All sense of time had departed. We were still in the early stages of the dive. I sat up in the couch and stretched my arms, bent at the elbows. My silvery thermal suit rustled.
I liked Dave. I like most people, at first. Dave was in his late thirties, reputedly a devout Christian, short and plump, with stringy blond hair, large intelligent green eyes, thick lips, and a quick, casual smile. He seemed a steady and responsible guy, good with machinery. He had once driven DSVs for the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. Just a month ago, he had signed on with the Sea Messenger to pilot Owen Montoya’s personal research submarine, his pricey and elegant little toy, Mary’s Triumph.
It was cold outside the acrylic pressure sphere: two degrees above freezing. Chill had crept into the cabin and the suits barely kept us comfortable. I avoided brushing my hands against the two titanium frame beams that passed aft through the sphere. They were covered with dew.
Dave grunted expressively and squirmed in his seat, not embarrassed, just uncomfortable. “Sorry.”
My nostrils flared.
“Go ahead and let it out,” Dave suggested. “It’ll clear.”
“I’m comfy,” I said.
“Well, you’ll have to put up with me. Rice and macaroni last night, lots of pepper.”
“I eat nothing but fish before a dive. No gas.” That sounded geeky and Boy Scout, but I was in fact comfortable. Be prepared.
“I’m trying to lose weight,” Dave confessed. “High-carb diet.”
“Um.”
“A few more lights?” Dave asked. He toggled a couple of switches and three more tensor lamps threw white spots around the sub’s controls. He turned their focused glare away from two little turquoise screens crammed with schematics and scrolling numbers: dutiful reports from fuel cells and batteries, the onboard computer, transponder navigation, fore and aft thrusters. When we were at depth, a third, larger overhead screen—now blank—could switch between video from digital cameras and images from side-scanning sonar.
All we could hear from outside, through the sphere and the hull, was the ping of active sonar.
Everything nominal, but I was still apprehensive. There was little risk in the DSV, so Jason the controller and dive master had told me before my first plunge. Just follow the routine and your training.
I wasn’t afraid of pain or discomfort, but I anticipated a scale of life that put all risk in a new perspective. Every new and possibly dangerous adventure could prematurely cap a span not of fourscore and ten, but of a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years . . .
So far, this was just an itch, an attitude I was well aware needed adjustment. It hadn’t yet reached the level of phobia.
At twenty-nine years of age, I worked hard to avoid what Rob had once called the syndrome of Precious Me. I could always rely on Rob to provide sharp insight. In truth, part of me might have welcomed a little vacation. The void might be a pleasure compared to the anxious, egocentric perplexity of my recent existence: divorced, cell-phone guru for radio talk shows, semicelebrity, beggar-scientist, mendicant, dreamer, fool. Prince Hal, my coat, my vehicle, forever and ever.
Spooky.
“You look philosophical,” Dave said.
“I feel useless,” I said.
“Me too, sometimes. This baby practically drives herself,” Dave said. “You can help me do a routine check in ten. Then we’ll make our report to Mother.”
“Sure.” Anything.
I rolled and adjusted the couch to lie on my stomach, Cousteau-style, closer to the chill surface of the bubble. My breath misted the smooth plastic, a spot of fog in the surreal darkness. Experimentally, I raised my digital Nikon, its lens hood wrapped in rubber tape to avoid scratching the sphere. I looked at the camera screen, played with the exposure, experimented with pixel density and file size.
“They also serve who sit and wait,” Dave said, adjusting the sub’s trim. Motors whined starboard. “Sometimes we play chess.”
“I hate chess,” I confessed. “Time is precious and should be put to constructive use.”
Dave grinned. “Nadia warned me.”
Nadia Evans, the number one sub driver on the Sea Messenger, was sick in her bunk topside. A rich, creamy pudding past its prime had made eight of our crew very unhappy. Nadia had planned to take me on this dive, but a deep submersible, lacking a toilet, is no place for the shits.
Best to keep focused on where we were going and what we might see. Dropping into Planet Extreme. Eternal darkness and incredible pressure.
Still more than a mile below, at irregular intervals along the network of spreading trenches, massive underwater geysers spewed roiling plumes of superheated water, toxic sulfides, and deep-crust bacteria. Minerals in the flow accreted to erect chimneys around the geysers. Some of the chimneys stood as tall as industrial smokestacks and grew broad horizontal fans like tree fungi. Sulfurous outflow fizzed through cracks and pores everywhere. Magma squeezed out of deeper cracks like black, grainy toothpaste, snapping like reptiles in combat. Close by, at depth, through the hydrophone, you could hear the vents hissing and roaring. Wags had named one huge chimney “Godzilla.”
Gargantuan Earth music.
Down there, the water is saturated with the deep’s chemical equivalent of sunshine. Hydrogen sulfide soup feeds specialized bacteria, which in turn prop up an isolated food chain. Tube worms crest old lava flows and gather around the vents in sociable forests, like long, skinny, red-tipped penises. Royal little white crabs mosey through the waving stalks as if they have all the time there is. Long, lazy, rat-tail fish—deep-water vultures with big curious eyes—pause like question marks, waiting for death to drop their small ration of dinner.
I shivered. DSV pilots believe the cold keeps you alert. Dave coughed and took a swig of bottled water, then returned the bottle to the cup holder. Nadia had been much more entertaining: witty, pretty, and eager to explain her deep-diving baby.
The little sphere, just over two meters wide, filled with reassuring sounds: the ping of a directional signal every few seconds, hollow little beeps from transponders dropped months before, another ping from sonar, steady ticking, the sigh and whine of pumps and click of solenoids.
I rolled on my butt and bent the couch back into a seat, then doubled over to pull up my slippers—thick knitted booties, actually, with rubber soles. I stared between my knees at a shimmer of air trapped in the sub’s frame below the sphere. The silvery wobble had been many times larger just forty minutes ago.
Two thousand feet. The outside pressure was now sixty atmospheres, 840 pounds per square inch. Nadia had described it as a Really Large Guy pogo-sticking all over your head. Inside, at one atmosphere, we could not feel it. The sphere distributed the pressure evenly. No bends, no tremors, no rapture of the deep. Shirtsleeve travel, almost. We wouldn’t even need to spend time in a chamber when we surfaced.
The sub carried a load of steel bars, ballast to be dropped when we wanted to switch to near-neutral buoyancy. Dave would turn on the altimeter at about a hundred feet above the seafloor and let the ingots rip like little bombs. Sometimes the DSV held on to a few, staying a little heavy, and pointed her thrusters down to hover like a helicopter. A little lighter, and she could “float,” aiming the thrusters up to avoid raising silt.
An hour into the dive. Twenty-seven hundred feet. The sphere was getting colder and time was definitely speeding up.
“When did you meet Owen Montoya?” Dave asked.
“A few weeks ago,” I said. Montoya was a fascinating topic around the office water cooler: the elusive rich guy who employed everyone on the Sea Messenger.
