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 death’s sake!”
“Really, Newhouse. Your language! Fve made a long study of subsurface conditions. You needn’t succumb to hysteria. You need some oxygen, that’s all.”
“I cant understand why I didn’t thinlr of this before,” I said. “Your insanity must have infected us all.” My last words were lost in a long dry groaning of ribs under pressure. The whaleskin glued over the slash in the sub’s side was forming a herniated bulge as it dimpled inwards.
“This is absurd,” I said, coughing. “I won’t be involved in your suicide. I’m going to cut my way out.” I picked my way across the tangled ballast toward Desperandum’s axe. With an effort I managed to hoist the huge, double-bladed axe to one shoulder. I moved shakily toward the bulging skin, where it would be easiest to cut. The flooring boomed uneasily under my feet.
“I wouldn’t do that at this depth if I were you,” Desperandum said. “The rush of dust would knock you to a pulp.”
I hesitated. “We’re not that deep yet.”
In answer Desperandum moved the fins and we dived again. I nearly fell down. I set the axe down quickly.
“Now return to your post,” he said flatly. I went, pulling my mask back on. The dust in the air and the stench inside the whale were making my nose run. It was impossible to tell our depth. Even the increasing pressure was not a reliable indication, because Desperandum had the oxygen tank open and running. Dust ran thickly by the plugs. My mind raced frantically, trying to squirm out from under a lowering weight of despair. After a while I felt a fatalistic inertia settling into the cores of my bones.
“The air’s getting so heavy,” I said. “I feel numb all over.” I stared out.
“Come get some oxygen then. I’ve never felt better,” Desperandum said.
A small amorphous something slid past the glass. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I saw something move just now!”
“What? What was it?” Desperandum said eagerly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was small and wiggly-looldng. I think I’d better get some air. I feel drunk.”
Desperandum inhaled hugely. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Tell you what, my lad. You take over navigation for a while, get some good air in your lungs. Let’s see what my trained eyes can make of it.”
I stumbled over the ballast, took a fiery gulp of oxygen, and grabbed the levers. I had an absurdly light feeling as I took the levers in my hands, the oxygen mask half-dangling from the snout of my dustmask. Now I could slowly and subtly direct us upward again. Desperandum released the levers, and I immediately knew that the levers were far beyond my strength.
“Captain! Captain!” I said, but my dustmask was on, and the muffled sounds were quickly lost in the drumlike booms of fhe flooring under Desperandum’s boots. It was a silent, desperate struggle then. I put my full weight against the levers and pulled till my wrists ached and cramps bit the insides of my biceps. It was no use. They escaped me, the ends of fhe levers sweeping violently upward and cracking my dustmask’s right lens. We went into an immediate nosedive. Desperandum was crouching at the port eye plug and he fell over immediately. Then the tangled mass of ballast slid onto him like an avalanche. I heard his scream and a yowl of feedback as his speakers shorted out Then he was lost beneath it all.