, most reluctantly, whilst John Quincy bade him an absentminded but affectionate goodnight.

It was at the very onset of mud-time, the least amenable of seasons, that the
accident,
with its unfortunate results, took place. I hold it bitterly ironic that John Quincy had begun to awaken, many a night, his slumber pierced by uncharacteristic doubt . . . and yet he could never have foreseen what would happen. His thoughts as always tended toward the abstract, for he worried that, in constructing a time-machine, with whatever modest expectations, he was tampering with an absolute Law of Nature; and thereby violating his own principles. Now and then his anxiety touched upon his relations with his pupils, and the community; and in his mind's eye the pale, intense face of little Nahum loomed large; but he made every effort to suppress his doubts, for, as we know, negative mental activities lead to nothing productive, and are fatally exhausting. Mr. Zinn's faith in the Supreme Being was such that he believed his intuition would be guided without ambiguity, should he be inadvertently violating an actual Law of Nature—in which case he would unhesitatingly smash his precious machine, and destroy all the diagrams. Nahum's heart would be broken, but that, alas, would be unavoidable.

It is ironic, too, that the crisis should have been precipitated by the child's reckless behavior, in the face of John Quincy's repeated warnings, and the exemplary model of his own caution. For as work on the time-machine progressed, and excitement naturally grew, the precocious child—who had in fact just celebrated his twelfth birthday—began to speak queerly of “fame” and “riches” and “changing the world forever”; and in a breathless, jocular voice that had not the tone of a normal child's voice. John Quincy either paid no heed to such remarks, or countered them with a more practical wisdom of his own: for the pragmatic results of any invention, however ingenious, could not really be foreseen; and the history of invention was strewn with brilliant but finally unworkable and unmarketable ideas. One must after all interest a wealthy patron, or the Congress of the United States, in order to be financed in the systematic
manufacture
of a new invention. Nahum would be wise, too, to recall the discouragement endured by such heroic visionaries as Robert Fulton and Charles Goodyear, whose genius oft invited ridicule and scorn, with rarely a warm wish; and whose lives were surely hastened to their ends by the cruel indifference of the public. The wisest strategy, John Quincy averred, was the hoary old counsel—
Make haste slowly!

Yet even as John Quincy was speaking, bent over the diagram with a quill pen in his hand, the precocious Nahum chose to follow his own whim—and, having set the gauge on the outside of the machine, to a date in the near future, proceeded to
crawl inside.

John Quincy worked for some minutes in silence, making emendations in the now alarmingly complex diagram; and it was only a subtle alteration in the atmosphere—a sense of sudden chill, and aloneness—that alerted him to glance around, startl'd, to see that Nahum was no longer present. Whereupon the astonished John Quincy Zinn stood with his quill pen in hand, simply staring. At last he feebly murmured: “Nahum?
Nahum?
”

Whilst the surface of his mind continued with the pretext that the child was still in the schoolroom, but unaccountably hiding from him, the deeper core of his intelligence knew full well, and immediately, that Nahum had plunged ahead with the experiment, with that perverse recklessness of which only the gifted are capable: he had crawled inside the time-machine, into a space that looked as if it would accommodate only a much younger child, and he had, somehow, one surely could not know
how,
caused himself to vanish. That he had penetrated the curtain of time, and traveled, as it were, into the future, John Quincy felt with a sickening certitude must be true—and yet the plausibility of so extreme an action struck the older man as unthinkable.

With what anxiety the next hour was endured, the sensitive reader may well imagine. The unhappy schoolmaster feared for his charge's well-being; indeed, he feared for his very life. Not a thought crossed his mind of the inevitable danger to himself, should Nahum not reappear, for our hero was made of noble substance, and yet he may well have considered his own situation—a schoolmaster who had lost one of his pupils, inside the very schoolroom! But he paid no heed to his own prospects, and paced about the machine, crying the child's name, and tearing at his hair, now and then stooping to peer inside the box at the small galaxy of wires and cylindrical mirrors, all of which (I am surprised to report) struck him as suddenly unreadable, as if constructed by another person altogether. Unreadable, alas, and quite mad!

Then he woke, and roused himself, as it were, and set to fiddling with the gauge, which operated along the general lines of an alarm clock, tho' of necessity it was far more complicated. By now it was late afternoon and the schoolroom had grown dark; it was only with a great effort that he forced himself to pause, to light a lamp, and set it on the table beside him. Again he stooped to peer into the machine, and again he saw that it was empty. Again the fanciful thought crossed his mind that Nahum was playing a trick on him—perhaps in concert with one or two others—and would reappear in another minute, jeering and grinning, from behind the stove, or beneath a desk, or out of a shadowy corner. Ah, how he would have rejoiced! The bitterness he might reasonably be expected to feel, that his most intimate pupil had turned against him, he would gladly have suffered in the interest of knowing that the child was well—and fully present in March of 1853.

Perhaps in response to his desperate adjustments, perhaps quite by chance, the machine whirred into spasmodic life: and the incredulous John Quincy saw that a form—a human figure of some sort—appeared to be taking shape in the machine's dim interior. Seconds passed slowly, as if the figure were reluctant to assume substance, or as if something were very much amiss. “Nahum?” John Quincy murmured. But even before the figure solidified and became, not the twelve-year-old boy who had disappeared, but a much smaller being, John Quincy seemed to realize the nature of the problem, and the certitude that he
had
violated a Law of Nature—however unwittingly—flashed through him like an electrical charge. For the essence of such a violation, the prescient young man knew, was that
it could never be amended.

And yet of course he must try. He must try to “save” Nahum—now fully materialized, but squirming and kicking and beginning to wail, with all the fleshy vigor of
a six-month-old infant.

And at this very moment, a rock struck the peak of the schoolhouse roof, and began its noisy tumble downward!

(That John Quincy Zinn should remain detached enough from his own jagged emotions, to reason quickly through the probabilities leading up to the extraordinary materialization of an
infant,
where a
twelve-year-old boy
had been expected, is a testament to his genius—indeed, one wonders how a lesser man, in so horrific a situation, might have conducted himself. The natural husbandly agitation Mr. Zinn would one day experience whilst his wife lay screaming in labor, in another part of the house, was mercifully joined with this selfsame mental detachment: unique, it may be, to his gender; and perhaps allowing for the general superiority of the masculine sex, where emotion and rationality contend. Yet tho' his physical being exhibited many of the symptoms of extreme panic, such as palpitations of the heart, sweating, and flashes of severe cold, combined with a terrifying looseness of the bowels, and the paternal or brotherly instinct in him was to seize the baby in his arms, as if to rescue it (for flesh, God save us, cries out to flesh!), at the same time his mental processes, acting with an almost preternatural accuracy, dictated to him the firm imperative:
Do not touch.
For he grasped the substance of the predicament, tho' the systematical reasoning behind it was not yet available—that is, the fatal error of the time-machine was not only its present primitive form (tho' it is a measure of John Quincy Zinn's skill, that he should have constructed an actual working time-machine, in 1853, out of such homely materials), but a miscalculation as to the nature, indeed the very possibility, of time-travel. For he had not entirely reasoned through the contingencies under which a time-traveler might labor, assuming that no living creature, let alone Nahum himself, would be plunged into the abyss of Time for many years: he had vaguely planned to send inanimate objects into the future or the past, simply to test whether they could be safely recalled, or no. Laboring with a crude model, tirelessly experimenting with the
physical,
he had set aside for the time being certain
metaphysical
problems . . . such as, the question of whether anything, animate or inanimate, would age if sent into the future, or whether it would maintain its integrity, so to speak, whilst suns and moons whirled o'erhead; and the question of how the object, once hurtled into Time, might be retrieved.