Greg Bear

by Vitals (v5)

  “What are you going to do with them?” Dave asked.

  I sucked up another specimen, chambered another tube. “They’re wonderful! I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  Dave gave another groan. His face was pallid and green in the reflected light from the seafloor.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I feel really weird. I swear I didn’t eat any dessert.”

  For a moment, making an effort, I forgot the manipulator arm and the precious specimens and sat up. “You look like you’ve got a chill.” I reached out to touch Dave’s forehead. He batted my hand away.

  “Son of a turtle,” he said.

  “Goddammit,” I said, simultaneously, and I was suddenly, irrationally furious, as if a flashbulb of rudeness had gone off in my head. “Are you going to screw this up because of something you ate?”

  He cringed and clutched his stomach, eyes going blank under another wave of pain. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain around me, buster,” he said. “Grab your specimens and let’s get out of here. Quick!” he growled.

  I pulled back in my seat, jerked the arm toward the drawers, and spewed the last tubes out, one, two, three, into their receptacles. So many more to collect. But training and humanity beat science.

  Dave looked bad. He drew his knees up in the chair.

  A pungent, tropical odor filled the sphere. It wasn’t flatulence. It came from Dave’s sweat, from his skin, and it was starting to make me feel ill, too.

  Topside was straight up, eight thousand feet. Three hours minimum.

  I took a last look at the Garden of Eden—what Mark McMenamin had called the Garden of Ediacara. Serene, untouched, isolated, downwind from the geyser spew, just as I had seen it in the photos—imagined it in my dreams—my triumph, the highlight of my exploring, perhaps the key to all my research . . .

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Diddly,” Dave muttered. His eyes went unfocused, wild, like an animal caught in a cage. He rapped his hand against the smooth inner surface of the sphere with a painful thwonk. The sphere was six inches thick—no risk of cracking it with bare knuckles. “It’s too . . . darned small in here,” he said. “Colder than a witch’s tit,” he added, eyes steady on mine, as if to receive applause, or criticism, for a dramatic performance.

  Clearly not an experienced blasphemer. I stifled a laugh.

  “I can call you Hal, or Henry, can’t I?” he asked, peppering the honey of sweet reason with sincerity.

  “Sure,” I said. “Dave, we have to go up now.”

  “I got to ask you.” He held out his hand, and the fingers twitched as if grasping something in the air between us. A little to the left, and he would have been strangling me. “I don’t really give a . . . horse’s patootie . . . I don’t give a dung heap if you know Owen Montoya. But did he ever give you a phone call?”

  “Yeah, I suppose he did. Dave—”

  “Did he ever tell you what to do with your life?”

  This made no sense. “Maybe,” I said.

  “Did your Dad ever call you, long after he was dead?”

  “No,” I said. This shook me, and I started to get really scared. My brother had asked me pretty much the same thing. “Why?”

  “Dog poop on them all. All the petty little bosses out there making their petty phone calls and telling me, of all people, what to do. Well, I don’t understand a petty word they’re saying, but they’re making me sick. Don’t you think that’s what it is?”

  I didn’t think it was the hi-carb diet. “Dave, I can get us back. Just relax and let go of the stick.”

  “You don’t know diddly about this boat.” He shook his head, flinging stinking drops of sweat against the inside of the pressure sphere.

  My mouth hung open. I was on the furry edge of braying like a donkey, this was so utterly ridiculous.

  With a dramatic shrug and a twist, Dave wrenched back on the stick. The aft thrusters reversed with a nasty clunk and churned up the silt below. Backwash shredded the delicate little garden. The golden lights glowed like sunset through the rising cloud of silt, and a few sparkling, dirty little jelly balls—xenos and bits of other creatures—exploded in front of the pressure sphere.

  “No! Dave, get a grip.”

  “Piddle on it,” he said coldly. Then he let out a shriek that nearly burst my eardrums. He flailed, knocked loose the data-glove box—leaving it dangling from its connecting wires—and pushed the stick over hard right. The little sub started to respond, veering, but the autopilot kicked in.

  A small female voice announced, “Maneuver too extreme. Canceled.”

  “Poop on you!” Dave screamed. He let go of the stick. His thick-fingered fist struck my cheek and knocked me back. I shielded myself with my arm, and he pounded that a couple of times, then grabbed it with both hands, torquing it like he wanted to break it off and get at the rest of me.

  “Dave, goddammit, stop!” I yelled, really frightened now. Should I fight back against my pilot, knock him senseless, possibly kill him?

  Did I really know how to surface all by myself?

  He let go of my arm and seemed to reconsider. Then, with a last, final grunt, he yanked his control stick out of its socket and swung it around his head. Before I could raise my hands again, he crashed the stick hard against my temple. I grabbed my head with one hand and the stick with the other.

  Dave wrenched the stick loose and screeched it against the inside surface of the pressure sphere. The metal end dug a shallow white groove in the acrylic. Not satisfied with that, he jabbed the stick into the sphere, scoring a pentagram of divots. He gave a doggy grin of delight, like a kid scrawling on walls with a Magic Marker. Then he delivered a frenzy of gouging blows, spittle and sweat flying.

  I pushed back, ignoring the blood dripping onto my arm. Watching for an opening, I straightened and swung. He saw the punch coming and leaned. We scuffled like two kindergartners. I bruised my knuckles against the top of the sphere, then connected solidly with the side of his jaw.

  My hand exploded in pain.

  Dave dropped the stick. It rattled to the bottom of the pressure sphere. He curled up like a bug in a killing bottle and moaned. Then he flung his head back, mouth agape, and gave the pitiful howl of a disappointed child. His hands jerked and shuddered.

  Dave stopped howling and lay stiff and still.

  The smell got worse.

  I watched him warily, ready to fight again, then lost control, doubled over, and retched. There was only a little sour fluid in my stomach. It dribbled between my knees and under the seat. I noticed that the silvery air pocket beneath the sphere, trapped in the sub frame, was no bigger than the bubble in a carpenter’s level.

  So much pressure.

  I sat up, waiting for the sphere to split along the white gouge or punch through the divots.

  The sub’s polite female voice spoke. “Please exert positive control to disengage autopilot.”

  I did the calculations, weirdly precise in my panic. Two hundred and forty-four atmospheres outside. Twenty-four million seven hundred and twenty-three Pascals. Three thousand five hundred and eighty-five pounds per square inch. A four-door sedan parked on every square inch.

  My head cleared. I wiped the blood from my cheek with the back of my hand and rubbed it against the fabric of my thermal suit. Training. Think.

  I had my own control stick stowed beneath my chair. It could be pulled out, inserted into my chair’s socket, and engaged. I could take over Mary’s Triumph.

  Dave let out a sigh and collapsed. He looked like one of those polyurethane foam mannequins ever-present in the galleys of ocean research vessels, carried to the bottom, squished in the deep and hauled back for laughs. I watched in horror. But he was just going limp, and that seemed worse: complete, total relaxation. His half-open eyes had a forgiving, indifferent gloss. They socketed in my direction as his head burrowed into his chest. Dave skewed over until the seat harness, still wrapped around his shoulder, brought him up s
hort.

  He looked dead.

  Mary’s Triumph rotated above the seafloor. I reached beneath my seat and felt for the stick, detached it from its clips, raised it to inspect the connector, then tried to insert it into the control armature. Sweat spilled into my eyes. The stick wouldn’t go. I reached down with damp fingers and pinched the plastic plug away from the small socket. I was shaking so hard by then it took me almost a dozen tries to make the fit and push down hard enough to lock both the electrical and mechanical connectors.

  I waggled the stick.

  “Autopilot control relinquished,” Mary’s voice announced. “Shall we begin the return to the surface?”

  I hadn’t been briefed on everything the autopilot could do; there hadn’t seemed any pressing need. “Sure,” I said. “Yes. Please.”

  I pushed on Dave with the tip of a finger. Inert. He had smashed the LCD screen and two of the smaller displays. It was the autopilot or nothing.

  The sub still rotated.

  “Yes,” I said, louder. “Go up.”

  “Answer clearly for voice activation.”

  “YES!” I shouted. “GO UP!”

  “Beginning ascent to surface. Transmitting emergency signals.”

  9

  The water outside grew brighter. It was now a twilit gray. I wiped cold sweat from my eyes.

  Dave stirred about ten minutes before we surfaced. I watched from my seat, ready to hit him again.

  “I feel sick,” he moaned.

  “Sit still,” I said.

  He goggled at my bloody head. “Cripes, what happened?”

  The good Christian was back.

  “You went nuts.”

  His eyes looked sad, betrayed. “I did not,” he said. “You tried to hit me.”

  “You broke your stick and gouged the sphere,” I said. I wasn’t about to argue with the man, not after spending three hours trapped with him in a dark, stinking, wretched little ball.

  Dave looked at the marks and divots. “We were collecting specimens,” he said thickly.

  “Shut up.”

  “I can drive,” he said.

  “You broke your stick. The autopilot’s in charge. Just shut up.”

  Dave’s face showed guilt and disbelief.

  We broke the surface and the beacons switched on automatically. Through the waves crashing over the sphere—just our luck, a rough sea—I tried to spot the mother ship. I couldn’t see a thing. Time to stand on top of the sub, by the mast, if only to get a breath of fresh air. I crawled back over the third, empty couch to undog the hatch.

  “It’s too rough out there,” Dave said.

  “Screw you,” I muttered, and crept into the tunnel, an L-shaped pipe barely two feet wide. Swearing, I knelt in the usual small puddle of water at the base of the tunnel, got to my feet, and crooked my arms to twist and spin more levers and wheels.

  The hatch sighed and my ears popped. Spray showered down. I sucked in the cold sea air, incredibly sweet and alive. I searched for the Sea Messenger and found her at three o’clock, well over a thousand yards away.

  I yelled into the wind and waved my arms. I didn’t dare crawl out any farther—Dave could close the hatch on me and take the sub down again. Lodging my leg, I held on to the mesh deck behind the pressure sphere.

  Dave glared up at me through the bubble, still in his seat. He looked frightened. He was calling on the radio. That made sense, but I still wasn’t ready to forgive and forget. Sea Messenger should have been almost on top of us, responding to our emergency signal with her H-shaped crane lowered for retrieval and the rolling ramp extended like a tongue.

  “They aren’t answering,” Dave shouted up through the tube. “Come back in and shut the hatch.”

  “No way!” I shouted. “I’m staying out here.”

  “Look,” he said, his voice hoarse and crackling. “This is a rough sea. If you’re staying out, get all the way out and shut the hatch or we’ll ship water and sink.”

  The waves were pounding stronger than ever and the wind blew stinging spume off the whitecaps into my eyes. The ship’s lights were out and it was dusk. All the running and rigging lights should have been on, and the searchlights jabbing over the water, looking for us.

  Nothing. Sea Messenger looked dead.

  “I’m going to bring us closer to the ship,” Dave shouted. “And I’m closing the hatch, damn it!”

  “All right,” I said. Reluctantly, I dropped down and dogged the top hatch. But I stayed in the tube, squeezing my back against the metal wall, still cold from the deep.

  “I’m really all right,” Dave insisted, his voice hollow in the sphere. “I swear, I don’t know what happened.”

  “You tried to kill us.”

  “That can’t be right! I swear.”

  I let it go. Dave moved over into my seat and tried to disengage the autopilot. There was something wrong, and at first it wouldn’t let him. He pulled up the touch pad and keyed in an override. The autopilot disengaged with a small chime.

  Then Dave maneuvered with my stick.

  The sub cut through the chop to avoid being overturned. We lurched like a bucket in a slow-motion paint shaker, with nauseating jerks and some rough slams. Standing in the tube in a rough sea could leave bruises for days. I climbed down into the sphere.

  The sub bobbed up on a roller and we caught another glimpse of Sea Messenger. People ran along the upper deck toward the forecastle. The lights were still out. Another bob, and I saw a flash of brilliant yellow-orange near the stern, then five more, rapid.

  “Did you see that?” I asked, as if once again Dave and I were partners trying to outguess the rest of the world.

  “Muzzle flash,” he said. His face went gray. “What in hell?”

  “How do we get on the ship if they won’t grab us?”

  “We abandon the DSV, swim to the ship, and use the stern ramp. More than likely a wave will wash us up.”

  “Or brain us,” I said.

  Dave did not disagree. “There’s a diving platform on the port side—if they have it down in these seas, which isn’t likely. We need to be out of the water fast.”

  That was important. Immersion in the icy waters for ten or fifteen minutes, even in our silvery thermal suits, could be deadly.

  “It’s important we let them know what happened,” Dave said.

  “That you went nuts down there?” My teeth chattered.

  The pilot seemed to accede to this scenario. “Your brain is not in charge,” Dave said. He looked like a frightened little boy confessing something dire. “They can just ring you up and it’s all over.”

  Dave Press’s mind was heading south, then north; he didn’t even know how to read the compass needle.

  Abruptly, Sea Messenger lit up like a squid boat on parade: beacons, running lights. Broken ribbons of silver and red and green glinted off the waves. A searchlight beam swung out from the bridge through the moist air, and another switched on near the stern. They swept the water, then converged on Mary’s Triumph. Dave shielded his eyes.

  “Somebody finally woke up,” he said. He wiped his face with his hands and stared at the palms, shaking his head forlornly. “That’s it for me. You coming?”

  Dave pushed himself out of his seat and gave me a look as if he were going for coffee, did I want some, too?

  “You can’t swim from here,” I said. Was that what he intended to do—abandon the sub and strike out for the mother ship? We were too far away, even for a strong swimmer, in this sea.

  He grabbed an overhead bar and hauled himself upside down to the hatch, then, with expert grace striking in a plump guy, swung himself around and knelt on the third couch.

  “So long,” he said. “Take my advice, for what it’s worth. Stay away from the telephone.”

  Before I could react, he shinnied up the tube. I swore and went after him, but he was quick as a seal, out the hatch before I could grab an ankle.

  That left me halfway in the tube, stuck at a precarious ang
le. My leg bent, and the sub lurched. For a moment, my upthrust knee jammed in the pipe and I couldn’t move. I struggled to drop back, and when that didn’t work, to crawl higher.

  I had been tamped down like a cork in a bottle.

  A wave washed in through the upper hatch and swamped me. Sputtering, I pressed on my thigh with both hands and shoved the knee down hard, painfully, past a welded steel join, then squirmed to grab a rung.

  I poked up through the hatch. Twilight was leaving the western sky, a lovely orange fading into blue and then black. Stars filled the zenith, visible even through the spray from swooshing and bumping whitecaps.

  Dave was nowhere to be seen. Another wave almost blinded me and spun the sub around. I palmed water from my eyes and blinked at the nightmare. The Sea Messenger had come about and was backing her screws two hundred yards to starboard, whipping the sea into dancing foam.

  A flare shot up from the ship’s deck and arced over Mary’s Triumph. They knew where I was.

  “Get Dave!” I shouted, and swung my arms over my head. “Man overboard!”

  Another wave loomed, a greenie so high I could see the last of the daylight through it. It smashed over the sub’s tiny housing and slammed me against the metal lip. The hatch banged shut on my head and fingers. A bomb blast of pain brought on blind rage, and I slammed the hatch back once, caught it on the rebound, flung it back for a second bounce, and once more, with all my might.

  Anger spent, fingers and head throbbing, I dropped and sealed the hatch. I wasn’t going to take any chances with the open sea. I trembled so hard I thought I’d vibrate around the inside of the sphere. For a moment I saw Dave in the water outside the sub, thrashing and drowning, but it was only a fat little twister of bubbles.

  It was finished—I was going to die.

  I caught myself moaning like a whipped dog, then, hearing water slosh in the bottom of the sphere, I remembered the specimens, locked safe in their drawers. My reason for being here, the reward for months of working the angel circuit. I had survived a maniac sub driver, I was afloat, I still had the prize, the putative Apple, the Golden Fleece of the Gods.