“All right,” Schelling purred. “Here are the rules. You are not to rummage about. Ever. I will select the books or find ones of interest for you. Do your parents or family know you came here? Does anyone know?”
“No,” Lloyd answered.
“Then let’s keep it that way. Trouble is easy to find these days, and I have no need of it. If I find that you have told anyone about your visits here, your privileges will be terminated. Always come in by the back door, which I will show you now, and you must always leave whenever I tell you to. And I do not want to hear anything about your life and problems-your family or the lack thereof. I will not tolerate either disrespect or private confidences. Understood?”
“Y-yes,” Lloyd answered.
“You may come tomorrow at either ten or one but not in between, and you must be punctual.”
“Yes, sir,” Lloyd said, nodding. “And may I bring my notebook?”
“You may. Buy you must not leave pencil shavings or do anything untidy,” Schelling replied-a remark that struck Lloyd as amusing, given the thick fur of dust that haunted the shop.
“And to resolve any unpleasant curiosity you may have, the hump on my back is a benign growth that is too close to my spine to be removed. No surgeon has the skill to remove it without endangering my life. So you need not stifle any impertinent questions on that score. Now follow me, and do not return except at the times I have indicated. Oh, and do consider bathing. You reek of fried catfish and the honey bucket.”
Lloyd flinched at this remark but picked himself up off the floor and followed the bookseller down the long hallway to the back door. Outside was an alleyway jammed with crates and excelsior, but he knew the way back to the stable and sprinted down the jagged cobblestones, leaving the humpbacked man watching him from the doorway. Once the boy was gone, Schelling returned to the room he had been reading in and took a mental inventory. The bookseller noticed that a treatise on the Greek Archytas of Tarentum’s mechanical pigeon, the first model airplane, was missing. Then, on the back of an old newspaper advertising a slave auction, he spotted something that made his bespectacled eyes bug out. Using but a hardened clump of street mud, the boy had managed to scrawl a rather fine imitation of one of Hooke’s microscopic drawings.
“I wonder…” Schelling murmured.
CHAPTER 7. Wild Science
THE SITTURDS’ MORALE COLLAPSED IN ST. LOUIS. THEIR WORLD always seemed to be ending. Rapture felt degraded and confused by the “w’ich en w’y talk” of the metropolis. She had lost her ability for “sperit voicen” and seemed fatigued at heart. Hephaestus teetered into the gutter. Where up to this point the trials of travel had brought them together in their quest to reach Texas and learn the secret of the “salvation” letter, now all the distractions and pressures of the city and their changing roles seemed to bring them undone. Each in a private way was homesick for their old life, as much as that had seemed a burden in the past. Each felt somehow to blame, especially Hephaestus.
The lame patriarch’s dalliance with Chicken Germain had been his first betrayal of marital fidelity and had been instantly apprehended by his wife the moment he staggered back to the stable. In Rapture’s mind there was an unbridgeable difference between chugalugging moonshine and doing the jellyroll with an “oagly” cathouse madam who consumed fried chicken by the plateful. The root witch in her was quick to take retaliatory action, concocting a noxious salve and applying it to Hephaestus’s manhood when he fell asleep. The next morning he experienced the kind of profound contrition that only a severe mix of pain and embarrassment can elicit. Since then his condition had improved but had not cleared, and his mood remained sullen and dejected. He was angry with himself for what he had done, angry with his wife for what she had done to him, and angry with Lloyd for keeping his head and becoming the family breadwinner. It was not right, and undermined what fragile dignity he had left.
Lloyd’s answer to this tension was to throw himself with full force into his work on the medicine show and into his secret studies at Wolfgang Schelling’s bookshop. While back in Zanesville Mabel Peanut and Irma Grimm battled to teach their students the multiplication tables, Lloyd considered the implications of a pendulum being perfectly isochronous when describing a cycloidal arc. In one sitting, he consumed and appeared to understand a complex dissertation on celestial mechanics. Even the densest algebraic equations were soon rendered in exact visual form on a graph. In Schelling’s experience, for sheer power of processing and retention the boy had no equal.
The book and map seller nourished the lad’s hunger for learning with the
Hour by hour Schelling imagined that he could see the boy’s mind changing shape to accommodate the new learning and, despite his best efforts to remain remote and uninvolved, when the usual look of forlorn acknowledgment swept across the prodigy’s face one afternoon at closing time the humped scholar found himself providing take-home reading-which Lloyd began to indulge in by candlelight when his feuding parents had finally dropped off to sleep.
The first work he devoured was on thaumaturgy, the engineering of ingenious machines for the purposes of theatrical or religious magic. It included the triumphant contrivances of Hero and Vitruvius, and John Dee’s panic- causing stage effect of a mechanical flying beetle in Aristophanes’
Apart from a dog-eared Japanese pillow book, he did not find many books to titillate his erotic senses, but he did find descriptions and drawings of the mechanical iron hand designed by Gotz von Berlichingen in 1505-the Little Writer, the ingenious automaton conceived by Pierre Jacquet-Droz and his son, in the 1760s, as well as Vaucanson’s miraculous mechanical digesting duck.
Lloyd rather felt his beaver was not altogether an inferior creation, but he resolved to become ever more ambitious. In response, he filched some items from a dustbin and a jeweler’s workshop and one afternoon presented his host and patron with a foot-high clockwork mannequin modeled on Andrew Jackson and armed with a whittled dowel flintlock that fired a mung bean. After that, the bookseller began showering the youngster with more than books. From the nether reaches of the dusty warren came horseshoe magnets, lengths of coiled copper and chemical solutions, lenses and grinding tools, professional carving implements, and a miscellany of objects to further entice the boy’s imagination. Lloyd responded with a dollhouse incorporating hidden passages and optical illusions, and a miniature paddle wheeler with a high-pressure steam engine that, in proportionate terms, produced twice the power using less than half the normal fuel. An ear trumpet attached to a night watchman’s knuckle-duster and some homemade gunpowder became a handheld cannon capable of projecting a load of ball bearings. (Lloyd field-tested it against the Rovers and the Mud Puppies, two warring gangs of urchins, who were less visible on the streets thereafter.)
When he set to work on improving the primary battery cell developed by J. F. Daniell, Schelling’s eyebrows stayed raised. Most significant of all, Lloyd proved that what the book merchant had taken to be a toy was at minimum a very sophisticated toy. It was a hand-size locomotive that appeared to be made of glass, which Schelling said had come from Austria. Lloyd recalled the story St. Ives had told him about the crystal orchids of Junius Rutherford, and performed a series of experiments. He revealed that the object responded to the energy of the sun and posited that the glass was really some form of disguised plant material. Schelling was careful to put the locomotive under lock and key after that, and he began to consider that it might be wise to do the same with Lloyd. Such a development prompted the bookseller to relax his rule about private confidences, and he began soliciting information about Lloyd’s family and their plans. He was pleased that the boy was as forthcoming as he was.
The problem Schelling perceived was that the lad’s interests flitted from subject to subject-one minute daguerreotypes,the next ideas for an internal-combustion engine. Of far greater concern, however, was an incipient
