The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (61 page)

On the eleventh day following Joe's discovery of Jotunheim, for reasons that the Geologist, in the face of intense pressure and threats from the Ministry, refused to characterize as anything more than "unbecoming," "unsuitable," and "of an intimate nature," Pecuchet shot Bouvard and then turned his weapon fatally on himself. The message announcing the death of Bouvard three days later was filled with intimations of imminent doom that Joe recognized with a chill. The Geologist, too, had sensed that loitering presence in a veil of glittering dust at the fringes of his camp, waiting for its moment.

All this, for two weeks, Joe pieced together in secret and kept to himself. He told himself, each time he dialed in to what he came to call Radio Jotunheim, that he would listen just a little longer, accrue another bit of information, and then pass everything he had along to Command. Surely this was what spies generally did? Better to get it all, and then risk discovery in transmitting it, than tip off the Geologist and his friends before he had acquired the full picture. The shocking murder-suicide, which broke new ground for death on the continent, seemed to put a point on things, however, and Joe typed up a careful report that, conscious as ever of his English, he proofread several times. Then he sat in front of the console. While nothing would have pleased him more than to shoot this haughty-sounding, languid Geologist in the head, he had come to identify so strongly with his enemy that, as he prepared to reveal the man's existence to Command, he felt an odd reluctance, as if in doing so he would betray himself.

As he was attempting to make up his mind what to do with his report, the desire for revenge, for a final expiation of guilt and responsibility, that had been the sole animator of Joe's existence since the night of December 6, 1941, received the final impulse it required to doom the German Geologist.

The coming of spring had brought on another whaling season, and with it a fresh campaign of the undersea boats.
U-1421,
in particular, had been harassing traffic in Drake Passage, Allied and neutral, at a moment when shortages of the oil rendered from whales could mean the difference between victory and defeat in Europe for either side. Joe had been supplying Command with intercepts from
U-1421
for months, as well as providing directional information on the submarine's signals. But the South Atlantic D/F array had, until recently, been incomplete and provisional, and nothing had ever come of Joe's efforts. Tonight, however, as he picked up a burst of chatter on the DAQ huff-duff set that, even in its encrypted state, he could recognize as originating from
U-1421,
there were two other listening posts tuned in as it made its report. When Joe supplied his readings on the signal from Kelvinator's HF/DF array in its cage atop the north aerial, a triangulation was performed at the Submarine Warfare Center in Washington. The resultant position, latitude and longitude, was supplied to the British navy, at which point an attack team was dispatched from the Falkland Islands. The corvettes and sub hunters found
U-1421,
chased it, and pelted it with hedgehogs and depth charges until nothing remained of it but an oily black squiggle scrawled on the water's surface.

Joe exulted in the sinking of
U-1421,
and in his role therein. He wallowed in it, even going so far as to permit himself to imagine that it might have been the boat that had sent the
Ark of Miriam
to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1941.

He trotted down along the tunnel to the Mess Hall and, for the first time in over two weeks, filled and turned on the snow melter, and took a shower. He fixed himself a plate of ham and powdered eggs, and broke out a new parka and pair of mukluks. On his way to the Hangar, he was obliged to pass the door to the Waldorf and the entrance of Dog-town. He shut his eyes and ran past. He did not notice that the dog crates were empty.

The sun, all of it, an entire dull red disk, hung a bare inch above the horizon. He watched it until his cheeks began to feel frostbitten. As it sank slowly back below the Barrier, a lovely salmon-and-violet sunset began to assemble itself. Then, as if to make certain Joe didn't miss the point, the sun rose for a second time, and set once more in a faded but still quite pretty flush of pink and lavender. He knew that this was only an optical illusion, brought on by distortions in the shape of the air, but he accepted it as an omen and an exhortation.

"Shannenhouse," he said. He had gone barreling down the steps without giving the pilot any warning and, as it turned out, had caught him during one of his rare periods of sleep. "Wake up, it's daytime! It's spring! Come on!"

Shannenhouse stumbled out of the plane, which glistened eerily in its tight glossy sheath of seal hides. "The sun?" he said. "Are you sure?"

"You just missed it, but it will be back in twenty hours."

A softness appeared in Shannenhouse's eyes that Joe recognized from their first days on the Ice long ago. "The sun," he said. Then, "What do you want?"

"I want to go kill Jerry."

Shannenhouse pursed his lips. His beard was a foot long now, his smell excoriating, probing, nearly sentient. "All right," he said.

"Can that plane fly or not?"

Joe started around the tail, over to the starboard side of the plane, where he noticed that the hides covering the front part of the fuselage were of a much lighter color and a different texture than those on the port side.

Stacked in a neat pyramid beside the plane, like cargo waiting to be loaded on board, sat the skulls of seventeen dogs.

4

Wahoo Fleer, their dead CO, had been at Little America with Richard Byrd in '33 and again in '40. When they went through his files, they found detailed plans and orders for transmontane Antarctic flights. In 1940 Captain Fleer himself had flown over part of the territory they would be crossing to kill the Geologist, over the Rockefeller Mountains, over the Edsel Fords, toward the shattered magnificent vacancy of Queen Maud Land. He had made carefully typed lists of the things a man ought to carry with him.

1 ice-chisel

1 pair of snow-shoes

1 roll toilet paper

2 handkerchiefs

The great anxiety of such a flight was the possibility of a forced landing. If they crashed, they would be alone and without hope of rescue at the magnetic center of nothingness itself. They would have to fight their way back to Kelvinator Station on foot, or press on ahead to Jotunheim. Captain Fleer had typed up lists of the emergency gear they would need in such an instance: tents, Primus stove, knives, saws, ax, rope, crampons. Sledges that they would have to drag themselves. Everything had to be considered for the weight it would add to the payload.

Engine muff and blow-torch 4 lbs. 2 reindeer-fur sleeping-bags 18 lbs. Flare gun and eight cartridges 5 lbs.

The precision and order of Captain Fleer's instructions had a settling effect on their minds, as did the return of the sun, and the idea of killing one of the enemy. They resumed each other's company. Shannenhouse came in from the Hangar, and Joe moved his bedroll into the Mess Hall. They said nothing about their descent over the past three months into some ancient mammalian despair. Together they ransacked Wahoo Fleer's desk. They found a decoded tidbit from Command, received the previous autumn, passing along an unconfirmed report that there might or might not be a German installation on the Ice, code-named Jotunheim. They found a copy of the Book of Mormon, and a letter marked "In the Event of My Death," which they felt entitled, but could not bring themselves, to open.

Shannenhouse took a shower. This necessitated the melting of forty-five two-pound blocks of snow, which Joe, grunting and cursing in three languages, cut and shoveled, one by one, into the melter on the Mess Hall's roof, whose zinc maw, like the bell of a gramophone, broadcast the thin reedy voice of the pilot singing "Nearer My God to Thee." They spoke little, but their exchanges were amiable, and over the course of a week they resumed the air of comradely put-uponness that had been universal among the men before the Wayne disaster. It was as if they had forgotten that flying unsupported and alone across one thousand miles of storm-tossed pack and glacier to shoot a lonely German scientist had been their own idea.

"How would you feel about a nice ten- or twelve-hour stretch of, oh, say
shoveling snow?"
they would call to each other from their bunks in the morning, after they had spent the previous five days doing only that, as if some unfeeling superior had put them on shovel duty and they were just the unlucky stiffs who had to obey the order to dig out the Hangar and the tractor garage. In the evening, when they came aching, faces and fingers seared with cold, back into the tunnels, they filled the Mess Hall with cries of "Whiskey rations!" and "Steaks for the men!"

Once they had the snow tractor dug out, it required a full day of tinkering and heating various parts of its balky Raiser engine to get it running again. They lost an entire day driving it thirty yards across level snow from the garage to the Hangar. They lost another day when the winch on the tractor failed, and the Condor, which they had managed to tow halfway up the snow ramp they'd crafted, snapped loose and went sledding back down into the Hangar, shearing off the tip of its left lower wing. This required another three days of repair, and then Shannenhouse came into the Mess Hall, where Joe had a Royal Canadian Mounted Police manual for 1912 open to the chapter entitled "Some Particulars of Sledge Maintenance," and was struggling to make sure the man-sledges were properly lashed. mare sure sledges properly lashed was item 14 on Captain Fleer's Pre-Flight Checklist. Three languages did not suffice for his cursing needs.

"I'm out of dogs," Shannenhouse said. The new tip he had grafted on the Condor's wing needed to be covered and doped to the rest of the sheathing, otherwise the plane would not take off.

Joe looked at him, blinking, trying to take in his meaning. It was the twelfth of September. In another few days, perhaps, if it could break through the melting pack, a ship bringing soldiers and planes would be returning to Jotunheim, and if they had not managed to get aloft by then, their mission might have to be called off. That was part of Shannenhouse's meaning.

"You can't use the men," Joe said.

"I wasn't suggesting that," Shannenhouse said. "Though I would be lying, Dopey, if I said the thought hadn't occurred to me."

He stroked at his whiskers, looking at Joe; he still hadn't shaved his bearish red beard. His eyes rolled toward Joe's bunk, where Oyster lay sleeping.

"There's Mussels," he said.

They shot Oyster. Shannenhouse lured the not wholly unsuspecting dog topside with a slab of frozen porterhouse and then put a bullet point-blank between the good eye and the pearl. Joe couldn't bear to watch; he lay on his bunk fully dressed, zipped into his parka, and cried. All of Shannenhouse's former loutishness was gone; he respected Joe's grief at the sacrifice of the dog, and handled the grisly work of skinning and flensing and tanning himself. The next day Joe tried to forget about Oyster and to lose himself in vengeful thoughts and the stupendous tedium of adventure. He checked and rechecked their gear against Captain Fleer's lists. He found and removed the ice-hammer that had somehow fallen into the gearbox of the tractor's winch. He waxed the skis and checked the bindings. He dragged the sledges back in from the tunnels, undid them, and lashed them again the Mountie way. He cooked steak and eggs for himself and Shannenhouse. He plucked the steaks from the salted pan, set them steaming on two big metal plates, and deglazed the pan with whiskey. He set the whiskey on fire and then blew the fire out. Shannenhouse came in stinking of processed flesh. He took the plate gratefully from Joe, his expression solemn.

"Just big enough," he said.

Joe took his plate, sat down at the captain's desk, and, hoping to absorb from the instrument some of the captain's thoroughness, typed the following statement:

To those who will come searching for Lt John Wesley Shannenhouse (j.g.) and Radioman Second Class Joseph Kavalier:

I apologize for our presence being elsewhere and probably in all truth dead.

We have confirmed an establishment of a German military and scientific base located in the Queen Maud Land, also known as Neuschwabenland. This base is presently manned by one man only. (See, if you please, attached transcripts, intercepted radio transmissions A-RRR, l.viii.44-2.ix.44.) As there are two of us the situation seems clear.

Here Joe stopped typing and sat chewing for a minute on a piece of steak. The situation was far from clear. The man they were going to kill had done nothing to harm either of them. He was not a soldier. It was unlikely that he had been involved in any but the most tangential, metaphysical of ways with the building of the witch's house in Terezin. He had had nothing to do with the storm that blew up out of the Azores or the torpedo that had blown a hole in the hull of the
Ark of Miriam.
Rut these things had, nonetheless, made Joe want to kill someone, and he did not know who else to kill.

To those who quite reasonably inquire as to our motives or authorities in performing this mission,

He stopped typing again.

"Johnny," he said. "Why are you doing this?"

Shannenhouse looked up from a nine-month-old copy of
All Doll.
Cleaned up and bearded, he looked like one of the faces that had lined the main hall of Joe's old gymnasium, the portraits of past headmasters, stern and moral men untroubled by doubt.