Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “That jasper,” sniggered Darby, “never pulled out his ‘dummy’ for nothing but pissing, I bet you!”

  “No takers!” Chick scornfully guffawed.

  The figurehead debate, at first no deeper than varying decorative tastes might account for, had grown bitter and complex, swiftly reaching an intensity that astonished them all. Old injuries “kicked up,” pretexts were found to exchange shoves and, not infrequently, blows. A sign in very large Clarendons appeared in the mess area—

  FUNDAMENT-SEIZING ACTIVITIES IN THE “CHOW LINE” WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!!!

  VIOLATIONS WILL DRAW TEN WEEKS’ EXTRA DUTY!!! EACH!!!

  By order of the Executive Officer.

  P.S.—Yes, that’s WEEKS!!!

  Nonetheless, they went on shuffling and muttering, sneaking finger-size globs out of the asparagus mousse, Creole-Style Gumbo, or mashed turnips, whenever they thought the Master-at-Arms wasn’t looking—not actually to eat but surreptitiously to flick at one another, hoping for a response. Miles Blundell, as Ship’s Commissary, looked on in genial bewilderment. “Zumbledy bongbong,” he called encouragingly, as the food flew. “Vamble, vamble!”

  Wandering corridors of the spectral, Miles had begun, increasingly, to alarm his shipmates. Mealtimes too often were apt to revert to exercises in deep, even mortal, uncertainty, depending where Miles had been that day to procure his ingredients. Sometimes his cooking was pure cordon bleu, sometimes it was inedible, due to excursions of spirit whose polarity was never entirely predictable from one day to the next. Not that Miles would deliberately set out to wreck the soup or burn the meat loaves—he seldom got that overt, tending more to forgetful omissions, or misreadings of quantity and timing. “If anything’s an irreversible process, cooking is!” lectured Thermodynamics Officer Chick Counterfly, meaning to be helpful, though unavoidably in some agitation. “You can’t de-roast a turkey, or unmix a failed sauce—time is intrinsic in every recipe, and one shrugs it off at one’s peril.”

  Sometimes Miles would reply, “Thank you, Chick, it is wise counsel . . . fellows . . . you are all so amazingly patient with me, and I will endeavor as best I can to improve,” and sometimes he would cry, “Of the metawarble of blibfloth zep!” gesturing violently with his chef’s toque, his face illuminated by an enigmatic smile.

  The one diner in the company who had never suffered disappointment, however, was Pugnax, whose fastidiousness of diet Miles, regardless of his moods, had always honored. Along with a range of human preferences that included vintage Champagnes, terrapin stew, and asparagus hollandaise, Pugnax insisted upon separate courses served in separate dishes, which must be of bone china of a certain age and authenticated origin, bringing new import to the expression “dog’s dinner.”

  IN THE U.S.A., it was almost the Fourth of July, which meant that tonight, by standing orders, there had to be a shipboard celebration out here, too, like it or not.

  “Lights and noise, just to keep us hoppin like trained baboons,” was Darby’s opinion.

  “Anyone at all educated,” protested Lindsay, “knows that Fourth of July fireworks are the patriotic symbols of noteworthy episodes of military explosion in our nation’s history, deemed necessary to maintain the integrity of the American homeland against threats presented from all sides by a benightedly hostile world.”

  “Explosion without an objective,” declared Miles Blundell, “is politics in its purest form.”

  “If we don’t take care,” opined Scientific Officer Counterfly, “folks will begin to confuse us with the Anarcho-syndicalists.”

  “About time,” snarled Darby. “I say let’s set off our barrage tonight in honor of the Haymarket bomb, bless it, a turning point in American history, and the only way working people will ever get a fair shake under that miserable economic system—through the wonders of chemistry!”

  “Suckling!” the astounded Lindsay Noseworth struggling to maintain his composure. “But, that is blatant anti-Americanism!”

  “Eehhyyhh, and your mother’s a Pinkerton, too.”

  “Why you communistic little—”

  “I wish I knew what they were arguing about,” complained Randolph St. Cosmo, to no one in particular. Perhaps, in this remoteness, to the wind.

  Yet tonight’s pyrotechnics amounted after all to more than simple explosion. As one by one their violent candles bloomed deafeningly above the ruined volcano, Miles bade the company consider, in tones of urgency they seldom heard from him, the nature of a skyrocket’s ascent, in particular that unseen extension of the visible trail, after the propellant charge burns out, yet before the slow-match has ignited the display—that implied moment of ongoing passage upward, in the dark sky, a linear continuum of points invisible yet present, just before lights by the hundreds appear—

  “Stop, stop!” Darby clutching his ears comically, “it sounds like Chinese!”

  “Who invented fireworks,” Miles agreed, “but what does this suggest to you about the trajectories of your own lives? Anybody? Think, bloviators, think!”

  The hour of the great experiment on the other side of the world approached. Smells not quite of mess-cooking collected in the lee of the wrecked volcano, as if some lengthy chemical procedure had repeatedly failed to provide an unambiguous result. Electrodes sputtered and flared, and giant transformer coils droned afflictedly, almost in human accents, fed by electrical generators whose steam was being supplied by the local hot springs. Transmitting and receiving antennas for the wireless equipment had been run up the sides of the lava-cone, and communication had commenced, while, almost exactly on the other side of Earth, Chums of Chance monitoring personnel waited in a weather-proofed shack at the top of Pike’s Peak, though beliefs varied as to the nature of the strange link—was the signal going around the planet, or through it, or was linear progression not at all the point, with everything instead happening simultaneously at every part of the circuit?

  BY THE TIME Inconvenience was ready to take once more to the sky, the figurehead dispute had been resolved amicably—the boys had compromised on a draped female personage, perhaps more maternal than erotic—apologies were exchanged, reiterated, eventually at tiresome length, new apologies for these reiterations then became necessary, and the working days became saturated in sky-punctilio. After a while the boys would come to think of the episode as others might remember a time of illness, or youthful folly. As Lindsay Noseworth was there to remind them all, such difficulties always arose for good reason—namely, to provide cautionary lessons.

  “Like what,” sneered Darby, “‘be nice’?”

  “We were always supposed—by whom it is less clear—to be above such behavior,” asserted the “X.O.” somberly. “Literally above. That sort of bickering may be for ground people, but it is not for us.”

  “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 ground-leave. 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 repeated
ly 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 peculiar-looking 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 doubly-refracting 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, cunningly-arranged 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 Étienne-Louis 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 so-called “hollow Earth.” One day, it was hoped, the technique of intra-planetary “short-cutting” 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 ice-mist, 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 entrance-way 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 self-protective 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 nitro-lycopodium 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 night-glass.

  “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 long-range armament,” suggested Chick mischievously, “—destructive rays, perhaps, or lenses for focusing the auroral energy upon our all-too-vulnerable 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, Bug-brains?”

  “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 knife-switches on the console before him, and an electrical sound-magnifier nearby sputtered into life.

  At first the “noise” seemed no more than the ensemble of mag
neto-atmospheric 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,” declared 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 night-glass, 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.