Mat Johnson - Pym

“There, right there, in front of your face. Those gray things,” I told him, not even aware of my tone until Garth put a firm hand on my arm to calm me down.

“What? What? I don’t see nothing. Is this your idea of a joke?” Karvel repeated without a hint of awareness, looking right at where the Tekelians crept.

It was then, looking past the painter and his biggest fan to the other end of the roof behind us, that I saw what we should have been worried about the whole time. First, at the far lip of the roof plateau we stood on, a small dot of albino head popped into view. Then, several more heads alongside it. Before I could even utter my warning, I saw the band of creatures those heads were attached to. They were pulling themselves up the side of the BioDome, over by the forty-nine stars and the one solar panel. A second line of attack. Garth turned in time to see the first creature hoist itself completely onto the roof to get us. The creature stood at almost the opposite end of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome’s roof, its colossal frame nearly reaching the sun. Silhouetted as it was against the blue sky, Thomas Karvel finally saw what he was up against.

“Cheese and crackers. What the hell is that?” he asked, pulling on my sleeve as if I could truly answer him. “Man, he’s huge. Look at the size of him. What’s he doing? I think that thing’s making a snowball. Well, if they’re just going to throw snowballs then—” Karvel said, stopping abruptly when the first frozen projectile hit the side of his head, knocking him to the roof and into a mild concussion. More iced balls drilled into our backs as we struggled to pull the unconscious master back to the exit door.

The BioDome door was metal, meant to keep out Martians and snow-loving Islamic militants, so for the moment it held attacking hordes at bay. This was good, because the Tekelians were really trying to get in, and we really didn’t want them to. Cowering as we were, we listened to the thunder of the door shaking under the brutal onslaught. Piling every heavy rat-emblazoned box we could in front of it just in case, we also locked the door to the corridor as we left the room. Dragged unconscious out into the hall, Thomas Karvel lay on his back before us, unaware as the three of us discussed our options, trying our best to yell over and otherwise ignore the sounds of angry fists that seemed to come from all over the outer hull.

“Well that plan didn’t work, did it?”

“No, ma’am, it did not,” we agreed.

“Then you boys need to call for help,” Mrs. Karvel told us with so much calm and acceptance of our improbable situation that I began to realize she was probably heavily medicated as a rule. Trying to match her subdued tones, I made the point that unfortunately there was no one whom it was possible to call: no police, no national guard, no anything.

“Get your friends, the co-workers you said they captured. Whatever you have to do, you do it. We got guns, we just need the people to hold them off, kill them if they try to come in here. And get me some ice for Tommy’s head too, he’s going to have quite the lump on him.”

In the excitement of the moment, motivated largely by a desire to simply run away, I seized on the request to get help as if it was my destiny. Not a thought did I give to the actual logistics of how we would manage to escape the 3.2 Ultra BioDome unprotected, or make it back through the frozen wasteland and repeat the journey that had almost killed me, or how we would do all this in time to make it back here for whatever siege this white woman had in mind. These questions must have also occurred to Mrs. Karvel, because as she stared down at her husband’s slack face, her plans became more specific.

“We got two snowmobiles: Tommy got him a real good blue one, and got me a pink one to match. But you can’t take ’em, can you? Because the garage door is right down there, facing their camp. As soon as you open it, they gonna be all on us. All on us,” she repeated, standing up and grabbing me by the shoulder as if I intended to disagree with her. I wasn’t. “You boys, you take the exhaust tunnel. Exit’s in the mechanical room. Don’t go near the boiler, that thing’s an accident waiting to happen, just head for the back door. That’ll get you far; that tunnel comes up out past where you say they are. You take that, you get out past them, and you get us some goddamn help. You hear me?”

I heard very well. Packing my old snow gear with Slim Jims and PowerBar gel this time, I was ready to get the hell out of there. The exhaust tunnel, it seemed, was perfect for our escape, a better solution we could not have asked for. In his fear that his precious dome would somehow be located by rogue nations with heat-seeking satellites, Thomas Karvel had also provided himself with the perfect escape hatch. Walking past it, I could easily see that this boiler system was a truly monumental construction, something I would have paused to be awed by had the moment allowed for it. After cranking off the water of the waterfall, Garth and I walked under its last sweet drops to get to the mechanical room’s door and make our way out of Karvel’s utopia. Without the waterfall, it was loud. In the room, though, it was absolute cacophony. The roar was the first thing that attacked my senses as we began our trudge. Clogs, pistons, lubes reverberating like a junkyard orgy. Before the vibrations could overwhelm me, I was hit by another assault. The heat. We walked through what felt to me like a nearly solid wall of heat. The main interior of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome was kept at a perfect seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Within the boiler room, though, it felt like twice that.

“This is unbearable,” I complained, wiping the sweat that had instantly appeared upon my brow.

“Enjoy it while it lasts, dog. You going to be cold soon enough,” Garth responded.

Still, in that moment, as sweat coated my body in a vain attempt to cool me down, it seemed that the walk back to the exhaust fan exit was endless. I had assumed that the boiler room was just little, merely covering the space under the waterfall and deck above, but this mechanical area went beyond the confines of the Karvels’ living quarters and spread back all the way to the dome’s edge. The supposed “room” was larger than a house, with pipes interlooping between the metal constructs in a way that only hinted at order.

The exhaust fan itself rose not to the height of my waist but twenty feet beyond, to the height of the ceiling itself. As the blades swung before us too fast to see, there was only the slightest of breezes to be felt and that came from behind us as the boiling air rushed to exit out of the dome to the great chill beyond. Through the blur of the blades, I could see there was nothing beyond the dome but darkness. Outside, the exhaust tunnel that led into the subterranean ice caves was large enough to park a bus in, and dark enough to hide it there. Although the blue of the ice could be seen beyond, it was far from a welcoming vision. As I looked into the dim abyss, the thought of walking out into it and all the way back to Tekeli-li to enlist our co-workers to do battle seemed the suicide mission that it was.

“Brother, listen to me,” I yelled to Garth over the din. “This plan is crazy. We’re never going to beat those monsters here, even with all of us.” I put a hand on his beefy arm as he reached to open the exit door. Trying to give him a squeeze he could feel even through his padded coat, I leaned in closer. “We should go back. Go back, get that sailboat, drag it with us. Then when we get the others, we all make a break for Tsalal. Tsalal . It’s out there, man, Pym knows where it is. We find him, we find a real way out of here. Black and warm and away from all this beyond the pale bullshit.”