The Abyss

by Orson Scott Card

  McBride didn't like it either. He'd come out of the Army a good many years back with a low opinion of the military, and he was pretty sure that whatever else happened, this test well and all the time and effort invested in drilling it were pretty much screwed. "Does not look at all good," he said.

  That was when Bendix saw a woman get off one of the choppers, along with four military guys who didn't look Navy. For a moment he wondered why the military had a woman along on an operation like this. Then he realized that this was the helicopter from Houston and the woman was from Benthic.

  "Oh, no, look who's with them."

  It was Lindsey Brigman. Didn't he already have enough shit to deal with today? Was somebody at Benthic trying to get him to take early retirement or something?

  A few minutes later, Kirkhill was on the bridge with Commodore DeMarco and the SEALs from the Houston chopper. Sure enough, all they wanted to know about was Deepcore. Practical things. How far divers working out of Deepcore could range. How long they could stay away. Above all, how fast Benthic Explorer could tow Deepcore without bringing it to the surface, and how soon they could start moving it.

  "As you can see," said Kirkhill, "you can follow everything they're doing down there from up here. It allows us as much information about actual drilling operations as we get on a surface rig."

  DeMarco didn't pick up on Kirkhill's enthusiasm. He just stared into the video screen, which showed divers on the bottom, working in total blackness except for a few pools of artificial light.

  "No light from the surface," said DeMarco. So the boy knew underwater work well enough to recognize conditions through a video. "How deep are they?"

  A question that Kirkhill couldn't answer. No problem - he could pluck answers out of the crew at will. "McBride?" he said.

  "Seventeen hundred feet," said McBride. The dickhead doesn't even know how deep our rig is, and he still acts like he's in charge. But McBride didn't let his contempt show. What's the point? If he didn't work for Benthic, he'd work for some other company that would put dickheads in charge.

  "I need them to go below two thousand," said DeMarco.

  "No problem," said Kirkhill. "They can do that."

  Yeah, right, thought McBride, but how much over two thousand? Trust Kirkhill to promise the moon before bothering to find out if our boys can actually do it.

  But if McBride was keeping his objections to himself, Lindsey wasn't. She'd been listening, none too patiently, as everybody stood around saying yes sir to DeMarco. Men didn't need to enlist. They all thought they were soldiers. It was like some secret cult among men, that when an officer says, I need your balls, they all unzip and reach for a pocketknife.

  Well, I'm not one of the secret regiment, thought Lindsey. I'm not going to let Kirkhill give away my project without a squeak. "So that's it? You just turn the whole thing over to the goon squad?"

  Kirkhill was all aggrieved innocence, of course. "Look, I was told to cooperate. I'm cooperating." Hey, none of this is my fault. Just following orders. Go take your shower.

  Lindsey wasn't actually too worried, not yet. There was at least one man who didn't kiss any ass that wore a uniform. Bud would put a stop to all this nonsense. All he had to do was say no, and the whole thing was over. Deepcore would stay where it was, and the military could take their choppers and fly back to wherever they came from. They were still Americans. The military was not supreme. Still, Kirkhill had caved in so easily. Lindsey was never good at hiding her scorn, but this time she didn't even try. "Kirkhill, you're pathetic." She walked away.

  McBride almost felt sorry for Kirkhill after all, getting publicly castrated by Lindsey Brigman was an experience most of the men on this ship had experienced. At the same time, he knew how Lindsey felt. He didn't like having these guys who knew nothing about the Deepcore project come on board and act like they owned the world. Especially he didn't like having all their work go down the toilet, just when they were close to succeeding.

  "Get Brigman on the line," said Kirkhill.

  Bendix got on the horn and started calling. "Deepcore, Deepcore." While he was waiting for Deepcore to answer, he turned to McBride and said exactly what McBride was already thinking. "Oh, man, if Bud goes along with this, they're going to have to shoot her with a tranquilizer gun."

  McBride could only raise his eyebrows in agreement.

  Somebody was on the line. "Hippy," said Bendix. "Get me Bud."

  Down in Deepcore itself, things were going on as usual. Bud Brigman sat at the dome port window of the mud room, talking to Catfish and Finler, who were working outside today. He could see them sometimes, and he liked what he saw. Catfish might be a hard-drinking foul-mouthed skirt-chaser on land, but put him in a hat and a drysuit and give him something to do underwater, and he did as sweet a job as you could ask for - quick, but never so quick you had to worry he wasn't doing it right. And Finler was right with him. They were a good team.

  Catfish swam near the window, looked in at Bud. "Hey," Bud said. His headset picked up his voice and carried it to the divers by UQC. That was the Navy's designation for high-frequency sound transceivers. Radio was no good in the water, but close to Deepcore they could use UQC, which translated their voices into high-frequency sound, which could keep its coherence for a little way in the water, and then translated it back on the other end. It made it a lot less lonely underwater when you could chatter a little bit. So even though you didn't keep the UQC so busy that somebody with an emergency couldn't break in, it was a good thing every now and then to give a reminder that somebody else was still alive in the world. It wasn't just you and the hissing of the breathing regulator in your hat. "You guys are milking that job," said Bud.

  A joke, of course. If they thought even for a second that Bud meant it as serious criticism, Catfish would blow up and Finler would go into a slow burn that would last for days. But Bud knew how to say things so they knew he was joking. Or maybe it's that they knew Bud so well that it didn't occur to them that he might mean it. They knew that if he had a real criticism, he'd say it to them in private, and unless it was an emergency he'd find a way to bring it up without it feeling like a criticism at all.

  But it wasn't "just" a joke. Down here in Deepcore every word counted, everything you said had meaning whether you wanted it to or not. These guys were doing boring, tedious maintenance and safety checking. A joke would help break it up, keep them alert. More important, though, was that it meant Bud was there, he was watching them. Not watching them like a zealous supervisor, hoping to catch them goofing off. Watching them more like a mother hen. They knew that if anything went wrong, Bud would see it right away. They weren't alone. And out in the cold and darkness, it didn't matter how grown-up you were, how good a diver you were, how brave you were. It felt good to know somebody was watching. That's what Bud's joke was for - to let them feel his gaze on them like a pat on the back, like a caress.

  But you don't say all that right out. You keep it light. So when Catfish answered, he didn't sound grateful. "That's cause we love freezin' our nuts off out here for you so much."

  Catfish turned away, swam off toward where Bird-Dog Finler was already closing down and cleaning up. "Come on, Finler," said Catfish. "Let's get it done, I'm tired."

  You'd think, listening to him, that Catfish was beat, but it wasn't true. Or if it was, it didn't matter much to him. Bud knew that if he needed it, Catfish would stay at the job another hour, two more, whatever it took. But then, Catfish also knew that Bud would never ask for such a thing if it wasn't safe or necessary.

  Working on a drilling platform is no job for weak men, even when the platform is rooted solidly in Mother Earth and sticks up several hundred feet above the sea. There's real danger in it. The ocean doesn't care whether you're a first-time tourist dipping your toes at the beach or a rigger drilling for oil day after day. Make the wrong mistake, and you're just as dead. And on a rig there's a lot more can go wrong than on your average tourist beach.

  But what s
eparates platform riggers from flatfoot land crews isn't just the danger. It's the isolation. A guy on a rig in Oklahoma can get in his pickup and drive somewhere that sells beer or Hustler, a place with people you don't know who say things you didn't know they were going to say. People, in other words, who are not crew. Fellow riggers always say exactly what you know they'll say, because they've said it ten thousand times already, till you want to ram a screwdriver through their ear just to give them something new to talk about later.

  Now take that platform, wrap it up in a metal cocoon, and plunge it seventeen hundred feet under the water, and you've got Deepcore, the world's first working underwater drilling platform. Far more dangerous if anything goes wrong, and a hell of a lot more isolated. At least on a surface platform you can see an occasional bird or passing ship. You can see the sky. But in Deepcore all you can see is the same walls around you, and that small part of the sea floor that's within range of the lights.

  And if you should decide you can't stand it anymore and you want to leave, well, it isn't just a jaunt in a boat or a helicopter. First you've got to decompress. Working at these depths has got your body so full of nitrogen that if you don't take your time in the chamber, decompressing the equivalent of rising through the water three to four feet an hour, you die of the bends. There's no quick trip home. If you feel like you have to get out of this tin can right this second, all you can do is climb into an even tinier can and spend three weeks all by yourself decompressing.

  Just knowing that makes most people just a little bit crazy in the back of their minds. Like they got this little teeny scream going on all the time, not so bad that they notice it's there, but droning on and on so that all of a sudden one day something happens, you let go just this much, and suddenly you've gone completely bugfuck and they take you up in a straitjacket. If they don't take you up in a sack. Most of the time, most people keep that scream under control. But it's there, and you know it, and everybody else knows it, and you watch each other to make sure nobody's losing it.

  You want variety? You're in the wrong job. Everything you're going to eat for the whole time you're underwater is already there in the galley - the stuff in storage is more of the same. No Big Mac or beer on tap for you, sorry to say. And everything you breathe comes down the lifeline from the Benthic Explorer, the mother ship floating above you on the surface. Everything's the same, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. And yet you can't let the boredom distract you. If you fail to concentrate just once, at the wrong time, you can die real quick.

  It's not like an office, where it's OK to have a couple of people you can't stand or just ignore, because what the hell, you're going home at five anyway. Down here, if you even suspect one of the guys you're with is stupid or careless, it poisons everything, because you're never sure he isn't going to get you killed. It's no place for polite hypocrisy. If you don't trust him, you just don't work with him. And when he notices you won't ever work with him - which is immediately, the first time you refuse - that's the worst insult you can pay him. He hates you worse than anything in the world, because you've told all the other guys on the crew that you think he's no damn good. And if he's no good in the eyes of his crew, then he knows, right down in his most secret soul, that he is truly worthless. He's so ashamed he wants to die, and he can't leave.

  So picking a crew for Deepcore wasn't just a matter of drawing names out of a hat or seeing who volunteered. They had to take a crew that already trusted each other to the edge of death, that had already worked out all their personality quirks so they didn't piss each other off just by breathing, and, above all, a crew in which all the members were absolutely competent and careful at every job they'd ever have to do.

  There were six crews that started at the same time, training as deep-sea saturation divers, not just the penny-ante shallow-depth hat stuff they had to learn for quick underwater work on surface rigs. Three of them finished training and qualified. Two of them would go into permanent rotation, one month under, three weeks coming up, one week of shore time, and back down into the water. And when it came time to pick the prime crew, the one that would go out to start sinking the first deepwater test drill, Bud Brigman's crew got the nod because they were the smoothest, quickest, happiest, readiest bunch that ever volunteered to live all but six weeks of every year in tin cans at the bottom of the sea or in even smaller tin cans coming up.

  Catfish must have caught Finler doing something not exactly perfect. "What you think you're doing here, buddy?" A little annoyed-sounding. Other guys got pissed off when Catfish talked to them that way. But Finler usually didn't mind getting corrected by Catfish, and when he did mind, Catfish didn't mind getting sassed by Finler. That was why Bud kept them together.

  Now that he was sure Catfish and Finler were wrapping up OK, Bud moved away from the window and started checking gauges. He could hear the pounding from the drill crew tending the turntable about twenty feet away. This was the working heart of the rig. Because of some first-rate semi-automated equipment, it only took a crew of five to tend to the actual drilling. All the rest of the people in Deepcore were there to keep that drill crew alive at the bottom of the sea.

  In a lot of ways Deepcore resembled a spaceship out of the movies. The white metal framework holding together the trimodules around the central bay, all neat and clean and sterile and cold. But here on the drilling floor, you knew that you weren't out in space. This was a hardhat area, as sure as any topside drilling rig, and the men who worked it were covered with mud and chewed-up bits of rock and sludge the drill had brought back from deep in the hole. So much for clean.

  "Hey Bud!"

  He looked around, trying to see who had called his name. It was Jammer, the big guy, standing a full head taller than anybody else on the rig. Deepcore wasn't designed for a basketball team - Jammer only had about ten places on the rig where he could stand up straight. Bud walked over to him so he could hear.

  "Hippy's on the bitch-box. It's a call from topside. That new company man."

  Bud had to think a moment to remember his name. Guys with ties came and went. "Kirkhill?"

  "Yeah."

  "That guy doesn't know his butt from a rathole." Lindsey's boyfriend probably looked just like Kirkhill. A guy who wore a tie all the time. They were a bunch of weasels. They all went to college and came out with an MBA, which as far as Bud could tell stood for My Bleeding Ass. He liked to say it after their name. Meet your new manager, Mr. Gerard Kirkhill, My Bleeding Ass.

  Bud chattered at the drill crew on his way to his office. "Hey, Perry!"

  "Yo!"

  "Do me a favor, will you? Square away that mud hose and these empty sacks? This place is starting to look like my apartment."

  It wasn't all that funny, but Perry chuckled. Bud had learned how to give orders without sounding like he thought it was all that hot being in charge. And yet his joking never sounded like he was apologizing, either. Nobody ever doubted that Bud was in charge down here. Nobody ever doubted that Bud should be in charge, either.

  Bud ducked through the hatch and tramped through the corridor, the steel grating under his boots making a noise like out-of-tune church bells reverberating down the tube. Now, away from the drill, he could hear Hippy's voice over the P.A. "Bud, topside line, urgent."

  "I'm coming, I'm coming. Jeez, keep your pantyhose on." Not that anybody could hear him yet. It just felt good to answer.

  He ducked into his office, which was just small enough to feel cramped and just large enough that nobody would listen if he complained about it. There were stacks of paperwork all over the place. Stuff that the guys with ties insisted he look at or fill out or obey. He'd get to it all real soon now. But till then it was part of his office decor.

  He picked up the phone, punched down the button that was blinking.

  "Brigman here. Yeah, Kirkhill, what's going on?"

  Kirkhill was full of importance and urgency, so of course he couldn't just say what he had to say. He had to set
it up. He had to make sure Bud knew exactly how important this was.

  Yeah, yeah, right, Bud said silently. Get on with it. "Yeah, I'm calm. I'm a calm person. Is there some reason why I shouldn't be calm?"

  So Kirkhill told 'him. "The Navy's here. Benthic Petroleum has agreed to cooperate fully with an operation they've got going. It means moving the rig."

  Bud practically climbed down into the phone. "What!"

  Hippy Carnes was in the control module of Deepcore, watching through a viewport as Little Geek obeyed his commands, dancing a little as he listened to his cassette player. This was the part of his work that Hippy loved most, controlling an ROV - remotely operated vehicle - so smoothly that it might have been his own body out there, only infinitely tougher than his own flesh would ever be. Yet even though his own hands controlled everything it did, he still thought of Little Geek almost as a living creature. Another person, but one who always did what Hippy expected. A true friend. A second self.

  He had Little Geek out on flashlight duty - the ROV's lights helped the diver by filling in shadows. But Little Geek, like his big brother Big Geek, was a flashlight with eyes. Hippy had to watch the monitor with absolute concentration because a diver, Sonny, was depending on him to warn him of unseen obstacles, tangles, fouling - any kind of danger - and if Hippy missed anything, it was Sonny who'd pay. Also in the back of his mind was some awareness that One Night was out in Flatbed, the manned deepwater submersible, so that if he got clumsy or lazy, she'd see. Not that he had the hots for One Night or anything, not that he even thought she was particularly attractive, but Hippy just naturally got extra careful, extra sharp when there was a woman watching.

  As a kid he always got his best videogame scores when he had an audience, and he never got a top score unless it was a girl watching him play. One time playing Galaga it felt like he could go on forever, shooting down wave after wave. He doubled the last high score. Some poor fool had thought that total was the ultimate, but Hippy left him in the cold. He only let his turn end because the girl had started running her hand along the seat of his jeans and down between his thighs and he figured if he quit playing now he could get two high scores tonight. Funny thing, though. He couldn't remember the girl's name or even her face or even whether it was particularly good or not. But he remembered how it felt, that game of Galaga.