White Shark (13 page)

"Why?"

"Because getting
drunk under water is... well... a real bummer.
 
The worst
thing is, a lot of times you don't know what's happening.
 
It's a mellow, dreamy kind of drunk.
 
You forget where you are; you don't care;
that deep reef down there at two hundred feet is so pretty you think you'll go
have a look for a while, and if you think to check your depth gauge or your air
gauge, you find you can't read them, the numbers are all blurry, but you don't
give a damn so you go anyway.

"They've done tests on divers and
found that, as a rule, at a hundred and fifty feet a twenty-five-year-old male
in peak physical condition can't perform simple tasks he wasn't prepared to
do."

"Like what?"

"One of those puzzles you did when
you were little, where you put the round thing in the round
hole
and the square thing in the square hole.
 
He can't do that, he can't figure it out.
 
He's lost all power of innovation.
 
He can't change his dive plan.
 
If he has an emergency, if he runs out of air
or his mouthpiece pulls away from his regulator, he survives by instinct and
reflexes conditioned by experience and training.
 
Or he doesn't survive."

"Emergencies kill them?"

"Not always.
 
Sometimes they kill themselves.
 
You'd think it was suicide if you didn't know
better."

"How?"

Chase took a breath and looked off into
the middle distance, remembering.
 
"Ten years ago, I was a safety diver for a guy who wanted to film
black coral on the
Little Cayman
wall.
 
Deep stuff, two hundred
feet, two-fifty, about the limit of safe compressed-air scuba diving."

"People breathe other things?
"
Max asked.

"Yeah, if you have to work deeper
than that, you use mixed gases.
 
Helium-and-oxygen is one.
 
Anyway,
we took all sorts of precautions:
 
put a
weighted line down to two-fifty, posted a diver every fifty feet with a spare
tank so the cameraman would have someone watching over him all the time and
plenty of air for decompression on the way up.
 
I was the guy at a hundred, and there was a guy below me at
one-fifty.
 
The cameraman was wearing twin
eighties pumped to thirty-five hundred psi — big tanks, so no way he'd run out
of air.
 
He said he'd never been narced
before, so nobody gave it a thought.

"We got positioned, and the cameraman
jumped in and started down.
 
He went by
me and gave me a wave, same for the next guy,
then
he
grabbed the line at two hundred and stopped to adjust his camera and turn on
his lights.
 
The water was clear as gin,
so I could see everything.
 
He looked
fine, in control, his bubbles coming up nice and regularly, which meant his
respiration was good, no anxiety, no panic, nothing.

"A big grouper came out of his hole
in the wall and hung there looking at the cameraman, who cranked off some film
of him.
 
Then the grouper got bored and
began to mosey down the wall.

"Well, all of a sudden the cameraman
looks up at the guy below me, waves, takes off his mask —
his
mask
, for God's sake
!
—
tosses it away and starts chasing the grouper down the wall.

"I started after him, so did the guy below me, and we were
humming
, but there was no way.
 
We quit at two-fifty, and all we could see
were the camera lights going down and down into that blackness, till they
looked like little pinpoints."

"He deep was it there?"

"Two miles.
 
I imagine he's still down there."

"Two miles!
"
Max said.
 
"Did you feel it... the rapture?"

"Mostly I was in shock.
 
But
there was one second when I felt a weird envy of what the man must be seeing
way down there in the abyss.
 
As soon as
I felt it I knew what it was, and it frightened me, so I grabbed the other diver
and dragged both of us up to where we felt normal again."

"What about the bends?
 
Have you ever had that?"

"No, thank God, and I hope I never
do."
 
Chase gestured around the
room.
 
"Sitting right here," he
said, "
we
have fourteen and a half pounds of air
pressure on every inch of our bodies.
 
Okay?
 
Fourteen-point-five
psi.
 
Every thirty-three feet you
go down diving, you pick up another atmosphere, as they call it; the air in
your tank is compressed another fourteen-point-five psi.
 
So at thirty-three feet, you've got
twenty-nine psi; at sixty-six feet, forty-three and a half; and so on.
 
You with me?"

"Sure," Max said.

"Now, remember what I said about the
deeper you go the more nitrogen you breathe?
 
Well, here it is again — nitrogen's a bad actor.
 
If you stay down too long and come up without
giving it a chance to vent out of your system — it's what's called
decompression, you just hang in the water and breathe it off — a bubble of
nitrogen can lodge in an elbow or a knee or your spinal cord or your brain.
 
That's the bends.
 
It can cripple you or kill you or give you
what you think is bursitis for the rest of your life."
 
Chase pointed at the steel cylinder.
 
"That's why we have the decompression
chamber, in case somebody gets the bends.
 
The chances of it happening around here are pretty slim, considering how
little deep diving we do, but when the Navy offered us this surplus chamber, I
snapped it up."

"What does it do?"

"If a person gets bent, you put him
inside and pump the chamber full of air and pressurize it to the equivalent of
the depth the dive tables say he should be at to begin safe decompression — a
hundred feet, two hundred, whatever.
 
We
can pressurize the chamber to the equivalent of a thousand feet.
 
Pressure puts the nitrogen back into solution
in the person's bloodstream, so the bubbles disappear and he feels normal
again.
 
Usually.
 
But it depends on how long ago he was bent
and how much damage was already done.

"Then comes the
tricky part.
 
You reduce the pressure in the chamber very gradually,
which is like bringing the person up from depth very slowly, almost inch by
inch, so the nitrogen has a chance to flush itself from his tissue.
 
Sometimes it takes as long as a whole
day."

"What happens if he comes up too
fast?"

"You mean
really
too fast?
 
He'll
die."

They tossed their soda cans into a trash
basket, and went outside.

On the southeast corner of the island, an
enormous circle of concrete, fifty feet in
diameter,
had been poured into forms set in craters blasted into the ledge rock.
 
The circle had been filled with water, and the
natural boulders had been left within it to make platforms and caverns.

"It looks like the sea lion house at
the zoo," Max said.

"Good for you... that's what it
is.
 
I had it custom-built for Dr. Macy's
sea lions."

"Do you think I'll be able to play
with them?"

"I don't see why not."
 
Chase looked at his watch.
 
"But right now I've got to go make a
couple of calls.
 
Want to come?"

"Can I go ask Tall Man for a fish,
maybe try to feed Chief Joseph?"

"Sure."
 
Chase started away,
then
stopped.
 
"But, hey, Max,
remember... this is an island... water, water everywhere."

Max grimaced.
 
"Dad..."

"I know, I know, I'm sorry,"
Chase said.
 
Then he smiled.
 
"But you've got to remember, I'm pretty
new at this fathering business."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Chase sat at his desk and stared at the
fax copy of the bank-transfer slip.
 
Dr.
Macy's money would be good funds in the Institute's account at the borough bank
tomorrow morning.
 
He could pay Mrs.
Bixler, he could pay Tall Man and the caretaker, Gene,
he
could clear his tabs with the fuel dock and the grocery store.
 
He could even pay his insurance premium on
time, avoiding a late charge for the first time in months.

He should probably frame the fax and hang
it on the wall, the way some people framed the first dollar bill their business
took in, because this ten thousand was a real lifesaver, the first step on the
Institute's road to solvency.
 
If he
could keep Dr. Macy and her sea lions here for the full three months — and why
shouldn’t he?
 
The weather would be good,
and the whales should be passing back and forth till the end of September —
he'd take in thirty thousand dollars, enough to keep him afloat until the end
of the year.
 
Maybe by then grant money
would have loosened up for the bite-dynamics project; maybe he'd be able to
wangle some charters from cable TV companies doing shows on sharks or whales;
maybe... maybe what?...
 
maybe he'd win
the lottery.

Yes, he'd copy the fax and frame the
copy.
 
He'd enjoy looking back at it
later on, when times were better.

He wondered if Dr. Macy had any idea how
critical her ten thousand was to him.
 
And what did ten grand mean to her?
 
Nothing, probably.
 
The state university system in
California
sucked up
hundreds of millions in grants every year.
 
Ten thousand was probably petty cash to her.

He wondered what Macy herself would be
like.
 
All natural, he'd bet,
fiber-loaded, fully organic, no preservatives, one of those women who smelled
of lamb fat because their sweaters were knit from raw New Zealand wool, who
wore little round eyeglasses and had dirt between their toes from walking
around in orthopedic sandals and refused to eat anything that had ever lived.

He knew them well, from his days in
Greenpeace, and found most of them to be
either insufferably
smug and
self-righteous or ditsily, dangerously naïve.

Anyway, he didn't care if Dr. Macy was the
spawn of Tiny Tim and Leona Helmsley.
 
Her money was good, as so was her project.
 
The Institute's public
relations — an element of his job that Chase loathed and wasn't adept at
exploiting — could benefit from an association with her.
 
Good video images of humpback whales,
especially if they were breakthrough images of the kind Dr. Macy had supposedly
gotten of the
California
grays, would be tangible evidence of serious scientific work.
 
There would be stories in newspapers and on television.
 
Brendan Finnegan would have to eat his words
and find someone else to harass.

12

Max's foot slipped on the slick boulder,
and before he could catch himself he skidded down its face and found himself
standing in water up to his ankles.
 
He
called himself a few names,
then
sloshed through the
shallow water till he came to a place where the rocks were smaller.
 
He climbed them and continued his circuit of
the island, stepping carefully from rock to rock, aware now of the truth of
what Tall Man had told him:
 
low tide
makes for slippery rocks.

Tall Man had given him two fish to feed to
the heron.
 
He had approached the bird
gingerly, for it was big, its beak was long and sharp and its dark eyes
followed him as if he were prey.

Max had dropped the first fish, fearing
for his fingers, and the heron had snatched it from the water, craned its neck
and swallowed it whole.
 
The heron had
seen the second fish, and had taken a step toward Max.
 
Max had forced himself to stand his ground,
dangling the fish from his fingertips, and the heron had plucked it from him
with surgical precision, its beak missing Max by millimeters.
 
Then Max had tried to touch the heron, but it
had turned away and marched back to the center of its tidal pool.