Medusa

CHAPTER 6

THE B3 PASSENGERS HAD DECIDED TO REPORT THEIR OBSERVATIONS like sportscasters. Joe Zavala would do the play-by-play, Max Kane would provide the color using William Beebe’s writings.

At two hundred eighty-six feet down, Kane announced, “The torpedoed ocean liner Lusitania is resting at this level.”

At three hundred fifty-three feet, he noted, “This was the deepest any submarine had ever gone when Beebe made his bathysphere dives.”

When the bathysphere reached six hundred feet, Kane slipped the lucky skullcap from his head and held it in his hands.

“We’ve entered what Beebe called the Land of the Lost,” he said in a hushed tone. “This is the realm that belongs to the human beings who have been lost at sea. Going back to the Phoenicians, millions of human beings have descended this far, but all of them have been dead, the drowned victims of war, tempest, or act of God.”

“Cheery thought,” Zavala said. “Is that why you said hello to Davy Jones’s Locker . . . where drowned sailors go?”

Zavala had rigged a switch to turn off the TV camera and microphone. Kane reached out and said, “Joe and I are taking a short break. We’ll be back with more observations in a few minutes.” He pushed the button. “I need a breather,” he said with a smile. “You asked about the Locker . . . It’s the nickname my colleagues gave to the lab.”

“The marine center at Bonefish Key?” Zavala said.

Kane glanced at the camera. “That’s right, Bonefish Key.”

Zavala wondered why anyone would compare a sunny Florida island on the Gulf of Mexico with the grim domain of the drowned. He gave a mental shrug. Scientists were strange birds.

“Beebe sounds morbid, but he had a relatively benign view of the ocean,” Kane said. “He knew the dangers were real, but he thought the hazards of the deep overblown.”

“The millions of drowning victims you mentioned might disagree,” Zavala said. “I respect everything Beebe and Barton did, Doc, but from an engineer’s point of view I’d say they were just plain lucky they didn’t become part of that Land of the Lost. The original bathysphere was an accident waiting to happen.”

Kane greeted the blunt assessment with a chuckle.

“Beebe was a realist as well as a dreamer,” he said. “He compared the bathysphere to a hollow pea swaying on a cobweb a quarter of a mile below the deck of a ship rolling in midocean.”

“Poetic but not inaccurate,” Zavala replied. “That’s exactly why I built safety features into the new diving bell.”

“Glad you did,” Kane said. He switched the microphone back on and turned his attention to the scene visible through the porthole.

The B3 rocked slightly from time to time, but its descent was signaled more by changes in the light coming in through the portholes than by any sense of motion. The most drastic color change comes at the start of a dive. Red and yellow are wrung from the spectrum as if from a sponge. Green and blue dominate. Deeper still, the water color shifts to navy and finally becomes an intense black.

In the early stages of the dive, pilot fish, silver eels, motelike clouds of copepods, and strings of lacelike siphonophores drifted past the windows like tiny ghosts, along with shrimp, translucent squid, and snails so tiny that they resembled brown bubbles. Long, dark shapes could be glimpsed at the extreme range of the B3’s searchlight beam.

At seven hundred feet, Zavala switched the searchlight off. He looked out the window and murmured an appreciative exclamation in Spanish. Zavala had grown up in Santa Fe, and the view through the porthole looked like a New Mexico sky on a clear winter’s night. The darkness sparkled with stars, some alone, others in groups, some continuously flashing, others just once. There were floating threads of luminescence, and glowing smudges that could have been novas or nebulas in a celestial setting.

The cabin was as hushed as a cathedral; the loudest sound was the low hum of the air-circulation motor, so when Kane saw an undulating form float by the porthole his response was like a gunshot.

“Wow!” Kane exclaimed. “An Aurelia jellyfish.”

Zavala smiled at Kane’s excitement. Although there was no denying the beauty in the jellyfish’s undulating motion, the creature outside the bathysphere’s porthole was only a few inches across.

“Had me for a second there, Doc. Thought you’d seen the Loch Ness Monster,” Zavala said.

“This is so much better than Nessie. The medusae are among the most fascinating and complex animals on the face of the earth or under the sea. Look at that school of fish lit up like the Las Vegas Strip . . . lantern fish . . . Hey,” Kane said, “what was that?”

“You see a mermaid, Doc?” Zavala asked.

Kane pressed his face against the porthole. “I’m not sure what I saw,” he said, “but I know it was big.”

Zavala flicked on the searchlight, a green shaft of light edged with purple-blue stabbing the darkness, and he peered through the porthole.

“Gone,” he said, “whatever it was.”

“Beebe spotted a big fish he thought might have been a whale shark,” Kane said to the camera. “Until the bathysphere’s dive, his fellow scientists never believed that he had seen fish with glowing teeth and neon skin. He got the last laugh when he proved the abyss abounded with such strange creatures.”

“They’re getting stranger all the time,” Zavala said, pointing at himself. “The locals swimming around out there must think that you and I are pretty unsavory-looking additions to their neighborhood.”

Kane’s loud guffaw echoed off the bathysphere’s curving walls.

“My apologies to the listening audience out there, hope I didn’t blow out your speakers. But Joe is right: humans have no right being where we are at this moment. The pressure on the outside of this sphere is half a ton per square inch. We’d look like jellyfish ourselves if it weren’t for the steel shell protecting us . . . Hey, there’s some more lantern fish. Man, they’re beautiful. Look, there’s-Whoops!”

The bathysphere’s descent had been smooth and without deviation, but suddenly a strong vibration passed through the sphere as Kane was talking. The B3 first lifted up, then dropped, in slow motion. Wide-eyed, Kane glanced around, as if expecting the sea to come pouring in through the sphere’s shell.

Zavala called up to the support vessel. “Please stop yo-yoing the B3, Kurt.”

An unusually mounding sea had rolled under the ship, and the cable suddenly had gone limp. The operator of the crane noticed the change and goosed the winch motor.

“Sorry for the rough ride,” Austin said. “The cable went slack in the cross swell, and we moved too fast when we tried to adjust.”

“Not surprising, with the length of cable you’re handling.”

“Now that you bring up the subject, you might want to check your depth finder.”

Zavala glanced at the display screen and tapped Kane on the shoulder. Kane turned away from the window and saw Zavala’s finger pointing at the gauge.

Three thousand thirty feet.

They had exceeded the original bathysphere’s historic dive by two feet.

Max Kane’s mouth dropped down practically to his Adam’s apple. “We’re here!” he announced, “more than half a mile down.”

“And almost out of cable,” Kurt Austin said. “The sea bottom is around fifty feet below you.”

Kane slapped Joe Zavala’s palm a high five. “I can’t believe it,” he said. His face was flushed with excitement. “I’d like to take this moment to thank the intrepid William Beebe and Otis Barton,” he continued, “for blazing the trail for all who have followed. What we have done today is a tribute to their courage . . . We’re going to be busy for a while shooting pictures of the sea bottom, so we’re signing off for a few minutes. We’ll get back to you when we’re riding to the surface.”

They cut television transmission, positioned themselves next to the portholes with still cameras, and shot dozens of pictures of the strange glowing creatures that the bathysphere’s lights had attracted. Eventually, Zavala checked their time on the bottom, and said the bathysphere would have time to head back up.

Kane grinned and pointed toward the surface. “Haul away.” Zavala called Austin on the radio and told him they were ready to make the ascent.

The B3 swayed slightly, vibrated, then jerked from side to side.

Zavala pulled himself back up to a sitting position. “Getting bounced around down here, Kurt. Sea picking up again?” he inquired.

“It’s like a mirror. Wind’s died down and the swells have flattened out.”

“Joe,” Kane shouted, “there it is again . . . the monster fish!” He jabbed his index finger at the window.

A shadow passed near the edge of the searchlight beam and turned toward the bathysphere.

As Zavala pressed his face against a porthole, every hair on his scalp stood up and saluted. He was looking into three glowing eyes, one of them over the other two.

He had little time to analyze his impressions. The sphere jerked again.

“We’re seeing cable oscillations near the surface,” Kurt’s voice came over the speaker. “What’s going on?”

There was another jerking movement.

“There’s something out there,” Zavala said.

“What are you talking about?” Austin asked.

Zavala wasn’t sure himself, so he simply said, “Haul us up.”

“Hang tight,” Austin said. “We’re starting the winch.”

The bathysphere seemed to stabilize. The numbers on the fathometer blinked, showing that the sphere was moving up toward the surface. Kane broke into a relieved grin, but the expression on his face froze as the bathysphere jerked once more. A second later, the men in the B3 were levitating as if plunging on a runaway elevator.

The bathysphere had gone into free fall.