Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet) (3 page)

They don’t call it the abyssal zone for nothing.
The abyss.
Eternal darkness, temperature 35º to 37º Fahrenheit, pressures up to five tons per square inch. Yet there is an even deeper zone, the hadal zone, down in the trenches, past 20,000 feet, where the pressure reaches seven tons per square inch. There are only a handful of places on the planet that qualify—and the Puerto Rico Trench is one. If the bucket from that spy satellite had not landed on a shelf, but sank all the way to the bottom...

He remembers the French Navy descended to the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench five years ago, and their Archimède could maybe have retrieved the bucket. Back in 1960, the old Trieste, she went all the way down to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the earth’s oceans, 36,000 feet beneath the surface. But the Trieste II is not the same boat, she doesn’t have the same pressure-sphere from that record-breaking dive, she doesn’t have the same float, the same systems. She’s a real operational submersible now, though she can no longer go as deep.

Abruptly, the sea about the bathyscaphe lights up, a ghostly radiance beneath the surface, as if the water itself has turned luminescent. McIntyre leans out and looks down, and he can see the flank of the Trieste II curving away beneath the waves, pale and spectral, blurred in the softly stirring water, a phantom whale basking in the night sea. He shivers at the thought—they’re only testing the bathyscaphe’s search lights, but the fancy makes something unearthly of it.

Ten hours it took them to ready the Trieste II, after they had flooded the USS White Sands’ aft dock well and towed the bathyscaphe out into the Atlantic; and soon they’ll be spending hours in the depths of the ocean, hunting for the bucket from this spy satellite. A long day— No, a long
night
. McIntyre was glad to give up nights like this when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, but he has to admit that right now he’s feeling a little of the old excitement.

He checks his Seamaster, they’re scheduled to dive at 2230, around twenty minutes from now. The water about the Trieste II suddenly turns black, and one of the sailors in the boat shouts something but McIntyre misses it. The boat’s outboard fires up with a cough and a roar, and then burbles away throatily. The boat bounces on a wave, its bow slapping down onto the sea surface.

Whatever the problem was it’s gone, sir, says the sailor from the steering thruster.

He’s standing by the small boat standoff now, hanging onto the rail, as the boat noses in close to the bathyscaphe.

Right, McIntyre replies, we’ll be all done below in about ten minutes.

The boat is near enough so the sailor scrambles into it. The prow swings away and the boat moves out to a position thirty feet away, its outboard still snorting and gurgling. McIntyre gives a wave, then enters the sail and climbs into the access tube. He shuts and locks the hatch above him, then descends the ladder to the pressure-sphere. Stryker and Taylor turn round and look up at him as he appears, and he’s struck anew at how small the sphere is and that he’s going to have to spend maybe six or seven hours in a space four feet by four feet square and five feet nine inches high. With two other guys.

All set? he asks.

Taylor nods and then speaks quietly into the mike of the headset he is wearing. McIntyre worms through the hatch, then he and Stryker swing it closed and seal it.

Flood the access tube, McIntyre orders.

He peers through the window in the hatch and watches as water splashes against the thick glass and quickly climbs up it. McIntyre settles on the low stool beneath the hatch, hands on knees, and says, I guess this is it. Phil, flood forward and aft water ballast tanks, let’s go see what it’s like down there.

Stryker is pilot for this dive and Taylor is on sonar duty. McIntyre’s handling the navigation, which for the moment is straight down. And then they’ll have to creep around on the sea bed 19,500 feet below, hunting the deep ocean transponder dropped next to the bucket because the bathyscaphe descends in a spiral.

He picks up the underwater telephone handset and informs the USS White Sands that the dive has commenced. See you in the morning, he says.

He puts the handset down and thinks, this is not diving. He’s wearing his khakis, he’s bone dry and will remain that way, and the nearest he’ll get to the water is looking at it through a window four inches in diameter and 5.9 inches thick. He’s been down to a simulated 1,000 feet in the NEDU pressure chamber, and spent a week there; he’s dived to 600 feet in the North Atlantic, and spent six days in decompression afterwards. The chipmunk-voice from breathing helium-oxygen, air so thick it’s a struggle to pull it into his lungs... 260 psi... 18 atmospheres... Ascend to the surface too fast and the bends is the least of his worries.

Sitting in this steel ball is not real. The sea has been a part of his life for decades, he works in it, it’s something he can touch and feel and in which he can immerse himself, it’s something he can become a part of. But this, there’s an air of falsity to it, experiencing the water mediated by technology and cold steel, separated from it. He doesn’t feel like a visitor to this submarine realm, he feels like an invader. Now, belatedly, he realises why he joined NEDU, why he turned his back on the Trieste II and walked away from her.

Strange, then, that he should only discover this by returning to her.

UP

Cobb lies on her back in the Mercury capsule she has named Destiny and waits patiently for the countdown to begin. It’s been over three hours since they bolted the hatch but she knows patience, she’s been in situations like this before. Not lying on her back in a pressure suit, of course, though she has done this in simulations; nor those long, silent and black hours in the sensory deprivation tank at the Oklahoma City Veterans’ Hospital three years ago—and when she heard some of the other lady astronauts spent even longer in the tank than she did, she wanted to do it all over again. No, her mind is drawn to the time she flew across the Caribbean through burning blue skies for Fleetway, the time the engine of the T-6 she was delivering to Peru went “pop” and threw oil all over her canopy and more oil seeped into the cockpit, over her instruments and herself. Though Jack Ford was there flying alongside, insisting she ditch, she prayed she’d make it safely to land. And so she did. She’s always known God is there for her, that these things happen to her because He makes them happen and He brings her through them.

Remembering that flight, she thinks of Jack, who passed eight years ago, he’d directed her into a landing at Montego Bay International Airport and told he’d loved her. And for two years they had shone so brightly together.

She can hear the blockhouse and the control centre speaking to each other in her helmet headset, but she tunes it out. The gantry has been rolled back and she can see blue sky through the capsule’s window. She recalls the excitement she felt when she watched Cagle’s Mercury-Redstone 3, America, lift from the launch-pad, rising up through a pale and hazeless Florida sky on a column of fire and thunder, such a pure and wonderful sight. Cobb doesn’t feel that thrill now, she is focused on her upcoming mission; she feels only a need to get everything right, to show Cochran and the others that she deserves to be right here right now.

The delay drags on. Through the periscope she can watch grey waves scudding across the Atlantic; in a mirror by the window, she sees the grey blockhouse. Below her, she hears pipes whine and creak, and then everything shakes and bangs as the ground crew check the engines’ gimbal mechanism. She thinks about the new president’s speech back in June—after Cagle’s flight President Kennedy was talking to Congress and he said they should set as a national goal “landing an American on the Moon and returning them safely to the Earth before ten years are up”, and she’s already thinking past this flight. She hasn’t even been into space yet but that’s what she wants: to be the first American to walk on the Moon’s surface.

The order comes through to top off the lox tanks. This is it. The countdown is finally going ahead. Minutes later, Cobb hears an infernal thunder as the main engines light and the hold-down clamps release with a decisive thud. The rocket begins to rise, slowly, ponderously, balanced atop its roaring pillar of flame. The top of the gantry slides past the window. Cobb offers up another silent prayer, this time one of thanks. She has much to be grateful for and she knows it—she was not first, but the Russians beat America to that, anyway. But she will beat the Russian record for number of orbits about the Earth.

The Mercury-Atlas rolls and shudders a little. Forty-eight seconds have passed, the rocket hits max-Q and the capsule vibrates, the dials and gauges before her blur. She wills herself to remain calm, none of this is unexpected, Cagle remarked on it happening during her flight. But that noise, that hellish roar, and the G-forces pressing her down into her seat, it makes it all
real
, this is no simulation. Oh this is what she wanted, this is what she prayed for—she feels such a sense of peace, despite the shaking and the demonic clamour and the weight upon her.

Twenty-four seconds later, the vibrations abruptly cease, the ride is smooth and clear and Cobb knows she is at last reaching for the heavens. After a minute, the booster engines cut off and the G-forces drop back to one as the boosters fall away. The sustainer engine continues to fire and the Gs build up once again, pushing Cobb back into her seat. The sky outside the window is black, and she says as much to Hart, the flight’s capsule communicator.

Cabin pressure holding at 6.1, she adds. Coming up on two minutes, fuel is 101-102, oxygen is 78-102, Gs are about six now.

Reading you loud and clear, replies Hart. Flight path looked good.

The jettison rockets on the escape tower fire, she sees it tumble away, and relays the fact to mission control. Capsule is in good shape, she reports.

Roger, you’re going for it, Jerrie, says Hart. Twenty seconds to SECO.

The sustainer engine cuts off as programmed, and Cobb is no longer pressed hard into her seat, it’s almost as if she’s falling forward. She relaxes her arms and her hands float up to hang before her. She starts to smile:
zero-G
. She made it, she’s in orbit, she’s above the sky. The capsule turns around and she sees the curve of the Earth below her, it’s so very blue and it glows and it’s streaked with clouds; and she can’t help saying, Oh the view is tremendous.

And there’s the booster, she can see it tumbling away, glinting as sunlight flashes from its white sides, a pencil of brightness against the blue, falling back to Earth, unable to escape as she has done.

You have a go, Hart tells her, for at least seven orbits.

Cobb closes her eyes, clasps her hands before her and bows her head as much as she is able in the helmet. She reflects on the glory of God’s creation and her current heavenly perspective upon it, she thinks of the part He has played in her life, she thinks of everything she went through, everything she did, to be here in orbit, the second American, the second woman, in space, and the first American to travel about the Earth 160 miles above its surface.

I’m coming back, she tells God silently. This is my first visit but it will not be my last.

She may have to fight Cochran for a second or third flight, or even more, but she will prevail. He will make sure of that.

DOWN

The trail ball, hanging thirty-five feet beneath the Trieste II’s keel, tells them they’ve reached bottom, so McIntyre orders some ballast dropped to give them neutral buoyancy. Taylor is busy trying to get a signal on the Straza Industries Model 7060 deep ocean transponder interrogator from any of the dots, but he’s having no luck. McIntyre kneels and peers out through the window—there’s not much to see, only the expected blurred and powdery sand of the bottom, tan shading to grey and then black thirty feet away at the limits of the search lights’ radiance. If there’s life down here, he can’t see it—and he tries to imagine what could survive with a pressure of four tons per square inch pressing on skin and eyeballs, compressing internal organs and cells...

Hey, wait a minute, he says.

He’s just seen something, a dark shape looming in the blackness on the edge of the light from the search lights. He can’t tell what it is—it’s not the wall of the trench, they’re more than half a mile from that; and another three hundred yards from the drop-off to the Puerto Rico Trench’s true floor.

You got anything on the sonar? he asks Taylor.

It’s unlikely: the minimum range on the sonar is thirty yards, so anything close enough for him to see is not going to be on its screen.

Got what? says Taylor. Hey, that’s strange. Multiple contacts. They just kind of appeared.

But McIntyre is still trying to figure out what it is he’s looking at. He lifts a hand and signals for Stryker to use the bow thruster to swing the bathyscaphe to port, and the sea bottom beneath the pressure-sphere rolls smoothly away to one side, the undulations seeming to propagate like waves across stationary sand.

Give her one third ahead on the centreline motor, he says.

The bottom current is about a quarter knot, but it’s pulling the bathyscaphe to starboard, so Stryker compensates.

Something vertical and sheer and flat looms out of the darkness.

Full stop, McIntyre orders, hold us steady.

It’s the hull of a ship, a tall slab of darkness covered in lumpy streaks of red and brown, rendered in washed-out greyish pastels by the Trieste II’s search lights. McIntyre can see a line of portholes, black circular maws in the steel.

Take us up about sixty feet, he says, and reel in the trail ball to fifteen feet.