One minute your humming along, happy as a horsefly on a cowpie - one minute you're locomoting downhill with a full head of steam - your heart's annunciator registering "3000 Volta's," the next minute you're stricken down to zero, grimly disengaged - all foredetermined by the machinery of fate? - A machinery that was the worst kind of indentured servitude? Worse than sugar caning in the typhoid tropics of the asteroid belt, because there was no chance - none! - of escaping or rebelling, not even into an afterlife.

It was ironic, than, if that were true, to be fighting for Democracy and Progress, when all was set according to an Awful Plan, without freedom from that despotism, without escape. Like slaves, like machines, we obeyed the constitution of the Awful Deity as his Agents & Subjects no matter what flag we furled.

More particularly to the 2nd of May, 1846, it was ironic and confusing to me that if I hadn't stolen back my counterfeit Bad Luck Charm, Oscar Rutherford Weigart would not have been killed. He would not have straightened up in just such a manner so as to place his head in the path of nine pounds of iron falling at some two hundred miles an hour. Now, it just wasn't fair to pin that on me. It wasn't my fault, but all the same, it seemed awfully particular to be a random whim of war. Why did he die? Why was I spared? It was nobody's fault, but it wasn't fair; it was an awful trick. Could it have been that because he was a true believer, he was punished by God for being afraid of a humbug charm? Why wasn't I punished? Because I Doubted? It seemed that the God of Nature had made a very strange design when he rewarded the bad and punished the good; seemed to me, moreover, the design was set against both bad and good, that neither was really powerful enough to withstand the Universal Law of Secession, that Things Bust. That Things Bust was the center of the Awful Deity's design; that was how he made us Fear him so much. That was why folks always called themselves, "God-fearing," because God was so Awful. I didn't find much love and goodness in him who, for instance, let my father drown trying to save a girl who fell in the Rappahannok before I was a year old, so that I never even hardly got to meet him. I found some reason for fear, however, if God was just a despot, like old King George, but even more aristocratic, by which I mean fatter, uglier, and meaner. Even in theory, didn't seem right that a well-intentioned god should assign my fate without my constitutional rights upheld -

"No Assignation without Representation!"

"I want to be tried in Heaven by my own peers!"

"Down with Nabob Angels - give the Common Man wings!"

"Andy Jackson for President God!"

I didn't figure any god looking quite as awful as old King George, really. Maybe the devil did, though. I figured that the dits and dots and dashes of the stars was a kind of Morse message that there was some kind of Design, and some folks called that design god, some called it nature.

However, there seemed a Flaw in the Design - that flaw betwix the Law of Union and the Law of Secession.

The Law of Union is, as every good balloonist respects, as his business is defying gravity, is that Things Want To Stick Together. It's this law that keeps Things from Busting right away.

That Law of Union contradicted the Law of Secession, or Spontaneous Decay, that Things Don't Want to Stick Together, so that between the two, heavy parts settled down, light parts up, and things in general sought to disperse themselves according the thousandfold sundry vectors of their composite parts.

One Law was stronger than the other. It was the Law of Union. Everyone knew that; it was why Providence smiled upon my nation. Otherwise there'd be no reason for the Sun to revolve around the Earth. Professor Morse's theory was that magnetism accounted for that.

But it's also a fact that the Law of Secession used the Law of Union to bust things, like poor Oscar's mortal frame. It was the unifying urge of gravity that caused the piece of iron to tear his body apart. Seemed to me that this was a mistake somehow. It seemed like a flaw in the natural despotism of the Design. Seemed to me that the design itself was busted. Seemed to me like all this rationale of planets was tangled up half way between Deity and Machine. It was sure strange that the Earth was the only planet that the sun revolved around, while everything else - excepting our Moon, of course - revolved around the Sun. Seemed to me that there was no accounting for it, lest it be, as the preachers said, the power of Faith - but putting that in rational terms I supposed Faith had to be an electromagnetic power, like the madman said.

The E-M cannon draws Volts from its Galvinic caisson, concentrates a terrifying electric charge to a spark at the bowls, where the annihilator cap detonates, the air pressure shock of which usually succeeds in concentrating the energy into that strange phenomenon of nature familiar to seasoned balloon sailors called "ball-lightning", which is pushed down the electromagnetically coiled barrel with the exploding air, giving it its trajectory much like - although not as predictable - iron projectiles. Like iron, too, the cannon's ball- lightning has been known to bounce, roll, and even splinter like a shell; unlike iron, cannon ball-lightning can unpredictably disappear, and reappear if it cares to, and as likely bounce as pass through armor, and do seemingly irrational things like hit one man and kill all the men around him but not him. In fact, seemed to me that no one - not ever Professor Morse - really understood why it worked, even if they claimed to, and of course they did.

There was a madman, a Yankee preacher named Garrison, who warned that electromagnetism was the substance of faith; and that when we used the telegraph - even more when we used the electromagnetic cannon, both of which harnessed divine lightning for our national ambitions - we were bleeding off the electric link between us and our creator. But he was just a madman. Only a madman could say those awful words two or three years before - words I never could forget - that the Constitution was "a convenant with death and an agreement with hell." Boy did that get my anti- abolitionist dander in a lather. However, because he was a madman I forgave him, and even liked him just a bit. He kept the stuffed shirt nabobs and Wall Street swanks and plantation aristocrats stirred up, like when I was a lad I used to whack hornet nests with a stick and then run, just because I was bored. When I got older I got wiser, and threw rocks at `em.

So I might as well tell you, I tended to agree with the Prince- President Franklin Stove on this point - although it didn't make much sense - the rational was irrational, and the irrational was rational. Seemed to me that this queer idear was a way of looking square bull's eye into the Flaw of the Design, and it didn't seem so ornery, day to day, specially if you looked at the Flaw through the bottle glass spectacles of Gin Fever. Life seemed sweet and kind, not hardly half-bad, when you set yourself under a friendly pine tree with a pint, and a handsome hussy, and a well-worn edition of Napoleon and His Marshalls. Nonetheless, life seemed more than just cruel on that day War came into my life. Seemed vindictive; seemed like a liar who turned around and plugged you for agreeing with his lies. Although my Bad Luck Charm was pure unadulterated humbug, there was a great deal of bad luck involved just then, when the gunner died.

This business made me wonder over the next few days about our Design. Some folks said that since the Awful Deity was such a clever watchmaker, everything had meaning, and a calculable meaning at that. I'd heard Cap Mansfield tell Lieutenant Griswolde the following naturalism, that applied three ratios to human nature:

1. That our biped nature was divided into sexes corresponded to (animal) magnetism;

2. That it had irritation of nerves corresponded to electricity ( - senses being sub-divided into Animus or Beef, Sensory Nerves or Spur, and Intuition or Horse Sense);

3. That it had intelligence corresponded to chemistry.

That little knowledge was rattling so loud in my skull like seeds in a dried up gourd, I had to try to apply these ratios to two of my favorite persons:

JACK BORGINNIS
Sex:Positive-Negative.
Senses:Beef x Spur x Horse Sense, Determined As Follows.
Beef:6 1/3 Volts
x Spur:150 Amperes
x Horse Sense:3 Ohm
= 2,850 Volta's of Irritation.
Intelligence:Substance of Caoutchouc.

SARAH BORGINNIS
Sex:Negative-Positive.
Senses:Beef x Spur x Horse Sense, Determined As Follows.
Beef:15 Volts
x Spur:8 Amperes
x Horse Sense:35 Ohms
= 4,200 Volta's of Irritation.
Intelligence:Sodium Nitrate & Potassium Chloride.

So what I didn't understand was, where did luck and free will come in the equation? Some folks call luck Providence, others Fate, but everyone set it against Free Will. As for luck, maybe there wasn't none, if everything was all set down according to laws, ratios, and design. It just seemed like luck because the cosmic machine was too big to understand, even planets were just seeds rattling in the gourd of the Awful Deity. As for freedom, then, even what we thought of as freedom was part of the preset equation. It was just foolishness, we were all slaves of the Awful Deity - no, not slaves, but machine parts, cogs and wheels and levers. There is a natural despotism in our design.

It was ironic then, if that were true, to be fighting for Democracy and Progress, when all was set in an Awful Glue according to an Awful Plan, without no freedom from that despotism, without no escape. Like slaves, like machines, we obeyed the dictatorship of the Awful Deity, as his Agents & Subjects no matter what Constitution we gave oath to, no matter what flag we furled.

Fate must seek the Doomed, and therefore, according to mechanically predestined railroad tracks of events, Oscar Weigart must die. Wasn't everything composed of formulas, then? Just formulas? Where was the possibility for chance? And where was the potential for choice?

Must be electromagnetism that holds the destiny of the sun chained to the earth. Then I had a worrying thought. All balloonists knew that the Perfect Circles of the planets were getting wobbly; there was a hot argument among astronomers whether or not and why they were getting smaller or bigger, since both seemed to be true. Since things tended to Bust, what if the heavens were changing? What if the Circles of the heaven weren't perfect any more? What if the sun was slipping from our grip? What if it were slipping away out of the flaw of electromagnetism? Would then the Law of Union prove strong enough against the Law of Secession, to keep the sun from rejecting the earth , and flinging it into the Void? Or would the Law of Union pull it into the Fire?

I was determined to think on it, and find in the flaw of my Design the means to gain my freedom.

The best that I can figure is that I fell right through that flaw.

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