Involution Ocean

“Ah, but thafs where you’re wrong,” the Captain said slowly. “Desperandum’s just a dustmask of a name. The real credit belongs to me—Ericald Svobold.”

I was stunned. “You’re Svobold? The discoverer of—that is—'

“Syncophine, that’s right,” the captain said mercilessly. “Oh, I gave up using Flare years ago, but I can still recog­nize a user.”

There was silence. I laughed, rather shrilly. “It’s ironic, Captain. You know, you’ve been my idol for years. Why, I’ve drunk and dropped to your memory a hundred times. But if the legends are right, why, you must be over four hundred years—'

“Let’s not get into that,” the captain said. “Let’s stick to the here and now. When you get to be my age you’ll find that’s best. Now, I don’t know how or why you introduced Murphig to syncophine. I don’t know how or why your henchman and my sharpest crewman both died in a single night. Your guilt or innocence is not my concern. But there’s no way out for you now, Newhouse. You might as well stop squirming. You know you’re caught. I can tell it just by looking at your face. Fm old, all right, but not in my dotage. Oh no. It doesn’t happen like that nowadays, not to us galactics. We only get sharper and sharper—God only knows how intolerably sharp we can become. If you could see the things I see for just one day—but that’s beside the point.

“I need you, Newhouse. I need a witness. I would have taken Murphig, you see. He was the only man among the crew, the only Nullaquan who could have understood the incredible revelations we’re going to find.down there. The rest of these woodenheads—they don’t even have thfe sav­ing grace of curiosity that Murphig had. So that leaves you, sir.”

“But it’s not so, Captain,” I said. “I’m hardly your most reliable witness. I’m a vagrant. And, yes, I use drugs. You need a solid, down-to-earth sort. First mate Flack for in­stance.”

“Flack has a wife and children,” the captain said chill­ingly. “And he doesn’t have half your mental agility. You know, I could almost admire you, Newhouse. I can under­stand your corrupting Murphig—and liquidating Calo­thrick, who was a jackal anyway—but I cant understand your leading on Dalusa, that poor tormented creature. That was a vicious act And I’m offering you a chance to purify yourself, to do something selfless for once. Think of it, Newhouse. Don’t you need this as much as I do?”

“You’re mistaken,” I said. I love Dalusa. When this is over I’m going to take her away—someplace where we can live free from death and madness.”

Desperandum looked at me closely for over a minute. Finally he said, “You do love her, don’t you? You’re in even worse trouble than I thought.”

“That remains to be seen,” I said. “Captain—Captain Svobold—if the legends are true, you’re a man of honor. I still love life, but I’ll court death with you if I must. But I want your word that after this there will be no more threats, spoken or unspoken.”

“You have my word,” Desperandum said. He extended his hand. I shook it, with the whimsical feeling of a night­mare.

Then I secured my mask and went up on deck. To star­board, the men were still working on the whale. I went down to the kitchen to sleep.

Next morning, Desperandum was eager to be under way. There was barely time for a brief, tearful farewell to Dalusa before he called me to his cabin. From there, the captain and I walked across the deck toward our odd vehicle with all the dignity we could muster. Through some atavistic social instinct I was still putting a good face on matters, and the captain was the gentleman scientist to the end. Calmly, he shook the hands of his three mates, making them wince. Knowing no better, I shook them too.

“Are you really going down there, Cookie?” Orent asked me as he shook my hand. I nodded. I was already regret­ting that Grent’s voice would be one of my last memories.

“Hope you’re back in time for supper,” he said. I nodded again, unable to reply because of the mask. I might have denounced the captain otherwise, shouted: “He’s crazy, don’t you see? He has to be restrained for his own good!” But it wouldn’t have worked. The captain would have seen to it that my life was ruined; it would have hurt Dalusa as well.

The captain waved formally to the crew, then ruined the dignity of his exit by clumsily forcing his huge bulk through the slash in the whale’s side. “Greasy luck, Cap­tain!” Flack called out as I followed him.

Following their captain’s orders, the crew securely glued a great doubled sheet of whaleskin over our entanceway. It grew dark at once inside our musty, eviscerated craft. Soon my eyes adjusted to the dim sunlight pouring through the animal’s goggling eye plugs. Desperandum—somehow I could not get used to thinking of him as Svobold—calmly took the ends of the iron fin-levers in his meaty hands.

“I’ll navigate for now, Newhouse,” he said kindly, giving the fins an experimental wiggle. “You go up for’ard to the portholes and keep the lookout. “Ware the ballast now.”

My eyes had adjusted fully now and everything took on a hallucinatory clarity as I picked my way forward through the heaped-up “ballast.” It was an incredible hodgepodge of heavy, miscellaneous jetsam: chunks of pipe, tight-wound bales of wire, bolt buckets, bundles of welding rods, metal boxes heaped with spare parts for the meat grinders, the oven, the recycler, neatly spooled miles of ceramic cable (it amazed me to see yet more of this particular item; Death knows where he kept it all), spare shafts and hafts for har­poons, flensing spades and axes, Desperandum’s own mighty axe, and crates containing stacked specimen jars, each one brim-full with murky, yellowish fluid. The whole mess was haphazardly bound together with an ageometrical webwork of cable, stringing with a loony haphazardness from junk to chunk. As I picked my way for­ward, noting the neat sailor’s knots that bound everything, the floor moved and I pitched forward, striking the plug in the monster’s tiny gullet a solid blow with my head.

The crew had not wasted time. I could see their opera­tions through the port plug as they calmly turned the pul­leys and cranks that governed the hoists.

As soon as our craft began to lift free there was an omi­nous series of sinewy creaks, pops and snaps as the inertia tugged the mummified muscle and bone. The thick, leath­ery belly flesh of the floor bowed noticeably under the weight of the ballast, and the bone-strutted walls leaned in­ward a little with the groany reluctance of rigor mortis.

There was a muffled hiss as Desperandum turned on the valves to the oxygen mask. Slowly, we swung outwards, off the deck and over the quietly seething sea.

Slowly we went down and settled into the dust with a floury rush and a whisper. There were four muffled thumps as the slings were released, and we began to sink. Desper­andum turned on the engine, and it began to whir and mumble. We surged slowly forward. Frothing dust washed quietly over the eye plugs and even as I watched, it grew pitch black inside the sub. I quickly ripped off my mask.

“My death!” I cried out. “It’s black! It’s completely black! Captain, we can’t see a thing!”

“Of course,” the captain replied urbanely. “The light cant reach inside, you see. That’s why I had our own lights installed.” There was a click and wan bluish light from a naked bulb overhead filled the sub. A pale charnel-house radiance gleamed off exposed patches of bone amid the dry sinew of the walls and ceiling.

I sneezed and put my mask back on. The dry mustiness was awful. I returned my attention to the eye plugs. An in­tricately patterned swirl of dust moved across our lenses, slowly abrading them. I realized with a shock that Desper­andum’s calmly stated absurdity had momentarily con­vinced me. I took off the mask again, ignoring the itch of dust in my sinuses. I swallowed to depressurize my ears and said, “Captain. This is ridiculous. The dust is opaque. We might as well be blindfolded.”

“Indeed,” Desperandum said. He moved the ends of the levers upwards slightiy and the sub nose-dived alarmingly. He pulled us back out of it. My ears popped again, and a chorus of creaks spoke up from the musty joints of ribs and vertebrae.

’Take us back up, Captain! The trip’s a failure! We can’t see anything, so we’re risking our lives for nothing. Come now, Captain.”

Desperandum looped the oxygen .mask over the snouted nozzle of his dustmask and inhaled audibly. Hie ship rolled and he grabbed his fin levers tightly.

The sounds from his speakers were half-muffled as Des­perandum replied. “It’s not your job to theorize on the opti­cal properties of dust, Newhouse. Just keep watching. We. should reach one of the translucent layers soon.”

“Hie translucent layers! The translucent layers? Captain, this is dust, not glass! For