So I said, Like the geologist never met Gene.
Jack reached at me and instead put a hand on my shoulder: You know who your geologist was under the spell of, Cartwright, you must surely have found that out, for God’s sake.
I reached out for what I was supposed to possess, and turning away into the long carpeted hotel hall said without any question in my voice, But the spell is over, eh Jack?
The strong hand like a steel automaton pinched my bicep and I felt it in my heel, and I smelled the greater alcohol on Jack’s breath as he said, Oh the time’s they are a changin’, man, and Christ it’s about time.
So turning upon our separate axes Jack and I had met for a moment, and I had to get away in part to think how he’d known Wheeler and I went to the same college, and I said over my shoulder that I was still suffering from jet lag, or maybe the bang on the head, and I wished I’d had one of those construction worker’s hard-hats.
When I let myself into Sub’s apartment the jack-o’-lantern was burning again, and Gilda was reading. Sub had phoned to ask me to get eggs, milk, and bread, because they’d all be back in the apartment tomorrow; and did I want to get arrested? — a friend had mentioned a peaceful occupation scheduled to take place tomorrow at a base in New Jersey, a bus was leaving Manhattan at 10 A.M. Someone had phoned and hung up — the usual, this time of night. Well, on the way back from Claire’s we had already bought all that Sub would want and Gilda had told him exactly what we’d bought, and it sounded as if they’d had quite a pleasant conversation.
Gilda put her novel down.
Later a loop rang all around me and I was not really dreaming of Monty in color on top of an affectionate pastel Claire; I woke to black and white shades of someone else’s skin and hair which moved, and then Gilda was speaking far away and said Graf? but I was trying to deliver a speech on my American trip in the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution Reading Room while at the same time trying to pull some tight-folded old collector’s-item newspapers out from under the arms of Incremona for I wished to have in my conclusion some headline violence I knew was there; and to a group of old parties on folding chairs, one of whom had on the greasy old mac that had inspired Lorna to make me go buy a new trenchcoat, I was saying, We are in the grip of forces — but also of their absence, and I tried to make Paul Flint appear, but an empty London cab rolled up with a motor like an outboard and then Gilda handed me a smooth warm phone and I was not in bed but hiring a helicopter, at least through Monty the middleman, and as an afterthought asking how well and from whom he had known my old college acquaintance Wheeler, and Monty could only say I’m so tired, so very tired, but he roused himself to answer (what I hadn’t asked) that Claire had known nothing and that he had known only that Wheeler had wanted out, whatever he was in, and had been following me at the time of the stabbing and had dropped out of sight.
I had gone too far with Monty.
The more I make the revolution, the more I want to make love.
Later Gilda and I had breakfast.
She borrowed the novel.
So what was with the suitcase, she said, where was I staying tonight?
I said I didn’t know.
The Sunday streets were solemn and poignant. You could think of slave-catcher Clare — for that was his name — arriving quietly on horseback, hiring a carriage and making arrangements, then kidnapping James Hamlet to Baltimore, there to become (according to my son’s research) the property of one Mary Brown. You could hear lone roaming cabs rattle the manhole covers. It was a pleasure to see a long way. I dropped Gilda at her subway and she made me wait and bought two copies of the only paper sold at the newsstand and shoved one through the window onto my case which I had put on my knees when she got out.
And fifteen minutes later I left that paper wrapped in its funnies in the cab untouched.
I went toward the warehouse from the east through the alley that ended in the lot. There were four cars parked along the old street, one a VW microbus — no Opel.
I looked straight at the left-hand warehouse as I went. There came a glint above and to the right, in a window of the right-hand warehouse where I’d been last night.
A change occurred as I set foot on the west sidewalk. It seemed to be in the late-model Ford parked down the block which looked like last night’s car. My hand was on the knob of the left-side door of the double-doors of the warehouse that I’d had only described to me by J. K. Flint, and then my case twitched as if someone had kicked it, and as if by coincidence a dry back-fire like a shot acted through my shoulder and arm to yank the door open and I was inside, and far above me John-of-the-loft called to the voices of children, and there was a second adult voice, and it was Aut’s.
I silently climbed the first flight, and John was saying into an acoustic slot I shared, OK when I say Action, really bend it, OK? then lay it on the table and talk into Mr. Aut’s mike, and then when he nods, light your match and talk into the mike again.
Experiments were being filmed. This one was low-density Nitinol, a spin-off alloy from NASA advertised now to hobbyists as “Metal with a Memory.” No one had reopened the front door below me. At the head of the stairs I saw the vast second floor, and crouched. There were stacks of cartons, aisles of shelves, detachments of great paperboard cylinders.
Somewhere below me the ground-floor door was opening and I slipped down between two four-by-four boxes made of some tough gray composition material. I listened to more instruction and to a light, low child’s voice.
Steps were coming up. Did Brunel apply engineering principles to delicate situations at home? The Clifton bridge was over-designed. There was a new shuffle of steps above me and I thought the filming must be not there but on the fourth floor. The steps overhead moved across from south to north, and then I knew the other person climbing from the ground floor had arrived and was with me here on the second floor — but hidden where I was I saw only across to the north wall.
I was unarmed.
I wasn’t thinking.
OK, sweetheart, called John, have your scissors handy so you can cut the flow after you show what it can do, right?
Hello? called John, and there was silence except for a child.
Then there was more talk and Action! and a girl’s voice was clearly though with indefinite loudness (but with my help since I knew the product) telling how what she put in the glass of water was an antigravity additive that had such a long molecular structure it reduced friction and the water would now…flow…uphill!