Against the Day (58 page)

“The sort of thing a girl should be
talking over with her mother,” she told Frank, “that’s if her mother was handy
and not hidden someplace among millions of folks in a city that might as well
be on another planet. One more reason for me to be heading out of here to find
her, sooner better than later, not to mention half the time Merle don’t seem to
want me around, and to tell the truth I’m gettin bored being around him, and
miners are not the world’s greatest beau material, and I sure need the change
of scene. Let’s see, there was somethin else, but I forgot.”

“Hope you’re not feeling like that
you’re responsible for him.”

“Course I do. Sometimes he might as
well be
my
kid.”

Frank nodded. “Called gettin out of
the house. Just one of those things everybody gets around to.”

“Thanks, Fred.”

“Frank.”

“Deceived again! Now you’ve got to
buy me a beer.”

The “vacancy”
at the Silver Orchid turned out to
be a space between two walls, way in the back, reached through a false
fireplace. There was room for

Frank and a cigarette, if he tore it in half. He was paid up
at the Sheridan for another night but decided not to try and get his money
back.

Clientele went crashing in and out.
The girls laughed way too much, and without mirth. Glass broke frequently. The
piano, even to Frank’s tin ear, was seriously out of tune. Frank lay down
between the walls with his coat rolled up for a pillow and drifted off to sleep.
He was awakened about midnight by Merle Rideout hammering on the wall.

“Picked up your things at the hotel.
Good thing you didn’t. Bob Meldrum was in and out and making everybody nervous.
Come along if you got a minute, want you to look at something.” He led Frank
outside under the chill, imponderable cone of an electric bulb high on a pole,
and they walked amid the feral discourse of the cribs, while a gunshot occurred
back down Pacific Street, somebody climbed to a rooftop and began to recite
“The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and nearer at hand singlejackers climaxed and
ruffled doves wailed, till they were down beside the river, where the Row had
been squeezed to by more respectable forms of commerce, and it was possible to
stand with the ungoverned electric town at your back, the untraveled night in
front, with the San Miguel between, brand new out of the mountains throwing
flashes of light like declarations of innocence.

“There is back in New York,” said
Merle, “a certain Dr. Stephen Emmens. Dismissed by many as a crackpot, but
don’t you be fooled, for he’s the real article. What he does is, he’ll take
some silver just the smallest trace of gold in it, and start to
pound on it,
at very low temperature, runnin’ a bath of liquid carbonic to keep it cold,
keep pounding onto it, pounding all day and night, till little by little the
gold content, some strange and unknown way,
begins to increase.
At least
up over point three hundred—sometimes even gone as high as nine
ninetyseven.”

“ ‘
Unknown way,’ sure, this is how
confidence operators talk.”

“All right. Not ‘unknown’ to me, I
just don’t like to spook people if I don’t have to. You’ve heard of
transmutation?”

“Heard of.”

“All it could be. The silver gets
transmuted to gold, and spare me that face. Dr. Emmens calls the stuff
‘argentaurum.
’
” Merle brought out
an eggsize nugget. “This is the stuff itself, argentaurum, about a fiftyfifty
mix. And this”—into the other hand sprang a blurry crystal about the size
of a pocket Bible but thin as a nymph’s mirror—“this is calcite, known in
this particular format to some of the visiting labor as
Schieferspath,
a
good pure specimen I happened to obtain one night back in Creede—yes,
night does return now and then to Creede—off of a superstitious Scotchman
holding a perfectly

good nine of diamonds he couldn’t
bring himself to hang on to. Think of this piece of spar here as the kitchen
window, and just take a look through.”

“Well holy Toledo,” said Frank after
a while.

“Don’t see much of that in mining
school?”

Not only had the entire scene doubled
and, even more peculiarly,
grown brighter,
but as for the two
overlapping images of the nugget itself, one was as gold as the other was
silver, no doubt at all
. . . .
At
some point Merle was obliged to remove the waferthin rhomboid from Frank’s
grasp.

“It is that way with some,” Merle
remarked, “leaves em spoiled for anything but the one breed of ghostlight.”

“Where’s this from?” Frank’s voice
slow and stunned, as if he’d forgotten about the nugget altogether.

“This piece of spar? Not from around
here, most likely Mexican, from down that Veta Madre someplace around
Guanajuato, Guanajuato, where silver mines and spar go together like frijoles
and rice, they say. For the other thing gets taken out of there, strangely
enough, is the same silver for the Mexican silver dollars that Brother Emmens
uses exclusively in that secret process of his. A mother lode south of the
border there of preargentauric silver, with all that spar right in the
neighborhood, see what I’m gettin at.”

“Not really. Unless you’re sayin that
double refraction somehow is the
cause
of this—”

“Yes and how could something weak and
weightless as light make solid metals transmute? does seem crazy, don’t
it—down here anyway, down at our own humble ground level and below, where
it’s all weight and opacity. But consider the higher regions, the lightcarrying
Æther, penetrating everyplace, as the medium where change like that is
possible, where alchemy and modern electromagnetic science converge, consider
double refraction, one ray for gold, one for silver, you could say.”

“Kim could.”

“Just saw it yourself.”

“Far beyond anythin the folks at
Golden must’ve wanted their mine engineers to know about, sorry. I’m only
trusting you not to take too much advantage of my ignorance.”

“Appreciate that,” Merle twinkled
back, “so I’ll let you in on something. This Emmens process, even with what it
costs—and the figure ten thousand dollars per run’s been mentioned, but
of course that’s now, and it’s bound to get cheaper—this stuff could
knock
the Gold Standard right onto its glorified ass.
And what’ll happen to metal
prices then? Did the Silver Act, all the foofooraw went with that, get repealed
for nothing? Will gold turn out to be worth no more than silver plus the cost
of this process, and what’ll there be

then to crucify mankind on a cross
of? Not to mention the Bank of England, and the British Empire, and Europe and
all
those
empires, and everybody they lend money to—pretty soon
it’s the whole world, you see?”

“ ‘
And I’ll sell you all the details of
the Emmens process for just fifty cents’—that what you’re leadin up to?
My brain ain’t quite made of pudding yet, Professor, and even if this is all on
the straight, who’d be simple enough to want to buy any of that
Argentinawhateveritis—”

“Bureau of the Mint, for one.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Don’t take my word, ask around. Doc
Emmens has been selling argentaurum ingots to the U.S. Mint since ’97 or
thereabouts, since the days of Lyman Gage, that old Gold Standard hand and bank
president, you hadn’t been so bughouse over zinc you might’ve heard what
everybody else knows. Big chunk of our damn
U.S. economy
resting
squarely onto it, how about that?

“Merle. Why are you even showing me
this?”

“Because maybe what you think you’re
looking for isn’t really what you’re looking for. Maybe it’s something else.”

Frank could not escape the strange
impression that he had walked into a variety theater and some magician, Chinese
for example, had summoned him up front to be the stooge in some long
complicated trick with a line of patter Frank was too confused to appreciate
fully. “Looking for . . .”

“Not this nugget. Not this little
window of Iceland spar either. Fact,” Merle’s voice beginning to divide, like a
kettle coming to the boil, into sharp little creaks of amusement, “there is a
whole
catalogue
of things you’re not looking for.”

“Well tell me. What it is I’m really
looking for. Besides a saloon, about now.”

“Just guessin’, but it’s also what
your father Webb was looking for, except he didn’t know it any more than you
do.”

That damn Chinese feeling again.

“Go talk to Doc Turnstone. He might
have an idea or two.”

At the shift in the sound of Merle’s
voice, Frank felt a strange wave of internal disquiet. “Why?”

But Merle had retreated behind his
professionally impassive magician’s face. “You remember those tommyknockers you
and Dahlia ran into up at the Hellkite?” Well, there had been a spell where
Merle too was seeing
little people
down in the stopes, some done up
quite peculiarly indeed, unusual hats, military uniforms not of the U.S. Army
exactly, little pointed shoes and so forth, and one evening he was injudicious
enough to mention this to his fellow man of
 
science, whereupon Doc Turnstone confidently declared it to
be the Charles Bonnet syndrome, mention of which he had lately run across in
Puckpool’s

classic
Adventures in Neuropathy.
“Been
attributed to any number of causes, including macular degeneration and
disturbances of the temporal lobe.”

“How about just some real
duendes?
”
Merle said.

“That’s not a rational explanation.”

“All respect Doc, I can’t agree, for
they’re down there, all right.”

“You like to show me?”

Third shift, of course, best time for
that sort of thing. In a spirit of scientific inquiry, the Doc had abstained
from his usual evening laudanum, though this hadn’t improved his mood, in fact
to Merle he seemed quite jumpy as the two of them, wearing overalls and miners’
waterproofs and packing electric torches, entered a hole in the moonlit
hillside and made their way through ancient, dripping debris down a sharply
inclined tunnel into an abandoned part of the workings.

“Having humans around causes ’em
discomfort,” Merle had explained up top. “So they tend to resort to places
where the humans ain’t.”

Not only had the tommyknockers found
this sector of the Little Hellkite congenial—in the years since its
abandonment they had converted it into a regular damn fullscale Tommyknockers
Social
Hall.
And abruptly there they all were, sure enough, a regular subterranean
tableau. Those
duendes
were playing poker and pool here, drinking red
whiskey and homebrewed beer, eating food stolen out of miners’ lunch pails as
well as the pantries of the unmarrieds’ eating hall, getting into fights,
telling tasteless jokes, just as you might find in any recreational club aboveground,
any night of the week.

“Well, this one’s easy,” muttered the
Doc as if to himself. “I’ve gone insane, is all.”

“We couldn’t both be having exactly
the same kind of Charles Whatsisname trouble?” Merle supposed. “No. Wouldn’t
make sense.”

“More sense than what I’m seeing.”

So they became in a way conspirators
against, if not the owners at least the everyday explanations owners and the
like tended to favor. The belief, for instance, that tommyknockers are not
little people in whimsical costumes but “only” pack rats. The thing that owners
found comforting about pack rats was their habit of constantly stealing
explosives. Every stick of dynamite a pack rat stole was one less in the hands
of Anarchists or Union men. “Someplace,” Dally declared, “there’s at least one
tommyknocker with a
hell
of a lot of dynamite stashed away. A dang
dynamite El Dorado. Now what’s he want with all that explosive?”

“Sure it’s all the same critter?”

“I know it. I know his name. I speak
their language.”

“Don’t,” said the Doc, “don’t bother
telling me. Depends whether he’s steal

ing detonator caps, too, I guess. How
many of
them’s
missing is what’d worry me a bit.”

Frank found Doc Turnstone on the
midnighttodawn shift at the Miners’ Hospital. “Merle Rideout said I should look
you up.”

“Then you’re Frank Traverse.”

Were he and Merle in touch by direct
wire, or what? Frank noticed the Doc staring at him. “Somethin?”

“Don’t know if Merle mentioned it or
not, your sister Lake and I kept company for a time.”

Another one of Lake’s admirers.
“She’s a beauty,” friends and runninmates had always been quick to assure
Frank, though he seldom ever could see it. He asked Kit once, who seemed to
spend more time with her than anybody, but the kid only shrugged, “I trust
her.” As if that might be some help.

“Yehp but I mean are we going to have
to go up someday against some damn reptile can’t resist these charms of hers
I’m always hearin about?”

“Think she can take care of herself.
You’ve seen her shoot, she ain’t bad.”