CV

9

The next day Chief of Operations Bliss showed him around the Control Center—it was not called the bridge—a comfortable, brightly lighted place lined with consoles and cabinets. There were four small, very thick quartz windows, the first he had seen in Sea Venture, two looking forward, one port, one starboard. For the rest, they relied on television screens.

Afterward Deputy Ferguson, who was going off shift, took him and Hal down to see the marine lab. Ferguson opened a door marked NO admittance and held it for Newland’s chair to pass through. Beyond was a tiled corridor with doors opening off either side. “This is our marine section,” he said. “We’re quite proud of it—a lot of very valuable work has been done here.”

“Justifying the appropriations,” said Newland with a smile. “What exactly do you do here?”

“Ocean charting, currents, bottom sampling, salinity and temperature measurements, pollutants, that kind of thing.”

Through the open doors Newland glimpsed office desks, filing cabinets, banks of instruments. They crossed a room lined with tanks in which large, bright-colored fish lazily swam. At the end of the corridor was a heavy door, open; beyond it was a room with a large window in the far wall.

“This sill may be a little problem.” said Ferguson.

“No, it’s all right,” Hal answered, and boosted the chair across.

“Is this a watertight door?” Newland asked.

"Yes. We’re right down at the bottom of the hull here, and that section beyond the window is open to the sea. Here’s Randy Geller, he can tell you more about it.”

Geller came forward, a tall, pale young man with a reddish beard. He smiled politely when Ferguson introduced him. “I was just about to take a bottom sample,” he said. “Maybe you'd like to watch?”

“Yes, very much.”

Geller led him over to the window, through which Newland could see a gray-walled chamber. Overhead were tracks with traveling cranes, hoists and cables; below was green water that surged slowly from left to right, slapped against the wall, and surged again.

“The pressure is equalized, I suppose,” said Newland; “that’s why you have to have the window.”

“That’s right,” Geller said with a surprised lift of his eyebrow. “People usually ask, ‘Why doesn’t the water come in and sink the ship?’ We could pressurize this whole section, the way they do in the fishery, but that would mean decompressing every time we leave, and it would be a nuisance.

We can also watch what goes on in there through TV cameras, but their lenses keep getting wet; it’s a convenience to have the window.” He pointed to a bank of television screens, only one of which was turned on: it showed a vague greenish background against which yellow motes drifted. ‘‘This is the dredge camera; it ought to be just about at the bottom by now. It’s a thousand meters here.”

They watched in silence until something began to show up on the screen; a pebbled floor, gray-green at first, then brown, then purple-brown as it came nearer. Geller touched a control. ‘‘This is an anomaly,” he said. “Manganese nodules. Most of them are farther southwest.”

Newland was watching attentively. “How big are the nodules?"

“I’d say these are about ten centimeters. We’ll see when we get the sample up.” He touched the controls again; the view in the screen rotated downward slightly until they could see the leading edge of a complex metal object, greenish-yellow in the light. “Here we go.” The metal edge bit into the bottom; a cloud of sediment rose. Geller threw a switch. “Now we just have to wait for it to come up.” In the screen, the cloudy water slowly receded; they saw the dredge again, with tiny particles streaming downward at an angle.

“One thing I’m curious about,” Newland said. “I notice that the water motion seems to be in a crosswise direction, but I assume that the camera we’re seeing here is facing toward the bow. Now, if we’re moving with the current, why is that?”

“Wind and current,” said Geller.

“Well, but are the currents different on the bottom? That’s what I meant to ask.”

"There are no currents worth mentioning on the bottom here, but from the surface down to about a hundred meters, the direction of the current does change—it rotates clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. So when we’re moving with the current at the surface, we're dragging the cable against the resistance of that fan of crosswise currents, and when we reel it in, it comes back at an angle.”

“I see. How long will it take to reel it in?”

“About half an hour, but I can show you what we got on the last grab, if you want.”

Under a large half-cylinder of white-painted metal on the wall beside the window was a marble-topped table on which was spread what looked like a heap of clods and dirt. When Newland looked at it more closely, he saw that the clods were purplish granular lumps about the size of his fist; the rest was brown clay. Geller handed him one of the lumps, and he turned it over curiously. "How do these form, anyhow? If that isn’t a silly question.”

“No, it's a good question. Nobody knows how they form. There's one theory that the manganese is in solution in volcanic material under the layer of sediment, and it filters up somehow and condenses out at the sediment-water interface. The reason you find it in fields like this is that it only condenses around solid objects, usually fragments of volcanic rock. But you find other things inside them, too—sharks’ teeth and the ear bones of whales."

“That's fascinating," said Newland. “Like pearls forming around grains of sand?"

A prim scientific smile twisted Geller’s lips. “Well, not exactly."

Newland did not quite smile in return. “Could we see what's inside this one?” he asked.

“Sure, if you want.” Geller took the nodule, picked up two others from the table, and took them to a machine that looked a little like a large stainless-steel nutcracker. He put the first nodule into the steel jaws, depressed the handle, and pulled out a little heap of fragments. “Rock,” he said, showing Newland a triangular reddish chunk. He put the second nodule in, cracked it. “Rock.” Then the third. “Well, well," he said. “Will you look at this?"

Newland bent closer. In Geller’s palm, half-surrounded by fragments of porous manganese, was what looked like a cracked hollow sphere of glass. “What is it?”

“Looks like an australite. That’s a real anomaly.”

“I’m sorry, what’s an australite?”

The horror began when Geller opened his mouth to reply. His eyes closed and he staggered. He came upright again, looking bewildered, with his hand to his brow.

"What’s the matter?"

“I don’t know. I felt like I was about to faint.”

“All right now?”

"Sure. Never did that before.” He bent to pick up the fragments he had dropped, and brushed the dirt away from the glass sphere. "An australite’s a kind of tektite. Found near Australia, that’s why they call them that. This one shouldn’t be here.”

“What are they, exactly?”

“Nobody knows that, either. They show evidence of melting and deformation, so they’ve got to be some kind of meteorite, but they’re never found together with any kind of meteoritic material that could have melted to form them. There are theories about that, too. I’m not that crazy about theories. What we need is data.” He put the cracked glass sphere carefully down on the table. "Wait till my boss sees this."