He turned his long rectangular room at the rear of the schoolhouse into a tinkerer’s paradise, filled with queer contraptions made of wire, glass, magnets, strips of copper, and wood. His students became his assistants—not only boys, but girls as well. They experimented with electricity by rubbing glass rods with fur, to produce a charge of static electricity. They experimented with radiant heat by carefully placing, on a snowbank, squares of cloth of different colors—thereby proving, to their own satisfaction, that darker colors absorb the sun’s heat more readily than light colors. They tinkered with the school stove, they constructed their own lightning rod, they dismantled clocks and built an elaborate orrery, which was at once a mechanical model of the universe and a calendar indicating the hour, the day, and the month. So intense was Mr. Zinn’s interest in his contraptions, and so powerfully did it communicate itself to his most sensitive pupils, they were distracted and nervous when away from the schoolhouse; and were oft awakened at night by tumultuous dreams, crying out that their schoolmaster was in danger—the building had caught fire, or had been struck by lightning! Their heads were filled with the motion of pulleys, wheels, cogs, and pistons. They spoke of telescopes, rockets, “auto-wagens” that would someday fly to the moon, machines that would propel themselves, tunnels beneath the rivers and lakes, buildings that rose miles into the sky, underground cities impervious to all weather, the colonization of distant stars, machines that dissolved time, machines that could run forever. A slender, small-boned eleven-year-old named Nahum, the youngest of six children, became particularly obsessed with two of his schoolmaster’s notions: the time-machine, and the perpetual-motion machine.
He dreamt about them, he told John Quincy, every night.
Lessons of a more conventional nature—in reading, writing, and simple mathematics—were neglected, as Mr. Zinn, pacing excitedly about the classroom, speaking in a monologue and taking little note, as to whether the youngest of his charges could follow him at all, speculated aloud on the nature of Invention, and the nature of Evolution, and the destiny of the United States of America. Now and then a boy might grin slyly behind his fingers, or a girl, suddenly embarrassed by Mr. Zinn’s dramatic self-queries—“But how shall I, John Quincy Zinn, figure in this great destiny? How shall Mouth-of-Lebanon declare itself to the world, and to posterity?”—might blush a deep red, and turn away, to doodle nervously in her notebook. But the majority of the students, of all ages and abilities, watched their teacher with rapt fascination, whether or no they comprehended his every word.
It may be said that John Quincy, being still very young, and, as it were, somewhat brash in his expectations, o’erestimated his students’ intelligence, as well as the willingness, on the part of their parents, to be tolerant of somewhat eccentric methodology, over a protracted period of time. His sojourn at the Brownrrigg Academy, tho’ by no means without attendant difficulties, was to be marked by a comparative conservatism, and this in a much more liberal social context, as we have seen. But in Mouth-of-Lebanon, alas, he seemed at times to be totally unaware of the presence of others, and of his responsibility to them. Enough for him, he fervently believed, that he loved his small charges: and consequently knew best how to educate them.
The objections of Reverend Tidewell continued, and had their sway in the community, for did not the “mechanical universe” (which very few adults had seen) speak of a godless, lawless, atheistical creation? Did not the schoolmaster Mr. Zinn preach a heresy, in the very bosom of a Christian land? Summoned to a meeting of the district board of education, John Quincy was called upon to defend himself—to answer to certain charges—but he professed only mild alarm that such questions should be asked at all; and declined to answer them, since no one unfamiliar with the livingness of his classroom could presume to judge him.
“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice quivering, “it is out of the mouths of babes my wisdom springs: I but pluck and gather it, and reap my humble harvest.”
So he returned to his small kingdom in the schoolhouse, and continued with his lessons as before, firmly resolved that his way was correct, and that his students, whom he customarily thought of as “his,” profited greatly from the very boldness of his enterprise. He believed himself immune to all outside attack, once he was safely home; he knew himself wonderfully privileged; at the same time, a part of his imagination disengaged itself, and considered coolly whether his life might be in danger!—and so he set about systematically preparing a document that would explain, in tireless detail, his educational theories; and he prepared a day-book out of the notes he had been scribbling informally for years, to exhibit to the world the absolute rightness of his method, as it blossomed forth in sessions with pupils given names and voices—itself a revolutionary approach. “Thus I consummate the work of seven years,” he declared, on the last page of the document.
And he mailed it off to the State Supervisor of Public Education.
THE CHILD NAHUM, tho’ but a sixth-grader, had become so adept at mathematics that John Quincy, ostentatiously seating himself in one of the larger desks, at the rear of the room, empowered him to “deliver a lesson—any lesson” on the blackboard, using colored chalks. These sessions were spirited, but Nahum’s shyness erupted into a queer rushed vocableness, which the other children, being unable to follow, began to find distinctly amusing. And so Mr. Zinn felt compelled to “discipline” them, by way of a curious stratagem: he commanded the noisiest offenders to cane him.
Which of course they could not do—they simply could not do. The oldest boy in the school, a fifteen-year-old who had grown to a height of six feet, and a probable weight of one hundred eighty pounds, could manage no more than to raise the hickory cane over his schoolmaster’s poised hands: and then, flushing red, and coming very close to bursting into tears, the naughty child dropped the cane to the floor; and ran out of the room.
So John Quincy had triumphed—and had, he believed, broken the spirit of all opposition.
As the weeks passed, and no challenge issued from the outside world—“the world of slumbering adults,” as he phrased it, tho’ not with scorn—John Quincy plunged all the more boldly, one might say brashly, into his teaching of Science. He read aloud from Newton, and Galileo; and William Blake; and Ralph Waldo Emerson; and Edgar Allan Poe, whose fantastical Eureka had recently appeared. He had gone on foot to Baltimore, where he examined the newest of steam locomotives of the Baltimore & Ohio, which he diagrammed on the blackboard, in cross-section, for his students to admire. Fire—steam—expanding gas—a closed cylinder—pistons—energy—glorious Motion! “And in such ways, boys and girls,” John Quincy said passionately, “is the great North American continent made humanly navigable.”
Crude “provisional” models of the perpetual-motion and time-machines, each some three feet in height, were set up on the schoolmaster’s desk, along with the controversial orrery—which continued, faithfully and precisely, to record the passage of hours, days, and months, as the tiny copper planets revolved around their copper sun. There was, of course, an initial interest in the models; but then they were not, after all, the actual machines. “They don’t work,” many a student murmured in dismay or chagrin. “They never will work”—so a daring student might reply.
Mr. Zinn lectured on the machines, and on invention in general. “What is called, boys and girls, an invention, is but the dramatic climax of a vast accretion of details, insinuated, as it were, into Time, by the grace of Eternity. An invention is an Evolution, very closely resembling a biologic and a geologic process, as well as the process of human mentality. Do you see?”
He erased the blackboard, and attempted diagrams of the time- and perpetual-motion machine, far more detailed than the models on the desk, and in some cases radically differing from them. Little Nahum at such times was greatly absorbed with his teacher’s monologue: he squirmed and writhed in his desk, he waved his hand frantically in the air, and, if not called upon (for Mr. Zinn was much absorbed in his own theorizing), d
ared to interrupt, and to speak out with a suggestion of his own; which Mr. Zinn, testifying to the charity of his nature, and his innate modesty, accepted with all respect, as if it had issued from an equal. The diagrams grew in complexity, and were abruptly erased with swipes of Mr. Zinn’s large hand. And then they blossomed forth again, perhaps with an assistance from Nahum, to last a day or two: and then they were erased again, as being “unworkable.”
At such times, John Quincy gave no evidence of minding that certain of his students were yawning rudely, or passing forbidden notes, or jabbing one another with their pens; that a plump German girl, whose seat was near the stove, had fallen asleep and was snoring faintly, to the vast amusement of her classmates; or that one of Nahum’s older brothers was lazily digging mud off his boots with a penknife.
(A pity it was, that during these last weeks John Quincy neglected to return to his earlier lessons, in order to reestablish patterns of learning in his pupils: for children forget rapidly acquired skills rapidly, and, undisciplined, tend to revert to their animal ways—charming enough, it may be, under certain restraints, but unruly indeed. So it was that his replacement in the school, a husky, strong-willed, and not overly sensitive widow of Dutch and English ancestry, who had been a Sunday school teacher for many years, found to her bewilderment and gradual anger that Mr. Zinn’s alleged star pupils knew but a farrago of unconnected facts and wispy theories; and that the rest of the class—of all ages, sizes, temperaments, and abilities—were “ignorant as savages, and as badly behaved.”)
John Quincy Zinn may have sensed that he was losing ground with the majority of his students, even as he gained ground with the precocious little Nahum, whom, indeed, he treated rather like a younger brother, sometimes rubbing his head in play, or stroking his slender shoulder; he may have convinced himself that the passionate pursuit, day by day and week by week, of the elusive machines, would in the end brilliantly justify itself, and silence local opposition—the members of the board of education, and the troublesome Reverend Tidewell above all. He may have told himself, too, that the imprinting of certain truths upon impressionable minds was perhaps the most he could hope for, in this backwoods community, where, after all, farming skills were the highest value, and book learning of any sort was looked upon with suspicion. So he strode about the classroom, a tall and somewhat disheveled figure, stroking his beard, clapping his hands softly together, interrupting his own monologue on the history of science and invention from Galileo onward (observations which, not a year later, would strike intellectual Philadelphia as simply brilliant—worthy of a lecture series in themselves), interrupting his own monologue to cast out small glittering gems, to be gathered up by those alert to their value: “The perfecting of a type of object mechanically, we must remember, is evidenced by its attainment of Beauty,” and “The mass of the Universe is living matter which constantly grows from within, its spiritual gravity necessarily increasing, until such time as it must implode, having no other recourse—and revert to the original fireball of Life, the Spirit that pervades all things.”
In the late afternoon, the rest of the students having departed, John Quincy and Nahum labored on the time-machine, in silence for the most part, rarely needing to consult with each other. The machine had now grown to a size of approximately five feet by three, and was set on the floorboards, boxlike in design, and deceptively simple when viewed from the outside. Inside, however, it was a veritable nest of wires, coils, magnets, cogs and wheels and small hammers, and cylindrical mirrors. The principle of time being fluid, as John Quincy believed, and having much to do with invisible radiant energies in the atmosphere, contained within the earth’s motion as it turned ceaselessly on its axis, the principle of time-travel would then involve a resistance to this motion, or an acceleration of it, within, of course, well-defined limits. (For John Quincy and Nahum could not reason how any object could be sent to travel a great distance in time, at least with their present model; nor did they anticipate that any living thing might be sent upon a time-journey, let alone a human being.)
So they labored, and corrected their original diagram, and added to the model, and hours might pass before a rock was thrown up on the roof, to roll noisily down the shingles: a sign, primitive enough, that one of Nahum’s brothers had been sent to fetch him, and that he must leave at once. His narrow face at such moments registered a truly adult regret: and he often backed away from their work, most reluctantly, whilst John Quincy bade him an absentminded but affectionate goodnight.
It was at the very onset of mud-time, the least amenable of seasons, that the accident, with its unfortunate results, took place. I hold it bitterly ironic that John Quincy had begun to awaken, many a night, his slumber pierced by uncharacteristic doubt . . . and yet he could never have foreseen what would happen. His thoughts as always tended toward the abstract, for he worried that, in constructing a time-machine, with whatever modest expectations, he was tampering with an absolute Law of Nature; and thereby violating his own principles. Now and then his anxiety touched upon his relations with his pupils, and the community; and in his mind’s eye the pale, intense face of little Nahum loomed large; but he made every effort to suppress his doubts, for, as we know, negative mental activities lead to nothing productive, and are fatally exhausting. Mr. Zinn’s faith in the Supreme Being was such that he believed his intuition would be guided without ambiguity, should he be inadvertently violating an actual Law of Nature—in which case he would unhesitatingly smash his precious machine, and destroy all the diagrams. Nahum’s heart would be broken, but that, alas, would be unavoidable.
It is ironic, too, that the crisis should have been precipitated by the child’s reckless behavior, in the face of John Quincy’s repeated warnings, and the exemplary model of his own caution. For as work on the time-machine progressed, and excitement naturally grew, the precocious child—who had in fact just celebrated his twelfth birthday—began to speak queerly of “fame” and “riches” and “changing the world forever”; and in a breathless, jocular voice that had not the tone of a normal child’s voice. John Quincy either paid no heed to such remarks, or countered them with a more practical wisdom of his own: for the pragmatic results of any invention, however ingenious, could not really be foreseen; and the history of invention was strewn with brilliant but finally unworkable and unmarketable ideas. One must after all interest a wealthy patron, or the Congress of the United States, in order to be financed in the systematic manufacture of a new invention. Nahum would be wise, too, to recall the discouragement endured by such heroic visionaries as Robert Fulton and Charles Goodyear, whose genius oft invited ridicule and scorn, with rarely a warm wish; and whose lives were surely hastened to their ends by the cruel indifference of the public. The wisest strategy, John Quincy averred, was the hoary old counsel—Make haste slowly!
Yet even as John Quincy was speaking, bent over the diagram with a quill pen in his hand, the precocious Nahum chose to follow his own whim—and, having set the gauge on the outside of the machine, to a date in the near future, proceeded to crawl inside.
John Quincy worked for some minutes in silence, making emendations in the now alarmingly complex diagram; and it was only a subtle alteration in the atmosphere—a sense of sudden chill, and aloneness—that alerted him to glance around, startl’d, to see that Nahum was no longer present. Whereupon the astonished John Quincy Zinn stood with his quill pen in hand, simply staring. At last he feebly murmured: “Nahum? Nahum?”
Whilst the surface of his mind continued with the pretext that the child was still in the schoolroom, but unaccountably hiding from him, the deeper core of his intelligence knew full well, and immediately, that Nahum had plunged ahead with the experiment, with that perverse recklessness of which only the gifted are capable: he had crawled inside the time-machine, into a space that looked as if it would accommodate only a much younger child, and he had, somehow, one surely could not know how, caused himself to vanish. That he had penetrated the curtain of time, and
traveled, as it were, into the future, John Quincy felt with a sickening certitude must be true—and yet the plausibility of so extreme an action struck the older man as unthinkable.
With what anxiety the next hour was endured, the sensitive reader may well imagine. The unhappy schoolmaster feared for his charge’s well-being; indeed, he feared for his very life. Not a thought crossed his mind of the inevitable danger to himself, should Nahum not reappear, for our hero was made of noble substance, and yet he may well have considered his own situation—a schoolmaster who had lost one of his pupils, inside the very schoolroom! But he paid no heed to his own prospects, and paced about the machine, crying the child’s name, and tearing at his hair, now and then stooping to peer inside the box at the small galaxy of wires and cylindrical mirrors, all of which (I am surprised to report) struck him as suddenly unreadable, as if constructed by another person altogether. Unreadable, alas, and quite mad!