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 all-but-irresistible fascination that subterranean monarch would come to exert, Circe-like, 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 ill-disposed hordes of thick-set 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 Étienne-Louis Malus, carrying the Vormance Expedition toward a fate few of its members would willingly have chosen.
Two
Iceland Spar
Besides keeping a sharp eye out himself from the flying bridge, Randolph St. Cosmo had also posted lookouts forward and aft with the most powerful binoculars on the ship. Here, north of the Arctic Circle, the standing directive to all Chums of Chance vessels was, “Unfamiliar sky-traffic is to be presumed hostile until proven otherwise.” Daily skirmishes were now being fought, no longer for territory or commodities but for electro-magnetic information, in an international race to measure and map most accurately the field-coefficients at each point of that mysterious mathematical lattice-work which was by then known to surround the Earth. As the Era of Sail had depended upon the mapping of seas and seacoasts of the globe and winds of the wind-rose, so upon the measurement of newer variables would depend the history that was to pass up here, among reefs of magnetic anomaly, channels of least impedance, storms of rays yet unnamed lashing out of the sun. There was a “Ray-rush” in progress—light and magnetism, as well as all manner of extra-Hertzian rays, were there for the taking, and prospectors had come flooding in, many of them professional claim-jumpers aiming to get by on brute force, a very few genuinely able to dowse for rays of all frequencies, most neither gifted nor unscrupulous, simply caught up in everybody else’s single-minded flight from reason, diseased as the gold and silver seekers of earlier days. Here at the high edge of the atmosphere was the next untamed frontier, pioneers arriving in airships instead of wagons, setting in motion property disputes destined to last generations. The Northern Lights which had drawn them from their childhood beds in lower latitudes on so many deep winter nights, while summoning in their parents obscure feelings of dread, could now be viewed up here at any time from within, at altitude, in heavenwide pulses of color, dense sheets and billows and colonnades of light and current, in transfiguration unceasing.
In small, remote corners of the planet nobody was paying much attention to, between factions nobody knew much about, the undeclared and largely imperceptible war had been under way for years. All up and down the Northern latitudes, clandestine transmitters had been deployed amid pinnacles of ice, in abandoned mining works, in the secret courtyards of ancient Iron-Age fortresses, manned and unmanned, lonely and unearthly in the iceblink. On sky-piercing crags as likely to be frozen seabird guano as rock, scouts of Earth’s Field, desperate, insomniac, interrogated horizons as to any signs of their relief, who were often years late. . . . And indeed for some, the Polar night would last forever—they would pass from the Earth amid unreportable splendor, the aurora in the sky raging up and down spectra visible and invisible. Souls bound to the planetary lines of force, swept pole to pole and through the fabled interior regions as well. . . .
Manœuvring in vessels camouflaged in naval-style “dazzle painting,” whereby areas of the structure could actually disappear and reappear in clouds of chromatic twinkling, scientist-skyfarers industriously gathered their data, all of deepest interest to the enterprisers convened leagues below, at intelligence centers on the surface such as the Inter-Group Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation (I.G.L.O.O.), a radiational clearing-house in Northern Alaska, which these days was looking more like some Lloyd’s of the high spectrum, with everyone waiting anxiously for the next fateful Lutine announcement.
“Dangerous conditions lately.”
“Hell, some days you’d give the world for a nice easygoing Indian attack.”
“I tell you it can’t go on like this.”
A few heads turned, though the plangent note was long familiar. “Presumptuous whelp, what would you know, you weren’t even around for the last eclipse.”
It was a dark assembly-room, its windows shuttered in iron, illuminated in patches by green-shaded lamps gas and electric, a gloom relieved only by the brief glittering of watch-chains across dark vests, pen-nibs, coins, dining utensils, glasses, and bottles. Outside, in streets of beaten snow, wolves, foraging far from home, howled all but eloquently.
“Yes—these days in the business too many people your age altogether. Unreflective steps, harmful consequences, no attention to history or the sacrifices of those who’ve gone before, so forth. . . .”
“Ever thus, old-timer.”
“You like to fricasseed a bunch of my boys the other day. D’ you care to address that?”
“The area was posted. They had ample warning. You know you don’t send a ship out on test-days.”
“Assbackwards as usual. You don’t test when there’s ships out, not even if it’s one defenseless little cutter—”
“Defenseless! She was fully rigged up as an assault ship, sir.”
“—cruising along innocent as any pleasure craft, till you assaulted her, with your infernal rays.”
“She made a Furtive Movement. We kept to procedure.”
“Here—this furtive enough for you?”
“Boys, boys!”
Such disputes had become so common that it hardly surprised Randolph now when the gong of the after lookout telegraph, whose sender was attached to Pugnax’s tail, began to clamor.
“Quickly, the field-glasses. . . . Now, what in blazes have we here?” The ship in the distance was distinguished by an envelope with the onionlike shape—and nearly the dimensions, too—of a dome on an Eastern Orthodox church, against whose brilliant red surface was represented, in black, the Romanoff crest, and above it, in gold Cyrillic lettering, the legend BOL’SHAIA IGRA, or, “The Great Game.” It was readily recognized by all as the flagship of Randolph’s mysterious Russian counterpart—and, far too often, nemesis—Captain Igor Padzhitnoff, with whom previous “run-ins” (see particularly The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates, The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin) evoked in the boys lively though anxious memories.
“What’s up with old Padzhy, I wonder?” murmured Randolph. “They’re sure closing awfully rapidly.”
The parallel organization at St. Petersburg, known as the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, was notorious for promoting wherever in the world they chose a program of mischief, much of its motivation opaque to the boys, Padzhitnoff’s own specialty being to arrange for bricks and masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his “signature,” to fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors. This lethal debris was generally harvested from the load-bearing walls of previous targe
ts of opportunity.
“We certainly have cause to steer clear of these fellows,” Lindsay nodded, sourly. “They will no doubt imagine us to be trespassing upon their ‘sky-space’ again. Given the far from trifling degree of nasal dislocation over that Polish contretemps—though certainly owing to no fault of our own—nevertheless, upon this occasion we had better get our story straight before they intercept us, which, it appears, could be at any moment—um, in fact—” Abruptly, a violent thump shook Inconvenience throughout her structure as the Russian craft came none too politely alongside.
“Oh, gravy,” muttered Randolph.
“Ahoy! Balloon boys!” Captain Padzhitnoff was flaxen-haired, athletic, and resolutely chirpy—indeed, far more than ordinary sky-business usually demanded. “Getting jump on me once again! What happened? Am I too old for this?” His smile, while perhaps unremarkable down on Earth’s surface among, say, a gathering of the insane, here, thousands of feet in the air and far from any outpost of Reason, seemed even more ominous than the phalanx of rifles, apparently late-model Turkish Mausers, as well as weapons less readily identifiable, which his crew were now pointing at Inconvenience.
“Na sobrat’ ya po nebo!” Randolph greeted them, as nonchalantly as possible.
“Where are you headed?” boomed the Russian commander through a gigantic speaking-trumpet of Chinese silver.
“South, as you see.”
“Zone of Emergency has just been declared by authorities,” Padzhitnoff sweeping his arm to indicate a wide sector of the frozen terrain below. “You may wish to divert.”
“Authorities?” Lindsay inquired, keenly, as if he had recognized the name of an intimate acquaintance.
“I.G.L.O.O.,” The Russian commander shrugged. “We pay no attention to them, but you might.”
“What sort of emergency,” inquired Randolph, “did they say?”
The Muscovite skyfarers grew convulsive with sinister merriment. “In part of Russia where I grew up,” Captain Padzhitnoff was able to say at last, “all animals, no matter how large or dangerous, had names—bears, wolves, Siberian tigers. . . . All except for one. One creature that other animals, including humans, were afraid of, because if it found them it would eat them, without necessarily killing them first. It appreciated pain. Pain was like . . . salt. Spices. That creature, we did not have name for. Ever. Do you understand?”
“Goodness,” whispered Lindsay to his chief, “all we did was ask.”
“Thank you,” Randolph replied. “We shall proceed with particular caution. May we help you with any problem of resupply? anything you may have begun to run short of?”
“Respect for your blind innocence,” smiled his opposite number—not for the first time, for it had become a ritual exchange. The Bol’shaia Igra began to drift away, its captain and senior officers remaining at the rail of the bridge and conferring together as they gazed after Inconvenience. When the ships were nearly out of earshot, Captain Padzhitnoff waved and called, “Bon voyage!” his voice tiny and plaintive in the immensity of Arctic sky.
“Well, what was all that about? If they were trying to warn us off . . .”
“No mention of the Vormance party, you notice.”
“It was something else,” said Miles Blundell, the only one of the crew who seemed to have taken the warning to heart, returning, as the other boys resumed their own activities, to his preparation of the midday meal, and Pugnax re-inserted his nose among the pages of a roman-feuilleton by M. Eugène Sue, which he appeared to be reading in the original French.
So they proceeded into the Zone of Emergency, keeping an alert ear to the Tesla device and scanning carefully the colorless wastes below. And for hours, well past suppertime, their enigmatic rival the Bol’shaia Igra hung distant but dogged upon their starboard quarter, red as a cursed ruby representing a third eye in the brow of some idol of the incomprehensible.
HAVING JUST MISSED intercepting the Expedition steamer at the boys turned north again, continuing their pursuit yet somehow at each step just missing the vessel, now owing to a contrary wind, now an erroneous report over the wireless or a delay in port because of the late return of some crew member who proved to be spectral at best, the “extra man” of Arctic myth. A familiar story up here. But no less unsettling, for there seemed, now and then, to be an extra member of the Inconvenience’s crew, though this was never recorded at the morning roll call. At times one of the boys would understand, too late of course, that the face he thought he was dealing with was not in any way the true face—or even one he recognized.
One day the Inconvenience arrived over a little settlement whose streets and lanes seemed crowded with wax figures, so still were they in their attention to the gigantic vehicle creeping above them.
Randolph St. Cosmo decided to grant ground-leave. “These are a Northern people, remember,” he advised. “They’re not likely to mistake us for gods or anything, not like those customers back in the East Indies that time.”
“Wasn’t that a paradise!” cried Darby Suckling.
After the ship had landed and tied up, the boys barged ashore, eager to spend their pay on anything at all.
“Is this turquoise?”
“We call it Blue Ivory. Preserved bones of real prehistoric mammoths, not the tinted bonzoline you see further south.”
“This one—”
“This is a miniature copy of an inukshuk that actually stands up on a ridge-line far away in the interior, rocks piled in roughly the shape of a human, not to threaten the stranger but to guide him in country where landmarks are either too few or too many to keep straight.”
“Sounds like my average day.”
“Perhaps why these copies are sold in such numbers. For any day, even in the cities of the South, can turn in a moment to wilderness.”
From time to time in the difficult days ahead, each of the boys was to gaze at the enigmatic miniature he had purchased, representing a faraway disposition of rocks he would probably never get to see, and try to glimpse, even at this degree of indirectness, some expression of a truth beyond the secular.
THE ÉTIENNE-LOUIS MALUS was named for the Napoleonic army engineer and physicist who, in late 1808, looking though a piece of Iceland spar at the sunset reflected from a window of the Luxembourg Palace, discovered polarized light. She was built of oak and iron, 376 feet, 6 inches long, with shelter and boat decks, two masts, two cargo booms, and a single tall black smokestack. The guy wires of dozens of transmitting and receiving antennas descended to fittings everywhere around the weather decks. Her prow was raked back from the waterline a little aft of vertical, as if she were expecting to cut through ice.
As she sailed north on her long voyage to the coasts of “Iceland,” to the inhabited cliffs of ice, those not actually on watch or asleep sat out on the fantail, watching the lower latitudes drop away from them, and played mandolins and little mahogany concertinas, and sang,
No more girls,
But the girls of Iceland,
No more nights,
But the nights of cold . . .
For we sail
With no sure returning,
Into winds
That will freeze the soul. . . .
They passed around rumors—the Captain was insane again, ice-pirates were hunting the Malus like whalers and if caught, her crew would be shown even less mercy—some believed they were on an expedition to find a new source of Iceland spar pure as the legendary crystals of HelgustaÐir, purer than anything being pulled these days out of Missouri or Guanajuato . . . but that was only one suspicion among many. It might not be about Iceland spar after all.
One day walls of green ice, nearly invisible off in the Northern dusk, began to slide by. The ship approached a green headland, sheer green walls of ice, the greenness nearest the water figuring also as a scent, a sea-smell of deep decay and reproduction.
From her ancestral home on an island just the other side of the promontory from town, Constance Penhallow, now passed into le
gend, though not herself ambitious for even local respect, watched the arrival of the Malus. When required she could pose with the noblest here against the luminous iceblink, as if leaning anxiously out of some portrait-frame, eyes asking not for help but understanding, cords of her neck edged in titanium white, a three-quarters view from behind, showing the face only just crescent, the umbra of brushed hair and skull-heft, the brass shadow amiably turned toward an open shelf of books with no glass cover there arranged to throw back images of a face, only this dorsal finality. So had her grandson Hunter painted her, standing in a loose, simple dress in a thousand-flower print in green and yellow, viewed as through dust, dust of another remembered country observed late in the day, risen by way of wind or horses from a lane beyond a walled garden . . . in the background a half-timbered house, steep gabling of many angles, running back into lizard imbrication of gray slatework, shining as with rain . . . wilds of rooftops, unexplored reaches, stretching as to sunset. . . .
Tales survived here from the first millennium, the first small pack of outlaws on the run, not yet come to be haunted by any promise of Christ’s return, thinking only of the ax-bearing avengers at their backs, setting off westward, suicidally cheerful, almost careless . . . tales of Harald the Ruthless, son of King Sigurd, sailing north, drawn by inexplicable desire, farther away each sunset from all comfort, all kindness, to the awful brink, scant oarstrokes away from falling into Ginnungagap the lightless abyss, glimpsed through the Northern obscurities and reported on over the years by lost fisherfolk, marauders, God-possessed fugitives. . . . Harald threw over his tiller, the men backed their oars, the fateful circumference wheeling past them through the fog, and Harald Hårdråde, having come about just in time, understood, from that moment of unsought mercy, with the end of the world now at his back, more than perhaps he cared to about desire, and the forsaking of desire in submission to one’s duties to history and blood. Something had called to him out of that vaporous immensity, and he had answered, in a dream, and at the last instant had awakened, and turned. For in the ancient Northmen’s language, “Gap” meant not only this particular chasm, the ice-chaos from which arose, through the giant Ymir, the Earth and everything in it, but also a wide-open human mouth, mortal, crying, screaming, calling out, calling back.
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