Against the Day (21 page)

On certain of these windhaunted
rocks, the Chums could observe work details, rigged with safety lines,
scrambling over wet surfaces scarcely big enough to hold them all, moving
swiftly and purposefully, though there was nothing evident, not even guano,
worth risking their safety for. The ships anchored close by were of the latest
design and appeared to be carrying armament available only to the European
Powers. Their presence in these waters, not so much as hinted at in any of the
extensive communiqués reaching the boys from Chums Headquarters, was a mystery
dark as the stormlit seascape.

The last island where they could take
on perishable supplies, such as milk, was St. Masque, which at first, as they
landed, appeared to be uninhabited. Then, slowly, in ones and twos, people
began to appear, until soon the Chums were surrounded by a considerable
population and a city to go with it, as if it had been there all along, waiting
for their arrival
. . .
a city of
some size, Englishspeaking, so clean and litterfree that everyone walked around
barefoot, no matter how formally they might be dressed otherwise—town
suits, tea gowns, no matter—it was the visitor wearing shoes who was
stared at. In the center of town, some huge underground construction venture
was in progress, citizens stood on overpasses and catwalks gazing down into concrete
pits full of steammachinery, draft animals, and debris. When asked its purpose,
they frowned, puzzled, as if they had not quite heard the visitors. “Home,”
some said, “it’s home. What is home where you come from?” But wandered away
before any of the lads could answer.

In a seamen’s tavern down by the
docks, one of those low haunts he had a sure instinct for finding wherever in
the world the boys happened to go, Chick Counterfly met up with a shadowy
seaderelict who claimed to be a survivor of the frigate H.M.S.
Megaera
which
had been wrecked on Amsterdam Island nearly thirty years before. “Miserable
place. Took months for us to be rescued. No different from sea duty
. . .
oh, that absence of motion of
course, bit more fish in the diet as you’d imagine
. . . .
One continued to stand watch, and share space with the
same people one had already learned to tolerate, or hate, or both at the same
time, which taken from the standpoint of pure survival proved a great
blessing—imagine if the old Meg had been a passenger ship full of
strangers—half of us would have murdered the other half within the first
week and perhaps eaten them as well. But four hundred of us made it.”

“Curious,” Chick said. “That’s about
what I estimated the population of St. Masque to be.”

·
    
·
    
·

And only hours
after leaving behind these
dechristened fragments in the sea’s reasserted emptiness, they had raised the
volcano, dark and ruinous, which was their destination. The assignment was to
observe what would happen at the point on the Earth antipodal to Colorado
Springs, during Dr. Tesla’s experiments there. They had been provided via Chums
of Chance Logistical Services, never questioned, always on time, an expensive
array of electrical instrumentation, reflecting everything within the current
state of technical knowledge, delivered uninvoiced by Oriental laborers who
trooped in and out of the encampment, shift after shift, beneath often quite
staggering burdens. Pallets and nails from opened crates soon littered the
area. Thatch debris fallen bit by bit from coolie hats drifted here and there
ankle deep. Vermin brought ashore with the cargo, sometimes all the way from
California, scrambled off and soon had found homes on the slopes of the
volcano, venturing down to the camp only on latenight galley raids.

The stevedoring at length done with,
the itinerant work crews were rowed away silently, out to the flagless vessel
lying offshore, to be bodyjobbed away somewhere else in the hemisphere. South
Africa, most likely. Leaving the boys to gather closely, beneath the
mephitically seeping volcano which rose nearly a thousand feet overhead, on a
beach so intensely sunlit as to appear almost colorless, the blindness at the
heart of a diamond for all they knew, while ocean waves came towering in one by
one, arriving measured as the breath of some local god. No one at first had
anything to say, even if it had been possible to hear above the battery of the
surf.

Mealtimes lately
had
been fraught with
political instability, owing to an ongoing dispute over the choice of a new
figurehead for the ship. The previous one, representing the head of President
McKinley, had been seriously damaged in an unpremeditated collision with a
Chicago skyscraper building which had not, as far as any of the boys knew, been
there the day before.

Chick Counterfly and Darby Suckling
had been lobbying for a naked woman, “Αand th’ more curvaceous, the
better!” as Darby demanded at each of their frequent
ad hoc
gatherings
on the subject, bringing to the lips of Lindsay Noseworth a reproof by now all
but reflexive—“Suckling, Suckling
. .
.
your list of demerits grows at a dishearteningly vertiginous rate.”

“And not one of em that ain’t just
danged shipboard politics,” expostulated Darby, with a redfaced scowl. Since
his voice had changed, its charmingly insubordinate tone, once tolerable, had
darkened to something more considered and, to that degree, disquieting. The
once cheery mascotte had passed from political innocence, through a short
period of adolescent uncertainty, into a distrust of authority approaching the
very slopes of Nihilism. His shipmates, even the reliably humorous Chick
Counterfly, now reflected at length before uttering even the most routine of
jocularities in Suckling’s hearing, lest he take offense.

Randolph St. Cosmo had continued, in
the matter of choosing a figurehead, to promote the National Bird, as a safe
and patriotic choice. Miles Blundell, for his part, didn’t care what the
figurehead represented, as long as it was something to eat—while Lindsay,
as if offended by the worldliness of these choices, argued as always for pure
abstraction—“One of the Platonic polyhedra, perhaps.”

“That jasper,” sniggered Darby,
“never pulled out his ‘dummy’ for nothing but pissing, I bet you!”

“No takers!” Chick scornfully guffawed.

The figurehead debate, at first no
deeper than varying decorative tastes might account for, had grown bitter and
complex, swiftly reaching an intensity that astonished them all. Old injuries
“kicked up,” pretexts were found to exchange shoves and, not infrequently,
blows. A sign in very large Clarendons appeared in the mess area—

FUNDAMENTSEIZING ACTIVITIES IN THE
“CHOW LINE”

WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!!!

VIOLATIONS WILL DRAW TEN WEEKS’ EXTRA
DUTY!!! EACH!!!

By order of the Executive Officer.

P.S.—Yes, that’s WEEKS!
!!

Nonetheless, they went on shuffling
and muttering, sneaking fingersize globs out of the asparagus mousse,
CreoleStyle Gumbo, or mashed turnips, whenever they thought the MasteratArms
wasn’t looking—not actually to eat but surreptitiously to
flick at one
another,
hoping for a response. Miles Blundell, as Ship’s Commissary,
looked on in genial bewilderment. “Zumbledy bongbong,” he called encouragingly,
as the food flew. “Vamble, vamble!”

Wandering corridors of the spectral,
Miles had begun, increasingly, to alarm his shipmates. Mealtimes too often were
apt to revert to exercises in deep, even mortal, uncertainty, depending where
Miles had been that day to procure his ingredients. Sometimes his cooking was
pure
cordon bleu
, s
ometimes
it was inedible, due to excursions of spirit whose polarity was never entirely
predictable from one day to the next. Not that Miles would deliberately set out
to wreck the soup or burn the meat loaves—he seldom got that overt,
tending more to forgetful omissions, or misreadings of quantity and timing. “If
anything’s an irreversible process, cooking is!” lectured Thermodynamics
Officer Chick Counterfly, meaning to be helpful, though unavoidably in some
agitation. “You can’t deroast a turkey, or unmix a failed sauce—time is
intrinsic in every recipe, and one shrugs it off at one’s peril.”

Sometimes Miles would reply, “Thank
you, Chick, it is wise counsel. . . fellows
. . .
you are all so amazingly patient with me, and I will endeavor as
best I can to improve,” and sometimes he would cry, “Of the metawarble of
blibfloth zep!” gesturing violently with his chef’s toque, his face illuminated
by an enigmatic smile.

The one diner in the company who had
never suffered disappointment, however, was Pugnax, whose fastidiousness of
diet Miles, regardless of his moods, had always honored. Along with a range of
human preferences that included vintage Champagnes, terrapin stew, and
asparagus hollandaise, Pugnax insisted upon separate courses served in separate
dishes, which must be of bone china of a certain age and authenticated origin,
bringing new import to the expression “dog’s dinner.”

In the U.S.A.,
it was almost the Fourth of July,
which meant that tonight, by standing orders, there had to be a shipboard
celebration out here, too, like it or not.

“Lights and noise, just to keep us
hoppin like trained baboons,” was Darby’s opinion.

“Anyone at all educated,” protested
Lindsay, “knows that Fourth of July fireworks are the patriotic symbols of
noteworthy episodes of military explosion in our nation’s history, deemed
necessary to maintain the integrity of the American homeland against threats
presented from all sides by a benightedly hostile world.”

“Explosion without an objective,”
declared Miles Blundell, “is politics in its purest form.”

“If we don’t take care,” opined
Scientific Officer Counterfly, “folks will begin to confuse us with the
Anarchosyndicalists.”

“About time,” snarled Darby. “I say
let’s set off our barrage tonight in honor of the Haymarket bomb, bless it, a
turning point in American history, and the only way working people will ever
get a fair shake under that miserable economic system—through the wonders
of chemistry!”

“Suckling!” the astounded Lindsay
Noseworth struggling to maintain his composure. “But, that is blatant
antiAmericanism!”

“
Eehhyyhh, and your mother’s a
Pinkerton, too.”

“Why you communistic little—”

“I wish I knew what they were arguing
about,” complained Randolph St. Cosmo, to no one in particular. Perhaps, in
this remoteness, to the wind.

Yet tonight’s pyrotechnics amounted
after all to more than simple explosion. As one by one their violent candles
bloomed deafeningly above the ruined volcano, Miles bade the company consider,
in tones of urgency they seldom heard from him, the nature of a skyrocket’s
ascent, in particular that unseen extension of the visible trail, after the
propellant charge burns out, yet before the slowmatch has ignited the
display—that implied moment of ongoing passage upward, in the dark sky, a
linear continuum of points invisible yet present, just before lights by the
hundreds appear—

“Stop, stop!” Darby clutching his
ears comically, “it sounds like Chinese!”

“Who invented fireworks,” Miles
agreed, “but what does this suggest to you about the trajectories of your own
lives? Anybody? Think, bloviators, think!”

The hour of the great experiment on
the other side of the world approached. Smells not quite of messcooking
collected in the lee of the wrecked volcano, as if some lengthy chemical
procedure had repeatedly failed to provide an unambiguous result. Electrodes
sputtered and flared, and giant transformer coils droned afflictedly, almost in
human accents, fed by electrical generators whose steam was being supplied by
the local hot springs. Transmitting and receiving antennas for the wireless
equipment had been run up the sides of the lavacone, and communication had
commenced, while, almost exactly on the other side of Earth, Chums of Chance
monitoring personnel waited in a weatherproofed shack at the top of Pike’s
Peak, though beliefs varied as to the nature of the strange link—was the
signal going around the planet, or through it, or was linear progression not at
all the point, with everything instead happening simultaneously at every part
of the circuit?
By the
time
Inconvenience
was
ready
to take once more to the sky, the figurehead dispute had been resolved
amicably—the boys had compromised on a draped female personage, perhaps
more maternal than erotic—apologies were exchanged, reiterated,
eventually at tiresome length, new apologies for these reiterations then became
necessary, and the working days became saturated in skypunctilio. After a while
the boys would come to think of the episode as others might remember a time of
illness, or youthful folly. As Lindsay Noseworth was there to remind them all,
such difficulties always arose for good reason—namely, to provide
cautionary lessons.

“
Like what,” sneered Darby,
“ ‘
be nice’?”

“We were always supposed—by
whom it is less clear—to be above such behavior,” asserted the “X.O.”
somberly. “Literally above. That sort of bickering may be for ground people,
but it is not for us.”