Cushing climbed over into the lifeboat, tried talking with Pollard, tried drawing him out of his shell.
George just sat there, taking it all in. New blood. It was exciting and somehow depressing at the same time.
“Can’t say exactly where this shitter is,” Marx said, “south of the goddamn Twilight Zone and north of the Devil’s Triangle. You go figure. But, way I’m seeing it, if there’s a way in, there’s a way out. Gotta be a back door around here somewhere.”
“You wanna be careful of that,” Pollard said, not looking at any of them.
They all stared at him. He had been silent for days, Marx said, and him speaking was big news, like Ghandi busting a move.
“Careful of what?” Gosling said.
“That back door,” Pollard said. “Never know where it might lead.”
And that was it. Pollard’s jewel of the day. He would speak no more of it and even Marx bullying him brought no results.
“Just leave him alone,” Chesbro said. “He’s scared. He’s been through a lot.”
“No shit?” Marx said. “Has he really? Well, I haven’t. I just been sitting here pulling my meat and hoping Jesus would see us through this pigfuck. I haven’t been trying to hold you goddamn pussies together for the past three days with spit and hope and snot, now have I? Trying to keep you alive when things came out of the sea with empty bellies and big shitting teeth. Guess again, Chesbro, we’ve all been through a lot. Each and every one of us. But you don’t see me shutting down, do you? Or the First here? Not even Mr. Cushing or Mr. Ryan. No sir. They’re all ready to slap ass and slide dick. They got their peckers out and are just looking for some sweet hole to fill. You know what that is? That’s called being a man.”
Chesbro, true to form, was mumbling prayers under his voice. He looked up at Marx. “I put my faith in God,” he said. “Whatever happens here, will be His will. I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, Chief, there’s things here a lot tougher than you.”
“Sure as shit there are, dumbass. I’m just saying that we got to buck up and take it. We all wanna get out of here, don’t we? Well, if we’re dead, that ain’t gonna happen… now is it?” He looked over at Pollard, shook his head, looked like maybe he wanted to clop him upside the head. “Case in fucking point, Chesbro. Goddamn Pollard here. You want us all to drop to his level? Sit there with that hang-dog, where-is-my-fucking-mommy look about us? I mean, hell and ice, look at him. Looks like he got cornholed by a striped ape with a bowling pin for a pecker, got his shit packed so tight he don’t know whether to squat and push or call the Roto-Rooter man. You want us all to sink to that?”
But Chesbro was praying again, looking close to tears.
“It’s been a tough business from square one,” Gosling said. He was looking on Pollard with a sort of compassion and that much was obvious. “It’s been tough on everyone.”
“Sure,” Marx said. “People handle it different ways, I suspect. But, way I see it, we got a hell of a plot to hoe, we don’t stick together and toughen up, we might as well drop our pants and jump in that slop, let the first thing that swims by make a sandwich out of our bare asses.”
“Amen to that,” Cushing said.
George wasn’t sure what to make of Marx. He was a tough bastard, to be sure, not exactly sympathetic, but something told him the chief engineer was okay. Down deep, he was a good guy… you got past the salty language.
Marx maybe read his mind, because he looked over at George, smiled, stroked his mustache which was flecked with silver. “Don’t mind me, boys, I just go off sometimes. I’m not so bad as I sound. But we got to toughen our asses up. That’s how I see it. Every man for himself doesn’t wash dirty shorts here. We gotta stay tight and stay hard. Am I right, First?”
“As rain,” Gosling said. “As always.”
Cushing cleared his throat. “But Pollard’s right, you know.”
“How’s that?” Marx asked.
“In saying we should be real careful of that back door. In this place, we should be careful of every door.” He had everyone’s attention now and that was what he’d wanted. “Way I see it, we slipped through some kind of door into this place, some kind of warp, if you will. Vortex. Time/space distortion. Wormhole. Call it what you want. If there’s a doorway into our world there just might be doorways into others. We had best be careful we don’t walk through the wrong one.”
That gave everyone something to chew over in their minds.
“I mean, some of the things we’ve seen here… some of the local wildlife… who can say if it’s even native to this place? It might have been pulled in from other places. Maybe.”
George thought that made sense. Most of it was probably native, but some of it could have been as alien as they were. Possibly. Just a theory, but it held some water when you thought about it. And George had been thinking about such things. “I like it, Cushing,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe all those crazy stories of sea monsters sailors reported, maybe they were things that got vomited out of this place and into ours.”
