The Deep (6 page)

“I can’t make it out.”

“Yes, none of us can,” Felz said. “I’ve replayed that section hundreds of times. We gave it to an audiovisual wizard, had her blow up the image and slow it down—it clarifies nothing. It simply happens too fast.”

“It looks like—”

“Like the ambrosia goes
into
the mouse, yes. Penetrates its skin. But the ambrosia is gelatinous. How could it solidify itself to pierce flesh, and not leave a wound? We inspected the mouse afterward. No hole. No blood. No scar. We thought since the entry point is near the mouse’s mouth, perhaps it entered there. We slowed the footage down, looked at it frame by frame. One frame, the ambrosia’s there. The next, it’s gone.”

“And it’s inside the mouse.”

“It simply must be,” said Felz.

The video resumed. The mouse lay still a few seconds, then hopped up and began racing around the tray, faster and faster until it flung itself out onto the bench.

Someone said,
“Damn!”
as the mouse skittered across the table with gleeful abandon. Clayton entered the frame, chasing it. Another man dashed behind him. Next came Clayton’s voice. “I’ve got it.”

The video ended.

Felz said: “Likely you already know what I’m going to tell you. You’ve realized that the
Hesperus
, the
Trieste
, and the trillion-odd dollars funding this project wouldn’t have materialized were it not for what happened to that mouse.”

Luke said: “It was cured.”

“The cancer was eradicated. There was not one discoverable cancerous cell in its body. It was
riddled
with the stuff and then, all gone.”

“What about the ambrosia?” Luke said. “Was it isolated inside the mouse?”

Felz shook his head. “The mouse was totally unchanged, other than the eradication of its cancer. Its amino profile and bone density and factors x, y, and z—all unchanged, except for changes that would naturally occur with the cancer gone.”

“But it’s just a mouse,” said Luke. “And it’s cancer. How can we know this stuff will address the ’Gets in humans?”

“Dr. Nelson, we would have searched for this
stuff
, as you call it, if all it did was cure cancer in mice. It’s a remarkable discovery any way you slice it. If your brother could have infected a mouse with the ’Gets, well, we would know to a certainty. But the disease doesn’t interact with animals, as you well know. We did, however, perform tests on cancerous human cells. Lab tests only, but the results were promising.”

“And that was enough to spur all this?”

“My God, man, what else were we waiting for? If not now, when?”

“So,” Luke said, “what you’ve found is some kind of—”

“Universal healer?” Felz shook his head wonderingly, a stunned smile on his face. “It would seem so. Imagine a drug that cures everything and anything. Whitewashes all the sickness in your body, fixing you completely. It seems crazy, but—”

“But this isn’t a drug. This is an organism. How do you know the effects aren’t temporary? Or that that
stuff
isn’t doing something to make it run around like that, to subtly injure the mouse?”

“Like what?”

I mean, controlling it in some way,
Luke thought but didn’t say, remembering the weird prickle he’d gotten when he’d stared at the ambrosia.

Felz said: “Are you a religious man, Dr. Nelson? Your brother isn’t. Men like us rarely are. But you?”

Luke shook his head. “My mom used to say she prayed at the church of State and Main, which was the intersection where the local bank sat.”

Felz nodded and said, “I only ask because of something your brother said. It was the one time when he sounded truly helpless—casting his lot with the fates, you could say. He’d been researching the ’Gets before this business with ambrosia. He couldn’t crack it for the life of him. Totally stymied. Then he encountered the ambrosia and couldn’t make heads or tails of it, either.

“One night after another fruitless session with the ambrosia, he said:
What if the devil unleashed a perfectly unexplainable plague on humanity? If so, isn’t it equally possible that God created the perfect, if inexplicable cure?
” Felz shrugged. “Clayton believes in keys and locks. For every lock,
there exists a key. You just have to find those keys. Find them, and trust in the will of a higher power.”

“Locks and keys.”

“Exactly, Dr. Nelson. Locks and keys.”

“And this particular key—you think it’s eight miles down?”

Felz closed the laptop. “That’s the hope. Perhaps there’s an abundance of it. Perhaps—and this is an admittedly out-there hypothesis—what we’ve found so far are shreds off a far larger organism. A mother-organism, if you will.”

A quaver passed down Luke’s spine. A
mother-organism
. Huge and amorphous and ageless, lying in darkness at the bottom of the sea. Jesus.

“Why wouldn’t Dr. Parks want to be part of this?”

Felz started. “I beg pardon?”

“Dr. Eva Parks. She discovered it. Why wouldn’t she want to be part of perhaps the greatest discovery in human history?”

Of course, Luke knew it had to be Clayton. His bullying ways. He was thinking about their childhood sandbox: how Clay had commandeered the toys for no other purpose than to deprive Luke of the satisfaction of playing with them.

“Dr. Nelson . . .” Felz licked his lips, smearing that ever-present dab of spit across them. “Dr. Parks committed suicide shortly after the sample arrived in our custody. She hanged herself in her apartment in Maine. In her closet, with a length of nautical rope.”

“Good God. Why would she do such a thing?”

“That I do not know. From all outward appearances she was happy. A good career. Engaged to another doctor she’d met at graduate school.” Felz glanced at the cooler and licked his lips again. “There is no sensible cause, but suicide is not a sensible act.”

A door banged open. Luke and Felz craned their necks toward the sound.

“The very man I’m looking for,” a new voice said.

13.

THE VOICE BELONGED
to a woman in combat fatigues. Tall and incredibly broad across the shoulders, that broadness tapering toward her waist, which was cinched in a thick belt. She wore no insignia of rank. Those things didn’t mean as much now, the same way a policeman’s badge carried less heft. Ever since the ’Gets, people were measured by their abilities rather than by the pieces of tin pinned to their chests.

Her hair was clipped short and her jaw had a long angularity that gave her face a sharpness, an intensity that was of a piece with her piercing green eyes. She carried herself with a controlled bearing that seemed almost robotic, each movement calibrated to deliver maximum function with minimal exertion. A scar roped up the side of her neck and trailed behind her left ear—thick and ribbed and pink, the color of bubblegum.

“Dr. Nelson?”

“Yes.”

She offered her hand. “Alice Sykes. Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy. But feel free to call me Al. Paul Simon may come sniffing around for royalties, but I can deal with that hassle personally.”

Luke liked her immediately—yet he got a sense of forced jocularity off of her, too: her smile was screwed on too tight.

She turned to Felz. “I take it you’ve filled Dr. Nelson in on the magical goo in deep freeze?”

Dr. Felz stood up straight. “Yes, we’ve covered just about everything.”

“Fine. We gotta get this show on the road.” Alice’s expression darkened. “Have you spoken to him about what’s surfaced?”

Felz said, “No. I thought . . .”

“That’s okay. It’s not an easy matter. Let’s hop to it.”

A four-seat golf cart waited on the deck. Al sat up front, Felz and Luke behind.

“A hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Al said to Luke as they careened through the floating minicity. Each building was painted a reflective black; the sun knifed off every angle, painfully bright. Luke caught sight of the sea through a gap between the buildings—the horizon shimmered, the sky a searing blue against the plate-glass water. Everything looked new and modern, but so many of the structures seemed to be half built or unused. It reminded Luke of those model communities on the outskirts of Las Vegas, built in anticipation of a boom that never came. The
Hesperus
had that same ghost town feel—it was a place built for great things that had not quite come to pass.

Al craned her head around to see if Luke was taking it all in—Luke diverted his gaze. He’d been focused on the scar that went all the way around the back of Al’s neck, a pink band that petered out at her right earlobe. It looked as though someone had tried to slit her neck, starting at the back. If she noticed him looking, she was tactful enough not to mention it.

“Who paid for all this?” Luke said.

“Everyone who earns a paycheck,” Al said. “You, me, the butcher, the baker. Not just American greenbacks, either: Japanese yen, British pounds, Chinese yuan, German deutsche marks.”

“That would be euros,” said Felz, fussily. “They replaced the deutsche mark in 2002.”

“Thank you, Dr. Felz, for your scrupulous attention in regards to matters of international currency.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Anyway,” Alice went on, “what you see here is the whole world, holding hands. We got a lot of support from private enterprise, too. CEOs, CFOs, magnates, philanthropists. Everyone’s smashing their piggy banks. Everybody’s lost something to this by now, y’know? And what’s money worth if there’s no future to spend it in?”

“Why is it all Americans, then? I mean, down on the
Trieste
? Dr. Felz said the researchers are all from the U.S.”

“I guess because America always rides point,” Al said.

They stopped beside a compact submarine. Fifteen feet long with a porthole window at one end. It lay in a massive canvas hammock. It looked like a huge lozenge—a vitamin pill for Neptune.

“
Challenger
5,” Al told Luke. “It’s being prepped for your descent.”

Luke said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I have no idea how to operate this.”

“Yeah, that would take some serious training. Thankfully, you’ll be in the company of a skilled pilot.” Al thumped her chest. “Like I said, tight squeeze.”

She leaned over the seat, jammed her face close to Luke’s own.

“Breathe on me.”

“What?”

“I said, breathe on me. Come on, don’t be shy.”

Luke did as she asked, too startled to refuse. Al sniffed.

“Okay, good. Nothing worse than being cooped up for hours with a guy with bad breath.”

Luke exhaled, chuckling now. “I’ve got Tic Tacs in my bag.”

She winked. “Even better.”

If I have to journey eight miles beneath the water’s surface,
Luke thought,
this Alice Sykes seems as fine a companion as any.

“Dr. Westlake came up in
Challenger
4,” Al said. “It’s still under quarantine.”

Luke said, “Dr. Westlake?”

“Dr. Felz hasn’t mentioned him yet?” Al darted a glance at Felz, a darkness settling into her eyes. “He was the third member of the team. Dr. Cooper Westlake. He was a—remind me what was his job again, Doctor?”

“Computational biologist,” Felz said as the cart got rolling again.

“I got to know Dr. Westlake pretty well,” Al said. The forced jocularity was gone. In its place was somber concern. “I liked him a hell of a lot. He seemed put together. But it’s incredibly hard down there. Not just the physical pressure; there’s the added pressure of what they’re trying to achieve. Dr. Westlake surfaced nine and a half hours ago, while you were in transit. Let me ask—has your brother ever mentioned him?”

Luke said: “I’ve never met Dr. Westlake. Never even heard his name.”

“I believe that’s the truth as you know it,” said Al.

The cart stopped before a building with a red cross on its exterior. Al rested her gaze gently upon Luke’s.

“What’s behind that door,” she said, “is Dr. Westlake. What surfaced of him. You don’t have to look . . . but maybe you’ll want to, seeing as you’ve agreed to go down.”

“What happened to him?” said Luke.

Alice showed him her palms, same as Felz had done. A helpless gesture.

“It’s still our world down there, Dr. Nelson,” she said, “but that’s like saying that the ice ten thousand feet beneath the arctic icepack is, too. Yeah, it
is
, but not anything we know. Our government has spent thirty trillion dollars on space exploration, and less than 1 percent of that to explore the world underneath us right now. But it’s just as unknown. You’ll be entering another world, really and truly.”

“It’s Luke,” he told her. “Call me Luke. And I’ll go. I’ll see.”

Al’s clipped nod made Luke think she wished he’d chosen otherwise.

14.

THE AIR WAS MEAT-LOCKER COLD
on the other side of the door with the red cross. Luke’s arms instantly broke out in gooseflesh.

The room was uncluttered. Halogen lights buzzed down on a bank of steel vaults. Luke had visited morgues as a veterinarian, most recently to perform an autopsy on a police drug dog that’d died after ingesting a perforated balloon of heroin.

“Every vault is empty save one,” Al said. “We’ve been lucky lately with the ’Gets. A few in quarantine, but none dead and no new cases reported in a week. Must be the sea air.” A gravedigger’s smile. “Sorry. Poor taste.”

They walked with aching slowness toward the vaults.

“Dr. Westlake and the others had settled into their roles inside the
Trieste
. The station was holding up. Electrical function, oxygen purification, waste disposal—all systems operational, which on the technical side of things was the main concern.

“Mentally, the crew seemed sound. Your brother was the point man—he gave the majority of the updates, so our perceptions up here were filtered through him. But we watched the other two on the monitors. They were eating, sleeping, engaged in productive labor. You’d see them talking and laughing with one another.

“There was the odd sign of strain, but that could be chalked up to their situation. Add to that the sensory deprivation. No sun, no fresh air. But our psychs are versed in signs of trauma fatigue; they assured us the trio was holding up well. Then . . . well, Westlake went off the grid.”