Against the Day (86 page)

   
“—bein
swept down to this waterfall off this big cliff—”

“—current’s
too strong for her to swim, he just found out, ridin hard to get there in
time—”

“And
ever’thin just goes all discombobulated! Fisk don’t know how close he is to bein
run out of town.”

   
“Here
he is now, the miserable coot.”

Merle moved over so as to put a
little space between the woefully upset Fisk and the crowd. “How do,
lensbrother, what’s the problem, film break, carbons burn out?”

   
“Picture
won’t stay put. Sprocket and gear, near ’s I can tell.”

“I’ve run one or two of these rigs,
mind if I have a look? What’ve you got, a Powers movement?”

“Just a regular Geneva.” He led Merle
to the back of the shadowy little exchurch and up some stairs to what had been
the choir loft. “It’s about all I can do to get it threaded in right, usually
Wilt Flambo, who’s the watchmaker in town, knows this rig inside out, I
inherited the job when Wilt run off with that feed clerk’s wife, and now he’s
off in Des Moines or someplace sending everybody picture postals about how much
fun he’s having.”

Merle took a look. “Well this Geneva
movement’s fine, it’s your sprocket tension’s gone a little strange, is all,
probably the shoe needs to be
. . .
there,
O.K., light her off now, what’re these, gas burners?”

“Acetylene.” It worked fine now, and
the two of them stood a minute and gazed at the screen as the lip of the
perilous cascade drew ever closer. “Guess I’d better wind this back again to
the beginnin of the reel. You sure saved my caboose, friend. You can have the
honor of givin them all the good news.”

“Frankly,”
Fisk admitted later over a friendly glass of beer, “it has always scared the
hell out of me, too much energy loose in that little room, too much heat, nitro
in the film, feel like it’s all going to explode any minute, the stories you
hear, if it was only the light it’d be one thing, but these other forces . . .”

They gave each other the sour,
resentful tightlip smiles of professionals who have learned the dimensions of
the payback for whatever magic is keeping the tip out front in their happy
stupor—in this case the sheer physical labor of cranking the projector
and the demonic energies a man was obliged to stand way too close to.

Merle got the job for a week or two
while Fisk went back to tending his wagonparts store and resting up. After a
while, as he’d done before, Merle found himself withdrawing from the story on
the screen, cranking the projector along and contemplating the strange relation
these moving pictures had with Time, not strange maybe so much as tricky, for
it all depended on fooling the eye, which was why, he imagined, you found so
many stagemagicians going into the business. But if the idea was for still
pictures to move, why there had to be a better way than this elaborate
contraption of geartrains and multiple lenses and matching up speeds and
watchmaker’s fancywork to get each frame to stop a splitsecond and all. There
had to be something more direct, something you could do with light itself
. . . .

One day under a
sky
of a certain
almostfamiliar shade of yellow, he came to the bank of a river on which young
people were canoeing, not in high spirits or carefree flirtation but in some
dark perplexity, as if they were here from deeper motives but couldn’t just then
remember what those were. He recognized the state of mind as if it were a
feature of the landscape, like an explorer discovers a mountain or a lake,
simple as coming up over a ridgeline—there it was, laid out neat as could
be like a map of itself. He had found Candlebrow, or, if you like, it had found
him—he drove in through the dilapidated portals of the campus, and
recognized the place he’d been looking for, the one he’d missed first time
around, streets lined with bookstores, places to sit and talk, or not talk,
cafés, wood stairs, balconies, lofts, feasting outside at tables, striped
awnings, crowds milling, night falling, a small movie show, lemonwhite neon
outside
. . . .

The land here had a gentle roll to
it. No voice, outside a playing field, was ever more than conversationally
loud. Horses grazed in the Quadrangle. Fieldscent percolated
everywhere—purple clover, honeysuckle, queenoftheprairie. Picnickers
brought with them horseshoes and ukuleles, baskets

full of sandwiches, hardboiled eggs,
pickles, and bottled beer, down to the

banks of Candlebrow’s tranquil and famously canoeable river,
the Sempi

tern. Every other afternoon thunderheads appeared to the
westward and began to pile up, and the sky darkened to a biblically lurid
yellowgray by the time the first winds and raindrops arrived.

The conferees had gathered here from
all around the world, Russian nihilists with peculiar notions about the laws of
history and reversible processes, Indian swamis concerned with the effect of
time travel on the laws of Karma, Sicilians with equal apprehensions for the
principle of vendetta, American tinkers like Merle with specific
electromechanical questions to clear up. Their spirits all one way or another
invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries.

“Fact is, our system of socalled
linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic
phenomenon—the Earth’s own spin. Everything spins, up to and including,
probably, the whole universe. So we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky,
the birthing of a funnelcloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of
everything—”

   
“Um,
Professor—”

“—‘funnel’ of course being a
bit misleading, as the pressure in the vortex isn’t distributed in anything so
simple as a straightsided cone—”

   
“Sir,
excuse me, but—”

“—more of a quasihyperboloid of
revolution which—say, where’s everybody going?”

Those in attendance, some at quite
high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing
to explain why. As if the Professor had lectured it into being, there now swung
from the swollen and lightpulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie
“twister,” lengthening to a point, about to touch down, approaching, it seemed
all but consciously, the campus which lay in its direct path, at a speed not
even the swiftest horse could hope to o u trace.

“Hurry—this way!” Everyone was
converging upon McTaggart Hall, the headquarters of the Metaphysics Department,
whose stormcellar was known throughout the region as the roomiest and
bestappointed such refuge between Cleveland and Denver. The mathematicians and
engineers lit gasmantles and stormlamps, and waited for the electric light to
fail.

In the stormcellar, over semiliquid
coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the
topic of periodic functions, and their generalized form, automorphic functions.

   
“Eternal
Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in

the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more
secular, more physical expressions.”

   
“Build
a time machine.”

   
“Not
the way I would have put it, but, if you like, fine.”

Vectorists and Quaternionists in
attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up known
as the Lobatchevskian, abbreviated Lob, as in “Lob
a
,” by which, almost as a byproduct, ordinary Euclidean space is
transformed to Lobatchevskian.

“We thus enter the whirlwind. It
becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which
everything will be referred. Time no longer ‘passes,’ with a linear velocity,
but ‘returns,’ with an angular one. All is ruled by the Automorphic
Dispensation. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like,
timelessly.”

“Born again!” exclaimed a Christer in
the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.

Above, the devastation had begun. And
now here one might have noted an odd thing about this tornado. It was not
simply “a” tornado which descended upon Candlebrow with such distressing
regularity but indisputably
always the same tornado.
It had been photographed
repeatedly, measured for wind speed, circumference, angular momentum, and
shapes assumed over time of passage, and from visit to visit these had all
remained uncannily consistent. Before long the thing had been given a name,
Thorvald, and propitiatory offerings to it had begun to appear heaped outside
the University gates, usually items of sheet metal, which had been noted in
particular as one of Thorvald’s dietary preferences. Human food, while not so
common, was represented by various farm animals live and slaughtered, though
occasionally entire
thresher dinners
had also been known to’ve been laid
out cooked and ready to eat, on long picnic tables, where it then required a
level of indifference to fate quite beyond this carefree undergraduate body to
risk actually stealing from, let alone inserting into one’s face.

“Superstition!” screamed certain
professors. “How are we supposed to maintain any scientific objectivity around
here?”

   
“And
yet suppose we did try to communicate with Thorvald—”

   
“Oh,
it’s ‘Thorvald’ now, my my quite chummy aren’t we.”

“Well, it is cyclic after all, so
some kind of signaling might be possible using wavemodulation—”

There were in fact a couple different
designs for a Thorvaldic Telegraph to be found for sale down on West Symmes,
where Merle had begun to loiter for an hour or so a day. Here, each summer at
Candlebrow, for miles up and

down the riverside, a huge population of jobbers and
operators appeared

running pitches in a bazaar of Time, offering for sale
pocketwatches and

wall clocks, youth potions, false birth certificates duly
notarized, systems of stockmarket prediction, results of horse races at distant
tracks well before post time, along with telegraphic facilities for placing
actual wagers on the fates of these asyetunaccelerated animals, strangely
gleaming electromechanical artifacts alleged to come from “the
future”—“You say, now, the live chicken goes in this end here—” and
above all instruction in the many forms of timetranscendence, timelessness, countertime,
escapes and emancipations from Time as practiced by peoples from all parts of
the world, curiosity as to which was assumed to be the true unstated reason for
attendance at these summer gatherings. Not surprisingly, a higherthanaverage
number of these more spiritualtype programs were being run by charlatans and
swindlers, often wearing turbans, robes, shoes with elongated toes that
concealed a “gaff” of some sort, as well as strangely modified hats serving the
same purpose, and except for the outandout hopeless greed cases, Merle found
most of them worth chatting with, especially those with business cards.

Soon enough, quicker than he would’ve
thought, he became a fixture at the summer gettogethers. The rest of the year,
it was like one day job after another just so for a month during the summer he
could enter a realm of timeobsession and share it with others of the breed. It
never occurred to him to question how this preoccupation had come about,
whether by way of photography and its convergence of silver, time, and light or
just with Dally out of the house finding Time so heavy on his hands that he was
obliged to bring it a little closer to his face, squint at it from different
angles, maybe try to see if it could be taken apart to figure how it might
actually work. From here on, the alchemy, the tinkering, the photography would
be relegated to day jobs of one kind or another. The nights, the flights and
journeys proper to night, would be dedicated to the Mysteries of Time.

One evening about twilight, out of the
corner of his eye, sailing past in the sky like one of the famous Giant
Airships of 1896 and ’7, Merle thought he saw the
Inconvenience
,
and sure enough, a little later,
down on West Symmes—

“Well, how are you, sir, I’ve thought
of you often, and of course your lovely daughter, Miss Dahlia.”

Merle had to squint his way past the
mustache but recognized Chick Counterfly all right. “She’s seeking a career in
show business back east,” Merle said, “thanks for asking. What are you boys up
to these days? Last I read, you were over in Venice, Italy, knocking down their
Campanile, which I should point out is the model for the one up on campus
there, that’s if you’re still in the belltower demolition business?”

“These days trying to get fixed up
with some Hypops equipment. Have you met Roswell Bounce, by the way? Father of
the Hypops Apparatus himself?”

“That’s me, get within ten foot of
any of them units, start hearing ’ese little voices, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’
Why—it’s ’at there Merle Rideout ain’t it.”

“Damn, Roswell, it’s sure been a
while since Cleveland,” said Merle.
“Followed
that trial with great interest.”

“Oh, I went to court, had to, but you
can imagine the kind of lawyers I was able to afford, whereas that Vibe
sonofabitch had his Wall Street flunkeys Somble, Strool, & Fleshway all
lined up against me.”