Against the Day (20 page)

“So you could make a case,” Foley
concluded, “for me being more Scarsdale Vibe than Scarsdale Vibe himself.”

Kit was respectful but not convinced.
“You see the problem for me, I hope. Supposed to believe that some
remittance’ll show up every month, on time, for three or four years straight?
With that kind of personal faith, I could be out in some tent handling snakes
and
really
making a name for myself.”

The famed inventor was at this moment
observed passing swiftly left to right.
“
Izvinite,
there, Dr. Tesla!” Foley cried out, “—mind if we use your
telegraph?”

“In the office,” the reedy Serb
called over his shoulder, breezing on to meet the day’s next intractable
difficulty.

“
Hvala!
Come on along,
buckaroo, prepare to be amazed.”

Once in Tesla’s shack, Foley lost no
time getting onto the telegraph key and in touch with the Vibe offices back
East. A few moments later, as if remembering Kit’s existence, “How much earnest
money on this deal would you be thinking?”

“Pardon?”

“Would five hundred dollars take care
of it for the moment?” Foley’s finger starting in again with the beetlebanter,
faster than eyes could follow—then an attentive stillness as the other
end chattered back. “O.K., all set. It’ll be there tomorrow at the Bank of
Colorado Springs, made out to you personally. Just go on in and sign.”

Kit kept a poker face. “Long night
ahead.”

Longer
than expected. Around eight o’clock, a secondary winding on one of the
transmitters blew up, having been repeatedly charged at, somewhere out along
the miles of coil length required by the low frequencies of the waves in use,
by a maddened elk. Near midnight a couple of prairie tornadoes roared by as if
seeking in the twohundredfoot transmission tower a companion in electrical
debauchery, and about the middle of the midwatch a couple of stimulated
freightmen down from Leadville got in a dispute and exchanged shots, which, as
usual, nothing came of, owing to the magnetic fields around here being so
strong and erratic they kept pulling the pistol barrels off target. Lurid
bursts of blue, red, and green light, with their manmade thunderclaps, kept the
skies busy till dawn. Kids at the adjoining Deaf and Blind School reported
hearing and seeing frequencies hitherto unaccounted for in the medical science
of the day.

In the morning, after a pot of trail
coffee, Kit saddled up and rode in to the bank, where all was just as Foley had
promised. A teller with some green celluloid rig across his brow peered up at
Kit with an interest few had ever shown. “Another one of Doc Tesla’s boys, eh?”
Kit, sleepless after thirtysix hours of voltaic frenzy and odd behavior human
and animal, took it as a message from perhaps farther beyond where it’d
actually come from. Somewhere along East Platte Street on the way back, guiding
on the tower with its threefoot copper sphere on top catching the sun across
the prairie, Kit was assaulted all at once by a yearning, or that’s how he’d
think of it later—a clarity of desire—to belong to that band of
adventurers into the Æther and its mysteries, to become,
por vida
,
one of Doc Tesla’s boys.
Well inside the mile or so back to the test station, he found himself,
unaccountably, ready to sign up with Foley’s plan for his life.

“After I finish college I come work
for Mr. Vibe till the debt’s paid off, that right?”

“Right—and if you’ll sign this
one here, too, just a standard release
. . .
Sure, think of it as paid conscription. Us geezers from the days of the
Rebellion, we tend to take it for the way of the world, one element in society
wishing to keep clear of some spell of unpleasantness—your case, having
to learn all that college stuff—paying another element to take it on
instead. Basic arrangement. Those above get their piece of time untroubled and
free, us below get our cash right away, and depending on the job, maybe even a
thrill now and then.”

“But after the War, as you tell it,
you thought your man still owed you.”

“Might’ve been from observing how Mr.
Vibe and other notable ransomed souls of his era had been left free to behave.
Not to mention the profit curve that resulted for them, while they just went
waltzing on, some of them even today unable to imagine any form of real
trouble. We that went and found more of that than we could bear felt like that
we ought to be seeking reparations, our damages to body and spirit being the
debit side of all their good fortune, you could say.”

“If you were a socialist, you could,”
Kit supposed.

“Sure, and isn’t that just the class
system for ya? Eternal youth bought with the sickness and death of others. Call
it what you like. If you go back East, you may run into more thinking along these
same lines, so if it offends you now, better speak up, we’ll go make other
arrangements.”

“No, no, I’ll be all right.”

“That’s also what Mr. Vibe thinks.”

“He doesn’t know me.”

“That will change.”

Later in the shack, Kit came upon
Tesla, frowning at a pencil sketch. “Oh. Sorry, I was looking for—”

“This toroid is the wrong shape,”
said Tesla. “Come, look at this a moment.”

Kit had a look. “Maybe there’s a
vector solution.”

“How’s that?

“We know what we want the field to
look like at each point, don’t we. Well, maybe we can generate a surface shape
that’ll give us that field.”

“You see it,” Tesla halfinquired,
looking at Kit with some curiosity.

“I see something,” Kit shrugged.

“The same began to happen to me also
at your age,” Tesla recalled. “When I could find the time to sit still, the
images would come. But it’s always finding the time, isn’t it.”

“Sure, always something
. . . .
Chores, something.”

“Tithing,” Tesla said, “giving back
to the day.”

“Not complainin about the hours here,
nothin like that, sir.”

“Why not? I complain all the time.
Not enough of them, basically.”

When Kit got
back
from Colorado
Springs all on fire with the news of Foley’s offer, Webb would have none of it.
“You crazy? I’ll get somebody to write em, tell em no.”

“Wasn’t you they asked.”

“It’s me they’re after, son.”

“They don’t know you down there,” Kit
argued.

“They own the mines here. You think
I’m not on their list? I’m on everbody else’s. They’re tryin to buy my family
away. And if gold don’t work, sooner or later they get around to lead.”

“I don’t think you understand this.”

“Everbody’s ignorant about somethin.
Me, it’s the electricity. You, looks like it’s rich folks.”

“They can afford this so easily. Can
you?”

It was falling apart. Webb could feel
himself losing this argument, losing his son. Too fast, he said, “And what’s
the payback?”

“I go to work for the Vibe Corp. when
I graduate. Anything wrong with that?”

Webb shrugged. “They own you.”

“It’ll mean steady work. Not like . .
.”

“Like around here.” Kit just stared
back. It was over, Webb guessed. “O.K., well. You’re either my boy or theirs,
can’t be both.”

“That’s the choice?”

“You’re not goin, Kit.”

“Oh ain’t I.” It was out, just that
tone of voice, before the boy could think, nor did he register too deeply then
what sorrow came flooding into Webb’s face, usually a little upturned these
days owing to Kit’s stillincreasing height.

“That case,” Webb pretending to look
at some kind of shiftboss paperwork, “leave just when you want. Jake with me.”
They would make a practice from there on of not letting their eyes meet, which
as things turned out was never to happen again, not here on the desolate lee
shore whose back country is death.

“Being a little hard with him,” it
seemed to Mayva.

“You too? You look at him lately,
May, he ain’t exactly some damn baby anymore, you can’t just keep girlyin onto
him till he’s no damn good for nothing.”

“But he is our baby, Webb.”

“Baby’s ass. He’s old enough and sure
big enough to see what this is, now. How the deal works.”

It took a while, till Kit had left
and the emotions had lost some of that knife edge, before Webb began to
remember times him and his own father, Cooley, had gone round and round, and
just as loud, andjust as senseless, and he couldn’t even remember what it had
been about, not every time. And though Webb was younger when Cooley died, it
had never occurred to him, from that day to this, how Cooley might have been
feeling the same way Webb felt now. He wondered if it would stay this way for
the rest of his life—he had never made it right between him and his Pa,
and the same thing now, like some damn curse, was happening between him and Kit
. . . .

Mayva saw Kit off at the depot, but
it was a chilly parting, and not too long on hope. He was pretending not to
understand why nobody else had showed up, none of the men. She was wearing her
church hat—“church” having been conducted often as not out under the sky,
the old maroon velvet had picked up some years of trail dust and grown sunfaded
along its many miniature ridgetops. Wasn’t too long ago that he’d still been
too short to look down and notice that. She fussed in and out of the depot,
making sure its clock was working all right, learning what she could of the
train’s whereabouts from the lady telegraph operator and her assistant, asking
Kit more than once if he thought she’d packed him enough food for the journey.
Cornish pasties and so forth.

“Not like it’s forever, Ma.”

“No. Course not. Only me, just being,
I don’t know . . .”

“Might not even work out. Easy to see
that happening, in fact.”

“Just so you mind that, that
penmanship. In school you always wrote so neatly.”

“I’ll be writing to you, Ma, regular,
so you can keep an eye on that.”

Some stirring now along the line of
town trainwatchers, as if they’d caught signals from the invisible distance in
that joint waking dream of theirs, or maybe, as some swore, like that they’d
seen the track shift, just a hair, long before the first smoke over the rise or
steam whistles in the distance.

“I’ll never see you again.” No. She
didn’t say that. But she might’ve, so easy. A look from him. Any small gesture
of collapse from his careful, young man’s posture back into the boy she wanted,
after all, to keep.

he call had come just a week before, in the midwatch, which
the Chums, even in this era of desuetude, nonetheless continued, every night,
to stand. A boy with the face of an angel in an old painting under a baggy cap
with its bill turned sidewise had appeared with a telephone set whose cord
trailed out the door into the scarcely lit darkness. It could’ve been someone
up too late, playing a practical joke. Opinion next morning, over watery
oatmeal and fatback and the dregs of the previous day’s coffee, was in fact
divided. There were no navigational charts to help them to find the way. Their
only instructions were to steer southwest and await course correction from a
station unnamed, at a distance indeterminate, which would be calling in via the
airship’s new Tesla device, which had remained silent since the day it was
installed, though kept ever electrified and flawlessly calibrated.

The voices which arrived over the
next few days were difficult to credit with any origin in the material sphere.
Even the unimaginative Lindsay Noseworth reported feeling a fine sustained
chill across his shoulders whenever the instrument began its hoarse whispering.

Presently they had picked up the
westerlies which would convey them with allbutgeometrical precision to the
uninhabited and littleknown Indian Ocean islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul,
recently annexed by France.

They were borne scant dozens of feet
above a high and hostile sea scattered with islands of bare black rock,
unpopulated, without vegetation. “At one time,” related Miles Blundell, “in the
days of the first explorers, each one of these islands, no matter how small,
was given its own name, so amazing was their abundance in the sea, so grateful
to God were their discoverers for any sort of landfall
. . .
but nowadays the names are being lost, this sea is lapsing
back into anonymity, each island rising from it only another dark desert.” As,
no longer named, one by one the islets vanished from the nautical charts, and
one day from the lighted world as well, to rejoin the Invisible.