Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “It was some sort of a prophecy, then?” asked Dr. Vormance.

  “Not quite as we’re used to thinking of it,” Throyle replied. “For us it’s simple ability to see into the future, based on our linear way of regarding time, a simple straight line from past, through present, into the future. Christian time, as you might say. But shamans see it differently. Their notion of time is spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant.”

  We found ourselves watching the dogs more closely. Often they were observed in the company of another large, otherwise nondescript dog, who had flown here with the airship crew. The sled dogs were usually gathered round him in an orderly circle, as if he were in some way addressing them.

  What bothered them particularly was the task of pulling the improvised sled we used to transport the object over the ice to the ship. It might as well have been a canine labor union. Perhaps, under the guidance of Pugnax, for that was the airship dog’s name, that is what it was.

  Bringing what we had recovered back to the ship proved to be only the first of our trials. Stowing the object in the hold was cursed from the beginning. One failure followed another—if a purchase did not give way, then some hawser, regardless of size, was sure to strand—yet each time, mysteriously, the object was rescued from falling to its possible destruction . . . as if it were somehow meant to survive our worst efforts. Trying to get it to fit inside the ship, we measured, and remeasured, and each time the dimensions kept coming out different—not just slightly so but drastically. There seemed no way to get the object through any of the ship’s hatches. We had finally to resort to our cutting-torches. All the while the thing regarded us with what, later, when we had begun to appreciate the range of its emotions, we might too easily have recognized as contempt. With its “eyes” set closely side by side like those of humans and other binocular predators, its gaze had remained directed solely, personally, to each of us, no matter where we stood or moved.

  Of the journey south again, we ought to have remembered more, our waking watches speeding by, the melodic whispering of a crewman’s ocarina down a passageway framed in steel-bolted timbers, the smell of the coffee at breakfast, the gibbous presence of the airship which had come to warn us, persistent off the starboard quarter, like a misplaced moon, until at last, as if given up on our common sense, they took their leave with a salute of Bengal lights from which irony may not have been entirely absent.

  Which of us was willing to turn, to look the future in the face, to mutiny if necessary and oblige the Captain to put about, return the thing to where we had found it? The last of our mean innocence tolled away ship’s bell after bell. Even if we could not predict in detail what was about to happen, there could have been no one among us, not even the most literal-minded, who did not feel that something, down there, below our feet, below the waterline where it lay patient and thawing, was terribly, and soon to be more terribly, amiss.

  Returned to harbor at last, we felt little alarm when those first deep metal-to-metal groans began. Here in this as in any great seaport, being invisible, so we thought, was the same as being safe, invisible amid all these impersonal momenta of the Commercial, the coming and going of Whitehall gigs, the bristling masts and funnels, the jungles of rigging, the bills of lading, the routine attendances of fitters, chandlers, insurance men, port officials, longshoremen, and at last a delegation from the Museum, to take delivery of what we had brought, and by whom we were ignored, nearly unsensed.

  Perhaps in their haste to be rid of us, they had missed seeing, as had we, how imperfectly contained the object really was. As if it were the embodiment of a newly-discovered “field” as yet only roughly calculated, there lay our original sin—the repeated failure, back there up north, to determine the distribution of its weight in ordinary space, which should have offered a strong hint, to any of us willing to devote a moment’s thought, that some fraction of the total must necessarily have escaped confinement. That this unbounded part had been neither detected nor measured was equivalent to saying that no part of it had ever been contained—and that thus had we, in our cloud of self-deluding and dream, brought it home already at large.

  Those who claim to have heard it speak as it made its escape are now safely away in the upstate security of Matteawan, receiving the most modern care. “Nothing voiced—all hisses, a serpent, vengeful, relentless,” they raved. Others attested to languages long dead to the world, though of course known to their reporters. “The man-shaped light shall not deliver you,” it allegedly declared, and, “Flames were always your destiny, my children.” Its children— Is it worth anyone’s while now to journey out those starfish corridors where they suffer, each behind his door of oak and iron, the penance they bear as a condition of that awful witness?

  My own part in the fateful transmittal, as I imagined, being discharged, I had intended to entrain at once for the Nation’s Capital, leaving others to dispute credit and compensation. As, in any case, it was a Washingtonian Entity to which I was obliged to report, I foresaw no difficulty in completing for them at least a précis during the journey south. Vain dream! Once the terror had commenced, even reaching the depot would prove an Odyssey.

  For the streets were in mad disorder. A troop of irregulars in red Zouave-style hats and trousers, their mounts confused and terrified, wheeled helplessly, with who knew what negligible increase of anxiety surely enough to start them shooting at one another, not to mention at innocent civilians. The shadows of the tall buildings swooped in the fire-reddened light. Ladies, and in many cases gentlemen, screamed without ceasing, to no apparent effect. Street-vendors, the only ones to show any composure at all, ran about trying to sell restoratives alcoholic and ammoniac, ingenious respirator helmets to protect against inhalation of smoke, illustrated maps purporting to show secret tunnels, sub-basements and other arks of safety, as well as secure routes out of town. The omnibus I had taken seemed scarcely to move, the distant flagpoles atop the station ever to linger against the sky, unattainable as Heaven. Newsboys ran to and fro alongside, waving late editions jagged with exclamatory headlines.

  Arrived at last at the depot, I joined a mass of citizens all trying to get aboard any outbound trains they could find. At the entrance the ungoverned mass of us was somehow spun into single-file, proceeding then with ominous slowness to thread the marble maze inside, its ultimate destination impossible to see. Non-uniformed monitors, street toughs in soiled work-clothes by the look of them, made sure none of us violated the rules, of which there seemed already too many. Outside, gunfire continued intermittently.

  Clocks high overhead told us sweep after sweep how late, increasingly late, we would be.

  AT THE EXPLORERS’ CLUB TODAY, the less fashionable one, seeking refuge from the pestilential rains of the District, everyone mingling in the anterooms, waiting for the liveried Pygmies bearing their Chinese bronze dinner gongs to announce the famed Gratuitous Midday Repast. If anyone observed me shaking from time to time, they assumed it was the usual bush fever.

  “Afternoon, General . . . ma’am . . .”

  “But I say, old ‘Wood! Haven’t the wogs killed you yet? Thought you were in Africa.”

  “So did I. Can’t imagine what I’m doing here.”

  “Since Dr. Jim’s little adventure it’s all been Queer Street out there, hasn’t it. War any moment, shouldn’t wonder.” He began to quote the British poet-laureate’s commemorative verse, with its questionable rhyme of “pelt” and “veldt.”

  I have begun to notice, among southern Africa hands in particular, this vernacular of unease and hallucination. Is it the growing political tension in the Transvaal, and the huge amounts of money changing hands from the traffic in gold and diamonds? Should I put some money in Rand shares?

  During luncheon got into a funny sort of confab about civilized evil in far-off lands.

  “Maybe the tropics,” somebody, probably the General, said, “but never the Polar Region, it’s too wh
ite, too mathematical up there.”

  “But always in our business there are natives, and then there are natives, don’t you see? Us and natives. Any particular tribe, the details of it, get lost in the general question—who is laboring to whose benefit, sort of thing.”

  “There’s never a question. The machines, the buildings, all the industrial structures we’ve put in out there. They see these things, they learn to operate them, they come to understand how powerful they are. How deadly. How deadly we are. Machinery can crush them. Trains can run them over. In the Rand some of the shafts go down four thousand feet.”

  “I say, ‘Wood, isn’t there a story about you out there, dispatching a coolie or something with a Borchardt?”

  “He was looking at me strangely,” I said. It is as far as I have ever gone with that story.

  “How’s that, ‘Wood? ‘Strangely’? What’s that?”

  “Well I didn’t exactly ask him what it meant, did I? He was Chinese.”

  The company, fitful, uneasy, half of them down with fever of some kind, shrugged and went jittering on to other topics.

  “Back in ‘95, Nansen’s plan on his final northward journey was eventually, as the total load grew lighter, to kill sled dogs one by one and feed them to the rest. At first, he reported, the other dogs refused to eat dog-flesh, but slowly they came to accept it.

  “Suppose it were to happen to us, in the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh.”

  “Oh, dear.” The General’s wife put down her utensils and gazed at her plate.

  “Sir, that is disgusting.”

  “Not literally, then . . . but we do use one another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience . . . each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.”

  “You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”

  “There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?”

  “Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step—human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood—a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is.”

  “If that brings you comfort, believe it. I believe in incursion from elsewhere. They’ve swept upon us along a broad front, we don’t know ‘when’ they first came, Time itself was disrupted, a thoroughgoing and merciless forswearing of Time as we had known it, as it had gone safely ticking for us moment into moment, with an innocence they knew how to circumvent. . . .”

  It was understood at some point by all the company that they were speaking of the unfortunate events to the north, the bad dream I still try to wake from, the great city brought to sorrow and ruin.

  Leaving the Arctic wastes, Inconvenience pressed southward, using as much fuel as they dared, jettisoning all the weight they could afford to, in a desperate attempt to reach the city before the steamer Étienne-Louis Malus.

  “I cannot but wonder what is to become of those unfortunate devils,” brooded Chick Counterfly.

  The sombre brown landscape of north Canada, perforated with lakes by the uncountable thousands, sped by, a league below them. “Great place to buy lakefront property!” cried Miles.

  The scientists of the Vormance Expedition had continued to believe it was a meteorite they were bringing back, like Peary and other recent heroes of science. Given the long history of meteor strikes in the Northern regions, more than one reputation had been made with rented ships and deferred payrolls, and a few wishfully storm-free weeks up there cruising some likely iceblink. Just before the discovery, the Vormance team, scrutinizing the sky, had certainly been shown signs enough. But who could have foreseen that the far-fallen object would prove to harbor not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well, and a plan for carrying it out?

  “It deceived us into classifying it as a meteorite, you see. . . .”

  “The object?”

  “The visitor.”

  “Your whole Expedition got hypnotized by a rock? that what you’re asking us to believe?” The Board of Inquiry was meeting in upper rooms of the Museum of Museumology, dedicated to the history of institutional collecting, classifying, and exhibiting. A decision to ration the whiskey supply had managed only to hasten a descent into incivility, which all the newspapers, whatever their arrangements with power, would comment upon in days to follow. From these turret windows, one might view some good-size wedges of the city, here and there all the way to the horizon—charred trees still quietly smoking, flanged steelwork fallen or leaning perilously, streets near the bridges and ferry slips jammed with the entangled carriages, wagons, and streetcars which the population had at first tried to flee in, then abandoned, and which even now lay unclaimed, overturned, damaged by collision and fire, hitched to animals months dead and yet unremoved.

  Before the disaster the whiskered faces at this long curved table, expressing such offended righteousness, belonged merely to appointees of a Mayor no more dishonest than the standards of the time provided for—Tammanoid creatures, able to deliver votes when required on a scale suitable to membership on this upstart museum’s Board of Overseers. Unlike those who sat on the boards of more exalted institutions, none here possessed a fortune or a family pedigree—city folk, few of them had observed so much as a stationary star, let alone one of the falling sort. Eminent scientific witnesses, who before the Events might have held these politicos in light regard, now could not meet their steady, and from time to time inquisitorial, gazes. Today to a man they were become Archangels of municipal vengeance, chiefly because no one else was available for the task—the Mayor and most of the City Council having been among the incendiary Figure’s first victims, the great banks and trading houses in severe disarray even yet, the National Guard broken in spirit and fled, vowing to re-group, into New Jersey. The only organized units to brave the immediate aftermath were the White Wings, who with exemplary grit continued to go wading into the inconceivable cleanup job with never less than their usual cheer and discipline. Today, in fact, the only signs of human movement in all the desolate post-urban tract one could see from here were a small party of the pith-helmeted warriors, accompanied by a refuse wagon and one of the last live horses in the Metropolitan area.

  Sometimes this inquiry board held night sessions, striding in the side entrance, where the enfeebled and unprotected had learned to come and wait for as long as they must. The Museum at night presented a vista of earth-bound buttresses, unlighted and towering, secret doorways between bays, several miniature street-level beer gardens within, remaining open until late, through the kindness and wisdom of the precinct police—block after block of sloping masonry, a sooty yellow in this growing dark, indistinct, as if printed out of register.

  “The Eskimo believe that every object in their surroundings has its invisible ruler—in general not friendly—an enforcer of ancient, indeed pre-human, laws, and thus a Power that must be induced not to harm men, through various forms of bribery.” At mention of the time-honored practice, Commissional ears were observed to develop sharp points and to tilt forward. “It was thus not so much the visible object we sought and wished to deliver to the Museum as its invisible ruling component. In the Eskimo view, someone of our party, by failing to perform the due observances, showed deep disrespect, causing the Power to follow its nature, in exacting an appropriate vengeance.”

  “Appropriate? given the great loss of property, not to mention innocent life . . . appropriate to what, sir?”

  “To urban civilization. Because we took the creature out of its home territory. The usual sanctions�
�bad ice, blizzards, malevolent ghosts—were no longer available. So the terms of retribution assumed a character more suitable to the new surroundings—fire, damage to structures, crowd panic, disruption to common services.”

  It had become quite unpleasant that night. This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its background rumble of anxiety. Anyone who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one consultation with somebody—that “there would always be time,” as citizens liked to put it. But that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed. That’s about as closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. Down the years of boom and corruption, they’d been warned, repeatedly, about just such a possibility. The city more and more vertical, the population growing in density, all hostages to just such an incursion. . . . Who outside the city would have imagined them as victims taken by surprise—who, for that matter, inside it? though many in the aftermath did profit briefly by assuming just that affecting pose.

  They had established few facts. Deep downtown, where a narrow waterway from long ago still ran up into the city, a cargo ship had arrived, in whose hold, kept in restraints more hopeful than effective, stirred a Figure with supernatural powers, which no one in its as-yet-unwritten history had ever known how to stop. Everyone in town seemed to know what the creature was—to have known all along, a story taken so for granted that its coming-true was the last thing anybody expected—including what its pitiless gifts would mean for any populace they might be unleashed upon—whereas, oddly, none of the men of science who had brought it here, the old polar hands, living only a few metal corridors away, all of its journey south, had so much as guessed.