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“No reason to be nervous,” Hendricks said. “It’s just like any
other day.”
Altman got the feeling that he was saying it to try to
convince himself. “No worries,” he said. “It’ll be a piece of
cake.”
They went down to one thousand meters, the sickly sea
life at first present and then slowly dwindling. Then two
thousand, the sea becoming more and more deserted, but
still a few flickers of life, the photophores of a viperfish
passing and spinning away into the darkness. A bony
fangtooth, caught briefly in the lights, looking like a halfformed
thing. A bathyscaphoid squid that resembled a
disembodied head made of glass.
At 2,700 meters, they could make out the lights below, no
more than pinpricks in the darkness. Slowly they grew
larger. Altman was still watching them when he heard a
whimper behind him.
He turned. Hendricks was pale and stiff faced. Tears
were dripping slowly from his eyes. He didn’t seem to
notice them. Oh God, thought Altman, something’s wrong.
Maybe I was wrong to tell Stevens to let Hendricks go
ahead with the dive.
But even then he didn’t feel nervous for himself, only
worried for Hendricks. Hendricks would never do anything
to hurt him.
“What’s wrong?” Altman asked.
“I don’t want to die,” he sobbed.
“You’re not going to die,” said Altman. “Don’t worry.”
“Hennessy and Dantec. What happened to them? We’re
not meant to be down here, Altman. I can feel it.”
Altman slowed the bathyscaphe until it was descending
almost unnoticeably. “If you want to go up, we can go up,”
said Altman in a level voice, trying to make Hendricks look
him in the eye. “I’m not going to make you do anything you
don’t want to do. But now that we’re here, we should take
the readings. You don’t mind doing the readings, do you?”
Hendricks took a deep breath, blinked his eyes, seemed
to grab hold of himself. “Yes,” he said. “I’m good at the
readings. I can do that. I need something to do.”
He let Hendricks busy himself with the machinery while
he continued to ease the craft down. Hendricks began,
running through them rapidly, Altman checking his work.
The signal pulse was there, much stronger at this level.
They should measure it again at two thousand feet on the
way back up, Altman thought—maybe the signal was
growing even stronger.
Then Hendricks tried to measure it again. This time there
was nothing; the signal pulse was gone. Altman took a
reading himself just to make sure. Same result. He tried yet
again and it was back.
So, Altman thought, the signal was pulsing on and off,
sometimes there, sometimes not. Maybe a problem with
the transmitter, some irregularity or corrupted circuit. Or
maybe it was deliberate. Maybe it was sending them a
message.
He glanced over at Hendricks. Was he going to be able
to hold it together? Should he try to get him up to the
surface as quickly as possible?
“Good, Hendricks,” Altman said. “These are excellent
readings. Let’s change our strategy for a moment. Instead
of trying to record the level synchronically, let’s take a
diachronic profile and see if we can figure out what the
pulse is doing over time.”
“Would Markoff want that?” asked Hendricks.
“I think he’d welcome it,” said Altman. “I think he’d
congratulate us for taking the initiative.”
“How long will it take?” Hendricks asked.
Altman shrugged, holding his face utterly neutral. “Not too
long,” he claimed.
When Hendricks nodded, he showed him how to
recalibrate the device and start it recording. Altman himself
kept the bathyscaphe descending, extremely slowly now.
Below them, maybe fifty meters farther down, were the
robotic dredgers and the MROVs. Most of the MROVs had
stopped, he saw, were on standby, waiting for the next
command from the surface. The signal wasn’t reaching
them. He made a mental note to suggest that arrangements
be made to control the MROVs from the bathyscaphe
rather than from the floating compound.
The machines that were still working had cleared a large
circle of the ocean floor of muck and slurry, digging down to
more solid rock. They had begun to break this up as well
and cart it away, digging downward to form a funnel. The
machines at the bottom were perhaps another two hundred
meters down. It was difficult to judge; the water there was
murky with mudrock particles and matter of other sort from
the rock they were removing. They were deeper than
Altman had thought they would be; Markoff must have
started them digging well before the floating compound
was moved into position.
He descended a few meters into the cone the MROVs
had dug out and then stopped. If he went too much farther,
he would risk being jostled by one of the robotic dredgers
moving into and out of the hole. He decided to wait until he
could control the dredgers and MROVs from the
bathyscaphe and move them out of the way. Besides, there
was Hendricks to consider.
He turned back to Hendricks. “How are you doing?” he
asked.
“My head hurts,” said Hendricks.
“That’s normal,” claimed Altman, though he wasn’t
entirely sure it was. His own head didn’t hurt, or at least not
any more than usual, and since the cabin was pressurized,
their descent shouldn’t have had any effect. “It’s just from
the pressure,” he lied. “It’ll go away soon.”
Hendricks nodded. “Oh, right,” he said, and gave a weak
smile. “Normal.” And then he squinted at the observation
porthole. “I think my father’s out there,” he said, his voice
filling with wonder.
Startled, Altman asked, “What did you say?”
“My father,” Hendricks said again. He waved. “Hi, Dad!”
Altman started the bathyscaphe ascending, gently, never
taking his eyes off Hendricks. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry,
Jason. It doesn’t seem possible.”
After a moment staring out the glass, Hendricks gave a
little laugh.
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “He’s explained it to me. He is
dead, and so the pressure can’t hurt him.”
“If he’s dead, he’s not here,” said Altman. “If he’s dead,
he’s not anywhere.”
“But I see him!” said Hendricks, starting to get a little
angry. “I know what I see!”
“All right, Hendricks,” said Altman, smiling and keeping
his voice level. “I’m sorry.”
Hendricks turned back to the observation porthole,
mumbling to himself. Altman risked glancing down at the
instruments. The pulse signal had increased in intensity just
around the time that Hendricks had started seeing his
father. He told himself that that wasn’t logical, that it was just
coincidence, but it was hard for him to believe that. It
dipped back down again and he watched Hendricks’s
eyes, which had been intensely regarding the observation
porthole, suddenly go out of focus. He snapped his fingers
in front of his eyes.
“Hendricks,” he said. “Look at me. Look here.”
Hendricks began to and then stopped, his eyes drifting
back to the porthole. Another glance: the signal had gone
up again, was even stronger than it had been before.
“He wants to come in,” said Hendricks. “He’s cold out
there. Don’t worry, Dad, we’ll help you.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Altman.
Hendricks got up from his chair and stumbled to the
observation porthole, knocking his head against the glass.
He hit it with his head again, and again.
“Hendricks,” said Altman, grabbing his arm. “Don’t!”
Hendricks shook Altman off and then elbowed him hard
in the face, knocking him out of his chair.
“Come in, Dad!” he was shouting now. “Come in!”
Altman pulled himself up and moved to the far end of the
cabin. The controls, he realized, had been knocked in the
struggle; they were descending again, slowly, and he
hoped he could stop it before they plowed into a dredger.
Hendricks was pounding on the porthole with his fists now,
stopping only to claw at its edges with his fingernails.
Altman searched frantically for a weapon. There was
nothing, at least nothing he could immediately see. He
searched his pockets, his person, nothing.
He crept forward, crouching. He reached past
Hendricks’s waist and flicked the lever even, was trying to
nudge it forward to make the craft rise when Hendricks
cried out and knocked him to the floor.
“Don’t touch him!” he was screaming.
Dazed, Altman stared at the base of the console. He’s
going to kill me, he suddenly realized. I was wrong. I signed
my death warrant when I cleared him.
He didn’t want to die. There had to be a weapon
somewhere.
Slowly, trying not to alert Hendricks, he wriggled
backward and away from him. Once he was as far away as
he could get, he sat up with his back to the bulkhead and
removed his shoes.
The shoes were modified bluchers, with a pebbled
Vibram sole but a hard heel in back, the sole flexible and
with a snap to it. He stood up, took hold of each shoe by the
toe box, made a chopping motion with his arms. Yes, he
thought, it might be enough.
“You’re not going to get him inside that way,” said
Altman. “You need to bring him through the hatch.”
Hendricks stopped, turned around to look at him. “I
thought you didn’t want him to come in,” he said
suspiciously.
“Are you kidding?” said Altman. “I heard your father was
a great guy.”
“He is a great guy,” said Hendricks, and smiled.
“Fine,” said Altman. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s
get him in here.”
Hendricks stumbled toward the hatch, then stopped.
“Wait a minute,” he said slowly. “Why are you holding your
shoes?”
Oh, shit, thought Altman, but tried to stay calm. “They’re
my favorite shoes. I thought I’d give them to your father,” he
said.
This answer seemed to satisfy Hendricks. He nodded
once and turned toward the ladder leading up to the hatch.
As soon as his hands touched the ladder’s rails, Altman
was on him. He hit him as hard as he could in the back of
the head with the heel of each shoe in turn, employing the
shoe like a blackjack. Hendricks swayed, started to turn.
Altman struck him again, then again. He crumbled and
collapsed into a heap.
“Sorry about that,” said Altman to his unconscious friend.
“I couldn’t think of any other way.”
He quickly stripped off Hendricks’s shirt and undershirt.
He tore them into strips, twisted them into ropes. These he
used to tie Hendricks’s hands and arms behind his back
and then hogtie his legs to his hands.
He sat down and put his shoes back on, then examined
the controls. Nothing had been hurt that he could see. They
were floating just above and to one side of the hole the
robotic units had dug out, probably carried there by some
deepwater current.
He was about to start back up again when something
caught his eye. An odd fish, drifting awkwardly into his
lights. It had a flayed, incomplete look. It was less like the
prehistoric-looking fishes that he had seen so far on the
dive than the corpse of a fish that had been dead and
floating in the water a few days. And yet as he watched it, it
moved under its own power.
There was something else puzzling about it. Rather than
a long slender body like a viperfish or a thick bulbous one
like a lanternfish, it looked like a long fish that had been
folded in half and then glued together. The head was
surmounted by a wavy translucent curtain of flesh that
resembled nothing so much as a tail. In the place of fins, it
had what looked like little spurs of bone undulating from its
sides. As he watched, a snaggletooth entered the lights
and the first fish darted toward it. The first fish caught the
snaggletooth on its spurs and, undulating, began to tear it
apart until the other fish was dead and in pieces. Intrigued,
Altman pressed a button and filmed the end of the fight and
the fish as it passed in front of them and into the darkness.
And then he saw something else even stranger. Here
and there, floating through the water, were patches of what
looked like flat, pale pink clouds. At first he thought it was a
ray, but it wasn’t differentiated in the way a ray was. It was
just a floating, billowing sheet of something. A strange
jellyfish maybe? A fungus of some kind? He nudged the
bathyscaphe in for a closer look. When the craft touched it,
it draped over the hull then split apart, slowly reknitting after
their passage. Some of it, though, adhered to the
observation porthole and remained there, caught on the
rivets.
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Altman.
Behind him, Hendricks groaned. He was tied up, but who
knew how long his bonds would hold? They had to get to
the surface as quickly as possible.
He turned off the override for the pellet release valve and
pressed a button. The bathyscaphe began to rise
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