For some reason this sound reared him to his feet in alarm.
“Phipps . . . !?”
The guards blinked with incomprehension.
Bayes snapped his fingers. “Is Phipps coming in tonight? Oh God, he mustn’t see this! Head him off! Tell him there’s an emergency, yes, emergency at the machine plant in Glendale! Move!”
One of the guards hurried out the door.
And watching him run, Bayes thought, please, God, keep Phipps home, keep him off . . .
Strange, at such a time, not your own life but the lives of others flashed by.
Remember . . . that day five years past when Phipps first slung his blueprints, his paintings, his watercolors out on a table and announced his Grand Plan? And how they had all stared at the plans and then up at him and gasped:
Lincoln?
Yes! Phipps had laughed like a father just come from a church where some sweet high vision in some strange Annunciation has promised him a most peculiar son.
Lincoln. That was the idea. Lincoln born again.
And Phipps? He would both engender and nurture this fabulous ever-ready giant robot child.
Wouldn’t it be fine . . . if they could stand in the meadow fields of Gettysburg, listen, learn, see, hone the edge of their razor souls, and live?
Bayes circled the slumped figure in the chair and, circling, numbered the days and remembered years.
Phipps, holding up a cocktail glass one night, like a lens that simultaneously proportions out the light of the past and the illumination of the future:
“I have always wanted to do a film on Gettysburg and the vast crowd there and far away out at the edge of that sun-drowsed impatient lost thick crowd, a farmer and his son trying so hard to hear, not hearing, trying to catch the wind-blown words from the tall speaker there on the distant stand, that gaunt man in the stovepipe hat who now takes off his hat, looks in it as to his soul rummaged there on scribbled letterbacks and begins to speak.
“And this farmer, in order to get his son up out of the crush, why, he hefts the boy up to sit upon his shoulders. There the boy, nine years old, a frail encumbrance, becomes ears to the man, for the man indeed cannot hear nor see but only guess what the President is speaking far across a sea of people there at Gettysburg and the President’s voice is high and drifts now clear, now gone, seized and dispersed by contesting breeze and wind.
And there have been too many speakers before him and the crowd all crumpled wool and sweat, all mindless stockyard squirm and jostled elbow, and the farmer talks up to his son on his shoulders in a yearning whisper: What? What’s he say? And the boy, tilting his head, leaning his peach-fuzz ear to the wind, replies:
“‘Fourscore and seven years . . .’”
“Yes?”
“‘. . . ago, our fathers brought forth . . .’”
“Yes, yes!?”
“‘. . . on this continent . . .’”
“Eh?”
“Continent! ‘A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are . . .’
“And so it goes, the wind leaning against the frail words, the far man uttering, the farmer never tiring of his sweet burden of son and the son obedient cupping and catching and telling it all down in a fierce good whisper and the father hearing the broken bits and some parts missing and some whole but all fine somehow to the end . . .
“‘. . . of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’
“The boy stops whispering.
“It is done.
“And the crowd disperses to the four directions. And Gettysburg is history.
“And for a long time the father cannot bring himself to ease his translator of the wind down to set him on the earth, but the boy, changed, comes down at last . . .”
Bayes sat looking at Phipps.
Phipps slugged down his drink, suddenly chagrined at his own expansiveness, then snorted:
“I’ll never make that film. But I will make this!”
And that was the moment he pulled forth and unfolded the blueprints of the Phipps Eveready Salem, Illinois, and Springfield Ghost Machine, the Lincoln mechanical, the electro-oil-lubricated plastic India-rubber perfect-motioned and outspoken dream.
Phipps and his born-full-tall-at-birth Lincoln. Lincoln. Summoned live from the grave of technology, fathered by a romantic, drawn by need, slapped to life by small lightnings, given voice by an unknown actor, to be placed there to live forever in this far southwest corner of old-new America! Phipps and Lincoln.
And that was the day, yes, of the first wild bursts of laughter which Phipps ignored by simply saying, “We must, oh we must, stand all of us, downwind from Gettysburg. It’s the only hearing place.”
And he shared out his pride among them. This man he gave armatures, to that the splendid skull, another must trap the Ouija-spirit voice and sounding word, yet others must grow the precious skin, hair, and fingerprints. Yes, even Lincoln’s touch must be borrowed, copied, the same!
Derision then was their style of life.
Abe would never really speak, they all knew that, nor move. It would all be summed and written off with taxes as a loss.
But as the months lengthened into years, their outcries of hilarity turned to accepting smiles and stunned wild grins. They were a gang of boys caught up in some furtive but irritably joyous mortuary society who met midnights in marble vaults to disperse through graveyards at dawn.
The Lincoln Resurrection Brigade yeasted full and prospered. Instead of one mad fool, a dozen maniacs fell to rifling old mummy-dust newsfiles, begging and then pilfering death masks, burying and then digging up new plastic bones.
Some toured the Civil War battlefields in hopes that history, borne on some morning wind, might whip their coats like flags. Some prowled the October fields of Salem, starched brown with farewell summer, sniffing airs, pricking ears, alert for some lank lawyer’s unrecorded voice, anxious for echoes, pleading their case.
And none more anxious nor paternal-proud worrying than Phipps until the month when the robot was spread out on delivery tables, there to be ball and socketed, voice box locked in, rubber eyelids peeled back to sink therein the deep sad eyes which, gazing out, had seen too much.
The generous ears were appended that might hear only time lost. The large-knuckled hands were hung like pendulums to guess that time. And then upon the tall man’s nakedness they shucked on suiting, buttoned buttons, fixed his tie, a gathering of tailors, no, Disciples now on a bright and glorious Easter morn and them on Jerusalem’s hills ready to roll aside the rock and stand Him forth at their cry.
And in the last hour of the last day Phipps had locked them all out as he finished the final touches on the recumbent flesh and spirit and at last opened the door and, not literally, no, but in some metaphoric sense, asked them to hoist him on their shoulders a last time.
And in silence watched as Phipps called across the old battlefield and beyond, saying the tomb was not his place; arise.
And Lincoln, deep in his cool Springfield marbled keep, turned in his slumbers and dreamed himself awake.
And rose up.
And spoke.
A phone rang.
Bayes jerked.
The memories fell away.
The theater phone on one far stage wall buzzed.
Oh, God, he thought, and ran to lift the phone.
“Bayes? This is Phipps. Buck just called and told me to get over there! Said something about Lincoln—”
“No,” said Bayes. “You know Buck. Must have called from the nearest bar. I’m here in the theater. Everything’s fine. One of the generator’s acted up. We just finished repairs—”
“He’s all right, then?”
“He’s great.” He could not take his eyes off the slumped body. Oh Christ. Oh God. Absurd.
“I—I’m coming over.”
“No, don’t!”
“Jesus, why are you shouting?”
Bayes bit his tongue, took a deep breath, shut his eyes so he could not see the thing in the chair and said, slowly:
“Phipps, I’m not shouting. There. The lights just came back on. I can’t keep the crowd waiting. I swear to you—”
“You’re lying.”
“Phipps!”
But Phipps had hung up.
Ten minutes, thought Bayes wildly, oh God, he’ll be here in ten minutes. Ten minutes before the man who brought Lincoln out of the grave meets the man who put him back in it . . .
He moved. A mad impulse made him wish to run backstage, start the tapes, see how much of the fallen creature would motivate, which limbs jerk, which lie numb—more madness. Time for that tomorrow.
There was only time now for the mystery.
And the mystery was enclosed in the man who sat in the third seat over in the last row back from the stage.
The assassin—he was an assassin, wasn’t he? The assassin, what did he look like?
He had seen his face, some few moments ago, hadn’t he? And wasn’t it a face from an old, a familiar, a faded and put-away daguerreotype? Was there a full mustache? Were there dark and arrogant eyes?
Slowly Bayes stepped down from the stage. Slowly he moved up the aisle and stopped, looking in at that man with his head bent into clutching fingers.
Bayes inhaled then slowly exhaled a question in two words:
“Mr. . . . Booth?”
The strange faraway man stiffened, then shuddered and let forth a terrible whisper:
“Yes . . .”
Bayes waited. Then he dared ask:
“Mr. . . . John Wilkes Booth?”
To this the assassin laughed quietly. The laugh faded into a kind of dry croak.
“Norman Llewellyn Booth. Only the last name is . . . the same.”
Thank God, thought Bayes. I couldn’t have stood the other.
Bayes
