Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online Page A

Inconvenience quite had the
lift for!”
    “Oh, an anxious hour or two,
perhaps,” allowed Randolph, his facial expression suggesting gastric memories.
“Tell us, Professor, how is your work coming along? What recent marvels
emerging from the Sloane Laboratory?”
    “Well now, there’s a student of
Professor Gibbs whose work really bears looking into, young De Forest, a
regular wizard with the electricity . . . along
with a Japanese visitor, Mr. Kimura—but say, where can a starving
pedagogue and his pilot get a couple of those famous Chicago beefsteaks around
here? Boys, like you to meet Ray Ipsow, without whom I’d still be back in Outer
Indianoplace, waiting for some interurban that never comes.”
    “Just missed you boys once, over
there in that Khartoum business,” the genial skyfarer informed them, “trying to
make it out of town a couple steps ahead of the Mahdi’s army—saw you
sailing overhead, wished I could’vebeen on board, had to settle for jumpin in
the river and waiting till the clambake subsided a little.”
    “As it happened,”   Lindsay, the Unit Historian, recalled,
“we caught a contrary wind, and ended up in the middle of some unpleasantness
in Oltre Giubba, instead of down at Alex, where we had counted upon some weeks
of educational diversion, not to mention a more salubrious atmosphere.”
    “Why and bless me,” the Professor
cried, “if that isn’t Merle Rideout I see!”
    “Still up to no good,” Merle beamed.
    “No need for introductions, then,”
Lindsay calculated.
    “Nah, we’re partners in crime, from
back in the olden days in Connecticut, long before your time, fellows, I used
to do some tinkering for him now and then. Don’t suppose one of you boys could
get a snap of us together?”
    “Sure!” volunteered Miles.
    They went off to a steak house nearby
for lunch. Though reunions with the Professor were always enjoyable, this time
something different, some autumnal disquiet behind the climate of warm
celebration, produced psychogastric twinges Randolph had learned from
experience he could ignore only at his peril.
    Having attended several useful
symposia for airship commanders on techniques for avoiding the display of hurt
feelings, Randolph could detect now that something was preying on the
Professor’s mind. In a curious departure from the goodhearted old fellow’s
usual “style,” his luncheon comments today were increasingly brief, indeed on
occasion approaching the terse, and no sooner had the pie à la mode made
its appearance than he had called for the check.
    “Sorry boys,” he frowned, making a
show of pulling out and consulting his oldfashioned railroad watch. “I’d love
to stay and chat some more, but I’ve a little business to take care of.” He
rose abruptly, as did Ray Ipsow, who, shrugging sympathetically to the boys and
murmuring to Randolph, “I’ll keep an eye on him,” followed the eminent Yale
savant, who, once outside, lost no time hailing a carriage, holding out a
greenback and requesting top speed, and just like that they were off, arriving
at the Palmer House, where the functionary at the desk tipped a salute from a
nonexistent hat brim. “Penthouse suite, Professor, take the elevator over
there, it only makes one stop. They’re expecting you.” If there was a note of
amused contempt in his voice, Professor Vanderjuice was too preoccupied to
notice.
    It swiftly became evident to Ray
Ipsow that his friend was in town to conclude a bargain with forces that might
be described, with little risk of overstatement, as evil. In the suite
upstairs, they found heavy curtains drawn against the festive town, lamps
sparsely distributed in a perpetual twilight of tobaccosmoke, no cut flowers or
potted plants, a silence punctuated only rarely by speech, and that generally
telephonic.
    One could hardly have expected a
widely celebrated mogul like Scarsdale Vibe not to attend the World’s Columbian
Exposition. Along with the obvious appeal of