Part 21 (1/2)
”When last I was in church, yes. And you are grounded, that is plain to see. Why not Velocipede, then? Having to do with speed and the applied toe and ankle?”
”Close-on, Dr. Goff, close-on. Why do you stare so fixedly?”
”It comes to mind that great times call forth great inventions. The inventor is child to his year and day. This is not a great time for such as you and yours. Did this century call you forth as its mightiest of all men of genius?”
Old Wetherby let his machine coast for a moment and smiled.
”No, I and my Tilda here, I call her Tilda, will instead be the gravity that calls forth the century. We will influence the year, the decade, and the millennium!”
”It is hard for me to believe,” said the medical gentleman, ”that you will build a road from your sill to the city on which to glide your not-inconsiderable dream.”
”Nay, Doctor, the reverse is true. The city, and the world when they know me1 and this will run a concourse here to deliver me to fame.”
”Your head knocks heaven, Mr. Wetherby,” said the doctor dryly. ”But your roots ache for sustenance, water, minerals, air. You stroke and pump wildly, but go nowhere. Once off that rack, will you not fall on your side, destroyed?”
”Nay, nay.” Wetherby, in gusts, pumped again. ”For I have discovered some physics, as yet nameless. The faster you propel this bodily device, the less tendency to fall left or right but continue straight, if no obstacles prevent!”
”With only two wheels beneath? Prove it. Release your invention, set it free in flight, let us see you sustain your forward motion without breaking your b.u.m!”
”Oh, G.o.d, shut up!” cried Wetherby as his kindling legs thrashed the pedals, racketing round as he leaned into a phantom wind, eyes clenched against an invisible storm, and churned the wheels to a frenzy. ”Don't you hear? Listen. That whine, that cry, that whisper. The ghost in the machine, which promises things most new, unseen, unrealized, only a dream now but tomorrow - Great G.o.d, don't you see?! If I were on a real path this would be swifter than gazelles, a panic of deer! All pedestrians vanquished. All coach-and-horses in dust! Not twenty miles a day, but thirty, forty miles in a single glorious hour! Stand off, Time. Beware, meadow-beasts! Here glides, in full plummet, Wetherby with nothing to stop him!”
”Aye,” said the Searcher dryly, ”you pump up a storm on that stand. But, set free, how would you balance on only two wheels!?”
”Like this!” cried Wetherby, and with a thrust of his hands and an uplift of frame, seized the Traveler, the Motion Machine, the Pathfinder, up free of its stand and in an instant plunged through the room and out the door, with Dr. Goff, in full pursuit, yelling: ”Stop! You'll kill yourself!”
”No, exhilarate my heart, oxygenate my blood!” cried Wetherby, and there he was in a chicken-yard he had trampled flat, paths some sixty feet around on which he now flailed his metal machine with scythings of ankle, toe, heel, and leg, sucking air, gusting out great laughs. ”See? I do not fall! Two legs, two wheels, and: presto!”
”My G.o.d!” cried Dr. Goff, eyes thrust forth like hardboiled eggs. ”G.o.d's truth! How so?!”
”I fly forward faster than I fall downward, an unguessed law of physics. But lo! I almost fly. Fly! Good-bye horses, doomed and dead!”
And with ”dead” he was overcome with such a delirium of pant and pump, perspiration raining off him in showers, that with a great cry, he wobbled and was flung, a meteor of flesh, over and down on a coop where the chickens, in dumb feather-duster alarms, exploded in shrieks as Wetherby slid in one direction while his vehicle, self-motivated, wheels a-spin, mounted Dr. Goff, who jumped aside, fearful of being spliced.
Wetherby, helped to his feet, protested his trajectory: ”Ignore that! Do you at last understand?”
”Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!”
”No, a future brave with motion, 'tween my legs. You have come a long way, Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?”
”Well,” said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. ”Ah,” he said.
”Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!”
”But.. .” said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back, alarmed. ”What have I done!” he cried.
Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. ”Your presence is known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic.”
And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.
”There they are!” someone cried.
”Have you come to take him away?” someone else shouted.
”Yah” echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.
Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, ”Yes. I will take him away!” And turned back to the old man.
”Take me where, Doctor?” whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.
”One moment!” cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs. ”Let me think.”
Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then ma.s.saging his brow for rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.
”I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers, to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them.”
”What, what, Doctor?”
”Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .
”To what purpose?”
”Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you spoke of at some future time!”
”The road, the path, the surface?”
”The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmiG.o.d, for all your needs!”
”Needs?”
”Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!”
”Oh, dear G.o.d,” murmured Wetherby, ”why didn't I think?”
”If you had you would've been too shy to ask!”
”The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!”
And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.
”Don't cry,” said Dr. Goff.
”I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?”
”My good man, here's my hand!”
They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.
”The excitement will kill me,” said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.