Against the Day (7 page)

“Expensive hobby,” marveled the
Professor. “Are there such people?”

“You have to have some idea of the
idle money out here. It can’t all be endowments to the church of one’s choice,
mansions and yachts and dogruns paved with gold or what have you, can it. No,
at some point that’s all over with, has to be left behind
. . .
and still here’s this huge mountain
of wealth unspent, piling up higher every day, and dear oh dear, whatever’s a
businessman to do with it, you see.”

“Hell, send it on to me,” Ray Ipsow
put in. “Or even to somebody who really needs it, for there’s sure enough of
those.”

“That’s not the way it works,” said
Scarsdale Vibe.

“So we always hear the plutocracy
complaining.”

“Out of a belief, surely fathomable,
that merely to need a sum is not to deserve it.”

“Except that in these times, ‘need’
arises directly from criminal acts of the rich, so it ‘deserves’ whatever
amount of money will atone for it. Fathomable enough for you?”

“You are a socialist, sir.”

“As anyone not insulated by wealth
from the cares of the day is obliged to be. Sir.”

Foley paused in his whittling and
looked over as if in suddenly piqued interest.

“Now, Ray,” admonished the Professor,
“we’re here to discuss electromagnetism, not politics.”

Vibe chuckled soothingly. “The
Professor’s afraid you’re going to chase me off with radical talk like that.
But I am not that sensitive a soul, I am guided, as ever, by Second
Corinthians.” He had a careful look around the table, estimating the level of
Scriptural awareness.

“Suffering fools is unavoidable,”
said Ray Ipsow, “but don’t ask me to be ‘glad’ about it.”

The guards lounging by the doorway
seemed to grow more alert. Foley got to his feet and strolled over to the
window. Scarsdale squinted, not sure if this should be taken as an affront to
his faith.

Ray gathered his hat and stood. “It’s
all right, I’ll be down at the bar,” as he went through the door, adding,
“praying for wisdom.”

Down
in the elegant Pump Room, Ray ran into Merle Rideout and Chevrolette McAdoo,
who were “out on the town,” owing to a fortunate wager Merle had made earlier
that day.

Couples in boutonnières and
ostrichplume hats paraded selfcomposedly among the dwarf palms or paused by the
Italian Fountain as if thinking about jumping in. Somewhere a small string
orchestra was playing an arrangement of “Old Zip Coon.”

Ray Ipsow regarded the surface of his
beer. “He seems different these days. You notice anything?”

Merle nodded. “Something missing. He
used to get so fired up about everything—we’d be designing something, run
out of paper, he’d take his shirt collar off and just use that to scribble on.”

“Lately he’s been keeping those ideas
pretty much to himself, like he’s finally learned how much they might be worth.
Seen that happen enough, Lord knows. This big parade of modern inventions, all
spirited march tunes, public going ooh and aah, but someplace lurking just out
of sight is always some lawyer or accountant, beating that 2/4 like clockwork
and runnin the show.”

“Anybody feel like dancing?” offered
Chevrolette.

U
p
in his penthouse suite
, Scarsdale had moved on to the business at hand. “Back in the spring,
Dr. Tesla was able to achieve readings on his transformer of up to a million
volts. It does not take a prophet to see where this is headed. He is already
talking in private about something he calls a ‘WorldSystem,’ for producing huge
amounts of electrical power that anyone can tap in to for free, anywhere in the
world, because it uses the planet as an element in a gigantic resonant circuit.
He is naïve enough to think he can get financing for this, from Pierpont, or
me, or one or two others. It has escaped his mighty intellect that no one can
make any money off an invention like that. To put up money for research into a
system of free power would be to throw it away, and violate—hell,
betray—the essence of everything modern history is supposed to be.”

The Professor was literally having an
attack of nausea. Every time Tesla’s name came up, this was the predictable
outcome. Vomit. The audacity and scope of the inventor’s dreams had always sent
Heino Vanderjuice staggering back to his office in Sloane Lab feeling not so
much a failure as someone who has taken a wrong turn in the labyrinth of Time
and now cannot find his way back to the moment he made it.

“If such a thing is ever produced,”
Scarsdale Vibe was saying, “it will meanthe end of the world, not just ‘as we
know it’ but as anyone knows it. It is a weapon, Professor, surely you see
that—the most terrible weapon the world has seen, designed to destroy not
armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, our Economy’s long
struggle to evolve up out of the fishmarket anarchy of all battling all to the
rational systems of control whose blessings we enjoy at present.”

“But,” too much smoke in the air, not
much time before he’d have to excuse himself, “I’m not sure how I can help.”

“Speak bluntly may I? Invent us a
countertransformer. Some piece of equipment that will detect one of these Tesla
rigs in operation, and then broadcast something equal and opposite that’ll
nullify its effects.”

“Hmm. It would help to see Dr.
Tesla’s drawings and calculations.”

“Precisely why Pierpont’s in on this.
That and his arrangement with Edison—but there I go again spilling
secrets. Bankrolling Tesla has given Morgan’s access to all Tesla’s engineering
secrets. And he has operatives on the pot, ready day and night to rush us
photographed copies of anything we need to know.”

“Well in theory, I don’t see any
great obstacle. It’s a simple phase inversion, though there may be nonlinear
phenomena of scale we cannot predict till we build a working Device—”

“Tell me the details later.
Now—how much do you reckon something like that would actually, um,” lowering
his voice, “cost?”

“Cost? Oh, I couldn’t
really—that is, I shouldn’t—”

“Come now, Professor,” boomed Foley
Walker, holding a hotel whiskey decanter as if he meant to drink from it, “to
the nearest million or so, just a rough guess?”

“Hmm
. . .
well
. . .
as a figure
to start from
. . .
if only for
symmetry’s sake
. . .
say about what
Brother Tesla’s getting from Mr. Morgan?”

“Well, ringtailed rutabagas.” Vibe’s
eyes with a contemptuous twinkle which colleagues had learned meant he had what
he wanted. “Here I figured you fellows spend your time wandering around with
your thoughts all far, far away, and Professor, why, you’re just a damn horse
trader without mercy’s what it is. Guess I should summon the legal staff,
before I find myself hanging in a poultryshop window, two bits away from
getting fricasseed. Foley, would you just crank us up long distance there on
the telephone—get us Somble, Strool & Fleshway, if you’d be so kind?
Could be they’d share some ideas on how best to ‘spring’ for a project of this
scale.”

The call went through immediately,
and Scarsdale, excusing himself, withdrew to an instrument in another part of
the suite. The Professor was left to stare into the depths of his ancient hat,
as if it were a vestiary expression of his present situation. More and more in
recent weeks, he had found himself approaching likewise the condition of an
empty cylinder, only intermittently occupied by intelligent thought. Was this
the right thing to do? Should he even be here? The criminality in the room was
almost palpable. Ray certainly didn’t care for any it, and the boys today, even
in their usual unworldliness, had regarded him with something like
apprehension. Would any sum the New York lawyers might be suggesting now be
worth the loss of that friendship?

he Chums of Chance could have been granted no more
appropriate form of “groundleave” than the Chicago Fair, as the great national
celebration possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys
access and agency. The harsh nonfictional world waited outside the White City’s
limits, held off for this brief summer, making the entire commemorative season
beside Lake Michigan at once dreamlike and real.

If there were any plots afoot to
commit bomb or other outrages upon the Fair, the
Inconvenience
was ideal
not only for scanning the grounds fence to fence, but also for keeping an eye
out against any seaborne assaults contemplated from the Lake side. Fairgoers
would see the ship overhead and yet not see it, for at the Fair, where miracles
were routinely expected, nothing this summer was too big, too fast, too
fantastically rigged out to impress anybody for more than a minute and a half,
before the next marvel appeared.
Inconvenience
would fit right in, as
one more effect whose only purpose was to entertain.

The boys began regular surveillance
runs the next day. The “spotter” from White City Investigations showed up at
dawn, packing a small observatory’s worth of telescopic gear. “Broke these in
on the Ferris wheel,” he said, “but couldn’t figure out how to compensate for
the movement. Gets blurry and so forth.”

Lew Basnight seemed a sociable enough
young man, though it soon became obvious that he had not, until now, so much as
heard of the Chums of Chance.

“But every boy knows the Chums of
Chance,” declared Lindsay Noseworth perplexedly. “What could you’ve been
reading, as a youth?”

Lew
obligingly tried to remember. “Wild West, African explorers, the usualadventure
stuff. But you boys—you’re not storybook characters.” He had a thought.
“Are you?”

“No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie
Bly,” Randolph supposed. “Although the longer a fellow’s name has been in the
magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from nonfiction.”

“I guess I read the sports pages
mostly.”

“Good!” declared Chick Counterfly,
“at least we won’t have to get on to the Anarchist question.”

Fine with Lew, who wasn’t even sure
what Anarchists were, exactly, though the word was sure in the air. He was not
in the detective business out of political belief. He had just sort of wandered
into it, by way of a sin he was supposed once to have committed. As to the
specifics of this lapse, well, good luck. Lew couldn’t remember what he’d done,
or hadn’t done, or even When. Those who didn’t know either still acted puzzled,
as if he were sending out rays of iniquity. Those who did claim to remember,
all too well, kept giving him sad looks which soon—it being
Illinois—soured into what was known as moral horror.

He was denounced in the local
newspapers. Newsboys made up lurid headlines about him, which they shouted all
through the civic mobilities morning and evening, making a point of pronouncing
his name disrespectfully. Women in intimidating hats glared at him with
revulsion.

He became known as the
UpstateDownstate Beast.

It would’ve helped if he could
remember, but all he could produce was this peculiar haze. The experts he went
to for advice had little to tell him. “Past lives,” some assured him. “Future
lives,” said other confident swamis. “Spontaneous Hallucination,” diagnosed the
more scientific among them. “Perhaps,” one beaming Oriental suggested, “
it
was hallucinating
you.
”

“Very helpful, thanks,” Lew murmured,
and tried to leave, only to find that the door would not open.

“A formality. Too many bank drafts
have come back unhonored.”

“Here’s cash. Can I go?”

“When your anger has cooled, consider
what I have told you.”

“It’s no use to me.”

He fled in among the skyscrapers of
Chicago, leaving a note at work suggesting he’d be back shortly. No use. A
close business associate followed, confronted, and publicly denounced him,
knocking his hat off and kicking it into the middle of Clark Street, where it
was run over by a beer wagon.

“I don’t deserve this, Wensleydale.”

“
You have destroyed your name.” And
without speaking further, turned, there, right out among the city traffic, and
walked away, soon vanishing into the summertime clutter of noise and light.