Microcosmic God (9 page)

It struck just aft the stem piece, blowing away the gunboat’s bow and turning her on her beam ends. She righted slowly lying far down by the head, and lay helpless. The sub, seeing her for the first time, came to the surface and men tumbled out of the hatches to man her four-incher. She began blasting away at the torpedo boat as fast as she could load, and the raider answered her, two shots to the sub’s one. And there we left them, and for all I know they are blasting away yet, far too busy to pay attention to a crummy old tankship. And Toole and I—well, we cried on each other’s shoulders for twenty minutes, and then we laughed ourselves sick.

The next four days were straight sailing, but for the pranks that were played on us. The skipper stuck to his cabin; we found out why later, and I can’t really blame him. There was still no sign of the mob of beings that could be felt aboard, but for—again—the pranks that were played on us. We stood our watches and we ate our meals and we painted and chipped and scraped as usual. But for the—but I said that before.

Like the time the buff-colored paint the day gang was laying on the after bulkhead turned the steel transparent for forty-eight hours.
Behind the bulkhead was the crew’s washroom. The view from up forward was exquisite. As the four-to-eight fireman expressed it: “I wouldn’t give a damn if the washroom was just fer washin’.”

And lots of little things, like a spoonful of salt turning to thumbtacks in the Cajun’s best gumbo soup, and live lobsters in the linen locker, and toadstools in the bos’n’s stores, and beautiful green grass, an acre of it, with four concentric fairy rings, growing on a flaked hawser in the forward cargo hold; and then there were the dice that, in the middle of a crap game, developed wickedly humorous caricatures of the six ship’s officers—including me. That might not seem like much to you; but when you remember how clever they were, and when you could never meet one of your crew without his bursting into fits of laughter when he saw your face—well, it wasn’t the best thing in the world for discipline.

About the captain—We got curious, Toole and I, about how he was getting on. He had locked himself in his room, and every once in a while would whistle for more food. He ate fish almost exclusively, in enormous quantities. We decided to do something about it. Some minor pretext to get a peek into his room. He wouldn’t come to the door if we knocked; the portholes were the answer. Now, how could we get the curtain off from the outside without the irascible old man’s coming out with a gun in each hand? We finally hit on something ideal. We’d get a broken spar with a snaggy end from somewhere, carry it past his porthole, and “accidentally” stick it in, tearing off the curtain and giving us a good look.

I’m sorry we did. We’d no business looking into the Old Man’s private life that way. After all, we decided when we batted the wind about it afterward, the Old Man had a right, if he wanted to, to have a … a mermaid in his room! We saw her without being seen, and the skipper must have been in the inner room. She was very lovely, and I got a flash of scales and golden hair, and felt like a heel for looking.

Toole and I talked it over one afternoon as we neared the coast. The two of us had seen more of the whole screwy business than anyone else, and besides, Toole was an Irishman. No one will ever know if he was right or not, but his explanation is the only one that will
fit all the facts. Pieced together from a two-hour conversation, this is about what he said, and now—I believe him:

“Third, this is a silly trip, hey? Ah, well. There are many things that you or I can’t understand, and we’re used to them, like the northern lights and the ways of a woman. I think that the skipper sold us out. No; no harm to us.” He dragged on his cigar and stared out to sea as he talked. “Something, or somebody, made a deal with him the day after we sailed. Listen; hear that?”

Far out on the beam sounded the steady
smack-splash
of huge schools of porpoise. Oh, yes; they
might
have been porpoise.

“You told me what the skipper said to you about those critters. And they don’t act like porpoises. I don’t know if it was one of them or not; maybe it was something we couldn’t see that talked. I think the skipper could. He’s a squarehead, and they’re seagoing people, and they know the sea from ’way back. He’s been to sea half again as long as the oldest sailor aboard; you know that. I don’t have to tell you that the sea is something that we’ll never really understand. You can’t know
all
about anything, even an atom; and the sea is so
damn
big.

“Well, he was made an offer; and it was probably a lifetime supply of whiskey and a week or so with that m-mermaid we—thought we saw in his room. What was the deal?

“That he should turn over his ship, and the crew to work it, to whatever party it was that wanted it for a trip from the African coast to America. There must have been provisions, if I know the skipper; he’s a downy bird. He must have provided that the ship was to be protected against weather and bullets, mines and torps. He must have stipulated that no one aboard was to be harmed permanently, and—I’m sure of this—that ship and cargo were to be returned to him at the end of the trip. Everything else I’ve guessed at has turned out, hasn’t it? Why not that? The only thing that really bothers me is the loss of time, because time is really big money in this racket. But you can bet that the squarehead wasn’t beaten down. We’ll find out—I’m certain of it.

“Now, about the passengers. Laugh at me and I’ll dry up like a clam; but I believe I have the answer. The old country has inhabitants
that men have dreamed and sung and written and told about a great deal, and seen more than seldom. I’ve spent a lot of time off watch reading about ’em, and my mother used to tell me—bless her! Anyway, there was ghosts and pixies, goblins and brownies, and dervishes and fairies and nymphs and peris and dryads and naiads and kelpies and sprites; gnomes and imps and elves and dwarves and nixies and ghouls and pigwidgeons, and the legion of the leprechauns, and many another. And some were good and some were not, and some helped and some hindered; but all were mischievous as hell. They weren’t too bad, any more than are the snakes and spiders that eat mosquitos, and many were downright beneficial.

“There’s hell to pay in Europe now, third. You can’t expect a self-respectin’ pixie to hide in a shell hole and watch a baby torn to shreds. They sickened of it, and their boss man, whoever he is, got ’em together and made arrangements to ship ’em someplace where there’s a little peace and quiet once in a while, where they can work their harmless spells on a non-aggressive populace. They can’t swim worth a damn, and you couldn’t expect the sea folk to ferry ’em over; they’re an unreliable lot anyway, to all accounts.

“I read a book once about Ol’ Puck, and how the Little People were brought to the British Isles from the Continent. They couldn’t swim even that, and they got a blind man to row and a deaf mute to stand lookout, and never a word was said of it until Puck himself told of it. This is the twentieth century, and it’s a big ocean they’ve got to cross, and there are many more of them. Did ye notice, by the way,” he broke off suddenly, “that though our tanks are empty an’ we’ve used fuel and water and stores for near two weeks, that we’re
low in the water
?” He laughed. “We’ve many and many of ’em aboard.

“We’ll unload ’em, and we’ll get our pay for the job. But this I’ll tell you, and now you may laugh, for you’re in the same boat. We’re r’arin’, tearin’ lawbreakers aboard here, third, and we don’t give a damn, or we wouldn’t be here. But if there’s any kind of a good place for us to go at the end of the voyage, then we’ll go there for this week’s work. It was always a good thing to help a war refugee.”

I didn’t laugh. I went away by myself and chewed and swallowed
that, and I thought about it a bit, and now I believe what I believe, and maybe a little bit more. It’s a big world, and these are crazy times.

Well, almost as we expected, we unloaded, but it only took us three hours instead of fourteen. Yes, we struck fog off the Carolinas, and the ship nosed up and heeled over in it, and we could feel the pressure getting less aboard. And when the
thing
under the ship sank and floated us again, and the sun came out—

Well, this is the part that is hard to explain. I won’t try it. But look: It was the twenty-third day of September when we sailed from the drydock. And when we lay off the coast that way, just out of the fog, it was the twenty-fifth. And it would have taken just three days for us to reach there from the drydock. Somewhere we lost a week. Yeah.

And the bunkers were full of fuel. And the lockers were full of stores. And the fresh-water tanks were full of water, just as they had been. But—there’s a difference. Any fuel we use is—or acts like—high-grade stuff. And our food tastes better, and the work is easier. Yeah, we’re lawbreakers—outlaws. But we take our ship where we please, when we please, and never a warship do we see, and never a shell or mine touches us. Oh, yeah; they say she’s haunted. No; there’s another word for it. She is
—enchanted
. We’re paid, and we’re being paid. And we’ll go anywhere and do anything, because we have the best skipper a man ever sailed under, and because, more than any other men on earth, we need not be afraid of death.

But I can’t forget that there’ll be hell an’ all to pay ashore!

I
’D NEVER SEEN
the place before, and I lived just down the block and around the corner. I’ll even give you the address, if you like. “The Shottle Bop,” between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets, on Tenth Avenue in New York City. You can find it if you go there looking for it. Might even be worth your while, too.

But you’d better not.

“The Shottle Bop.” It got me. It was a small shop with a weather-beaten sign swung from a wrought crane, creaking dismally in the late fall wind. I walked past it, thinking of the engagement ring in my pocket and how it had just been handed back to me by Audrey, and my mind was far removed from such things as shottle bops. I was thinking that Audrey might have used a gentler term than “useless” in describing me; and her neatly turned remark about my being a “constitutional psychopathic incompetent” was as uncalled-for as it was spectacular. She must have read it somewhere, balanced as it was by “And I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth!” which is a notably worn cliché.

“Shottle Bop!” I muttered, and then paused, wondering where I had picked up such oddly rhythmic syllables with which to express myself. I’d seen it on that sign, of course, and it had caught my eye. “And what,” I asked myself, “might be a Shottle Bop?” Myself replied promptly, “Dunno. Toddle back and have a look.” So toddle I did, back along the east side of Tenth, wondering what manner of man might be running such an establishment in pursuance of what kind of business. I was enlightened on the second point by a sign in the window, all but obscured by the dust and ashes of apparent centuries, which read:

There was another line of smaller print there. I rubbed at the crusted glass with my sleeve and finally was able to make out

Just like that:

Well of course I went in. Sometimes very delightful things come in bottles, and the way I was feeling, I could stand a little delighting.

“Close it!” shrilled a voice, as I pushed through the door. The voice came from a shimmering egg adrift in the air behind the counter, low-down. Peering over, I saw that it was not an egg at all, but the bald pate of an old man who was clutching the edge of the counter, his scrawny body streaming away in the slight draft from the open door, as if he were made of bubbles. A mite startled, I kicked the door with my heel. He immediately fell on his face, and then scrambled smiling to his feet.

“Ah, it’s good to see you again,” he rasped.

I think his vocal cords were dusty, too. Everything else here was. As the door swung to, I felt as if I were inside a great dusty brain that had just closed its eyes. Oh yes, there was light enough. But it wasn’t the lamp light and it wasn’t daylight. It was like—like light reflected from the cheeks of pale people. Can’t say I enjoyed it much.

“What do you mean, ‘again’?” I asked irritably. “You never saw me before.”

“I saw you when you came in and I fell down and got up and saw you again,” he quibbled, and beamed. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I saw your sign. What have you got in a bottle that I might like?”

“What do you want?”

“What’ve you got?”

He broke into a piping chant—I remember it yet, word for word.

“Now wait right there!” I snapped. “You mean you actually sell dragon’s blood and ink from the pen of Friar Bacon and all such mumbo-jum?”

He nodded rapidly and smiled all over his improbable face.

I went on—“The genuine article?”

He kept on nodding.

I regarded him for a moment. “You mean to stand there with your teeth in your mouth and your bare face hanging out and tell me that in this day and age, in this city and in broad daylight, you sell such trash and then expect me—me, an enlightened intellectual—”