by James Kahn
It was magical. We stared up at the projections almost hypnotized, as the raft slowly floated farther and farther into the core of the cavern. In a minute or so I looked around and realized I couldn't see any of the walls. Then I realized we were sort of bobbing in place and not really moving anywhere.
Data shined his lantern over three hundred and sixty degrees, but the beam didn't reach a single landmark.
“Uh-oh,” he whispered as the raft turned in slow circles. His teeth started chattering. “We're in trouble now, this is no good.”
It was pretty intense, I gotta admit. Stef was cool, though. “Relax, we just start paddling, that's all. We'll get somewhere sooner or later.”
So we started paddling in the direction we thought was the other side. We gave up ten minutes later when we still couldn't see a wall. Besides, we were all a little shy about putting our hands in the water after we saw something break the surface about twenty feet away and then dive again. It was hard to tell in this light, but it looked an awful lot like a dorsal fin.
“Oh, man, this is terrible, this is it…” Data whimpered.
“Take it easy, man, we'll get outta this,” said Brand.
“No, you don't understand,” said Data. “Drowning is the worst. I can't take drowning. Anything but that. I can't swim. I can't even float.”
Stef took his hand and put her arm around his shoulder, real nice. “You're not gonna drown, kid. I can swim like a fish.”
Mouth was gonna say somethin' wiseass—I could see it in his eye—but Stef threw him a look like “Don't you dare,” so he kept his mouth shut.
Anyway, Data seemed to relax a little. And then, as we all sat there gazing up at the crystal ceiling in the middle of this black, boundless, motionless ocean, Data started talking.
“Someday I'm going to invent something great,” he said. “It's gonna be a city that's under the ocean, and it's gonna be inside this huge, clear, plastic bubble. Space-age plastic, the kind the NASA guys developed, so it can withstand thousands of degrees of heat, in case there's an underwater volcano eruption; and thousands of tons of pressure, so the weight of the ocean can't crush it. It'll be clear, so you can see through it to watch all the fish, so you're like surrounded on all sides by this gigantic aquarium. And it won't have any seams. It'll be molded out of one huge piece of plastic, so it can't spring a leak.
“It'll be a mile in diameter, and it'll have all these different levels, like plateaus constructed across the bubble at different levels,. and they'll be connected by ladders and stairways that go up and down. And each level will be for a different purpose. There'll be one level for housing and one for farming—there'll be special lights there, so you can grow whatever you want—and one level for fisheries, and one for playgrounds and restaurants and movies, and all the areas right near the inner surface of the plastic would be for observation decks, with big powerful spot-lights in some places shining out into the ocean so you could see all the amazing fish and coral and whales and stuff.
“And there'll maybe be an airlock, so people can go out on expeditions in submarines if they wanted to.
“The bubble will be held down to the ocean floor by a hundred gigantic anchors, connected to nondegradable cables that stretch over the top of the bubble and criss-cross there so they form a huge net weighted down by these anchors, so the bubble doesn't float up to the surface. It'll be held down there, at least a mile below the surface, so it won't be wrecked if there's a nuclear war, and fallout won't get that far down, either, or germs if there's a germ war. And it won't get hurt if there's an underwater earthquake, either, because it's not touching the bottom, only the anchors are, so the bubble will just kind of shift around on its cables and sway a little in the underwater current.
“That's where all its energy will come from, from underwater currents. So the location will have to be carefully chosen, so it's right beside one of those super currents that never stops, like the Gulf Stream, or El Nino, or one of those. We'll put a huge series of huge propellers right in the path of the current and connect them to huge turbines, so the propellers will always be turning and cranking out energy—I guess we will have to have an airlock, so the submarines can go out to service the propellers if they need maintenance.
“But, anyway, it'll be a safe, endless energy source, nonpolluting and self-generating. It'll power the lights in the city, and there'll be a desalination plant so we can get as much water as we need right outside and turn it into fresh water. And it'll power a big plant for extracting oxygen out of the water, so we can breathe—it's not very efficient, but who cares about efficiency when you can harness the power of the ocean?
“It'll be completely self-contained and self-sustaining, and we'll limit the number of people who can come live there, so it doesn't get overcrowded—only my friends and their friends and some of my relatives and a few nice people I don't know.
“And we'll be completely safe and happy, and we can never drown, even though we're surrounded by water on all sides, and life will be devoted to farming and eating and playing and discussing philosophy and working on new inventions.
“That's what I'm gonna invent.”
“Sounds like you already did,” said Mouth.
“Data, that's beautiful,” said Andy.
Our eyes had grown used to the dark by now, but the farther we were able to see, the farther we could see that there was no end to this cavern. The raft drifted this way a little, then that way, then just bobbed without direction for a bit, then turned around its center. We were going nowhere.
Stef said, “Now me, I love the water. I grew up around it, I go fishin' all the time with my old man—I'm the only one who will go with him. My brothers just play with car engines and smoke dope. I love goin' out there, though, it's so quiet and peaceful, no one else around, no one tellin' you what to do, no noise and stench from the factories, just you sittin' out there in the middle of all this quiet, rollin' on the waves like it was a cradle. There's nothin' else as peaceful as that.
“And swimmin', that's just like runnin' or dancin'. You just dip in the water and mess around there and dip out and mess around in the air again. Same difference. Except in the water, there's this peace.
“I like to scuba, too, only it's too expensive to do it very often, but my old man lets me use his gear once in a while. That's a real mind-blower, swimmin' around down under all that water. Talk about quiet, man. It's like nothin' but you and all these strange, silent fishes starin' back at you and you just know they're thinkin' somethin', but they ain't talkin' about it.
“I scuba'd off Catalina once. It was so warm and clear and blue, man, and these fish were like orange and neon purple—no shit, they were like punk fish. Like there was a Cyndi Lauper fish, and a Eurhythmics fish, all glidin' around to some special underwater fish beat that I couldn't hear, but I could see it, and the seaweed wavin' like in slow motion and these pink jellyfish hangin' their fringe down wavin' back, and schools of fish that turn in formation like they had the same thought at the same second, and all the time it's so quiet and peaceful….
“No, I love the water. Water's where I go when I wanna stop being scared. What I'm afraid of is the dark. Knowing something's out there but you can't see what. That's what scares me.”
We looked out in all directions, trying to see something. Anything. The raft rocked almost not at all now. Just flat and still.
Off to the left something caught my eye, though. Real hazy, like just a sort of lightness in the darkness. It seemed to get a lot colder all of a sudden, not a wind exactly, but like a movement of cold air all around us. And then the lighter area in the distance got closer and whiter and thicker. And then you could see that it was a fog rolling in.
“Oh, shit,” whispered Stef.
The fog started to reach us, sort of a chilly wetness at first, and then the mist began creepin' over the edge of the raft and just sat there, real low, for a time.
Something echoed way in the fog, and we all jumped. S
ort of a falling rock noise, only muffled by the fog, and then it was quiet again.
“Reminds me of a story, kinda,” said Mouth. “Took place on a cold, dark, foggy night up near Vancouver, sorta like what we got right here, in fact. This family was livin' in a little place at the edge of town. They were tryin' to make ends meet, like all our families. It was just a little nowhere sorta place with a creaky front gate, in a little factory town. Mother and a father, and they had one kid, a guy, he just finished high school and he was still livin' at home and workin' in the factory with his dad, so he could save up enough to get a place of his own. His name was Alex, he was a friend of my cousin, Doug. That's how I know the story.
“Anyway, there used to be an older son, too, but he got killed in Vietnam years ago. But then one day they heard the front gate creak open, and a mailman with this package showed up at the door, and it was from the older son, the dead one—see, the army had just found his personal junk, it was lost in a warehouse or somethin' for fifteen years, so they just sent it. Typical army.
“So, anyway, this package came, and they opened it, and it had, you know, his dogtags and some pictures and some medals and his clothes and letters and stuff, but it also had this one sealed envelope addressed to them, and it was taped to a box, all wrapped up and about the size of a telephone.
“They opened the letter, and it had a lot of personal stuff—made 'em cry, 'cause they remembered him all over again now—but it also said he got this special gift for 'em from an old Chinese wizard, and it would grant 'em three wishes if they just held it while they made the wishes.
“So they opened the box. And inside they found the paw of a monkey.”
“Mouth, you jerk, are you gonna tell ‘The Monkey's Paw?’” said Stef.
“Hey, gimme a break, I listened to your story, now you listen to mine. C'mon, you might get into it.”
“I don't wanna get into it.”
We were all pretty into it already, though—starin' real quiet at him, with the fog rollin' over our feet in the dark, getting wrapped up in his ghost story.
“So, anyway,” said Mouth, talkin' softer now, “the father wanted to put the paw away with the rest of the son's junk, but the mother said, ‘Wait a minute, now, this thing was his last gift to us, maybe we should use it,’ and the father said, ‘No, it's bad luck to try to take things from the dead,’ and the mother said, ‘Geez, it couldn't hurt, and they sure could use the money,’ and the father said, ‘Yeah, but greed only gets people in trouble, and they'll get by just fine,’ and the mother said, 'Well, they don't need to be greedy, they could just ask for a little money, just what they needed to make their back payments and fix the roof and help their son get his own place. ‘Just ten thousand dollars,’ she said. ‘That's all we'll ask for is ten thousand bucks.’
“Well, the father didn't like it, but he said okay, so he held the monkey's paw in his hand and said, ‘Please give us just ten thousand dollars.’ Then all at once he yelped and dropped the paw. ‘It moved in my hand,’ he said.
“Well, nothin' else happened. They looked around, waited a minute—nothin'. The father just laughed, though, and said, ‘Oh, well, we still got each other.’ So they went to bed.
“Next day the father and son went off to work, out the creaky front gate to the factory. But that afternoon at three, they didn't come home. Couple hours passed, and she started to worry… and then all of a sudden, creeeeak, the front gate, and the father came staggerin' in, cryin' and gnashin', and two guys from the factory were with him, and the mother said, ‘Oh, my God, what happened?’
“And one of the factory guys tells her he's real sorry, but her son Alex fell into one of the machines at work and was killed.
“She screamed and said she didn't believe it, and she wanted to see her son. But they said no, that wasn't advisable, 'cause he'd been mangled beyond recognition and parts cut off and stuff.”
“Eeuww, gross,” said Andy.
“Sshh. Go on,” said Brand.
Mouth went on. “And then the factory guy put his arm on the mother's shoulder and said it wasn't much consolation, but her son had a life insurance policy with the factory, and the guy had a check here for her for ten thousand dollars.”
“Wow,” whispered Andy.
“So she screamed and tore at her hair and stuff, and her husband finally quieted her down, and the other guys left. The mother and father sat there at the kitchen table for hours, just lettin' it get darker as night came on. And night did come on—kinds cold and black and foggy. Just like this.
“And the mother finally couldn't stand it no more, so she grabbed the monkey's paw, and the father said, ‘No!’ but before he could do anything, she said, ‘Bring him back. Bring my son back to me!’
“The father grabbed the paw away, but it squirmed out of his hand and fell back on the table. Anyway, it was too late. She'd said it. So they just sat there at the table as the fog curled all around the house, and it got colder and darker, and an hour passed, and all of a sudden… they heard it. Kind of a scraping sound, and then a thump. Wshhh, thup. Wssshhh, thup. Wssshh, thup. Like that.
“Kinda the sound a body might make if it was missin' a leg and an arm, draggin' itself along the ground, inch by inch.
Wsshhh, thup. They heard it comin' closer, along the front walk. The windows were all open, but it was too foggy to see anything, foggy and dark, and they were so scared, they couldn't move, anyway, and all they could do was hear. Wsshhh, thup. Wsshhh, thup.
“It went all the way along the front of the house, and it got to the place where they knew the front gate was… and there was a long pause. The sound stopped, it was totally silent in the thick, black fog… and then they heard it. Creeeeeeeeak. The front gate was opening, slowly opening… and then a loud thup, like somethin' fell hard through the gate.
“Then it got all quiet again. They didn't move a muscle, they just sat there starin' at the night, and then all at once… it started again. Wsshhh, thup. Wsshhh, thup. Much louder now. Closer. Comin' down the path to the front door.
“The mother started whimperin' now, and they were both starin' at the door, and they could hear the thing comin' closer—wsshhh, thup—and it was at the door, and suddenly… there was a knock.”
Mouth knocked three times on one of the wooden logs of the raft.
“‘Go away,’ whispered the father. But the mother stood up. ‘Alex,’ she cried. ‘My baby.’”
Mouth knocked three more times on the wood.
“And the mother started walking to the front door. ‘No,’ the father whispered, but she ran to the door now. And just as she flung it open, the father grabbed the monkey's paw and said, ‘Make him go away forever. Let us never see him again!’ And the paw twitched.
“And the mother, threw the door open. And there was nothin' there. Only the fog, creepin' in over the doorsill and over her feet. And into her heart.”
We all sat there starin' at him, but he didn't say any more. Just sat there starin' back at us, like he was darin' us to disbelieve his story.
Andy clung to Brand for reassurance. “Oh, Brand, that was so scary.”
He wrapped his arms around her. “It was just a story,” he said. But the fog was starting to come higher on us, and it was pretty damn chilly.
“You satisfied now, Big Mouth?” said Stef. “You got everyone scared real good?”
“It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it, baby,” said Mouth.
I gotta admit, it did take our minds off our own worries, for just a little while.
“I feel safer with you here,” I heard Andy whisper to Brand. “Nothing much scares you.”
Brand was quiet a minute, and then he said, “Something does scare me. Small spaces scare me.”
I was kinda shocked to hear him say it, but I was glad he did, partly because it was big of him to admit it, and it made me like him better for copping to one of his weaknesses. And partly because it made me feel not so bad about blabbing to Andy about him freakin'
out in the elevator.
“Elevators scare me,” he kept on talkin', “and closets scare me, and even cars scare me a little. I think that's why I screwed up gettin' my driver's license.”
“Excuses, excuses,” said Mouth.
“Shut up, Mouth,” I told him. I wanted to hear what Brand had to say.
“I know why they scare me, though,” he said. “It's because when I was six, I accidentally locked myself in an old refrigerator in the basement. I knew I wasn't supposed to go near it, but I went, anyway, and then I couldn't get out. So I was afraid to call for help, 'cause I knew I'd get in trouble, so I just sat in there—in this totally black, tiny, closed-in space, and it seemed like it was gettin' smaller and smaller and smaller, until I couldn't stand it anymore, and I started kickin' and yellin', and Mom heard me and got me right away. And you know what? She spanked me for playin' with the thing. Here I was half-chokin' to death, and she rattles my ass for it.
“So ever since then, I don't know, small spaces just kind of get me. Make me feel… I don't know, like I did when I was six. Real scared.”
The fog was all around us now, from here to the ceiling and in all directions. We could see each other barely, if we stood close together. And I'm here to tell you, we stood close together.
“Well, it was brave of you to tell us,” said Andy. “Me, I'm scared of just about everything. Scared of my father, scared of the nuns, scared of getting bad grades, scared of being lonely, scared of getting hurt. And I'm really scared of dying. I mean, not just because of all the things I'd miss out here and how sad that would be, and unfair—the thing is, what's out there?
“I mean, is there a heaven? God? What does he look like? Will he be angry with me? Probably so. Probably send me to hell, if there is one, 'cause of all the bad things I've thought and done.
“So then I get scared of what hell's like. Is it painful eternally? Is it flaming, do you have to swim in molten lava? Or is it icy cold and you have to sit on icebergs, shivering forever, and your skin sticks to the ice and pulls off in little bits when you try to stand up?