Starshipsofa stories vol.., p.4
StarShipSofa Stories: Volume 3, page 4
Finished, the men gather up the canvas and ropes, then wait for money, although Hare has paid them at the loading. Dr Gourlay reluctantly tips them, not generously by any means, and, feigning indignation, they depart. His wife’s voice echoes from the foyer.
He approaches the device with grave caution.
It is a lovely satinwood needlework table – or once was. Now, attached to the top, marring more than half of the veneer, sits a tall metal box with a steeply angled lid, a kind of enormous bread box. From the back of this emerges the cord on which the sinker weight ultimately dangles, but first the cord wraps around the spindle of a large wheel. The wheel hangs off the side of the table. It has letters inscribed around its rim: ZJWKERUCFH&ALUSMOP around the top half, GTNXOBIVD around the bottom. Where the spindle protrudes through the centre of the wheel, the line from the iron counterweight attaches. There is also a thin metal rod that sticks up to mark which letter is to be read. At the moment it rests upon the letter “F”.
The doctor circles the table. Around behind the wheel, the metal box is open. Inside it is some sort of lever. Gourlay leans on the table, bending slightly, and reaches to put his hand in the box and press the lever.
From the doorway, his wife says, “Don’t.”
The doctor straightens. “I was going to –” He stops, for he does not know what he intended. “Did you know of this… this contraption of his? How it works?”
“No,” she replies. “I’ve put my trust in Professor Hare as he has in me.”
Her husband brushes his hand across the table as if in defiance of her. He turns smartly on his heel, sweeps up his gray stovepipe hat from the chairback settee where his wife’s clients usually sit, and marches out of the parlour. “I shall refrain from interfering, of course, in spiritual matters,” he tells her, then leaves the house. Mrs Gourlay waits until the vibrations of the front door have ceased reverberating before she sets foot in the parlour.
-------------------------------------------
When Hare arrives some hours later, Mrs Gourlay meets him at the door in an excited state. “She’s spoken to me,” she tells him. “Come see, come see.” And she leads him by the hand into the parlour. She has drawn a dining room chair to the table, on which she settles, her skirts billowing around her. “Look,” she says. Hare takes a seat where he can read the wheel and watch the medium.
For a time she sits in seeming contemplation, her gaze unfixed. Then her eyelids flutter and close. She leans forward as her hands, within the box, begin to press upon the lever. The wheel answers her pressure, rolling clockwise in sluggish rotation. Around and around on its axle the wheel spins, stopping briefly, sometimes with difficulty, upon each letter in sequence, having to rotate around a full turn to spell the same letter twice. By then he knows; a cold apprehension suffuses him like a chemical reaction overflowing a flask. The medium doesn’t seem to be aware. Her head is down. He can’t see her eyes at all. She cannot be watching the wheel, and couldn’t see the letters on its face in any instance.
The wheel spells out the fourth letter, the name ANNA. His sister’s name. Mrs Gourlay’s head remains lowered.
The wheel continues to spin another quarter hour, until he has recorded the message: ROBERT WELCOME. At that point, Mrs Gourlay exhales sharply and draws back from the device. Her head circles, coming upright. She opens her eyes and looks at him. “It is so difficult, so draining, to use this machine. But she came, did she not?”
“Who?”
“Your sister, Professor Hare.”
“My sister?” He tries to seem unenthusiastic.
“Yes, that was her relation to you, I’m sure of it. A sister.” She glances at the wheel. “You hadn’t told me of your sister.”
Had he though? No, he’s quite certain he withheld everything. He replies, “I hadn’t thought –” He had not dared hope.
“Your device is a most cumbersome thing to use. Levers and wheels.”
Here’s something he can speak to. “Cumbersome, yes. And yet you succeed in demonstrating its merit, Mrs Gourlay. More than that, I believe you’ve made a case here for the truth of your claims and those of other mediums. This is a great stride forward, do you have any idea? The first scientific validation of your craft, Mrs Gourlay. Exhausting or not, please apply yourself again to the spiritoscope, if you would be so kind.”
“Spiritoscope.” She stares apprehensively at the thing before replying. “I must tell you, sir, that it takes all my energy to manoeuvre it.”
“Your energy?”
“Indeed, sir. ’tis after all mine that the spirits utilize. Look how quickly I was drained. How quickly she withdrew from me – one message and no more. A card is very easy for them, as you can imagine. It takes but a finger.” As she says this, she raises her index finger.
Precisely. That was the point. But now the point impedes. He wants only to hear from Anna again. He contemplates the machine awhile in silence.
Mrs Gourlay doesn’t begin, and instead pushes her chair back from the table. “Might I offer you some tea, Doctor? I’m, myself, quite thirsty just now.”
“Please,” is all he says. His gaze does not shift from the table, even after she has risen and gone away.
He reconsiders the design of his spiritoscope. He has re-engineered everything he ever constructed – he modified the oxyhydrogen blowpipe a dozen times in twenty years to make it more efficient, even though the original was already the hottest heat source in the world. Nothing that is humanly engineered cannot be improved upon.
His father, the senior Robert Hare, was a brewer. Hare’s American Porter was a superb ale, the most popular in Philadelphia at the turn of the century; yet he was forever working with the formula, experimenting with different roasts of malt the further to enhance the flavour. His son, apprenticed to him, assisted in much of the experimentation, from whence came his fascination with chemistry but also with sources of heat, with all that heat could do. The slightest increase or decrease in the temperature or duration of roasting of the malt changed the characteristics of the finished porter significantly – in many instances beyond drinking. The younger Hare’s mind raced along as it contemplated variables and cobbled a device to roast the malt faster, thus enabling his father to increase his output. The process existed; he refined it. As he will do here.
The problem served up by Mrs Gourlay is how to make working the spiritoscope easier without sacrificing the safeguards built into it. He can’t communicate in two-word dribs and drabs like this. He dwells upon it to such an extent that he barely notices her return, doesn’t see the china cup and saucer set before him, hardly recollects the tea, and only returns to his senses when she says to him, “You know, Professor Hare, I must tell you a thing I’ve sensed about you since first Miss Fox introduced us.”
He finds he’s perched on the edge of his chair. Tea steams out of his cup. “What you sense about me,” he repeats, as if the repetition will explain what she has said.
“Yes, sir.”
He regards the tea as a fortune teller might before sipping it, as if it might yield a secret, and compresses his lips as he swallows the bitterness. “What would that be, ma’am?”
“Why, that you share the spiritualist’s gift.”
Whatever he thought she might say, this isn’t it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know that I understand you. Do you mean to imply I should be able to speak to them?”
“And they to you.”
“How, then, do you explain that I have never in my life received any communication whatsoever from the spirit world? Even as I would have hoped and prayed to hear of the continuance of my sister, there was no rapping on walls, no shifting of furnishings.” He abhors the suggestion. Hands trembling, he sets aside the cup. “Indeed, it is outrageous, madam.”
“Oh, but, sir, you would not be aware. You have no training in the spiritualist’s art. Your faculties lie dormant, untapped and untried. I and my spirit guide do both sense about you such powers, restrained, awaiting release, that with training –”
“Please, Mrs Gourlay, no more!” He waves her to silence. “I have in my time been a brewer, a chemist, a professor, an economist, and an inventor in all of these rôles.” The thought slides in below his words: And a neglecter of her in all of them. “I believe I have quite enough talents for a lifetime without adding spiritualism to the list. Especially –” he hesitates, wrestling his ire under control “– especially as the city is quite well populated with such like already. Inventors seem far less procurable.” He stands, leaning upon the table for support. “And now, as the demonstration has exhausted you, Mrs Gourlay, I will be on my way. You’ve set me a fine challenge, to improve upon my invention. I’ll consider it. But, I would like you to utilize the spiritoscope as much as possible. You may find it easier to manoeuvre as time goes on. Also, as I intend to publish my findings, you will likely find yourself with a clientele desirous to witness its demonstration.”
Her smile as she sees him off is stiff – no doubt, he thinks, as a result of what he has said of her spiritualist compeers. But it’s true: Philadelphia is a haven for spiritualists. There must be one for every street in the city. Mrs Gourlay has a reputation as one of the more upright of her kind… which is to say that no one has ever caught her in a deception. That’s why he chose her to receive the first machine. It was to be Margaret Fox, whom he no longer entirely trusts. But to suggest that he ought to practice spiritualism himself is –
Is what? he asks himself.
By the time he has been coached safely home, he has the answer.
Terrifying. It is terrifying.
III. Expansionism
He has dreams after his meeting with Mrs Gourlay in which his sister visits him. In one, she divides like a cell, becoming three of herself, in wide-striped skirts and puff-sleeved blouses, her long chestnut hair crimped and coiffured into chains encircling each of her heads. The nineteen-year-old sisters knock wooden balls across the lawn of the chemistry building with croquet mallets. He has a mallet, too, but the multiplicity of sisters play their game around him, never offering him a turn, as though they don’t notice him in their midst. Annas enclose him; the wickets trip him up and like bear traps catch his ankles. The mallets clack familiarly as they strike. The croquet balls roll up against the posts and stop; there are three posts, and he thinks that this is wrong, there should be only two. The sisters pause over the balls, leaning on their mallets as they stare straight through him to one another in silent communion. If he could only move, if he could reach one and warn her, protect her. The wickets are driven through his legs, and when he tries for her, he totters and falls.
The instant he hits the ground he opens his eyes. His heartbeat hammers, his nightshirt is stuck, twisted, to him. He wipes spittle from his cheek, and sits up in the darkness.
She was so close that he heard her skirt swishing as she strode about. What if she is always as near as that? He has no way to know.
For days and weeks afterward, intense dreams interrupt his cerebration and render him incapable of invention. He broods upon her, turns her over like a coin, each turn a painful remembrance.
She grew up a tomboy, fearlessly investigating what she was not supposed to see, what girls were supposed to stay out of. She made him teach her conkers, a game that only boys ever played. They picked out chestnuts together, he advising her on the quality of each one she brought to him. He took the acceptable chestnuts, soaked them in vinegar awhile, and then nailed a hole through the light caps of six of them. After tying a bootlace through each, he left them dangling from a clothes peg beside her bed. Then he waited. The thrill of her squeal as she discovered what he had made for her still sped his heart. She came out of her room, the conkers clacking together, and she kissed him. With that kiss she transformed from the tomboy sister into Anna. Anna, the perfect jewel. Who married late and died young; who survived the yellow fever plague of 1793, only to surrender to consumption before she had even borne a child of her own. When he thinks of her, he thinks of those clacking chestnuts swinging like simple pendulums on their laces – a moment suspended in time to which all other memories lead… because he, from the moment he began to help their father at the brewery, became so bound up in his researches that he barely noticed her, eventually losing sight of her. He thought she would always be there. As if, had he paid her more attention, she would have lived. His guilt coils into a wall of thorns around the spiritoscope.
He turns to other, less cumbered fronts.
There are some improvements he has wanted to make to his deflagrator, and another paper to deliver upon the caloric properties of weather systems: For some years he has studied the possibility that warm water from the Gulf of Mexico charges the air above it with such heat that, as the heat meets the cooler inland air above the mountains, it produces violent weather such as tornadoes, which are themselves – so he has determined – comprised of electrical currents of air. That study returns him to his calorimotor, and its production of heat in tandem with electricity. The circle of phenomena with which he’s familiar ever expands, ever merges.
Through the sciences he finds he can approach the subject of spirits again. Might the realm of the spirits incorporate such things as electricity and heat? Are spirits cold? Mediums often describe a chill that settles upon them, and he once gripped a medium’s hand that had gone ice cold in an instant, but that is hardly the sort of proof he can use. Are they electrical in nature, the souls that guide Mrs Gourlay’s hands? It seems fitting that they should be – they would add another layer to what he already knows of electricity. Why shouldn’t it be the unifying principle? All the world and all the energies, driven by electrical forces.
Hare recalls when he was twenty-two and fused strontianite for the first time with his oxyhydrogen blowpipe. Silliman assisted. Woodhouse and Seybert were practically beside themselves with excitement and wasted no time pushing through his election to the Chemical Society. He remembers thinking that his future would be like this. He would continue to invent, continue to win praise. Nothing could stop him. He had no inkling then of spiritualism – Seybert’s fascination was not expressed until so much later – or that he would run up against such ignorance and prejudice within his own society. They forget that it’s he who first fused heavy spar and threw platinum, gold and silver into a state of ebullition. He whose process, under names such as Drummond light and Calcium light, illuminate lighthouses the world over. He whose Compendium of Chemical Instruction is the standard text to which all chemistry students are referred. He who possesses the Rumford Medal for his discoveries. He who is a life member of the Academy of Natural Sciences. It isn’t arrogance. He has accomplished all these things. And he’s not done yet.
With renewed purpose, he completely redesigns his spiritoscope.
Invited to speak in New York, he loads the new version onto a wagon and has it carted there.
He’s allowed to choose the nature of his talk in New York – they know how broad is his range; nevertheless, the audience of professional and amateur scientists gathers in anticipation of a discourse related to chemistry.
Instead, Hare pounces upon the infinite chimeras of scripture, blasting the Bible, and then describes the possibilities of spirit communication. Finally, like a stage magician who has saved his best trick for last, he offers a brief demonstration of the new, improved spiritoscope. He wants them to appreciate the mechanics of the machine.
It’s a rectangular dining table now. The same revolving wheel hangs off one of the long sides of the table, facing the audience. He, as acting operator, sits across from them. On his left the two table legs end in small truckles, whereas on the right they’re fitted with larger wheels connected by an axle. Rolling the table back and forth turns the axle, which drives the lettered wheel. His maxim remaining “no hands upon the table,” he has placed a small wooden tray on casters of its own. The operator moves the table by rolling the tray back and forth upon it. Cumbersome once again, but less so, he feels, than the earlier version Mrs Gourlay is mastering; and if it works it removes the medium even further from direct contact with the wheel.
But when Hare attempts to demonstrate it for the audience, he can’t move the table at all. Discouraged, he finally sets the tray aside and pushes the table back and forth manually. The wheel turns, but spins without any inclination to stop. He can spell out nothing. So much, he thinks, for his latent powers. So much for the proof of his claims. Even though the presence of a medium would have given his audience an easy excuse to dismiss him, he sees he has been stupid not to bring one. Something remarkable might have happened. He can see that the people don’t care what he’s doing. They can’t wait to get out of the hall.
His reputation saves him from direct humiliation. So exhausted is he from trying to wrestle the table back and forth that he disregards the disappointment in the voice of the professor who arranged the talk – “that was a most singular performance, Doctor Hare” – and falls asleep in the carriage that takes him to his hotel.
Within the month of his appearance a letter arrives from a man named Isaac T. Pease of Thompsonville, Connecticut. Pease has learned of the spiritoscope. Perhaps he attended the New York lecture or knew someone who did. In ingratiating language he explains that he has experimented with a similar device at the urgings of local spiritualists and redesigned it on a much smaller scale than Hare’s grand spiritoscope. He includes schematics of his devices, which he has dubbed “Pease’s Dials.” Looking them over, Hare doesn’t know whether to be pleased or furious, remembering how the British attempted to steal his credit for the blowpipe.
He admits that Pease has made one or two improvements: rather than the wheel, he has the index needle spin, which seems much easier to accomplish once considered; the activator operates by a spring rather than a system of cables and weights and axles, and directly affects the index. The smaller disks, which can be adjusted for the medium to see, incorporate phrases as well as letters. The needle can point to “Think So” or “Must Go”, “Yes” or “Doubtful”, “I’ll Spell it Over”, “Done”, “I’ll Come Again”, and even “Good-bye”– all spread around the wheel, written as if along the spokes. Ultimately, Hare is too impressed at the ingenuity to be angry. He admires invention too much to discount it even when accompanied by apparent hubris: “Pease’s Dials” indeed. He’ll catalogue them in his book, but otherwise, with their simple mechanisms, they return too much control to the medium for his necessary proof.
