The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  The cable beckoned. The why of the cable beckoned even more brightly. Of the mystery: there was no tar, no pitch, no gutta-percha, to matte its gleam. He knew now what he had to do. He would take the Great Eastern and slit her side. It was nothing: it was the loss of one ship in a sea of a thousand ships. But it was something.

  He fastened his eyes to the omni-scope’s ocular and fixed the stern of the Leviathan in its field, dead-center. He watched it for the longest while in silence. It would be better, he thought, to have the benefit of M. Brunel’s wisdom at this hour. Preferable. But perhaps—

  Not necessary.

  “Full speed ahead,” said Captain Nemo into his speaking-tube.

  In the engine hold the dynamo man did receive the command and, accordingly, pulled the long brass lever rightward as far as it would go. Then Nemo he quit his salon without glance backward at his Cavaillé-Coll organ, his mechanical Turk, his library of books, his table of charts, his Courbet portrait of Baudelaire, his Niépce heliograph with its faint, faded commemoration of his wife and his children. All of this he left behind sans regard. But he did, before he left, take the small ivory ball from its socket in Breguet’s orrery and place it in his pocket. Only then did he ascend the spiral steps that led from salon to wheelhouse.

  FORTY-ONE

  LANGHORNE DID NOT speak so much: when he opened his mouth it was far more often to sing than to converse. But in spite of his habitual silence—perhaps because of it—he was a keen observer of his fellow man. This, too, was an inheritance from his father, who’d picked cotton in Virginia, cut cane in Tobago: work hard, say little, be mindful of the master. By day Langhorne hauled, and by his singing helped the other men with their hauling. By night he would lie with the captain who would fall asleep almost immediately, though never for very long or in any consistent manner. But Langhorne could tell by the manner in which his captain’s body would sway, list, and keel in the night, and the grunts and moans emitted in sleep, all that the captain would never share if awake.

  Here is what Langhorne he knew: that the captain was in the slough of disquiet between two periods of certitude. That once he was reacquainted with his own resolve—such as he was, when he decided it was of necessity that they board the Great Eastern and overcome its captain—he would again sleep through the night. But until then: the tossings and the turnings only intensified, as if demons within were themselves struggling for command, mutineering ‘gainst the captain in which they lived.

  When the seeing wasn’t good the captain would spend long hours peering into the mist. He’d climb up the mizzen under lowering glass when any sensible person would be climbing down. All Ahab could do was wait: inviting—begging, really—the Leviathan to pursue him. And then, with the Great Eastern‘s steam-powered chaloupes at the ready, and his lance well-honed, Ahab would do now what he’d failed to do then. One of the more reliable of human motivations, thought Langhorne— And one of the more foolish. Except that if Ahab were right, he’d take down not only himself, but the crew entire down with him.

  And if Ahab were wrong, he’d fall into the blackest mood, one from which he might not his self be able to extricate. That would cause sadness in the Captain and in those who cared for him. But at least they all would live. Langhorne found himself in the odd corner: wishing failure and defeat to one he held dear.

  On the night of the new moon Ahab was sleeping with uncharacteristic depth, his breaths slow and widely spaced, the sound and image of a man at rest, when abrupt from nowhere he was up, eyes wide, limbs tense— Within moments was dressed and out the cabin door.

  Langhorne heard his syncopated step as he strode up the gangway to abovedecks, followed him discreetly. What Langhorne from the doorway saw: Ahab, pacing fast from his cabin to the stern of the ship, a distance of perhaps six hundred feet— T-THUMP, T-THUMP, T-THUMP— A tattoo that would wake the dead. And all the while Ahab yelling at the very top of his lungs: “She’s here! She’s here!” Until all on board were waked, and all on board (save Mr. Field, still in confines) were (sleep-eyed, confused, and in motley variety of nightdress) trailing in Ahab’s wake.

  “She’s here,” said Ahab, more softly now. His voice was low, intimate yet all heard; and when he pointed astern, they now all saw what he saw: a faint luminescence, two symmetrical orbs—like eyes! like eyes!—trailing the ship at a distance of perhaps a quarter mile. They kept pace with the Great Eastern and never veered more than a degree or two from her wake. “Right half rudder,” said Ahab, and the wheelman called to his men, and his men pulled the rudder chain, and the sail-men trimmed in accord—

  And as the Great Eastern turned, the lights turned with it.

  The crew—all awake now, all gathered, and someone making coffee in an iron pot, and someone dragging the telescope astern—stared. The phosphorescent globes stared back. The fog, the wake, the eyes that followed them at steady pace and without remit.

  The sailors on board the Great Eastern had, in the course of their lives at sea, seen extraordinary things. They had seen the sheer cliff of the Antarctic shelf; they had seen ships swallowed up whole by a maelström that five minutes before was nowhere to be seen and five minutes later was gone. They had seen fires off the Isle of Dogs flickering in wild and eerie semaphore. They had seen hapax legomena: sea-creatures that existed in no taxonomy, that had ne’er been seen before and ne’er would be again. And they of course had seen all manner of human behavior, from acts of wild and generous self-sacrifice to cannibalism, the food still shuddering on the knife.

  But none of them, o’er the course of the hour that they stared at the willful and persistent phosphorescence, had e’er attended a moment more unsettling, and a long moment it was, and quiet, too, under the clouded sky. All men on board were filled with awe and wonderment and not a little fright: what was this?

  Langhorne he had a deeper ponder: how did Ahab know, in deepest sleep, that there was—something—astern? How did the distant phosphorescence penetrate the water, the iron hull, the cabin wall, to make its way into his dreams? Or was there something that by the laws of nature could not be explained— Only by the laws of the sea, which cleave to a different contour.

  “Ahab wants the steam-chaloupe fired up, and Ahab wants it done quick; and when it has pressure then my men—we of the Valparaiso—shall board, and ye shall lower us down.” This is what Ahab said and the crew they did snap to.

  Langhorne did not want to be lowered down. But his captain had spoken. What use is a chanteyman on dangerous seas? Could his high and clear song protect them from harm? What use is a human voice, no matter how pure its tone, no matter how jubilant or mournful its melody, ‘gainst the glowing uncanny?

  Langhorne knew in that instant: he did not want to die. He was not sure if the captain, in the depth of his soul, felt similar. Yet he was yoked to the captain, even as the captain was yoked to the creature astern. At once Langhorne knew that what followed Ahab was Ahab. Langhorne did not know how this be possible but he did know that this be true. He knew that Ahab and the creature they were doublegoers; that if the creature were to die Ahab would die with it. And so would Langhorne. And so would they all, because they were tied to their captain, and the captain needed to kill—something. In stabbing the creature, the other end of the lance would pierce Ahab’s own heart. And the blood would gutter out, soaking them all, and draining down to the sea, the sea so deep and vast and wide that all the blood of all the dead of all the world could be mingled with it and the sea still blue, a deep and tranquil blue.

  The hiss and sputter of the steam-chaloupe, readied now. Hauled up to deck for boarding. Ahab and his chips and his swabbers and his holystoners and his line-men and his navigator and his wheelman and his chanteyman, all queued up, and Ahab he was about to swing his good left leg o’er the gunwale when from the man with the telescope came sharp cry. One word:

  “Approaching!”

  And the phosphorescent orbs that had for the past ninety minutes haunted from fixed distance now were c
oming up upon them. With great and ferocious rapidity: how can it move so fast? The lights streamed up on them and then— Went out. The sea as black as the moonless sky. Where had it gone? But that question was answered soon enough: with a clang and a crash and a terrible groan of metal. And the grand ship pitching around its midline. And from belowdecks, from the cable-hold, an awful cry:

  “We are hit!”

  Langhorne looked to Ahab, half o’er the rail, who clutched at his chest and belly as if the pain of the ship were reflected in his body, and by locating the hurt he could thereby know how the Great Eastern she had been compromised.

  And e’en in this shocked and terrible moment the Great Eastern officers, Englishmen all, could be heard to speak among themselves. The words were muffled but the meaning was clear. Had Anderson been captain, this would never have happened. Had Great Eastern‘s grand boilers been ablaze, had the screw and paddles been turning, they could have outrun it. But with this madman, this American—

  Then Ahab spoke with a clean and cool voice, no tremor in the voice, nothing but the sure and calm voice of command.

  “Cable and boiler crew, scout and report. If we are taking on water Ahab will remain with his ship. If ‘tis just the outer hull Ahab will board the chaloupe and do the monster in.”

  The men were silent as Ahab spoke. Langhorne could see the change at once: in affect, in posture— Ahab was their captain now, and if he were giving orders why they would follow them.

  “Bring her about,” said Ahab, and the deck-men flew to action, hauling in the boom, while below the rudder-men pulled in concert.

  “Look!” said the mate with the telescope.

  Within a moment Ahab’s eye was at the ocular. Langhorne, beside him, even without the aid of glasswork, could see what the mate saw: the two rounded phosphorescent eyes, now fleeing the Great Eastern off its starboard side with a speed wild and nigh-unimaginable for so large a creature. The small ones, thought Langhorne, were fast, and the big ones slow, but this one was large, and fast— And as frightening in departure as it had been in approach.

  “Fire up the boilers below and when we have a north heading, full speed ahead,” said Ahab. The English officers exchanged the briefest of nods and glances. Then Ahab turned from the officers to the sea, and to the ocean he spoke.

  “Ye cannot attack us with impunity. Ye can only attack us and die.” And with that Ahab turned his back, that we saw his billowing shirt as he descended, T-THUMP, T-THUMP, down to the boiler hold. The stokers followed. Soon they would be shoveling coal into the fiery maw as they’d not done since Ahab took the helm. Soon it would be a blazing hell down there. Soon the Great Eastern would be churning, prow pointed toward the northern pole in rapid pursuit.

  There was no way of knowing how this would end. But Langhorne knew. And deep in his heart was a sadness, the sadness of predestined fate. It was the sadness his father felt, born a slave and knowing he would for the rest of his life a slave remain. In the Royal Marines he was a slave (to the Crown); and on Tobago he was a slave (to the work)— And on his deathbed (and on his deathbed he was not old) he told his son Langhorne that there was nothing more a man could do, nothing better a man could do, than to be free.

  He had tried, Langhorne had, to be free. But that path had led him here, to this doom-struck ship, on an errand of death. His only uncertainty was this one: as to whether he would die of shipwreck, drowned in the icy sea; or die of cold, wandering the ice floes of the pole, looking for shelter, looking for food, finding neither. His mad Ahab pursued his Leviathan—even as his Leviathan, in turn, followed the drinking gourd, north, ever north.

  FORTY-TWO

  THE FIRST BRUNEL knew of it was the acceleration—that moment, more felt than seen, more sensed than felt, when the captain did change the Nautilus‘s speed from follow-at-a-distance to full-pursue. And he could hear the treble-clef whine of the electric motors as they went into higher range. He knew those motors, he’d designed them, he’d wound the armatures by hand. And they were soon pitched as high as he’d ever heard them.

  He tried the door of his chambers. Still locked. The captain had asked him to reflect. But—and this now had the clarity of crystal or of bell—the captain would do what he would do, will-he, nill-he. It was the first time—at least since the perilous voyage ‘neath polar ice—that Brunel wondered whether he, or anyone else aboard, would survive.

  He wished for something to hold—a rosary (though he was not Catholic or even, in any abiding sense, religious). Or, better, the Hadley’s quadrant that Marc Brunel had fashioned from ebony, handed down to him and which, last seen, resided in place of honor upon his desk in London. A desk that—like all else—would ne’er be seen again, ‘cept in mind’s eye, where Brunel saw it now with grand clarity, as if each object were glimpsed through convex glass, and outlined in black so as to stand out from its surround.

  Brunel again tried to quit his room. He pounded on the door with real force and yelled at the top of his voice phrases in the odd language of Nautilus‘s crew. There was no response. If he were going to perish he did not want to do so alone.

  He was pounding on the door when he felt the shock, the deceleration more brutal than any he could recall, from full-speed-ahead to— Full-stop. He was not braced ‘gainst anything and his body was tossed a full yard back from the doorway. Books flew from the rear shelf as if by their own devise. A drinking glass on the nightstand took to the air, soared, hovered, stood mid-air for the longest moment as if frozen in time— Then at once dropped to the cabin floor, hitting bottom, glass shattering, water blooming up and out and down in thick drops and sheets.

  Then there was the noise, the noise, the thick and awful noise, louder than any he’d yet heard undersea, and lower too, with a frequency that shook the bones and loosed the bowels, a low and terrifying groan octaves below any orchestra’s lowest note. It wrenched and tore and would not cease. It was, Brunel thought, as if he’d been strapped to the clapper of some enormous bell, high up in a cathedral’s tower, and now some masked demonic madman were pulling on the rope with insane force, and the clapper—Brunel with it—were slammed and slammed again into the side of that bell, which, once struck, emitted tones loud, low, unearthly. And blood did spatter now too. He tasted salt in his mouth. Was he bleeding? He took his hand to his forehead. Yes, he was bleeding. Yet he had no recollection of having hit his head. Odd. And then the ferocious groan of metal, the Nautilus entire shaking in low subsonic tremor.

  They’d hit something.

  With what had they collided? There was at this latitude the occasional iceberg, but Nautilus, beneath the waves, would be able to see any iceberg long before any possible collision. There were rocks that jutted up from the ocean floor, but none that were so high as to violate the shallow depths at which Nautilus was now cruising.

  Yet this was but idle mental speculation for in his gut and, were he to admit it, in his head, Brunel knew exactly what had happened. It was the Great Eastern. And the hit was deliberate. The captain had pointed Nautilus toward the grand iron ship, had given the order for full speed. And his crew, his strange crew, the crew that spoke an other-worldly tongue, the crew to whom Nemo’s word was command, and whose command was as edict from the gods, would not have demurred, or e’en voiced hesitation. Nemo says full ahead, then— Full ahead.

  Brunel’s stomach—or what was left of it following the crash, the gut-shaking, the terrible low roar that even now continued—dropped out on him. It was as if he’d been tossed from a high bridge. The captain: Was he mad enough to think he with Nautilus might sink Great Eastern—the largest ship afloat, the grandest, of iron, and double hulled, too? It could not be done. Or— Could be done, just as a man with a harpoon can take down a whale. But would be folly to attempt, and would cost countless lives; and it would be toward ends that could by no rational mind be fathomed.

  It was now perhaps five full seconds after the collision. The awful low ringing had not yet damped out. In his mind Brunel now rev
iewed the events, which all had seemed near-simultaneous, tried to see them with clarity, place them along a line: the ahead-full-speed; the crash; the wild deceleration; the ring and low scream of tortured metal—

  And now the ringing abruptly ceased. Leaving silence— Not silence so much as an onrush of ear pressure, as if the very atmosphere were collapsing around him. Brunel now wondered where on Great Eastern they had hit and what damage they had caused.

  Scant seconds later Brunel heard the dynamos wind up again and there was another jerk. The last book dropped from the sternward shelf. Brunel by this knew that the ship she was now running backward. Full-speed astern. This was accompanied by another low and terrible ringing, the screech of metal ‘gainst metal. He only now noticed that in the collision the door to his chamber had unlocked, had flung itself open.

  Without premeditation or thought Brunel rushed through that door, down the gangway and up the metal stairs to the captain’s salon. There were books strewn everywhere, and the Breguet clock lay on its side, its delicate ormolu hands bent up and ruined, the case cracked along its length. Books, clocks, charts, all mix’d round as if in aftermath of a maelström— But no captain. In the wheelhouse? Likely.

  The salon’s large glass was iris’d open and though it Brunel could see, if he looked through it sidewise, what in his mind’s eye he had already imagined: the sharpened prow of Nautilus, retreating from Great Eastern‘s belly. But the image in life was worse than any he’d in imagination envisioned. He could see with terrible clarity the long length of thinner plates where Great Eastern she’d been repaired, and the prow of Nautilus pulling back from the center of that scar where she’d struck upward as a knife to the gut. Already—and the lighted plankton gave clear picture—the waters were rushing round the wound and into the maw of the grand iron ship.