Young Captain Nemo: The Door into the Deep

by Jason Henderson

  Gabriel watched his mom’s eyes and thought he saw what she wanted to say. Especially to Nerissa, which had to be something like You were wrong to run away, and also No, no, the risk is worth it, we will stand with you against whatever comes, and the burdens you take on yourself are too much for one person.

  But instead she said, “Then we’d better take a look at this sample of yours.” And then she shook her head. “But I’m just so happy to see you. Both of you. All of you.”

  It was a nice enough greeting considering the madness that had ensued the morning Nerissa ran away from Nemolab.

  That was a bad morning. He didn’t like to think about it. He’d seen her from one of the big windows in the corridors, or at least seen the Nebula, starting up, lights erupting on the ocean floor around it. He’d called to her, shouting into the mic as he ran to the access tube, only to find the iris locked. She was leaving, and she was taking the Nebula. Leaving him when she was the only one he trusted to even try to understand this world his parents had made and the outside world they both yearned to see. She had taken the Nebula and left him.

  It was a dark memory that made his heart ache. And as far as Gabriel knew, this was Nerissa’s first time back.

  It was his dad, though, who walked down the steps and took his daughter in his arms, then stepped back and looked from Nerissa to Gabriel. “You should know that Mr. Zinoman thinks you’re crazy, Gabriel.” He leaned in, whispering loudly. “I think he’s a little afraid of you.”

  The crew gathered at a large window in a corridor wall right at the bottom edge of the observation dome. They looked out on the creature as it swam up to the top of its near-invisible cage, feeling around with its tentacles, and back down. It hung near the bottom, close to the mirror window. Its stalk eyes staring as its tentacles moved it closer to the glass, where it floated, feeling all around and inspecting with slippery thoroughness the Nemoglass in front of it.

  “Can it see us?” Peter asked.

  “No—not with conventional chromatic vision, anyway. This is a one-way mirror.” Gabriel’s mom held up her hands to the window.

  “Chromatic…?” Misty asked.

  “That’s the way we see,” Mom said. “But who knows? Maybe it sees thermal signatures, too. Maybe it uses a type of sonar. We don’t know.”

  “So it sees its own reflection right now?” Gabriel asked.

  “Yes, and it’s not acting like it sees an enemy or another creature,” his mom observed. “I spent a semester watching dolphins react to mirrors. They knew it wasn’t another creature, too. They tried to figure out the mirror, but they knew it was an illusion.”

  “So it’s a little smart,” Misty observed. “I’ve read about those dolphin experiments.”

  “Smart and dangerous.” Peter nodded. “That thing was trying to eat the Obscure when Gabriel, Misty, and Nerissa went out after it. It can put up a fight.”

  “It’s in any creature’s nature to defend itself,” Mom said. “What sort of damage have they done?”

  “Apparently they damaged a US Navy tender ship,” Nerissa said. “I have no idea if the ship provoked them.”

  A two-way microphone and speaker beside the mirror broadcast sounds from inside the dome. Gabriel heard shuffling sounds as it moved its tentacles along the silty floor.

  Abruptly the creature whined, its tentacles trembling in all directions as it hung in the middle of the tank. The whining rose and fell in pulses, dulled by the glass partition. It thrummed, sustained, and then relieved, repeating several times before stopping.

  Misty said, “They all do that.”

  “But it didn’t pulse like that before.” Gabriel held up a hand, letting his palm dance and stop. “That sounds … new.”

  His mom went over to a door not far from the tank, where a window separated them from a larger section of the lab with tables and computer monitors. Mom rapped on the glass and pressed a call button next to the door. “Sharmila?”

  A woman inside the lab came on the line. “Doctor?”

  “Are we ready to look at the tissue sample?”

  “Just about.” Gabriel’s mom left them for a moment as the rest remained with his dad at the window. Gabriel tapped on the glass. The microphone hanging nearby picked up the vibrations as a sharp tone, which he heard in his earpiece. The enormous Lodger swiveled in place, finally looking toward the glass.

  The creature flexed its tentacles and whined. Gabriel thumped the glass with his fingers.

  This time the creature did something new—its tentacles spun rapidly. Some unknown set of muscles moved and allowed it to send out a different, deeper whine, like the purr of a cat but musical—a sea-thrumming, he thought.

  “Try that again,” Dad said.

  Gabriel tapped the glass again, and it answered.

  “Huh,” Peter said. His eyes narrowed as though he was thinking through something.

  “What is it?” Gabriel asked.

  Peter shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Try that again.”

  A third time tapping and the creature was still. I guess it’s bored now, Gabriel thought. As though it had tried to communicate with them and its effort had failed, and now it had written them off. The way you might startle at first at a hat rack that looks like a person in the dark, but after a while, you blow it off because it’s just a hat rack. But what if it were a person after all?

  Gabriel’s mom stuck her head out of the lab door—another flash of warmth, a faint memory of seeing her calling him into a lecture when he was too small to even have a clear memory—and said, “Okay. Care to see where your friend is from?” She added with a pleasant shrug, “If possible?”

  Gabriel felt a thrill of expectation. They had taken a couple of tiny samples of tissue from the creature while loading it into the tank, and Sharmila Kassam, the head of genetic studies at the lab, had hurried it away in small sample jar.

  He followed the others into the lab.

  The lab was circular, occupying the bottom floor of a dome dedicated to biological studies. The walls curved, jutting every so often with mechanical arms holding lights, lasers, cutting tools, and other instruments. Soft lamps in recesses around the room gave off a bright glow. There were no portholes out. As the door hissed closed, Gabriel heard locks inside clamping down. This room was built to be isolated if necessary, sanitized with strong corrosives or, if really necessary, far more permanent solutions.

  They joined Dr. Kassam next to a microscope at a table near the center of the room. She wore a white cap over her hair, which flowed in a neat tail down her back.

  Gabriel had known Sharmila Kassam, one of the five non-family humans who lived at Nemolab, since he was three years old. He was originally told that she had come to learn from them, the way the Nobel scientist had. But eventually he learned there was more. Sharmila had been the only survivor of a terrorist attack on a science ship where her parents had worked. A genius, she had already been doing doctorate-level work at seventeen years old. She had lost both her parents and their experiments—on nonnuclear deep-sea engines—in one day. Some crazy enemies of the Nemos had been behind the attack. Apparently Mom and Dad had rescued her themselves. He had never gotten the whole story, but as the years went by, he suspected it had been harder than it sounded.

  But still the story—even as far as he knew it—stuck with him. His parents rarely left the lab or approached other ships or land—and yet sometime back then they’d had their own wild lives and adventures. It was impossible for him to picture.

  His mom approached the eyepiece of the microscope, peered into it for a moment, and then said, “Hmm. Let’s project this.” She hit a button beside the microscope, and a three-foot-wide screen on the wall lit up.

  Onscreen, they saw a magnified world of moving matter, which Gabriel expected. He saw tiny masses teeming with what looked like hairs up and down their bodies as they danced in the saline solution that held the sample. In biology, both at the lab and in his time at school in Santa Marta, he’d see
n a few such samples, and nothing here jumped out at him.

  His mom took a pen out of her hair and pointed at the screen. “This is a scraping from one of the tentacles, from the sort of frond at the end where it gets wide. In every respect I would say what we are looking at is definitely crustacean. I’m seeing the usual mucus, proteins, fats. Now can we look at the second specimen?”

  Dr. Kassam moved a second glass plate into place under the microscope, and the screen changed.

  Mom said, “This is a scraping from those little … what you called bulbs.”

  “You’re lucky it didn’t burn you.”

  “I think they only burn when they want to,” Mom said. “But look at this tissue.”

  She indicated squarish structures, blocks up and down the surface of the specimen. “You know what that is? That’s white sulfuric crystal. Embedded in the skin. Only here, though.”

  Misty peered at it. “Crystal?”

  “Why would they look like crystal?” asked Peter.

  “Because they are crystal.” Gabriel’s dad moved closer to the screen and put his hands in the pockets of his white smock.

  Gabriel looked back at the rest. “They use these—bulbs—to burn out the insides of the machines they take over. But they’re not actually part of the Lodgers. They’re more like…”

  “Like snails on a plant,” Dad said. “The bulbs on the tentacle fronds are different creatures entirely.”

  17

  THEY WERE DUE for dinner, but there was something Gabriel wanted to take care of first: the engines. Peter was interested in spending some more time at the Lodger window, so Gabriel and Misty headed back to the access tube and the Obscure. Along the way they stopped at a supply room, and the lights came on as they entered.

  “What are we looking for?” Misty asked, scanning shelves and shelves of engine parts, rivets, and even a few disassembled pincer torpedoes.

  Gabriel found it: a large black cylinder about the size of a watermelon, with tubes and wires on either end. “This.” He held it up with both hands. “It’s an engine filter for the Nebula.”

  “Will that keep us from fouling up in the Garbage Patch?”

  Gabriel nodded. “It should. We just gotta fit it to the Obscure.”

  * * *

  Inside the engine room, as Misty crouched and unscrewed the bolts on the old filter, she changed the subject back to the Lodgers. “Symbiotic,” she said. “The Lodgers are in a symbiotic relationship.”

  “Yeah.” Gabriel was on the floor again, unscrewing another connector. He actually loved being under the engine. “Like the eels that hang around whales.”

  “You ready for this to come loose?”

  “Yeah, drop it.” He looked up as she let the end of the old filter fall out of place, and together they maneuvered it to the floor. He took one end of the new filter, and she started fastening the other end.

  “Symbiotic relationships are so strange.”

  “Why’s that?” Gabriel screwed the bolts into place.

  “I mean—what do we do, as a species?” She fastened her end. “We grow to be our best selves. Right? Humans get smarter. Birds get faster. Worms get to break in two and form another worm. But to decide my best self is a self with … another self?”

  Gabriel was satisfied with the connection and slid out, sitting up. “That sounds deep.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just loving the mystery.” She patted the connection of the filter and sat down.

  He was glad she was loving it. But once again it made him remember what she’d said about her parents. “You know, I was thinking. I could have my parents call yours. If they can call Mr. Zinoman, they can call your folks.”

  Misty shook her head. “No … my folks said yes. Calling them in a panic wouldn’t help. I’m where I said I’d be. Sort of.”

  Gabriel sighed in relief. Then he shrugged. “Finish the trip. Then when we’re home, if you’re out, you’re out.” Please don’t be out.

  “What I want to finish is helping that thing in the dome.” She pointed over her shoulder, through the wall of the engine room. “That’s it.”

  “Gabriel?” His dad’s voice came over the intercom. “If you have time before dinner, there’s something I’d love to show you guys.”

  Gabriel looked at Misty and shrugged.

  They met up with Peter and Nerissa, who had each gotten the same invitation, and found Gabriel’s dad at the entrance to a large, rectangular room with a curved roof. It was one of the few rooms exposed to the outside that wasn’t a dome shape, and the curve of the ceiling made strange refractions of the seaweed and fish that floated by. The tile floor was polished volcanic rock and reflected them perfectly as they walked along.

  But the main thing about the room was the models. What in the world?

  There were eight short columns in the center of the room, and each one held a perfect scale model of a submarine.

  “Whoa.” Peter stopped short.

  Gabriel’s dad smiled. “Yeah. I’ve had a little time on my hands lately and I thought—well, I know Gabriel used to like to look at pictures of the old ships. I figured I could do better. Take a look! This one…”

  “Dad, I’m not sure we have time…” Nerissa sounded more hesitant talking to him, her voice a little higher.

  “I figured. Gabriel has brought his crew,” Dad said. “And it matters to understand where we’re coming from. Come on, I’ll bet you’ll get something out of it, too.”

  Gabriel was lost for a moment looking at the ships and heard his throat catch as he replied, “Yeah. Give us the tour.”

  “By all means,” Nerissa mumbled.

  Dad arranged himself behind the models and stretched his hands wide toward the two subs that Gabriel’s friends would be familiar with. “This is the fleet. Not even the whole fleet, I guess, but most of it. You know the Obscure, and of course, this big thing is the Nebula.” He pointed to the sleek black sub with its pointed nose and a ship three times larger perched on a column.

  He indicated the other subs, some of them short and squat, some long, some with strange up-and-down arrangements instead of “lying down” horizontally. But all had the same eye for the sea, the fins and the seashell inlays, the sense of belonging in the deep.

  “Toward the back are the ones that came earlier. Arronax, named after the man who traveled with our ancestor. That one saved President Eisenhower’s life once. Decommissioned in 1965. Before that, Prince Dakkar, which ferried the crown jewels of England to Japan and back in a pretty strange gambit that would be way too difficult to explain.”

  “Wait, excuse me?” Peter asked. “Why?”

  “Seriously, we don’t have time for that.” Nerissa shook her head.

  “Prince Dakkar was … well, let’s say lost, but it’s complicated. Before that, here’s Paravar, the first to explore the Mariana Trench. It was taken by pirates and destroyed. Eye of Providence, used for listening to ships, mainly. Decommissioned in the 1920s. That was during the quiet period after Captain Nemo ended his reign of … I guess his reign of terror. That brings us to the Nautilus.”

  The tip of the pyramid shape, farthest from Gabriel’s dad and closest to the rest, was a final submarine, the earliest. A little bigger than the Obscure but slower, with a battering nose like the Nebula but sharpened with a corkscrew point. “The Nautilus, the ship of Captain Nemo.”

  Gabriel’s dad was silent for a moment as he stared at it, and Misty spoke. “What happened to the Nautilus?”

  Gabriel’s dad looked up. “You can get closer—take a look at it. It’s beautiful. The Nautilus was damaged in a storm—the legendary ‘maelstrom.’ Captain Nemo kept it on the island at the yard where we build the ships while he worked his repairs.”

  “That location is secret,” Nerissa added.

  “Yeah. But it did sail again, and then it was lost during a mission in the Pacific.”

  “Where in the Pacific?” Misty asked.

  “We don’t know.” Gabriel’s d
ad shrugged. “Could be anywhere from Mexico to Japan. But by that time Captain Nemo was very old. And the family had begun its work already. And so it was … lost.”

  “So … every ship you built here is gone. Almost.” Peter put his hands in his pockets. As though it was sinking in what a special place he was inhabiting. “The Obscure and the Nebula are the last of the Nemotech subs.”

  “Not the last.” Gabriel’s dad went to the door and beckoned them. “We like to think of them as a new beginning. Come on. Dinner.”

  18

  FOR THE FIRST time in nearly a year, Gabriel had dinner at Nemolab, and it was glorious. At least to him. For once, the dining hall, which occupied its own dome to the side of the main one, was almost crowded. One long table held Gabriel, his parents, Peter, Misty, and the five trusted guests of Nemolab who helped run the different sections. Plus two more: Nerissa had invited her executive officer, Jaideep, to represent her crew (the rest of the three hundred remained aboard the Nebula, presumably doing whatever they usually did in the evening). Dad served up a seaweed-based lasagna that even Peter loved. Behind them, strange fish swam around the dome, zooming past in swirls of color and speckled schools.

  Mom was more talkative than he had ever seen and seemed determined to embarrass him, loudly entertaining everyone with stories of Gabriel and Nerissa when they were smaller. “When Gabriel was eight, they watched this thing about a singer. You know, he wants to make it big as a singer with a band.”

  “That could be anything,” Peter said.

  “He had a maroon motorcycle,” Mom said. “Il Pleut Mauve?”

  “Purple Rain,” Nerissa and Gabriel answered.

  “That movie’s like a hundred years old.”

  “Oh, come on,” Gabriel said. “I lived on the bottom of the ocean; for me that was a great movie. First thing I did when I got to California was look to see if Morris Day and the Time were still around.” That was the hilarious band in Purple Rain.