by Don Wilcox
The central shaft did not extend all the way to the ground like the center pole of a tent, but hung, chandelier-like, with the observation balcony attached to the lower end. Eight hundred feet of space separated Stupe’s lofty perch from the city proper.
“Are you and your horse ever tempted to try a high dive from here?” he asked facetiously. “Or is that fish pond deep enough to catch you?”
“That is a dive for wingmen, but not for Marble Boy,” she laughed. “He is good for water, but not for air.”
A vague suspicion had been tantalizing him ever since their descent into the sea, and now it became sharp curiosity. Could this girl and her horse actually travel under the sea—or was it an illusion? After all, he himself had held his breath long enough to stay with them down through the waves until they reached the comparative safety of the tunnel.
He was upon the point of asking; but just then the old man coughed and snorted and waggled his head, so that Stupe guessed he was relaying a warning to the girl.
“Let us go around to the other side,” she said. “Some of the guards from overhead may be returning.”
His question was left unanswered for the present. But before the day was over his curiosity was destined to be satisfied.
“What does a stranger have to do to feel safe around here?” Stupe asked. “If these guards from overhead are scouting for a prisoner, their faces are gonna brighten when they see me.”
He glanced back at the shaft. From the observation balcony, a web of foot bridges led off horizontally to make contact with each of the six Eiffel towers. Elevator cars could be seen within the towers, rising or lowering slowly.
There was little indication of speed or hurry in this undersea world. The little wheeled conveyors down on the surface moved almost silently. The slightest echoes of people’s voices carried up to this elevation, but they were not the voices of agitated or worried people. Stupe caught the impression of a placid and orderly existence, in spite of the unaccountable setting.
“Everybody’s relaxed except the guards and the old man,” he observed. “And me. I keep feeling as if I’m about to be pounced upon. Are you sure—”
He broke off, unwilling to believe that he should hold any distrust toward her.
Her response was reassuring. “I shall see that you are dressed as one of my personal guests so that you will not be disturbed.”
“Lady, you must have a lot of influence around here. What are you, the empress or queen or something?”
The girl laughed. “About that I shall tell you more later.”
“You haven’t even told me your name.”
She had led the way back to her own private palace. As he now realized, it was a special structure, built onto the outside of the huge undersea bowl. It must have been constructed especially for her needs, for there was, in addition to her own comfortable quarters, a stable for Marble Boy.
“Your name?” he repeated.
“My name is Zaleese-Ocella-dudu-Valletha-Kolello-Enyuperra-dudu-Ferroteela-Conzanzi-Methopop Ling—”
“Wait a minute!”
“-Vondokeel-dudu-Waparra-Opinokattra-dudu—”
“Stop it!” Stupe cried. “I lost out after the second dudu.”
“But I did not finish. Come here. Let me show you.”
“How did it start? Zaleena-Zaleese-?”
“You would not want to call me Zaleena-Zaleese. No, not you.”
“Why not?”
“Because that is the name my people use for me when they worship me. You do not worship me.”
“Are you sure about that?” Stupe said it under his breath. He was not sure why he said it. He only knew that this strange world was rapidly taking on new and different meanings for him. He had not had time to explain to himself just why he had come down here in the first place. Not that he had entirely forgotten his original mission. But gradually it had slipped in importance, compared to his personal interest in the most charming and mysterious person he had ever met.
Neither was he certain, by this time, that the ability of Zaleena-Zaleese-Ocella-dudu to ride through the waves on a white horse was the miraculous thing he had once thought it to be. But he was ready to concede that she did have some miraculous power, otherwise why had he such an interest in tagging her around like a little pet dog, down through tunnels, over bridges, over the city, and now back to her private palace?
She was unrolling a white ribbon that crackled like parchment. The characters scrawled on it in bright green paint were strange to him.
“There you have it,” she was saying. “Zaleena-Zaleese-Ocella-dudu—”
She unrolled the entire ribbon. He had asked her name and she meant to answer him in full. It was plain that every separate name had a meaning for her. Stupe was growing dizzy. He thought it would be enough if he could remember Zaleena-Zaleese. Yet that seemed to mean something sacred which he was not supposed to understand.
“I’ll just call you Dudu,” he said in exasperation.
Her fingers let the ribbon slip to the floor. She looked at him with such wide eyes that it frightened him. Had he said the wrong thing?
“You will call me Dudu?” Her voice was suddenly gone. Her whisper was so tense that Stupe was alarmed. He had quick visions of being executed for blasphemy. She was accustomed to being worshipped, she had said. Did this mean that she was a deity? What had he done? She repeated, breathlessly, raising her hands toward him, “You will call me Dudu?”
He barely nodded, gulping.
Then she literally sprang at him, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the mouth—not once but six times.
“Dudu!” she repeated, and began all over again, kissing him and laughing, flooded with some strange joy, and kissing him again until she was out of breath.
He backed away, slightly dumbfounded over the magic of words. Unintentionally he murmured the word that was echoing in his ears. “Dudu.”
It was a mistake. Again he was being smothered with kisses.
CHAPTER XXX
Before Stupe had visited the city below him, he had an opportunity to write a brief letter to Hefty. Perhaps it was foolish. There would be no mail service, no carrier pigeons, not even an accommodating messenger fish. However, Stupe, in the presence of all this wonder world, felt compelled to express his thoughts to someone.
“If I can chuck this message in a bottle—” In all the stories he had read, a message in a bottle always found its way to someone.
“Dear Hefty: You should be here. You’d never believe it. It takes your breath away. It’s the most amazing, stupendous, colossal—”
At once Stupe was writing furiously. He felt that the pressure of time was upon him. He was not sure why. As be puzzled over his feelings he realized that this undersea world carried with it an air of impending doom. The very fact that he was enclosed within this 800-foot structure of “stone-glass” with the ocean above him was enough to weigh him down with an undefined fear.
“Wish you were here, Hefty, I need your moral support. Within the next hour or two I may visit the city below me. About ten thousand people live here. I have looked down on their homes—little stone mounds like Eskimo Igloos. They have a tower that runs up through the surface of the water. And who do you think keeps guard here at the top of their world? A white-bearded old fellow they call the Old Man.
“He’s from the earth, Hefty. His grandfather is an engineer who constructed this gigantic solid bowl. It happened many years ago when the water was rising. This city would have been submerged. But they began building walls, higher and higher—”
Stupe used his most impressive rhetoric as he described the immensity of the engineering feat. And yet as he described the strength of this undersea structure, he was nevertheless thinking of his peril.
Later after he had packed the letter away for safekeeping, he strolled to the balcony to view more critically the vast spaces around him. He wanted to write more. He wanted to write of Zaleena-Zaleese. But what shou
ld he say of her? What position did she occupy in relation to the other natives?
“Maybe the Old Man will give me the lowdown,” he said to himself as he approached the central platform.
The Old Man was walking around aimlessly tapping his gray forehead. He would sweep the white locks over the back of his head with his thin fingers, muttering to himself. His hands gave an involuntary jerk as he saw Stupe beckon to him. Always on his guard, Stupe thought.
“Nice weather you have down here, sir,” Stupe began casually.
“Weather?” The Old Man replied slowly. “Oh, yes, weather. All weather is the same down here. Nobody ever talks about it.”
Stupe saw that the topic stirred long forgotten memories in the Old Man’s dusty brain.
“If you talk about weather, you give yourself away. It proves you come from the outside. You’d better be careful.”
That was a sharp warning. Perhaps the old fellow’s brain wasn’t so dusty after all.
“Thank you,” Stupe said. He felt strangely humble in the Old Man’s presence. Much as he wished to ask questions, he bided his time.
“You are young and strong,” the Old Man said, studying him from head to foot. “The goddess has favored you by bringing you here. Will you stay here long?”
Stupe didn’t know how to answer this. His real mission had to be crowded back into the hidden recesses of his thoughts. How could he justify his presence?
“Do you think she will let me stay?”
“You are a foreigner,” the Old Man said, shaking his head slowly. “Foreigners get into trouble here.”
“But you are a foreigner, the same as I—”
“They honor me,” the Old Man said, and his old eyes twinkled with pride. “I have been here many years—almost all my life.”
Then to Stupe’s delight the venerable man began to tell his story. They walked slowly around the platform, looking down on the city as Stupe listened to the recital of its strange history.
“The land was sinking,” the Old Man said. “My grandfather knew what to do.”
Stupe thought of the Thirteen Fingers. That sort of geological formation, he knew, was an indication of a sinking coastline. While the irregular coastlines of the earth were generally the result of very slowly sinking land, it was possible that on Venus the process might take place much more rapidly.
“My grandfather and I came to help them,” said the Old Man. “At that, time this city was almost as large as it is now. It had been built many centuries before.”
“Under the sea?” Stupe asked.
“On the shore. On the level dry rock a mile above the water’s edge. The houses were not built as mounds first. But as the ocean rose, season after season, the houses were in danger of flooding waves.”
“Why didn’t they move the city back?”
“I am told that they believed their ground was sacred. Their gods had chosen this spot. It would be a sacrilege to move.”
“M-m-m,” Stupe groaned. “I’ll bet somebody got wet.”
“In time it was necessary to build waterproof houses that would resist the waves,” the Old Man passed wisps of his white beard through his fingers as if counting off the years. “Later they built a circular wall around the city. In time the wall had to be built higher. Eventually—”
“I understand,” said Stupe. “At what point did you and your grandfather enter the picture?”
“We were brought here when the wall was about one hundred feet high.” The Old Man pointed past the balcony railing toward the base of the wall that curved around the outside edges of the town. “See the different shades of material? We had to thicken the vertical wall to build on it. We added those buttresses. Then we built on up and curved the wall toward the six towers.”
“Strange,” Stupe mused. “The people have deliberately trapped themselves.”
“They reasoned right,” the Old Man declared stubbornly. “If the land kept sinking, they couldn’t go on raising the wall forever. My grandfather tested the stone glass. Wonderful material, son. Wonderful. He found it could be melted and shaped and cooled and made to stand stronger than the best steel.”
The Old Man drew a proud breath as if he himself had performed the engineering feat. Stupe wondered if he too knew all of these wonderful tricks of architecture. Apparently the natives had honored him by giving him a place at the zenith of their world.
The Old Man might have talked more, but Stupe was called back to the palace of Zaleena-Zaleese-Ocella-Dudu. She had instructed her servants to provide a room for him. He must eat and rest. The “goddess” had not forgotten his strenuous swim of that morning. Now it was nearly night, he was told.
As for the “goddess”—as the Old Man had called her—she and her white horse were off again, galloping up through the dimly lighted blue tunnel on unknown errands.
Stupe waved as they disappeared.
A few moments later, as he was glancing toward the sleepy little city beneath, one of his earlier questions was answered. Could the girl ride through the sea for more than a few minutes at a time? Longer than she could hold her breath? Could she breathe under water?
“There she goes, friend,” said the Old Man casually.
Through the thick glass-like walls Stupe could see the streak of whiteness as it pranced downward, outside the enclosure, toward the bottom of the sea. So swift was the progress that he might have guessed it to be a white shark plunging through the deep. Every stroke of the stallion’s hoof counted for twenty-five or thirty feet, so rapid was the descent.
Stupe watched until the bleary figures disappeared. Then he knew. The girl’s conquest of the sea was no fanciful rumor. She was somehow acclimated to the ocean depths—she and her mount. No wonder that the natives considered her some sort of deity.
“Wellington would like that,” Stupe said, not meaning to speak aloud. “But I’ll never—”
“What’s that, young man?” The Old Man was on the alert.
Stupe walked over to him. Something deep and strong was welling up out of his conscience. He rather liked the idea of having a witness.
“I hereby pledge, sir,” he said to the Old Man, “in strictest confidence, you understand—”
“I can keep a secret. I’m full of them.”
“I hereby pledge that I will never force that girl to go back to the earth with me.”
The Old Man turned his back and Stupe thought he gave a funny little laugh.
“What did you say?” Stupe asked.
“Not a thing,” said the Old Man. He climbed the spiral stairs to his throne chuckling and muttering lightheartedly to himself.
CHAPTER XXXI
When Stupe awoke, several hours later, his first thoughts were of Hefty. A day and night had passed, he guessed, since the plane had sailed over him in the morning fog. Somewhere on the shore beyond the Thirteenth Finger his party would be looking for him in vain.
It never occurred to him, however, that one member of that party might, by a strange trick of fate, be moving toward him on the waves, on the back of a snail.
His second thought was of Zaleena-Zaleese-Ocella-Dudu. Had she returned?
“You have called me Dudu! Your words are so wonderful. You have called me . . .”
Were these echoes of a dream? No, she had talked with him for a few minutes in the night. She had bent over his bed and whispered strange mysteries to his sleeping ears.
“The Old Man has been waiting for years. He expects to marry me. But you have come. You have called me Dudu. That means-”
Stupe was wide awake now. The thoughts came flooding back. From his first encounter with this world he had known that a celebration was about to occur. In honor of whom?
“It is the anniversary of our building,” the girl had whispered. “It is the Old Man’s triumph. All of the people will march in his honor. But it will not be a marriage, as he expects because you have called me Dudu.”
Stupe roused out of bed, a bed of wing-feather comforters. His
heart was pounding. All at once he realized that he had fallen into a very complicated situation. He had better find Dudu and let her know the original purpose of his coming.
“No, that won’t do,” he said aloud. “I’d be sacrificed sure.”
For now it came to him. She had explained that a sacrifice was supposed to be a part of the ceremony. They had waited for a foreigner to come. The Old Man must have known. Was that the reason he had smiled when Stupe spoke of his own pledge—his pledge never to take the goddess back to the earth with him?
A servant’s costume was waiting for him and he dressed hurriedly. She had spoken of his disguising himself so he could visit the city. It would be safer not to dress in his own clothing. The costume consisted of tan slacks, a yellow shirt of sport design, and a yellow and white sash. His sandals swished along the floor as he hurried through the private palace to the observation balcony.
The Old Man was still sleeping. Good.
This was his chance to ascend to the surface. He crept cautiously up the spiral stairs. To think clearly he must draw a free breath and see the open skies. These hours of being enclosed had weighed upon him.
He glanced back, wondering whether any guards might have seen him. He wouldn’t want Zaleena to think that he was running away. He wasn’t. It was only that he must catch a free breath—
Ah! Morning sunlight. The fresh, cool air of the sea.
Now he discovered that his raft was still here, tied to the edge of the platform. This was his chance to recover his goods. For a moment he hesitated. The time for decision was at hand. The open sea was before him, the world of mystery was beneath him.
Perhaps it was the image of the beautiful girl that dominated him in that moment. He gathered the goods from the raft and carried them down to his room. Then he returned, wondering whether he might hide the little raft so that it would be in readiness for an emergency.