by Paul Gallico
Then why did hope persist? Why this upward striving, this eternal climbing by himself and these ill-assorted people, castaways in a floating tomb, the odds on whose chances for rescue were astronomical?
Suddenly death was imminent. The ship's buoyancy must fail. But evidence of this that had already come to others was also all about them. This blind crawl was ridiculous; it was stupid; it was ant-like. Yet indomitably they persisted. For a moment Muller entertained what amounted to almost a flash of pride and joy in himself and his companions, before he again succumbed to what must be the utter futility of their position and surrendered to the encompassment of this prison. Nonnie was all that was left. Beyond was too far away to be any longer grasped by the mind.
He and Nonnie lay apart from the rest, nearest the spot from which they had emerged. He had taken her now as he had wanted to do, holding her -- he thought of it as an enfolding -- and she had crept as close to him as she could. She said, 'Squeeze me tight.'
Even as he did so he was aware of the vulgarity of the expression but was unable to react to it. She whispered, 'I love you. Do you love me a little?'
'Yes.'
'I never felt like this about anyone before. It's different. I love you terrible.'
The strange emotion that Muller felt could not bear to be translated into banalities. He did not want to hear her speak of it, or say those commonplace things to her that he had so often parroted, the senseless, meaningless phrases tumbling from his lips like formulae from a computer at a given signal.
He felt her shiver again in spite of the increasing heat. He said, 'Hush. Lie still. I'll warm you.'
Ice-cold lips once again searched for his, found them and clung. In their touch was all her childishness, her fears and her dependency; an abused little animal creeping to shelter. In the dark, her sharpness and overlay of suspicion, her self-reliant gamin person vanished.
She whispered, 'Can we do it again?'
For an instant the old Muller who never made love until he had cleared the coast, arranged the conditions and made sure the doors were locked, was scandalized. 'Here? With everybody about?'
'They wouldn't know. I'll keep very quiet. I promise. I want you.'
'Supposing someone turns on a flashlight.'
'Then they'll see me in your arms. Maybe that's what some of the others will be doing too. Hubie please . . .'
When her begging mouth touched his again, he forgot everything but her and the surge through him of something he could not identify; hunger for this one person and the exquisite joy in union with her.
At the climax of the all engulfing sweetness he prayed that they would never awaken, that the stricken ship would show mercy and gather them now together into oblivion.
Her whisper, her breath so close to his ear brought him back. 'I was a good girlie, wasn't I?'
'Yes you were.'
'I didn't wriggle or make a sound, did I?'
'No, you didn't.'
'I wanted to. You do something to me. I never loved anyone like this before. I don't know what's come over me.'
She fell silent and he knew that she was waiting for him to tell her that he loved her too, to join her in those meaningless post-coitus murmurings which to her, for whatever reason, guilt, practice, or limit of emotional depth, were a necessity and perhaps even a habit. Would he ever be able to explain to her, or make her understand how greatly he was lost in her, that again when he had been joined to her, something further had happened to him that he did not understand. It was like the turning of a page or the opening of a door; even a reversal within him of all he had ever known or thought before. Down was up and up was down and where was Hubie Muller to whom this girl had become as necessary to him as breathing.
And she was such a common little thing.
Again she whispered 'I'm crazy over you, Hubie. It's something different, really. We hardly even met. Do you love me?'
He whispered his reply almost fiercely, 'Couldn't you feel?'
'Oh that,' she replied, almost in disappointment as having too much everyday normality connected with it. And he knew that she wanted, must have . . . words.
'Yes, I love you.'
'A lot? More than anyone else.'
'Yes. Much more.'
' Is there any one else?'
'No.'
'Are you married?'
'No.'
'Gee!'
And in the breathlessness of that expression and the wonder, Hubie thought that Nonnie had told him all of her story there was to tell. But he knew that she was craving to be interrogated, that she had her confession to make and that if he truly loved her he must abide by the rules.
'And you? Have you a . . .' He was certain she was unaware of his split-second pause while he abolished the word 'lover' and quickly substituted 'boy friend?'
But she did hesitate and perhaps wished him to note it as she replied, 'No-no. Not now.'
'But you've had them.'
She put her lip closer to his ear and he could barely hear the confidence. 'Only two.'
He knew it to be a lie and loved her the more for the perverse and infantile stupidity of it. Her instincts were those of self-preservation. Everything she did that was wrong and against his upbringing and nature charmed him. He knew all about the professed chaperonage of the Gresham Girls, but there probably had been a succession of married men.
She was satisfied now and her mind shifted yet in a manner that was so pathetically simple to follow. She said, 'Poor Moira. She won't have to worry any more. She got herself pregnant in Rio.'
'Do the girls often get pregnant?'
'We're not supposed to. They're awful strict with us.'
Hubie asked, 'Were you ever pregnant?' and then was sorry that he had. He didn't really want to know.
There was a longer hesitation while she determined whether or not to lie again. She decided against it. Gents like Muller had a way of finding things out. Her whisper dropped into an even lower key. 'Yes. Does it matter?'
Hubie was involved now. In platitudes lay safety from the emotion she roused in him. 'Does anything matter now? Or did it ever? What did you do?' He wondered if there was a child left behind with grandparents or relatives somewhere in Bristol.
'I went to a doctor. You know, one of those who helps you. It happened in Rome. Those Eyties can soft-talk you into anything.'
'Have I soft-talked you into something?'
'No. This is different. You put your arms about me when I was scared, and it done something to me. I didn't love him. I love you.' But her mind would no longer stay on the subject. She asked, 'What's become of the others? Are they all floating around in their cabins like dead goldfish in a bowl?'
'Don't say that, Nonnie. Don't think of them.'
'I can't help it. We been together so long. Three years now. It seems like just a minute ago I was asking Sybil whether she was coming to dinner and she said, "Go away, you pig! I just want to die." See, she was still sick. So she died. And I suppose the jailer did too and all the rest who stayed in their cabins.'
'Who was the jailer?'
'Mrs Timker. She was in charge of our group, kept us up to scratch; practice; clean costumes; and snooped what time we came in. But Timmy was a good sort. She'd close an eye. She was one of us until she married Bert Timker, the Assistant Manager. Only thing she used to say was, "Have your fun, but put a bun in the oven, and out you go."'
'A bun in the . . .'
Nonnie gave a tiny tinkling laugh still close to his ear and whispered, 'Oh well, you know . . . What we was talking about before.'
Muller laughed too and pressed her nearer to his heart.
'Why are you squeezing me so?' she said.
He replied, 'Don't even ask.'
Out of tho stilly darkness and its silences, broken only by whisperings and an occasional snore, came a hard, cool impersonal voice and what it said was so astounding that none of them at first even identified it as coming from Scott.
'Take your hand awa
y from there, or I'll break your arm.'
It was followed by a movement and a gasp from a woman. James Martin heard it with a shudder and thought to himself, Holy Mackerel! Who's having a go at whom? And then he thought of the soft, plump hand of Mrs Lewis.
To Susan Shelby came an instant vivid recollection. On the swing couch in the garden, behind the house back home and her saying sharply, 'Toby, take your hand away. That's enough!' But oddly her mind never turned to Herbert or what had happened to her.
Manny Rosen woke up and said, 'Somebody's broken an arm?'
It was Mike Rogo who turned on his torch and said, 'What the hell's goin' on here?'
Scott was lying down on his side, resting on an elbow, Linda Rogo was sitting up near by, her face flushed with fury. She pointed to Scott and said, 'That bastard was trying to give me a feel.'
Rogo said, 'What? Who was? Him?'
Scott interrupted him coolly, 'Work out the sequence for yourself, Rogo.'
What Rogo really hated Scott for at that moment was setting the minds of the others on to the same track. If it were true that the Minister had been trying to take liberties with his wife, why should he call attention to himself in that manner? Rogo knew all there was to know about guys and broads and the way they behaved and had been suspecting for some time that Linda had a yen for the preacher. Obviously in the dark she had been trying to have a go at him. And just as obviously it must be covered up.
He said in his loud copper's voice, 'Don't nobody try any funny business around here. Anybody tries to get fresh can collect a busted jaw. What are we gonna do, stick around here all night? I thought the idea was to get up to the top somewhere so they can hear us.'
Scott rose to his feet. 'Yes,' he said, 'you're right. It's time we were moving on. If three of you will throw your lights up along this side, I think I can show you the way we have to go.'
CHAPTER XVII
Mount Poseidon
The engine room of a great quadruple-screw ocean liner consists of a series of platforms, some five decks high, connected by ladder-type stairs leading to open-work steel flooring or catwalks. These platforms are built around the huge central steam turbines and reduction gear housings. The auxiliary machinery, such as turbo generators, condensers, compressors, emergency compressors and a whole battery of pumps are ranged around the four sides, joined by what seems to be completely helter-skelter coils of pipes and wiring to feed steam under various degrees of pressure, oil, lubricating materials and electrical power.
All this is attached to the double-bottomed fuel and ballast tanks which constitute the floor of the vessel, planned for maximum stresses of a 45° roll. Cross beams of heavy girders support the platforms, catwalks and conduits.
When the Poseidon turned over, almost everything but the main propeller shafts was twisted, shaken or torn away, either plummeting directly into the sea through the open well of the engine-room shaft, or tumbling down the sides in a cascade of tangled metal. Dynamos had plunged through their housings, shearing the steel as though it had been paper, leaving wedge or spear-shaped pieces razor sharp, thrust upward in menacing pinnacles like miniature Dolomites.
Mingled with these were curling sections of the platforms, reversed ladders with a half-dozen steps smashed out of their centres, and the curved surfaces of the larger pipes, some of them crumpled, others cut open lengthwise, the way one slits a sausage skin. Everything was covered with a film of oil released from the bottom tanks when the heavy turbines had ripped loose from the floor plating.
At one point a giant reduction gear and its housing had broken completely away from its turbine unit, but instead of falling through to the sea, had been slammed against the sides of the engine room by the centrifugal force of the capsizing and locked there, with the gear wheel jammed at an angle and held aloft by the crumpled housing. Scott's probing lantern showed up the square edges of the finely milled teeth curving outwards for several yards in an overhang, before receding into the general tangle of battered steel.
Fragments of this jumbled mountain reached to within a foot of the platform on which they had been resting. Their lights showed up a similar range across the stygian lake.
Scott studied the outcroppings on the far side. Had he judged it an easier climb, he would have been prepared to have got himself and his party across the water. But it was, if anything, more formidable-looking and there was an overhang of metal pushed out at a thirty-degree angle, some eight feet from the edge which made it an impossible task.
Muller asked, 'What are you looking for?'
Scott replied, 'Path!' and then removing the light beam from across the lake, added, 'Well, that leaves us no choice.' He studied the precipice of metal on their own side.
Rogo said, 'Where do you think you're going now?'
Scott replied simply, 'Up there.'
Shelby was horrified and cried, 'Frank, you must be out of your mind! It's impossible. My family could never . . .'
The fanatic look was back in the Minister's eyes and his voice suddenly filled the vast cavern, 'We're being tested. You believe in God; worship him by being worthy!'
The echo repeated, 'Worthy' and died away. In a quite normal tone he said, 'Don't think of it as you're seeing it, but simply as a mountain to be climbed. It's everything you find on a mountainside: crevices, projections, buttresses, pinnacles, clefts, foot and handholds. There's hardly a single peak left in the world that someone hasn't managed to climb.'
Martin muttered under his breath, 'Someone!' and Muller said, 'The Mount Poseidon Expedition.'
'Exactly,' Scott continued. 'You've all seen photographs of mountain climbers roped together. The line is so arranged that the entire weight never falls upon one person, but is distributed. Is that clear? It's actually much simpler for us. We've only an ascent of fifty feet to make. There are . . .' he made a quick count as though he had forgotten -- 'thirteen of us. We'll be double roped at say a distance of three or four feet apart.'
'My God,' Hubie Muller muttered, 'you'd think he was preparing to take an alpine tourist party up the Jungfrau for an outing.'
Scott looked the group over. 'I'll lead, followed by Miss Kinsale. Nothing seems to worry her. Then I think Martin, Susan and you, Dick, followed by Jane and Kemal. Then Mrs Rosen, Manny, Nonnie and Hubie; Mrs Rogo and her husband. Rogo, I'm afraid I'm putting you last as usual because you're not likely to lose your head if something goes wrong.'
Rogo said, 'Thanks!'
'The success or failure of any climb depends upon two things; the leader and the manner in which he is followed,' Scott explained. 'The leader maps out the route; the others follow in his footsteps. In fact it goes right back to that childhood game you've all played, "Follow My Leader," in which you must do everything exactly as he does, or you're "Out." Remember, if he wiggled his fingers to his ears or something else crazy, you had to do the same thing.'
'Manny, do you understand any of this talk?' Belle Rosen asked. 'All I heard is we was thirteen and thirteen I don't like. I always said we were thirteen.'
'He's telling us how we got to going next,' Manny said.
'How, I'm not interested in, but where.' She was still lying down. Her triumphant underwater swim ought to have elated and stimulated her. On the contrary, oddly, it seemed to have taken everything out of her that she had left. Perhaps as much as fatigue to an unaccustomed heart and set of muscles, it was the transition mentally she had made backwards and forwards over a span of forty years.
'Each step, I take, each place I put my hand or foot, each thing I do, one at a time will be observed by the climber behind me,' Scott went on, 'and copied exactly. That will be you, Miss Kinsale. In turn, Martin will copy you, then Susan and so on. Get it, everybody?'
Martin asked, 'You really mean you think we can make it?'
Scott replied, 'Yes, or at any rate that we must try. It's simply a matter of imitating the one ahead of you. If you'll stick to that we'll reach the top safely.'
'Reach where?' asked Bel
le Rosen.
Manny replied, 'Look! Up there!'
Belle Rosen dragged herself to her knees and for the first time looked to where the beams of light were fingering the greasy surface of the distant propellor shaft. 'I couldn't do it,' she declared. 'Not in a thousand million years for a thousand million dollars.'
'Belle, look. Like Frank says, we'll all be tied together so . . .'
'So one falls, all fall. That ain't for me.'