Against the Day (61 page)

“Because you can understand these
airyfairy scratchmarks,” Scarsdale Vibe had scolded, when it became clear that
Kit’s reluctance to become a Vibe heir was not coyness merely for the sake of
improving the deal, “do you imagine yourself better than us?”

“More a case of what it leads on to,
I think,” said Kit, not about to be badgered into a dispute with the gent
paying the bills.

“While the rest of us, you mean, are
left behind in this soiled Creation.”

“Is that what I mean? Here—”
still amiable, he drew toward them a block of paper quadrilled into quarterinch
squares.

“No, no, don’t bother.”

“It’s nothing too spiritual. “

“Young man, I am as spiritual a
person as any you are liable to run into at the formerly proud institution you
now attend.” He stalked out, leaving a glowing trail of offended righteousness.

Kit dreamed he
was with his father in a city that
was Denver but not really Denver, in some kind of strange variety saloon full
of the usual collection of lowlifes, though everybody was acting unnaturally
wellbehaved. Except for Webb, who was yelling. “The Æther! What’n the hell have
I got here, a little damn Tesla on my hands? What do you care about the Æther?”

“I have to know if it exists.”

“Nobody
has
to know that.”

“Right now, Father, I do. I always
believed that children came from Heaven
. . .
.
”

He went silent, expecting Webb to
complete the thought he was suddenly too sad to elaborate. Webb, as if with no
idea what had brought on such intensity, couldn’t answer. Everybody else, every
boozehound, muleskinner, opium smoker, and flimflam artist in the place, paid
them no notice, preferring shoptalk, gossip, and chitchat about sports. He
woke. The hand on his shoulder was that of his scout, Proximus. “That Professor
Vanderjuice wants to see you up at the Sloane Lab.”

“What time is it, Prox?”

“Don’t ask me, I was asleep, too.”

All the way out Prospect Street, past
the cemetery, the feeling grew that something awful was about to happen. Kit
doubted it was about Theories of Light, which he happened to be taking that
semester with the Professor, who had studied it under Quincke in Berlin, back
before Michelson and Morley, so there was kind of a distinct Ætheric residue
there. Out of academic enclosure, south of the Green, splashing beer about the
room, waving for emphasis a triangular slice from the Italian cheeseandtomato
pastries to be found everywhere in that neighborhood, the old bird thank
goodness was quite another species entirely, recalling tales of the early
electrical days that even the most beersoaked of freshman attended to,
wideeyed.

At last he reached the rat’snest
office where Professor Vanderjuice was waiting with a solemn look. Rising, he
handed Kit a letter, and Kit saw immediately that it brought news he was not
ready for. The envelope was postmarked

Denver, but the date was illegible,
and someone had already opened and read the letter inside.

   
Dear
Kit,

Mamma asked me to write and tell you
that Pa is gone. They say it happened over in the McElmo someplace. And not
from “natural causes.” Reef brought back his body and he is buried in the
miners cemetery at Telluride. Reef says there is no need for you to come back
right now, he and Frank will take care of all that must be done. Mamma is being
strong, saying like she knew it would always happen, enemies wherever he went,
borrowed time and so on.

I
hope you are well and that someday we will see you again. Keep studying hard
back there, don’t quit and try not to worry much about this, for we are all
able to do what we have to.

   
We
miss you.

   
Your
loving sister,

   
Lake

Kit gazed at the violated cover, so
unraggedly slit open as to suggest a letterknife from a deskset of some
quality. First things first. “Who opened this, sir?”

   
“I
don’t know,” replied the Professor. “This is how they handed it to me.”

   
“They.”

   
“The
provost’s office.”

   
“It’s
addressed to me.”

“They have been keeping it there for
a while
. . . .
” Pausing as if to
consider the next part of the sentence.

   
“It’s
all right.”

   
“My
boy . . .”

“Your position. I understand. But if
it means there was some doubt about passing it on to me at all . . .”

   
“We
do our best around here not to be altogether bought and sold
. . . .
”

“Sir, there is still an implication
here. Of conniving, at least. More, maybe, though that is so terrible . . .”

   
“Yes.”
The old fellow’s eyes had begun to brim.

Kit nodded. “Thank you. I’ll have to
think about what to do.” He felt inside himself the presence of a small,
wounded girl who was trying to сry—not in pain, or to appease any
who would harm her further, but as if in fear of being left to the hazards of a
winter street in a city known to abandon its poor. He had not cried for a long
time.

   
He
wandered without any clear plan, wanting to be anonymous among the

town mobility, wanting at the same time to be alone. He knew
that nothing

known to the alternate universe of vector analysis could
bring him comfort

or help him see a way out. Moriarty’s wasn’t open yet, Louis
Lassen’s lunch stand would have been good for a hamburger sandwich if Kit
could’ve been sure he wouldn’t choke on it. Canonical Eli venues were not the
ticket today. He came to rest about a mile up the Quinnipiac on top of West
Rock, lay on the ground, and let himself cry.

Not a word
then from any of the Vibes about his
father, not even from Colfax—no condolences, inquiries as to Kit’s
current state of mind, nothing like that. Could be they believed Kit hadn’t found
out yet. Could be they were waiting for him to bring it up. Could be they
didn’t care. But there was the other possibility, growing more probable the
longer the silence continued. That they knew all about it, because—but
could he afford to pursue that line of thought? If his suspicions proved to
have anything to them, what would that oblige him to do about it?

The academic year went twostepping on
toward summer, and the girls wondered why Kit had stopped showing up at dances.
One day, gazing out across the Sound, he observed a peculiar dark geometrical
presence where previously there’d been only the misted shores of Long Island.
Day by day, when visibility permitted, he noticed whatever it was
increasing
in height.
He borrowed a telescope from a classmate, took it up on top of
East Rock, ignored the spooning couples and dedicated drinkers, and devoted
what time he could to observing the structure’s vertical progress. A trusswork
tower, apparently eightsided, was slowly rising over there. Whatever it was supposed
to be, it was the talk of New Haven. Soon, at night, from that same general
direction, came heavenwide multicolored flashes of light, which only the
incurably complacent tried to explain away as heat lightning. Kit couldn’t help
recalling Colorado Springs and Fourth of July Eve 1899.

“It’s Tesla,” confirmed Professor
Vanderjuice, “putting up another transmitter. I understand once you worked with
him in Colorado.”

“In a way it’s how I got to Yale.”
Kit told him about meeting Foley Walker in Colorado Springs.

“That’s odd,” said the Professor.
“The Vibe interests once hired me—” He looked around the office. “Do you
mind taking a walk?”

They headed into the Italian
neighborhood south of the Green. The Professor told Kit about the agreement he
and Scarsdale Vibe had come to in Chicago ten years before. “I’ve never felt
proud of it. There was always something vaguely criminal.”

   
“Vibe
was financing Tesla but wanted you to sabotage his work?”

“Morgan’s had been doing much the
same thing, but more effectively. Eventually Vibe saw there’d never be a
practical system of wireless power transmission, that the economy had long
before devised means to prevent it.”

   
“But
Tesla’s building a transmitter now.”

“It doesn’t matter. If it ever gets
to be too much of a threat to the existing power arrangements, they’ll just
have it dynamited.”

   
“So
they didn’t really need your antitransmitter.”

“To tell the truth, I never worked
all that diligently on it. One day, just around the time I was beginning to
feel dishonest taking Vibe’s money, the checks stopped arriving—not even
a letter of dismissal. I know I should have quit sooner, but things worked out
anyway.”

“You
were able to do the right thing,” Kit said miserably, “but the longer this goes
on, the more I owe them, the less likely it’ll be I can ever turn it around.
What can I do? How do I buy my way out? “

“You
could first convince yourself that you owe them”—he would not say
“him”—“nothing.”

   
“Sure.
In Colorado people get shot for that all the time. It’s called poker.”

The
Professor breathed deeply, once or twice, as if preparing to lift an
unaccustomed weight. “Allow for the possibility,” he said as evenly as he
could, “that forces unnamed for the moment are corrupting you. It is their
inevitable policy. Those they may not at the moment harm, they corrupt. Usually
all it takes is money, for they have so much that no one feels any moral
hesitancy about taking it. Their targets become rich, and where’s the harm in
that?”

   
“And
if money doesn’t do the trick . . .”

“Then
there must follow the slow and evil work they have made their specialty,
conducted all in silence. Perhaps years of it, until one day, money having been
traded off for time, the same soulless condition is brought about, with the
money meanwhile having been put somewhere else and bringing a better rate of
return.”

They
were passing the entrance of an “apizza” establishment. The aroma was
distracting, you’d say compelling. “Come on,” said the Professor, whose
condition, over the preceding year, had progressed from a simple tropism to
advanced pizzamania, “let’s perhaps grab a slice, what do you say?”

As
his relations with Scarsdale Vibe had dwindled to yearly tycoonical
headinsertions into Sloane Lab and eventually, blessedly, to none at all, Heino
Vanderjuice began to think that once or twice he’d detected, out at the far
edges of his visual field, a glimmering winged object among the rusticated
stonework and the rippling elms, and there grew upon him the curious

notion that this might actually be his soul, whose exact
whereabouts since 1893 had been in some doubt.

His conscience was also showing signs
of feeling, as if recovering from frostbite. One day, chatting with young
Traverse, he happened to pull an old copy of the British science journal
Nature
from a row of them on his bookshelf, and leaf through to one of the
articles. “P. G. Tait on Quaternions. Regards their chief merit as being
‘uniquely adapted to Euclidean space . . .’ because—‘lamp’
this—’What have students of physics, as such, to do with more than three
dimensions?’ I invite your attention to ‘as such.
’ ”

“A physics student, as something
else,
would
have need for more than three dimensions?” Kit puzzled.

“Well, Mr. Traverse, if you ever
considered becoming that ‘something else,’ Germany would seem the logical place
for you. Grassmann’s
Ausdehnungslehre
can be extended to any number of
dimensions you like. Dr. Hilbert at Göttingen is developing his ‘Spectral
Theory,’ which requires a vector space of
infinite
dimensions. His
coadjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all just fade away
into a
Kontinuum
of space and time. Minkowski and Hilbert, in fact, will
be holding a joint seminar at Göttingen next year in the electrodynamics of
moving bodies, not to mention Hilbert’s recent work on Eigenheit
theory—vectors right in the heart and soul of it all, mightn’t it be, as
you lads say, ‘just the ticket’?”

Overflowing with an allbutelated idea
of how he might actually do someone some good, the old fellow produced as from
empty space a ukulele of some dark exotic wood trimmed with tortoiseshell and,
after strumming a peppy eightbar intro, sang—

That
Göttingen Rag

Get into, your trav’ling coat,

Leave Girly, a goodbye note,

Then hopon, the verynext boat,

To Ger—manee—

Those crazy, professors there,

They don’t ever cut their hair,