Quicker Than the Eye Part 21

"When last I was in church, yes. And you are grounded, that is plain to see. Why not Velocipede, then? Having to do with speed and the applied toe and ankle?"

"Close-on, Dr. Goff, close-on. Why do you stare so fixedly?"

"It comes to mind that great times call forth great inventions. The inventor is child to his year and day. This is not a great time for such as you and yours. Did this century call you forth as its mightiest of all men of genius?"

Old Wetherby let his machine coast for a moment and smiled.

"No, I and my Tilda here, I call her Tilda, will instead be the gravity that calls forth the century. We will influence the year, the decade, and the millennium!"

"It is hard for me to believe," said the medical gentleman, "that you will build a road from your sill to the city on which to glide your not-inconsiderable dream."

"Nay, Doctor, the reverse is true. The city, and the world when they know me1 and this will run a concourse here to deliver me to fame."

"Your head knocks heaven, Mr. Wetherby," said the doctor dryly. "But your roots ache for sustenance, water, minerals, air. You stroke and pump wildly, but go nowhere. Once off that rack, will you not fall on your side, destroyed?"

"Nay, nay." Wetherby, in gusts, pumped again. "For I have discovered some physics, as yet nameless. The faster you propel this bodily device, the less tendency to fall left or right but continue straight, if no obstacles prevent!"

"With only two wheels beneath? Prove it. Release your invention, set it free in flight, let us see you sustain your forward motion without breaking your b.u.m!"

"Oh, G.o.d, shut up!" cried Wetherby as his kindling legs thrashed the pedals, racketing round as he leaned into a phantom wind, eyes clenched against an invisible storm, and churned the wheels to a frenzy. "Don't you hear? Listen. That whine, that cry, that whisper. The ghost in the machine, which promises things most new, unseen, unrealized, only a dream now but tomorrow - Great G.o.d, don't you see?! If I were on a real path this would be swifter than gazelles, a panic of deer! All pedestrians vanquished. All coach-and-horses in dust! Not twenty miles a day, but thirty, forty miles in a single glorious hour! Stand off, Time. Beware, meadow-beasts! Here glides, in full plummet, Wetherby with nothing to stop him!"

"Aye," said the Searcher dryly, "you pump up a storm on that stand. But, set free, how would you balance on only two wheels!?"

"Like this!" cried Wetherby, and with a thrust of his hands and an uplift of frame, seized the Traveler, the Motion Machine, the Pathfinder, up free of its stand and in an instant plunged through the room and out the door, with Dr. Goff, in full pursuit, yelling: "Stop! You'll kill yourself!"

"No, exhilarate my heart, oxygenate my blood!" cried Wetherby, and there he was in a chicken-yard he had trampled flat, paths some sixty feet around on which he now flailed his metal machine with scythings of ankle, toe, heel, and leg, sucking air, gusting out great laughs. "See? I do not fall! Two legs, two wheels, and: presto!"

"My G.o.d!" cried Dr. Goff, eyes thrust forth like hardboiled eggs. "G.o.d's truth! How so?!"

"I fly forward faster than I fall downward, an unguessed law of physics. But lo! I almost fly. Fly! Good-bye horses, doomed and dead!"

And with "dead" he was overcome with such a delirium of pant and pump, perspiration raining off him in showers, that with a great cry, he wobbled and was flung, a meteor of flesh, over and down on a coop where the chickens, in dumb feather-duster alarms, exploded in shrieks as Wetherby slid in one direction while his vehicle, self-motivated, wheels a-spin, mounted Dr. Goff, who jumped aside, fearful of being spliced.

Wetherby, helped to his feet, protested his trajectory: "Ignore that! Do you at last understand?"

"Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!"

"No, a future brave with motion, 'tween my legs. You have come a long way, Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?"

"Well," said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. "Ah," he said.

"Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!"

"But.. ." said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back, alarmed. "What have I done!" he cried.

Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. "Your presence is known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic."

And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.

"There they are!" someone cried.

"Have you come to take him away?" someone else shouted.

"Yah" echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.

Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, "Yes. I will take him away!" And turned back to the old man.

"Take me where, Doctor?" whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.

"One moment!" cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs. "Let me think."

Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then ma.s.saging his brow for rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.

"I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers, to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them."

"What, what, Doctor?"

"Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .

"To what purpose?"

"Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you spoke of at some future time!"

"The road, the path, the surface?"

"The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmiG.o.d, for all your needs!"

"Needs?"

"Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!"

"Oh, dear G.o.d," murmured Wetherby, "why didn't I think?"

"If you had you would've been too shy to ask!"

"The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!"

And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.

"Don't cry," said Dr. Goff.

"I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?"

"My good man, here's my hand!"

They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.

"The excitement will kill me," said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.

"No better way to die! Tomorrow night?"

"But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?"

"If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off."

"Be careful downhill."

"Careful."

Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said: "Did you see the lunatic?"

"I did."

"Will you take him to a madhouse?"

"Yes. Asylum." Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. "Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!"

"Good!" said all as he pa.s.sed.

"Grand," said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.

And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?

Dr. Goff snorted.

"Think on it," he said, half aloud, "no more horses, no more manure! Think!"

And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.

AT THE END OF THE NINTH YEAR.

"Well," said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, "here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year."

Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journa4 saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. "What?"

"I said," said Sheila, "the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore."

Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said: "Not married?"

"No, that was another time, another body, another me." She b.u.t.tered more toast and munched on it philosophically.

"Hold on!" He took a stiff jolt of coffee. "Explain."

"Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, b.u.m, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-"

"Oh, get to it," he grumbled. "The point, wife, the point!"

"The point, dear Tom," she replied, finis.h.i.+ng her toast, "is that with this breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is not the woman you married-"

"I have often said that!"

"Be serious."

"Are you?" he said.

"Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Sat.u.r.day nine years ago this very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the Journal. The other, now that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!"

She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.

"Wait!" He gave himself another jolt of coffee. "Where are you going?"

Hallway to the door, she said, "Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!"

"Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!"

She hesitated as he a.s.sumed his lion-tamer's voice. "Dammit. You owe me an explanation. Sit!"

She turned slowly. "For only as long as it takes to draw a picture."

"Draw it, then. Sit!"

She came to stare at her plate. "I seem to have eaten everything in sight."

He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it in front of her.

"There.! Speak with your mouth full."

She forked in the eggs. "You do see what I'm driving at, don't you, Tomasino?"

"d.a.m.nation! I thought you were happy!"

"Yes, but not incredibly happy."

"That's for maniacs on their honeymoons!"

"Yes, wasn't it?" she remembered.

"That was then, this is now. Well?"

"I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin p.r.i.c.kle, my pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone mad in the mirror."

"All right, all right!" He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the slops from the saucer. "Sum it up!"

"Every hour of every night and then all day, I could feel it as if I were out in a storm being struck by hot August rain that washed away the old to find a brand-new me. Every drop of serum, every red and white corpuscle, every hot flash of nerve ending, rewired and restrung, new marrow, new hair for combing, new fingerprints even. Don't look at me that way. Perhaps no new fingerprints. But all the rest. See? Am I not a fresh-sculpted, fresh-painted work of G.o.d's creation?"