Fire in the Abyss

by Stuart Gordon

  With mounting horror I read Hayes’ account of my Newfoundland expedition. I read his account of my death.

  I think I was delirious for a long time. Later they said I’d had a “relapse.” They said they’d miscalculated the speed of my “emotional reorientation.” They apologised, and then enraged me back to life, to the present, by sending Frank Lubick to torment me.

  Yes. He too is clear enough in my memory. One morning, without introduction or by-your-leave, this gawky young white-suit came in and sat down and started prattling at me. His speech was almost incomprehensible. He said he was a “psychohistorian.” He said it was “truly incredible,” “amazing,” and “a great honour” to meet me. He would not let me speak, but went on and on and on, even when I sat up and glared at him. He seemed too much a puppy to be a demon. At length he began asking me stupid questions that I would not answer. Where did my wife’s father die? Had I felt DRIVEN by DESTINY? Had I ever felt that colonialism might be unjustified? Finally I could take no more. “Your gabble’s a disguise just like your white-suit!” I shouted at him. “You are ignorant and have no respect, you fool!”

  That was when I heard the muffled laugh.

  At first I thought it was the cunning man. I was still very confused. Then I realised it came from a watcher behind the dark glass-covered hatch which was set high up in one wall. I’d looked at the hatch before, and had sensed the watchers, but until this moment they’d meant nothing to me, for I’d been too much bound into the aches and pains of my mind, body, and numb confusion. Now for the first time, hearing that laugh, I paid attention. I glared up at the hatch through which they watched and videotaped me, and with my mind realised what my nerves knew already: that I was completely helpless and lost. I groaned, and slumped back, wanting to weep, to scream, to die inside. And I saw all this later, at the “Debriefing.” The Lubick had flinched at my outburst.

  Now he said, with better respect and clarity:

  “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. It was a terrible accident. But here you are… and you scare me, I guess, because I can’t accept what you are any more than you can accept us. I’ve been talking nonsense. Please… let’s start again. I’ll answer your questions.”

  Thus began my modern education. I humoured him and occupied myself by asking questions. He came every day. Reluctantly, as detail built on detail, I began to accept my fatal transition. But one day I spoke of Devon, and wept bitterly, then grew furious at myself for such display of weakness. Lubick was alarmed. “Oh no, Mr. Gilbert!” he said quickly. “Don’t be angry at yourself! We all cry sometimes, I do, and you have much more to cry about than most of us, so let it all out, please—you’ll feel better for it!”

  He was a curious young man. I grew quite fond of him. He insisted on calling me “Mr. Gilbert” because, he said, “Sir Humphrey sticks in my craw.” He said, “titles like that are elitist and redundant,” language I could not understand at all. He explained. I was amazed.

  “There is no longer an order of knighthood in England?”

  “Yes. But many people think it should be abolished, along with all the other traditional titles of rank.”

  This was on the second day he came. I felt a terrible fear. “But… there is still a… king… or a queen…”

  “Yes. Queen Elizabeth the Second.”

  “Queen Elizabeth the Second??? Does she… does she… is she in good health? Is she a great monarch? Is England happy under her?”

  “England is not exactly under her, and not exactly happy.”

  I felt I was drowning again. “Tell me the truth, man!”

  He started to explain about democracy. I exploded. “Democracy? But Plato proved that to be a low form of constitution that leads invariably to the worst sort of tyranny. Democracy means chaos, without order, every man fighting every other man!”

  So it started. So it went. With great enthusiasm Lubick tried to bring modern light into my mind. He unleashed so many “facts” on me that if facts were gold I’d have quickly been richer than Midas. And despite myself I was fascinated. He drew charts innumerable to help my comprehension—family trees of revolutions, genealogies of four hundred years of change, and plotted these with steepening graph-curves to show me how much the speed of change, of everything, had increased. Industrial Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Transport Revolution, Communications Revolution! The balance and distribution of modern power! America, Russia, Third World, Middle East, Europe! And all the initials, used by people in a hurry—EEC, UAR, OPEC, UN, USSR, USA, Washington DC, LA, CBS, NASA, NBC, PBS, BBC, KGB, CIA, FBI, SAS, SALT, NATO, PLO, etc., etc., etc. It all sounded most cabalistic to me, a vast and bewildering mystery. I suffered frequent sweats and headaches, and a sense of panic sometimes. Then I think the doctors told Lubick to “cool it.” For some days there were no more facts, graphs, dates. He brought me a book of crossword puzzles so I could “get into the way people think now.” He played chess and chequers with me. Casually he discussed my sense of Order and Hierarchy that I’d brought from my time, and laughed through his suit, and said, “Well, yes, Mr. Gilbert, it’s all hugely changed, but there are still four seasons, the earth still goes round the sun!” So my mind was eased somewhat. I asked for maps, and he brought me the Reader’s Digest World Atlas… and I could hardly believe what I began to understand. The Unknown World, no more? All the wildernesses filled up with people, or known and fenced in such detail? Yet it seemed wonderful, too—the clarity, and scientific exactness now applied to Mercator’s scheme! I pored over these maps for many, many hours, just as once I did with Waldseemüller’s maps when I was a boy.

  I pored over them with greedy fascination, tinged with fear. Maps of hell? Temptations of Satan?

  How could I tell? What could I do but go along with it the best I could, bearing myself as well as I could?

  So from the maps Lubick again tried to construct for me a picture of the world. He discussed the Constitution of the United States with me, and the Declaration of Independence, and told me something of the struggle of the Thirteen States against the English, two hundred years ago—two hundred years after my time. My emotions were mixed indeed, as anyone will understand, to begin to see this consequence of a dream of colonising America which I was the first man in England to try.

  “But… you mean the Crown of England was rejected?”

  “Mr. Gilbert, you were among the first to reject it!”

  “That is not true! I was loyal to… I am loyal to…”

  “Surely you were more loyal to what lay beyond the horizon!”

  He had me there, and when he told me of England’s history, I heard it with a strange mixture of pride, unhappiness, and apathy. He told me that the British Empire had been great, at one time embracing more than quarter of the world’s population, but that now there was no longer an empire, England being drained and collapsed on herself, and the British Isles packed with sixty million people squabbling and enduring their way through a social revolution of a sort which, said Lubick, had been put off “for much too long.” And when I heard this, I could only think of certain prophetic lines in the Ode that Parmenius wrote for my fatal voyage that was his fatal voyage too. Shakily, lost in myself, I murmured the lines in their Latin, and when Lubick asked me what I’d said, for some minutes I was too confused and distressed to answer. Then, in a low troubled voice, I told him my rough translation, and my voice sounded very strange and faraway to me, as faraway as Parmenius himself was now:

  “O! Anglia, happy island,

  famed for the blessings of peace and war,

  the glory of the wide world,

  now rich in resources and thickly peopled, having won renown by thy deeds,

  and reared thy head on high

  throughout the world,

  careful of thy destiny,

  lest some day thy wide spread dominions

  should fall by their own weight…”

  Lubick was not impre
ssed by the sentiment, and said so bluntly, but acknowledged the accurate prophecy. “What goes up must come down,” he said, “but we still speak English here, Mr. Gilbert.”

  “Yes,” I said, and asked him to leave me.

  Another day he told me that Islam was resurgent, that the Papist Church remained united and powerful, but that over the centuries the Reformed Churches had divided so many times that now there were more sects and beliefs than could ever be counted, especially in America. Also he started to tell me about the “Moral Majority,” and the “Electronic Church,” and the “Christian Consensus” here in America—but here I stopped him and said I did not want to know. A peculiar distress overwhelmed me at talk of the Church. It reminded me of the demon Weil. It reminded me that, however things appeared, I was in the grip of “the power not of Christ.” It made me hate myself as a traitor and weakling for talking at all with these white-suited men, or devils, or whatever they were. It brought back all of my lost life too strongly and bitterly, it reminded me that I could not be sure of anything I was told, it put me in knowledge of my desperate loneliness and confusion. No. I did not want to hear of it at all.

  Lubick told me very little about himself. Such as I could see of his face through the glass told me he was fair-complexioned, perhaps blue-eyed, not very old, perhaps twenty five. In fact later he told me he was forty. It took me a long time (once I was given faces to see) to get over my amazement at the youthful, unformed appearance of many American faces, especially those of the men. Lubick said he came from Salt Lake City. Once I tried to flirt with him, jokingly:

  “I like the look of white-suited boys like you!”

  “I’m not a faggot!” he said, stiffening with alarm.

  Thereafter there was an uneasiness in his attitude to me, as if I had threatened him.

  There were many mysteries. It was all a fog, a mystery, with continual insulting reminders of my helplessness.

  One day the doctor with Big Hands said I could go outside and sit in the sunlight for a while—wearing a white-suit.

  I said I would not under any circumstances wear a white-suit.

  He asked me again the next day.

  I said I would not under any circumstances wear a white-suit.

  He asked me again the next day. A sunny day.

  “Why must I wear a suit?”

  “If you breathe our air right now you’ll probably die. That’s why we keep you in this sterile environment.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with your air?”

  “I told you before. About germs and viruses—remember? Your body has no defence against our diseases. They’ve changed since your time. Even the common cold would kill you. We’re trying to build up your defences, but this will take a long time, and perhaps we’ll never succeed completely. You must be patient. Do you want to go outside? In the suit?”

  I shook my head… uncertainly.

  He left the white-suit with me.

  “If you want to go out, get into it, and buzz us.”

  I fought. I gave in. Slowly I got into the suit. It smelled strange. I could not put the helmet on. I pressed the buzzer.

  Big Hands came in with Small Hands. Her hands were efficient and deft; his were more methodical. Their hands showed me how to zip and clip and shut up the suit so that no natural influence could reach in and kill me. With great effort I overcame my panic at being smothered. But the air in the suit felt hard to breathe, and it was difficult to walk, being so cut off.

  They helped me out through the two doors, along a gleaming clean corridor, round a comer, through a door, and… into the sunlight!

  It was terrible.

  I sat on a chair in the suit in the sunlight that I could not feel at all. I sat in the walled courtyard, staring at the walls, and at the peach-blossom I could not smell. Very quickly I felt giddy, trapped, abused. I could not even feel irregularities in the paving-stones beneath my feet! I could not touch the earth! Gardens! Wild gardens, lost gardens, all snatched from me! I stared at the sun through the glass of the suit. Sickness rose in my gorge! I looked away, I saw red, I heard a rumbling in the sky, I saw a shining monstrous metal creature flying through the sky, bellowing! I began to pant with panic and rage To be so cut off! To have life but not have it at all! To He so horribly castrated out of my own age! To be treated like a baby by these hidden people who would not show themselves, if people they were, and to be locked up in this place that had my body humming painfully with noise-waves and other unpleasant influences that surged from every direction—NO!

  I stood. I nearly fell. I shook off the helping hands.

  “What’s the matter?” Hand, hands! “What’s the matter?”

  “I am Sir Humfrey Gylberte!” I panted dizzily. “On my honour I swear I’ll never go out in one of these torture-suits again!”

  Then I turned and walked unsteadily back to my room.

  As it so happened, I did not keep my word. Later at Horsfield I learned to make the best of a bad business.

  It went on for weeks. Still I had no idea I was not the only one, nor knew why the watchers watched me. While asleep I had dreams of being wheeled into a shining white room where the white-suited doctors did strange things to me with machines and instruments.

  I grew stronger.

  From mush I graduated to fruit and vegetables.

  I asked for ale and got coloured bubbling water in a can. I asked for books and Lubick brought me Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, The Grapes of Wrath, and Robinson Crusoe These were clever choices, though he had to explain to me what novels were for, as the nearest I had come to this kind of tale telling was in Mandeville, Malory, and Geoffrey of Monmoutu. Once I had the hang of it I plunged into these romances the mesmerised way of a dreamer who doesn’t want to wake up. In this fashion many days passed: I questioned Lubick on everything I read. Defoe I found resourceful; Swift at first delightful but finally much too true for pleasure; Melville, once I understood him, I found to be a high, high mountain—but it was Steinbeck who fascinated me the most, though the language was hard.

  “But these Okies,” I asked Lubick, “Where did they come from?”

  “Where did you come from?” he responded, grinning.

  After this he brought me newspapers. I met Doonesbury, Dow-Jones, football, the dramatic incantation of headlines—RUSSIANS ACCUSED OF WEATHER WAR—NEW OPEC ULTIMATUM—CREDIT CRUNCH RUINS MILLIONS—USAF IDAHO RADIATION DISASTER SUIT—SUPERBOWL: FORTY-NINERS STRIKE GOLD!

  It was too occult for me. I preferred the maps. When they brought me television I refused it because of the harmful rays. Lubick asked me what I meant. “I’ve already told you about the bad influences in and about this building!” I snapped. “If you are doctors, why do you allow them?”

  He was puzzled. “What influences?” he wanted to know.

  I pointed through the window. “From that direction,” I said, “comes a power that races fiery, quick, and nervous through me. It is worse than the electricity and this television. What is it?”

  “There’s a microwave installation over there,” he said, “but the radiation’s below the harmful level.”

  “Not harmful?” I was amazed. “Can you not feel it in you?”

  “No.” He shook his encased head slowly. “Not a thing. Not consciously. Maybe you pick it up because you’re not used to it, Mr. Gilbert. But… yes… some say microwaves are harmful.”

  Then I burst out in angry laughter.

  “You’re mad!” I shouted. “This is hell!”

  Through his window I could see Lubick was embarrassed.

  “Not altogether,” he said, “but you have a point!”

  Yet they must have thought me ready. One evening Lubick came with Big Hands and Small Hands and they bundled me into a white-suit.

  “You’re going to meet Captain Pointer,” said Lubick. “He runs this joint. He’s got some important things to tell you.”

  They swept me through empty corridors to a carpeted region, to a door I thought was oak unt
il Lubick knocked at it. False wood? Why not? I had begun to feel recalcitrant about hell.

  Into a long low soft-lit room we went. The far end was a sort of study, with desk and machines and world-globe, and bookcases, and charts and diagrams on the wall. But the part we entered was meant for comfort. It was carpeted, furnished, with prints of sailing ships on the wall, with magazines on a table, and there was a sideboard stocked with many bottles. Captain Pointer stood at the sideboard.

  When I saw him I gasped. I was stupefied, for he did not wear a white-suit. His face was uncovered, his body clad in U.S. Navy uniform. He was a tall straight man, his eyebrows bushy, his eyes keen grey, his hair thinning, his nose a great hook, his complexion that of a man who knew both wind and wave. And his gaze was level.

  “Sir Humphrey Gilbert? I’m Captain James Pointer, U.S. Navy.”