Its back was warm and soft. Whether it was gentle or cats were just like this, it didn’t bite or scratch even when someone it had just met stroked its body. I’d forgotten I’d let the cat loose, but it seemed someone had taken care of it. Didn’t animals need water too? What did cats eat? Mice?
What were snakes supposed to eat? Didn’t snakes eat mice too? Did both of them lap up water and swallow it? I’d never raised an animal before, so I was at a loss. The only time I’d seen a snake eat anything was on an animal channel on TV. And even then, it had only been hunting and eating mice in the wild.
Did mice live in undersea bases too? Could I catch one in this situation? I didn’t even know whether it was venomous or not. What was I supposed to do after we escaped? Who raised cats or snakes? I’d saved them because it was urgent at the time, but now that I thought about it, there were more than one or two things to consider. Still, I couldn’t just leave them to die in that seawater.
Baek Aeyeong was shining her flashlight here and there, then saw the cat settled on my stomach and changed the direction of the light. She had probably been carrying the cat on her back or in her arms all this time.
“Do you happen to know anyone in Baekho-dong who keeps a cat?”
Silence followed this question too. Since everyone already knew about the cat anyway, I figured one more snake wouldn’t make things much worse, so I asked again.
“Or do you happen to know anyone who keeps a snake?”
“A snake? Isn’t that… venomous?”
Seo Jihyeok must have been exhausted; he lay there without moving a muscle. It was hard to answer. I couldn’t exactly ask the snake whether it was venomous.
“I’m not sure. I picked it up from a cage when we were escaping the Baekho-dong dormitory.”
“That snake. Where is it now?”
At the sound of Shin Haeryang’s voice, I pointed at the bag beside me, then realized he wouldn’t be able to see in the dark. Only after finishing a yawn did I answer.
“In the small inner pocket inside my bag.”
“Have you been bitten?”
“No. ……Now that I think about it, I’m not sure. If it only grazed me, I wouldn’t know. If I had been bitten, wouldn’t I be dead by now?”
“It may not be a neurotoxin. In the case of hemotoxins, death can occur in as little as twenty minutes, and usually takes about two hours.”
Shin Haeryang had quite the talent for sending a person’s heart lurching with a single sentence. To think he could make me anxious in mere seconds. It felt like more than two hours had already passed since I found the snake. Had my hand hurt at all when I put it in and took it out of the bag? I didn’t know. Everything had been so chaotic. I was so tired from climbing the stairs that I felt as if I could only accept it even if I dropped dead from snake venom right now. A voice sounded in the darkness. It was Yu Geum-i’s voice.
“What do you think happened to the others?”
“What others?”
“The people who took the central elevator. Henry, and Ms. Jennifer, and Gayeong unni, and the Russians. The people who escaped using the escape boats, or the people who left by submarine. The people from our research center too.”
“They’re either dead. Or alive. Or escaping. Or captured by the cult, or captured and killed. We’ve got enough on our plate. In this situation, we don’t have the luxury of worrying about others.”
Hearing Seo Jihyeok’s slow voice, Baek Aeyeong rose from her seat, arched her back like a cat, and sneered sharply.
“‘We’ don’t have that luxury either. Injured man.”
“……Ms. Geum-i. I hereby retract my previous statement in full. Please spare me a little. No, please do think hard about the others too. Life is precious. Everyone is someone’s precious family member, friend, or lover. One act of helping another person can change that person’s future.”
Listening to Seo Jihyeok sounding like a public service announcement, I chuckled. Yu Geum-i’s laughter reached my ears.
When I scraped through the bottom of the bag with the snake in it, three candies came out. I placed one candy each into the hands of the two women, then went over to where the three men were sprawled on the floor and asked which of the two wanted to eat the single remaining candy. As if he couldn’t be bothered, Shin Haeryang shook his head and said,
“Shut Jihyeok’s mouth with it. I’m fine.”
“I can talk even with candy in my mouth, you know?!”
The last of the food was handed to the injured man. During our first rest, when Baek Aeyeong had taken fruit cups out of the bag on her back and declared with that charisma, “You have to eat no matter what if you want to climb! No refusing. If you’re given something, you eat it!” everyone had nodded, and since then, anything someone pulled from a bag and shared was eaten immediately.
As we climbed, I understood why she had made us eat. On empty stomachs, we probably wouldn’t have been able to climb all these stairs. She was worthy of being called a stair-climbing expert.
We would reach the Second Undersea Base soon. I wondered if Shin Haeryang might, by some chance, give even a very short speech. We had climbed well so far. We would soon arrive at the Second Undersea Base. This was the result of everyone’s actions. We were more than halfway there. And so on. But in the darkness, he said only one low sentence.
“Let’s go.”
The hope that there weren’t many stairs left wrapped around my whole body. Soon, the Second Undersea Base. Let’s hang in there. In the corner, Seo Jihyeok scratched his head, then put that arm around my shoulders.
……Once I got out, the first thing I’d do was wash. I’d throw away my clothes too. Was I the only one sensitive about hygiene? My hope for the future lasted only thirty steps. Once I climbed more than that, my heavy legs felt as if they were stuck to the stairs, refusing to go up. After sighing dozens of times, I stared into the darkness and asked,
“How were they able to build something like this under the sea? It couldn’t have been easy.”
“There’s nothing impossible if you throw enough money at it. Humans are sending people to Mars, after all.”
After Seo Jihyeok’s simple reply, Shin Haeryang added from the darkness.
“They say this base is a combination of impossible design and the most cutting-edge technologies humanity possesses. When they first built the North Pacific Undersea Base, starting with offshore structure engineers, every person whose job title had the word ‘marine’ in it came swarming in. Architecture, civil engineering, drilling, and so on. By now, those people are probably at the Atlantic Undersea Base. They said all the concrete and rebar produced by the North Pacific nations over several decades were poured into the four undersea bases.”
I had heard on the news that the undersea bases revived the shipbuilding and construction industries. The marine sector was booming too, so quite a few kids chose that as their major instead of aerospace engineering. As for me, I needed a job that would bring in money steadily, so I chose pre-dentistry, but… now I’d ended up in an undersea base that might collapse. Such was life. Even a week ago, I never would have imagined I’d be climbing these dark stairs no one knew about, avoiding a cult and men with guns.
Let’s trust cutting-edge technology. The experts must have designed it with safety as their top priority. If I were one of the higher-ups, I would have even gotten houses at the Fourth Undersea Base for the experts in marine structure safety. You said it was safe, so live here. Something like that.
“What do you think will happen if the undersea base collapses?”
Seo Jihyeok waited for Shin Haeryang to speak, but his team leader seemed to be thinking and had no intention of opening his mouth, so he answered first.
“We’ll be screwed. I don’t know if they’ll even find our corpses properly. The fish will probably eat everything.”
He was right. As soon as Seo Jihyeok finished speaking, I remembered the story about diving for four days to find a corpse. Just as I was about to agree with his short-sighted perspective, we climbed a few more steps before Shin Haeryang’s voice sounded.
“……The repercussions will be enormous. This was something begun after putting the Mars Program and the Frontier Project on hold. The Atlantic First Undersea Base is scheduled to be completed at the end of next year, but it will be affected too. The North Sea Undersea Base may not even be able to begin construction. ……More than that, I’m more concerned about the pollution of the North Pacific after the collapse, though the experts would know better than I do.”
Oh. A far-sighted perspective. I wished I could watch the experts talk about the undersea base on TV as if it were someone else’s problem. I gave a small glimpse of the anxiety I’d had when the Fourth Undersea Base collapsed.
“You’re not worried about losing your job?”
At that, a low laugh sounded. I couldn’t tell whether it was Seo Jihyeok laughing or Shin Haeryang. I had no idea why they were laughing.
“Mr. Muhyeon, isn’t your profession rather far removed from unemployment in connection with the collapse of the undersea base?”
“That’s true, but I don’t have the money to open my own practice. If I could have opened one in the first place, I wouldn’t have come here.”
“I see.”
“Right? If I get out alive, what am I going to do for a living? I’ll have to think about whether I keep working as an engineer. What about you, Team Leader?”
“I’m going to rest for three months, then think about it.”
And we climbed the stairs. Seo Jihyeok poured out a bucketful of complaints about this job. It seemed life at the undersea base hadn’t been happy for him. Then, saying he had majored in electronic and electrical engineering, he started listing every possible job he could switch to. I nodded along. Even if I changed jobs, I’d still be a dentist. From the way Seo Jihyeok talked, it didn’t seem like he would starve to death. Only after some time did I realize that Seo Jihyeok was expressing his anxiety through chatter.
Around the time Seo Jihyeok tired himself out from talking, the party of three men quieted down. Remembering the questions I used to ask the kids who came to the dental clinic, I looked at the two adults.
“Do you know which creature has the most teeth? I used to ask this to kids who came to the dentist, and if they got it right, I’d give them a toothbrush. Of course, even if they got it wrong, I still gave them one.”
“Isn’t it a shark?”
“Wrong, Mr. Seo Jihyeok. If you open a shark’s mouth and count, it only has three hundred. What about you, Mr. Shin Haeryang?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking of a shark too. Or perhaps a whale.”
“The answer is…… a snail! It has over ten thousand. It licks fruit or leaves with the teeth on its tongue. Since we don’t lick fruit or leaves to eat them, we have to brush our teeth diligently.”
“Clap, clap, clap.”
Seo Jihyeok had both his arms entrusted to me and Shin Haeryang, so he couldn’t clap and said it with his mouth instead.
“Now, next question. ……What animal has no teeth?”
“There are animals without teeth?”
At Seo Jihyeok’s question, I nodded. Like a child. It was the same question elementary school students asked most often. Come to think of it, how old was Seo Jihyeok?
“Yes. There are three of them. Teeth and claws are primary weapons of attack, but these animals can live without teeth.”
“……An anteater?”
I was so surprised I almost stopped climbing the stairs. I had asked that question many times, but it was the first time I’d gotten the correct answer back. Usually, I asked the question and told the patient to think hard about it during treatment. Then, when I finished the treatment and asked for the answer, most of them had either forgotten the question because it hurt or they were screaming, or they gave the wrong answer.
“Ding-dong-dang-dong. Yes. One is the anteater.”
“Anteaters don’t have teeth? Team Leader?”
Shin Haeryang answered like a sigh.
“Judging by the name, it seems like it would only have a tongue.”
“Uh…… that’s right. It has no teeth and only a tongue. The other two?”
“Koala!”
“Wrong!”
“Elephant?”
“Wrong!”
Maybe my voice had been too loud, because Yu Geum-i, standing on the stairs high above, asked,
“What are you three doing?”
“I was asking about animals without teeth. Do you happen to know?”
“Armadillo.”
Yu Geum-i answered without hesitation. I was truly grateful that I could be together with people more knowledgeable than me. Especially in a difficult situation like this.
“Ding-dong-dang-dong. Correct! Armadillos have no teeth. One more!”
Seo Jihyeok groaned and started throwing out all sorts of animals.
“I have no idea. Camel?”
“Wrong.”
“Giraffe?”
“Wrong.”
“Panda!”
“No.”
“Sloth?”
“Uh. Correct! It’s a sloth!”
The blue light of the necklace shone blue over Seo Jihyeok’s face, which looked pleased like a child’s. He’d gotten at least one right, that was it. I wanted to give him a toothbrush or dental floss as a prize.