Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

He had known for fourteen months that he was dying. The back pains had been cancer of both kidneys. It was a while before he could handle his gin-gins altogether comfortably. But Harry persevered. He had been a dentist, and a good one, all his life, except for a few timid and colorless childhood years. His student days were a blank to him once they had passed. He had never been able to get close to any woman but his dead wife. The passing of the boy who had been partly his wife and partly himself had burned something out of him. He reflected that he had not lied completely to Roseboom when he laid his sickness to a plate of pickled fish on a hot night in Martinique. Then he had bought Decline And Fall; he had discovered that his only pleasure was in making, rather than merely doing. He had made Decline And Fall well, and it would be his monument. With Joe’s help, he had made it good beyond his dreams. Then came the thing that would unmake him and his creation, and he had done a bit of unmaking himself. Except for Joe, they were all expendable; and he would live—he would—to see the outcome of the battle that he had posed between his enemies as it raged around his house.

He finished the mixing and laid the long spoon down carefully, took up the fresh gin-gin and walked slowly back to his chair by the fire. The paper boy was on his way out but came back for his tip. Harry sat down gently and opened the paper, flipping it so that the pages stood by themselves, the headline boldly exposed. He could hardly wait to see what he had done tonight.

It had been a very long and ragged and incredibly interlocked and detailed river shore. Then a funny thing had happened to it. It had been broken up, sliced up into pieces. Some of the pieces had been folded and compressed into bales. Some of them had been rolled up on rollers. Some of them had been cut into still smaller pieces and used for ornaments and as Indian medicine. Rolled and baled pieces of the shore came to rest in barns and old warehouses, in attics, in caves. Some were buried in the ground.

And yet the river itself still exists physically, as do its shores, and you may go and examine them. But the shore you will see along tine river now is not quite the same as that old shore that was broken up and baled into bales and rolled onto rollers, not quite the same as the pieces you will find in attics and caves.

His name was Leo Nation and he was known as a rich Indian. But such wealth as he had now was in his collections, for he was an examining and acquiring man. He had cattle, he had wheat, he had a little oil, and he spent everything that came in. Had he had more income he would have collected even more.

He collected old pistols, old ball shot, grindstones, early windmills, walking-horse threshing machines, flax combs, Conestoga wagons, brass-bound barrels, buffalo robes, Mexican saddles, slick horn saddles, anvils, Argand lamps, rush holders, hay-burning stoves, hackamores, branding irons, chuck wagons, longhorn horns, beaded serapes, Mexican and Indian leatherwork, buckskins, beads, feathers, squirrel-tail anklets, arrowheads, deerskin shirts, locomotives, streetcars, mill wheels, keelboats, buggies, ox yokes, old parlor organs, blood-and-thunder novels, old circus posters, harness bells, Mexican oxcarts, wooden cigar-store Indians, cable-twist tobacco a hundred years old and mighty strong, cuspidors (four hundred of them), Ferris wheels, carnival wagons, carnival props of various sorts, carnival proclamations painted big on canvas. Now he was going to collect something else. He was talking about it to one of his friends, Charles Longbank who knew everything.

“Charley,” he said, “do you know anything about ‘The Longest Pictures in the World’ which used to be shown by carnivals and in hippodromes?”

“Yes, I know a little about them, Leo. They are an interesting bit of Americana: a bit of nineteenth-century back country mania. They were supposed to be pictures of the Mississippi River shore. They were advertised as one mile long, five miles long, nine miles long. One of them, I believe, was actually over a hundred yards long. They were badly painted on bad canvas, crude trees and mud-bank and water ripples, simplistic figures and all as repetitious as wallpaper. A strong-armed man with a big brush and plenty of barn paint of three colors could have painted quite a few yards of such in one day. Yet they are truly Americana. Are you going to collect them, Leo?”

“Yes. But the real ones aren’t like you say.”

“Leo, I saw one. There is nothing to them but very large crude painting.”

“I have twenty that are like you say, Charley. I have three that are very different. Here’s an old carnival poster that mentions one.”

Leo Nation talked eloquently with his hands while he also talked with his mouth, and now he spread out an old browned poster with loving hands:

“The Arkansas Traveler, World’s Finest Carnival, Eight Wagons, Wheel, Beasts, Dancing Girls, Baffling Acts, Monsters, Games of Chance. And Featuring the World’s Longest Picture, Four Miles of Exquisite Painting. This is from the Original Panorama; it is Not a Cheap-Jack Imitation.”

“So you see, Charley, there was a distinction: there were the original pieces, and there were the crude imitations.”

“Possibly some were done a little better than others, Leo; they could hardly have been done worse. Certainly, collect them if you want to. You’ve collected lots of less interesting things,”

“Charley, I have a section of that panoramic picture that once belonged to the Arkansas Traveler Carnival. I’ll show it to you. Here’s another poster:

“King Carnival, The King of them All. Fourteen Wagons. Ten Thousand Wonders. See the Rubber Man. See the Fire Divers. See the Longest Picture in the World, see Elephants on the Mississippi River. This is a Genuine Shore Depictment, not the Botches that Others show.”

“You say that you have twenty of the ordinary pictures, Leo, and three that are different?”

“Yes I have, Charley. I hope to get more of the genuine. I hope to get the whole river.”

“Let’s go look at one, Leo, and see what the difference is.”

They went out to one of the hay barns. Leo Nation kept his collections in a row of hay barns. “What would I do?” he had asked once, “call in a carpenter and tell him to build me a museum? He’d say, ‘Leo, I can’t build a museum without plans and stuff. Get me some plans.’ And where would I get plans? So I always tell him to build me another hay barn one hundred feet by sixty feet and fifty feet high. Then I always put in four or five decks myself and floor them, and leave open vaults for the tall stuff. Besides, I believe a hay barn won’t cost as much as a museum.”

“This will be a big field, Charley,” Leo Nation said now as they came to one of the hay-barn museums. “It will take all your science in every field to figure it out Of the three genuine ones I have, each is about a hundred and eighty yards long. I believe this is about the standard length, though some may be multiples of these. They passed for paintings in the years of their display, Charley, but they are not paintings.”

“What are they then, Leo?”

“I hire you to figure this out. You are the man who knows everything.”

Well, there were two barrel reels there, each the height of a man, and several more were set further back.

“The old turning mechanism is likely worth a lot more than the picture,” Charles Longbank told Leo Nation. “This was turned by a mule on a treadmill, or by a mule taking a mill pole round and round. It might even be eighteenth century.”

“Yeah, but I use an electric motor on it,” Leo said. “The only mule I have left is a personal friend of mine. I’d no more make him turn that than he’d make me if I was the mule. I line it up like I think it was, Charley, the full reel north and the empty one south. Then we run it. So we travel, we scan, from south to north, going upstream as we face west.”