Against the Day (22 page)

“Oh, I don’t know, I kind of enjoyed
it,” said Darby.

“Despite which, we must ever strive
to minimize contamination by the secular,” declared Lindsay.

Each of the boys in his way agreed.
“We have had a narrow escape, fellows,” said Randolph St. Cosmo.

“Let us develop protocols,” added
Chick Counterfly, “to avoid its happening again.”

“Gloymbroognitz thidfusp,” nodded
Miles, vigorously.

Was it any wonder that when the opportunity
did arise, as it would shortly, the boys would grasp unreflectively at a chance
to transcend “the secular,” even at the cost of betraying their organization,
their country, even humankind itself?

The orders had
arrived
with the usual
lack of ceremony or even common courtesy, by way of the Oyster Stew
traditionally prepared each Thursday as the Plat du Jour by Miles Blundell,
who, that morning, well before sunup, had visited the shellfish market in the
teeming narrow lanes of the old town in Surabaya, East Java, where the boys
were enjoying a few days of groundleave. There, Miles had been approached by a
gentleman of Japanese origin and unusual persuasiveness, who had sold him, at
what did seem a remarkably attractive price, two buckets full of what he
repeatedly described as “Special Japanese Oyster,” these being in fact the only
English words Miles would recall him having spoken. Miles had thought no more
about it until the noon mess was interrupted by an agonized scream from Lindsay
Noseworth, followed by a half minute of uncharacteristic profanity. On the
messtray before him, where he had just vigorously expelled it from his mouth,
lay a pearl of quite uncommon size and iridescence, seeming indeed to glow from
within, which the boys, gathered about, recognized immediately as a
communication from the Chums of Chance Upper Hierarchy.

“Don’t suppose you happened to get
that oyster merchant’s name or address,” said Randolph St. Cosmo.

“Only this.” Miles produced a small
business card covered with Japanese text, which, regrettably, none of the boys
had ever learned to read.

“Mighty helpful,” sneered Darby
Suckling. “But heck, we all know the story by now.” Chick Counterfly had
already brought out of its storage locker a peculiarlooking optical contraption
of prisms, lenses, Nernst lamps, and adjustment screws, into an appropriate
receptacle of which he now carefully placed the pearl. Lindsay, still clutching
his jaw in dental discomfort and muttering aggrievedly, lowered the shades in
the dining saloon against the tropical noontide, and the boys directed their
attention to a reflective screen set on one bulkhead, where presently, like a
photographic image emerging from its solution, a printed message began to
appear.

Through a highly secret technical process,
developed in Japan at around the same time Dr. Mikimoto was producing his first
cultured pearls, portions of the original aragonite—which made up the
nacreous layers of the pearl—had, through “induced paramorphism,” as it
was known to the artful sons of Nippon, been selectively changed here and there
to a different form of calcium carbonate—namely, to microscopic crystals
of the doublyrefracting calcite known as Iceland spar. Ordinary light, passing
through this mineral, was divided into two separate rays, termed “ordinary” and
“extraordinary,” a property which the Japanese scientists had then exploited to
create an additional channel of optical communication wherever in the layered
structure of the pearl one of the thousands of tiny, cunninglyarranged crystals
might occur. When illuminated in a certain way, and the intricately refracted
light projected upon a suitable surface, any pearl so modified could thus be
made to yield a message.

To the fiendishly clever Oriental
mind, it had been but a trivial step to combine this paramorphic encryption
with the Mikimoto process, whereupon every oyster at the daily markets of the
world suddenly became a potential carrier of secret information. If pearls so
modified were then further incorporated into jewelry, reasoned the ingenious
Nipponese, the necks and earlobes of rich women in the industrial West might
provide a medium even less merciful than the sea into whose brute flow messages
of yearning or calls for help sealed in bottles were still being dropped and abandoned.
What deliverance from the limitless mischief of pearls, what votive offering in
return for it, would be possible?

The message from Upper Hierarchy
directed the crew to get up buoyancy immediately and proceed by way of the
Telluric Interior to the north polar regions, where they were to intercept the
schooner
ÉtienneLouis Malus
and attempt to persuade its commander, Dr.
Alden Vormance, to abandon the expedition he was currently engaged upon, using
any means short of force—which, though not prohibited outright to the
Chums of Chance, did create a strong presumption of Bad Taste, which every Chum
by ancient tradition was sworn, if not indeed at pains, to avoid.

Some of the greatest minds in the
history of science, including Kepler, Halley, and Euler, had speculated as to
the existence of a socalled “hollow Earth.” One day, it was hoped, the
technique of intraplanetary “shortcutting” about to be exercised by the boys
would become routine, as useful in its way as the Suez or the Panama Canal had
proved to surface shipping. At the time we speak of, however, there still
remained to our little crew occasion for stunned amazement, as the
Inconvenience
left the South Indian Ocean’s realm of sunlight, crossed the edge of the
Antarctic continent, and began to traverse an immense sweep of whiteness broken
by towering black ranges, toward the vast and tenebrous interior which breathed
hugely miles ahead of them.

Something did seem odd, however. “The
navigation’s not as easy this time,” Randolph mused, bent over the chart table
in some perplexity. “Noseworth, you can remember the old days. We knew for
hours ahead of time.” Skyfarers here had been used to seeing flocks of the
regional birds spilling away in long helical curves, as if to escape being
drawn into some vortex inside the planet sensible only to themselves, as well
as the withdrawal, before the advent of the more temperate climate within, of
the eternal snows, to be replaced first by tundra, then grassland, trees,
plantation, even at last a settlement or two, just at the Rim, like border
towns, which in former times had been the sites of yearly markets, as dwellers
in the interior came out to trade luminous fish, giant crystals with geomantic
properties, unrefined ores of various useful metals, and mushrooms unknown to
the fungologists of the surface world, who had once journeyed regularly hither
in high expectation of discovering new species with new properties of visionary
enhancement.

On this trip, however, the polar ice
persisted until quite close to the great portal, which itself seemed to have
become
noticeably smaller,
with a strange sort of icemist, almost the
color of the surface landscape, hovering over it and down inside, soon becoming
so thick that for a short while the crew of the
Inconvenience
were in
effect flying blind, guided only by their sense of smell, among odors of
sulfurous combustion, fungus harvesting, and the resinous transpiration of the
vast forests of sprucelike conifers which began fitfully to emerge out of the
mist.

Its engines humming strenuously, the
airship entered the planet’s interior. The antennas and rigging were soon
outlined in a pale blue radiance much more noticeable than on previous
transits. “Even with the Southern winter,” reported Chick Counterfly, who had
been taking photometric readings, “it is much darker in here than previously,
which is certainly consistent with a smaller entranceway admitting less light
from the surface.”

“I wonder what could be responsible,”
frowned Randolph. “Can’t say I like it, much.”

“Inordinate attention from the middle
latitudes,” proclaimed Miles, with a sort of vatic swoon in his voice. “When
the interior feels itself under threat, this is a selfprotective reflex, all
living creatures possess it in one form or another
. . . .
”

Far “below,” through the
intraplanetary dusk, they could make out upon the great inner concavity,
spreading into the distances, the phosphorescent chains and webs of settlement
crossing lightless patches of wilderness still unvisited by husbandry, as,
silently as the ship’s nitrolycopodium engines would allow, the skyfarers made
their passage. “Do you think they know we’re here?” whispered Lindsay, as he
always did on this passage, peering through his nightglass.

“Absent any signs as yet of other
airborne traffic,” shrugged Randolph, “it seems an academic point.”

“If any of them down there were to
possess longrange armament,” suggested Chick mischievously, “—destructive
rays, perhaps, or lenses for focusing the auroral energy upon our
alltoovulnerable envelope—they may only be waiting for us to come in
range.”

“Perhaps, then, we ought to implement
heightened alert status,” proposed Lindsay Noseworth.

“Eenhhyhh, nervous Nellies the bunch
o’ yih,” scoffed Darby Suckling. “Keep chinnin about it, ladies, maybe you can
worry us into a real disaster.”

“There is traffic on the Tesla
device,” Miles, who had been attending
Inconvenience
’s
wireless apparatus, now advised in
hushed tones.

“How do you know, Bugbrains?”

“Listen.” Miles, smiling calmly at
what might, by someone more engaged with the earthly, easily be read as
provocation, reached for and threw a set of knifeswitches on the console before
him, and an electrical soundmagnifier nearby sputtered into life.

At first the “noise” seemed no more
than the ensemble of magnetoatmospheric disturbances which the boys had long
grown used to, perhaps here intensified by the vastly resonant space into which
they were moving ever deeper. But presently the emission began to coalesce into
human timbres and rhythms—not speech so much as music, as if the twilit
leagues passing below were linked by means of song.

Lindsay, who was Communications
Officer, had his ear close to the Tesla device, squinting attentively, but at
last withdrew, shaking his head. “Gibberish.”

“They are calling for help,” ~delared
Miles, “clear as day and quite desperately, too. They claim to be under attack
by a horde of hostile gnomes, and have set out red signal lamps, arranged in
concentric circles.”

“There they are!” called Chick
Counterfly, pointing over the starboard quarter.

“Then there is nothing to discuss,”
declared Randolph St. Cosmo. “We must put down and render aid.”

They descended over a battlefield
swarming with diminutive combatants wearing pointed hats and carrying what
proved to be electric crossbows, from which they periodically discharged bolts
of intense greenish light, intermittently revealing the scene with a morbidity
like that of a guttering star.

“We cannot attack these fellows,”
protested Lindsay, “for they are shorter than we, and the Rules of Engagement
clearly state—”

“In an emergency, that choice lies at
the Commander’s discretion,” replied Randolph.

They were soaring now close above the
metallic turrets and parapets of a sort of castle, where burned the crimson
lights of distress. Figures could be discerned below gazing up at the
Inconvenience.
Peering at them through a nightglass, Miles stood at the conning station,
transfixed by the sight of a woman poised upon a high balcony. “My word, she’s
lovely!” he exclaimed at last.

Their fateful decision to land would
immediately embroil them in the byzantine politics of the region, and
eventually they would find themselves creeping perilously close to outright
violation of the Directives relating to Noninterference and Height Discrepancy,
which might easily have brought an official hearing, and perhaps even
disfellowshipment from the National Organization. For a detailed account of
their subsequent narrow escapes from the increasingly deranged attentions of
the Legion of Gnomes, the unconscionable connivings of a certain international
mining cartel, the sensual wickedness pervading the royal court of Chthonica,
Princess of Plutonia, and the allbutirresistible fascination that subterranean
monarch would come to exert, Circelike, upon the minds of the crew of
Inconvenience
(Miles, as we have seen, in particular), readers are referred to
The
Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth
—for some reason one of the
less appealing of this series, letters having come in from as far away as
Tunbridge Wells, England, expressing displeasure, often quite intense, with my
harmless little intraterrestrial scherzo.

After their precipitate escape from
the illdisposed hordes of thickset indigenous, over another night and day, as
time is reckoned on the surface, the Chums swept through the interior of the
Earth and at last out her Northern portal, which they beheld as a tiny circle
of brightness far ahead. As before, all remarked the diminished size of the
planetary exit. It was a tricky bit of steering, as they emerged, to locate the
exact spot, on the swiftly dilating luminous circumference, where they might
with least expenditure of time find themselves in the vicinity of the schooner
EtienneLouis
Malus,
carrying the Vormance Expedition toward a fate few of its members
would willingly have chosen.