Against the Day (12 page)

“If there was a reliable lightmeter,”
said Roswell, “it might make a difference to know about how the light was being
transmitted, is all.”

It was a sort of small Ætherist
community, maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church. They hung out
in the saloons of Whiskey Hill and were tolerated by though not especially
beloved of the regulars, who were mill hands with little patience for extreme
forms of belief, unless it was Anarchism, of course.

Merle by then was also spending a lot
of time, not to mention money, on a couple of sisters named Madge and Mia
Culpepper, who worked at the Hamilton Street establishment of Blinky Morgan’s
lady friend Nelly Lowry. He had actually glimpsed the flashily turnedout Blinky
a couple of times coming and going, as had the police, most likely, because the
place wasunder close surveillance, but attentiveness to duty being negotiable
in those days, there were intervals of invisibility for anybody who could
afford it.

Merle found himself more often than
not the monkey in the middle, trying to calm the dangerously fervid, find work
for those who ran short, put people up in the wagon when landlords got mean,
trying meantime to stay reasonably unentangled with moneymaking schemes which,
frankly, though plentiful as fungi after the rain, verged all too often on the
unworkably eccentric, “. . . amount of light in the universe being finite, and
diminishing fast enough so that damming, diversion, rationing, not to mention
pollution, become possibilities, like water rights, only different, and there’s
sure to be an international scramble to
corner light.
We have the
knowhow, the world’s most inventive engineers and mechanics, all’s we need is
to get far enough out to catch the prevailing flows
. . . .
”

“Airships?”

“Better. Psychical antigravity.”
Ætherists possessed to this degree usually ended up for a stay in Newburgh,
from which it became necessary to break them out, Merle after a while becoming
known as the fellow to see, once he’d developed a relationship with elements of
the staff out there who did not mind an escapee now and then, the workload
being what it was.

“Escaped!”

“Ed, they’ll hear you, try not to
holler quite so—”

“Free! Free as a bird!”

“Shh! Will you just—” By which
point uniformed guards were approaching at a clip you could call moderate.

Somehow Merle
got
the idea in his head
that the MichelsonMorley experiment and the Blinky Morgan manhunt were
connected. That if Blinky were ever caught, there would also turn out to be no
Æther. Not that one would cause the other, exactly, but that both would be
different utterances of the same principle.

“This is primitive hoodoo,” objected
Roswell Bounce. “You might as well head for the deep jungle and talk this over
with the trees, for in this town that kind of thinking won’t go, nosir not at
all.”

“But you’ve seen his picture in the
papers.” Each of Blinky’s eyes, according to press accounts, saw the world
differently, the left one having undergone an obscure trauma, either from a
premature detonation during a box job or from a naval howitzer while fighting
in the Rebellion. Blinky gave out a number of stories.

“
A walking interferometer, as you’d
say,” suggested Ed Addle.

“A doublerefractor, for that matter.”

“There you go. An asymmetry with
respect to light anyway.” One day Merle had seen the astonishing truth of the
case, though admittedly he had been most of the night working his way from one
Whiskey Hill saloon to the next, drinking. Why hadn’t he seen it before? It was
so obvious! Professor Edward Morley and Charles “Blinky” Morgan were one and
the same person! Separated by a couplethree letters in name as if
alphabetically doublerefracted, you could say
.
. . .

“And they’ve both of ’em got long
shaggy hair and big red mustaches—”

“No, no couldn’t be, Blinky’s a natty
dresser, whereas Professor Morley’s attire is said to exhibit a certain
tendency to the informal. . .

“Yes yes but suppose, suppose when
they split that light beam, that one half of it is Michelson’s and the other is
his partner Morley’s, which turns out to be the half that comes back with the
phases perfectly matched up—but under slightly different conditions,
alternative axioms, there could be another pair that
don’t
match
up, see, in fact
millions of pairs, that sometimes you could blame it on the Æther, sure, but
other cases maybe the light
goes someplace else,
takes a detour and
that’s why it shows up late and out of phase, because it went where Blinky was
when he was invisible, and—”

In late June, just about when
Michelson and Morley were making their final observations, Blinky Morgan was
apprehended in Alpena, Michigan, a resort town built on the site of an Indian
graveyard. “Because Blinky
emerged from invisibility
,
and the moment he reentered
the world that contained Michelson and Morley, the experiment was fated to have
a negative outcome, the Æther was doomed
. .
. .
”

For word was circulating that
Michelson and Morley had found no difference in the speed of light coming,
going, or sideways relative to the Earth speeding along in its orbit. If the
Æther was there, in motion or at rest, it was having no effect on the light it
carried. The mood in the saloons frequented by Ætherists grew sombre. As if it
possessed the substance of an invention or a battle, the negative result took
its place in the history of Cleveland, as another of the revealed mysteries of
light.

“It’s like these cults who believe
the world will end on such and such a day,” Roswell opined, “they get rid of
all their earthly possessions and head off in a group for some mountaintop and
wait, and then the end of the world doesn’t happen. The world keeps going on.
What a disappointment! Everybody has to troop back down the mountain with their
spiritual tails dragging, except for one or two incurably grinning idiots who
see it as a chance to start a new life, fresh, without encumbrances, to be
reborn, in fact.

“
So with this MichelsonMorley result.
We’ve all had a lot of faith invested. Now it looks like the Æther, whether
it’s moving or standing still, just doesn’t exist. What do we do now?”

“Taking a contrary view,” said O. D.
Chandrasekhar, who was here in Cleveland all the way from Bombay, India, and
didn’t say much, but when he did, nobody could figure out what he meant, “this
null result may as easily be read as
proving the existence
of the Æther.
Nothing is there, yet light travels. The absence of a lightbearing medium is
the emptiness of what my religion calls
akasa,
which is the ground or
basis of all that we imagine ‘exists.
’ ”

Everybody took a moment of silence,
as if considering this. “What I worry about,” said Roswell at last, “is that
the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything
we want to explain without it, then why keep it?”

“Unless,” Ed pointed out, ~it
is
God.”
Somehow this escalated into a general freeforall, in which furniture and
glassware didn’t come out much better than the human participants, a rare sort
of behavior among Ætherists, but everybody had been feeling at loose ends
lately.

For Merle it had been a sort of
directionless drift, what Mia Culpepper, who was devoted to astrology, called
“void of course,” which went on till midctober, when there was a fire at the
Newburgh asylum, where Merle happened to be that night, taking advantage of an
inmates’ dance to break out Roswell Bounce, who had offended a policeman by
snapping his picture just as he emerged from the wrong sporting establishment.
The asylum was in chaos. Lunatics and keepers alike ran around screaming. This
was the second major fire at Newburgh in fifteen years, and the horror of the first
had not yet faded. Crowds of onlookers from the neighborhood had gathered to
see the show. Sparks and coals blew and fell. Gusts of hot red light swept the
grounds, reflecting brightly off desperately rolling eyeballs, as shadows
darted everywhere, changing shape and size. Merle and Roswell went down to the
creek and joined a bucket brigade, hoses were run from hydrants, and later some
engines showed up from Cleveland. By the time the fire was under control, the
exhaustion and confusion were too advanced for anyone to notice as Merle and
Roswell slipped away.

Back in Whiskey Hill, they made a
beeline for Morty Vicker’s Saloon. “What a hell of a night,” Roswell said. “I
could’ve been in the chapel at that dance where the fire broke out. Guess you
saved my fundament, there.”

“Buy the next round, we’ll call it
even.”

“Better than that, my apprentice ran
off when the coppers showed up. How’d you like to learn the deepest secrets of
the photographer’s trade?”

Since Roswell had only been in the
asylum for a day or two, they found his equipment untouched by local scavengers
or the landlord. Merle was no hoosier on the subject, he had seen cameras
before, even had himself snapped once or twice. It had always seemed like an
idiot’s game, line them up, squeeze the bulb, take the money. Like anybody, of
course, he had wondered what happened during the mysteriously guarded
transition from plate to print, but never enough to step across any darkroom’s
forbidden doorsill to have a look. As a mechanic he respected any straightforward
chain of cause and effect you could see or handle, but chemical reactions like
this went on down in some region too far out of anyone’s control, they were
something you had to stand around and just let happen, which was about as
interesting as waiting for corn to grow.

“O.K., here we go.” Roswell lit a
ruby darkroom lamp. Took a dry plate from a earning case. “Hold this a minute.”
Started measuring out liquids from two or three different bottles, keeping up a
sort of patter meantime, hardly any of which Merle could
follow—“Pyrogallic, mumblemumble citric, potassium bromide
. . .
ammonia . . .” Stirring it all in a
beaker, he put the plate in a developing tray and poured the mixture over it.
“Now watch.” And Merle saw the image appear. Come from nothing. Come in out of
the pale Invisible, down into this otherwise explainable world, clearer than
real. It happened to be the Newburgh asylum, with two or three inmates standing
in the foreground, staring. Merle peered uneasily. Something was wrong with the
faces. The whites of their eyes were dark gray. The sky behind the tall, jagged
roofline was nearly black, windows that should have been lightcolored were
dark. As if light had been witched somehow into its opposite
. . . .

“What is it? They look like spirits,
or haunts or something.”

“It’s a negative. When we print this,
it’ll all flip back to normal. First we have to fix it. Reach me that bottle of
hypo there.”

So the night went on, spent mostly
washing things in different solutions and then waiting for them to dry. By the
time the sun rose over Shaker Heights, Roswell Bounce had introduced Merle to
photography. “Photography, this is Merle, Merle—”

“All right, all right. And you swear
this is made of silver?”

“Just like what’s in your pocket.”

“Not lately.”

Damn.

“Do one more.” He knew he sounded
like some rube at the fair but couldn’t help it. Even if it was only some
conjuring trick, purely secular, he wanted to learn it.

“Just what people have been noticing
ever since the first sunburn,” Roswell shrugged, “which is that light makes
things change color. The professors call it ‘photochemistry.
’ ”

Merle’s allnight illumination
prolonged itself into an inescapable glow that began to keep him awake. He
parked the wagon out on a vacant patch in Murray Hill and set in to study the
mysteries of lightportraiture as then understood, gathering information
dipfingered and without shame from everyplace he could, from Roswell Bounce to
the Cleveland Library, which as Merle soon discovered had taken the revolutionary
step some ten years before of opening up its stacks, so anybody could walk in
and spend all day reading what they needed to know for whatever it was they had
in mind to do.

After going through all the possible
silver compounds, Merle moved on to salts of gold, platinum, copper, nickel,
uranium, molybdenum, and antimony, abandoning metallic compounds after a while
for resins, squashed bugs, coaltar dyes, cigar smoke, wildflower extracts,
urine from various critters including himself, reinvesting what little money
came in from portrait work into lenses, filters, glass plates, enlarging
machines, so that soon the wagon was just a damn rolling photography lab. He
grabbed images of anything that came in range, never mind focus—streets
aswarm with townsfolk, cloudlit hillsides where nothing seemed to move, grazing
cows who ignored him, insane squirrels who made a point of coming right up to
the lens and making faces, picnickers out at Rocky River, abandoned
wheelbarrows, patent bobwire stretchers left to rust under the sky, clocks on
walls, stoves in kitchens, streetlamps lit and unlit, policemen running at him
waving daysticks, girls arm in arm windowshopping on their lunch hours or
strolling after work in the lakeside breezes, electric runabouts, flush toilets,
1,200volt trolley dynamos and other wonders of the modern age, the new Viaduct
under construction, weekend funseekers up by the reservoir, and next thing he
knew, winter and spring had passed and he was out on his own, trying to make a
living as a circuitriding photographer, sometimes taking the wagon, sometimes
just traveling light, a hand camera and a dozen plates, keeping to the
interurbans, Sandusky to Ashtabula, Brooklyn out to Cuyahoga Falls and Akron,
playing a lot of railroad euchre as a result, and posting a modest profit each
trip out.