Against the Day (46 page)

chinery across—Arctic ice,
frozen tundra—you can see that it all makes one great mass, doesn’t it?
Eurasia, Africa, America. With Inner Asia at its heart. Control Inner Asia,
therefore, and you control the planet.”

“How about that other, well,
actually, hemisphere?”

“Oh, this?” He flipped the globe over
and gave it a contemptuous tap. “South America? Hardly more than an appendage
of North America, is it. Or of the Bank of England, if you like. Australia?
Kangaroos, one or two cricketers of perhaps discernible talent, what else?” His
small features quivering in the dark afternoon light.

“Werfner, damn him, keenwitted but
unheimlich,
is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course,
but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own
necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations
therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by
tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made
material—and flows of power as well, expressed, for example, in massive
troop movements, now and in the futurity—he styles himself the prophet of
Eisenbahntüchtigkeit,
or railworthiness, each and every accommodation to
the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s
unwritten equation
. . . .
” He was
lecturing. Lew lit another cigar and settled back.

“
Enjoyable
visit
?” the Cohen inquired a little too offhandedly, as if a practical
joke were about to unfold.

“He offered me a job.”

“Capital!”

Lew summarized the Gentleman Bomber
of Headingly case, which the Cohen, like everybody in the British Isles except
Lew, was intimately familiar with already. “Does this make me a double agent?
Should I start wearing a fake nose or something?”

“Renfrew can be under no illusions
about your relations with the T.W.I.T. By now he must have worked up a complete
dossier on you.”

“Then . . .”

“He thinks he’ll be able to use you.”

“The way you folks’ve been doing.”

“Oh, but we’re the pure of heart, you
see.”

It might have been the residual
effects of Cyclomite abuse, but Lew swore he could hear an invisible roomful of
laughter, and some applause as well.

cross the city noontide a field of bells emerged into flower,
as the boys came swooping in over Murano, above widetopped redclay chimneys the
size of smokestacks, known as
fumaioli,
according to the local pilot,
Zanni. “
Very dangerous,
the sparks, they could blow up the balloon,
certo,
”
drops of perspiration flying
off his face at all angles, as if selfpropelled. The comically anxious but
goodhearted Italian had come aboard earlier in the day, after the boys had
obtained the necessary clearances from the Piacenza branch of the Chums of
Chance, known here in their native Italy as “Gli Amici dell’Azzardo.” The
Inconvenience
having gone into dockyard facilities, the boys had been given temporary use
of an Italian airship of the same class, the semirigid
Seccatura.

From their stations the fellows now
beheld the islandcity of Venice below them, looking like some map of itself
printed in an ancient sepia, presenting at this daylit distance an impression
of ruin and sorrow, though closer at hand this would resolve into a million
rooftiles of a somewhat more optimistic red.

“Like some great rusted amulet,”
marveled Dr. Chick Counterfly, “fallen from the neck of a demigod, its spell
enfolding the Adriatic—”

“Oh, then perhaps,” grumbled Lindsay
Noseworth, “we ought to set you down there right away, so that you can go rub
it, or whatever amulet fanciers do.”

“Here, Lindsay, rub this,” suggested
Darby Suckling, from his seat at the control panel. Next to him Miles Blundell
gazed carefully at various dialfaces while reciting in a sort of torpid
rapture, “The Italian number that looks like a zero, is the same as our own
American ‘zero.’ The one that looks like a one, is ‘one.’ The one that looks
like a two—”

“Enough, cretin!” snarled Darby, “we
‘get the picture’!”

Miles turned to him beaming, his
nostrils taking in the ambiguous smell of molten glass rising from the
vomitoria beneath them, which only he among the crew found at all pleasant.
“Listen.” From somewhere in the light mist below could be heard the voice of a
gondolier, singing of his love, not for any ringleted
ragazza
but for
the coalblack gondola he was at this moment oaring trancefully along. “Hear
that?” tears sliding down the convexities of Miles’s face. “The way it goes
along in a minor key, and then at each refrain switches off into the major?
Those Picardy thirds!”

His shipmates glanced at Miles, then
at one another, then, with a collective shrug, by now routine, returned to
ship’s business.

“There,” said Randolph. “There’s the
Lido. Now, let’s just have a glance at the chart
. . . .
”

Approaching the sand barrier which
separated the Venetian lagoon from the open Adriatic, they descended to a few
dozen feet of altitude (or
quota,
as the Italian instruments referred to
it) and were soon scouting the socalled
Terre Perse,
or Lost Lands.
Since ancient times numerous inhabited islands here had sunk beneath the waves,
so as to form a considerable undersea community of churches, shops, taverns,
and palazzi for the picked bones and incomprehensible pursuits of the
generations of Venetian dead.

“Just to the east of Sant ’Ariano
and— Ecco! Can you see it? if I’m not mistaken, gentlemen, Isola degli
Specchi, or, the Isle of Mirrors itself!”

“Excuse me, Professor,” Lindsay with
a puzzled frown, “there’s nothing down there but open water.”

“Try looking
below
the
surface,” advised the veteran aeronaut. “I’ll bet you Blundell can see it,
can’t you Blundell, yes.”

“Something a little different today,”
sneered Darby Suckling. “A mirrorworks under the water. How are we s’posed to
carry this mission out?”

“With our accustomed grace,” replied
the skyship commander wearily. “Mr. Counterfly, stand by your
lenses—we’ll want as many plates of this little
stabilimento
as
you can get us.”

“Snapshots of the empty
sea—whoowhee!” the embittered mascotte twirling a finger beside his
temple—“but ain’t the old man just gone bugs at last!”

“I would for once feel compelled to
agree with Suckling,” gloomily added Lindsay Noseworth, as if to himself,
“though perhaps in terms more narrowly clinical.”

“Rays, boys, rays,” chuckled
Scientific Officer Counterfly, busy with his photographic calibrations, “the
wonders of our age, and rest assured none of ’em strangers to the spectrum of
this fabled Italian sunlight. Just wait till

we’re back in the developing room,
and you shall see a thing or two then, by Garibaldi, that you shall.”

“
Ehi,
sugo!
”
cried
Zanni now from the helm, directing Randolph’s attention to a trembling
apparition in the distance, off to starboard.

Randolph seized binoculars from the
chart table. “Confound it, boys, either that’s the world’s largest flying onion
or it’s the old
Bol’shaia Igra
once again, coming to town, planning to
take in some Italian culture, no doubt.”

Lindsay had a look. “Ah! that
miserable Tsarist scow. What can they possibly want here?”

“Us,” suggested Darby.

“But our orders were sealed.”

“So? Somebody unsealed ’em. Don’t
tell me those Romanoffs can’t afford a fellow, or even two, on the inside.”

There was a moment of grim silence on
deck, acknowledging that, quite beyond coincidence, everywhere they had gone
lately, no matter what conditions of secrecy they might have taken to the sky
under, the inexorable Padzhitnoff, sooner or later, had appeared on their
horizon. Whatever mutual suspicions might have flowered among the lads
themselves—by the simplest computation, twentyfold at least—their
true apprehensions converged on those invisible levels “above,” where orders,
never signed or attributed, were written and cut.

Throughout the day the fellows found
themselves unable to refrain from discussing the Russians’ presence here, and
how it might have come about. Though there was to be no encounter with the
Bol’shaia
Igra
that day, the shadow of the bulbiform envelope, and the menacing
twinkle of gunmetal beneath it, nonetheless would persist well into the later
moments of groundrecreation.

“You cannot be implying that whoever
issues Padzhitnoff’s orders is intimate with whoever issues ours,” Lindsay
Noseworth was protesting.

“Long as we just keep on doing
everything we’re told,” Darby scowled, “we’ll never know. Wages of
unquestioning obedience, ain’t it?”

It was early evening. Having returned
their borrowed airship to the A. dell’A. compound on the mainland, the team
were gathered for dinner in the garden of an agreeable
osteria
in San
Polo, beside a littlefrequented canal, or, as the narrow waterway is known to the
Venetians,
rio.
Wives leaned out onto small balconies to collect the
clothes that had been drying all day. Somewhere an accordion was wrenching
hearts. Shutters were beginning to close against the night. Shadows flickered
in the narrow
calli.
Gondolas and less elegant delivery boats glided
over water smooth as a dancing floor. Echoing in

the chill dusk, through the windflues
of
sotopòrteghi
and around so many occult corners that the sounds might
have come from dreamers forever distant, one could hear the queerly desolate
advisements
of
gondolieri—
“
Sa
stai, O! Lungo, ehi!
”
—mingled with cries of children,
greengrocers, sailors ashore, streetvendors no longer expecting reply yet
urgent as if trying to call back the last of the daylight.

“What choice have we?” said Randolph.
“No one would tell us who informed Padzhitnoff. Whom could we even ask, when
they’re all so invisible?”

“Unless we decided to disobey for
once—then they’d show themselves quick enough,” Darby declared.

“Sure,” said Chick Counterfly, “just
long enough to blast us out of the sky.”

“So
. . .
then,” Randolph holding his stomach as if it were a crystal ball
and addressing it musingly, “it’s only fear? Is that what we’ve become, a bunch
of twitching rabbits in uniforms intended for men?”

“Cement of civilization, ’nauts,”
chirped Darby. “Ever thus.”

The girls who worked here, recently
down from the mountains or up from the South, glided about among the tables and
in and out of the kitchen in a kind of compressed rapture, as if they couldn’t
believe their luck, out here, drifted like this into the pallid sea. Chick
Counterfly, as the most worldly of the company, and thus spokesman by default
in fairsex encounters that might turn in any way ambiguous, beckoned to one of
the comely
cameriere.
“Just between us, Giuseppina—a lovers’
secret—what have you heard this week of other
pallonisti
around
the Lagoons?”

“Lovers, eh. What kind of ‘lover,
’ ”
wondered Giuseppina, pleasantly though
audibly, “can think only of his rivals?”

“Rivals! You wish to say, that some
other skyfarer—perhaps even more than one!—lays claim to your
heart?
Ehi, macchè, Pina!
—what kind of ‘beloved’ is it who coldly
tosses her admirers about, like leaves in a salad?”

“Maybe looking behind those leaves
for a big
giadrul,
”
suggested
her Neapolitan colleague, Sandra.

“Captain Pazino!” Lucia singing from
across the room. Giuseppina appeared to blush, though it might have been from
residual sunset above the rooftops.

“Pazino . . .” Chick Counterfly
suavely puzzled.

“It’s Padjeetnoff,” Giuseppina
pronounced, while gazing at Chick with a formally wistful smile that might
well, in this city of eternal negotiating, have meant,
Now, what may I
expect in return?

“Thundering toadspit,” exclaimed
Darby Suckling, “with all the spaghettijoints in this town to choose from, are
you saying those dadblame Russians have come in
here?
how many of ’em
were there?”