Bilocations, Chapter Two: The Attack of Thorvald the Recursive Living Tornado!

Does that chapter heading make you want to read on? We've gotta put asses in seats here.

We're back with Merle again, who's feeling something like empty nest syndrome in Dally's absence. He quits his job at Little Hellkite and heads east. He's not going after Dally, per se. Where he IS going--you will find out in due course.

First, there's a little vignette in a town called Audacity, Iowa. There's one of them newfangled movie theaters there, but there are technical difficulties and the people are restive. Fortunately, Merle is good with gadgets, so he's able to fix it. Movies...photographs...light...you know the drill. A maybe-suggestive line from the movie operator:

"Frankly," Fisk admitted later over a friendly glass of beer, "it has always scared the hell out of me, too much energy loose in that little room, too much heat, nitro in the film, feel like it's all going to explode any minute, the stories you hear, if it was only the light it'd be one thing, but these other forces... (550)

Not just light? Nitro? Explosives? Huh?

Merle temporarily takes over the job of projectionist, but he's dissatisfied with the process: "there had to be something more direct, something you could do with light itself..." (551). There are all these different processes: there's light, there's the physical gears and lenses moving, different physical forces working together, but they don't necessarily have to, yeah? They can be discrete? This is all VERY abstruse, but it's a major part of what the book's about.

Anyway, he finally reaches his destination: Candlebrow University, for the time travel conventions. There are...well, a lot of people there, talking about the nature of time. Is it a one-way thing, is one question raised, or is it circular? Going back and forth? One piece of evidence for the latter is this tornado, named Thorvald, which seems to keep reappearing. You might think, oh, it's a different tornado every time, but apparently not. There's some talk about whether you can communicate with it, but who would believe such tommyrot? I ask you.

Merle has a very brief interaction with Chick Counterfly, to recognize whom "he had to squint his way past the mustache" (555) GAH! They were DEFINITELY kids at this time! This is when the Chums are trying to rustle up sand-suits, so towards the end of their stay at Candlebrow--though obviously, given all the futzing around with time, the value of knowing that to orient yourself is going to be limited. But as you would expect, the upshot of it is that Merle meets up with his ol' pal Roswell Bounce. Roswell's been trying to sue VibeCorp, but with predictable results. However, he IS getting into explosives and/or religion:

Roswell winked. "You know how there's some have found Jesus? Well, that happened to me, too, only my Savior turned out to be more of a classical demigod, namely," pretending to look furtively right and left, and lowering his voice, "Hercules."

Merle, recognizing the name of a popular brand of blasting agent, twinkled back discreetly. "Powerful fella. Twelve Labors instead of twelve apostles, 's I recall..." (556)

Unclear whether Roswell is actually ingesting this stuff after the manner of Lew, or just using it for its intended purpose. Anyway, he's really into light: "I want to know light . . . I want to reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul, take some in my hands whatever it turns out to be" (557).

Going back to the subject of movie theaters and light and machinery, we get, once again, an abstruse conversation: Roswell argues that watches and clocks "are a sort of acknowledgement of failure, they're there to glorify and celebrate one particular sort of time, the tickwise passage of time in one direction only and no going back" (558). That may be true, but really, the average person does have to acknowledge time in its "normal" sense. We can't all be abstract theorists all the time.

There's material about time and gravity: the tourbillon was invented to prevent gravity from messing around with the time as told by a watch. Okay. So now gravity isn't having an effect on the watch, in theory. BUT: what if you wanted to do the opposite thing, and "make gravity impervious to time?" (558). I must admit...I don't really know what that means. But, to be fair, neither do Merle and Roswell, really.

We end the chapter with Merle and Roswell attending a lecture by a Professor Hermann Minkowski, who, well, gives the lecture in German, we don't know what he says, but Roswell reads: "There times ten to the fifth kilometers . . . equals the square root of minus one seconds. That's if you want that other expression over there to be symmetrical in all four dimensions." (560)

Do with that what you will. I am done for today.