Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [117]
“Young man,” Thomas Karvel began, and his voice alone was enough to quiet his biggest fan. The painter was still hoarse since rising back to consciousness, and he held the site of the painful blow on his head as if he was keeping his brain from falling out of a hole there. “Young man,” he repeated, emphasizing the words in such a way that through his southern accent “man” sounded belittling. “This isn’t some uniformed army, this is something totally different. There are no rules here.”
“But sir, it doesn’t have to be this way,” Garth asserted, jutting his gut forward in the center of the assembly, as if to use his girth to stop the momentum of the room. “Why not—I don’t know—just listen to what the snow monkeys are saying. I mean, they have actual demands here, right? I’m saying, can’t we just turn down the heat? That’s what they’re asking, right? We can just turn down the heat and figure out some other way to keep warm. We could save energy, you know? I bet if you turned off that waterfall for one, that alone would make the boiler chill a little. Dim the lights. I don’t know. And then we could just turn the heat down to fifty degrees or something—”
“Fifty degrees! You’re talking to me about fifty degrees? You lost your mind? If I wasn’t worried the boiler wouldn’t blow to high hell, I’d have it running at eighty. Fifty?! Forget fifty, why not thirty-two degrees? You drop it to fifty, then they’re going to want it below that. You show them weakness now, and where does it stop? Where?” Karvel’s face was flushed with indignation. Motioning with his arms to provide an invisible canvas, Karvel painted this horrific vision for the room. “Hell, we could even have snow in here.” He spun around on his heels after that declaration, joining his wife in her culinary preparations.
“Well, all right then. That sounds settled to me.” Angela was the first to break the silence. It was no small thing that her legal husband was out there, serving the savages of the cold as we spoke. If she could move forward, if she could move on, what could the rest of us say?
Although Garth’s complaints were ignored almost as quickly as they were registered, it should be said that the final decision to poison the Tekelian Army wasn’t made quickly. There were logistics to consider. For one, we had no real knowledge of their physiognomy: would this even work? What if it offered the beasts no more than a case of heartburn or just left them groggy?
“We’ll feed them up on the roof. We got some foldout chairs, some pullout tables. It’s too hot in here anyway. And if they get a little drunk, hopefully it will be enough to just push them off the side.”
“ ‘The side’?” Angela asked, confused.
“Yeah. The side of the roof. That ought to take care of them.” Mr. Karvel took up the direction. “Sure thing it’ll work. When times get tough, you got to go back to the simple things to get them done. You do what you have to. And we have to survive. Even if we lose the dome, we have to survive.”
It was simplistic and brute, and nobody argued with it because nobody had a better idea. Each of us on our own mumbled about the improbability of it all, but the simple fact was that there were no other legitimate options. Even my Plan B of getting that little boat and sailing to the Tsalalian refuge of blackness depended on us getting out of this dome alive, and that seemed impossible now. The Tekelians knew of the exhaust tunnel, and they had seen Jeffree here as well, so it was safe to assume that that exit would soon be obstructed.
In our absence, Augustus managed fairly well in the freezer. I went to visit him as Carlton Damon Carter and Angela helped Mrs. Karvel prepare her feast, to at least alert him of the invasion and take some of the prepoisoned Betty Crocker golden food cake out to where the creature lay in his robe on a sack of frozen burritos as if it was furniture. There was a moment there as I watched him that I empathized not only with this individual, who had been so kind to me, but with the race that he was