TWICE IN TIME

CHAPTER XII The New Reflector

Even if I could, I do not think I would get down exact details of a machine which is so apt to cause trouble as the one which Guaracco had retrieved in theory from the waste places of my mind. The fact is, he kept the plans to himself, and questioned me only now and then, sometimes hypnotizing me for the questions, sometimes not. And there were bits of science which even he could not digest.

"These exact measurements of the steel frame parts, how can we achieve them?" he would ask. "You tell me, in your sleep, of micrometers, yet how can we design a micrometer? How, even knowing its principle, can we make it without proper tools? How was the first micrometer made?"

Automatic lathes, alloy charts, and welding torches were equally unobtainable. Guaracco did the next best thing. He sought out a master swordsmith and in some adroit way—I think his witch-cult helped him—bound the fellow to his service by terror and awe. This craftsman, with all his tools and materials, he transported to the country estate, and there set him to work painstakingly shaping the metal skeleton of the reflector mechanism.

Electrical engineering Guaracco learned from the ground up. Here, once again, I must needs be hypnotized and my subconscious mind probed. My partner began with sticks of sealing wax and glass rods, rubbing them with fur or silk, and studying the effects of the static charges. From that he progressed to what I was able to remember as a Leyden jar, contrived by his own cunning hands after several unsuccessful trials. Finally came simple batteries, but here he kept back from me the knowledge he had mined from my own inhibited memory. He refused to tell the acids and metals involved.

When I insisted, interruption came—a messenger from Lorenzo, asking how I progressed with the flying machine.

"You reminded him," I accused Guaracco in private.

"How ungrateful you are, Leo!" He snickered unabashedly, fingering his red beard. "Go to Florence and make your report. I shall work here in our laboratory, and promise you that I will have progress to show when you return."

To Florence, perforce, I went. Lorenzo received me with some impatience, in his frescoed audience chamber at the palace.

"Well, young sir, what of the wings you were making?" he demanded. "I gave you and Guaracco money for your experiments, and it is high time you made me some return."

I exhibited my small models, all that I had to show since the breaking of my first wings. He was interested, but not completely satisfied, and I regretted having mentioned aviation to him. Yet, I knew, men could fly. I remembered seeing them, in that age whence I came and which itself was yet to come—men flying singly or in parties with the aid of great spread-pinioned contrivances.

Meanwhile, Lorenzo was giving me orders.

"I shall see this device take shape under my own eyes. At my villa in Fiesole is a great guest house. Go you thither, set up your shop, and have sent to you all that you need. Work where I can watch."

I bowed acceptance, and went to Fiesole. There messengers brought me the remains of my wings and rudder, also more leather, silk and staves, while Lisa came at my urgent plea to help with the sewing. She made a considerable impression on the various guests who thronged Lorenzo's villa. Botticelli wanted to paint her, Poliziano wrote six sonnets about her, Giuliano spoke so courtly to her that Simonetta's eyes took on a green glow, and to a certain captain of mercenaries, a Spaniard named Hernando Villareal, I was forced to voice a warning. * * *

"The young lady is working on my machine," I told him, "at my wish and under my protection. She does not welcome your pressing attentions."

"By God's blood," he sneered. We were walking in a grove of poplars, to which I had drawn him for privacy. "I think, Ser Leo, that it is you who find the situation unwelcome."

"I do not like it either, if that will content you."

He caressed his long moustache of black silk. "Now nay, it does not content me a whit. I shall say to her what I please, whenever I please."

"Few words are best," I made reply. "If you speak to her again, I shall deprive your company of its captain." And I turned and walked away.

He was in a towering rage, and made haste in search of a friend to bear me a formal defiance. The first he met was Giuliano, who had not forgotten the cudgeling I had given him, and the friendship he had sworn. Giuliano informed the Spaniard that I was the most dangerous antagonist in Christendom, in whose hands a wand was worse than a sword, and a sword itself a finger of Fate. Whereat Captain Hernando Villareal left Fiesole the same day, indeed left Florence, and I never heard speak of him again.

When my wings were completely repaired and improved, I made a second attempt, springing from the eaves of the guest house while Lorenzo and his friends watched. Again I failed badly, tumbling aslant through the air, but this time I managed to land upright on my feet, only spraining my ankle. My wings and other harness remained undamaged, and I was not distressed by Guaracco's ironic laughter.

"I count myself lucky," I said, and Giuliano ran out to support my limping steps. "My ankle will mend of itself. But my wings, being broken, would take much more labor and time."

"You have not a complete loss of labor to show," Lorenzo was considerate enough to say. "You came to ground a good ten paces beyond the house, farther than you might have leaped unaided."

"And had you leaped without wings you would have had worse hurt than your ankle," added Giuliano, though he had first disputed my theory of man's ability to fly. "For those two moments you were above ground, methought I saw your fabric hold you aloft. It broke your fall, at least."

This encouragement heartened me. "I shall yet succeed," I made bold to say, while a physician plucked the shoe from my injured foot. "It is not the fault of my theory, nor the weakness of my arms. I must learn, as a fledgling bird learns."

But my sprained ankle kept me for days at Fiesole, where I could practice no art save lute playing and repartee among those silken courtiers. Lisa insisted on remaining with me, most prettily concerned over my injury. After a day or so Guaracco appeared with some of his healing salves, to care for me with the apparent solicitude of a kinsman, to bow and utter compliments to the ladies, to discuss poetry with Poliziano, weapons with Giuliano, science and government with Lorenzo.

"I submit that my young Cousin Leo makes progress with his flying," he told the company. "Who can hold these first failures against him? Can he learn as a science, in a few days, the behavior that has been a born instinct of birds since the Creation?" * * *

With more such talk, Guaracco helped to convince Lorenzo that I should continue my labors in the field of aviation. I came to realize that it was to Guaracco's interest that I do so. He wanted me to stay out of his way. He was carefully arranging that I not re-learn too much of the science I remembered only when in a trance.

The rest of that summer I was able to put off a third experiment with my wings—not that I did not want to fly, but that I dreaded failing and falling again before the eyes of my patron. During the winter I achieved several substitute offerings. These included a plan for draining some nearby swamps, which Lorenzo approved but did not act upon at once; a brief written outline of a new system of sword play for the palace guardsmen, which Lorenzo in high good humor caused me to demonstrate upon two very surprised and glum fencing-masters; and a suggestion, rather vague, about the use and purpose of antiseptics, at which Lorenzo laughed and which I could not demonstrate at all.

I made several attempts at fashioning both a microscope and a telescope, but I did not understand the accurate grinding of lenses, and nobody was skillful enough to show me. Also, even when I secured from Andrea Verrocchio's spectacle maker a pair of indifferent lenses that would serve, I could not bring them into proper relationship in a tube.

One thing I remembered well from my century, or rather the one before it, was Mark Twain's pleasant novel about the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. I was failing signally to duplicate the exploits of that hard-headed and blithe hero. Perhaps the Yankee, being an adroit and impassioned mechanic, knew the principles of all things from the ground up.

My science, first of all, had been sketchy and too derived. Second, I had been too interested in art, so that my less loved studies in chemistry, engineering, and physics had been shoved too far back in that now clouded brain of mine. Without Guaracco's hypnotism, hardly anything of real complex practicality could be evoked. And with Guaracco's hypnotism, I was unable to see or appreciate the very things I was caused to remember.

Poor Andrea Verrocchio, who had hoped for so much from my drawing, dared to shake his untidy head over these scientific gropings of mine.

"His Magnificence will ruin a master painter to make a convenient philosopher," he mourned. And it was true that I had little or no opportunity that winter to paint the picture I had once visioned as my footprint in the sands of Renaissance time.

As for the time reflector, which Guaracco worked on with phenomenal energy and understanding, it took form and power as the cold weather passed us by. Among the things it lacked was a piece of alum large enough to make a lens, but the most notable alum mines of our knowledge were not far away— fifty miles to the southwest in the ancient town of Vofierra.

At that time, however, the Volterrans chose to refuse any trade or tribute to Lorenzo; even to defy him. It began to look as if the only alum we could get must be secured by theft or force.