The Poseidon Adventure

by Paul Gallico

  Rogo took over with a curiously affectionate expression on his usually blank face. 'Manny,' he said, 'we're going to fix you up just dandy. You got any handkerchiefs?' With one he tied the torch to Rosen's forearm. With a second he wrapped his wife's glasses and tucked them inside Rosen's shorts. 'Keep your own on. Belle took hers off because she didn't know what she might find down there. Okay, Johnny Weissmuller, don't forget to hold your breath.'

  Rosen looked around sheepishly for an instant, 'Anyone thinks I was built for a hero should have his head examined,' took his grip upon the rope and plunged.

  One after the other Shelby, Kemal and Scott went through. Muller said to Rogo, 'You've got guts to be the last one.'

  Rogo replied, 'Yeah,' with a rising inflection, but made no further comment. He was busying himself with strapping on his big lantern and laying out the remainder of the long coil of rope so that there would be no chance of its tangling or snagging when they went to pull it through after them.

  Muller was wondering whether he would be the one to funk it and what it would be like when he was down there in the black with only one last gulp of air in his lungs to see him through. He had little faith left in himself as a man prepared to cope with danger or trouble. Even Rosen, he felt had more guts than himself and seemed better equipped by whatever kind of life he had lived to do the necessary to survive. But at the other end of that passage was Nonnie, poor frightened Nonnie, who had tried to make a joke of it. She would be wet, bedraggled, her hair streaked with oil, naked and shivering. She would be needing him.

  Rogo seemed to have read his thoughts. His expression was quite blank again as he said, 'You better git goin'. The kid'll be waiting for you.' Muller felt his contempt but could not blame him. He did his best to put a face on it by saying, 'Be seeing you.'

  'Yeah,' Rogo replied, this time without any inflection at all.

  Forty-five seconds. The shaft descended some eight feet. His body, filled with air, did not want to go down and he had to pull on the rope hard. His torchlight did not penetrate more than a few feet to show the inevitable piping but the passage narrowed suddenly as though some gigantic force had squeezed it. He saw an outcropping in time not to hit it with his head and the rope bent upwards and along the inside.

  He realized that this was a steel walk that had originally been flooring and now was reversed. How many seconds had elapsed? His chest had not yet begun to feel tight. He kept his light on his lifeline and managed to entertain the most absurd thought: Hubie Muller, if they could see you now! 'they' being the jet set of which he was a part.

  Muller endured a thrill of fright as a dark shape ahead seemed to reach out for him. It was rounded and stretched almost to the far side of the passage and was actually a section of a hydraulic pump that had been blown apart. Muller had time to wonder further at the courage of Belle Rosen when she had encountered this obstacle for the first time and had made her decision to swim under it, not knowing what might lie ahead or whether she could ever get back.

  There was room enough for him to go over it. He was feeling strain in his lungs. Forty-five seconds could not have passed that quickly. When he had been holding the watch on the others it had seemed much longer. Actually no more than twenty had passed, but he was already aware of the rise of fear that might turn into panic and kill him. Darkness, water, lurking shapes. How brave a man was he by himself? How did one combat fear when one was alone? What resources did men call upon to be men? He could feel his heart pounding and pressure in his throat and chest to let go that precious few cubic inches of air

  The back of his hand no longer scraped the steel ridge above him. The rope rose sharply. He pulled at it and shot upwards, his head breaking the surface into a glare of lantern lights. He saw what looked like an assortment of demons straight out of the Inferno: white, half-naked bodies, oil and grime-streaked, limp straggling hair, strange faces that he no longer seemed to recognize. Hands reached for his armpits and he was dragged out of the water and on to a kind of platform. Without ever having encountered the Divine Comedy, little Martin said wryly, 'Welcome to Hell!'

  Shelby handed him the rope, the end of which was fastened to a bent bar and said, 'You've made it. It's your yank. Give it two.'

  But instead, Muller, like Belle, went, 'Dum de-de-dum- dum,' with it to Rogo at the other end. Thirty seconds later, the detective emerged from the well, resembling something prehistoric rising from the deep.

  Muller searched for Nonnie. She had turned away from him and said, 'Oh, don't look at me! Please don't look at me.'

  Belle said, 'What's the fuss? Nobody don't exactly look as though they'd been to the beaudy parlour.'

  But Muller had seen her, a desperately begrimed nymph. The two pieces of cloth clung to her frail form. Her red hair, darker from the water, was stuck together and clung to her shoulders. Her face, smeared, appeared smaller than ever. Whatever delicacy she had was destroyed. She looked, indeed they all did, as though she had crawled up out of a sewer. Yet somehow the other women bore their filth and dishevelment with a certain dignity. Nonnie's was all gone and Muller longed to enfold and comfort her. For more than ever her queer little person applied that strange twist to his heart for which he could not account. Everything within him told him to take her and let her hide what she felt was her shame close to him. But he could not do it with everyone watching. He could not bring himself to go to her and open himself to her need with the eyes of Linda and all the others on him. He did not do it until later when Scott ordered a rest and the lights put out to save the batteries.

  But first Rogo, having regained his breath asked, 'Where the hell are we?'

  Scott replied, 'In the engine room.'

  'Where do we go from here?'

  Scott raised the big lantern and stabbed the heavy darkness with a ray of light that travelled some fifty feet up before it spotlighted a smooth shaft of metal that reflected its shine.

  Rogo said, 'Are you kiddin'?'

  Scott replied, 'No. Up there, but not directly over our heads, is the outside hull of the ship. But it's still the double bottom Acre told us about. Once we get up there we shall have to make our way still farther aft.'

  'You haven't seen the worst yet,' Shelby put in. 'Martin meant it when he welcomed Muller to Hell.' A hollow shout echoed back from the cavernous roof, '. . . to Hell!'

  Martin and Rogo sent their beams roving over the appalling scenery of wreckage, an alpine scape of lacerated steel, twisted pipes, dangling wires and girders, peeling dynamos, cliffs of turbine rotors, peaks and ravines made by shattered generators only half-torn loose from their foundations, split open and pouring forth their metal innards.

  'The women won't look,' Shelby said, 'we've told them.' Martin added, 'I'm not looking either. It's too much for my stomach. I'd be sick again.'

  There were bodies crushed to death and wedged in amongst tangled remains of machinery, twisted ladders and catwalks. A detached arm was lodged in a crevice. The upper half of a man hung from the jagged rim of an electro-hydraulic coupling. Something had sheared him in two at the waist. They could not see his face. His body had long since been drained of blood. And there were bits and pieces no longer with people in them, caught upon edges and these were almost worse than the bodies. One pleading hand was still thrust out from beneath what must have been tons of metal which had crashed down to the level of where the party now found themselves. There was no telling how many dead there were.

  The probing lanterns revealed that there was no one alive in the vast cavern. Nor was there so much as a sound except the slight lapping of water of the black lake some twenty yards square. Things unidentified floated on its surface; objects were thrust up out of it that, caught at the sides, had failed to follow the rest of the debris to the bottom of the sea. They themselves were now on a kind of peninsula jutting out from the shore which must originally have been the reverse one of the supervisory platforms at the top of the engine room.

  Miss Kinsale suddenly said, 'Oh dear,
oh dear.'

  Shelby inquired, 'What is it, Miss Kinsale?'

  She was sitting close to the edge of the platform with one leg curled under her in the pose of a beach beauty in bikini at a poolside. The astonishing thing was the change made in her by her length of hair. The swim had dragged or knocked it out of its bun and the strands hung to her waist. In the gloom and the occasional passage of a torch beam over her figure she resembled a summer naiad.

  She replied, 'Those two poor people, the gentleman you call The Beamer and the girl who always seems to be with him . .

  'Oh Lord,' said Jane Shelby.

  'Oh, Mummy!' Susan added, 'They said they'd . . .'

  'Come after us when they could,' Muller concluded.

  Miss Kinsale brushed her long hair out of her eyes and said, 'But they can't. However will they get through where we've come by themselves.'

  Rogo said with finality, 'They can't, the stupid slobs.'

  Linda snapped, 'Well, it was her idea to stick around. We said we'd take them . . . I mean her.'

  Jane Shelby said, 'But you see she was a woman. She wouldn't leave him.'

  Her husband shrivelled. They had not even dared to shout for Robin up into that awful black void of shattered gear from which pieces of dead men hung. And Rogo had said the boy would be climbing.

  Miss Kinsale said to Linda, 'You mustn't be too hard on her.'

  Shelby asked, 'Should we go back for them?'

  Linda said, 'And if the guy is still dead drunk?'

  There was no answer to this. They were ashamed that there was not, that Linda's toughness for once had let them off from something. No one wanted to go back through that tunnel again. Besides, how to get a man in a drunken sleep to hold his breath while being towed under water. And they had their own case to consider.

  'Welcome to Hell,' Martin had said, and in the sense of their surroundings, the ghostly echoes, heat and the feeling of utter abandonment, of having entered the domain of the damned, it was true.

  While they had been making their way along the uncertain footing of the ceilings of the ship's corridors, or struggling to overcome the reversed staircases, even during the nightmare of their sojourn in the working alley, they had begun to become somewhat accustomed to this new world of upside-down and there had been still some semblance of things recognizable. The topsy-turvy signs over storerooms and offices confirmed that it was yet a steamer they were inhabiting. With their subterranean entrance into the engine room they had left behind everything they had ever known, could adhere to, or compare. They might have come out on to another planet, the tortured desolation of the pitiless ruptured steel crags and pinnacles revealed by lamplight, and above all, the foul, oil-covered lake on the shores of which they found themselves marooned, drained the courage out of all of them with the exception of Scott.

  With the beam of his lantern he was exploring the steel mountain he meant to have them conquer, memorizing every jagged steel promontory and pinnacle.

  It would be unlike any ascent he or anyone else had ever attempted. Here there could be no cutting of steps, no circumventing or bypassing. The engine room had spilled its guts down the sides when the vessel, keeling over had subjected the turbines and all their auxiliary equipment to stresses for which their anchorage had not provided.

  To make things worse, everything was slippery from the oil that had leaked out of the tanks in the double bottoms, now overhead. How much of the black lake was salt water intruded into the shaft and what was oil, could not be determined. The huge airspace of the cavern must be helping to keep the ship still afloat. Yet it had been evident to them all that she had been slowly settling and the water in the lower corridors rising. They had no way of even guessing as to what air and buoyancy remained in the forward and after freight compartments.

  'Do you mean to get us up to the top of that?' Shelby asked.

  'Yes,' Scott replied. He moved his light along the bright, oily cylindrical shaft far above. 'That must be the propeller shaft. But do you see just behind it, that is, on top of it, that long, thin flat piece. That must be the catwalk that enables them to follow the shaft down to the collar, in case of trouble.'

  'But it's upside-down,' Shelby said. 'We can't cling to it like flies.'

  'We've got to make it on to the other side. Then we can walk along it.'

  'Where do you get your strength from?' Shelby asked suddenly and expected Scott to answer 'From faith', but instead the Minister merely replied, 'From knowing how.' Then he added, 'I think I've seen a path. We'll rope together, alternating man and woman. There's plenty of line. It will be up to both the man in front and behind the woman to see that she steps exactly in the right place. I'll put you, Dick, where you can work with Susan and Jane. Rogo can bring up the rear again. He's reliable.'

  'He doesn't like you,' Shelby said.

  'It's mutual,' replied Scott. 'But he's dependable. Life has given him fibre.'

  And robbed me of mine. Shelby thought and felt shamed again. Nobody had mentioned Robin. If he had been anywhere about, if he had managed to climb and gain entrance from some other direction, he would have heard them and managed a hail. How could Jane have lived so serene and composed all those years, hating every minute of it?

  Scott said, 'If you don't mind, lights out. We'll save batteries. We've come through some difficult trials. There are others ahead. We'll rest for a little. If you are able to snatch a few minutes of sleep, do so. Keep your lights off. We shall be needing them every minute later. I'll let you know when it's time to start again. Sleep if you can . . .'

  None of them, with the exception of Shelby and possibly Rogo knew what lay ahead of them. They were aware that they had farther to go. How and when was in his hands. His voice soothed them. They separated into their own little groups and lay down upon the oily steel. It was better in the total darkness, for then they could not see. And if the darkness were to become permanent . . . well, then they might not even be aware of the transition.

  Yet there was one more phenomenon which in one way or another affected them all and of which they had not become aware until they had reached this dark lake that Martin had named 'Hell', and in which by lantern light their reflections had been mirrored.

  Each, while able to see the disarray and utter dismantling of the physical shell of the others, up to then had not thought of this as applied to himself or herself.

  They had been reduced to the primitive state of near naked savages, debased to breech clout and filth, yet individually they had somehow managed to retain an image of themselves as they had been. On the way, as necessity had demanded, they had been compelled to shed the garments which differentiated them from one another and from primitives. But they had not divested themselves of the memory of these articles: trousers, jackets, frocks, slips.

  As by lantern light they caught glimpses of one another, they found themselves aware of the absurdity of Rosen's pot belly emerging from the waistband of his shorts: the Minister turned Tarzan; the thin body of Miss Kinsale protected almost like Lady Godiva by her long hank of hair, or the show-girl's makeshift loin and breast coverings looking like something out of a bad jungle film. But they never thought how they must look to each other.

  In some way this contributed a measure of self-esteem and courage, enabling them to do what was required without thinking too much or at all how they must appear. Much of this was drained away at Hell Lake, whose oily surface when illuminated showed them up for the ridiculous scarecrows, caricatures of human beings they had become.

  Jane Shelby felt shamed by the utter preposterousness of the undergarments that only served to emphasize the parts they were worn to conceal. The reflection of her triangular panties and carefully engineered, cup-shaped breast supporters irritated her to the point where she felt the impulse to tear these last bits of fabric from her body, to feel herself free and mother-naked.

  Of the men, only Scott in briefs amounting to track shorts, appeared to feel comfortable and unconcerned. The others
had suddenly become aware of the all too flimsy protection to their genitalia afforded by their underpants. They were not only embarrassed, but hated the idea of injury or sudden extinction finding them so vulnerable.

  Further to Muller, the comfort-loving Muller, who more than any of them was aware of the variety and complexity of the globe, over whose surface he wandered so restlessly, it was astonishing how his world had diminished and almost vanished front his memory. He could think of places and people and bring up images in his mind, but they no longer seemed to have any connection with reality. There was only the here; this dark, fetid, gruesome cavern. They were marooned upon a lifeless planet, bumbling about like insects on a Lunar landscape, as cut off from everything familiar as though indeed they had been projected through space.

  He supposed it was perhaps their constant proximity to death, their closeness to becoming one with nothingness that made the earth, and life as they had known it, seem so many aeons away. It surprised him how wholly not only his body but his mind could become confined to this narrow space, the gloom, the echoes, the cruelty and the limitations.