SLUG HELL

by Steven Utley

Except perhaps for the sunken city of R’lyeh where he’s undoubtedly very popular with the bus-sized trilobites that scavenge there, Steven Utley is an “internationally unknown writer.” He’s a member of the infamous Turkey City Gang, but so far has managed to stay mostly out of prison. Steven has done a number of collaborations with the likes of Howard Waldrop and Lisa Tuttle. His most recent collections are The Beasts of Love and Where or When. In spite of little resemblance to the Silurian, the setting for which he’s most noted, Steven Utley lives in Tennessee.

Silver, just returned from or soon to return to Slug Hell, avails himself of the base camp’s facilities and its denizens’ impersonal hospitality. He is just passing through, coming or going, and during the time he must spend here, resting up from or for his labors on the other side of the divide, he is conscious of being an interloper among insiders. It is, he thinks with wry amusement, the story of my professional life.

In common with nearly everyone else at the base camp, the three men whose tent he shares, Burleson, Martin, and Carstairs, work hard from sunup to sundown and consequently do not keep extravagantly late hours when they can avoid it. They have taken him in, but they have their own missions to accomplish and their own social arrangements to help them endure in this primeval wilderness. Silver therefore makes a particular effort to observe the niceties of camp life. There are no niceties where he either is going or else has just been, but he is naturally a quiet, even taciturn, individual and manages to be unobtrusive among other people without being standoffish toward them.

The camp itself, compared with Slug Hell, is the lap of luxury. He sleeps restfully on a comfortable cot and eats reasonably well-prepared food that does not grit between his molars. He soaks up water, color, sound, conversation. The camp members, both civilian and Navy, have their own recreations, so Silver has a chance to watch a softball game and listen to much recorded music, all kinds of music, and attends an informal exhibition put on by the expedition’s Sunday painters. He is charmed by the paintings, which tend to depict not the muted Paleozoic vistas here but explosions of burgeoning Holocene flora. Everybody misses flowers.

He naps after these recreations, enjoying restful sleep of a sort impossible on the other side of the divide. Even deep in this restful sleep, however, he cannot remember whether he is either lying on a cot at the base camp dreaming of the saltlands, or lying in his bedroll out in the saltlands, dreaming of the base camp.

Somehow, now I am aboard the helicopter as it settles earthward. A swirling grayish whitish cloud raised by rotor blast expands outward from a point directly beneath the machine, loses momentum quickly in the thick hot translucent air, but takes its time diffusing.

The Navy aircrew and I, the lone civilian, peer out. The almost perfectly flat, almost perfectly white plain extends to the shimmering horizon in every direction. The pilot twists around in his seat to ask, loudly but still barely audibly above the dying whine of the generator and the slowing whir of the rotor, “Are you sure you want to get out here?”

I nod jerkily, probably resembling a bird dipping its head. The Navy people think all us scientists resemble birds, more or less.

The flight engineer’s expression twists with consummate distaste. “Slug Hell,” she says.

I smile, admittedly a bit thinly, and check my gear a final time. I would be traveling light, carrying on my own back my entire camp, shelter, food, equipment, but for the all-important water tank which two bluejackets manhandle out of the helicopter. Unless you propose to drink brine, you bring your own liquid refreshment to this place.

I step out and down and separate myself from the machine and its crew. Brown, hard, gaunt, I already look desiccated, like an insect husk.

The helicopter lifts through a vortex of stinging dust, circles once, then heads west to complete its supply run to camps on the far rim of this basin. The crew will rest and service the helicopter, then pick me up on their way home to the base camp. I am on my own for the time being.

Of an evening, Silver accompanies his hosts, Burleson, Martin, and Carstairs, to the mess tent and returns with them from it. Silver and Carstairs sit or lie on cots opposite Burleson and Martin, and Carstairs reaches into his seabag for the treasured bottle of scotch, and everybody nurses a measure of liquor for a time and nobody speaks. Then the lamp is turned out, the men settle on their cots, sigh. Carstairs and Burleson and Martin somehow decide among themselves—tacitly, perhaps telepathically (Silver knows how it can be among people who work and live together, he has not always been a solitary field researcher)—whether to finish off the day with conversation or to settle for no conversation at all and just go to sleep.

When there is conversation, it usually pertains, such as it is, to that day’s work, or to exciting news passed along from colleagues in camp—so-and-so has found a unique patch of lichen, or netted a strange new bony fish, or spent the afternoon sexing trilobites—but inevitably the talk (such as it is) turns to home and everything that home has that this world does not have. It is almost ritualized, and Silver welcomes the litany.

“After looking at psilophytes all day,” Burleson says, “when I close my eyes, I see garden flowers, just a riot of them. Tea rose, columbine, zinnia, veronica, campanula, regal lily, Darwin and cottage tulips. Delphenium, gladiolus, peony, chrysanthemum. China aster, dahlia, snapdragon. Bearded and Japanese iris, pansy, trollius. Ah, ah!”

Ah, ah, indeed, thinks Silver.

“It’s wildflowers for me,” says Martin. “I was a hiker, not a gardener. I hiked all over North America. Slogged or canoed through the parts that weren’t really conducive to hiking. Give me senna, wild iris, lotus, moccasin flower. Give me swamp milkweed and sneezeweed. Jacob’s ladder, fringed gentian, pitcher plant. Lupine. Rose mallow.”

“Ah,” says Burleson, “ah!”

Ah, thinks Silver, ah!

“Lilies,” says Martin, “I always loved the lilies. Tuberous water lily, yellow pond lily, meadow lily.”

“Blackeyed Susan,” says Burleson, “and bee balm and red trillium.”

“Greater bindweed!”

“Butterfly weed!”

“And don’t even get me started,” says Martin, “on desert plants.”

“Or flowering trees and shrubs.”

I am in a place of silence.

The eardrum is an amphibian innovation, and amphibians themselves are an innovation whose time isn’t due for many more millions of years. The only terrestrial vertebrates on earth (if this is earth; the physicists say no) are myself and my fellow human beings—all of whom are well out of earshot, over the divide, where rain falls and rivers run and things grow and thrive, and where my fellow human beings study rain, rivers, growing thriving things, and a good deal more besides. Can’t blame them. This, however, is my chosen sphere of activity, and even I admit that it’s an utterly hellish place. Evaporite basins always are. I’ve seen salt flats before, but this is the grandmamma of ‘em all, stretching to the horizon and beyond in three directions. Somewhere far off is a sea that’s being squeezed out of existence.

Let me make you a crude map of the world as it is now. Here, straddling the equator, is proto-North America, called Laurentia. Northeast lies Baltica, southeast lies Avalonia, both separated from Laurentia by the proto-Atlantic. Beyond Avalonia are the Rheic Ocean and a seafloor-spreading zone that’s pushing Avalonia and Baltica into Laurentia. As these landmasses close, land levels rise, and the sea withdraws. It’s a slow process, of course. The sea retreats by fits and starts, inches or fractions of inches at a time. Here a lagoon gets isolated and begins to evaporate. Along the seaward lip some water still spills into the lagoon, and that water, too, begins to evaporate, and the lagoon gradually fills and shrinks as chemicals in the seawater precipitate. Hydrated sulfate of calcium. Sodium chloride. Anhydrite. Potassium and magnesium salts. The bones of the sea. As that Navy gal called it: Slug Hell.

My specialty is extremophilic organisms. Apart from myself—again, an interloper—prokaryotic extremophiles thriving in these brine pools are the only living things in this hot silent monochromatic hellhole. The majority are haloarchaea, but all are extreme halophiles adapted to very high concentrations of salt; amino acids on the surface of their cellular machinery permit retention of water molecules. Indeed, they require a minimum of ten times the salt content of ocean water to exist. For all their adaptations, however, they are fragile organisms—place them in distilled water, and they instantly lyse, burst, and die from the change in osmotic conditions. Their domains, marked by red streaks due to carotenoid compounds in the cells, provide the only real touch of color. They are, to me, the most remarkable lifeforms on earth.

Probably they were the first living things on earth and probably they’ll be the last. Eventually, terrestrial geologic processes will stop, the atmosphere will thin, the seas evaporate entirely. By the time the sun starts to die, the dominant lifeforms on earth, the culmination of billions of years of biological evolution, will be some orange and pink streaks in a brine pool. Not to worry, however. Very similar organisms surely live in essentially the same extreme conditions on other worlds circling other suns. All hail the extremophiles!

But do it quietly.

I love the little buggers, but they are truly lousy conversationalists.

Carstairs laughs shortly. Carstairs’ moment has arrived; his contribution to the litany is contrapuntal, and Silver welcomes it. He feels the greatest affinity for Carstairs.

“You have something to add?” asks Martin, as though he did not know what the answer will be.

“You two are a panic. You carry on like botanizing young ladies in Victorian England.”

Burleson says, “Don’t tell me you never look up from your pale gray fungi and look around at this pale gray landscape and wish there was a splash of color in it somewhere.”

“Plenty of color splashed around here,” Carstairs says.

“Earth colors,” says Martin, “muted, washed out. Nothing vivid. Nothing the eye can really fasten on.”

“Beg to differ. Sky here’s so blue you can’t look at it for very long at a time. And the swamp—all that vibrant chlorophyll green. Look out over the sea, it’s velvety purple out beyond the headlands.”

“But no hot colors,” says Burleson.

Silver can almost hear Carstairs grin in the darkness. “Find yourself a volcano.”

“No reds, I mean, no oranges.”

“I just miss flowers, is all,” Burleson says. “Psilophytes have their charms, but I’d just like to look at, oh, a magnolia blossom.”

“Send for a picture of one from home.”

“A real one.”

“Then wait around here till the Cretaceous,” Carstairs says. “Isn’t that when magnolias first appear? Meanwhile, I rejoice in my fungi. They’re already everywhere here in Paleozoic time. The most opportunistic multicellular lifeforms on Earth.”

“Funny,” says Martin, “I’d’ve said politicians.”

Everybody laughs now and settles himself for the night, the evening’s entertainment being concluded.

I love this work and am good at it, but this place even gets to me. I have dreamed that as I lay sleeping out here the very earth sucked every drop of moisture from my body. I have dreamed that things came out of the brine pools on moonless nights.

I dreamed of a man who came staggering across the saltlands. He was ragged and filthy. He had lost his equipment, his supplies. He had lost his way. He had lost his mind. I took him into my tent, though it was barely big enough to shelter me alone, and shared with him my meager food and water. Late that evening he began to babble of Biblical events, the Deluge, the Ark, the recession of waters. Somewhere behind this saltland, he said, were the fabled first cities of post-diluvial time. He was dead by the following morning, and I buried him in a grave scooped out by hand. “Better than embalming,” I said, to no one in particular.

Poring over my specimens I suddenly overhear myself mouthing the words of a song popular back home,

“She had different faces,

Different ones for different places

And every hour of every day,

And no one knew the whole array,”

and feel, suddenly, alone as I am, embarrassed.

Do I miss people?

Somewhat. Slightly. There are people back at the base camp whose company I enjoy. Anarchists, mostly, whose chief amusement, the thing from which they derive the most pleasure (apart of course from their work), is annoying the authoritarians. The authoritarians for their part regard the anarchists with disdain and suspicion, which is how it ought to be. The authoritarians, the true ones, are as few in number as the true anarchists, but the authoritarians have people, myrmidons, to do their bidding. Living and working in the midst of this amazing primeval world’s myriad wonders, people with a distinctly small-town-in-the-midwest Junior-Chamber-of-Commerce view of everything. This is not to say that they, any more than members of the other two groups, are incompetent scientists, or, any more than the true authoritarians, incapable administrators, or, any more than the anarchists, bad human beings. It’s just that for people uninfected with boosterism, they are a royal pain in the ass.

These groups are capable of working together, for they are, all of them, highly trained professionals. Yet the struggle always rages between them, manifesting itself in matters as trivial, or as some people would put it, as seemingly trivial, as what to call the base camp. Its prosaic official designation is Number Two Camp; its real name, however, is Stinktown, because it’s located at the mouth of an estuary, and at low tide it smells like the world’s biggest binjo ditch. The first Paleozoic explorers necessarily established Number One Camp where the vagaries of the so-called spacetime anomaly put them, which happened to be approximately where I am right now, smack in the middle of a desolate evaporate basin. The camp was abandoned as soon as a relatively more hospitable site became accessible. Only a lunatic would come back here.

And here I am, again.

I could have brought along a chip player, of course, one small enough to fit right into my ear. I always tell myself this after I have actually arrived in Slug Hell. I think I prefer to hear music with my mind’s ear as I work. For one thing, my brain has much greater storage capacity than any chip. For another, I have perhaps inherited my memory for music from my great-great-grandfather.

The evening’s entertainment being concluded, Silver settles himself for the night, but sleep comes on him more gradually than for the other three men, affording ample time for reflection. He has an excellent, even an extraordinary memory, keeps his diary in his head, everything perfectly organized and accessible. He has only to reach in and pluck out the memories of similar evenings spent as a guest in similar tents, listening to similar litanies. One, in condensed form, goes: In the bay there are reddish placoderms with silvery bellies, and honey-colored sea scorpions and chocolate-brown ones and shiny black ones. The primitive land-living scorpions look just like their descendants four hundred million years from now, just like the ones back in Texas, even to having exoskeletons that reflect ultraviolet rays from moonlight and other sources; in the darkness, they gleam eerily, fluorescent green and pink.

Another goes: Where most of you see only dull earth colors, I see a wonderful mosaic of white, gray, black, tan. Black basalt, gray granite. The beaches here are multicolored with flecks of brown feldspar, with quartz, clear, colorless, or tinted amber, peach, and pink.

And Silver thinks: There are vast stretches of beach white with coral and shell fragments that would unnerve me if not set off against the blue sea and sky. It is only the unrelieved whiteness of the saltlands, stretching to the horizon where the sea has evaporated, that disturbs my sleep.

And Silver thinks of his great-great-grandfather, whose unpublished memoirs tell how, still in his teens, he escaped from Nazi Germany on foot during the late 1930s. (The rest of his family remained behind and were wiped out.) He walked the whole way to Marseille, where he booked passage or hired on as a deck hand (this much is rather unclear) to the United States. He was a great music lover, not a bad cellist in later life, and claims to have kept himself sane during his trek by playing out favorite Mozart and Brahms pieces in his head. He never whistled or hummed, he simply made the music happen in his head. Writing as an old man, he summed up his experience in this way: “Anywhere we find ourselves, we upright apes cannot do without beauty, even if we must carry it around inside our big ape heads.” Throughout his journey across Europe, he had especially cherished the wrenching middle movements of Bach’s Concerto in A Minor and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21.

And Silver thinks, in the moment just before he happily yields to sleep: I like those, too.

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