Standing on the stage with Ryan, Bill McDonagh exulted in Ryan’s speech as it boomed through Apollo Square. Rapture rose in sturdy magnificence around them.
“To build a city at the bottom of the sea! Insanity! But look around you, my friends!” Andrew Ryan’s voice boomed, with only a little feedback squeal. Wearing a caramel-colored double-breasted suit, his freshly barbered hair slicked back, Ryan seemed to emanate personality from the podium. Bill could feel Ryan there, to his left—and the almost frighteningly deep conviction in his tone kept his listeners riveted. The crowd of more than two thousand seemed a bit stunned by their surroundings when they’d first come. Now Bill could see them nodding, the pride shining from their faces, as Ryan told them they were a unique people in a unique place—each one of them with a chance to make their own destiny within the walls of Rapture. Those at the front were mostly the moneyed patricians, eccentrics, and pioneering professionals Ryan had recruited. The determined blue-collar types milled at the back of the crowd.
Hands clasped in front of him, Bill stood to Ryan’s right and as close to Elaine as propriety allowed. Beside Bill and Elaine stood Greavy, Sullivan, Simon and Daniel Wales, Prentice Mill, Sander Cohen, and Ryan’s new “personal assistant,” the statuesque beauty Diane McClintock. She looked like she fancied herself a queen. Bill had heard she was originally some cigarette girl Ryan had picked up—and now she was putting on airs.
Under the bunting-swathed stage overlooking the square, a tape recorder took down Ryan’s speech. He planned to record all his speeches and put edited sections of them out as “inspirational talks” on public address throughout Rapture.
“But where else,” Ryan demanded, “could we be free from the clutching hands of parasites?” His deep voice resonated in the gleaming windows looking out to the shadowy, light-shafted depths of the sea. Bill nudged Elaine and nodded toward the windows as a school of large fish swam up to the glass. The fish seemed to be taking in the speech, ogling Ryan as if awestruck. She hid a smile behind her hand. Bill wanted to take that hand and kiss it, draw his new fiancée away from this pensive crowd, up to the privacy of his apartment in Olympus Heights—celebrate the culmination of so much hard work with another sort of climax. But he had to be satisfied with winking at her, as Ryan went portentously on: “Where else could we build an economy that they would not try to control, a society that they would not try to destroy? It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea! It was impossible to build it anywhere else!”
“Hear hear!” Greavy said, leading a patter of applause.
“The ant society misunderstands the nature of true cooperation!” Ryan boomed. “True cooperation is enlightened self-interest, not grubbing parasitism! True cooperation is not based on the bloodsucking that the parasites call ‘taxation’! True cooperation is people working together—each for their own profit! A man’s self-interest is at the root of all that he accomplishes! But there is something more powerful than each of us: a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. It is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. The Great Chain may sound mystical…” Ryan shook his head contemptuously. “It is not! Some would imagine the hand of their so-called God behind every mystery! The best of human nature, the laws of natural selection—such is the power behind the Great Chain, not God! We need no gods or kings in Rapture! Only man! Here, man and woman will be rewarded with the sweat of their brows. Here, without interference, we will prove that society can order itself with unfettered competition, with unfettered free enterprise—with unfettered research! I have scientists in Rapture working on new discoveries that will astound you—and the persecution of the small-minded is all that kept those discoveries from happening till now. Science will advance without the oversight of pompous tyrants who would impose their personal view of ‘morality’ on us.” He cleared his throat and smiled, his tone becoming friendly, fatherly. “And now, in celebration of the opening day of Rapture—a song performed by Sander Cohen, written by Miss Anna Culpepper…” Anna Culpepper was an unfinished English major, a naïve but ambitious young woman whom Ryan had recruited out of her third year in college and who fancied herself a lyricist.
Wearing a tux, the impish performer stepped up to the microphone. Bill winced. Cohen got on his nerves.
From somewhere canned music played, and Cohen sang along.
“The paradox of our city
is the freedom of the chain,
the chain that holds youuuu
to meeeee,
a chain that oh so strangely, so very strangely,
Sets me at lib-er-tyyyy—
As the blue world scintillates
outside our gates,
and the fish gyrate and the lovely, lovely ocean awaits…”
It was a sluggish number, taking a long time to reach its chorus, and Bill lost interest, letting his attention wander to the majesty of Apollo Square, Rapture’s “Grand Central Station” …
Rapture’s architecture and design was a fusion of the style of the World’s Fair of 1934—an event that had a great impact on Andrew Ryan—and the industrial grandiosity of “The Art of the Great Chain.” To either side of the stage, heroic statues of electroplated bronze, forty feet high—the elongated forms of sleek, muscular, idealized men—stretched their arms toward the heights as if straining for godhood. To Bill they looked a bit like giant hood ornaments, but he’d never say as much to Ryan, who loved that sort of art. Bill had been a trifle taken aback the first time he’d seen a towering statue of Ryan, like the one at the other end of the big room—there were many about Rapture, the figures looming magisterially, seeming to embody an iron determination. In Apollo Square, relief images of lines of men—cheerfully pulling chains—decorated the walls. Everywhere was art decoratif trimming, often shaped like rays of light emanating from glistening knobs, intricate borders evoking both the industrial scale of the modern world and the temples of Babylon and Egypt.
As the song droned on, Bill felt suddenly giddy, riding an inner rush of amazement at what he’d helped build. The Waleses had created the look and feel of Rapture, but he and Greavy had built its flesh, its bones, its inner workings—and Ryan was its animating “soul.” They’d done it with the help of all those men who’d labored in the tunnels, under the sea—who’d risked their lives in the completed, watertight sections of Rapture, levels built from Hephaestus to Olympus Heights. Rapture was a reality: a small city, three miles to a side so far, rising from the depths to tower over the deep seabed.
Rapture. They’d really done it! Oh, there weren’t enough maintenance workers, there were still more heating ducts to be put in, still pipe to be laid in some levels. So far, only three of the five geothermal turbines were running in Hephaestus. Slow seepage was a problem in some areas. But Rapture was real: a man had conceived it, funded it at gigantic cost— spending the kind of money that small countries spent every year—and saw it through to completion. It was breathtaking.
He looked over at Sullivan, who always seemed gloomy, worried. Rumors were still rampant about G-men sniffing around in New York, wondering if Ryan was dodging taxation on some new project.
Some of the faces in the crowd seemed pinched with a vague anxiety of their own, were staring restlessly around at their strange new habitat. A lot of Rapture’s people were high-tone types, moneyed or formerly moneyed nobs who’d become disaffected with society. They’d come here looking for a new start and liking the fact that a wealthy man like Ryan had offered them one.
Bill hoped it was all worth it. So much was sacrificed down here. Like the time he’d seen three men boiled alive setting up the geothermal central heating. The volcanically heated water in the feed pipes had been released at too high a pressure—something he’d tried to warn Wallace about—and the pressure burst a pipe joint. Superheated water gushed to fill a room in seconds. Barely got out in time himself. Wallace should have known better after that close call the first day in the domes. Bill had felt those deaths hard—he’d watched the men die through a port, and the sight had given him nightmares for a week.
That first accident, though, in the dome tunnel, had cemented Bill’s relationship with Ryan. He had saved Andrew Ryan’s life—and Ryan had rewarded him with a nice raise, for one thing.
But he wondered if money really meant the same thing down here. Initially most of the inhabitants of Rapture were required to change their money for Rapture dollars, some percentage kept by Ryan to pay for maintenance services. And what would happen to a man when his Rapture dollars ran out? People couldn’t wire out for money—or even send letters out of Rapture. Did they really understand how sealed off from the outside world they were?
The song ended, and Elaine reached over, giving Bill’s hand a discreet squeeze. Long as Elaine was there, Bill was happy. It didn’t matter where they were.
He had helped build something glorious, something unprecedented. Sure, Rapture was untried, was a glaringly new idea. A gigantic experiment. But they’d planned Rapture down to the last detail. How badly could it go wrong?
The North Atlantic
1948
A raw morning on the North Atlantic. Broken light slanted fitfully through silver-gray clouds. Wind snapped the tops off waves, smacking packets of saltwater into the men manning the decks of the six Fontaine’s Fisheries trawlers. The man who now called himself Fontaine had invested some of his own cash, and somewhat to his surprise he’d made a success of Fontaine’s Fisheries, selling tons of fish to Ryan’s project—and to Reykjavík. Cold comfort, so to speak.
Frank Fontaine—formerly Frank Gorland—could see the peculiar little tower rising tantalizingly from the waves, a quarter mile off. Beyond it were two ships, one of them the platform ship with its winches and hoists. Slabs of ice still floated about the trawler, brightly white against the green-blue water.
The object was to get from up here—to down there—to get safely into the city marked by that anomalous lighthouse. The first time Rapture’s buyers had come to his trawlers to purchase fish, he’d given them a letter to take down to Ryan.
To the Overseer of the Undersea Colony: The commerce between us has made me aware of your enterprise, & I have inferred something of its heroic scope. I have always yearned to be a frontiersman, & an appreciation for the mysteries of the deep draws me to offer you my services. I have a plan for harvesting fish underwater using modified submarines. Up above, this idea is dismissed as “crackpot.” I hope that you, clearly a forward thinker, will be more open-minded to this innovation in enterprise. Accordingly, I request your permission to relocate to your colony and develop my subaquatic fishery.
Yours Sincerely, Frank Fontaine.
In fact, he’d sent variations of the same letter with three different deliveries to Rapture.
Standing at the prow of the pitching deck of the trawler, unscrewing the top of his flask, Frank Fontaine asked himself: Am I after fish—or a wild goose? Sure, he always dreamed about a big-paying long con, but this one was threatening to go on indefinitely—and though it was afternoon and supposedly summer, it was cold as a son of a bitch out here. Made a witch’s tit seem like a hot toddy. Was it worth giving up Gorland—becoming Fontaine?
A city under the sea. It was becoming an obsession.
Fontaine looked up at the streaming charcoal-colored clouds, wondered if it was going to storm again. Just being on this damn tub was too much like work.
Talking to the men who picked up the fish for Rapture’s food supply, Fontaine had confirmed that Ryan had indeed built some gigantic underwater habitat, a kind of free-market utopia—and Fontaine knew what happened with utopias. Look at the Soviets—all those fine words about the proletariat had turned into gulags and breadlines. But a “utopia” was pure opportunity for a man like him. When this undersea utopia fell apart, he’d be there, with a whole society to feast on. Long as he didn’t step too hard on Ryan’s toes, he could build up an organization, get away with a pile of loot.
But he had to get down to Rapture first …
The trawler lurched, and so did Fontaine’s stomach.
A small craft was being lowered over the side of the platform ship—a thirty-foot gig. Men descended the ladder and clambered aboard it. When it started motoring toward the trawlers, almost a quarter mile away, it was bristling with men, rifles glinting in their hands.
But he hadn’t come this far to run. He waited as his crew lined up behind him. Peach Wilkins, his first mate, came to the rail. “Doesn’t look good, boss,” Wilkins said as the launch came steadily closer. “What they need all those guns for?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Fontaine said, trying to sound more confident than he felt.
The launch cut through the tossing waves and then came about to ease up against the trawler’s starboard side. A man in early middle age, wearing a top coat, rubber boots and leather gloves, climbed the ladder and swung aboard, followed by two burly, watchful younger men in watch caps and slickers, rifles on straps over their shoulders.
Looking chilly and gray-faced, the older man braced himself on the bucking deck and looked Fontaine up and down. “Name’s Sullivan, chief of security for Ryan Industries. You’re Frank Fontaine. Am I right?”
Fontaine nodded. “That’s me. Owner and operator, Fontaine’s Fisheries.
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