(no subject)

[gone_byebye]

September 1st, 2004
Mid-Afternoon
14 North Moore Street, Manhattan

A door opened in the side of the old Hook and Ladder No. 8 building, and two men stepped out. "Looks like home," Ray said, looking up with a slightly disgruntled expression at the huge ad for Keymaster Cologne painted on the side of a nearby building. "Welcome to New York City, sir. Pardon the smell- while we do have a police stable across the street from us, most of what's hitting your nostrils right now is the wonderful scent of burning petroleum, which we use to power our primary means of transportation. If you'll just step right this way..."

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"Leonardo da Vinci?" Ray guesses. "Yeah. The inventor owed a lot to his designs. His ideas for a device that would fly by flapping its wings as a bird does didn't work out nearly so well. Humans haven't got chest muscles big enough to flap wings that could lift them. We had to come up with engines to do that."

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"One cannot be a prophet all the time," Prospero says with a chuckle.

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"Darn right. The world'd be a pretty boring place if everything was foreshadowed."

Ray glances across the street, at the parking lot and the police stables, and then looked back over his shoulder. "Was there anything else you wanted to see out here, or would you like to go inside? The city'll still be here when we're done."

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Prospero shakes his head. "As you say, the city is not Lyonesse, to go hither and thither at the approach of a good, virtuous man. Shall we away to your laboratorium?"

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"Right this way, sir, right this way."

They stand in the alley between the firehouse and the nearest building, or at least at the very mouth of it. Ray leads Prospero over to the smaller door within the main door, pausing briefly to touch the memorial plaque that was part of the building when they bought it.

Then he shrugs a little, opens the door, and holds it for Prospero before going through himself. There's room; Ecto-1 isn't nearly big enough to take up as much space as the old hook and ladder trucks once did, though she does sit squarely in the middle of that open area.

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Assuming that touching the plaque is custom, Prospero follows suit, then pauses to read the inscription. Quietly, he says, "A former colleague of yours?"

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"No," Ray says. "But this building was where he was based. The city closed down this station a few years after he died, and it stood vacant for a long time. We bought it from them and left the old markings up- there's a message on the back wall from the fire-captain to his men, a sign on one of the doors about how to report a fire if the company's out, and this. When you work with angry ghosts, it's always a good idea to show respect for the potentially benevolent dead."

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Prospero smiles. It's good to see history accorded proper respect. "Prudence has ever been my favorite virtue," he says, then: "Ser Stantz, I trust you'll be able to explain...this."

Three guesses as to what he's talking about, and unless that guess involves something with four wheels, red spoiler fins and a cheery white ghost stamped out on its side, it probably isn't right.

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Ah, yes, yes indeed... Ray's face lights up with the sort of smile one sees in a breeder of racehorses bringing forth a favored foal. "This," he says, laying a hand on the tailfin fondly, "is my primary vehicle, my steed of choice. We call her Ecto-1, or just Ecto, for short. She's a horseless carriage, like the ones outside. Runs on burning petroleum, the fires tempered and controlled by chemically generated electricity. She'll carry up to six people and their packs comfortably, up to eight or nine in cramped conditions if absolutely necessary. I bought her from a man who was going to have her taken apart for scrap, and I've replaced virtually every single piece of her since that time. Would you like to see the engine?"

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"By certes, yes," Prospero says, obviously intrigued. He's not a, how shall we say, mechanically-minded sort of person, but...a monstrous-large cart such as this, powered by a chemical reaction of the sort as yet unaccounted for by his alchemy? The old man might as well be a schoolboy on his first school field trip, for the excitement in his eyes.

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And few fathers indeed could be more proud of their offspring than Ray is of his baby mechanical girl.

"Okay, over here," he says, leading the older man around to the front of the car. "It's under here- it's going to be immensely complicated on first sight, but don't worry. Everything under this hood-" He raps it with one knuckle. "-is here for a purpose."

He slides his fingers under the front edge of the hood and feels for the latch. Eventually, something clicks, and he lifts the hood up and out of the way. He pauses to prop it open before wiping his hands on his uniform's trousers and turning to Prospero. "Want me to get some more light, or are you all right with what we've got?"

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"Allow me," he says. Prospero cups one hand and concentrates--

--and nothing happens.

He frowns. Clearly, an unexpected outlier.

His eyebrows draw together as he focuses. At some length, some little light pools in his palm, casting the engine block in a golden tint.

"The lighting of that most august celestial orb, rotating high in the sky above, should not have been so difficult as that was," he says, more to himself than to Ray. "Perhaps there is more bedevilment at play than we'd previously anticipated."

He shakes his head, affixes the light to the hood of the car, then gestures for Ray to continue.

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Ray watches with patent fascination, both failure and success alike. "One of these days I'm going to break down and ask you to show me how to do that," he mutters. "Anyway. Here..." He touches the great black circular thing in the middle, looking around and finding a wrench with which to remove it. (His mun has no experience under the hoods of old cars and is going off this photo of a '67 hearse's engine under the hood.) "This is the air filter, but if I take this out of the way, the engine proper lies underneath it. Gasoline- that's the modern formulation of petroleum- gets fed into the engine from its tanks based on how hard I press on a pedal when I'm sitting behind the driver's wheel. That opens a valve and the gas comes flowing in, getting sprayed into these parts here..."

From there he goes on to carefully explain as much of the workings of an old V-8 gasoline engine as he can to Prospero, but eventually he stops, and works at it again with the wrench. "Here," he says at last, pulling a part free. "I need to replace these anyway, but this- this is a spark plug. The electrical energies generated by the car's chemical battery flow in through wires that connect to this end, and force a spark- just like one you'd get from amber- to jump across the gap on this end. Since the end with the spark is held in the presence of the vaporized gasoline, the gas ignites, forcing the piston to move out of the way..."

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And Prospero's curiosity gets the better of him. He takes the sparkplug, sets it to balancing upon one finger, then taps its other end. It closes a circuit, and soon the hairs on the back of Prospero's hand rise. "Marvelous. It's powered, then, by a series of circuits, the closure of which initiates combustion?"

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"Got it in one, sir. The circuit that has to be closed to start the car relies on a key that gets inserted by the driver, but ultimately when they're all properly closed- spark, vapor, combustion, and there we go."

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"Interesting, interesting...elementary mechanics, really. For want of a sufficient motive impulse, perhaps easily supplied in my day by globes of St. Elmo's fire, all the citizens of my Milan could have been...yes...yes..." Prospero shakes his head and grins, then. "Ahh, but of course, even if I were to disseminate such technologies to the universities of my day, it would never have come to pass that my city, in my time, were filled with such devices as this, no? Ere otherwise, you would already have known about as much."

Temporal mechanics. They're a real bitch, aren't they?

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"Well, yeah," Ray says. "But there are practical difficulties to disseminating this kind of thing in your time, anyway. The fuel it runs on isn't exactly easily come by in most of Europe; you'd have to fight your way through some of the worst territory on the continent to win any of the lands it could be mined from. And then you'd have to refine it, distribute it, and store it until it was needed- not to mention what you'd have to do to get your smiths to make these machines, without bringing in the kinds of metal errors that would cause explosions or worse. It took us a very long time to get as far as making a machine like this." He rests a hand fondly on Ecto's fender. "So unless you're amazingly stubborn, it looks as if simple practicality protects the time stream as much as anything else."

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"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate," Prospero quotes; plurality should not be considered without necessary. "As you say, then, it would seem that simplicity dictates the circumstances which would facilitate the advance of such particulars as this are, indeed, beyond the ken of my time--as perhaps it well should be." A chuckle. "We are scientists, Ser Stantz, are we not? We work with what is to produce what might be, and not the other way around."

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Ray nods; though his French, as he once said, is nonexistent, he'd be a piss-poor scholar if he didn't have a thorough grounding in Latin. "When I was a boy of... oh, seven years, I think... my teacher asked me to consider what one invention or discovery I'd most want to bring to the people of my country's western frontier a hundred and fifty years ago," he says. "It's really amazing how very much any single invention depends on all the inventions that came before it. The Great Chain of Being isn't a hierarchy so much as a Jacob's ladder of what we know and how we get to know other things..."

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Prospero arches an eyebrow, a good-natured smile on his face. "Indeed? You surprise me, ser; endorsement of that particular cosmology did not seem to be, ahh, how shall I put it, forthcoming, from a thinker of your pedigree. Utility as qualification for distinction does seem to be complementary to natural progressions of advancement."

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"Old concepts do new jobs," Ray says. "Nature isn't a ladder, she's a web- everything relates to everything else, and no one part is necessarily higher or more sophisticated in every situation than any other. Ideas, now, that's another story. Nature doesn't progress- she moves in one direction or another as events take her- but ideas? Those do. So the ladder analogy still holds."

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Prospero looks out a window, through which a sliver of blue sky might be seen. "Heh. Whether it be wings of sorceror's will or scientist's steel, the dream of flight remains."

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"That it does." Ray smiles a bit. "Some things call too strongly for us ever to give up on-"

He leaves the rest of the sentence unsaid, holding up a hand. "I think someone's coming. Ready to meet the natives?"

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"By all means." Prospero tries to discreetly wipe off some of the motor oil that's stained the sleeves of his pullover. Won't do to make a disheveled introduction, after all.

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Even disheveled, Prospero is still something of a step up from quite a lot of the people who come to visit the Ghostbusters. Ray nonetheless offered him a damp cloth- a towelette ripped from a small packet- just in case. "Guys?" he called out. "It's me..."

"Good, Ray, you're back." The voice came from above- very definitely from above.

"Sure am," Ray said, looking up towards the ceiling. A long, brass-plated pole ran from floor to ceiling and disappeared into a hole from whence the other's voice came. "And I brought company."

"I'll be right down."



A moment later, the screeling sound of cloth and flesh in friction with metal rang out, and a tall, dark-haired man dropped down the pole's length. He wore subdued clothes by the standards of the people outside- a black T-shirt, a pair of olive trousers, and ordinary wire-rimmed spectacles. When he straightened, he stood a good hand or so taller than Ray.

"This is who we're here to see," Ray whispered to Prospero before stepping forward with a grin. "Egon!" he said in a more normal tone. "Boy, am I glad you're home- we have some questions for you."

"We?" Egon turned to examine Prospero, one eyebrow just starting to hint that it might possibly consider arching sometime soon. Ray nodded.

"Yep. We. This, my friend, is His Grace Prospero, that right duke of Milan, philosopher, scholar, and magus."

The eyebrow went up.

"And this, sir, is my longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Egon Spengler, parapsychologist, nuclear physicist, and fellow Ghostbuster."