deeper fit of madness than he was in already. He had to keep his head, and so he thought of his lost hat, imagining where it was-how far it would travel, what would become of it, what people would think. What did people think? He had to keep moving, just like his hat, which by then was very far downstream, bobbing along in the water the way it seemed to have drifted away from him in time. For time is a kind of river, it is said.
Which, to some, might well raise the question of where one goes when that river is crossed. Maybe time, if we could apprehend it, is nothing even like a river.
And perhaps Mind is not something we think with our brains that we possess and somehow are, and yet can lose in moments of calamity like a hat, but rather something both within us and beyond us, ever open to discovery… like a dark and shining territory… fertile, haunted, and filled with possibilities. Of all kinds. Of all kinds. The young dumbstruck officer kept crawling-hearing again those silent words:
Part 1 – All Things are Hidden in the Mind
CHAPTER 1. Time of the End
WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? THE YEAR IS 1844. KARL MARX IS IN Paris playing indoor tennis with Friedrich Engels, who has just authored
One such individual in Zanesville, Ohio, was just straggling out of a peculiar iron sphere, about the size of three B & O hopper cars, which sat balanced in a cradle of railroad ties ringed at a distance of ten feet by an assemblage of timepieces that ranged from hand-rolled, graduated beeswax candles to sundials of various descriptions, a tribe of hourglasses, and an assortment of borer-eaten cuckoo clocks-along with a once dignified but now gaunt and weather-faded grandfather clock that leaned into its own shadow like an old coot trying not to nod off in the middle of a story.
The bantamish man of apparently mixed breed wedged himself out of a fire grate-size hatch in the sphere and fished a pocket watch from his overalls. The watch casing was silver, but it had the dirty, worn fog of lead now. Still, the gears and springs gave out a satisfying report, as loud as the grasshoppers in the grain bin and as strong and regular as a healthy heartbeat.
The name mingled with the call of the clocks, which began to chime and ping and cluck, not quite at once but close, followed a silent moment later by an answering echo from inside the sphere, which caused the man’s paprika-colored face to brighten for an instant. He heaved himself down to the ground, mopping his slick scalp with a handkerchief, and glanced up at the slanting August sun.
The man, who was now standing in the circle of timepieces, looked scrawnier than the bulk of his cranium would have suggested. A scarecrow that had turned into a blacksmith, you might have said, and this would not have been far wrong. His name was Hephaestus Sitturd, and he was indeed skilled as a blacksmith, as well as a wood turner, cooper, tinker, and carpenter of great ingenuity (but no discipline); he was also a middling gunsmith, a dedicated fisherman, a maker of moonshine, a spinner of yarns, and a rhabdomancer (water diviner) of some repute. His white father had been the master mechanic responsible for the operation of a large cotton gin in Virginia until a religious vision prompted a change of career to Baptist preacher, a vagabond calling he set out to pursue with his son Micah Jefferson Sitturd, following the loss of the boy’s mother to peritonitis. This led to various digressions as a keelboat pilot, dance-hall tenor, tent boxer, and garrulous rainmaker. Along the way he met a half-breed Shawnee woman who was related to the great Chief Tecumseh and fathered another son, to whom he gave the name Hephaestus because of one slightly clubbed foot.
This clubfooted boy was the man who now stood in the Ohio sun beside the hollow iron sphere he had forged and hammered together himself. The rainmaker minister and his half-Indian bride were long dead, and Hephaestus had been left with their crumbling ruin of rabbit-weed farm on the outskirts of Zanesville, overlooking the Licking River. Half brother Micah was believed to be a Texas Ranger who had taken a Comanche wife, but Hephaestus had not heard from him in years. His family now consisted of his wife, Rapture, and their son, Lloyd, and they were such a blessing to him that he thought of little else-save his inventions.
Unfortunately, he was afflicted with that American misconception that the world was in constant, dire need of a better mousetrap, and that he was just the man for the job. He had, in fact, invented several different kinds of rodent traps (over fifty at the time), as well as a series of wind-driven bird frighteners, an automatic fishhook, a foolproof tree straightener, a hand-operated drum-cylinder motion-picture machine (which had been dismantled by the local church matrons because he had made the tactical error of demonstrating the capability with some rather bold Parisian postcards that a man in a marmot hat had sold him in Cleveland), a flyswatter that could also be used for toasting bread, as well as a wide range of outside-the-box ideas for things like disposable dentures and the creation of a pigeon-winged federal postal system.
The mania had started innocently enough, as such things often do, when he was still a wet-behind-the-ears young boy and his father had come home wounded from fighting in Benoni Pierce’s Light Horse Company at the Lakes in the War of 1812. Laid up as he was, the old man could not go fox hunting in the Moxahala Hills, which had been his great passion, and so was forced to sell his beloved hunting dogs-or would have been forced to had not the young Hephaestus hit upon the idea of using the dogs to run a drum treadmill to power the drill for gun boring. Gunsmithing became the family’s primary source of income until the father died of pneumonia.
Now, years later, the sphere was by far Hephaestus’s most ambitious undertaking. It had exhausted all his resources as well as his family’s finances and patience. Yet he was intensely proud of it, although he knew there was still much work to be done-and so little time. Time was the problem, for the sphere was not simply a hollow iron ball. Oh, no. It was meant to be a refuge, a shelter, an ark-the Time Ark, he called it, or, in sour mash-fueled moments, the Counterchronosphere.
Although not a full practicing Christian, he had become influenced by William Miller, the numerically minded New York State farmer who had worked out that the world was soon going to end or that Christ would return, depending on your point of view. Miller, who based his theory on the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, supported by calculations from Ezekiel and Numbers, had taken to sermonizing and lecturing at camp meetings back in 1831, and had since become a national and indeed international celebrity, with several newspapers devoted to spreading the word of imminent advent and hopeful paradise for the worthy.
Believing firmly in mathematics and partially in the Good Book-and being superstitious about his wife’s name and undecided about the question of “worthiness,” Hephaestus had become a default Millerite-and a very worried one at that. After all, a comet had been spotted in recent times, and just the year before a dairy farmer in Gnadenhutten had found a cow pie in the shape of the Virgin Mary. Clearly, the world was working up to something decisive. So Hephaestus had turned the bulk of his attention to the problem of how to escape time and so shield his loved ones from doomsday.
Many exceptional minds and more than a few competent engineers would have been daunted by such a
