White Shark (3 page)

Down, down it went, passing through two
thousand feet, then five thousand.
 
And with
every thirty-three feet another fifteen pounds of water pressure forced the
hull, rushed into tiny pockets of residual air and crushed them like
grapes.
 
At ten thousand feet, more than
two tons of water pressed against every square millimeter of steel, and the
last scintilla of air popped from the shattered hulk and drifted upward in the
darkness.

The submarine descended as if it were a
discarded soda can, until finally it struck a mountainside, bounced and rolled
in slow motion, throwing clouds of unseen silt and dislodging boulders that
accompanied it into a stygian canyon.
 
There, at last, it came to a halt, a heap of twisted steel.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

In the rubble of the bow, the huge box,
cast of bronze, sealed with rubber, denied penetration to the seeking sea.

The silt settled, time
passed.
 
Legions of infinitesimal organisms that
patrolled the abyss consumed what was edible.

Calm returned to the ocean bottom, and the
relentless cycle of life and death went on.

Part Two

1996

Latitude 26
Degrees North

Longitude 45
Degrees West

5

Absolute darkness is rare on earth.
 
Even on a moonless night, with clouds hiding
the stars, the loom of civilization glows against the sky.

In the deep oceans, absolute darkness is
commonplace.
 
Rays of the sun, thought
for millennia to be the sole source of life on earth, can penetrate less than
half a mile of seawater.
 
Nearly three
quarters of the planet — vast plains, great canyons, mountain ranges that rival
the
Himalayas
— are shrouded in perpetual
black, broken occasionally by bioluminescent organisms that sparkle with
predatory or reproductive intent.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Two submersibles hovered side by side like
alien crabs — white-bodied, brilliant-eyed.
 
The two five-thousand-watt lights mounted on their concave snouts cast a
path of gold some two hundred feet in front of them.

"Four thousand meters," one of
the pilots said into his radio.
 
"The pass should be dead ahead.
 
I'm going in."

"Roger that," the other pilot
replied.
 
"I'm right behind
you."

Propellers turned simultaneously as
electric motors were engaged, and the first submersible moved slowly ahead.

Inside the steel capsule — only ten feet
long and six feet across — David Webber half lay, half crouched beside the
pilot and pressed his face to a six-inch porthole as the lamps picked up steep
gray escarpments of dirt and rock that seemed to go on forever, as if
descending from nowhere above to nowhere below.

Four thousand meters, Webber thought.
 
Thirteen thousand feet of
water, more or less.
 
Two and a half miles.
 
All that water above him, all that pressure around him.
 
How much pressure?
 
Incalculable.
 
But certainly enough to
turn him into a Pudding Pop.

Don't think about it, he told
himself.
 
If you think about it, you'll
go apeshit.
 
And this is not a good time or
place to go apeshit.
 
You need the work,
you need the money.
 
Just get the job
done and get the hell out of here.

A few drops of condensation dripped from
overhead, landed on his neck, and he jumped.

The pilot glanced at him and laughed.
 
"Wish I'd have seen it coming," he
said.
 
"I'd have screamed along with
you, made you think we were buying the farm."
 
He grinned.
 
"I like to do that to first-timers, watch ‘em
go
goggle-eyed."

"Nice," Webber said.
 
"I'd have sent you my cleaning
bill."
 
He shivered and crossed his
arms to rub his shoulders.
 
It had been
85 degrees on the surface, and he had been sweating in his wool pullover, wool
socks and corduroy trousers.
 
But in the
three hours it had taken them to descend, the temperature had dropped more than
fifty degrees.
 
He was freezing.
 
He was still sweating, but now it was from
fear.

"What's the water temperature out
there?" he asked, not from genuine curiosity but because there was comfort
in conversation.

"Thirty, thirty-two," the pilot
said.
 
"Cold enough to pucker your
dickie, that's for sure."

Webber turned back to his porthole and
rested a hand on the controls of one of the four cameras he had installed in
movable housings bolted to the skin of the submersible.
 
The boat was skimming the side of a canyon
wasteland, an endless terrain of monochromatic rubble that looked less inviting
than the surface of the moon.
 
He kept
reminding himself that his and the pilot's were the first human eyes ever to
see this landscape, and his lenses would be the first to record it on film.

"Hard to believe things actually live
down here," he said.

"Oh, yeah,
there's
things
, but nothing like you've ever seen.
 
There's albino critters and things with no
eyes — I mean, talk about tits on a bull, what good's eyes gonna do ‘em
here?
 
There's
transparent things
— shit, there's life of some kind damn near
everywhere.
 
‘Course, I can't speak for
the
bottom
bottom, like thirty-five
thousand feet.
 
I
never
been
down there.
 
But, sure,
there's life all around here.
 
What's got
everybody in an uproar is the idea that some kinds of life actually
begin
here."

"Yeah," Webber said.
 
"So I hear.
 
They're calling it chemosynthesis."

Chemosynthesis, that
was the point, the reason he was here.
 
Here, freezing his ass off two miles down in
the sea, in an utter, impenetrable blackness.

Chemosynthesis:
 
the generation of life without light; the
concept that living things could be created by chemicals alone.
 
Fascinating.
 
Revolutionary.
 
Undocumented.

To discover evidence that chemosynthesis
was possible, to record that evidence, to prove its existence beyond all
reasonable doubt — this was his assignment, a photographer's dream.
 
A freelancer on contract to
National Geographic
, Webber was to take
the first pictures ever of deep-ocean vents in the recently discovered Kristof
Trench,
a the
bottom of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge just
west of the
Azores
.
 
These vents, like postulant sores on the skin
of the earth, spewed out molten rock from the bowels of the planet into the icy
water.
 
The vents themselves were
mini-volcanoes, but they were believed to harbor life forms that had been
created by, and fed from, the chemicals the vents emitted.
 
In other words,
chemosynthesis.
 
Life forms
created chemically, and which did not need — did not know, could be born and
live and die without — sunlight.

He had been chosen for the assignment over
several of his peers because he was celebrated for possessing great ingenuity
with his cameras, his lenses and his housings; and also because of his youth
and his courage.
 
He had accepted the
assignment partly for the money, partly for the credit in the magazine, but
mostly for the thrill of being the first to prove that this oddity of science
really could occur in the sea, in nature.

He hadn't thought of fear; he considered
himself inured to fear.
 
Over the past
fifteen years, he had lived through three plane crashes, an attack by a wounded
lioness, bites from sharks and moray eels, scorpion stings and infestation by a
succession of exotic parasites and amoebas that had caused, among other
inconveniences, the temporary loss of all body hair and the sloughing of the
skin from his tongue and penis.

He was accustomed
. in
short, to surprises, to the bizarre tricks nature could throw at him.

What he hadn't suspected, had not even imagined
and was amazed to discover in just the past few hours, was that he had become a
claustrophobe.

When did this happen?
 
And why?
 
Blundering around blindly in an underwater
mountain range deeper than the Rockies were high, with his survival dependent on
the skills of some laid-back sub jockey at the helm of a miniscule capsule that
had probably been welded together by the lowest bidder, Webber felt
unwell:
 
suffocated, compressed,
imprisoned, ill.

Why hadn't he listened to his girlfriend
and taken the other assignment instead?
 
He'd be much happier in the
Coral Sea
,
shooting close-ups of poisonous sea snakes.
 
At least there he'd have some control; if things got hairy, he could
just get out of the water.

But, no, he had to have the glory of being
the first.

Asshole.

"How much farther?" he asked,
eager for his voice to distract him from the sounds of his own heart.

"To the smoker?
 
No too
long."
 
The pilot tapped a gauge on
the panel before him.
 
"Water temp's
creeping up.
 
We gotta be close."

As the submersible rounded a sharp point
of rock in the cliff face, its lights were suddenly dimmed by a cloud of thick
black smoke.

"Here we are," the pilot said,
and he stopped the boat's forward motion and reversed.
 
They descended until the lights cleared.

Webber hunched forward and gripped his
camera controls.
 
"Tell Charlie to
see if he can move around to the other side," he said.
 
"I want to get him in the frame."

"Will do."
 
The pilot
spoke into his microphone, and Webber saw the white shape of the other submersible
drift through the black cloud and
hover
spectrally.

From this distance, the vent didn't look
like much:
 
a roiling plume of black
smoke against a background of black water, with occasional slashes of
red-orange flame as the belly of the earth belched molten rock up through its
skin.
 
But the
Geographic
wanted comprehensive coverage of everything he saw, no
matter how mundane, so Webber began to shoot.

Each camera was loaded with one hundred
frames of 35-mm film, and the strobes recycled instantaneously, so he was able
to fire shot after shot as the pilot guided the submersible slowly toward the
mouth of the vent.

Webber was relieved to be working now,
concentrating on angles and exposures, trying to avoid the glare from the other
submersible's lights, his fear forgotten.

His shivering had stopped, he wasn't cold
anymore.
 
In fact, he felt hot, as hot as
he had on the surface.

"What's the temperature out there
now?" he asked.

"Almost two hundred Fahrenheit,"
said the pilot.
 
"The vent's like a
stove, heats everything around it."

Suddenly something bumped into Webber's
porthole and ricocheted away into the cloud of smoke.
 
Startled, he jerked backward and said,
"What the hell?"
 
It had been
too fast and too close for him to distinguish its features; all he had seen was
a fluttering blur of white.

"Just wait," said the
pilot.
 
"Don't use up all your
film.
 
We got lots of critters out there
now, might even find something brand-new nobody's ever seen before."

They were approaching the mouth of the
vent now.
 
Here, supposedly, animals fed
on the vent's chemicals.
 
There was a
deep staccato rumbling sound, and flashes of red and orange, as molten rock
erupted from fissures in the cliff.