upon which all those ingenuities were based: that a motive force—a falling weight, a wound spring—was prevented by an escapement from expending all its energy at once, and made to pay it out in ticks and tocks, which moved hands or planets around evenly until the force was all expended. Then you wound it up. All the foliots, verges, pallets, stackfreeds and going-barrels were only ingenuities, to keep the motion regular. The difficulty, the maddening difficulty, about Edgewood’s orrery was that Smoky couldn’t discover a motive force that made it go around—or rather he had discovered where it was, in that huge circular case, as black and thick as an old-time safe, and he had examined it, but still couldn’t conceive how it was supposed to drive anything; it looked like something meant itself to be driven.
There was just no end to it. He sat back on his heels and clutched his knees. He was eye-level now to the plane of the solar system, looking at the sun from the position of a man on Saturn. No end to it: the thought stirred in him a mixture of itchy resentment and pure deep pleasure he had never felt before, except faintly, when as a boy he had been presented with the Latin language. The task of that language, when he had begun to grasp its immensity, had seemed likely to fill up his life and all the blank interstices of his anonymity; he had felt at once invaded and comforted. Well, he had abandoned it somewhere along in the middle of it, after having mostly licked off its magic, like icing; but now his old age would have this task: and it was a language too.
The screws, the balls, the rods, the springs were a syntax, not a picture. The orrery didn’t model the Solar System in any visual or spatial way, if it had the pretty green-and-blue enameled Earth would have been a crumb and the whole machine would have needed to be ten times the size it was at least. No, what was expressed here, as by the inflections and predicates of a tongue, was
It had taken him a long time to figure that out, being unmathematical as well as unmechanical, but he had its vocabulary now, and its grammar was coming clear to him. And he thought that, not soon perhaps but eventually, he would be able to read its huge brass and glass sentences with some comprehension, and that they would not he as Caesar’s and Cicero’s had turned out to be, mostly dull, hollow and without mystery, but that something would be revealed equal to the terrific encoding it had received, something he very much needed to know.
There were quick footsteps on the stairs outside the orrery door, and his grandson Bud put his red head in. “Grampa,” he said, looking over the mystery there, “Gramma sent you a sandwich.”
“Oh, great,” Smoky said. “Come on in.”
He entered slowly, with the sandwich and a mug of tea, his eyes on the machine, better and more splendid than any Christmas-window train set. “Is it done?” he asked.
“No,” Smoky said, eating.
“When will it be?” He touched one sphere, and then quickly drew his hand away when, with the smooth ease of heavy counterweighting, it moved.
“Oh,” Smoky said, “about the time the world ends.”
Bud looked at him in awe, and then laughed. “Aw come on.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Smoky said. “Because I don’t know yet what makes it go around.”
“That thing,” Bud said, pointing to the black case like a safe.
“Okay,” Smoky said, and went to it, cup in hand, “but then the question is what makes
He pushed up the lever that opened the gasketed door (dust-proof, but why?) and swung the case open. Inside, cleaned and oiled and ready to go if it could, which it couldn’t, was the impossible heart of Harvey Cloud’s machine: the impossible heart, so Smoky sometimes thought, of Edgewood itself.
“A wheel,” Bud said. “A bent wheel. Wow.”
“I think,” Smoky said, “it’s supposed to go by electricity. Down under the floor, if you lift up that door, there’s a big old electric motor. Only—”
“What?”
“Well, it’s backwards. It’s in there backwards, and not by mistake.”
Bud looked over the arrangement, thinking hard. “Well,” he said, “maybe this makes this go around, and this makes this go around, and this makes that go around.”
“A good theory,” Smoky said, “only you’ve just come full circle. Everything’s making everything else go around. Taking in each other’s washing.”
“Well,” Bud said. “If it went fast enough. If it was smooth enough.”
Fast, and smooth, and heavy it certainly was. Smoky studied it, his mind crossing in paradox. If this made that go around, as it was obviously meant to do; and that made this go around, which wasn’t unreasonable; and this and that powered that and this… Almost he saw it, jointed and levered, its sentences reading backwards and forwards at once, and couldn’t just for a moment think why it was impossible, except that the world is as it is and not different…
“And if it ever slowed down,” Bud said, “you could come up once in a while and give it a push.”
Smoky laughed. “Should we make that your job?” he asked.
“Yours,” Bud said.
A push, Smoky thought, one constant small push from somewhere; but whosoever that push was, it couldn’t be Smoky’s, he had nothing like the strength, he would Somehow have to inveigle the whole universe to look away for a moment from the endless task of itself and reach out an enormous finger to touch these wheels and gears. And Smoky had no reason to think that such a special mercy would be his, or Harvey Cloud’s, or even Edgewood’s.
He said, “Well, anyway. Back to work.” He pushed gently on the leaden sphere of Saturn, and it moved, ticking a few degrees, and as it moved all the other parts, wheels, gears, rods, spheres, moved too.
Caravans
“But perhaps,” Ariel Hawksquill said, “perhaps there’s no war on at all.”
“What do you mean?” asked the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, after a moment’s startled thought.
“I mean,” Hawksquill said, “that perhaps what we think of as a war is in fact not one. I mean that perhaps there is no war on at all, after all; and perhaps there never was one.”
“Don’t be absurd,” the President said. “Of course there’sa war on. We’re winning.”
The Emperor sat sunk in a broad armchair, chin resting on his breast. Hawksquill was at the grand piano which took up much of the far end of the room. She had had this piano altered to make quarter-tones, and on it she liked to play plangent old hymn-tunes harmonized according to a system of her own devising, rendered oddly, sweetly discordant by the altered piano. They made the Tyrant sad. Outside, snow was falling.
“I don’t mean,” Hawksquill said, “that you have no enemies. Of course you have. I was speaking of the other, the long war: the Great War. Perhaps that’s not a war at all.”
The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, though exposed (their drawn cold faces and dark overcoats appearing in every newspaper) had not fallen easily, as Hawksquill had known they would not. Their resources were great; for whatever they were charged with they had countercharges, and they had the best legal counsel; but (they hadn’t listened when Hawksquill had warned them it might be so) their part in the story was over. Struggle only prolonged the end, it was never in doubt. Money gathered at junctures of the case and went off like bombs sometimes, causing temporary outlandish reversals of members’ fortunes, but these firebreaks never seemed to give the Club time to recoup. Petty, Smilodon & Ruth, after accruing enormous fees all around, withdrew from their defense amid mysterious circumstances and bitter recriminations; shortly thereafter, masses of paper came to light whose provenance couldn’t successfully be denied. Men once made of power and cold blood were seen on every television screen to weep tears of frustration and despair as they were led away to trial by the gloved hands of marshals and indifferent plainclothesmen. The end of the story was not widely known, for it was in the winter of its most shocking revelations that the universal grid of communications which had for a glorious seventy-five years or so lit up the nation like the strung lights of a Christmas tree was for the most part roughly cut: by Eigenblick himself, to forestall its takeover by his enemies; elsewhere, by his enemies, to forestall its takeover by the Tyrant.
