Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon Page A

is
condensation, and storms in which not rain but precipitated nothingness sweeps
a given area, cyclones and anticyclones of it, abroad not only locally at the
planetary surface but outside it, through cosmic space as well.”
    “There’s a U.S. Bureau in charge of
reporting all this?” wondered Roswell Bounce, who was gainfully selfemployed as
a photographer, “a network of stations? Ships and balloons?”
    Ed became guarded. “Is this just your
usual wetblanket talk, or do you really want to know?”
    “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