Against the Day (23 page)

Two

Iceland Spar

esides keeping a sharp eye out himself from the flying
bridge, Randolph St. Cosmo had also posted lookouts forward and aft with the
most powerful binoculars on the ship. Here, north of the Arctic Circle, the
standing directive to all Chums of Chance vessels was, “Unfamiliar skytraffic
is to be presumed hostile until proven otherwise.” Daily skirmishes were now
being fought, no longer for territory or commodities but for electromagnetic
information, in an international race to measure and map most accurately the
fieldcoefficients at each point of that mysterious mathematical latticework
which was by then known to surround the Earth. As the Era of Sail had depended
upon the mapping of seas and seacoasts of the globe and winds of the windrose,
so upon the measurement of newer variables would depend the history that was to
pass up here, among reefs of magnetic anomaly, channels of least impedance,
storms of rays yet unnamed lashing out of the sun. There was a “Rayrush” in
progress—light and magnetism, as well as all manner of extraHertzian
rays, were there for the taking, and prospectors had come flooding in, many of
them professional claimjumpers aiming to get by on brute force, a very few
genuinely able to dowse for rays of all frequencies, most neither gifted nor
unscrupulous, simply caught up in everybody else’s singleminded flight from
reason, diseased as the gold and silver seekers of earlier days. Here at the
high edge of the atmosphere was the next untamed frontier, pioneers arriving in
airships instead of wagons, setting in motion property disputes destined to
last generations. The Northern Lights which had drawn them from their childhood
beds in lower latitudes on so many deep winter nights, while summoning in their
parents obscure feelings of dread, could now be viewed up here at any time from
within, at altitude, in heavenwide pulses of color, dense

sheets and billows and colonnades of light and current, in
transfiguration unceasing.

In small, remote corners of the
planet nobody was paying much attention to, between factions nobody knew much
about, the undeclared and largely imperceptible war had been under way for
years. All up and down the Northern latitudes, clandestine transmitters had
been deployed amid pinnacles of ice, in abandoned mining works, in the secret
courtyards of ancient IronAge fortresses, manned and unmanned, lonely and
unearthly in the iceblink. On skypiercing crags as likely to be frozen seabird
guano as rock, scouts of Earth’s Field, desperate, insomniac, interrogated
horizons as to any signs of their relief, who were often years late
. . . .
And indeed for some, the Polar
night would last forever—they would pass from the Earth amid unreportable
splendor, the aurora in the sky raging up and down spectra visible and
invisible. Souls bound to the planetary lines of force, swept pole to pole and
through the fabled interior regions as well
.
. . .

Manœuvring in vessels camouflaged in
navalstyle “dazzle painting,” whereby areas of the structure could actually
disappear and reappear in clouds of chromatic twinkling, scientistskyfarers
industriously gathered their data, all of deepest interest to the enterprisers
convened leagues below, at intelligence centers on the surface such as the InterGroup
Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation (I.G.L.O.O.), a radiational
clearinghouse in Northern Alaska, which these days was looking more like some
Lloyd’s of the high spectrum, with everyone waiting anxiously for the next
fateful Lutine announcement.

“Dangerous conditions lately.”

“Hell, some days you’d give the world
for a nice easygoing Indian attack.”

“I tell you it can’t go on like
this.”

A few heads turned, though the
plangent note was long familiar. “Presumptuous whelp, what would you know, you
weren’t even around for the last eclipse.”

It was a dark assemblyroom, its
windows shuttered in iron, illuminated in patches by greenshaded lamps gas and
electric, a gloom relieved only by the brief glittering of watchchains across
dark vests, pennibs, coins, dining utensils, glasses, and bottles. Outside, in
streets of beaten snow, wolves, foraging far from home, howled all but
eloquently.

“Yes—these days in the business
too many people your age altogether. Unreflective steps, harmful consequences,
no attention to history or the sacrifices of those who’ve gone before, so forth
. . . .
”

“Ever thus, oldtimer.”

“
You like to fricasseed a bunch of my
boys the other day. D’ you care to address that?”

“The area was posted. They had ample
warning. You know you don’t send a ship out on testdays.”

“Assbackwards as usual. You don’t
test when there’s ships out, not even if it’s one defenseless little
cutter—”

“Defenseless! She was fully rigged up
as an assault ship, sir.”

“—cruising along innocent as
any pleasure craft, till you assaulted
her
,
with your infernal rays.”

“She made a Furtive Movement. We kept
to procedure.”

“Here—this furtive enough for
you?”

“Boys, boys!”

Such disputes had become so common
that it hardly surprised Randolph now when the gong of the after lookout
telegraph, whose sender was attached to Pugnax’s tail, began to clamor.

“Quickly, the fieldglasses
. . . .
Now, what in blazes have we here?”
The ship in the distance was distinguished by an envelope with the onionlike
shape—and nearly the dimensions, too—of a dome on an Eastern
Orthodox church, against whose brilliant red surface was represented, in black,
the Romanoff crest, and above it, in gold Cyrillic lettering, the legend
bol’shaia igra,
or, “The Great Game.” It
was readily recognized by all as the flagship of Randolph’s mysterious Russian
counterpart—and, far too often, nemesis—Captain Igor Padzhitnoff,
with whom previous “runins” (see particularly
The Chums of Chance and the
Ice Pirates
,
The Chums of
Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin
)
evoked in the boys lively
though anxious memories.

“What’s up with old Padzhy, I
wonder?” murmured Randolph. “They’re sure closing awfully rapidly.”

The parallel organization at St.
Petersburg, known as the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, was notorious for promoting
wherever in the world they chose a program of mischief, much of its motivation
opaque to the boys, Padzhitnoff s own specialty being to arrange for bricks and
masonry, always in the fourblock fragments which had become his “signature,” to
fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors. This lethal debris was
generally harvested from the loadbearing walls of previous targets of
opportunity.

“We certainly have cause to steer
clear of these fellows,” Lindsay nodded, sourly. “They will no doubt imagine us
to be trespassing upon their ‘skyspace’ again. Given the far from trifling
degree of nasal dislocation over that Polish contretemps—though certainly
owing to no fault of our own—nevertheless, upon this occasion we had
better get our story straight
before
they intercept us, which, it
appears, could be at any moment—um, in fact—” Abruptly, a violent
thump shook
Inconvenience
throughout her structure as the Russian craft
came none too politely alongside.

“Oh, gravy,” muttered Randolph.

“Ahoy! Balloon boys!” Captain
Padzhitnoff was flaxenhaired, athletic, and resolutely chirpy—indeed, far
more than ordinary skybusiness usually demanded. “Getting jump on me once
again! What happened? Am I too old for this?” His smile, while perhaps
unremarkable down on Earth’s surface among, say, a gathering of the insane,
here, thousands of feet in the air and far from any outpost of Reason, seemed
even more ominous than the phalanx of rifles, apparently latemodel Turkish
Mausers, as well as weapons less readily identifiable, which his crew were now
pointing at
Inconvenience.

“
Na
sobrat’ya po nebo!
”
Randolph greeted them, as nonchalantly as possible.

“Where are you headed?” boomed the
Russian commander through a gigantic speakingtrumpet of Chinese silver.

“South, as you see.”

“Zone of Emergency has just been
declared by authorities,” Padzhitnoff sweeping his arm to indicate a wide
sector of the frozen terrain below. “You may wish to divert.”

“Authorities?” Lindsay inquired,
keenly, as if he had recognized the name of an intimate acquaintance.

“I.G.L.O.O.,” The Russian commander
shrugged. “We pay no attention to them, but you might.”

“What sort of emergency,” inquired
Randolph, “did they say?”

The Muscovite skyfarers grew
convulsive with sinister merriment. “In part of Russia where I grew up,”
Captain Padzhitnoff was able to say at last, “all animals, no matter how large
or dangerous, had names—bears, wolves, Siberian tigers
. . . .
All except for one. One creature
that other animals, including humans, were afraid of, because if it found them
it would eat them, without necessarily killing them first. It appreciated pain.
Pain was like
. . .
salt. Spices.
That creature, we did not have name for. Ever. Do you understand?”

“Goodness,” whispered Lindsay to his
chief, “all we did was ask.”

“Thank you,” Randolph replied. “We
shall proceed with particular caution. May we help you with any problem of
resupply? anything you may have begun to run short of?”

“Respect for your blind innocence,”
smiled his opposite number—not for the first time, for it had become a
ritual exchange. The
Bol’shaia Igra
began to drift away, its captain and
senior officers remaining at the rail of the bridge and conferring together as
they gazed after
Inconvenience.
When the ships were nearly out of
earshot, Captain Padzhitnoff waved and called, “Bon voyage!” his voice tiny and
plaintive in the immensity of Arctic sky.

“Well, what was all that about? If
they were trying to warn us off . . .”

“No mention of the Vormance party,
you notice.”

“It was something else,” said Miles
Blundell, the only one of the crew who seemed to have taken the warning to
heart, returning, as the other boys resumed their own activities, to his
preparation of the midday meal, and Pugnax reinserted his nose among the pages
of a
romanfeuilleton
by M. Eugène Sue, which he appeared to be reading
in the original French.

So they proceeded into the Zone of
Emergency, keeping an alert ear to the Tesla device and scanning carefully the
colorless wastes below. And for hours, well past suppertime, their enigmatic
rival the
Bol’shaia Igra
hung distant but dogged upon their starboard
quarter, red as a cursed ruby representing a third eye in the brow of some idol
of the incomprehensible.

Having just
missed
intercepting the
Expedition steamer at Isafjörðr the boys turned north again, continuing
their pursuit yet somehow at each step just missing the vessel, now owing to a
contrary wind, now an erroneous report over the wireless or a delay in port
because of the late return of some crew member who proved to be spectral at
best, the “extra man” of Arctic myth. A familiar story up here. But no less
unsettling, for there seemed, now and then, to be an extra member of the
Inconvenience
’s
crew, though this was never
recorded at the morning roll call. At times one of the boys would understand,
too late of course, that the face he thought he was dealing with was not in any
way the true face—or even one he recognized.

One day the
Inconvenience
arrived
over a little settlement whose streets and lanes seemed crowded with wax figures,
so still were they in their attention to the gigantic vehicle creeping above
them.

Randolph St. Cosmo decided to grant
groundleave. “These are a Northern people, remember,” he advised. “They’re not
likely to mistake us for gods or anything, not like those customers back in the
East Indies that time.”