CHUDSTORIES: AHEAD OF HIS TIME

(From the "Isolation" Creature Features)

“A crash? What on Earth caused us to crash?”

This was the question that rattled out of Eli Jacobson’s head as he looked around the wreckage of his space flyer.

He began by calculating and recalculating the weight of the flyer, his own body weight (which he allowed for 5 pounds either way depending on what the Widow Miller had laid out for Sunday dinner), the amount of food he had brought, the plants, the automatons, the gravit-o-mation machine...

The gravit-o-mation machine.

Eli raced back to the machine that two of his automatons were gleefully pedaling on in order to keep the flyer’s gravity the same as that on Earth. Eli grimaced when he looked at the smiling man-sized robots whose one task was to pedal this machine, but who couldn’t even remind him to double-check the weight.

You see, the problem was that Eli’s original gravit-o-mation machine would not work in the tests he performed in his Connecticut barn. He had traveled all the way to New York City in search of a new property that might settle this problem and he finally found it in the seediest part of Five Points, in between a pair of opium dens, where a wizened old Chinaman had sold him a ten pounds of a miraculous metal that fit Eli’s needs completely.

Unfortunately, the Chinaman, so used to cheating his customers, had cheated himself when it came to selling the metal to this particular Yankee wing-ding and had given him twelve pounds.

So now, as Eli found this out for himself, he looked out the window of his flyer at the vast landscape of the Moon and realized that he might well be in serious trouble.

1896 was a strange year to be thinking about space travel, especially for a strapping man in his late thirties who had, for most of his life, only known the provincial life of a small town apothecary. When Eli Jacobson was a child, his father was already well into his “babbling idiot” stage following the War which had his only son running to fetch new and unusual medicines for his father on a weekly basis. The town’s pharmacist, a snake-oil salesman who had gone into legitimate business, had doled out a new “miracle cure” to the Jacobson family for years, most of which were simple candy-flavored elixirs with issuances of lead, copper, and other ridiculous compounds that sped Eli’s father to an early grave.

Eli didn’t know this, of course, and when his rich Uncle Horace made the decision for him that he would be sent to school to learn the ways of medicines and bone-setting, that suited Eli just fine.

In his studies, however, Eli found out more about the powers of metal than any student or inventor before him. When he was only 19 years old, Eli tried his first experiment in space flight, rocketing a small Yorkshire Terrier a good thousand feet in the air before the small craft exploded. Canine sidekick notwithstanding, Eli recorded his first success in his journal that day.

This continued for years and though Eli never succeeded in his original plan – to provide a way that rural cartographers could map the land better by having a bird’s eye view (albeit for only a matter of seconds) – he now set his sites higher- the Moon!

Eli spent years honing the design of his space flyer. Yes, there were the occasional interludes of love where Eli’s urges got the better of him and he tried to woo any number of the local, young unwed ladies, but the moment he told them about his space flyer, he was laughed at and mocked, despite an early reputation for being a handsome flatterer. Now, he was seen as being a too-young addled eccentric.

Yet people continued to buy their medicines from him. Something Eli puzzled about for years.

“Sir Isaac Newton arrived at his own grave chastity intact,” said Eli to one of his automatons as he carved it, his only real companionship. “What’s good enough for Newton is good enough for me.”

Eli knew that when he finally went up in his space flyer, there would be no turning back. He would be the laughing stock of the entire county if he failed and so he planned a launch for the 4th of July, 1896.

The Fourth of July in 1896 was a special time, marking the 120th anniversary of the signing of the declaration of independence, but also a time when the country (Connecticut included) looked forward to the twentieth century and away from the horrors of war and Reconstruction that had crippled the nation’s forward-thinking attitude.

In Eli’s small Connecticut hamlet, a great outdoor dance was held with musicians from many counties brought in by a wealthy landowner (who was looking to increase his political stranglehold on the ridiculously uninterested farmers) and everyone in town attended.

Except Eli. He had packed up the wooden cabinets of his space flyer with enough food to last years if necessary and had finally perfected the oxygen-making device he dubbed the Jacobson Oxygenator Machination Defibrilating Device – the name which he painted in red in a merry script along the side.

When night fell, Eli positioned his space flyer aimed directly at the Moon. He had calculated that the trip would last a told of twenty minutes and soon he would find himself having tea with the man in the moon himself.

Eli chuckled to himself. There were those who believed people lived on the Moon and were watching them just as they watched the stars. Eli knew that this was completely untrue – for the next twenty minutes.

A simple folk, the townspeople of Eli’s city thought that God had returned and the Rapture was upon them when they heard the explosion that signaled Eli’s launch into the Heavens. Some began praying, others began sinning, and one of the musicians, who believed in the healing powers of voodoo, suggested to the fire department that they might see if the ammunition shed behind the police department had blown up. <![endif]>

But now, Eli was stuck on the Moon.

This fact would no doubt depress a lesser man, but Eli, a man of industry who had finally realized his greatest dream, let depression get him down for all of forty-five seconds. No, Eli put on his space suit, a design of his own that he had convinced the tailor he needed to do a bit of underwater shipwreck exploring, and proceeded to walk outside the flyer and onto the Moon.

What really struck Eli first about the Moon was the silence. Eli stood for about ten minutes flat listening for anything and hearing nothing before cursing himself for wasting ten dollars on a fine fabric that covered the ear part of his helmet in order that he could hear the music on the Moon’s winds. With no music to be heard, the fabric only allowed the cold in which Eli cursed and cursed again (in further outing, Eli would wear earmuffs fashioned from the leather straps he had used to rope in the spare automatons in case one of the others broke down or came alive and went mad with “moon fever” as suggested by one of the quirkier fantasy fiction writers of the day – all of whom Eli dismissed readily).

It had been about 50-50 to Eli whether or not plants would be able to grow on the Moon. Eli had brought a few already growing pumpkin vines with him in hopes of getting them to grow, but the effort was fruitless (pardon the pun). Eli tried again with apple seeds, grape vines, a small oak tree, a dogwood, a birch, a Virginia creeper, and even hemp, but nothing seemed to grow. Eli had been sure that the hemp would at least take root, but he was proved wrong.

That’s when Eli began to realize that he would need to get the attention of someone back on Earth to build a space flyer such as his to bring him more food. Eli had planned for a return flight, but had also considered staying on the Moon for the rest of his life recording his observations (hence the 75 empty, bound journals locked up near the spare automatons). The crash had effectively made the decision for him, but the harsh inability for anything to grow on the Moon now made that a bit of a danger.

Eli went through his flyer’s stores and counted up the tins of beef and packed flour that he had brought to see how long he might actually have. He knew that if he was very careful, he had brought enough plants and soil to turn his ship into a little greenhouse and continue to subsist on a rigidly vegetarian diet for many years indeed.

No need for that, he thought triumphantly as he unpacked his greatest invention.

Eli had invented the wireless telegraph as a money-saving device at one point. At the apothecary, it was very useful for him to have a telegraph alongside his telephone as he never knew which one would be used by the place he wanted to send away for his medicines or metals to. Because the local townspeople would feel a small-town apothecary would be “putting on airs” by having both a telegraph and a telephone in his own business, he solved the problem by hiding the old telegraph and divining his own machine that needed no tell-tale wires running into his shop. No one ever suspected a thing, though Eli continued to use the telegraph just as often as the telephone.

And now he would put it to the ultimate test. Eli knew that it would take a lot of time to walk someone through the building of a rescue space flyer, but he thought that even the government might be interested in how he, a Yankee pharmacist, was able to invent such a potent device. He also knew that patience would be a virtue in the attempts at communication.

Everyone in Birch Squire, Connecticut remembered the day that the first telegraph message from Eli Jacobson claiming that he was on the Moon appeared at the mercantile. It was such an odd thing for the apothecary, who was regarded by many to be a vain stuffed-shirt who didn’t attend society functions and preferred the company of his workshop to the company of the local pub patrons, to play such a public prank and a few swore that they would let him know just that at church on Sunday.

A couple of local boys who thought that Eli was more than likely the most intelligent man they’d ever met who did, on occasion, regale them with tales of the mysterious and unexplained, ran over to the apothecary only to find that it was closed. They went to the Widow Miller’s boarding house and found out that Eli hadn’t been there for weeks, though the Widow had been paid many, many months in advance and had been telling callers that Eli had left word for them to use the apothecary in North Brook as he was away on business.

The Widow Miller was short with the boys, however, because she still felt it was them – who she had seen spending time with her missing boarder – who had scorched out a radius of ten feet out by the barn where Eli had done his “experimentin.’” The scorched ground had set a number of small fires that were easily put out, but the crater that had been blown in the center of the circle was so deep that the widow felt the boys must’ve been playing with dynamite.

But Eli never returned from wherever he had gone. The owner of the mercantile, a Mr. Hiram Johnson, tried to discreetly contact Eli back, but as his telegraph was constrained by wires, no message ever made it to the man on the moon. Hiram spent days on end trying to figure out the cryptic messages from Eli that reported his status on the Moon, how he was able to subsist on the plants he was growing in his space flyer, but also his call for another space flyer to be built in order to join him there.

Years went by and the telegraph messages became more and more spaced apart. Instead of once a day, they became once a week and finally, once a month. Hiram Johnson was convinced after three years that Eli Jacobson really was on the moon. Hiram’s son, Nicholas, knew that Hiram’s public acceptance of the impossible would only hurt the business of the mercantile, began advertising the telegraph messages as someone might market a mysterious cave or the recovered skeleton of a giant. Farmers flocked in from all over the state to read the mysterious messages from the telegraph and paid even more to be there at the first of the month when a new message would come across the wire.

After the dawn of the new century, the telegraph messages continued, but now they would only come once a year. At first, it was treated like groundhog’s day and the “message from the moon” was decrypted to say something about the weather or how the crops would be that year. Politicians stumped on the messages and even one swell, in 1908, used a telegraph machine at a local train station to fool the locals into believing that the Man on the Moon was supporting his campaign.

After Hiram Johnson died in 1912, the messages became less important, but some people, who had grown up knowing about the mysterious lines sent to them by the Man on the Moon, kept the telegraph wire alive and even published a compendium of all the known messages up to that point. The book sold well, incredibly well, but was picked up and reprinted by so many unscrupulous printers that the town didn’t see much money from the sale of the book after everyone in the three neighboring counties had bought a copy.

But tourism increased as the legend of the telegraph continued. People came from far and wide and even a troop of French scientists came from Paris to determine the truth of the telegraph. After reading the message of 1914, they dismissed it as a hoax and left in a huff.

The world’s attention turned to World War I and even though the faithful continued their watch of the telegraph during the war years, some said that it was time for the prank to be over and preachers called from the pulpits for the perpetuator of the hoax to cease their activity out of sensitivity to the war. But, the messages continued.

In 1927, the message didn’t come. Fifteen members of the local Society of the Man on the Moon were gathered around and nothing came. The following year, Twenty-eight members waited and there was no message for 1928, either. In 1929, the last gathering of the Society of the Man on the Moon took place on the usual date – Eli Jacobson’s birthday, a fact that none of them had any clue about – but again, nothing. The Depression hit hard that year and the following year and no one cared one little whit about the telegraph as they were concerned with more pressing matters.

A famous magician in the late 70’s wrote a book in which he recorded famous hoaxes and tricks perpetuated throughout the past two hundred years, specifically those that were done in the rural areas of America to illustrate, in his opinion, the beliefs and hopes of the frontier Americans. His summation of the “Connecticut Moon Man Hoax” was that it was started as a plot by Hiram Johnson and his son to increase business and was carried on by a small society of believers who were conned into thinking it was something more. This oh-so-self-important magician, who died onstage of a heart attack at the age of 46 due to his incredible girth, failed to mention the name Eli Jacobson once in his dismissal of the ghostly telegraph that some believed brought messages from the future down to those still trundling aimlessly in the past.