Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [62]
The name Malachi Constant came to him, and he didn’t know what to do with it.
Unk lapsed into a blank reverie, a blank respect for the splendid people and the splendid lives that had produced the majestic buildings that the searchlights swept. Here, surely, faceless families and faceless friends and nameless hopes could flourish like—
An apt image for flourishing eluded Unk.
He imagined a remarkable fountain, a cone described by descending bowls of increasing diameters. It wouldn’t do. The fountain was bone dry, filled with the ruins of birds’ nests. Unk’s fingertips tingled, as though abraded by a climb up the dry bowls.
The image wouldn’t do.
Unk imagined again the three beautiful girls who had beckoned him to come down the oily bore of his Mauser rifle.
"Man!" said Boaz, "everbody asleep—but not for long!" He cooed, and his eyes flashed. "When old Boaz and old Unk hits town," he said, "everybody going to wake up and stay woke up for weeks on end!"
The ship was being controlled skillfully by its pilot-navigator. The equipment was talking nervously to itself—cycling, whirring, clicking, buzzing. It was sensing and avoiding hazards to the sides, seeking an ideal landing place below.
The designers of the pilot-navigator had purposely obsessed the equipment with one idea—and that idea was to seek shelter for the precious troops and matériel it was supposed to be carrying. The pilot-navigator was to set the precious troops and matériel down in the deepest hole it could find. The assumption was that the landing would be in the face of hostile fire.
Twenty Earthling minutes later, the pilot-navigator was still talking to itself—finding as much to talk about as ever.
And the ship was still falling, and falling fast.
The seeming searchlights and skyscrapers outside were no longer to be seen. There was only inky blackness.
Inside the ship, there was silence of a hardly lighter shade. Unk and Boaz sensed what was happening to them—found what was happening unspeakable.
They sensed correctly that they were being buried alive.
The ship lurched suddenly, throwing Boaz and Unk to the floor.
The violence brought violent relief
"Home at last," yelled Boaz. "Welcome home!"
Then the ghastly feeling of the leaf-like fall began again.
Twenty Earthling minutes later, the ship was still falling gently.
Its lurches were more frequent.
To protect themselves against the lurches, Boaz and Unk had gone to bed. They lay face down, their hands gripping the steel pipe supports of their bunks.
To make their misery complete, the pilot-navigator decreed that night should fall in the cabin.
A grinding noise passed over the dome of the ship, forced Unk and Boaz to turn their eyes from their pillows to the portholes. There was a pale yellow light outside now.
Unk and Boaz shouted for joy, ran to the portholes. They reached them just in time to be thrown to the floor again as the ship freed itself from an obstruction, began its fall again.
One Earthling minute later, the fall stopped.
There was a modest click from the pilot-navigator. Having delivered its cargo safely from Mars to Mercury, as instructed, it had shut itself off.
It had delivered its cargo to the floor of a cave one hundred and sixteen miles below the surface of Mercury. It had threaded its way down through a tortuous system of chimneys until it could go no deeper.
Boaz was the first to reach a porthole, to look out and see the gay welcome of yellow and aquamarine diamonds the harmoniums had made on the walls.
"Unk!" said Boaz. "God damn if it didn’t go and set us down right in the middle of a Hollywood night club!"
A recapitulation of Schliemann breathing techniques is in order at this point, in order that what happened next can be fully understood. Unk and Boaz, in their pressurized cabin, had been getting their oxygen from goofballs in their small intestines. But, living in an atmosphere under pressure, there was no need for