The Six Messiahs

a chuckle.'

The screen changed again to an intimate boudoir draped with tasseled gauzes and Silks, lush pillows crowding a leopard-skin rug. A shapely larm encircled with silver bracelets slithered out from behind the curtains, followed by a barefooted leg; then their owner revealed herself, a sinuous, dark-haired dancing girl in diaphanous harem pants and a filmy halter; flowers adorned her hair, pearls ringed her neck, a hefty dew-drop jewel ornamented her navel. She flirted with them from the screen, flashing her kohl-rimmed eyes, and began to shake and shimmy in a way that could only be described as extraordinarily professional.

'Good night!' said Innes. 'Who is that?'

'Her name is Little Egypt,' said Edison. 'Actually her name is Mildred Hockingheimer from Brooklyn. Our nation's foremost practitioner of the hootchy-kootchy. And she is going to be very, very famous.'

They watched her for a while and could find no basis for disagreement.

'Very talented girl,' said Stern.

'From Brooklyn?' said Presto. 'It hardly seems possible.'

'She found the inspiration for her act in a Syrian woman— not so coincidentally also named Little Egypt—who scandalized last year's World's Fair: There are currently twenty-five Little Egypts plying their trade around the country. We've got the jump on them, though: Our Little Egypt is already the biggest attraction in every Kinetoscope parlor we've put her into; we could charge a quarter a peep and men would still be standing in line.'

'Worth every penny,' said Innes.

'And all a trick, her sense of motion, that is. Retention of vision; a trick the eye plays on us. Separate still photographs shown so quickly in succession the mind perceives the movements as continuous.'

'The possibilities,' said Doyle, thinking well beyond the scope of her current performance, 'are limitless.'

'Do you think so? I'm afraid it may not have much application beyond the prurient or purely sensational. Eye-catching, of course, but something kind of shameful about it finally, isn't there?'

'For two hundred years, the most popular attractions in England were public executions, followed closely by bear-baiting and cockfights,' said Presto. 'If your marvelous invention moves the masses toward voyeurism, they shan't have much distance to travel.'

'Hope you're right. People are usually suspicious of new inventions,' said Edison. 'For the longest time, they were afraid diseases could be transmitted over the telephone. But not moving pictures; I've never seen anything like it; people take to it like camels to water.'

'How ever did you find her?' asked Innes, untroubled by Edison's concerns, his mind doing handsprings around some pretext—a convention; a class reunion of sorts—that would unite all twenty-five of the Little Egypts.

'Dancing at Coney Island, although this performance was recorded right here in our Black Maria. Quite a gal, Mildred; she likes to tell you her dance is patterned after the secret ceremonies of the ancient Egyptian temple. How they happened to fall into her hands in the middle of Flatbush remains a mystery she will carry to her rest.'

Little Egypt vanished without revealing any of the secrets she seemed to have been leading up to: A stunning vista of white Grecian and Italianate pavilions took her place on the screen, immense crowds scurrying in and out of the buildings like insects.

'This is the World's Fair now,' said Edison. 'Ran for six months last year—any of you gentlemen have the good fortune to attend?'

No, none of them had, they said.

'Sorry to say you missed one of the great spectacles in creation. Originally the town fathers wanted to show the world how Chicago had recovered from the great fire in '71, but it quickly became clear that the unseen forces which occasionally conspire to push forward the progress of man had something more significant in mind. In the middle of our worst economic crisis in forty years, the Fair was visited by twenty-seven million people; nearly half our country's population. And between my company's efforts and those of our competitors, it was the most widely photographed event in human history.'

A dazzling flood of images cascaded over the screen: exhibition halls filled with gargantuan manufacturing displays; dynamos, hydroelectric power, models of machines from the new Golden Age of Science. An entire building full of turbines and generators, seemingly the work of a race of giants. Steam-powered fire engines. Horseless carriages. The latest advances in luxurious rail travel; gloriously appointed sleeping cars with silk curtains and silver washbasins. In its central chamber, a tower of electricity reached to the roof of the vast steel hall, the words 'Edison Light' flashing around its pinnacle—as he stood beside them, Doyle watched the flickering shadows play off Edison's face, marveling at the riches of inspiration that must animate his mind; godfather to the march of progress they were witnessing.

A separate pavilion displayed Edison's Inventions of Tomorrow, machines predicted to better the lives of every man, woman, and child; vacuum cleaners, laundry machines, refrigerated ice boxes. And most astonishing: the Telectroscope, a viewing tube, like a telescope, that when perfected would allow a man in New York to see the face of a friend in Chicago as if they were standing side by side.

Rising from an amusement area called the Midway, a gigantic wheel of light carried passengers in swinging baskets, up, down, and around in a fiery circle—invented by a local man named George Washington Ferris, Edison told them—as if a wonder from Mount Olympus had fallen among the mortals. One dizzying shot demonstrated the point of view of someone sitting in the revolving chairs; from its apex the fairgrounds spread out beneath the wheel like the dawning of a new civilization.

'Two hundred and fifty feet in the air: Our cameraman nearly fainted and fell to his death,' said Edison.

Now pictures documented groups of men and women gathered on stairs in front of various Fair pavilions; in wide-angle shots, a banner in their center announced the group's identity—Pan American Association of Horse Breeders; the Chicago Club; United Women's Congress—followed in each instance by closer shots of the camera slowly panning across each stationary membership, most of them, used to posing for still photographers, standing as rigidly as statues with unwavering smiles on their faces.

This is all very interesting, thought Doyle, on the verge of asking: What was the point?

Then came the Parliament of International Religions: one of the largest groupings, a swell of clergy populating the steps around their banner and a second sign that read: Not Men, but Ideas. Not Matter, but Mind.

Lionel Stern leaned forward in his seat. The closer examining shots began: bishops, cardinals, deacons, vicars, Protestant and Catholic in their clerical collars standing shoulder to shoulder with rabbis, both Orthodox and the more contemporarily outfitted Reform....

'There, there he is, there's my father,' said Lionel Stern, leaping forward to the screen and pointing at a briefly glimpsed angular figure in the center of the group. 'Is there any way to stop the picture?'

'I'm afraid not,' said Edison.

The camera continued to slip to the right across the congregation; Lionel watched anxiously as Jacob's grainy image drifted to the edge of the screen and disappeared. Now the many races and religions of the East made their appearance, eyeing the camera with more variety of expression—from quiet humor to outright suspicion—all wearing their distinctive traditional vestments: clusters of draped and turbaned Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists in dark saffron robes, ascetic Confucianists, Coptic Christians, Tibetans, elegant Shinto priests, forbidding Eastern Orthodox patriarchs.

As the camera reached the far margin of the group, it stopped moving and held the frame. A lone figure in the back row captured their eye: a tall, arresting man, thin as a scarecrow, wearing a high stovepipe hat and a severe black frock coat, cut like an undertaker's. Long, scraggly hair flowed to his shoulders; out of his back on the left side rose a spiny deformed hump. The features of the face remained blurry; alone among the entire membership, this man was moving his head from side to side....

Jack stood straight up, jolted from his seat. He moved quickly to the screen and studied the faint image; moments later the film ended, the screen trailed off in a congestion of lines, sprockets, motes of dust. Edison turned off the projector and the room went silent. Jack turned to Doyle, eyes wide with alarm, caught for a moment in the stark white light on the screen.

'I must see it again,' said Jack.