I would have fallen on him if I had not been holding the starboard finlever. As it was I dangled about ten feet above him, my feet just above the treacherous, unstable heap of metal and cable and crates. The smell of preserving fluid went through the dry musty air like a knife.
Hie oxygen tank had taken its mask attachment with it when it tumbled free. The engine, though, was secured to the sub’s skeleton, and it had stayed in place. It was still running. Painfully, I pulled myself up the length of the lever until I could wrap my legs around it. Then I pulled off my mask.
“I’m so sorry I came down here,” I said. “Tm really, really sorry I did it and it wasn’t my idea at all, and if I ever get away from here I’ll never, ever let this happen again—"
“Newhouse ...”
“—to me or anyone else, ever, ever again. ...”
“Newhouse. Turn off the engines. Turn them off!”
“Captain! Captain Desperandum!”
“Turn off the engines, Newhouse,” came Desperandum’s reasonable voice. “I think I hear something down here.”
Tears were running down my face. “I don’t know if I can do it Captain,” I said. “There’s something wrong with filie.”
“It’s nitrogen narcosis, my lad. We’re too deep, far too deep. You’ll have to turn off the engine. I can’t do it. I can’t feel my legs.”
I shuddered. “All right Captain. I’ll try.” I inched my way up the lever, dug my feet and fingers into the stinking, dessicated flesh around the ribs, and leapt. The whirling propeller shaft almost brushed against my face, but I wrapped my arms around the bulk of the engine. I kicked once, twice against the switch, and the engine shut down with a moan and a mumble.
Then there was silence. I heard the crunch and rustle of Desperandum moving amid the rubble. “I can just see out the eyehole,” he said. “There. Do you hear that?”
I got up on top of the engine block, and it groaned a little. The whole belly of the hollow whale was bulging inward at my back. “I don’t hear anything, Captain. Just the dust . . . I think.”
“I see them moving out there,” Desperandum said matter-of-factly. “They’re quite small. And they’re shining—sort of an amorphous glow. There are hundreds of them. I can see them strung off into the distance.”
“Captain,” I said. “Captain, how are we going to get back to the surface? We can’t navigate while the ship is standing on its head like this.” I burst into feeble giggles. It was half the nitrogen poisoning, half the pure deadly ludicrousness of the situation.
“That’s not important now, Newhouse. But it’s vital that you come down here and confirm this sighting. We’re making scientific history.”
“No.” I said. “I’m not going to look at them. They have a right to their privacy. God I wish I had some clean air. I feel so weak.”
Desperandum was silent for a while. Then he said coaxingly, “The oxygen’s down here with me. I can hear it hissing. You’ll pass out in a little while if you don’t get some, you know. And maybe you could get these pipes off my legs. I think they’re bleeding, but it might just be the preservative fluid. Then you could have a look. Just a little one. What do you have to lose?”
“No!” I said more urgently, my fogged brain stung a little now with panic. “I don’t want to look at them. I don’t think they want me to.”
“For stability’s sake!” Desperandum said, resorting to Nullaquan profanity in his final crisis. “Don’t you have a shred of plain human curiosity? Just think how interesting they arel I never realized they were so small! And the way they move is so fascinating, almost a kind of dance. Like little colored lights. See how they move away to the sides now! And—Oh my God!”
Desperandum began to scream. “Look at that thing! Look at the size of it! It’s coming closer! It’s coming too close! It’s coming too close to us! Don’t! Don’t do it!”
There was a jar that nearly knocked me loose from the engine. Then a hideous cracking and crumbling. Something was squeezing us. Big dimpled indentations, like troughs, appeared in the back and belly of the whale—five of them. There were four of them across the back and a big thumblike one almost directly behind me. The great dry bones added their screaming to the captain’s. There was a crunch, a scream, a great rupturing sound at the savage bursting of our vessel, a rush and roar of exploding air—grayness— and blackness.
Chapter 15
The Dream
The sky was that blackness, and I was in the sky, floating weightless, disembodied. Far below me, baked in raw sunlight, was the shimmering, seething Nullaqua Crater. And as the landscape cleared, I saw before me a city of the Elder Culture, reborn.
The city was a miracle. It was whole, beautiful, charged with the energy of life, its fluted spires and broad black plazas shrouded from vacuum by a thin protective field, the iridescent essence of a bubble. As I watched I saw delicate, insect-wing tints chase one another across its translucent surface. It was far beyond anything made by man. This was the Elder Culture at its peak.
Something moved me closer. I slipped without difficulty through the geld surrounding the city. There was no sense of transition; suddenly I was watching a citizen at work. He was a reptilian centaurlike being, his skin one long sheen of tiny golden red scales. He had eight eyes circling his pink head like studs in a headband.
He sat alone in a small, hexagonal room, lit by a shifting geometric pattern of tiny bulbs in the ceiling. Incense smoldered in a corner. Before him on a low black pedestal was a device that might best be called a sculpture. The core of it was a solid yellow cylinder, shrouded by a blindingly intricate linking and twisting of multicolored beads, glowing like winter stars through a cloud of mist.
I had an intuition that was not my own. I saw the object’s significance at once. It was at the same time a work of art, a religious symbol, and a physical representation of its owner’s persona.
He looked at the sculpture intently. He was dissatisfied. Out of the thousands of beads, three abruptly winked out. He had just destroyed a month’s work.
His latest work had been too rushed, too hurried. The stresses of the past months had affected him subliminally, and true soul sculpture required complete repose.
He wanted peace. Surcease. Electropsychic nirvana, the dynamic joy, the more than religious content that would come when, his personality was fused with the sculpture, and he died. Friends would launch his soul into an infinity of space, to float eternally.
Once this belief had been their faith, but now it was the literal truth. The Elder Culture had made it so.
Changing, I floated from the centaur’s room and into the city streets. There was an incredible throng, members of a race that took a pure hedonistic joy in the possibilities of surgical alteration. They switched bodies, sexes, ages, and races as easily as breathing, and their happy disdain for uniformity was dazzling. There were great spiny bipeds; slinking doglike things with the hands of men; big creeping bulks with multiplicities of crablike pincered legs; hairy, globular beings with long, warty, cranelike legs and huge, incongrous wings; things on wheels or tracks with great grapelike dusters of dozens of eyes and ears; things that flew, that did, that humped, that wallowed; things that traveled in colonies, or linked by long umbilicals, or moved in great multiheaded hybrids like whole families grafted together. It seemed so natural, rainbow people in the rainbow streets; humans seemed drab and antlike in comparison.