Ocean Black

CHAPTER ONE

“She’s just too damned pretty for my likes, Chief.”

Orville “Bull” Kontas, captain of the Mighty Moose, didn’t care for the new paint scheme on his workboat, an ex tugboat converted to new uses by the Marine Visions Unlimited crews.

Kaylene Thomas had sold the other two workboats, Priscilla and Cockamamie, and used the proceeds to drydock and fully refit the Mighty Moose. In addition to her new engines and refurbished living and working spaces, she sported the company’s recognizable theme of white paint with a yellow stripe rising diagonally on each side of the pilot house.

“You’ve sailed prettier, Bull,” Dane Brande told him.

“Maybe. But not on a damned tugboat.”

Brande had to cede the point. The workboat’s captain had probably sailed every classification of boat and ship in every sea and ocean available. Kontas was over seventy, with no documented evidence of his true age. His black market purchased papers birth certificate and passport reported that he had been born in Shanghai of a Greek father and a Chinese mother, but the data was based primarily on hearsay. His bald pate had a rusty edged fringe of white hair, and the lines of his weather and sea beaten face were deep. His ears were huge and blistered. Whatever his age, his strength seemed undiminished, and his loyalty would never be faulted. He had been with MVU from soon after the start up.

It wasn’t until after the Moose came out of drydock that Brande realized how much pride Kontas had taken as master of a boat that didn’t fit into a corporate scheme. Her decrepit state of repair had not meshed with the MVU ideology, but it had meshed perfectly with Bull Kontas.

“Would you like it better without the yellow stripe, Bull?”

“Ah, Chief….”

“Go ahead and paint it out.”

“Well, shit. I mean, it’s your boat and all.”

“I don’t care, Bull. I just like to come and ride with you.”

And that was true. He liked almost any form of marine transport. After Brande’s parents died in an automobile accident, and while he was being raised on the farm by his grandparents, Sven and Bridgette, he had learned to like more water than wheat farmers generally appreciated. With his fifteen foot aluminium boat, he had sought adventure on Tenmile Lake, then Leech Lake, then Lake Superior. Obtaining scholarships where he could and working the summer wheat harvests, Brande had accumulated enough cash to get him to the University of California at San Diego, then on to graduate schools.

Though he had left the wheat farm, Brande carried much of his Swedish heritage with him. Henning Sven Brande’s wide shoulders and barrel chest were apparent in Dane, disguising the fact that he weighed 215 pounds. He was six four, and that too was a reflection of both Sven and his father, Stephen. Henning Sven’s antecedents, confused by the tradition of differing surnames Brandeson, Svenson, Petterson all had identifiable blue eyes, and Brande carried that trait forward. He had been unable, or unwilling, however, to continue plowing the ground that Henning Sven had broken in Minnesota in 1917.

Brande sported the hands of his grandfather, large with blunt fingers, but they displayed the scars of contact with coral reef and sharp edged equipment rather than John Deere tractors and harrows. His blond hair was bleached to near whiteness by sun and salt water, and his face was deep sea tanned and weathered, with early crow’s feet at the corners of his blue eyes.

Keeping his private life private wasn’t an obsession, but it was a habit. While his professional successes were the fodder of boasting, he didn’t bother. Brande’s quiet demeanor and self-confidence gave outsiders the impression of arrogance, but his employees, whom he considered more as colleagues than employees, accepted his indirect style of leadership without question. Except, perhaps, for Bull Kontas.

Stepping to the back of the pilot house, Brande poured two mugs full of coffee from the cradled pot and took one forward to Kontas.

Keeping one gnarled hand on the helm, Kontas accepted his mug with the other and said, “Miss Kaylene, she won’t like that.”

“You take care of the paint, Bull. I’ll take care of Rae.”

In the nearly five years that she had worked for him, Brande had always called Kaylene Rae Thomas by her middle name. He knew it was an avoidance trait. His wife, Janelle Kay, had died on their honeymoon trip to the azure depths of the Caribbean, pinned beneath the broken crane boom of a sunken Liberty ship. His frantic and unsuccessful attempts to free her before her oxygen ran out had partially set the course of his career.

He preferred to call the president of his company, for which he was still chairman of the board, Rae.

Brande stood next to Kontas and watched the endless blue sea rolling toward them. The waters off Southern California were calm and smooth. Off the stern, North Island disappeared behind Point Loma, and San Diego Bay faded.

Two hours later, the chronically taciturn Kontas, after a silence of nearly an hour, said, “There she is, Chief.”

Brande scanned the sea and found the buoy. It was a beatup, steel concoction emplaced for the duration of the construction phase of Ocean Deep, which was two hundred feet straight down. They had come today to replace it.

Bending toward the low placed PA microphone on the side bulkhead, Brande pressed the switch and yelled, “Both hands on deck!”

Several minutes later, Darby Jones appeared. He was Bull Kontas’ entire crew.

A minute later, Maynard Dokey followed him into the pilot house, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Okey Dokey was short of stature and hated dentists so much that he went through life with a chipped front tooth. At sea, he rarely combed his hair, which was a tangled mass of dark curls. He was wearing cut off jeans and a bright yellow tee shirt with the boldly printed legend, “Save the mammals? I thought you said mammaries.”

Dokey designed his own shirts and coffee mugs, in addition to intricately plotted electronics circuits and massively complicated software programs. When he felt like it, he could be a genius with a machine tool, fabricating intricate components for mechanical monsters. Despite his sea bum appearance, he was a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he carried the Marine Visions Unlimited title of Chief Robotics Operations Engineer. Robots being the prime concern of the company, Dokey and Brande were frequently in one another’s company.

He clomped into the pilot house and stopped in front of Brande. “The next time, Chief….”

Kontas had learned to call Brand, “Chief,” as a result of Dokey’s example.

“…I prefer to be awakened gently, preferably by someone with long, blond hair, swishing it lightly across my face. There should be coffee at hand, perhaps a warm croissant….”

“Coffee’s on the hot plate,” Brande grinned at him. “Maybe Darby has a croissant in the galley.”

“What’s a croissant?” Jones asked.

“God,” Dokey complained, “there’s got to be a better outfit somewhere, like the Navy.”

“The Navy didn’t have croissants,” Jones told him. He had retired as a chief petty officer.

Kontas reduced speed as he neared the buoy, saying, “Let’s hop to it.”

“I didn’t get my coffee,” Dokey said.

“Get up earlier,” Kontas told him.

Dokey grinned and headed for the afterdeck, followed by Jones.

Brande moved to the rear bulkhead, now outfitted with state of the art radar, sonar, and radio equipment, including an acoustic phone. Radio waves tended to bend in the wrong directions in water, and most of their subsurface communications were accomplished with acoustic transmissions.

Lifting the phone from its cradle, Brande said, “Ocean Deep, anyone listening? This is the Mighty Moose.”

“Voyager Two here, Dane. I’m surfacing.”

The captain of Voyager II was Ron Zendl. Eventually, there would be six Voyager submarines, passenger carrying vessels accommodating thirty two tourists. That was two more subs than originally planned, but expectations had risen. They were designed to operate at depths of less than two thousand feet, carrying visitors from San Diego and Los Angeles to Ocean Deep.

“We’re watching for you, Ron. How about Dot?”

“They’re loading her up now,” Zendl said.

“Dot,” was short for Neptune’s Daughter, a two man mini sub utilized for undersea chores. Her sisters were Neptune’s Niece and Neptune’s Wife, known as “Nice” and “Wifey,” and the three subs, like the Voyager class, were designed for relatively shallow waters.

“All right. We’ll have a package for her in about twenty minutes,” Brande said.

He replaced the telephone, slipped out onto the sidedeck, and walked aft to join Dokey and Jones.

Dokey had pulled the tarpaulin from the new buoy. It was, naturally, finished in white and yellow. It was eight feet in diameter, and it was not intended to serve any useful purpose for seafarers. Rather, it was Ocean Deep’s communication link. On top of the globular buoy was a fiberglass housing protecting a wide array of antennas and a video camera. A small radar dish provided a twenty mile scan of the area around it, triggering radio warnings to ships that might collide with the buoy.

Microwave antennas connected Ocean Deep with the mainland, and a satellite uplink provided a route for more heavenly communications. Rae Thomas frequently complained about the cost of MVU’s satellite communications subscription.

Another set of sensors for wave motion, wind direction and speed, temperature, salinity, and the like in addition to the video, provided inputs to the consoles on board Ocean Deep. The technicians and the tourists could monitor conditions on the surface. Those conditions were often a stark contrast to the seemingly motionless serenity at depth.

Dokey and Brande released the tiedowns, then Brande signalled Jones, who was operating the controls of the crane. The boom’s line went taut, stretched a tad, then eased the buoy from its cradle on the deck. When it was six feet above the deck, Jones stopped the lift, and Brande took some strain on a guideline to steady it. He studied all of the lines and cables, looking for undue stresses before he nodded an okay to Dokey.

Dokey slipped beneath the buoy with the end of a thick umbilical cable that was coiled high on the deck and began to fasten the connector in place. The cable was Kevlar shielded, strong as steel and contained as an inner core a bundle of fiber optic fibers.

Marine Visions utilized a cable of the single mode fiber type. The diameter of the filament was small enough to force a single beam of light to stay on a direct path. Lasers generated light signals in binary code pulsing on for 1 and off for 2 that zipped along the fiber at tremendous speeds. The high frequency of light waves allowed the transmission of thousands of times more information than was permitted by current flowing in a copper wire. The speed and data capacity of fiber optic cables reduced immensely the thickness of the cable required. A quarter inch thick fiber optic cable could handle telecommunications, computer data transfer, electronic mail, and image transfer with ease, and with space left over. This cable, because it would also anchor the buoy, was two inches in diameter, the additional bulk made up of carbon reinforced strands of fiberglass.

The laser light generators and receivers on both ends of the cable had to be correctly aligned. A cable inserted into a connector with a 1/64 inch twist off alignment would scramble all communications between the host vehicle and the sensors and antennas. Dokey inserted the male connector into the female receptor, levered the locking ring into place, and bolted it down. Or up, since he was working on the bottom of the buoy.

Backing out from beneath the slightly swinging buoy, he said, “I must have designed this, Chief. It fit.”

Dokey had helped, but the team had also included Kim Otsuka and Bob Mayberry, the respective directors of computer systems and electronic technology.

Brande released his guideline, disconnected it from the buoy, then waved at Jones.

The crane boom moved outboard, carrying the buoy with it, dragging its cable behind, and lowered the sphere to the sea.

As Jones released the crane line’s lift hook remotely, Dokey said, “I’ll be damned. It floats.”

“This stuff won’t,” Brande said, referring to the coil of cable. It was six hundred feet long, with a fitting 250 feet from the buoy which would fasten to the concrete anchor pier imbedded in the sea bed. The remaining length would snake across the sea floor and be attached to an exterior connector on the dome.

With Jones’s assistance on the crane, they lifted the coil from the deck, swung it over the side, and lowered it to water level.

Then they waited for the subs. When both Dot and Voyager popped their sails above the surface, out of harm’s way, Jones released the coil from the crane line.

Brande watched as it began to unfurl, disappearing into the depths.

Dot immediately submerged again, chasing after the fitting she would attach to the pier.

Zendl cautiously brought Voyager alongside the workboat, and Brande and Dokey leaped from the low gunwale to the tower of the sub, which was located well forward on the hull. The sail tilted back and forth in the wave action, and Brande kept a firm grip on the exposed hand railing. The access hatch popped open, and Zendl stuck his head out. Boyish and charming, the thirty year old had an adolescent’s cowlick at the back of his head, completely uncontrollable.

“Going my way?” he asked.

“Forgot our tickets,” Dokey told him.

“We’ll bill you.”

Brande followed Dokey through the hatch, then closed and dogged it tight. Descending an eleven-foot-long ladder brought him to the main deck of the sub, in the control cabin. The smooth, well illuminated sea was visible through the four large ports over the instrument panel, which was a Boeing 747 pilot’s dream. Red, green, and blue digital readouts monitored the submarine’s performance and position. There were two comfortable seats for the pilot and his assistant, though Zendl was the only operator on board just now. When they started carrying passengers, they would have a full crew of two operators and two stewards.

The first Voyager was already back in drydock, her interior being fitted for the expectations of the traveling public airline type seats, carpeting, laminated bulkhead panelling. Voyagers III and IV were in the final stages of construction in Bremerton, and III would undergo sea trials within the month.

Zendl offered Brande the pilot’s seat, but he shook his head, and the captain settled into his seat.

Brande often felt the pangs of jealousy in such encounters. He had been the primary designer of this sub, which was based on the configuration of the submersible Ben Franklin, but he was reticent about taking the controls from the people he had designated as captains of his vessels, whether it was Bull Kontas or Ron Zendl.

Voyager II was seventy feet long, and almost all of her operating systems were below the passenger deck. Water, trim, ballast, and waste tanks took up the most space, followed by the four gigantic sets of battery banks which powered the twin electric motors. The liquid oxygen tanks and the electronic components were mounted in an aft compartment.

He dipped his head and passed though the hatchway into the main cabin, which could seat thirty two people. Each pair of seats had its own porthole, the better to view the trip through Southern California seas. The Voyager craft had been given much thinner hulls than other submersibles since they would travel in shallower water. Additionally, they had sleeker shapes in order to increase speed. The interior of Voyager II had exposed electrical and hydraulic conduits along the sides and ceiling. The floor was steel, and the seats were covered in canvas. The utilitarian decor, finished in gray speckled paint, did not bother the work crews who were transported daily to Ocean Deep.

The submarines made their ways out of San Diego Bay on the surface, and the first leg was generally rough. Once into open sea, and submerged to a level of one hundred feet, most impressions of motion disappeared. The submersibles could make almost thirty knots subsurface, and the trip to Ocean Deep was usually accomplished in about an hour. Out of Los Angeles, whenever they arranged for porting facilities, it would be seventy minutes.

He and Dokey flopped into seats on the opposite sides of the narrow aisle as Zendl took on ballast and the sub began to settle into the sea. The relatively mild wave motion decreased, and Voyager II felt increasingly stable.

“The trouble with this job,” Dokey said, “is the more we accomplish, the less we get to do.”

“Agreed, Okey. Figure out another project for us.”

“Done.”

Dokey liked to get his hands dirty, delving into the innards of robots or diving on the sea’s treasures. In that respect, he and Brande were exactly alike. Brande had, at one time or another, fulfilled his wish list for sky diving, race car driving, scuba diving, and a few other adrenaline producing pursuits.

One of the benefits, he had learned, of relinquishing the president’s position in favor of Rae Thomas was more freedom to pursue the on site activities of MVU’s mining, agricultural, and seabed living experiments. Still, many of those projects were manned by experts in the fields, and Brande didn’t want to encroach on their territories.

The deck tilted forward, and the sunlight filtering through the water dimmed. Humming lightly, the electric motors drove them downward as Zendl added to his ballast load.

Voyager descended in a wide spiral, finding the sea bottom several minutes later.

Zendl called back through the open hatchway, “They’ve deployed Turtle.”

“Give us a look, will you, Ron?” Brande said.

The submarine drifted to a stop, and Brande leaned close to his porthole. Dokey crossed the aisle to the seat behind him.

Neptune’s Daughter was just rising from the sandy seabed after deploying the robot from the sheath beneath her hull. A gaggle of silver and orange fished darted across her path, and a lazy sea bass looked on with disapproval.

The two man mini submarine, devised and built in MVU’s San Diego shops was intended only for tasks that could be accomplished at depths of less than one thousand feet. In side by side lounge seats, her two operators had a fair view of their environment from within an aircraft like canopy. Less than twenty feet long, the sub was normally used as the control platform for tethered robots, in this case, Turtle.

Turtle had never been given a more exotic title. Like Gargantua, the heavy mover, Turtle had come to be known by a male appellation. Most sea craft were provided with feminine pronouns, but Turtle had always been Turtle, possibly in deference to his squat, solid physique.

He had a heavy metal body and two sets of rubber cleated tracks, giving him the image of a down sized battlefield tank. Guided by the operator in the sub through the Kevlar shielded fibre optic cable, he crawled along the bottom, waving his hands in front of him. A small rotatable housing on the top of the body contained cameras for remote viewing of the work performed by his three manipulator arms, also attached to the movable housing. Each arm had a reach of twelve feet and a specific duty cutting and welding operations, gripping and lifting, and spinning. The spinnable wrist simplified the task of installing bolts and nuts. Seabed crawling robots had leverage; they had footing. Robots suspended in the water relied on the power of their thrusters for leverage, and frequently they were found wanting.

Leverage was a basic principal that Brande had learned, or re learned, in agony when he had been unable to pry the crane boom away from Janelle and had been forced to watch her drown.

Now he watched Turtle trundle across the uneven seabed, skirting some deep depressions and swirling the leaves of a clump of seaweed as he passed. His control tether trailed after him like an exotic sea snake, and his three manipulator arms were folded in front of him like those of a mutant praying mantis.

When he reached the anchor fitting attached midway down the buoy’s line, he stopped, and his central arm extended. The hand, composed of two curving fingers at the top and one opposed thumb at the bottom, gently closed on the fitting and raised it from the sea floor. The tracks dug in and began to spin, raising a mini cloud of particulates. Turtle started moving again, dragging the fitting and its attached cable toward the anchoring pier, which was seventy yards away.

The mini sub trailed along behind the robot, providing the brains and the guidance for the operation.

“Love that guy,” Dokey said.

Brande did, too. Now, after two years of nearly glitch free trials with Turtle, the San Diego shops were producing his brothers on order for sale to mining and drilling operations. The cost of his development had already been recovered, and the profit column on that particular project was beginning to show positive numbers.

Revenue production was one of Marine Visions’ shortfalls. In the nearly nine years of their existence, they hadn’t yet reported a profit on total operations.

They watched Turtle at work for a few more minutes, then Brande called to Zendl, “Take us on in, Ron.”

“On the way, Chief.”

Voyager II slipped into forward motion, and Brande leaned closer to the porthole to get a glimpse of what Rae Thomas called Disneyland West. Brande thought of it as a revenue producer, designed and built solely to compete with tourist attractions like Sea World and Universal Studios. He didn’t particularly want to be in the entertainment business, and he thought of the project as one which, first, demonstrated MVU’s capabilities and, second, created income to support the loftier goals of exploration and scientific experimentation.

The domes came into view.

There were three of them, oversized and connected by twelve foot long cylindrical tunnels. Each of the domes rose one hundred feet above steel piers imbedded in the sea floor, and each was two hundred feet in diameter. The two end domes had airlocks and docking facilities on their lower sides, between the stabilizing legs.

Kim Otsuka had told him that she thought they looked like spider plants. An olive colored plastic imbedded with carbon fiber made up the hub, at the top of each dome. The super strong carbon fiber material was also used in the curved beams that radiated from the tops down to the bases of the domes. There were four horizontal rows of thinner structural beams, and the spaces between the structural members was filled with a translucent plastic that had also been strengthened with carbon.

The design, the construction, and the materials used had been tested for over four years on Harbor One, MVU’s first sealab, and Brande had utter confidence in the reliability of the engineering.

The official name of the complex, a separate corporation owned by Marine Visions, was Ocean Deep, though it was not actually very deep. Located thirty miles west of San Diego and about thirty five miles south-southwest of Los Angeles, the complex was two hundred feet below the surface, its foundation legs embedded in the Patton Escarpment. The tourists were to be given a thrill, not put at extreme risk.

The domes had been designed for specific functions. One would house marine theme amusement rides aimed at youngsters, one would contain museums and galleries, and one would focus on marine life. And still, Brande would avoid direct contact with the entertainment aspects. The company would own the complex, the transportation system, and the operating systems, but subcontractors would operate the internal businesses. The sub-leases were slowly being finalized, since the insurance underwriters had agreed to terms two months before.

As the submarine closed in, the interior lighting made the domes stand out prominently against the darkness of the sea.

Zendl dove beneath the western dome and slowed to approach the mating collar. The base of the dome was sixty feet above the seabed, allowing ample room for the submersible to wend its way to the interlock on the floor of the dome. The captain could look directly up through a port in the sail, line up a red painted cross, and blow ballast to rise to meet the collar.

A solid clunk reverberating through the hull told Brande the connection had been made. He waited while technicians above checked the seals, and then equalized pressures. A hiss and a swirling movement of air inside the submarine indicated that the hatches had been opened, and he rose from his seat.

Dokey followed him forward to the ladder, and as Brande stepped up on the first rung, he had a thought.

“Okey.”

“Yo.”

“Here’s a project for you. We want a system, probably in Voyager Five, for embarking wheelchairs. We don’t want to exclude anyone.”

“Good idea, Chief. I’ll talk to Ingrid about it.”

Ingrid Roskens was the chief structural engineer for MVU.

Brande climbed the ladder and emerged into the wide central corridor of the dome’s first level. Engineering and life support systems were hidden behind bulkheads. Two escalators, not yet operating, would move people to the upper level where variants on traditional amusement park rides were in the final stages of construction by the subcontractor. There would be “Davy Jones Locker,” “Shark Spree,” and “Orca’s Revenge,” among the attractions that Brande didn’t intend to visit.

Along this corridor, souvenir booths and fast food enterprises were getting their final touches. “T Shirts by Dokey,” was located in a ten by ten stall, a business commissioned by Okey Dokey, but operated by someone else. He liked to use ideas, ink, and paint, not credit card machines.

“You want to stop by Jack’s Galley?” Dokey asked.

“It’s not open yet.”

“Damn. And here I am, hungry again.”

“My grandma Bridgette always told me to eat a big breakfast,” Brande said.

“Yeah, but your grandma probably knew how to make a big breakfast. You’ve never seen me with a mixer and pancake batter.”

“And let’s keep it that way,” Brande told him.

Avery Hampstead was a scion of the Hampsteads of Philadelphia, but outside the pale of Hampstead appearance. His father’s handsome good looks had been wasted on others in the family, like his sister Adrienne.

Hampstead was identifiable from a block away by his protruding and over lobed ears which, if he were not a proper undersecretary of Commerce, he would have disguised with a 1960’s Ringo Starr styling of his dark hair. He had horsey, square teeth that were often revealed in a smile on his elongated face.

While he didn’t fit the Hampstead image, he did mesh with the family’s tradition of public service, joining two brothers and a sister in the nation’s bureaucracy. His youngest sister detested the foppish, intriguish ways of the capitol, and she had found her calling in promotion, from wrestling matches to fund raising. Like the rest of his siblings, Avery Hampstead earned his living. There was steel and railroad money in the family, but his father had other, unknown designs for it. Beyond education and a single automobile for each of his offspring, the elder Hampstead had provided only the philosophy that work was good for the soul and the psyche.

Fortunately, Hampstead enjoyed his work. He was the Department of Commerce’s liaison with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, overseeing the administration’s contracts and projects in the marine sector. He worked frequently with other agencies conducting research and surveys in the ocean depths for, while NOAA had twenty one specialized vessels in its inventory, Transportation, Interior, and the National Science Foundations could account for another three. The Navy dedicated eight ships to sub surface missions, and the academic institutions controlled another sixty vessels. Then there were the private firms which obtained federal subsidies for exploration.

It was a challenging position, and it kept him from aspiring to higher rank. Hampstead was quite happy where he was.

He liked his office, also, which to the disgust of Angie, his secretary, was decorated with framed posters of some of the wrestling matches Adrienne had promoted. They were garish, and the captions were filled with hyperbole, and he personally found the sport revolting, but they gave him a sense of balance with the real world.

Sometimes, he needed that when working so closely with academics.

Culling through a foot high stack of contracts that had adorned his desk for a week, Hampstead was deep into goals and objectives and the dollars necessary to fulfill them when his intercom buzzed.

“Yes, Angie?”

“The Secretary’s on line one, boss.”

“Thank you.” He punched the button. “Yes sir?”

“Avery, I’d like to have you fly out to Golden.”

“Colorado?”

“That’s the one.”

“Right away?”

“I don’t think there’s any great rush,” the Secretary said, “but the seismic people have an anomaly they think you might be interested in.”

“I can’t imagine that. I don’t know the first, or the last, thing about earthquakes.”

“This one’s out in the Pacific somewhere. That’s your bailiwick.”

After the Secretary rang off, Hampstead looked at the pile of paper in front of him. He thought that his prospects for the afternoon were dismal.

He pressed the intercom bar. “Angie, would you call Alicia and tell her I won’t be home tonight.”

His favorite women were all A’s. Alicia, Adrienne, Angie. He couldn’t have designed it better himself.

“Me? Why me? You always saddle me with these messages.”

“Because if I call her, I can’t come home tomorrow night.”

“That’s possible, I suppose. Do I tell her where you’ll be?”

“I’ll be in Colorado.”

“You never take me to these exotic places.”

“Someday, I promise.”

“When are you going?” she asked.

“I don’t know. You haven’t made my reservations yet.”

Paul Deride was a big, blustery man with a red face, penetrating green eyes, and a spreading halo of thick, blond hair. He was fond of wearing sunglasses with lenses smoked so black that his eyes were indiscernible until he whipped them off and stabbed his quarry with those bright eyes.

His torso maintained the same diameter from chest to hips, a solid cylinder of muscle and sinew. At six foot five inches of height, with wide shoulders and heavy arms, Deride plowed through crowds on the street or in airport terminals like an Ultra Large Crude Carrier. His determination and momentum were difficult to arrest, and he went through life with the same singleness of purpose. Many years before, he had plowed his way through the University of Sydney in record time, then repeated the feat at Oxford in England. Both of his degrees had been obtained on scholarship for in those days he was stone broke, right off a sheep ranch in the outback of New South Wales.

Deride drove his rented Buick through the Roseville area of San Diego, on the western side of the bay. The streets were all named for people he didn’t care about Emile Zola, Louisa May Alcott, Lord Byron. They were all poets and writers who hadn’t contributed much to the world’s gross production.

He found the headquarters of Marine Visions Unlimited by its small sign on the side of an ancient, red brick warehouse off Dickens Street. The offices were apparently on the second floor, accessed from a street level glass door facing a stairway. The ground floor was devoted to their experimental endeavors, he supposed.

Parking the Buick at the curb, Deride got out and straightened the skirts of his suit coat. He had expended a thousand dollars U.S. for the suit, but like almost anything else of a personal nature, he didn’t pay much attention to it. If someone asked him what color he was wearing, he would have to look down before saying, “gray.”

On one end of the building was a small loading dock, backed by an overhead door which was closed. He crossed the street, pulled open the glass door and stepped inside. Another sign told him he was welcome, just climb the stairs. A door on the right was labeled for “Authorized Personnel Only,” and he twisted the handle and pushed it open. Deride quite often went where he wasn’t invited.

Stepping inside the large, open space, Deride took a slow look around. Shoved into one corner were the remains of an old American convertible. It had been badly damaged in a turnover, and he couldn’t understand why it was there. He would have sent it off to the landfill.

The rest of the room was something of a lunatic asylum. Tools and welding equipment littered the concrete floor; work tables and steel lockers were shoved against the walls. Schematic diagrams and blueprints were taped to walls and lockers. Out in the center of the floor were half a dozen big work tables, and the odd shapes, electronic boards, and electric motors scattered on them suggested that six or seven differing projects were underway at the same time.

There were fourteen people in the lab, and not one of them took notice of him. They were bent intently over their work, six of them gathered together at one table.

He didn’t take notice of them, either. His attention was drawn to another corner, opposite the damaged automobile.

Sitting on a four wheeled trailer was an oblong monstrosity that Deride knew from experience was the result of practical design. It was about staying American twelve feet long and eight feet wide, perhaps two and a half feet tall. The corners and edges were all rounded. Deride had understood that there were legs, but they were apparently retracted, and the body rested on the bed of the trailer on four one foot diameter steel pads.

He walked slowly toward the trailer, studying the creature.

The forward end was slightly bulged and featured large round floodlights on stalks; giving the monster a bug eyed appearance. Below the lights were projections that Deride assumed to be the lenses for video and seventy millimeter cameras. Between the floodlights was an upright, circular housing that contained a fan. A similar housing and fan on the stern, combined with the forward unit, controlled the side to side movement and the horizontal plane rotation. A single propeller in a protective housing on the aft end provided forward propulsion.

Three rounded wells, two of them forward and one aft, passed completely through the body and contained three more turbine blades. Powered by electric motors, those blades would provide up and down movement, and judging by their size, Deride expected a massive lift capability.

In addition to the apparent lift capacity, Deride was also intrigued by the manipulator arms. There were three of them, mounted just below the floodlights, and though they were folded back in repose, he estimated a reach of around eight feet. Each had elbow and wrist joints and were probably capable of the seven axes of movement he had heard about.

Two of the arms were fitted with two fingered, one thumbed hands which appeared extremely strong. The third arm was outfitted with a cutting torch at the moment.

The whole apparatus was painted a virginal white, and diagonal yellow stripes the corporate identification of Marine Visions Unlimited ran up the sides from bow to stern. At the stern terminus of the yellow stripe was the legend, in black letters, Celebes.

Deride also knew, from the newspaper accounts of the Soviet rocket retrieval, that the unofficial name of the robot was Gargantua.

“Mr. Deride?”

He turned away from the robot to find a stunning young woman looking at him. She was tall, with platinum blonde hair and pale blue eyes that didn’t waver from his own. Definitely a bird of another feather, he decided. Most women demonstrated a large degree of timidity when they faced him. His reputation, his physique, or his money accounted for that, but he did not know, nor care, which of those attributes were responsible for the subservience of women. Or of most men.

Pulling his glasses off, he folded the temples and dropped them in his breast pocket.

“You know me?” he asked.

“I’ve seen your picture. You aren’t authorized to be in this area, Mr. Deride. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“I’m here to see Dr. Brande.”

“Dr. Brande is out of the country. Perhaps I can help you?”

“And you are?”

“Kaylene Thomas.”

“I need to meet someone in authority,” he said.

“I’m president of the company.”

He had known that. Deride always knew everything about any mission he took for his own. He even had a copy of her picture in his dossier on MVU. Still, it never hurt to put people down a little, keep them off balance.

“I see. Well, I want to buy that thing.” He pointed back at Celebes.

“He’s not for sale.”

“Oh, I think it is.” Deride produced his wallet from his inside jacket pocket and extracted a cashier’s check. Handing it to her, he said, “That’s made out for two and a half million dollars. I believe it covers your development, as well as a tidy profit.”

She looked at the check.

Deride also knew that Thomas was a pragmatist when it came to dollars and cents. He preferred dealing with her over negotiating with Brande.

Unexpectedly, she shoved the check back at him. “Not for sale.”

Deride held up both of his hands, palms toward her, rejecting the check.

“Why don’t you discuss it with Dr. Brande? Keep the check for the time being.”

He turned and walked out of the laboratory, carefully taking time to don his sunglasses and set them squarely and precisely on his nose.