For a moment, making an effort, I forgot the manipulator arm and the precious specimens and sat up. “You look like you’ve got a chill.” I reached out to touch Dave’s forehead. He batted my hand away.
“Son of a turtle,” he said.
“Goddammit,” I said, simultaneously, and I was suddenly, irrationally furious, as if a flashbulb of rudeness had gone off in my head. “Are you going to screw this up because of something you ate?”
He cringed and clutched his stomach, eyes going blank under another wave of pain. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain around me, buster,” he said. “Grab your specimens and let’s get out of here. Quick!” he growled.
I pulled back in my seat, jerked the arm toward the drawers, and spewed the last tubes out, one, two, three, into their receptacles. So many more to collect. But training and humanity beat science.
Dave looked bad. He drew his knees up in the chair.
A pungent, tropical odor filled the sphere. It wasn’t flatulence. It came from Dave’s sweat, from his skin, and it was starting to make me feel ill, too.
Topside was straight up, eight thousand feet. Three hours minimum.
I took a last look at the Garden of Eden—what Mark McMenamin had called the Garden of Ediacara. Serene, untouched, isolated, downwind from the geyser spew, just as I had seen it in the photos—imagined it in my dreams—my triumph, the highlight of my exploring, perhaps the key to all my research . . .
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Diddly,” Dave muttered. His eyes went unfocused, wild, like an animal caught in a cage. He rapped his hand against the smooth inner surface of the sphere with a painful thwonk. The sphere was six inches thick—no risk of cracking it with bare knuckles. “It’s too . . . darned small in here,” he said. “Colder than a witch’s tit,” he added, eyes steady on mine, as if to receive applause, or criticism, for a dramatic performance.
Clearly not an experienced blasphemer. I stifled a laugh.
“I can call you Hal, or Henry, can’t I?” he asked, peppering the honey of sweet reason with sincerity.
“Sure,” I said. “Dave, we have to go up now.”
“I got to ask you.” He held out his hand, and the fingers twitched as if grasping something in the air between us. A little to the left, and he would have been strangling me. “I don’t really give a . . . horse’s patootie . . . I don’t give a dung heap if you know Owen Montoya. But did he ever give you a phone call?”
“Yeah, I suppose he did. Dave—”
“Did he ever tell you what to do with your life?”
This made no sense. “Maybe,” I said.
“Did your Dad ever call you, long after he was dead?”
“No,” I said. This shook me, and I started to get really scared. My brother had asked me pretty much the same thing. “Why?”
“Dog poop on them all. All the petty little bosses out there making their petty phone calls and telling me, of all people, what to do. Well, I don’t understand a petty word they’re saying, but they’re making me sick. Don’t you think that’s what it is?”
I didn’t think it was the hi-carb diet. “Dave, I can get us back. Just relax and let go of the stick.”
“You don’t know diddly about this boat.” He shook his head, flinging stinking drops of sweat against the inside of the pressure sphere.
My mouth hung open. I was on the furry edge of braying like a donkey, this was so utterly ridiculous.
With a dramatic shrug and a twist, Dave wrenched back on the stick. The aft thrusters reversed with a nasty clunk and churned up the silt below. Backwash shredded the delicate little garden. The golden lights glowed like sunset through the rising cloud of silt, and a few sparkling, dirty little jelly balls—xenos and bits of other creatures—exploded in front of the pressure sphere.
“No! Dave, get a grip.”
“Piddle on it,” he said coldly. Then he let out a shriek that nearly burst my eardrums. He flailed, knocked loose the data-glove box—leaving it dangling from its connecting wires—and pushed the stick over hard right. The little sub started to respond, veering, but the autopilot kicked in.
A small female voice announced, “Maneuver too extreme. Canceled.”
“Poop on you!” Dave screamed. He let go of the stick. His thick-fingered fist struck my cheek and knocked me back. I shielded myself with my arm, and he pounded that a couple of times, then grabbed it with both hands, torquing it like he wanted to break it off and get at the rest of me.
“Dave, goddammit, stop!” I yelled, really frightened now. Should I fight back against my pilot, knock him senseless, possibly kill him?
Did I really know how to surface all by myself?
He let go of my arm and seemed to reconsider. Then, with a last, final grunt, he yanked his control stick out of its socket and swung it around his head. Before I could raise my hands again, he crashed the stick hard against my temple. I grabbed my head with one hand and the stick with the other.
Dave wrenched the stick loose and screeched it against the inside surface of the pressure sphere. The metal end dug a shallow white groove in the acrylic. Not satisfied with that, he jabbed the stick into the sphere, scoring a pentagram of divots. He gave a doggy grin of delight, like a kid scrawling on walls with a Magic Marker. Then he delivered a frenzy of gouging blows, spittle and sweat flying.
I pushed back, ignoring the blood dripping onto my arm. Watching for an opening, I straightened and swung. He saw the punch coming and leaned. We scuffled like two kindergartners. I bruised my knuckles against the top of the sphere, then connected solidly with the side of his jaw.
My hand exploded in pain.
Dave dropped the stick. It rattled to the bottom of the pressure sphere. He curled up like a bug in a killing bottle and moaned. Then he flung his head back, mouth agape, and gave the pitiful howl of a disappointed child. His hands jerked and shuddered.
Dave stopped howling and lay stiff and still.
The smell got worse.
I watched him warily, ready to fight again, then lost control, doubled over, and retched. There was only a little sour fluid in my stomach. It dribbled between my knees and under the seat. I noticed that the silvery air pocket beneath the sphere, trapped in the sub frame, was no bigger than the bubble in a carpenter’s level.
So much pressure.
