Gob went out looking for Professor Morse, operating on the very reasonable assumption that laying eyes upon that great man might inspire him to success. Gob would stroll down Broadway, keeping a sharp eye out for a man of some eighty years with a definite look of genius about him. Gob had his engraved likeness from an illustrated weekly, and he would peek at it every now and then as he walked along. He never saw Professor Morse on Broadway, though it was widely known that the man took a daily walk there. So Gob lurked outside Morse’s house on Twenty-second Street near Fifth Avenue, and finally saw him come out one rainy afternoon in March of 1866. He was not remarkable-looking, after all. Gob ran across the street and caught him before he stepped up into a cab. “Professor!” he said. “Professor, a word with you, please?”
Professor Morse turned to Gob and peered at him through rain-spattered spectacles. “Yes, sir?” he said. He looked closer and said, “Can I help you?”
Could he? It seemed to Gob that if he could formulate the proper question, then Mr. Morse could indeed help him. But Gob did not know what question to ask. He stood there silently in the rain, blinking at the eminent man. Professor Morse smiled at him and pressed a dime into his hand. “Good day, young fellow!” he said cheerily, and drove off. Gob brought the dime home and affixed it to the telegraph.
As the dime was the first of many accretions, Gob never figured his quest for Professor Morse to have been fruitless. An urge made him put the coin on the telegraph, but once it was there he had a notion of the telegraph as the heart of his machine, and after that notion dawned, there dawned another, as naturally and simply as one day following another — something poorly remembered from his dreams, a conviction that the machine would have a heart, that it would take its shape around a center. The telegraph would be the heart of the machine. The Urfeist manifested a childish excitement when Gob told him of his revelation. Together they became incorrigible affixers. Glass pipes, miniature armillary spheres, copper and silver wire — the telegraph grew until it was a globe of stuff.
The Urfeist insisted that Gob would find his inspiration mostly in dreams. Gob got a beating for merely suggesting that they take a trip to the Smithsonian Institution to consult with Professor Henry. Mornings, the Urfeist hovered around Gob’s bed, watching him sleep and waiting for him to wake. It was no way to start a day, waking to the unsavory visage of the Urfeist. “Did you dream?” he would ask. “Did you see?” If Gob shook his head, then the Urfeist would make him sip from a big blue bottle of paregoric, and say, “Continue sleeping. Continue dreaming.” He kept a pencil and notebook by Gob’s bed, so if Gob woke when he wasn’t there Gob could make notes himself on what he saw in his dreams. And he thought that he did see things in his dreams. Every night, he was sure, he saw the whole, fabulous machine. It breathed and worked. But he forgot, when he woke, what it looked like, and how it functioned.
Buttons, bones, string and wire, marbles and pennies and glass straws — Gob made his machine out of anything he could find in the house, and the Urfeist had basements full of every possible thing. “I am a collector,” he said sometimes, as if this made him distinguished, and it was true that the Urfeist collected treasures, little figures of wrought gold, paintings rolled up and stuck under beds, sculptures locked away like prisoners in the basement. But mostly the Urfeist collected trash. He had a room stuffed with broken furniture, a room where broken glass was scattered a half foot deep over the floor, and set in the ceiling where it glittered like stars. There was a room full of what Gob was sure must be a disassembled steam engine, and a room next to that one full of stacked rails.
Gob went picking and choosing among the rooms, waiting for things to seem necessary to his work. It would happen — one moment a glass ball was only a glass ball, but the next it would be the eye of his machine, and he would rush it to his workshop and install it. Every so often, the Urfeist would come and inspect his machine and insult it, saying it was loose and ill-planned, the child of an undisciplined and undiscerning mind. He would lift his hand as if to smash it, but then say he couldn’t be bothered even with its destruction. “What is it?” he’d ask. “Is it a glass sheep? Is it a pet to guard you from loneliness?”
It was true that it looked like a sheep now. It had a barrel-shaped body and something like a head that hung down between its legs, as if it were grazing off the floor. But where a sheep might have a heart, this thing had the stock ticker, grown with accretions to twice its original size. The machine was electrical and spiritual, with an umbilicus that left its belly to split and run to twenty batteries, and feet that stood in silver cups of a mystical fluid which Gob had mixed according to a recipe in his McGuffey’s Necromancer. When he activated it, the ticker vomited up wriggling streams of blank paper: they exited the machine like a growing tail. It was a failure because it did not carry a message from his brother, and this was what he sought to amend. The answer, he was sure, was to keep adding things.
For all that the Urfeist ridiculed the thing, Gob knew he secretly admired it, because he’d looked through the keyhole into his workroom and seen his teacher gazing at it or running his long nails over all its smooth parts. Visiting with it took up more and more of the Urfeist’s time, and he began to build on it also. The two of them worked on it in turns, Gob too afraid to say how he resented and admired his master’s contributions, the Urfeist too proud to acknowledge how he was now collaborating with his student. But one night, as Gob served up his master’s rat pudding, the Urfeist made an observation. “It lacks the crucial element of desire. How can it bring him back, if it cannot want him?” After that they began to work together, and always on that problem — how to make the unfeeling thing feel?
The answer, they decided, was to put a feeling thing in it. “We shall have to bind you up,” the Urfeist informed Gob, sounding almost sad. With wire thin as thread he wrapped Gob under the thing, and ran a thicker wire from Gob’s heart to the mouth of the sheep. “Of course there has to be a little pain,” the Urfeist said, pushing the sharp wire through the skin of Gob’s chest. He sank it no more than a half inch, but Gob was sure he felt it pierce his heart. “You are not a kosmos,” the Urfeist told him, “yet perhaps you will do. Perhaps you are sufficient for a short message.” He opened the current in the batteries, mixed up the mystic fluid with a glass wand, blew a harmonica in the four corners of the room. The telegraph did what it always did, danced and hummed and chittered. “You must sink down,” the Urfeist said, pinching the wire delicately between his thumb and finger and twisting it round so it spiraled deeper into his student. “Think of your brother,” the Urfeist said, but Gob didn’t need to be told. It was easy for him to sink down to a place where there was nothing but absence of Tomo, and need of Tomo, and love of Tomo.
“Yes,” the Urfeist said. “Yes! Sink down! There is a message!” Gob did not hear the noise of the stock indicator, but he felt it as a ticking in his bones. He felt his vitality go out of him like a single breath. If he hadn’t been bound up with wire he would have fallen. He hung his head and moaned because he hurt all over. The Urfeist was moaning too, but in pleasure. The spiritual telegraph had relayed a message. “What does it say?” Gob asked weakly, after the Urfeist tore off the message and looked at it.