Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  Mickey relayed the message, and the last thing Sean heard before Slipjack helped him into the JSL was her response of “Roger that.” It gave him the tiniest peace of mind, which was better than nothing.

  Slipjack got him ready and was about to screw the hatch shut but stopped and looked Sean in the eyes. “Go save your wife. Save our Kat.”

  Our Kat? But Sean nodded, holding back the desire to say, Why in the hell do you think I’m sitting in this thing? but he could hardly blame the crew for loving her. She was so good to everyone, always smiling and working as hard as anyone else. Sean saw her occasional tantrums and tears, but that was the difference between a husband and a coworker on a research vessel.

  Slipjack screwed on the hatch and stepped back. He and Toro and Vanessa exchanged thumbs-ups with Sean and then with one another when each of them took their assigned positions to deploy the A-frame and crane to lower the submersible into the sea.

  Excruciatingly slowly, they lowered the JSL. So slowly he would surely never get down in time to Kat, who was breathing the last of her air, waiting for him, so far away.

  ***

  Inside D-Plus, Katherine quickly hit the necessary switches and buttons to release the ballast. She’d done it a hundred times in submersibles; the ballast was just seawater, but water actually made for better ballast than any other material, and it didn’t shoot a lot of garbage into the ocean they all loved, like the old-school kind did.

  But neither of the hatches on the sides of the submersible opened to release the ballast. D-Plus was still as weighted down as she was at launch, when the hatch worked perfectly to let the seawater in and allow the dive to happen in the first place.

  She didn’t panic, though, didn’t enter any kind of fugue state like before. She just went through the steps again, more slowly and carefully this time.

  It didn’t make any difference.

  The hatch wouldn’t open, and of course there was no way for her to get out at this depth and open them manually with the fail-safe tool. “You’re just going to have to lift me with my ballast,” she said into her headset.

  She kept in contact with Mickey up on the surface, but radio waves traveled more slowly the deeper one went—which was why a deep-sea submersible like D-Plus was connected to fiber optics for data and video and lines for voice and other communications. These lines were encased in armored steel and were supposed to be as close to indestructible as possible. That was because fail-proof systems were essential in extreme environments like those Sean and Kat were aiming for with this expedition. Supposed to be indestructible. At least, that was if no one with specialized knowledge—and some kind of motivation, obviously—got to them when no one was looking.

  But delay or not, saboteur on the loose or not, Mickey on Piranha II kept the video and other sensors tightly focused on the line that was all that was keeping Kat on D-Plus from sinking, fatally, to the bottom. If she had been able to jettison the ballast—which was done with the push of exactly two buttons and a switch—it would have made Sean’s job of grabbing hold of the cable just above D-Plus with the JSL’s clamp-like “hands” and bringing her up much easier.

  Easy wasn’t happening in this FUBAR situation anyway, but trying to bring up D-Plus loaded down with ballast might be impossible for an ancient gadget like the JSL. Sean would jettison his own ballast when he got to her, so at least he would retain some buoyancy.

  As was always the case in their line of work, they’d just have to go with what was even infinitesimally possible and make it a dead-certain reality.

  It was obvious that rescue of D-Plus—and, more importantly, Katherine—fell into this category. No one could blame him for failing, but everyone still would. He still would. He needed to show everyone that he could do this, save the day. Mariners were an odd lot who might call off the next dive “because of weather,” since they were empowered to make the final decision. Theoretically, this took into consideration the science team’s input, of course; but the professional sailors on board knew that, outside of a storm forcing waves over the deck, the scientists would always choose to dive. Thus, oftentimes the “consideration” of the scientists’ opinions meant “seeming to listen and then doing what real men and women of the sea thought right and proper.” So it was best to avoid discomfort in the sailing crew.

  Also, of course, if they lost this submersible—even if it during an unmanned test—it would render funding for of his any further dives highly unlikely. His and Kat’s funding, that was. She wasn’t dead yet. He had to not think like that, Jesus.

  Not yet, anyway.

  D-Plus and similar research submersibles were designed to be pulled up by the same cable that guided them down. That would make it a hell of a lot easier to drag it back up with the JSL, which was built for exploration mostly in the euphotic zone, not for its gripping or lifting power. Of course, there never would have been a problem like this if the deep-sea sub dived and rose under its own power. But that’s just not how it worked anymore, the cable being needed for heavy data and communications demands if not for lowering and lifting the submersible.

  Mickey told him which ways to activate the JSL’s small water jets to keep the vessel the right distance from the cable. Not that this was in any way a “normal” operation, but the usual and much less difficult way of approaching would have been for Sean in the JSL to loop onto the cable itself and just slide down to the research sub. However, that option wasn’t available to them since it was a flaw in the cable itself (Ha! That’s the understatement of the year, Sean scoffed despite himself) that had put the submersible in peril in the first place. One strong tug on that line and it would snap up on the boat and that would be that for his wife; the ballast-weighted D-Plus would be much too heavy for the smaller and lighter JSL to hold.

  They had gotten extremely lucky—or less unlucky, he guessed, because this was not a lucky day—that the surface was almost mirror-calm that day. Choppy or “confused” seas, when you couldn’t tell which way the water was going to take you, put a lot more stress on the cable.

  And that stress was exactly what the damaged cable couldn’t take.

  The JSL’s descent went smoothly, Mickey letting him know how things looked and also relaying any messages from Kat and doing the same for Sean’s messages to his wife.

  In fact, it went so smoothly that his mind drifted.

  Diving to just three thousand feet wasn’t going to be any help with the expedition’s goals, but they had been on the path to the benthic zone, where they’d found evidence that a line of hydrothermal vents stretched for several thousand miles from just north of Hawaii right up to the Marianas Trench. Maybe continued in the Marianas Trench, so little had those extreme depths been explored in any detail.

  Heat was at the center of his theories. When the oceans cooled and put the Permian Extinction into motion, most aquatic dinosaurs died off—actually, 95 percent of everything in the oceans and a huge percentage of things living on land, including dinosaurs. But where the ocean remained warm, even hot, was at the bottom, near the network of hydrothermal sulfur vents.

  The idea came to Sean Muir five years earlier, when he was a graduate student in oceanography with a specialty in undersea geology at UCSD. He went on a deep-sea expedition with his advisor and two other grad students the professor was mentoring. It wasn’t some kind of historic outing, diving in a well-explored area just off the California coast, but it was deep enough that there was no light except for the glow around their four-person submersible caused by the sub’s own floods.

  Looking at the constant snowy fall of organic material destined for the ocean floor could hold one’s interest for only so long, but they weren’t underwater for an hour when his advisor said, “Do you see that? This is a fount of life, lady and gentlemen!”

  The submersible had many viewports, and they all got a look at the odd orange-yellow light coming from the ocean floor. It was only about 1,500 feet down, but it presented a completely alien world. The vent
had things all around it, things that looked like those giant inflatable men at car dealerships and such, beckoning buyers just by random movement catching their eyes: tube worms.

  It was the same principle at work here—all four of them were mesmerized by the giant sea worms, securely attached to the seafloor but being blown around by the sulfur-rich, superheated water coming from the tectonic rip.

  “I wish we could get closer, but that heat would overpower the sub and boil all of us faster than trout in a steam basket,” he said. “But look—it’s an ecosystem like none other. These worms—and amoebas so large they’re visible to the human eye—thrive directly on the chemicals pouring out, and then there are predators even down here ready to eat them, starting a food chain without the slightest thing to do with sunlight.”

  “Predators?” Sean asked in a dreamy voice.

  “Oh, yes, there are albino squid down here, octopoids, jumbo shrimp relatives, and there are signs of even more complex life. Even vertebrates.”

  One of the other grad students spoke up: “Wouldn’t their bones get crushed at this depth?”

  “No, indeed. That’s what one would worry about, isn’t it? Your rib cage being flattened and your head caving in? But, in fact, you would die of capillary damage and organ failure at much shallower depths than those required to destroy the calcium in your bones. This is because water is incompressible. Not just the water in the ocean, but the water in the human body! This presses against all of the body’s systems, including the skin, and meets the incompressible water contained in your organs. They reach a stasis rather quickly, but stasis is not how organs keep us alive! A stopped heart may be perfectly balanced with the water pressure outside it, but that doesn’t do its owner much good if all the oxygen has been rendered immobile.”

  A chuckle went through the submersible, then the third grad student asked, “Then how can anything with organs live down here? I mean, tube worms are pretty simple, and octopoids are incredibly elastic, I know. But things that would eat them? I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “But you’re working on your doctorate in marine biology! Surely you know that, as Jeff Goldblum so succinctly put it in that dinosaur movie, ‘Life finds a way.’”

  “Jurassic Park,” Sean said almost automatically. It and its sequels were favorites of his since he was a kid. But paleontology was a field with precious few positions available, and professors retired very late, if at all; the joke was “Old paleontologists never die. They just turn into fossils.”

  “Just so. The way the concept was used in that story was a bit silly, but the statement remains valid in a general sense, and is definitely applicable down here. And Sean, since you’re a dinosaur aficionado, you see how, with the oceans growing colder after the Cretaceous event, some marine lizards could evolve to take advantage of heat sources far deeper than those they had earlier thrived in.”

  Sean said lightly but with respect, “That’s pretty speculative.”

  His advisor laughed. “Indeed, it is. But something balances the ecosystem down here, and aquatic dinosaurs have had a long time to adapt. I mean, the water didn’t turn cold overnight, and maybe the deeper one went at that point—and remember, there was a lot more going on volcanically and such down here during that period—the warmer it would be. Yes, they’d have had to evolve structures other than bones and organs that would work in ways we probably aren’t even able to conceptualize at this point … unless one were researching it full-time, say.” He gave Sean a meaningful glance. “Also, the giant lizards ruled the earth for 165 million years—you think they’d all just give up without a fight?”

  They laughed, but Sean was struck by the idea. Being a graduate student was a time for learning what could be reasonably speculated upon and what was better not to waste one’s time with, because the thesis and dissertation were what mattered most. The fortunate few, however, were able to develop something new, something at least different, about which they could publish, and publish papers on every change of nuance as their research developed. Sean and every other student in any graduate program anywhere needed something real, and possibly dramatic, upon which to create a reputation and thus become very attractive to those seeking to fill empty tenure-track lines at Carnegie I research institutions.

  However, he also had heard many cautionary tales of grad students who went awry trying to prove some pet theory of their advisors’—drinking the academic Kool-Aid, as it were. Embarrassment and wasted time were the least of it. No, the worst was a career up in smoke, one’s world-changing dissertation given up for something mundane, something just to get the degree so he could accept the first community-college job offered to him. If any were offered. Life as an adjunct earth sciences “professor” was worse than embarrassing to someone like Sean; it would be humiliating and would remain humiliating until the day he retired. Or killed himself. Which would be preferable was a coin toss.

  In other words, Sean Muir needed to find something attractive and unusual, maybe even slightly groundbreaking, but nothing so off the wall that it would come crashing down around him and ruin his life. (Any advisor he had would be tenured already and thus wouldn’t be affected professionally in the slightest by such a disaster. If he or she were a human being, the professor in question might feel terrible about the whole thing, but pity or even heartfelt regret didn’t open doors to academic careers.)

  But God, dinosaurs still existing near the ocean floor! Evolved and adapted, of course, just like every other living thing, but perhaps in the same way that sharks and alligators had evolved—almost unchanged through the millennia, so what you had now was almost identical to what you would have had 300 million years ago. And even if it weren’t dinosaurs, finding whatever was at the top of the sea-vent chemosynthesis food chain would attract a lot of welcome attention.

  It was a risk; but no risk, no reward. Sean had a long talk with his advisor the day after their undersea excursion, during which each argued for and against the idea of building on this speculation as a real program of research. Finally, they agreed the best course of action would be for Sean to change his concentration from oceanography and tectonic geology to marine biology and—thank God he was at San Diego, where this wouldn’t get him laughed out of the room—paleoichthyology. Even if he didn’t find the predators that just had to be there (life finds a way), he would certainly discover enough about deep-sea hydrothermal vents to write a dissertation that still broke new ground, so to speak.

  A voice snapped him back to reality, the present, where he was in the rickety JSL submersible surrounded by black water.

  “Sean? Copy? Sean.” It was crew chief Mickey’s voice, and he must have been calling for a while. “Sean, tell me you’re not dead. Sean, do you copy?”

  He said into the comm, a bit sheepishly, “Copy here, Sea Legs. Sorry, I was having trouble with something.”

  “Sure, okay,” Mickey said in the tone Sean would have used himself if he had been on the other end. “Listen, do you still have the sub’s cable in view?”

  Fortunately, despite his sudden mental walkabout, he did.

  “You’ve got about twenty feet to go, by your instruments. Can you get a visual on D-Plus? She should be just below you, dead cen—right in the middle.”

  He leaned against the viewport and saw the lights that adorned the submersible. “Affirmative, I see it. If I can get down to Kat—”

  “No, Sean, there’s no time. You need to extend the JSL claw in front of you and open the claw, then ease yourself forward until you can get a tight grasp on the cable. Keep descending, too—get as close as you can to the sub, but stay above her. Nobody blames you for wanting to see your lovely bride after all this, but first we need to get her out of danger by you clamping on. You copy that?”

  “Roger. Moving toward the cable—”

  “Did you extend the arm and open the claw?”

  Dammit. A few seconds later, he called up, “Affirmative. Centering JSL to position the claw around
the cable … got it.” He could hear a small background cheer from Mickey’s microphone.

  ***

  Katherine Muir was running out of air and running out of hope. She had been stuck in one place for more than an hour; this after an hour for descent, and the CO2 scrubbers were going to remain operative for perhaps one more hour, but perhaps not.

  Mickey kept her advised on every move her husband was making in the JSL to come rescue her, and it made her cry to spot the floodlights on that obsolete piece of flotsam that was now going to save her life. It came closer, closer, then used some vertical jets to stabilize its depth. The arm of the JSL extended and the claw opened. She couldn’t see Sean because of the angle and the bright lights, but she felt it was him.

  Let me live, the hardcore atheist prayed to whatever deity would listen. I’ll tell him everything. Just get me out of here so I can make amends. Come on, I’m evidence-based. I’ll consider that evidence enough.

  She felt rather than heard the JSL’s clamp make contact with the iron-clad cable. It felt like a miracle, and she added to whatever deity was responsible, Thank you. Just a little more, and you’ll have a devotee for life, I promise—

  She was cut off by D-Plus lurching to port—the side Sean in the JSL was on—and then swinging widely to the right before repeating the pendulum motion. Sean must have pushed on the cable instead of just grabbing it.

  But it seemed that everything had held, and that the JSL had now clamped onto the cable. In a moment, she would feel a tug from just above her, and a moment after that, she would begin her ascent, pulled by the JSL all the way to the top, or at least within scuba distance to the surface.

  “We’ve gotcha,” Mickey said with obvious relief, but it was nothing compared to Kat’s. She shook with adrenaline and felt tears running down her cheeks. “Please put your tray tables in the upright position and enjoy the ride.”

  Kat laughed hard, very hard. She could feel that D-Plus was being tugged upward. Sean must have been hitting the JSL’s vertical thrusters in a staccato fashion, which really was not ideal, even though she could see that it might seem ideal. However, instead of making it safer—because he was repeatedly stopping to make sure everything was okay—the jerks and stops were adding a lot more stress to her end of the cable. But she remembered now that the problem part of the cable was on the spool on Sea Legs, not on D-Plus’s connection, so tugs on her end wouldn’t cause any important stress on it there. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Mick, tell my husband that I know he likes to jerk it, but this is taking it too far,” she said, crying with laughter.