Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon Page B

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