Against the Day (27 page)

Scholars of the Eddas, recently
having perused them in original form in the Library of Iceland, were to suggest
later—too late—comparison to Buri, grandfather of Odin and the
first gods, frozen in the ice of Niflheim for uncounted ages, till being licked
awake by the tongue of the mythic cow Audumla. Which of us then, mindlessly as
children at a fairground, had not performed the analogous service for our own
frozen Visitant? What gods, what races, what worlds were about to be born?

Alpinists among us were to describe
the recovery as no more arduous than a descent into a crevasse. The crew of the
great airship, having warned us as much as they felt they could, now held
aloof. Their charge appeared to go no further than warning—they shook
their heads ruefully, they gazed down at us from the rail of their gondola, but
they neither interfered nor lifted a finger to help. And we, intrepid
innocents, we climbed down into those shadows, leaving abruptly the wind, as
the scentless snow walls rose about us, and we followed the alltooregular slope
of what we foolishly continued to call the
“
nunatak,
”
down to meet our destiny. The Eskimos
had seemed eager, at times unnaturally so, to speed our work. But whenever we
happened upon a group of them conversing, they fell silent and did not resume
till we had passed from earshot. Soon, one by one, on some private schedule we
could not decipher, they departed, muttering, gliding away over the ice and
into the yellowed glare forever.

We entered a period of uncritical
buoyancy, borne along by submission to a common fate of celebrity and ease. We
exchanged formulaic sentiments—“Even the weather is cooperating.” “Glad
we’ve all got contracts.” “Vibes will sell it, whatever it is, the minute they
see it.” We labored in the polar darkness, our faces beaten at by the terrible
orange flamelight of the Aurora. From time to time, the dogs went
crazy—rigid, staring in fear, they ran away and tried to hide or to bite
anything that got close. Sometimes there were reallife explanations—some
polar bear or walrus scented from miles away. But sometimes no explanation
could be found. Whatever it was, it was invisible.

And on occasion they did not bark
when they should have. One day there came walking to us over the white plain a
figure in bearskins not of the region, strangely, unsettlingly,
approaching
from the north.
Mr. Dodge Flannelette was impulsively reaching for his
rifle, when Mr. Hastings Throyle, I believe it was, called out in Tungus,
adding, “Damned if it isn’t old Magyakan. Knew him in Siberia.”

“He can’t have come all this way on
foot,” said Dr. Vormance skeptically.

“Actually, most likely he flew here,
and not only is he here visiting with us but also and simultaneously, I’ve no
doubt, back in the Yenisei watershed with his people as well.”

“You are beginning to worry me,
Throyle.”

Throyle explained about the
mysterious shamanic power known as bilocation, which enables those with the
gift literally to be in two or more places, often widely separated, at the same
time. “He says he has a message for us.”

“He seems afraid of something.”

“Arctic hysteria,” said Dr. Ghloix,
the Expedition’s psychomedical officer. “A sort of Northern melancholia, all
too often a foreshadowing of suicide.”

Magyakan declined food but took a cup
of tea and a Havana cigar, sat, halfclosed his eyes, and began to speak, with
Throyle translating.

“They may not wish to harm us. They
may even in some way love us. But they have no more choice than your own sled
dogs, in the terrible, to them empty, land upon which they have chosen to
trespass, where humans are the only source of food. We are allowed to live and
work until we fall from exhaustion. But they are suffering as much as we. Their
voices will be gentle, they will administer the pain only when they must, and
when they bring out the weapons, objects we’ve never seen before, we stare,
wordless as dogs, we don’t recognize them, perhaps we think they are toys or
something else to amuse us
. . . .
” He
fell silent, sat and smoked and presently slept. Sometime after midnight he
woke, rose, and walked away into the Arctic emptiness.

“It was some sort of a prophecy,
then?” asked Dr. Vormance.

“Not quite as we’re used to thinking
of it,” Throyle replied. “For us it’s simple ability to see into the future,
based on our linear way of regarding time, a simple straight line from past,
through present, into the future. Christian time, as you might say. But shamans
see it differently. Their notion of time is spread out not in a single
dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant.”

We found ourselves watching the dogs
more closely. Often they were observed in the company of another large,
otherwise nondescript dog, who had flown here with the airship crew. The sled
dogs were usually gathered round him in an orderly circle, as if he were in
some way addressing them.

What bothered them particularly was
the task of pulling the improvised sled we used to transport the object over
the ice to the ship. It might as well have been a canine labor union. Perhaps,
under the guidance of Pugnax, for that was the airship dog’s name, that is what
it was.

Bringing what we had recovered back
to the ship proved to be only the first of our trials. Stowing the object in
the hold was cursed from the beginning. One failure followed another—if a
purchase did not give way, then some hawser, regardless of size, was sure to
strand—yet each time, mysteriously, the object was rescued from falling
to its possible destruction
. . .
as
if it were somehow
meant to survive
our worst efforts. Trying to get it
to fit inside the ship, we measured, and remeasured, and each time the
dimensions kept coming out different—not just slightly so but
drastically. There seemed no way to get the object through any of the ship’s
hatches. We had finally to resort to our cuttingtorches. All the while the
thing regarded us with what, later, when we had begun to appreciate the range
of its emotions, we might too easily have recognized as contempt. With its
“eyes” set closely side by side like those of humans and other binocular
predators, its gaze had remained directed solely, personally, to each of us, no
matter where we stood or moved.

Of the journey south again, we ought
to have remembered more, our waking watches speeding by, the melodic whispering
of a crewman’s ocarina down a passageway framed in steelbolted timbers, the
smell of the coffee at breakfast, the gibbous presence of the airship which had
come to warn us, persistent off the starboard quarter, like a misplaced moon,
until at last, as if given up on our common sense, they took their leave with a
salute of Bengal lights from which irony may not have been entirely absent.

Which of us was willing to turn, to
look the future in the face, to mutiny if necessary and oblige the Captain to
put about, return the thing to where we had found it? The last of our mean
innocence tolled away ship’s bell after bell. Even if we could not predict in
detail what was about to happen, there could have been no one among us, not
even the most literalminded, who did not feel that something, down there, below
our feet, below the waterline where it lay patient and thawing, was terribly,
and soon to be more terribly, amiss.

Returned to harbor at last, we felt
little alarm when those first deep metaltometal groans began. Here in this as
in any great seaport, being invisible, so we thought, was the same as being
safe, invisible amid all these impersonal momenta of the Commercial, the coming
and going of Whitehall gigs, the bristling masts and funnels, the jungles of

rigging, the bills of lading, the routine attendances of
fitters, chandlers, insurance men, port officials, longshoremen, and at last a
delegation from the Museum, to take delivery of what we had brought, and by
whom we were ignored, nearly unsensed.

Perhaps in their haste to be rid of
us, they had missed seeing, as had we, how
imperfectly contained
the
object really was. As if it were the embodiment of a newlydiscovered “field” as
yet only roughly calculated, there lay our original sin—the repeated
failure, back there up north, to determine the distribution of its weight in
ordinary space, which should have offered a strong hint, to any of us willing
to devote a moment’s thought, that some fraction of the total must necessarily
have escaped confinement. That this unbounded part had been neither detected
nor measured was equivalent to saying that
no
part of it had
ever
been
contained—and that
thus had we, in our cloud of selfdeluding and dream, brought it home
already
at large.

Those who claim to have heard it
speak as it made its escape are now safely away in the upstate security of
Matteawan, receiving the most modern care. “Nothing voiced—all hisses, a
serpent, vengeful, relentless,” they raved. Others attested to languages long
dead to the world, though of course known to their reporters. “The manshaped
light shall not deliver you,” it allegedly declared, and, “Flames were always
your destiny, my children.”
Its
children— Is it worth anyone’s
while now to journey out those starfish corridors where they suffer, each
behind his door of oak and iron, the penance they bear as a condition of that
awful witness?

My own part in the fateful
transmittal, as I imagined, being discharged, I had intended to entrain at once
for the Nation’s Capital, leaving others to dispute credit and compensation.
As, in any case, it was a Washingtonian Entity to which I was obliged to
report, I foresaw no difficulty in completing for them at least a précis during
the journey south. Vain dream! Once the terror had commenced, even reaching the
depot would prove an Odyssey.

For the streets were in mad disorder.
A troop of irregulars in red Zouavestyle hats and trousers, their mounts
confused and terrified, wheeled helplessly, with who knew what negligible
increase of anxiety surely enough to start them shooting at one another, not to
mention at innocent civilians. The shadows of the tall buildings swooped in the
firereddened light. Ladies, and in many cases gentlemen, screamed without
ceasing, to no apparent effect. Streetvendors, the only ones to show any composure
at all, ran about trying to sell restoratives alcoholic and ammoniac, ingenious
respirator helmets to protect against inhalation of smoke, illustrated maps
purporting to show secret tunnels, subbasements and other arks of safety, as
well as secure routes out of town. The omnibus I had taken seemed scarcely to
move, the distant flagpoles atop the station ever to linger against the sky,
unattainable as Heaven. Newsboys ran to and fro alongside, waving late editions
jagged with exclamatory headlines.

Arrived at last at the depot, I
joined a mass of citizens all trying to get aboard any outbound trains they
could find. At the entrance the ungoverned mass of us was somehow spun into
singlefile, proceeding thenwith ominous slowness to thread the marble maze inside,
its ultimate destination impossible to see. Nonuniformed monitors, street
toughs in soiled workclothes by the look of them, made sure none of us violated
the rules, of which there seemed already too many. Outside, gunfire continued
intermittently.

Clocks high overhead told us sweep
after sweep how late, increasingly late, we would be.
At the Explorers’ Club today
, the less
fashionable one, seeking refuge from the pestilential rains of the District,
everyone mingling in the anterooms, waiting for the liveried Pygmies bearing
their Chinese bronze dinner gongs to announce the famed Gratuitous Midday
Repast. If anyone observed me shaking from time to time, they assumed it was
the usual bush fever.

“Afternoon, General. . . ma’am . .

“But I say, old ’Wood! Haven’t the
wogs killed you yet? Thought you were in Africa.”

“So did I. Can’t imagine what I’m
doing here.”

“Since Dr. Jim’s little adventure
it’s all been Queer Street out there, hasn’t it. War any moment, shouldn’t
wonder.” He began to quote the British poetlaureate’s commemorative verse, with
its questionable rhyme of “pelt” and “veldt.”

I have begun to notice, among
southern Africa hands in particular, this vernacular of unease and
hallucination. Is it the growing political tension in the Transvaal, and the
huge amounts of money changing hands from the traffic in gold and diamonds?
Should I put some money in Rand shares?

During luncheon got into a funny sort
of confab about civilized evil in faroff lands.

“Maybe the tropics,” somebody,
probably the General said, “but never the Polar Region, it’s too white, too
mathematical up there.”

“But always in our business there are
natives, and then there are natives, don’t you see? Us and natives. Any
particular tribe, the details of it, get lost in the general question—who
is laboring to whose benefit, sort of thing.”

“There’s never a question. The
machines, the buildings, all the industrial structures we’ve put in out there.
They see these things, they learn to operate them, they come to understand how
powerful they are. How deadly. How deadly
we
are. Machinery can crush
them. Trains can run them over. In the Rand some of the shafts go down four
thousand feet.”