The Goonies (16 page)

“But, anyway, I tell him, ‘Hey, man, it's not cool to smoke.’ So he gets this real bummed-out look on his face and throws
the cigarette away and holds up his hand like he means ‘Wait a minute,’ and reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a ratty
old deck of cards, which he fans in front of me, and says, ‘Pick a card.’

“Well, you coulda blown me away with a straw. I mean, this guy never ceases to amaze me. So I pick a card and look at it and
stick it back in the deck, and he shuffles like a pro from Vegas. It was the four of diamonds. Then he throws the pack into
the air, and the cards flutter down all over the place, except there's one card sitting in the palm of his hand, and I'm damned
if it isn't the four of diamonds.

“Well, he can see I'm impressed, but he just kinda nonchalantly picks up the cards and pockets 'em, still wearing his pirate
hat. ‘You know, you're an interesting kinda guy,’ I say. He just sorta smiles, though, and tips his hat back.

“Anyway, while I'm helpin' him pick up the cards, I find this Twinkie wrapper on the ground, so I know you guys have been
here, and I see all these footprints goin' into the middle tunnel, so I figure this must be the place.
So this time I take the lead. ‘Come on, men,’ I say, and Sloth follows me into the middle tunnel.”

So that got Chunk to where I left off with
my
story, except I was there first. Or second, actually, although the only guy there ahead of
me
was One-Eyed Willy, and I was about to meet up with
him
soon enough. But he wasn't the
first
cutthroat I met down in those caves—first was the Fratellis, and that was
sooner
than enough.

My Story Continued… The Lake… Data's Story… Stef's Story… The Fog… Mouth's Story… Brand's Story… Andy's Story… Dreamy River.

So, anyway, I went back through the middle tunnel—the nose hole in the skull—and joined the gang, and we started down the
next section of twisting corridors. And the farther we went, the more the caves echoed with the sound of rushing water, first
louder, then softer, like a tide. We kept pretty quiet. Thinkin' to ourselves, I guess.

After walking in silence for about thirty minutes, we came to a cave the size of our house, with only one exit—tunnel—and
it
was filled with water.

Floating on the water in the tunnel was a huge wooden raft made of tarred logs strapped together with chains and rope and
tied to a rock in the cave. And scattered around the stone floor of the cave itself were a dozen more rafts of different sizes.

Stef said, “This must've all been filled with water once. Like a harbor or somethin'.”

“Well, it's a dry dock now,” said Mouth.

“Except for that waterway. Where do you suppose it leads to?”

“Well, since it's the only way outta here, I think we're about to find out.”

“Maybe we can go back,” said Data. He looked more worried than the others about goin' down this underground river.

Far behind us, though, we could hear maybe footsteps, and maybe voices.

“I don't think we can go back,” I said.

So we hopped on the raft, unhooked the rope from its anchorage, and cast off.

The water looked smooth, but there was a pretty good current comin' from somewhere, 'cause we immediately started driftin'
downstream. There was no way to steer the thing, but that didn't matter, since it was about fifteen feet square, and the tunnel
was only about twenty wide. So we just bobbed down the water, turning slowly, bumping softly into one wall, and then, a minute
later, into the other.

After about ten minutes the tunnel started to widen, though, and the current picked up.

“I've got a bad feelin' about this,” said Mouth.

The raft began to bounce a little. There were spots of white water now and then. We all gathered near the center, away from
the edges, touching each other. The logs were so big, they floated high, at least, so we weren't getting very wet. Just very
scared.

We plunged down a three foot drop-off, and Data nearly went overboard before we leveled off again. That got us wet. And very,
very
scared.

The raft was spinning now, really out of control, and Andy was cryin', and Data shiverin', and Stef stickin' her feet over
the edge to try to steer a little bit, and me tryin'
to light a flare so we could see better… and suddenly we spewed out into a huge, quiet lake, in a huge, sparkling cavern,
and drifted slowly toward the center of it.

Now, when I say huge, I mean we couldn't see the far side. It might have been two hundred yards across, or it might have been
a mile. The ceiling was at least a hundred yards high, and it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Crystal formations hung down like fine-cut chandeliers, ruby-colored and sparkling in the light of my flare. They hung down,
then splayed out, interconnecting with each other, then dangled again in this like incredible jumble of cut-glass spiderwebby
crystalline icicles. Like a light show.

It was magical. We stared up at the projections almost hypnotized, as the raft slowly floated farther and farther into the
core of the cavern. In a minute or so I looked around and realized I couldn't see any of the walls. Then I realized we were
sort of bobbing in place and not really moving anywhere.

Data shined his lantern over three hundred and sixty degrees, but the beam didn't reach a single landmark.

“Uh-oh,” he whispered as the raft turned in slow circles. His teeth started chattering. “We're in trouble now, this is no
good.”

It was pretty intense, I gotta admit. Stef was cool, though. “Relax, we just start paddling, that's all. We'll get somewhere
sooner or later.”

So we started paddling in the direction we thought was the other side. We gave up ten minutes later when we still couldn't
see a wall. Besides, we were all a little shy about putting our hands in the water after we saw something break the surface
about twenty feet away and then dive again. It was hard to tell in this light, but it looked an awful lot like a dorsal fin.

“Oh, man, this is terrible, this is it…” Data whimpered.

“Take it easy, man, we'll get outta this,” said Brand.

“No, you don't understand,” said Data. “Drowning is the worst. I can't take drowning. Anything but that. I can't swim. I can't
even float.”

Stef took his hand and put her arm around his shoulder, real nice. “You're not gonna drown, kid. I can swim like a fish.”

Mouth was gonna say somethin' wiseass—I could see it in his eye—but Stef threw him a look like “Don't you dare,” so he kept
his mouth shut.

Anyway, Data seemed to relax a little. And then, as we all sat there gazing up at the crystal ceiling in the middle of this
black, boundless, motionless ocean, Data started talking.

“Someday I'm going to invent something great,” he said. “It's gonna be a city that's under the ocean, and it's gonna be inside
this huge, clear, plastic bubble. Space-age plastic, the kind the NASA guys developed, so it can withstand thousands of degrees
of heat, in case there's an underwater volcano eruption; and thousands of tons of pressure, so the weight of the ocean can't
crush it. It'll be clear, so you can see through it to watch all the fish, so you're like surrounded on all sides by this
gigantic aquarium. And it won't have any seams. It'll be molded out of one huge piece of plastic, so it can't spring a leak.

“It'll be a mile in diameter, and it'll have all these different levels, like plateaus constructed across the bubble at different
levels,. and they'll be connected by ladders and stairways that go up and down. And each level will be for a different purpose.
There'll be one level for housing and one for farming—there'll be special lights there, so you can grow whatever you want—and
one level for fisheries, and one for playgrounds and restaurants and movies, and
all the areas right near the inner surface of the plastic would be for observation decks, with big powerful spot-lights in
some places shining out into the ocean so you could see all the amazing fish and coral and whales and stuff.

“And there'll maybe be an airlock, so people can go out on expeditions in submarines if they wanted to.

“The bubble will be held down to the ocean floor by a hundred gigantic anchors, connected to nondegradable cables that stretch
over the top of the bubble and criss-cross there so they form a huge net weighted down by these anchors, so the bubble doesn't
float up to the surface. It'll be held down there, at least a mile below the surface, so it won't be wrecked if there's a
nuclear war, and fallout won't get that far down, either, or germs if there's a germ war. And it won't get hurt if there's
an underwater earthquake, either, because it's not touching the bottom, only the anchors are, so the bubble will just kind
of shift around on its cables and sway a little in the underwater current.

“That's where all its energy will come from, from underwater currents. So the location will have to be carefully chosen, so
it's right beside one of those super currents that never stops, like the Gulf Stream, or El Nino, or one of those. We'll put
a huge series of huge propellers right in the path of the current and connect them to huge turbines, so the propellers will
always be turning and cranking out energy—I guess we
will
have to have an airlock, so the submarines can go out to service the propellers if they need maintenance.

“But, anyway, it'll be a safe, endless energy source, nonpolluting and self-generating. It'll power the lights in the city,
and there'll be a desalination plant so we can get as much water as we need right outside and turn it into fresh water. And
it'll power a big plant for extracting
oxygen out of the water, so we can breathe—it's not very efficient, but who cares about efficiency when you can harness the
power of the ocean?

“It'll be completely self-contained and self-sustaining, and we'll limit the number of people who can come live there, so
it doesn't get overcrowded—only my friends and their friends and some of my relatives and a few nice people I don't know.

“And we'll be completely safe and happy, and we can never drown, even though we're surrounded by water on all sides, and life
will be devoted to farming and eating and playing and discussing philosophy and working on new inventions.

“That's what I'm gonna invent.”

“Sounds like you already did,” said Mouth.

“Data, that's beautiful,” said Andy.

Our eyes had grown used to the dark by now, but the farther we were able to see, the farther we could see that there was no
end to this cavern. The raft drifted this way a little, then that way, then just bobbed without direction for a bit, then
turned around its center. We were going nowhere.

Stef said, “Now me, I love the water. I grew up around it, I go fishin' all the time with my old man—I'm the only one who
will
go with him. My brothers just play with car engines and smoke dope. I love goin' out there, though, it's so quiet and peaceful,
no one else around, no one tellin' you what to do, no noise and stench from the factories, just you sittin' out there in the
middle of all this quiet, rollin' on the waves like it was a cradle. There's nothin' else as peaceful as that.

“And swimmin', that's just like runnin' or dancin'. You just dip in the water and mess around there and dip out and
mess around in the air again. Same difference. Except in the water, there's this peace.

“I like to scuba, too, only it's too expensive to do it very often, but my old man lets me use his gear once in a while. That's
a
real
mind-blower, swimmin' around down under all that water. Talk about quiet, man. It's like nothin' but you and all these strange,
silent fishes starin' back at you and you just know they're thinkin' somethin', but they ain't talkin' about it.

“I scuba'd off Catalina once. It was so warm and clear and blue, man, and these fish were like orange and neon purple—no shit,
they were like punk fish. Like there was a Cyndi Lauper fish, and a Eurhythmics fish, all glidin' around to some special underwater
fish beat that I couldn't hear, but I could see it, and the seaweed wavin' like in slow motion and these pink jellyfish hangin'
their fringe down wavin' back, and schools of fish that turn in formation like they had the same thought at the same second,
and all the time it's so quiet and peaceful….

“No, I love the water. Water's where I go when I wanna
stop
being scared. What
I'm
afraid of is the dark. Knowing something's out there but you can't see what.
That's
what scares me.”

We looked out in all directions, trying to see something. Anything. The raft rocked almost not at all now. Just flat and still.

Off to the left something caught my eye, though. Real hazy, like just a sort of lightness in the darkness. It seemed to get
a lot colder all of a sudden, not a wind exactly, but like a movement of cold air all around us. And then the lighter area
in the distance got closer and whiter and thicker. And then you could see that it was a fog rolling in.

“Oh, shit,” whispered Stef.

The fog started to reach us, sort of a chilly wetness at
first, and then the mist began creepin' over the edge of the raft and just sat there, real low, for a time.

Something echoed way in the fog, and we all jumped. Sort of a falling rock noise, only muffled by the fog, and then it was
quiet again.

“Reminds me of a story, kinda,” said Mouth. “Took place on a cold, dark, foggy night up near Vancouver, sorta like what we
got right here, in fact. This family was livin' in a little place at the edge of town. They were tryin' to make ends meet,
like all our families. It was just a little nowhere sorta place with a creaky front gate, in a little factory town. Mother
and a father, and they had one kid, a guy, he just finished high school and he was still livin' at home and workin' in the
factory with his dad, so he could save up enough to get a place of his own. His name was Alex, he was a friend of my cousin,
Doug. That's how I know the story.