Involution Ocean

Chapter 14 Desperandum Conducts an Experiment

I didn’t say anything. Desperandum stooped to peel back Murphig’s eyelid with one thick thumb. He brought his lantern close to the dead man’s face and studied the eye for a moment. Then he straightened up.

“Syncophine overdose,” he said, with a sort of morbid satisfaction. “Written all over his face. Did you murder him, Newhouse?”

I pried my mask slightly away from my face, just enough to make my voice audible. “No,” I said, too stunned to dissemble. “He drank too much of it He was upset because he just killed Calothrick.”

“For death’s sake,” Desperandum said, sounding more annoyed than shocked. “What a stupid, reckless act Well, Newhouse? Don’t just sit there like a lump of suet Explain yourself.”

“Well,” I said.

“Don’t bother to lie. I know you much better than you think I do. I know all about Flare—do they still call it that? I know about the still in the kitchen, too. And Calothrick’s addiction was obvious, at least to an initiate.”

I was red-handed and we both knew it, so I said quite frankly, “They got into a fight over Flare. Calothrick stabbed him, but Murphig threw him overboard and the sharks got him. I saw it and offered to help him hide the murder so the Flare thing could stay under cover. But Murphig drank too much Flare and died, and now I have to throw him overboard or be found out It’s not honest but it’s easiest Captain.”

Desperandum mulled it over. “It’s a dirty shame about Murphig. He could have been very useful to me. Now I’ll have to find a replacement for him.’’

There was a weighty silence. The implication of his state­ment was obvious.

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

“No conditions,” Desperandum said flintfly, quite secure in his power. “Are you willing to take his place?”

“Is it honorable?”

Desperandum chuckled in quiet contempt. “By your standards, you mean? Yes. As honorable as anything you’ve ever done. Now, yes or no?”

“This is absurd! I want to know what—" The captain’s expression changed, and just as quickly I said, “IH do it Yes.”

His cry of alarm was cut off before it was ever uttered, and a bemused expression crossed his face for a few rapid heartbeats. Then Desperandum said, “Very well then, over he goes,” and we shoved Murphig under the railing.

The gnashing of the sharks was half-muffled in the roil­ing dust. Desperandum spoke with loathing. “Death, I hate those monsters. Damn their teeth! But we can’t let hate stop progress, can we? I’m going back to bed—as soon as I finish looking over the craft, that is.”

“Captain, now that I’ve agreed—"

“No more, Newhouse. Pull your mask cm tight; do you want to ruin your lungs?”

“But I only—"

“Go to sleep. And try to remember you’re an innocent man.” Desperandum turned off his lantern and thumped off into the darkness. .

I went below. My lungs burned, and sleep was slow in coming.

I was up at dawn for breakfast. The two men were missed at mess. There was a perfunctory search of the ves­sel, and hypocritical displays of deep concern from the cap­tain and myself. Desperandum amazed me; his perform­ance was so authentic that it seemed to hint at a split personality—no uncommon occurrence In a man of his age.

The situation could have been much worse; the two missing men had not been popular. No one cared for Mur­phig much; his mannerisms were peculiar, and he had come from the wrong social class for a sailor. Calothrick was even less liked; he was a cipher, a sinner, and an off-worlder to boot. In fact, many of the crew seemed to regret that Dalusa had not vanished as well; they had always de­spised her as a parody of womanhood. No doubt the sailors were profoundly disturbed by the “accident,” as it came to be called, but they didn’t talk about it much. They didn’t talk about anything much.

Desperandum’s official theory was that they had fought and fallen overboard, and everyone paid lip service to this idea.

The anxiety caused by the mishap may have accounted for the crew’s feverish energy that day. Desperandum soon had them working on the whale. They seemed inspired by the captain’s unflagging vitality and they worked like man­iacs on this incomprehensible task.

The methodical nature of the process showed the long thought behind it. First the whale was completely hollowed out and its insides cleansed and salted to prevent decay. Its gullet was cleaned out and plugged. Its eyes were dug out with harpoons and replaced with foot-thick lenses of trans­parent plastic coated with a clear, slippery substance that would retard dust abrasion . . . for a while, at least.

While this was being done Desperandum went into the hold and unlocked his hidden bulkhead. The engine, the tank of oxygen, the tub of glue, and the batteries were all dragged onto the deck.

Desperandum hauled the engine into the body cavity of the whale. Three men bored a long hole inside the whale lengthwise through the tail of the monster. The blacksmiths forged a long propeller shaft for Desperandum, and they thrust it through the hole. While the blacksmiths welded on the propeller Desperandum attached the batteries and started it up. The propeller whirred like a buzz saw.

Satisfied, Desperandum began work on the fins. They were attached to long iron levers inside the animal. The crew members were hardly able to budge them, but Des­perandum’s double-gravity strength allowed him to wiggle them almost as well as the whale.

Desperandum painted all the outside seals with glue, making them absolutely airtight. He had some problems with the propeller shaft, and the friction would soon wear away even the stout plastic washers and gaskets. But he seemed satisfied.

As we worked together on the day’s last meal, Dalusa and I were both remote and uneasy. She had to step aside from the tiny droplets of grease as I fried some meat, and she spoke in her momentary idleness.

“What is he doing, John? What is the captain doing?”

“Dalusa,” I said, “I couldn’t believe it at first, but its obvious by now that the damned thing’s a submarine,” and I explained to her the nature of submarines.

“To go beneath the surface? Will he use it?”

“He’s been thinking about it a long time,” I said, “and I think he’s going to ask me to go with him. In fact, I’m almost sure of it.”

“You? Both of you?”

“I think so.” I said with false cheerfulness. °

“But John, why?” she said, alarmed.

I answered offhandedly, “Someone has to take care of the old fellow, don’t you agree? He’s too careless. Why not me? I understand him, and I’m not afraid.”

“But John, it could be dangerous.”

“Oh, certainly,” I said. “I wouldn’t have done it myself. But the captain has his heart set on it, and I have an obli­gation to go if he asks.”

“But you might be killed, John! What then?”

“It’s never happened before,” I said, but the utter blankness of Dalusa’s response showed that my wit had been lost in translation. “It’s a little risky,” I said, “but I’m a resourseful sort—more so than the captain thinks.”

“Oh, John, don’t go! The thing that took the crewman . last night still might be waiting. Tell the captain to not go!”

“What thing that took the crewmen? Dalusa, don’t be absurd. They fell overboard. There’s nothing waiting down there.” I regretted the words as soon as they were spo­ken—they struck a chill into me. Dalusa seemed to perk up, though.

“I don’t understand mankind,” she said. “But this is hu­man, yes? To help someone who needs you, even if it’s dangerous—even if it hurts?”

“Yes.” I said, nodding sagely. “That’s part of it.”

“Then, John, goodt I can do that. I’m not afraid, either. Some day I will do that, too, and you can be proud of me—like I’m proud of you, John.”

“All right, sweetheart,” I said. I sniffed. “I think your pastry’s burning,” I said, and after that I saw to it that we talked of other things.

That night Desperandum called me into his cabin.

“This is it, Newhouse!” he told me excitedly. “I’m going down to see it with my own eyes! I want firsthand contact with the data!”

“That’s wonderful, Captain,” I said. “A remarkable feat of engineering. It’s hollow, though. How will you get it to sink?”

“The crew is storing ballast in it this very minute.”

“Then how will you get back to the surface?”

“Easily. Just like flying an airplane. It’s also heavier than the medium that supports it, you see? And I have a power­ful engine.”

“Then how will you get out?”

“I have my axe on board. I’ll rendezvous with the Lun­glance and cut my way out in a matter of seconds.”

“And the sharks, Captain?”

“They can’t follow me into the depths. I’ve examined their metabolisms; they’re not built for it. This whale is built for better things than they.”

“How will you breathe?”

“I have my oxygen mask!” the captain shouted. “I have it all planned!”

“It’s an amazing piece of work, Captain,” I told him’ soothingly.

Desperandum looked at me sharply. He got up from his worktable and went to the cabin door. He opened it quickly and looked out, but there toas no one there. He shut the door and bolted it.

“I’m glad, to see you show so much enthusiasm for the venture,” he said. “Because I want you to come with me.”

I had expected this and I made a determined effort to talk my way out of it. “Captain, sir,” I said, “who financed this expedition? Who worked tirelessly to promote it? Who chose the experiments, carried them out, recorded them? Who made a lasting contribution to human knowledge, gave new insights into the ecology of an entire planet? It was you. My contributions were minimal, not worth men­tioning. No, Captain; you honor me too much, you flatter me beyond my worth. What would they say of me? That my reputation was made at the expense of a better man. I’m just a ship’s cook, a wanderer far from home, but I have too much pride to sink to such a thing.” Aghast at my unconscious pun, I hurried on. “The glory should all be yours, Captain. It belongs not to me, but to Nils Desperan­dum.”

“Ah, but thafs where you’re wrong,” the Captain said slowly. “Desperandum’s just a dustmask of a name. The real credit belongs to me—Ericald Svobold.”

I was stunned. “You’re Svobold? The discoverer of—that is—"

“Syncophine, that’s right,” the captain said mercilessly. “Oh, I gave up using Flare years ago, but I can still recog­nize a user.”

There was silence. I laughed, rather shrilly. “It’s ironic, Captain. You know, you’ve been my idol for years. Why, I’ve drunk and dropped to your memory a hundred times. But if the legends are right, why, you must be over four hundred years—"

“Let’s not get into that,” the captain said. “Let’s stick to the here and now. When you get to be my age you’ll find that’s best. Now, I don’t know how or why you introduced Murphig to syncophine. I don’t know how or why your henchman and my sharpest crewman both died in a single night. Your guilt or innocence is not my concern. But there’s no way out for you now, Newhouse. You might as well stop squirming. You know you’re caught. I can tell it just by looking at your face. Fm old, all right, but not in my dotage. Oh no. It doesn’t happen like that nowadays, not to us galactics. We only get sharper and sharper—God only knows how intolerably sharp we can become. If you could see the things I see for just one day—but that’s beside the point.

“I need you, Newhouse. I need a witness. I would have taken Murphig, you see. He was the only man among the crew, the only Nullaquan who could have understood the incredible revelations we’re going to find.down there. The rest of these woodenheads—they don’t even have thfe sav­ing grace of curiosity that Murphig had. So that leaves you, sir.”

“But it’s not so, Captain,” I said. “I’m hardly your most reliable witness. I’m a vagrant. And, yes, I use drugs. You need a solid, down-to-earth sort. First mate Flack for in­stance.”

“Flack has a wife and children,” the captain said chill­ingly. “And he doesn’t have half your mental agility. You know, I could almost admire you, Newhouse. I can under­stand your corrupting Murphig—and liquidating Calo­thrick, who was a jackal anyway—but I cant understand your leading on Dalusa, that poor tormented creature. That was a vicious act And I’m offering you a chance to purify yourself, to do something selfless for once. Think of it, Newhouse. Don’t you need this as much as I do?”

“You’re mistaken,” I said. I love Dalusa. When this is over I’m going to take her away—someplace where we can live free from death and madness.”

Desperandum looked at me closely for over a minute. Finally he said, “You do love her, don’t you? You’re in even worse trouble than I thought.”

“That remains to be seen,” I said. “Captain—Captain Svobold—if the legends are true, you’re a man of honor. I still love life, but I’ll court death with you if I must. But I want your word that after this there will be no more threats, spoken or unspoken.”

“You have my word,” Desperandum said. He extended his hand. I shook it, with the whimsical feeling of a night­mare.

Then I secured my mask and went up on deck. To star­board, the men were still working on the whale. I went down to the kitchen to sleep.

Next morning, Desperandum was eager to be under way. There was barely time for a brief, tearful farewell to Dalusa before he called me to his cabin. From there, the captain and I walked across the deck toward our odd vehicle with all the dignity we could muster. Through some atavistic social instinct I was still putting a good face on matters, and the captain was the gentleman scientist to the end. Calmly, he shook the hands of his three mates, making them wince. Knowing no better, I shook them too.

“Are you really going down there, Cookie?” Orent asked me as he shook my hand. I nodded. I was already regret­ting that Grent’s voice would be one of my last memories.

“Hope you’re back in time for supper,” he said. I nodded again, unable to reply because of the mask. I might have denounced the captain otherwise, shouted: “He’s crazy, don’t you see? He has to be restrained for his own good!” But it wouldn’t have worked. The captain would have seen to it that my life was ruined; it would have hurt Dalusa as well.

The captain waved formally to the crew, then ruined the dignity of his exit by clumsily forcing his huge bulk through the slash in the whale’s side. “Greasy luck, Cap­tain!” Flack called out as I followed him.

Following their captain’s orders, the crew securely glued a great doubled sheet of whaleskin over our entanceway. It grew dark at once inside our musty, eviscerated craft. Soon my eyes adjusted to the dim sunlight pouring through the animal’s goggling eye plugs. Desperandum—somehow I could not get used to thinking of him as Svobold—calmly took the ends of the iron fin-levers in his meaty hands.

“I’ll navigate for now, Newhouse,” he said kindly, giving the fins an experimental wiggle. “You go up for’ard to the portholes and keep the lookout. “Ware the ballast now.”

My eyes had adjusted fully now and everything took on a hallucinatory clarity as I picked my way forward through the heaped-up “ballast.” It was an incredible hodgepodge of heavy, miscellaneous jetsam: chunks of pipe, tight-wound bales of wire, bolt buckets, bundles of welding rods, metal boxes heaped with spare parts for the meat grinders, the oven, the recycler, neatly spooled miles of ceramic cable (it amazed me to see yet more of this particular item; Death knows where he kept it all), spare shafts and hafts for har­poons, flensing spades and axes, Desperandum’s own mighty axe, and crates containing stacked specimen jars, each one brim-full with murky, yellowish fluid. The whole mess was haphazardly bound together with an ageometrical webwork of cable, stringing with a loony haphazardness from junk to chunk. As I picked my way for­ward, noting the neat sailor’s knots that bound everything, the floor moved and I pitched forward, striking the plug in the monster’s tiny gullet a solid blow with my head.

The crew had not wasted time. I could see their opera­tions through the port plug as they calmly turned the pul­leys and cranks that governed the hoists.

As soon as our craft began to lift free there was an omi­nous series of sinewy creaks, pops and snaps as the inertia tugged the mummified muscle and bone. The thick, leath­ery belly flesh of the floor bowed noticeably under the weight of the ballast, and the bone-strutted walls leaned in­ward a little with the groany reluctance of rigor mortis.

There was a muffled hiss as Desperandum turned on the valves to the oxygen mask. Slowly, we swung outwards, off the deck and over the quietly seething sea.

Slowly we went down and settled into the dust with a floury rush and a whisper. There were four muffled thumps as the slings were released, and we began to sink. Desper­andum turned on the engine, and it began to whir and mumble. We surged slowly forward. Frothing dust washed quietly over the eye plugs and even as I watched, it grew pitch black inside the sub. I quickly ripped off my mask.

“My death!” I cried out. “It’s black! It’s completely black! Captain, we can’t see a thing!”

“Of course,” the captain replied urbanely. “The light cant reach inside, you see. That’s why I had our own lights installed.” There was a click and wan bluish light from a naked bulb overhead filled the sub. A pale charnel-house radiance gleamed off exposed patches of bone amid the dry sinew of the walls and ceiling.

I sneezed and put my mask back on. The dry mustiness was awful. I returned my attention to the eye plugs. An in­tricately patterned swirl of dust moved across our lenses, slowly abrading them. I realized with a shock that Desper­andum’s calmly stated absurdity had momentarily con­vinced me. I took off the mask again, ignoring the itch of dust in my sinuses. I swallowed to depressurize my ears and said, “Captain. This is ridiculous. The dust is opaque. We might as well be blindfolded.”

“Indeed,” Desperandum said. He moved the ends of the levers upwards slightiy and the sub nose-dived alarmingly. He pulled us back out of it. My ears popped again, and a chorus of creaks spoke up from the musty joints of ribs and vertebrae.

’Take us back up, Captain! The trip’s a failure! We can’t see anything, so we’re risking our lives for nothing. Come now, Captain.”

Desperandum looped the oxygen .mask over the snouted nozzle of his dustmask and inhaled audibly. Hie ship rolled and he grabbed his fin levers tightly.

The sounds from his speakers were half-muffled as Des­perandum replied. “It’s not your job to theorize on the opti­cal properties of dust, Newhouse. Just keep watching. We. should reach one of the translucent layers soon.”

“Hie translucent layers! The translucent layers? Captain, this is dust, not glass! For death’s sake!”

“Really, Newhouse. Your language! Fve made a long study of subsurface conditions. You needn’t succumb to hysteria. You need some oxygen, that’s all.”

“I cant understand why I didn’t thinlr of this before,” I said. “Your insanity must have infected us all.” My last words were lost in a long dry groaning of ribs under pres­sure. The whaleskin glued over the slash in the sub’s side was forming a herniated bulge as it dimpled inwards.

“This is absurd,” I said, coughing. “I won’t be involved in your suicide. I’m going to cut my way out.” I picked my way across the tangled ballast toward Desperandum’s axe. With an effort I managed to hoist the huge, double-bladed axe to one shoulder. I moved shakily toward the bulging skin, where it would be easiest to cut. The flooring boomed uneasily under my feet.

“I wouldn’t do that at this depth if I were you,” Desper­andum said. “The rush of dust would knock you to a pulp.”

I hesitated. “We’re not that deep yet.”

In answer Desperandum moved the fins and we dived again. I nearly fell down. I set the axe down quickly.

“Now return to your post,” he said flatly. I went, pulling my mask back on. The dust in the air and the stench inside the whale were making my nose run. It was impossible to tell our depth. Even the increasing pressure was not a reli­able indication, because Desperandum had the oxygen tank open and running. Dust ran thickly by the plugs. My mind raced frantically, trying to squirm out from under a lower­ing weight of despair. After a while I felt a fatalistic inertia settling into the cores of my bones.

“The air’s getting so heavy,” I said. “I feel numb all over.” I stared out.

“Come get some oxygen then. I’ve never felt better,” Desperandum said.

A small amorphous something slid past the glass. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I saw something move just now!”

“What? What was it?” Desperandum said eagerly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was small and wiggly-looldng. I think I’d better get some air. I feel drunk.”

Desperandum inhaled hugely. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Tell you what, my lad. You take over navigation for a while, get some good air in your lungs. Let’s see what my trained eyes can make of it.”

I stumbled over the ballast, took a fiery gulp of oxygen, and grabbed the levers. I had an absurdly light feeling as I took the levers in my hands, the oxygen mask half-dangling from the snout of my dustmask. Now I could slowly and subtly direct us upward again. Desperandum released the levers, and I immediately knew that the levers were far be­yond my strength.

“Captain! Captain!” I said, but my dustmask was on, and the muffled sounds were quickly lost in the drumlike booms of fhe flooring under Desperandum’s boots. It was a silent, desperate struggle then. I put my full weight against the levers and pulled till my wrists ached and cramps bit the insides of my biceps. It was no use. They escaped me, the ends of fhe levers sweeping violently upward and crack­ing my dustmask’s right lens. We went into an immediate nosedive. Desperandum was crouching at the port eye plug and he fell over immediately. Then the tangled mass of bal­last slid onto him like an avalanche. I heard his scream and a yowl of feedback as his speakers shorted out Then he was lost beneath it all.

I would have fallen on him if I had not been holding the starboard finlever. As it was I dangled about ten feet above him, my feet just above the treacherous, unstable heap of metal and cable and crates. The smell of preserving fluid went through the dry musty air like a knife.

Hie oxygen tank had taken its mask attachment with it when it tumbled free. The engine, though, was secured to the sub’s skeleton, and it had stayed in place. It was still running. Painfully, I pulled myself up the length of the lever until I could wrap my legs around it. Then I pulled off my mask.

“I’m so sorry I came down here,” I said. “Tm really, really sorry I did it and it wasn’t my idea at all, and if I ever get away from here I’ll never, ever let this happen again—"

“Newhouse ...”

“—to me or anyone else, ever, ever again. ...”

“Newhouse. Turn off the engines. Turn them off!”

“Captain! Captain Desperandum!”

“Turn off the engines, Newhouse,” came Desperandum’s reasonable voice. “I think I hear something down here.”

Tears were running down my face. “I don’t know if I can do it Captain,” I said. “There’s something wrong with filie.”

“It’s nitrogen narcosis, my lad. We’re too deep, far too deep. You’ll have to turn off the engine. I can’t do it. I can’t feel my legs.”

I shuddered. “All right Captain. I’ll try.” I inched my way up the lever, dug my feet and fingers into the stinking, dessicated flesh around the ribs, and leapt. The whirling propeller shaft almost brushed against my face, but I wrapped my arms around the bulk of the engine. I kicked once, twice against the switch, and the engine shut down with a moan and a mumble.

Then there was silence. I heard the crunch and rustle of Desperandum moving amid the rubble. “I can just see out the eyehole,” he said. “There. Do you hear that?”

I got up on top of the engine block, and it groaned a little. The whole belly of the hollow whale was bulging in­ward at my back. “I don’t hear anything, Captain. Just the dust . . . I think.”

“I see them moving out there,” Desperandum said matter-of-factly. “They’re quite small. And they’re shin­ing—sort of an amorphous glow. There are hundreds of them. I can see them strung off into the distance.”

“Captain,” I said. “Captain, how are we going to get back to the surface? We can’t navigate while the ship is standing on its head like this.” I burst into feeble giggles. It was half the nitrogen poisoning, half the pure deadly ludicrousness of the situation.

“That’s not important now, Newhouse. But it’s vital that you come down here and confirm this sighting. We’re mak­ing scientific history.”

“No.” I said. “I’m not going to look at them. They have a right to their privacy. God I wish I had some clean air. I feel so weak.”

Desperandum was silent for a while. Then he said coaxingly, “The oxygen’s down here with me. I can hear it hiss­ing. You’ll pass out in a little while if you don’t get some, you know. And maybe you could get these pipes off my legs. I think they’re bleeding, but it might just be the pre­servative fluid. Then you could have a look. Just a little one. What do you have to lose?”

“No!” I said more urgently, my fogged brain stung a little now with panic. “I don’t want to look at them. I don’t think they want me to.”

“For stability’s sake!” Desperandum said, resorting to Nullaquan profanity in his final crisis. “Don’t you have a shred of plain human curiosity? Just think how interesting they arel I never realized they were so small! And the way they move is so fascinating, almost a kind of dance. Like little colored lights. See how they move away to the sides now! And—Oh my God!”

Desperandum began to scream. “Look at that thing! Look at the size of it! It’s coming closer! It’s coming too close! It’s coming too close to us! Don’t! Don’t do it!”

There was a jar that nearly knocked me loose from the engine. Then a hideous cracking and crumbling. Something was squeezing us. Big dimpled indentations, like troughs, appeared in the back and belly of the whale—five of them. There were four of them across the back and a big thumb­like one almost directly behind me. The great dry bones added their screaming to the captain’s. There was a crunch, a scream, a great rupturing sound at the savage bursting of our vessel, a rush and roar of exploding air—grayness— and blackness.