Against the Day (2 page)

At one end of the gondola, largely
oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively
now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by
Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed
by the text before him. Ever since the Chums, during a confidential assignment
in Our Nation’s Capital (see
T
he Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit
)
, had rescued Pugnax, then but a
pup, from a furious encounter in the shadow of the Washington Monument between
rival packs of the District’s wild dogs, it had been his habit to investigate
the pages of whatever printed material should find its way on board
Inconvenience,
from theoretical treatments of the aeronautical arts to often less
appropriate matter, such as the “dime novels”—though his preference
seemed more for sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting
extremes of human behavior, which he appeared to find a bit lurid. He had
learned with the readiness peculiar to dogs how with the utmost delicacy to
turn pages using nose or paws, and anyone observing him thus engaged could not
help noting the changing expressions of his face, in particular the uncommonly
articulate eyebrows, which contributed to an overall effect of interest,
sympathy, and—the conclusion could scarce be avoided—comprehension.

An old aerostat hand by now, Pugnax
had also learned, like the rest of the crew, to respond to “calls of nature” by
proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting in surprises among
the surface populations below, but not often enough, or even notably enough,
for anyone to begin to try to record, much less coordinate reports of, these
lavatorial assaults from the sky. They entered rather the realm of folklore,
superstition, or perhaps, if one does not mind stretching the definition, the
religious.

Darby Suckling, having recovered from
his recent atmospheric excursion, addressed the studious canine. “I say,
Pugnax—what’s that you’re reading now, old fellow?”

“Rr Rffrff Rrrr
rff
rffrrf,” replied Pugnax without looking up, which Darby, having
like the others in the crew got used to Pugnax’s voice—easier, really,
than some of the regional American accents the boys heard in their
travels—now interpreted as,
“
The
Princess Casamassima.
”

“Ah. Some sort of. . . Italian
romance, I’ll bet?”

“Its subject,” he was promptly
informed by the everalert Lindsay Noseworth, who had overheard the exchange,
“is the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism, to be found peculiarly
rampant, in fact, at our current destination—a sinister affliction to
which I pray we shall suffer no occasion for exposure more immediate than that
to be experienced, as with Pugnax at this moment, safely within the fictional
leaves of some book.” Placing upon the word “book” an emphasis whose level of
contempt can be approached perhaps only by Executive Officers. Pugnax sniffed
briefly in Lindsay’s direction, trying to detect that combination of olfactory
“notes” he had grown accustomed to finding in other humans. But as always this
scent eluded him. There might be an explanation, though he was not sure he
should insist upon one. Explanations did not, as far as he could tell, appear
to be anything dogs either sought or even were entitled to. Especially dogs who
spent as much time as Pugnax did up here, in the sky, far above the
inexhaustible complex of odors to be found on the surface of the planet below.

The wind, which till now had been
steady on their starboard quarter, began to shift. As their orders had directed
them to proceed to Chicago without delay, Randolph, after studying an
aeronautical chart of the country below them, called out, “Now,
Suckling—aloft with the anemometer—Blundell and Counterfly, stand
by the Screw,” referring to an aerialpropulsion device, which the more
scientific among my young readers may recall from the boys’ earlier adventures
(
The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa
,
The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis),
for augmenting the
cruising speed of the
Inconvenience
—invented by their longtime
friend Professor Heino Vanderjuice of New Haven, and powered by an ingenious
turbine engine whose boiler was heated by burning surplus hydrogen gas taken
from the envelope through special valve arrangements—though the invention
had been predictably disparaged by Dr. Vanderjuice’s many rivals as no better
than a perpetualmotion machine, in clear violation of thermodynamical law.

Miles, with his marginal gifts of
coordination, and Chick, with a want of alacrity fully as perceptible, took
their stations at the controlpanels of the apparatus, as Darby Suckling,
meantime, went scrambling up the ratlines and shrouds of the giant ellipsoidal
envelope from which the gondola depended, to the very top, where the aery flux
was uninterrupted, in order to read, from an anemometer of the Robinson’s type,
accurate wind measurements, as an index of how rapidly the ship was proceeding,
conveying these down to the bridge by means of a written note inside a tennis
ball lowered on a length of line. It will be recalled that this method of
passing information had been adopted by the crew during their brief though
inconclusive sojourn “south of the border,” where they had observed it among
the low elements who dissipate their lives in placing wagers on the outcomes of
pelota
games. (For readers here making their first acquaintance with our
band of young adventurers, it must be emphasized at once that—perhaps
excepting the as yet insufficiently known Chick Counterfly—none would
e’er have entered the morally poisonous atmosphere of the
“
frontón
,”
as such haunts are
called down there, had it not been essential to the intelligencegathering
activities the Chums had contracted to render at that time to the Interior
Ministry of President Porfirio Díaz. For details of their exploits, see
The
Chums of Chance in Old Mexico
.)

Though the extreme hazard was obvious
to all, Darby’s enthusiasm for the task at hand created, as ever, a magical
cloak about his elfin form that seemed to protect him, though not from the
sarcasm of Chick Counterfly, who now called after the ascending mascotte, “Hey!
Suckling! Only a
saphead
would
risk
his life to see how fast the wind’s blowing!”

Hearing this, Lindsay Noseworth
frowned in perplexity. Even allowing for his irregular history—a mother,
so it was said, vanished when he was yet a babe—a father, disreputably
adrift somewhere in the Old Confederacy—Counterfly’s propensity for
gratuitous insult had begun to pose a threat to his probationary status with
the Chums of Chance, if not, indeed, to group morale.

Two weeks previous, beside a
blackwater river of the Deep South, with the Chums attempting to negotiate a
bitter and unresolved “piece of business” from the Rebellion of thirty years
previous—one still not advisable to set upon one’s page—Chick had
appeared one night at their encampment in a state of extreme fright, pursued by
a band of nightriders in white robes and sinister pointed hoods, whom the boys
recognized immediately as the dreaded “Ku Klux Klan.”

His story, as clearly as could be
made out among the abrupt changes of register which typify the adolescent
voice, exacerbated by the perilousness of the situation, was as follows.
Chick’s father, Richard, commonly known as “Dick,” originally from the North,
had for several years been active in the Old Confederacy trying his hand at a
number of business projects, none of which, regrettably, had proven successful,
and not a few of which, in fact, had obliged him, as the phrase went, to
approach the gates of the Penitentiary. At length, upon the imminent arrival of
a posse comitatus who had learned of his attempted scheme to sell the state of
Mississippi to a mysterious Chinese consortium based in Tijuana, Mexico, “Dick”
Counterfly had absquatulated swiftly into the night, leaving his son with only
a pocketful of specie and the tender admonition, “Got to ‘scram,’
kid—write if you get work.” Since then Chick had lived from hand to
mouth, until, at the town of Thick Bush, not far from the Chums’ encampment,
someone, recognizing him as the son of a notorious and widely sought
“carpetbagger,” had suggested an immediate application of tar and feathers to
his person.

“Much as we might be inclined to
offer our protection,” Lindsay had informed the agitated youth, “here upon the
ground we are constrained by our Charter, which directs us never to interfere
with legal customs of any locality down at which we may happen to have
touched.”

“You ain’t from these parts,” replied
Chick, somewhat sharply. “When they’re after a fellow, legal ain’t got nothing
to do with it—it’s run, Yankee, run, and Katie bar the door.”

“In polite discourse,” Lindsay
hastened to correct him,
“ ‘
isn’t’
is preferable to ‘ain’t.
’ ”

“Noseworth, for mercy’s sake!” cried
Randolph St. Cosmo, who had been glancing anxiously out at the robed and hooded
figures at the perimeter of the camp, the blazing torches they carried lighting
each fold and wrinkle of their rude drapery with almost theatrical precision
and casting weird shadows among the tupelo, cypress, and hickory. “There is
nothing further to discuss—this fellow is to be granted asylum and, if he
wishes, provisional membership in our Unit. There certainly remains to him no
future down here.”

It had been a night of sleepless
precaution lest sparks from the torches of the mob drift anywhere near the
hydrogengenerating apparatus and devastation result. In time, however, the
ominously cloaked rustics, perhaps in superstitious fear of that very
machinery, had dispersed to their homes and haunts. And Chick Counterfly, for
better or worse, had remained
. . . .

The Screw device soon accelerated the
ship to a speed which, added to that of the wind from directly astern, made it
nearly invisible from the ground. “We’re doing a way better than a mile a
minute,” remarked Chick Counterfly from the controlconsole, unable to eliminate
from his voice a certain awe.

“That could put us in Chicago before
nightfall,” reckoned Randolph St. Cosmo. “Feeling all right, Counterfly?”

“Crackerjack!” exclaimed Chick.

Like most “rookies” in the
organization, Chick had found his initial difficulties to lie not so much with
velocity as with altitude, and the changes in airpressure and temperature that
went along with it. The first few times aloft, he did his duty without
complaint but one day was discovered unauthorizedly rummaging through a locker
containing various items of arctic gear. When confronted by Lindsay Noseworth,
the lad in his defense could only chatter, “Cccold!”

“Do not imagine,” Lindsay instructed,
“that in coming aboard
Inconvenience
you have escaped into any realm of
the counterfactual. There may not be mangrove swamps or lynch law up here, but
we must nonetheless live with the constraints of the given world, notable among
them the decrease of temperature with altitude. Eventually your sensitivities
in that regard should moderate, and in the meantime”—tossing him a
foulweather cloak of black Japanese goatskin with
с.
of с. property
stenciled in bright yellow on the
back—“this is to be considered as a transitional garment only, until such
time as you adapt to these altitudes and, if fortunate, learn the lessons of
unpremeditated habitude among them.”

“Here it is in a nutshell,” Randolph
confided later. “Going up is like going north.” He stood blinking, as if
expecting comment.

“But,” it occurred to Chick, “if you
keep going far enough north, eventually you pass over the Pole, and then you’re
heading south again.”

“Yes.” The skyship commander shrugged
uncomfortably.

“So
. . .
if you went up high enough, you’d be going
down
again?”

“Shh!” warned Randolph St. Cosmo.

“Approaching the surface of
another
planet
,
maybe?” Chick
persisted.

“Not exactly. No. Another ‘surface,’
but an earthly one. Often to our regret, all too earthly. More than that, I am
reluctant—”

“These are mysteries of the
profession,” Chick supposed.

“You’ll see. In time, of course.”

As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found
them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like the
dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared
increasingly likely, to help promote. Somewhere down there was the White City
promised in the Columbian Exposition brochures, somewhere among the tall
smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black greasesmoke, the effluvia of butchery
unremitting, into which the buildings of the leagues of city lying downwind
retreated, like children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the day.
In the Stockyards, workers coming off shift, overwhelmingly of the Roman faith,
able to detach from earth and blood for a few precious seconds, looked up at
the airship in wonder, imagining a detachment of not necessarily helpful
angels.

Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of
Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia,
mile on mile. “The Great Bovine City of the World,” breathed Lindsay in wonder.
Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this
height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed
the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the
Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement
only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of
choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the
killingfloor.