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 Back in Whiskey Hill, they made a beeline for Morty Vicker's Saloon.

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Aside from the reiteration that Roswell and Merle spend much of their time drinking in various saloons around Whiskey Hill in Cleveland, I don't get much more from this sentence. My poor attempt at research turned up nothing on a Morty Vicker of Cleveland in the 1880s. So I guess I'll just have to pick apart his name for some clues?

Morty is short for either Morton or Mortimer. Let's go with Mortimer because it has a more interesting meaning: dead (or still) water. The name Vicker probably references "vicar", a priest in the Church of England. Could Pynchon just be having a bit of sly fun on a name equating one of the local saloons to a church, since all the discussion of Æther has revolved around talk of faith and God? Morty Vicker can be thought of as Priest Dead Water, the dead water being a reference to alcohol (with "Whiskey Hill" being a bit of help toward that interpretation?). Merle and Roswell have fled chaos, fire, and damnation to spiritual safety, to their church and its member with whom they spend most of their time.

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 One day Merle had seen the astonishing truth of the case, though admittedly he had been most of the night working his way from one Whiskey Hill saloon to the next, drinking.

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"Merle had seen the astonishing truth of the case"
This makes it sound like Pynchon's going to explain exactly the connection Merle saw between Blinky Morgan and the Michelson-Morley experiment. Nobody would blame you for rubbing your hands together, pulling your pants down to your upper thighs, pumping the lotion bottle three or four times, and getting ready for the money shot reveal. And while I, sitting here with my pants half off, don't know for sure if there's going to be a reveal because I'm reading this long ass book one sentence at a time (probably due to some early childhood brain injury), I'm hesitant to start pumping lotion into my hand because I quickly noticed the conjunction "though" which is how a grammarian shouts, "Before you begin fondling your nether regions in anticipation of universal truth revealed and/or boobies, take a second to regard the framework of the first clause by studying this second clause!"

"though admittedly he had been most of the night working his way from one Whiskey Hill saloon to the next, drinking"
See? Merle was drunk when he had this revelation so take it with several grains of salt on the rim of your tequila shot. Do teetotalers understand how truly overwhelming revelation can be when one is in an altered state? I feel like the reaction to revelation while you're sober reduces itself to a nod of the head as it's swiftly incorporated into your understanding of life and the universe around you. In an altered state, revelation becomes truly religious. The immenseness of the revelation multiplies by the grandeur of the altered state. A drunk might be, as Merle here, astonished, a pothead flabbergasted, while somebody on mushrooms or LSD might trepan themselves to let out the massive truth flow freely from their blown mind. I may not have trepanned myself but I regularly had mind blowing revelations about severely mundane things while on mushrooms or LSD which thought about later sober just made me shake my head and laugh. I'm glad I never started a cult about how the number three connects everything and triangles are the perfect shape, or how some VCRs' pause button would pause the show but then to unpause the show, you'd have to press it again instead of play. Even though, you know, the button's purpose was to PAUSE, not to UNPAUSE!

"Whiskey Hill"
Whenever I research Cleveland to read about Whiskey Hill, I just get modern mentions of Whiskey Island. I'm assuming this is the same place but things have changed due to climate change!

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 They hung out in the saloons of Whiskey Hill and were tolerated by though not especially beloved of the regulars, who were mill hands with little patience for extreme forms of belief, unless it was Anarchism, of course.

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"Whiskey Hill"
From the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History at Case.edu:

"After the CIVIL WAR, cheap housing made the Haymarket attractive to impoverished immigrants. Though Italians and Slavs predominated in 1870, later contemporary observers counted 40 nationalities and 14 languages. For some, the Haymarket was a stopping place; for others, enmeshed in the cycle of poverty, its deteriorating housing provided permanent residence. The area and nearby Whiskey Hill became an overcrowded refuge for the unemployed, derelicts, transients, and criminals who preyed on the other hapless residents. Nearby factories and passing trains polluted the area with dirty smoke."

So once again, the idea of a population who embrace Anarchism are really just a population who have been failed by America and are desperate for change. Perhaps these mill hands and the other residents stricken by poverty tolerated these Æther enthusiasts primarily because they and their theories dealt with change and the search for a better way. Maybe not a tactile better way that can feed people's families. But a change for a better model of light and light transmission, at least. Perhaps it was this optimism for finding truth that made them tolerable to the regulars.

Anarchism
As we've seen, the tent of Anarchism houses many different people but the label is used to indict anybody embracing it as violent and destructive. Which, I suppose, they are. When something changes (even if it's for the better), those who accepted the thing for what it was can only see the thing as having been broken or destroyed. So when those America steps on want to destroy the status quo and lift up the masses, they're seen as destructive and violent.