Cape Flattery Will Get You Nowhere
3
Later, Mabel said the whole experience was like being on the worst amusement park ride in Hell.
In the unbreakable grip of a rushing current, the boat slipped lower and lower in the whirling funnel of water—and the lower it sank, the faster it sped. By the time the deck was at a close to ninety-degree angle, it didn't matter so much—because the speed stuck them to the deck as firmly as gravity would have.
By then they were halfway down the narrowing vortex. Dipper's ears rang with the sound of the hissing, rushing water. Worse, everything was getting dark.
That was because overhead, heavy clouds clamped on the vast mouth of the whirlpool like a lid covering a seething pot—though right up until the Stan O' War II slipped over the edge, the clouds had looked no more threatening than a patchy fog just a few feet above the surface.
Lower still, and faster, and as the speed increased, so did everyone's disorientation and nausea—except for Mabel. First Stan, then Ford, and finally even Dipper lost their breakfast over the side. Ford switched on the twin searchlights, but they showed very little—just the streaked, ebony-black walls of rushing water.
At first the shattering noise was like the roar of a waterfall, but as they descended, it grew horribly louder, filling the whole world like a physical force, forcing them to shout to be heard. A gasping Ford worked with some of his instruments and bellowed, "It's a serious space-time anomaly! Not a complete dimensional rift, like Weirdmageddon, but something very strange and localized!"
"Real interesting!" Stan yelled back. "But how does that piece of trivia help us get outa here alive?"
"Knowledge is power!" Ford returned.
"Well, it ain't enough to light a flashlight bulb if ya ain't alive!" Stan shouted.
Then he seemed to notice the stricken faces of Dipper and Mabel and he said in a furious voice, "Figure out something to do, Poindexter! Think about the kids here. Worry about the scientific stuff later!"
Nothing could stop that slippage, and faster and yet faster they whirled. The G forces made Dipper feel at least twice as heavy as he was and made it difficult to breathe. Mabel sank down and sat on the deck, her back against the bulkhead. "We're not gonna make it this time, are we?" she asked.
"Don't know!" Dipper yelled.
She took his hand. "But we're together," she yelled. "Mystery Twins!"
He squeezed his sister's hands. "Yeah. When we get out of this, sibling hug with extra pats!"
"It's getting worse," she said as the boat began to spin around and around on its own axis, like a bottle on its side picking out someone to be kissed—or like Waddles when he was small enough to be "it" in a game of spin-the-pig. The vessel spun like a carousel struck by infernal lightning, so fast, so hard, that the centripetal force hurled everyone against the bulkheads and pinned them there—
Then absolute darkness.
And silence.
And then—
"What happened?" Mabel bawled. "Are we dead? There's supposed to be a light! I demand my light!"
"Huh?" Dipper asked, unable to understand her words though he sat right next to her. His ears were ringing. True, the boat had leveled out and everything seemed to have fallen quiet, if his eardrums hadn't been punctured.
"What! Happened!" Mabel screamed right into his ear, and he heard that.
"I don't know!" he yelled back into her ear.
He rose unsteadily to his feet—he felt back to his normal weight, at least—and groped across the pitch-dark deck. The boat rocked a little, but seemed to be floating normally. The engine was no longer running. Dipper blundered into someone. "Grunkle Ford?" he shouted as loud as he could.
"Guess again!" It was Stan, on his feet but leaning against the bulkhead, both hands braced on the rail. With a grunt, he straightened and Dipper felt him fumbling with something. "Just a minute. Where's the fershlugginer cord—there it is!" A red light came on—the signal light on the shoulder of his lifejacket—and in its feeble glow Dipper saw Ford still sitting on the deck and looking stunned.
Stan opened a chest and pulled out an electric lantern, which he switched on. "Ya all right, Brainiac?" he asked, squatting beside Ford.
"I'll have the muffins and anchovies, thank you," Ford replied. Then he shook his head. "Gah! Whoa, what just happened? I'm dizzy! Where are we?"
"Kinda hopin' you'd explain that, Captain," Stan said.
"Let me get the searchlights on again. The engine died," Ford said. He struggled to his feet with Stan's and Dipper's help, and then in the light of the lantern he fiddled with the controls. "Oh, no wonder. I didn't switch tanks, and the first one must be out of fuel. Here we go." He clicked switches and turned valves.
The engine coughed, then caught, and the beams of the searchlights shot out. They illuminated nothing but a black surface—it was as though they were navigating an ocean of oil. Rough oil, because the deck still rose and fell as though in a lightly chopping sea. The powerful lights were good for about a half-mile or so—but they showed nothing but that inky ocean.
"Are we still on earth?" Mabel asked, coming to stand beside them. "Ew, Dipper, you smell like barf!"
"I'll clean up as soon as I can!" Dipper said. He looked back over the stern transom. "Hey, there's another whirlpool behind us!"
It showed as a gray spot in the blackness, visibly rotating—but unlike the one they'd been caught in—
"Aw, it's a baby whirlpool!" Mabel said.
"Yeah, a lot smaller than ours. Looks about the size of our boat," Stan said.
"That's . . . extremely odd," Ford muttered, staring off into the distance. "It's turning in a clockwise direction."
"So?" Stan asked.
Dipper said, "Grunkle Stan, all whirlpools and hurricanes and so on in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise."
"Even flushed toilets," Mabel said.
"Uh, no," Dipper told her. "That's a popular belief, but it's not true. The Coriolis effect controls big vortices like storms and whirlpools, but little ones like drains might go either way, depending on their orientation, how level they are, and other factors."
"Quite right," Ford said. "Hm. Where can we be? We can't have gone through the middle of the Earth and emerged in the Southern Hemisphere. I'm sure we would have noticed passing through a core of molten rock and iron."
"Yeah, that would be kinda hard to miss," Stan said. "Suppose we got teleported or something?"
"Doubtful," Ford said. "That would take a terrific amount of energy, and I think we would have noticed a manifestation of forces if our molecules had been beamed elsewhere."
"I beamed what was in my stomach elsewhere," Stan said.
"It's still morning, isn't it?" Mabel asked. "I mean, we couldn't have been in that whirlpool for twelve hours! I would've had to pee if we had!"
"Speak for yourself," Stan said, and Mabel and Dipper edged away from him.
"Anyone have the time?" Dipper asked.
"My watch says it's right around seven-thirty in the morning," Stan told him. "Huh. Sure looks like it's the middle of the night. But where are the stars?"
They all looked up. Nothing but blackness overhead.
"Maybe the sky is overcast," Ford offered. "Let's see if it's a low cloud cover." He swiveled one of the searchlights so it pointed straight up, past the mast.
Dipper didn't understand what he saw—a round patch of grayish-white light, yes, but not all that far above them. Yet it didn't look like cloud cover—in fact, it had a solid appearance, and wavery lines streaking through it. And there were—"Rocks?" he asked. "Those are rocks! Oh, my gosh, we're underground! We're in some kind of gigantic cave!"
"Cool!" Mabel said.
"No," Ford replied slowly. "I don't think that's possible. This is—beyond my experience. Look ahead."
He shined the beam of light forward. Again, Dipper had a hard time understanding what he saw—but then he realized it was an upward-curving wall of water, because the light penetrated it enough to give it a greenish tinge, and he saw the shadowy form of a whale pass by. They were sailing in a mile-wide bowl of ocean, but toward the edges the bowl curved gradually upward to meet the ceiling of the cave, or whatever it was.
"Hang on!" Ford said as the boat slipped up the curve.
"I'm feeling strange," Mabel said. "Like somebody's pulling on my head!"
Dipper glanced at her—and in truth, her hair was standing on end. He felt the sensation, too, as though he were being tugged up and down simultaneously. "This is like being in that tourist trap, the upside-down house," he said. He felt his cap moving and clapped his hand on it just in time.
Now the rocks and sand above them were closer and unmistakable.
And they weren't part of a cave ceiling at all.
In fact, they made up the sea floor.
And the Stan O' War II was, impossibly, sailing along upside-down.