This clubfooted boy was the man who now stood in the Ohio sun beside the hollow iron sphere he had forged and hammered together himself. The rainmaker minister and his half-Indian bride were long dead, and Hephaestus had been left with their crumbling ruin of rabbit-weed farm on the outskirts of Zanesville, overlooking the Licking River. Half brother Micah was believed to be a Texas Ranger who had taken a Comanche wife, but Hephaestus had not heard from him in years. His family now consisted of his wife, Rapture, and their son, Lloyd, and they were such a blessing to him that he thought of little else-save his inventions.
Unfortunately, he was afflicted with that American misconception that the world was in constant, dire need of a better mousetrap, and that he was just the man for the job. He had, in fact, invented several different kinds of rodent traps (over fifty at the time), as well as a series of wind-driven bird frighteners, an automatic fishhook, a foolproof tree straightener, a hand-operated drum-cylinder motion-picture machine (which had been dismantled by the local church matrons because he had made the tactical error of demonstrating the capability with some rather bold Parisian postcards that a man in a marmot hat had sold him in Cleveland), a flyswatter that could also be used for toasting bread, as well as a wide range of outside-the-box ideas for things like disposable dentures and the creation of a pigeon-winged federal postal system.
The mania had started innocently enough, as such things often do, when he was still a wet-behind-the-ears young boy and his father had come home wounded from fighting in Benoni Pierce’s Light Horse Company at the Lakes in the War of 1812. Laid up as he was, the old man could not go fox hunting in the Moxahala Hills, which had been his great passion, and so was forced to sell his beloved hunting dogs-or would have been forced to had not the young Hephaestus hit upon the idea of using the dogs to run a drum treadmill to power the drill for gun boring. Gunsmithing became the family’s primary source of income until the father died of pneumonia.
Now, years later, the sphere was by far Hephaestus’s most ambitious undertaking. It had exhausted all his resources as well as his family’s finances and patience. Yet he was intensely proud of it, although he knew there was still much work to be done-and so little time. Time was the problem, for the sphere was not simply a hollow iron ball. Oh, no. It was meant to be a refuge, a shelter, an ark-the Time Ark, he called it, or, in sour mash-fueled moments, the Counterchronosphere.
Although not a full practicing Christian, he had become influenced by William Miller, the numerically minded New York State farmer who had worked out that the world was soon going to end or that Christ would return, depending on your point of view. Miller, who based his theory on the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, supported by calculations from Ezekiel and Numbers, had taken to sermonizing and lecturing at camp meetings back in 1831, and had since become a national and indeed international celebrity, with several newspapers devoted to spreading the word of imminent advent and hopeful paradise for the worthy.
Believing firmly in mathematics and partially in the Good Book-and being superstitious about his wife’s name and undecided about the question of “worthiness,” Hephaestus had become a default Millerite-and a very worried one at that. After all, a comet had been spotted in recent times, and just the year before a dairy farmer in Gnadenhutten had found a cow pie in the shape of the Virgin Mary. Clearly, the world was working up to something decisive. So Hephaestus had turned the bulk of his attention to the problem of how to escape time and so shield his loved ones from doomsday.
Many exceptional minds and more than a few competent engineers would have been daunted by such a challenge. But not the Sitturd patriarch. When not hobbling between the forge and the distillery shed, he pored over both engineering pamphlets and Scripture, devotional tomes and Mechanics Hall literature-anything and everything he could get his hands and mind on to help answer the eschatological call.
However, with the revised countdown on to the Lord’s Return (the original Miller prediction had put it in 1843) Hephaestus was forced to admit that the technical issues were still troubling. In the evenings when he sat watching the fireflies blinking in the pea patch-his wife, Rapture, brewing some extract of wolf mint, dressing buckskins, or working at her spinning wheel; his son, Lloyd, cataloguing his trilobites or dreaming of his twin sister, Lodema, who had died at birth-doubts would overcome Hephaestus. It was when these doubts took their darkest form that the sphere grew hopelessly heavy. Gleaming in the sunshine now, it appeared to him to be cumbersome beyond all description-ridiculous-so that all his reckonings, all his research, shone back in mockery from the surface of the hot metal.
“It needs to move,” a boy’s voice announced. “Time is a vibration. So the Ark must vibrate in time with Time-to become transparent.”
As remarkable as it may seem, the speaker was none other than his five-year-old son, Lloyd, and as the boy spoke a wishbone and paper airship wafted around the door of the barn. Powered by miniature spindlewood propellers and guided by rudder wings of dried bluegill fins, the delicate machine floated above the goat pasture, then around the barn, and finally over the peppergrass that surrounded their corncrib house, landing intact just beside the man’s mangled foot. Hephaestus looked at the airship in dismay and then over at Lloyd, the craft’s designer and fabricator, knowing that the ingenious trinket had been constructed in but a matter of minutes.
The child’s inventive life had begun in the cradle (or so it seemed to Hephaestus). In addition to a hyper-accelerated acquisition of language skills, although small physically, the boy’s manual dexterity was unnaturally adept while he was still theoretically confined to the old kindling scuttle that had been converted into his bassinet. His curiosity was inexhaustible, and by the time most children are just beginning to make sense of a rattle and how to move from all fours to wobbly legs, young Lloyd had already demonstrated an almost disturbing grasp of the principles of basic machines: the lever, the wheel, the pulley, the inclined plane, and the screw-even the mysterious utility of gears.
Inclined to wander, as well as to disassemble and reassemble anything his little hands touched, not long after his second birthday it had become necessary to remove him from the house and install him in his own dedicated section of the family barn, where Hephaestus kept his tools and maintained his blacksmith’s forge.
Here the father had designed a kind of labyrinth to keep the boy’s insatiable sense of experimentation occupied (and also to keep him somewhat protected from the prying eyes of visiting neighbors, whose dry, thick Zanesville tongues took to wagging whenever anything, let alone anyone, out of the ordinary crossed their paths). This combination of protective and distractive measures proved to have remarkable consequences.
What to other parents might have seemed a rather dangerous obstacle course of materials of various kinds (the debris of Hephaestus’s own inventions, miscellaneous bits of scrap metal and lumber, spare tools, and the like) provided yet more spark to the boy’s intellect and hunger for creation. To the blacksmith’s astonishment, the miniature minotaur embraced the labyrinth and began turning it into a working machine of its own unique kind, so that he was soon in no sense constrained by it but using it in the prosecution of new discovery and manufacture.