34
They were still six or seven days away from the center of
the crater when Markoff decided without warning to put the
bathyscaphe through deepwater tests. Hendricks and
Moresby were to be carried by freighter thirty miles or so
ahead of the facility. There they were to dive as deep as
they could, until they reached the ocean floor, test the
equipment, the air systems, the communications systems,
sonar, lighting, et cetera, take a few readings, remain in
place for at least an hour, then ascend. Two submarines
were to go along and stand by in case assistance was
required.
Hendricks showed up at Altman’s door shortly before he
was scheduled to leave. He looked nervous.
“I’ve got a problem,” he claimed. “It’s Moresby. He tied
one on last night as soon as he heard we’d be going
down.”
“Is he all right to go down?”
“Right now he can’t even see,” said Hendricks. “I’ve been
trying to walk him out of it, but I’ve got to supervise the
transfer of the bathyscaphe. Do you think you . . .”
He trailed off, waited.
“Maybe you should say something to Markoff,” said
Altman.
“I don’t want to do that,” said Hendricks. “He already
warned Moresby once, and I don’t want to do anything to
get him fired. I know it’s a lot to ask, but will you look in on
him, see if there’s anything that can be done?”
Altman nodded. “But I’m doing it not for Moresby but for
you.”
Hendricks smiled. “Thanks, man. I owe you one.”
Altman clambered through the tunnels and up decks to
Moresby and Hendricks’s cabin. He knocked on the door.
There was no answer. He hesitated, knocked again. When
there was still no answer, he tried the door and, finding it
unlocked, entered.
It was a narrow space with two berths, the top belonging
to Hendricks, the bottom to Moresby. The room reeked of
vomit. Moresby was half in and half out of the bottom bunk,
as still as a corpse. Altman shook him.
At first there was no response. After a few more minutes
of shaking, he groaned slightly, his eyes barely opening
before closing again.
Altman shook him harder, slapped him.
Moresby blinked, coughed. “Give me a minute to steady
myself,” he said, and groped a bottle off the floor beneath
the bed.
“You don’t need any more,” said Altman. “Come on, get
up.”
“Who are you to tell me what I need?” asked Moresby.
He tried to stand up and nearly fell. “I’m a Moresby, by God,
a descendant of . . .”
He was still babbling out his pedigree while Altman
dragged him down the hall and thrust him, fully clothed, into
the shower, turning the cold tap all the way open. A moment
later, Moresby was shouting. Ten minutes later, he was
dressed in dry clothes and subdued. He was pale, was
sweating a sour smell, and his hands were still shaking, but
he was more or less presentable.
“You’re all right?” Altman asked.
“Just nerves,” said Moresby. “I’ll be all right once I’m
down there.”
Altman nodded.
“You won’t tell anybody, will you?” said Moresby, refusing
to meet his gaze now.
“Hendricks doesn’t want me to,” he said. “If it was up to
me, I would.”
He led Moresby to the submarine bay, where Markoff
was planning to pass them in review before leaving. The
submarine pilots were already there, the bathyscaphe
transferred.
“You stay here,” said Altman.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find Hendricks.”
It might have been different if he’d found Hendricks sooner,
or if the other submarine pilots had kept an eye on
Moresby. Or if Markoff had come right away, before
Moresby had had time to have second thoughts, but it took
almost half an hour for him to arrive. As it was, Hendricks
and Altman made it back just a few moments before
Markoff, and it wasn’t until he’d started speaking that
Altman realized Moresby was nowhere to be seen.
Markoff took the review very seriously. He wore a freshly
pressed dress uniform and was flanked by two guards on
either side. He thanked the pilots and crews and
technicians for their efforts, reminded the other two
submarine crews that they would stand by on the freighter in
case anything went wrong and the bathyscaphe failed to
rise. As for the bathyscaphe, if for any reason Hendricks
and Moresby—
He stopped. “Where’s Moresby?” he asked.
Hendricks looked around. “He was here just a moment
ago, sir,” he said.
In the end, two guards discovered him. He’d managed to
find a bottle somewhere and had downed a good bit of it.
Drunk, he had fallen from one of the lifts and broken his
neck. It’s my fault, Altman thought. I should have watched
him more carefully. He looked over and caught
Hendricks’s eye, realized that Hendricks was thinking much
the same thing, was blaming himself.
Markoff, however, didn’t react at all, and rejected out of
hand Hendricks’s request to put the dive off for a day out of
respect for the dead. “Just as well,” he said when the body
was brought to him. “That way we’ll be sure to get the
geophysical readings right. Sound all right to you, Altman?”
He had to repeat it twice before Altman realized he was
being addressed. “Fine,” said Altman, trying not to stare at
the body, at the way the head hung at an odd, impossible
angle.
They took a boat to the freighter in silence, the bathyscaphe
being towed behind. Once there, the guards held the
bathyscaphe steady as they loaded on.
“I’m still a little shaky,” said Hendricks. “I lived with
Moresby, after all. If it’s all the same with you, I’ll let you
drive.”
Though a little shaky himself, Altman was happy to have
the distraction of working the instruments. He eased them
slowly down. Before long they were resting steady on the
ocean floor.
“How deep are we?” asked Altman.
“Not nearly as deep as we’ll be in the center of the
crater,” said Hendricks. “Two thousand meters, I’d guess.”
“Have you ever been this deep before?”
Hendricks shook his head. “Almost,” he said, “but not
quite.”
It was peaceful there, thought Altman, soothing almost,
like they had come to the end of the world. He liked
listening to the quiet whir of the air recirculators, liked
watching the dark, almost empty world outside
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