Against the Day (62 page)

But do they, have brains to
spare—

You wait and see!

Out on that,

HamburgAmerika Line, ’fore

Youknowityou’llbechinninwith

Felix Klein—don’t cha paynomind
to

The rent or the housekey (say,

Howdy there, Hilbert! pleased to

meetcha, Minkowski!) Tellya,

College Joe,

You think there’s nothinthat, you
don’t know,

You ain’t seen nothing until you
go—so!

Pack up that baaag—

Go east, young Yank, to where the

Sabers clank, aand th’

FourColor Problem’s just a

Student prank, while they’re

Frolicking, flirting ’n’

Doin’ That Göttingen, Rag!

“Yes, a wonderful place, among my old
stomping grounds, in fact. I keep in regular touch, and I could drop them a
line if you like.”

A plunge into advanced Vectorism. No
looking over your shoulder. “Well, being busy is the thing I guess.”

The Professor watched him carefully
for a moment, as if judging the distance across a crevasse. “It works for some
people,” he said quietly. “But it’s not a surefire cure. When human tragedies
happen, it always seems as if scientists and mathematicians can meet the
situation more calmly than others. But it’s as likely to be a form of escaping
reality, and sooner or later comes the payback.”

Kit could not quite take the thought
where it had to go. He wanted to trust the Professor, but he was alone in the
matter. He replied, “Just trying to work through one problemset at a time, sir,
and not get too blind drunk on the weekends.”

Likewise he wanted to trust ’Fax, who
was a good skate all round, and yet strangers on and off campus with focused
stares, too many to be coincidental, had made him wary. There had developed
between him and ’Fax this exquisite stupor of assumption about who knew what,
or didn’t, branching and rebranching, none of it ever stated aloud, all
pregnant eyebeaming and circumlocution. ’Fax in any case had never been the
feckless character his father had assumed him to be. Out of the corner of his
eye, out the corners of ’Fax’s own, Kit had caught a whole unacknowledged range
of activity going on.

It turned out ’Fax was mighty
intrigued with the mysterious tower across the Sound. “We could sail over and
take a look. You could introduce me to your pal Dr. Tesla.”

For half an hour, they breezed down
the harbor, among the beds of Fair Haven oysters staked to show the boundaries
of each plantation. When they

got out into the Sound, ’Fax began to cast anxious looks at
water and sky. “Not happy about this wind,” he kept saying. “And the tide’s
going out. Keep a sharp eye aft.”

It was on them fast enough. One
minute they were looking eastward at lightning flashes in black skies over
Connecticut, the next they were all but careened and being borne toward the lee
shore of Long Island and the looming face of Wardenclyffe. Sighting the tower,
intermittently revealed through the torn mists, Kit might have imagined himself
being stormblown to some island as yet uncharted, in quite another ocean, had
there been time for such reverie—but there was the little knockabout to
be saved, the elements outwitted—bailing frantically, sailing loosefooted
as they dared without even time to unship the boom—as the great skeletal
tower drew steadily closer in the maritime uproar, a lone enigmatic witness to
their desperate struggle.

They sat in
a masonry transmitter “shack”
designed by McKim, Mead, and White, gradually getting used to being alive and
on dry land again. A workman’s wife had brought them blankets and coffee Dr.
Tesla had imported from Trieste. The rainlight came in through a series of high
arched windows.

The thin young scientist with the
hypnotic eyes and Wild West mustache had remembered Kit from Colorado. “The
vectorist.”

   
“Still
at it I guess.” Kit gestured across the Sound in the direction of Yale.

“I was sorry to hear of Professor Gibbs’s passing. I greatly
admired him.”

“I hope he’s in a better place,” Kit
said, more or less automatically, but understanding about a second and a half
later that he had also meant
better than Yale,
and had maybe had Webb’s
departed soul in mind as well.

When Kit introduced ’Fax, Tesla kept
a straight face. “A pleasure, Mr. Vibe, I have had dealings with your father
only marginally more cordial than with Mr. Morgan, and yet the son is not
guardian of the father’s purse, as we used to say in Granitza
. . .
in fact, as we never said, for when,
in daily life, was that likely to come up?”

Across the water and all around them
the storm still raged. Kit, shivering, forgot Curls and Laplacians, likely
debutantes, his own recent caress from the wings of Silence, and sat
unblinkingly attentive as Tesla spoke.

“My native land is not a country but
an artifact of Habsburg foreign policy, known as ‘the Military Frontier,’ and
to us as Granitza. The town was very small, above the Adriatic coast in the
Velebit range, where certain places were better than others for
. . .
what would you call them? Visual
experiences that might prove useful.”

“Visions.”

“Yes, but you had to be in tiptop
mental health, or they would prove only hallucinations of limited use.”

   
“Back
in the San Juans we always blamed it on the altitude.”

“In the Velebit, rivers disappear,
flow underground for miles, resurface unexpectedly, descend to the sea.
Underground, therefore, lies an entire unmapped region, a carrying into the
Invisible of geography, and—one must ask—why not of other sciences
as well? I was out in those mountains one day, the sky began to darken, the
clouds to lower, I found a limestone cave, went in, waited. Darker and darker,
like the end of the world—but no rain. I couldn’t understand it. I sat and
tried not to smoke too quickly the last of my cigarettes. Not until a great
burst of lightning came from out of nowhere did heaven open, and the rain
begin. I understood that something enormous had been poised to happen,
requiring an electrical discharge of a certain size to trigger it. In that
moment, all this”—he gestured upward into the present storm clouds, which
all but obscured the giant toroidal terminal nearly two hundred feet above,
whose open trusswork formed a steel cap of fungoid aspect—“was inevitable.
As if time had been removed from all equations, the Magnifying Transmitter
already existed in that moment, complete, perfected
. . . .
Everything since, all you have seen in the press, has
been theatrical impersonation—the Inventor at Work. To the newspapers I
can never speak of that time of simply waiting. I’m expected to be
consciously
scientific
,
to
exhibit only virtues likely to appeal to rich sponsors—activity, speed,
Edisonian sweat, defend one’s claim, seize one’s chance— If I told them
how far from conscious the procedure really is, they would all drop me flat.”

Suddenly
apprehensive, Kit looked over at ’Fax. But his drowsing classmate showed no
reaction—unless, like others of the Vibe persuasion, he was only
pretending semiconsciousness.

“I
have been around them long enough, Dr. Tesla. They have no idea what any of us
are about.” If he had waited an instant longer, this expression of solidarity
would have been drowned out by a Parthian peal of thunder from somewhere over
Patchogue Bay as the storm, having crossed the Island, withdrew to sea. Workmen
came and went, the cook showed up with another urn full of coffee, the “shack”
smelled like wet clothes and cigarette smoke, it could have been any Long
Island workday, Neapolitans and Calabresi playing
morra
under the
streaming eaves, wagons arriving with lumber and preshaped members of steel,
welding torches spitting blue silent intensities through the rain.

   
There
was plenty of room here, and the boys were invited to stay over. Tesla looked
in later to say good night.

   
“Back
in Colorado, by the way—those modifications to the transformer. You were
right about all that, Mr. Traverse. I never had a chance to thank you.”

“You have now. With interest. Anyway,
it was pretty clear what you were up to. The curvatures had to be the right
ones, and built exactly to shape.”

“I wish I could offer you a job here,
but—” gesturing with his head at ’Fax, who appeared to be asleep.

Kit with a sombre face nodded. “You
might not believe it now, sir, but you are well out of that.”

   
“If
there is anything—”

   
“Let’s
hope there will be.”

Next morning the
boys
hitched a ride on a
market wagon heading in to New York. Colfax seemed to be watching Kit more
narrowly than usual. They rode swaying among sacks of potatoes and cabbages,
cucumbers and turnips, along the dusty and clamorous North Hempstead Turnpike,
stopping in from time to time at different crossroads saloons.

   
“There’ll
be search parties out by now,” ’Fax supposed.

   
“Sure.
If it was my kid, I’d have the whole damned Atlantic Fleet out.”

   
“Not
for me,” ’Fax morosely insistent. “For you.”

Abruptly Kit could see, as if arclit,
his trail right out of this unpromising patch he was in. “Wouldn’t’ve been too
hard to get me out of the way, ’Fax. You could’ve just pulled one them ‘North
River jibes’ of yours and forgot to say ‘Duck,’ let the boom do it for you.
Must happen all the time out on that Sound.”

“Not
my style,” ’Fax blushed, so taken aback that Kit calculated he’d got the seed
planted, all right. “Maybe if you were more of a son of a bitch . . .”

   
“Then
it’d be me putting
you
over the side, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, one of us should be just a
little meaner, ’stead of us both being unhappy like this.”

“Who, me? I’m as happy as a Long
Island steamer clam, what’re you talking about?”

   
“You’re
not, Kit.
They know
you’re
not.”

   
“Here
I thought I was bein a real Sunny Jim.”

’Fax waited, but not long, before
looking him in the eye. “I’ve been keeping them posted, you see.”

   
“About.
. .”

“You. What you’re up to, how you’re
feeling, they’ve been getting pretty regular reports, all along.”

   
“From
you.”

   
“From
me.”

Neither
surprised nor hurt but letting ’Fax think he might be, “Well
. . .
I thought we were pardners, ’Fax.”

   
“Didn’t
say it was pleasant for me.”

   
“Hmmm
. . .”

   
“You’re
angry.”

“No. No, I’m thinking
. . . .
Now, let’s say you were to
tell
them
I got lost in that storm yesterday—”

   
“They
wouldn’t believe it.”

   
“They’d
keep looking?”

“You’d have to hide darned well, Kit.
The City, maybe it looks easy to you, but it isn’t. Sooner or later you find
you’re trusting people you shouldn’t, some who could even turn out to be on
Father’s payroll.”

   
“What
’n hell do you suggest, then?”

“What I do. Pretend. You’ve been
talking a lot about Germany lately, well, here’s your chance. Pretend that our
coming through that storm was a certified miracle. Go south of the Green
someplace, go in a Catholic church, make a votive offering. Tell Father, who’s
a man of religion despite all appearances, that you vowed, if you survived the
ordeal, to go study in Germany. Kind of, I don’t know, math pilgrimage. Foley
will be bending a much more skeptical ear, but it’s possible to deceive him as
well, and I can back you up on that.”

   
“You’d
really help?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but.
. . say, I’ve every reason to, wouldn’t you think?”

   
“Guess
so. Beats going over the side.”

After a while Colfax said, “There’re
people who hate him, you know.” He was looking sort of sidewise at Kit, almost
resentfully.

   
“Hell
you say.”

“Look here, Kit, sarcasm aside, he is
my father.” Sounding so anxious for Kit to hear the truth that he was almost to
be pitied for it. Almost.

In the bright
light
of day, the
figures still looked sinister—not gargoyles, not that elaborate, but with
something purposeful about the way in which, denying the official structure,
they strained outward from the façade, erect, clenched, trying to escape the
conditions of human shelter, seeking the outside, the storm, all that freezes,
roars, goes lampless in the dark.