Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  In the protracted journey which was to follow, covering eventually most of the World-Island, it would not escape the boys’ attention that something very peculiar indeed was going on down on the Surface. More and more often, detours became necessary. Entire blocks of sky were posted as off-limits. Now and then there would arrive, from nowhere immediately visible, great explosions of a deep and unprecedented intensity which caused structural members of the skycraft to groan and tremble. Miles began to encounter unexpected shortages when making commissary purchases. One day his most reliable wine purveyor brought alarming news. “Shipments of Champagne have been suspended indefinitely. All through the growing region now, the countryside is torn up with trenches.”

  “Trenches,” Miles said, as if it were a foreign technical term.

  The merchant gazed back at length, and may have gone on speaking, though he could no longer be heard clearly. Miles was aware in some dim way that this, as so much else, had to do with the terms of the long unspoken contract between the boys and their fate—as if, long ago, having learned to fly, in soaring free from enfoldment by the indicative world below, they had paid with a waiver of allegiance to it and all that would occur down on the Surface. He switched his order to still wine from Spain, and the Inconvenience flew on, dodging from place to place across the great counter-planet, so strange and yet so familiar, the elusive Padzhitnoff always just a step or two ahead.

  “And another odd thing,” announced Chick one evening at their regular weekly review of progress on the case. “The travels of Captain Padzhitnoff,” tapping a pointer across the map that covered the entire forward bulkhead of Inconvenience’s wardroom, “over the years, have pretty closely matched our own. No surprises there. But looking only at the months just before he disappeared, everyplace we’d been that year,” tapping one by one—“the Riviera, Rome, St. Petersburg, Lwów, the High Tatra—old Padzhy’s gone as well. Where we haven’t been yet, he seems to have left no trace.”

  “Swell!” Darby ejaculated. “We’re chasing ourselves now.”

  “We always knew he was haunting us,” shrugged Lindsay. “Likely this is only more of the same.”

  “Not this time,” declared Miles, retreating into his customary silence, and only resuming the thought some months later, one night off the coast of Cyrenaica, as he and Chick were on the fantail sharing a smoke and regarding the luminosity of the sea. “Are ghosts dreadful because they bring toward us from the future some component—in the vectorial sense—of our own deaths? Are they partially, defectively, our own dead selves, thrust back, in recoil from the mirrorface at the end, to haunt us?”

  Chick, who regarded the metaphysical as outside his remit, settled as usual for nodding and puffing politely.

  Not until some additional months later, in the baleful mists above West Flanders, would Miles abruptly recall his sunlit bicycle excursion long ago with Ryder Thorn, who had been possessed that day by such a tragic air of prophecy. “Thorn knew we’d come back here. That there would be something down there we ought to pay attention to.” He gazed, as if desire were all it would take, down through the gray rainlight, at terrain revealed now and then through the clouds, like a poisoned sea brought still.

  “Those poor innocents,” he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. “Back at the beginning of this . . . they must have been boys, so much like us. . . . They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand ‘Adventure.’ They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative—unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death.”

  “Miles,” said Randolph in some concern. “What is it? What do you see down there?”

  Not many days after that, somewhere over France, Miles happened to be on watch in the Tesla shack when a red smear appeared without warning in the vaporous sky ahead of them, and slowly grew larger. Seizing the voice-cone of the apparatus, Miles began calling into it, “Neizvestnyi Vozdushnyi Korabl! neizvestnyi vozdushnyi korabl!” which was Russian for “Unknown airship! unknown airship!” Not “unknown,” by then, to Miles, of course.

  A familiar voice replied, “Looking for us, balloon-boys?”

  It was the old Bolshai’a Igra, all right, grown by now to dozens of times its former size. The Romanoff crest had vanished from its envelope, which instead was now all a single chaste expanse of saturated red, and the ship’s name had been changed to Pomne o Golodayushchiki.

  “Remember the Starving,” explained Captain Padzhitnoff, whose former athletic glow seemed now to have grown phosphorescent, as if arising from a source less material than blood.

  “Igor!” Randolph beamed, “Dobro pozhalovat,” as somewhere on the Russian vessel a bell, a scale model of the famous Tsar-Bell of Moscow, given the crew by Nicholas II himself, began to clamor.

  “Means ‘Come and get it!’” said the Captain. “We would be honored to have you all join us for midday meal.”

  There was beet and cabbage soup, buckwheat cooked like oatmeal, and black bread, from which a strange sort of cranberry-flavored beer had also been fermented, and in the middle of the table, where the boys usually had a lemonade pitcher, an enormous jug full of vodka from the ship’s distillery.

  The connection with the Okhrana having been long severed, Padzhitnoff related, these days his ship and crew flew everywhere across Europe and Inner Asia, no longer dropping brickwork but sending food, clothing and—since a great influenza epidemic the boys had not till now been aware of—medical supplies, gently down by parachute to whatever populations below were in need of them.

  “Someone hired us to find you,” Randolph told him forthrightly. “Our instructions were to notify them as soon as we did. But we have not yet reported in. Should we?”

  “If you tell them you can’t find us, do you owe them money?”

  “Nahh, we had ’em strike all the penalty clauses,” said Legal Officer Suckling.

  “If it’s who we think it is,” Pavel Sergeievitch, the ship’s intelligence officer, chuckled professionally, “they’d rather send out assassination teams anyway. Revenge is better than rubles.”

  “Baklashchan is unfamiliar by name, but not his type,” said Padzhitnoff. “He is another podlets—a cringer. Thousands of them have denounced us, thousands more will. Under Tsar, with Okhrana, our status was always in question. . . . These days, I think we are fugitives, declared enemies of whatever is in power now.”

  “Where is your base of operations, then?” Chick inquired.

  “Like good bandits, we have hideout in mountains. Shtab is in Switzerland, though we are not Red Cross, being far less saintlike, in fact funded from profiteering in coffee and chocolate, big business in Geneva till 1916 when everybody but us got arrested and deported. We are on our way back there now, if you’re interested. We’ll show you our private Alp. Looks like solid mountain, but it’s all hollowed out inside, full of contraband. You like chocolate? We give you good price.”

  Back aboard Inconvenience the boys met in the wardroom to discuss their course of action.

  “We’ve signed a contract,” Lindsay reminded everybody. “It continues in force. We must either turn Captain Padzhitnoff over to the authorities of his country or escort him to safety, and become fugitives from justice ourselves.”

  “Maybe Russia’s not his country anymore,” Darby pointed out. “Maybe it ain’t ‘justice’ he’s fleeing from. You don’t know, dimwit.”

  “Not perhaps to the degree of certitude prevailing among the general public as to your mother’s preference for the genitalia of the larger and less discriminating zoo animals,” Lindsay rep
lied. “Nevertheless—”

  “Oooh,” murmured the other boys.

  From a bookshelf nearby Darby had already produced a legal volume and begun to thumb through it. “Yes. I quote from the English Slander of Women Act of 1891—”

  “Gentlemen,” Randolph pleaded. He gestured out the windows, where long-range artillery shells, till quite recently objects of mystery, glittering with the colors of late afternoon, could be seen just reaching the tops of their trajectories and pausing in the air for an instant before the deadly plunge back to Earth. Among distant sounds of repeated explosion could also be heard the strident massed buzzing of military aircraft. Below, across the embattled countryside, the first searchlights of evening were coming on.

  “We signed nothing that included any of this,” Randolph reminded everyone.

  THE TWO AIRSHIPS reached Geneva in convoy. The great silent ghost of Mont Blanc stood sentinel behind the city. Padzhitnoff’s crew were quartered south of the river in the older part of town, where some of them had lived as University students in the years before the Revolution. The boys settled in eventually on an entire floor of adjoining suites, with a view over the lake, at the former Helvetia Royale, one of the great Swiss tourist hotels which once, before the war, had swarmed with visitors from Europe and America.

  Despite the influenza and shortages, the town was lively with all sorts of business. Each city block held multiple chances for accostment by someone with a deal in coal, or milk, or rationing cards. Spies, speculators, and confidence men mingled with refugees and invalid internees from all the belligerent powers. Since 1916 there had been agreements in effect among Britain, Germany and France allowing severely wounded prisoners of war to be exchanged and returned to their home countries by way of Switzerland, while those less seriously disabled could be interned under Swiss custody. Transport trains had begun to appear after dark, hurtling through the country often at express speed, bearing the consumptive, the shellshocked and imbecile. Village children crept from bed, taverns emptied out so the customers could stand by trackside and watch the carriages drum darkly through town. Whenever the trains paused to bring aboard a new draft of passengers, or to stand beneath dark green trusswork holding up strangely pointed spherical tanks to take on water, citizens appeared from nowhere with flowers for the ailing prisoners whose names they would never learn, bottles of homemade schnapps, chocolates hoarded for years. Suspecting that their country was the scene of a great experiment in the possibilities of compassion in the depths of war, they may have felt some need simply to be there and contribute what they could.

  Out in Europe, the great Tragedy went rushing on, lit by phosphorus flares and shell-bursts, scored for the deep ostinati of artillery against the staccato chorales of machine-gun fire, faint suggestions of which found their way backstage from time to time along with smells of cordite and poison gas and rotting bodies. But here in everyday Switzerland it was the other side of the tapestry—a ragged, practical version of the grander spectacle out there. One could imagine the drama, have terrible dreams, infer from those who came off after their turns what they must have been doing out there. But here backstage the business was of a different nature.

  Pomne o Golodayushchiki had more than enough work, and Captain Padzhitnoff was happy to pass on the overflow to the Inconvenience. At first most of this involved cargo jobs—flying in goods it was no longer easy for the Swiss to import, such as sugar, cooking fat, pasta. . . . The boys spent a lot of time mostly waiting in border towns like Blotzheim, though there were also plenty of flights inside the country, redistributing hay during hay famines and cheese during cheese shortages, which in the later years of the war grew chronic here. After a while the missions expanded across the borders, running in oranges from Spain or wheat across the sea from Argentina. One day Padzhitnoff appeared, looking as authoritative as he ever did, and announced, “Time for promotion, balloon-boys! No more cargo handling—from here on, you are moving personnel!”

  Now and then, the Captain explained, there arose osobaia obstanovka— “special situation,” his favorite military term—in which an exchange of internees by train would be inadvisable. “Some person of particular interest, who cannot be repatriated without certain awkwardness. You understand.”

  Faces remained blank, except for Miles, who was nodding gravely. “If we lacked the necessary maps and charts,” he said, “you could lend them to us.”

  “Konechno. We regret that our ship is no longer built for speed demanded by special situation.”

  They soon found themselves hovering in the dead of night over prisoner-of-war camps in the Balkans. They revisited Siberia for the first time since the Tunguska Event to negotiate for captured members of the Japanese-American expeditionary force, and were also instrumental in the relocation of Admiral Kolchak’s government from Omsk. They were shot at by everything from hundred-mile guns to dueling pistols, without result, sometimes on impulse, not always by someone with a clear idea of what they were shooting at. It was a new experience for the boys, and after a while they learned not to take it any more personally than bad weather or faulty maps. It had not occurred to any of them, until Miles pointed it out, that their involvement in the European war had really not begun until they took refuge on neutral ground.

  ONE MORNING IN GENEVA, out in the street, Padzhitnoff, after a long night in the taverns down by the riverside quays, and Randolph, a resolutely early riser in search of a brioche and cup of coffee, happened to cross paths. The city was washed in a strangely circumspect light. Birds had long been up and about, but discreetly so. Lake steamers refrained from blowing their sirens. Tram cars seemed to ride on pneumatic wheels. A supernatural hush hung over the steeples, the mountains, the known world. “What is it?” Padzhitnoff wondered.

  “Today? nothing special.” Randolph took from his pocket a booklet-size ecclesiastical calendar he used for writing himself notes in. “Martinmas, I think.”

  Toward noon the bell of the Cathedral of Saint Pierre known as La Clémence began to ring. Soon all the bells in the city had joined in. Back in Europe something called an armistice had taken effect.

  ONCE HOSTILITIES WERE OVER, contract offers, which had previously so eluded the boys, began to pour in. The Inconvenience continued to fly in and out of Switzerland on the same kinds of relief and repatriation jobs that had occupied it before, but now there were also civilian assignments, more in the tradition of the boys’ earlier adventures. Spies and sales representatives in particular could be found lurking at all hours in the lobby of the Helvetia Royale with fists full of francs and propositions of a grandiosity unknown to the world before 1914.

  One lunchtime just as Darby was preparing to scream, “Not fondue again!” Pugnax came strolling in to the mess decks with a mysterious light in his eyes, and in his mouth a large embossed envelope, sealed with wax and bearing a gilt crest.

  “What’s this? wondered Randolph.

  “Rff rff rr RR-rff!” commented Pugnax, which the boys understood to mean, “Looks like some money!”

  Randolph scanned the letter thoughtfully. “A job offer, back in the States,” he said at last. “Sunny California, no less. The lawyers who sent this are withholding the names of their principals, nor does it seem clear what we’re to do exactly, beyond wait for instructions once we’re there.”

  “And, eeyynnhh . . . how much were they offering?” Darby inquired.

  Randolph held the sheet up so that all could see. The sum, clearly visible, represented about twice the combined net worth of everyone on board.

  “Something criminal, one presumes,” warned Lindsay.

  “This offer must obviously be subjected to the most exhaustive moral and legal scrutiny,” Darby declared, pretending to eyeball the sum once again. “OK, everything looks fine to me.”

  The prospect of well-remunerated work in California—which up till then had figured for the boys as a remote and mythical locale—soon overcame scruples even as unresponsive as Lindsay’s, though
as self-selected conscience of the crew, he could not resist asking, “Who will tell Captain Padzhitnoff?”

  Everybody looked at Randolph. Randolph looked at his bulbous reflection in the silver tea-service for a while, and finally said, “Rats.”

  Padzhitnoff’s shrug and smile were notable for an absence of bitterness. “You don’t need my authorization,” he said. “You’ve always been free to go.”

  “But it feels like we’re deserting you, Igor. Deserting—” he waved his hand a little desperately, as if to include all the waiting populations of unconnected souls adrift, orphans and cripples, unsheltered, sick, starving, incarcerated, insane, who must yet be helped to safety.

  “War is not over. May never be. Consequences may never end. My crew have had four years, a University education, in learning to manage famine, disease, broken cities, all that now must follow what has happened. Horror, pointlessness—but we did get educated. You may have been differently educated. Your own obligations may be to different consequences.”

  “American consequences.”

  “Nebo-tovarishch”—a hand on his shoulder—“I cannot—would rather not—imagine.”

  So it came about, one evening, just as the first stars appeared, that the Inconvenience rose from the shores of Lake Geneva and set her course west-southwest.

  “We should pick up prevailing westerlies off the coast of Senegal,” reckoned Lindsay, who was Weather Officer.

  “Remember when we had to go where the wind took us?” Randolph said. “Now we can just light off the engines and let ’er rip.”

  “Our clients,” Lindsay reminded everyone, “are insistent that we be on the Pacific coast as soon as possible, travel costs being covered contractually only up to a certain sum, above which we become responsible.”

  “Eehhnnyyhh, what idiot put a clause like that in there?” sneered Darby.

  “You did,” chuckled Lindsay.

  CROSSING THE ROCKIES, they found aloft an invisible repetition of the material terrain beneath them. Three-dimensional flows of cold air followed the flow of rivers far below. Air currents ascended sunny sides of mountains at the same steep angles as colder air drained down the shady sides. Sometimes they would be caught in this cycling, and hung over the ridgeline repeating great vertical circles until Randolph ordered the engines engaged.