Against the Day (202 page)

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 nighttime
terrains passing below them had become—more than anyone could ever
remember, as isolated lanterns and skeins of gaslight had given way to electric
streetlighting, as if advanced parties of the workingday 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 workshifts,” 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
twoword 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, “. . .
areyoupeopletalkingabout
?”

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 hotdog
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 ~Thickbush, 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 BeauxArts
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 rapidlyspinning 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 palelylighted 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 balloonfield 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. “Oldtime 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
longfamiliar blend of ozone, guttapercha, solvent chemicals, heated insulation.
The shelves and benchtops were crowded with voltammeters, rheostats,
transformers, arc

lamps whole and in pieces, halfused carbons, calcium burners,
Oxone tablets, hightension magnetos, alternators storebought and homemade,
vibrator

coils, cutouts and interrupters, worm drives, Nicol prisms,
generating valves, glassblowing torches, Navy surplus Thalofide cells, brandnew
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 triplelocked 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 certain, 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 ~querelans 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 for

mer 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 doublerefract it at a particular angle of polarization, and
there, invisible under a pile of stuff accumulated since, would be the very
item.