Against the Day (87 page)

Bounce
v.
Vibe
had proved reliable as
a source of public entertainment and even made Roswell a sort of celebrity.
Eccentric inventors were then enjoying in America a certain vogue as longshot
opponents of the mills of Capital. They were expected to lose, poignantly as
possible, though now and then an educated sidebet on one winning might pay off
big.

“Years go by, no satisfaction, I
eventually develop litigious mania, ‘paranoia querulans,’ as the nerve croakers
call it, even try to bring old Vibe to court over that, at least to recoup the
minddoctor fees, but as usual no dice.”

“Well you’re mighty cheerful,” it
seemed to Merle, “for somebody with chronic P.Q.”

Roswell winked. “You know how there’s
some have found Jesus? Well, that happened to me, too, only my Savior turned
out to be more of a classical demigod, namely,” pretending to look furtively
right and left, and lowering his voice, “Hercules.”

Merle, recognizing the name of a
popular brand of blasting agent, twinkled back discreetly. “Powerful fella.
Twelve Labors instead of twelve Apostles, ’s I recall
. . . .
”

“There you go,” Roswell nodded. “So
now it’s more like ‘paranoia detonans.’ The man may’ve stolen my patents, but I
still know how to build my own gear. Buckle on that Hypops, move around
underground carefree as a gopher in a garden till one day I’ll have the
criminal bastard right overhead, and—well not to get too specific . . .”

   
“Kaboom,
you might say.”

   
“Oh,
you
might, I’m just another nutty inventor, harmless as your grandma.”

Next afternoon
the light
took its deep
yellowish turn, and here came that Thorvald again. Merle was rooting through
the wagon looking through some of his old lightningrodsalesman gear when
Roswell showed up and stood gazing with interest. “You ain’t one of these
Anharmonic Pencil folks?”

   
“Beats
me.”

“What are you doin with that
contraption?” indicating an arrangement of metal spikes, aimed upward in
different directions, converging to a single common point at the bottom, fitted
up with wires and connectors.

“Put this up on the barn roof, hook
it on to your lightning rod—what in the trade we call an aigrette,” said
Merle.

   
“You
mean lightning hits it—”

“Damndest thing. Gives off a glow.
Lasts awhile. First time you think you’re dreaming.”

“Geometry professors call that a
Pencil. If you ran a transversal plane of some kind across this, so as to cut
these spikes into different lengths? Put in insulators, you’d have different
currents in the different segments, whose ratios could be harmonic or
anharmonic depending—”

   
“How
you moved that plane around. Sure. You make it movable—”

   
“Tune
it basically—” Off they went, forgetting about the imminent cyclone.

Thorvald hovered over them for a
moment, as if trying to analyze how murderous it might be feeling today, then,
briefly slowing and resuming speed, this being the Tornadic equivalent of a
shrug, moved on to more promising prey.

“I want to know light,” Roswell was
confessing, “I want to reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul,
take some in my hands whatever it turns out to be, and bring it back, like the
Gold Rush only more at stake, maybe, ’cause it’s easier to go crazy from,
there’s danger in every direction, deadlier than snakes or fever or claim
jumpers—”

“And what steps are you taking,”
Merle inquired, “to make sure you don’t end up wandering around the badlands of
our fair republic raving about lost mines and so forth?”

   
“I’m
heading for California,” replied Roswell.

   
“That
ought to help some,” said Merle.

“I’m serious. It’s where the future
of light is, in particular the moving pictures. The public loves those movies,
can’t get enough of ’em, maybe that’s another disease of the mind, but as long
as nobody finds a cure for it, the Sheriff will have to keep settling for traildust
in my case.”

“There sure is projectionist work
everyplace you look,” Merle said, “but the machinery itself, it’s dangerous,
and somehow, I’m not sure why, but—more complicated than it needs to be.”

“Yes, it continues to puzzle me,”
Roswell agreed, “this irrational worship of the Geneva movement, and the whole
idea of a movie projector being built like a clock—as if there could be
no other way. Watches and clocks are fine, don’t mistake my meaning, but they
are a sort of acknowledgment of failure,

they’re there to glorify and celebrate one particular sort of
time, the tickwise passage of time in one direction only and no going back.
Only kind of movies we’d ever get to see on a machine like that’d be clock
movies, elapsing from the beginning of the reel to the end, one frame at a
time.

“One problem the early watchmakers
had was that the weight of the moving parts would affect the way the watch ran.
Time was vulnerable to the force of gravity. So Breguet came up with the
tourbillon, which isolated the balance wheel and escapement off on a little
platform of their own, geared to the third wheel, rotating about once a minute,
assuming in the course of the day most positions in 3D space relative to the
gravity of the Earth, so the errors would cancel out and make time impervious
to gravity. But now suppose you wanted to turn that around.”

   
“Make
gravity impervious to time? Why?”

Roswell shrugged. “It’s that oneway
business again. They’re both forces that act in one direction only. Gravity
pulls along the third dimension, up to down, time pulls along the fourth, birth
to death.”

“Rotate something through spacetime
so it assumes all positions relative to the oneway vector ‘time.
’ ”

   
“There
you go.”

   
“Wonder
what you’d get.”

Out came the patent pencils and, well,
talk about being impervious to time—next thing they knew, they had
wandered miles up the river and paused by an ancient sycamore. Above them its
leaves all abruptly turned the other way, the tree brightening all over, as if
another storm was about to break—as if it were a gesture of the tree
itself, directed more to the sky and some skyborne attention than necessarily
intended for the diminutive figures beneath, who were now hopping up and down
and shouting at each other in a curious technical patois. Anglers abandoned
promising riffles to get up or downstream of the disturbance. College girls
with their hair in Psyche knots and other sweptup arrangements and long floral
dresses of zephyr gingham, lawn, and pongee paused in their strolling to gaze.

Usual thing. The daybyday politics of
this conference would’ve made an average recital of Balkan history seem
straightforward as a joke told in a saloon. Over in the theoreticians’ shop,
nobody, however wiselooking, was able to avoid the combinations, coups, schisms,
betrayals, dissolutions, misread intentions, lost messages, that writhed and
crept below the cheery blandness of this midwestern campus. But the
mechanicians understood each other. At the end of the summer, it would be these
hardheaded tinkers with their lopsidedlyhealed fractures, scars, and singedoff
eyebrows, chronically shorttempered before the Creation’s irreducible
cussedness, who’d

come out of these timetravelers’ clambakes with any practical
kind of momentum, and when the professors had all gone back to their
bookshelves and protégés and intriguings after this or that Latinate token of
prestige, it’d be the engineers who’d figured out how to keep in touch, what
telegraphers and motor expressmen to trust, not to mention sheriffs who
wouldn’t ask too many questions, Italian fireworks artists who’d come in and
cover for them when the townsfolk grew suspicious of night horizons, where to
find the discontinued part, the exotic ore, the local utility somewhere on
Earth able to generate them current with the exact phase or frequency or
sometimes simple purity that would meet their increasingly inscrutable needs.

One day there
was
a flurry of
rumors that the famous mathematician Hermann Minkowski was coming over from
Germany to give a talk on Space and Time. Lecture halls for the event kept
being announced and then switched to larger ones, as more and more people heard
about it and decided to attend.

Minkowski was a young man with a
pointed mustache and curly black hair brushed in a pompadour. He wore a black
suit and high collar and pincenez, and looked like a businessman out for some
fun. He gave the lecture in German but wrote down enough equations so people
could follow it more or less.

After everybody else had left the
hall, Roswell and Merle sat looking at the blackboard Minkowski had used.

“Three times ten to the fifth
kilometers,” Roswell read, “equals the square root of minus one seconds. That’s
if you want that other expression over there to be symmetrical in all four
dimensions.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Merle
protested, “that’s what
he
said, I’ve got no idea what it means.”

“Well, it
looks
like we’ve got
us a very large, say, astronomical distancethere, set equal to an imaginary
unit of time. I think he called the equation ‘pregnant.
’ ”

   
“Jake
with me. He also said ‘mystic.
’ ”

They rolled cigarettes and smoked and
gazed at the chalked symbols. A student loitered in the back of the room,
tossing a wet slatesponge from hand to hand, waiting to erase the board.

   
“Notice
the way the speed of light kept coming into it?” Roswell said.

“Like being back in Cleveland, all
those Æther folks. We were all probably on to somethin then, didn’t know it.”

“
Way I figure, all’s we need to do’s translate this here into hardware,
then solder it all up, and we’re in business.”

   
“Or
in trouble.”

“By the way, who’s the practical one
here and who’s the crazy dreamer, again? I keep forgetting.”

rank came one day back over into west Texas, splashing up
droplets

out of the muddy river which transmuted briefly to sunlight
he could

no longer in his heart appreciate much.

He kept to the river up through New
Mexico to San Gabriel, picking up the old Spanish Trail, drawn westward,
visited each night now by a string of peculiarly clearedged dreams about Estrella
Briggs. Till one day there he was in the McElmo country, and it was almost like
emerging from a stupor he had fallen into years back. He was headed for
Nochecita, or the spur line of his destiny was. Where else? Like asking a damn
avalanche to run uphill.

In Nochecita, maybe owing to the
troubles south of the border, he found a hardcase element had moved in. Not
dangerous, though definitely, a number of them, illegal—sociable enough,
yet not about to suffer fools for any longer than they had to. New buildings
had gone up near Stray’s old place, so close sometimes that there remained only
narrow slipways for the wind to pass, picking up speed, whereupon the pressure
decreased, so much that as the unrelenting plateau wind passed through town,
the flimsily braced older structure was actually being sucked to one side, then
the other, all night long, rocking like a ship, ancient nails creaking, plaster
apt to chip away if you looked at it for more than a second, walls of the rooms
shedding soiled white flakes, a threat of collapse in some near future. The
foundations had gone on crumbling back to pebbles and dust, and rain leaked in
everywhere. Little or no heat in the place, floorboards not quite level. And
yet the rent here, he heard people complain, kept getting higher each month,
newer tenants continued to move in, earning more and eating better, as the
place filled up with factory reps, realestate salesmen, drummers of weaponry
and medical supplies, linemen, water and road engineers, none of whom would