Against the Day (78 page)

three dimensions and perhaps more, like stars blown through
by the shock

waves of the Creation. Were those voices out there crying in
pain? sometimes it almost sounded like singing. Sometimes a word or two, in a
language almost recognizable, came through. Thus, galloping in unceasing flow
ever ahead, denied any further control over their fate, the disconsolate
company were borne terribly over the edge of the visible world
. . . .

The chamber shook, as in a hurricane.
Ozone permeated its interior like the musk attending some matingdance of
automata, and the boys found themselves more and more disoriented. Soon even
the cylindrical confines they had entered seemed to have fallen away, leaving
them in a space unbounded in all directions. There became audible a continuous
roar as of the ocean—but it was not the ocean—and soon cries as of beasts
in open country, ferally purring stridencies passing overhead, sometimes too
close for the lads to be altogether comfortable with—but they were not
beasts. Everywhere rose the smell of excrement and dead tissue.

Each lad was looking intently through
the darkness at the other, as if about to inquire when it would be considered
proper to start screaming for help.

“If this is our host’s idea of the
future—” Chick began, but he was abruptly checked by the emergence, from
the ominous sweep of shadow surrounding them, of a long pole with a great
metal
hook
on the end, of the sort commonly used to remove objectionable
performers from the variety stage, which, being latched firmly about Chick’s
neck, had in the next instant pulled him off into regions indecipherable.
Before Darby had time to shout after, the Hook reappeared to perform a similar
extraction on him, and quick as that, both youngsters found themselves back in
the laboratory of Dr. Zoot. The fiendish “time machine,” still in one piece,
quivered in its accustomed place, as if with merriment.

“Got a friend works at one of the
Bowery theatres,” the Doctor explained. “This hook here can come in mighty
handy sometimes, specially when the visibility’s not too good.”

   
“What
was that we just saw?” Chick as smoothly as he was able.

“It’s different for everybody, but
don’t bother to tell me, I’ve heard too much, more than is good for a man,
frankly, and it could easily do you some harm as well to even get into the
subject.”

“And you’re sure that your
. . .
machine
. . .
is running up to its design specifications and so forth.”

   
“Well
. . .”

“I knew it!” Darby screamed, “you
miserable psychopath, you nearly murdered us, for God’s sake!”

   
“Look,
fellows, I’ll let you have the trip for free, all right? Truth is, the

cussèd rig ain’t even one of my designs, I picked it up for a
pretty good price a couple of years ago, out in the Middle West at one of
these, I guess you could call it a convention
.
. . .
The owner, now I recall, did seem anxious to be rid of it
. . . .
”

   
“And
you
bought it used?
”
shrilled
Darby.

   
“ ‘
Preowned’ was how they put it.”

“I don’t suppose,” Chick striving for
his accustomed suavity of tone, “you obtained engineering drawings, operating
and repair manuals, anything like that?”

“No, but my thinking was ’s if I
already know how to take apart the latest Oldsmobile, and put it back together
again blindfolded, well how tough could this contraption be?”

   
“And
your attorneys will agree with that, of course,” snapped Darby.

   
“Aw,
now, fellas . . .”

“Exactly where and from whom, Dr.
Zoot,” pressed Chick, “did you happen to purchase the unit?”

“Don’t know if you’ve heard of
Candlebrow U., institute of higher learning out there in the distant heart of
the Republic—once a year, every summer, they hold a big gettogether on
the subject of timetravel—more cranks, doubledomes, and bugbrains than
you can scare off with any known weapon. I happened to be out there, just, you
know, some drumming, nerve tonics and so forth, ran into this particular jasper
at a saloon down by the river called the Ball in Hand, and the name he gave me
then was Alonzo Meatman, though it could’ve changed since. Here, here it is on
the bill of sale—though, if you’re really gonna look him up
. . .
well I hope it won’t be necessary to
mention my name?”

“Why not?” Darby still in some
agitation, “he’s dangerous, you mean? you’re sending us into another death
trap, right?”

“Not him so much,” Dr. Zoot fidgeting
and unable to meet their gaze, “but his
. .
.
associates, well, you just might want to keep an eye out.”

   
“A
criminal gang. Swell. Thanks.”

“Say that I was just as glad to get
back out again on the road soon as I could, and even then I didn’t feel
comfortable till I had the river between us.”

   
“Oh,
they don’t like to cross running water,” sneered Darby.

   
“You’ll
see, young fella. And you might wish you hadn’t.”

t Candlebrow U., the crew of the
Inconvenience
would
find exactly the mixture of nostalgia and amnesia to provide them a reasonable
counterfeit of the Timeless. Appropriately, perhaps, it would also be here that
they would make the fatal discovery which would bring them, inexorable as the
Zodiac’s wheel, to their
Imum Coeli
. . .
.

In recent years the University had
expanded well beyond the memories of older alumni, who, returning, found
Chicagostyle ironwork and modern balloonframing among—even in place
of—the structures they remembered, earlier masonry homages to European
models, executed often as not by immigrants from university or cathedral towns
on the elder continent. The West Gate, intended to frame equinoctial sunsets,
still retained two flanking towers of rusticated stone and Gothical aspect,
quaintly dwarfed now by the looming and more boxlike dormitories just inside,
and managing somehow, though itself not much older than a human generation, to
present an aspect of terrible antiquity, evoking a remote age before the first
European explorers, before the Plains Indians they had found here, before those
whom the Indians remembered in their legends as giants and demigods.

The nowfamous yearly Candlebrow
Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast
fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his
bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the ’80s, in which, before
Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that
comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already
debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a
Christmaspudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided,
often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of
profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow’s labora

tory hands happened to invent “Smegmo,” an artificial
substitute for everything in the ediblefat category, including margarine, which
many felt wasn’t that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital
Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that “the
Hebrew
 
people have been waiting
four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats.” With
astonishing rapidity, Smegmo had come to account for the majority of Candlebrow
Ventures’ annual profits. The secret of its formula was guarded with a
ruthlessness that would have embarrassed the Tsar of Russia, so at Candlebrow
U., ubiquitous as the product was in the cuisine and among the table condiments
of the Student Cafeteria, you kept hearing different stories about exactly what
was in it.

Profits flowing from sales of Smegmo
provided funding, on a scale almost describable as lavish, for the First
International Conference on TimeTravel, a topic suddenly respectable owing to
the success of Mr. H. G. Wells’s novel
The Time Machine,
first published
in 1895, a year often cited as a lower limit to the date of the first
Conference, although no one had yet agreed on how to assign ordinal numbers to
any of the gatherings, “because once timetravel
is
invented, you see,”
declared Professor Heino Vanderjuice, who the boys were delighted to discover
was attending this year as a guest lecturer, “there’s nothing to keep us from
going as far back as we like, and holding the Conferences
then,
even
back when this was all prehistoric around here, dinosaurs, giant ferns,
flammivomous peaks everywhere sort of thing
.
. . .
”

“All due respect to the Professor,”
protested Lindsay Noseworth at the nightly Unit meeting, “but is this what we
have to look forward to around here, these sophomoric slogs through endless
quagmires of the metaphysical? Frankly, I don’t know how much of that I can
tolerate.”

   
“Lotta
nice college ‘nooky’ around, though,” commented Darby, leeringly.

“Another of your vulgarisms,
Suckling, with which I must confess myself, no doubt mercifully, unfamiliar.”

“An ignorance likely to continue,”
prophesied Miles Blundell, “until the year 1925 or thereabouts.”

“You see!” Lindsay somewhat louder
than necessary, “it’s beginning! I imagined, naively it seems, that we had come
here to discover, if we could, some purpose to these evermoredangerous
expeditions out upon which we are ordered, our unreflective participation in
which someday must surely, unless we begin to take steps to promote our safety,
end in our dissolution.”

“Assuming that this Dr. Zoot hasn’t
sent us here on a fool’s errand,” Randolph St. Cosmo reminded them, “from not
entirely respectable motives of his own.”

   
“Durn
lunatic,” Darby scowled.

   
Inside
the campus athletic pavilion, a vast dormitory space had been created, aisled
and numbered, accessible byway of complicated registering procedures and colorcoded
tickets of identification
. . . .
After
lightsout, a space no longer entirely readable, forested with shadows, full of
whispering, murmuring, glowing white lampmantles by bedsides, ukulelists
playing and singing in the dark
. . . .
Softvoiced
pages recruited from among the children of the town circulated among the
sleepers all through the night watches, with telegraphic messages from parents,
sweethearts, timetravel societies in other towns
. . . .

Meals were served throughout the day
and night, according to a mysterious timetable and system of menu changes, in
the dininghall of the enormous student commons, reached not by way of the
ceremonial entrance lobby and front desk but via semisecret flights of stairs
deep in the back regions, softly carpeted conduits which led ever downward to
the serving line, where impatient mess staff allowed latecomers very little
slack in following the correct sequence of doors and hallways, resulting at
best in a stray flapjack or the dregs of a coffee urn and, as a penalty for
arriving “too” late—a flexible concept around here—nothing at all.

The boys, having conscientiously
mastered the intricacies of access and scheduling, proceeded now with their
breakfastladen trays into a cafeteria full of dark brown light, wood chairs and
tables, glowingly waxed.

Miles, locating the patriotically
colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce,
sugar, and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. “Say, what
is
this stuff?”

“Goes with everything!” advised a
student at a nearby table. “Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash
it into your turnips! My dormmates comb their hair with it! There’s a
million
uses for Smegmo!”