"Very good," she said. But Lindsey did not take hints easily. They might think they knew it all, but she knew they didn't. They may know this by the book, but did they know the reality of it? HPNS wasn't funny. It could kill. Why did they think a minute proportion of nitrogen was retained in the breathing mix? Because it was a narcotic to counter HPNS. Because everybody got HPNS. Without the nitrogen, everybody'd get the jitters, get paranoid, scream or kill people or curl up and whimper in a corner. Even with the nitrogen, some people went over the edge. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. And just because you had no problems the first time - the first thirty times - you went down, that didn't mean you couldn't have problems the next time. So she didn't take the hint and drop the subject. If these guys thought there was no problem, that was all the more reason to remind them. "About one person in twenty can't handle it. They just go buggo."
"Look," said Coffey, "they've all made runs at this depth. They're checked out."
"No, I understand that. What I'm saying is that it's impossible to predict just who's susceptible."
"They're checked out." The discussion was over. Coffey didn't have to give an order. His men knew that it was time to go over their assignments inside the sub. They had been through all the floorplans and diagrams, planning alternate routes through the sub, depending on damage, making sure they all knew every item that had to be picked up. They knew it - but they went over it again. It was their answer to Lindsey: If they said they were prepared, they were prepared. These men didn't leave anything to chance.
"Fine," Lindsey said. They ignored her. "Fine." She sat back, trying to make herself comfortable on the bench. These guys obviously didn't have as much experience doing time in a chamber as she had. Even with people you dislike, you could still help each other, read, tell stories, something. You never had to be alone. But these military goons were going to make her go through this like solitary confinement. Maybe she shouldn't have pushed them, but why did they have to get so annoyed? Didn't they know it's better to be safe than sorry? So now they were going to punish her for trying to help, for trying to be a decent person.
It really bothered her to see them all working together. It was obvious they knew each other so well they hardly even had to complete sentences. Coffey didn't have to give orders, either. Just lead them through a review. They all knew exactly what part to play. Lindsey couldn't have put it into words, but this was what bothered her most of all. She'd never been part of a group like that. The only time she ever came close was when she spent time with crews on Deepcore - especially Bud's crew. She knew she didn't really belong, but there was the illusion, especially during those hours locked up together in the compression chamber. Singing, talking, laughing, playing cards - even if she didn't really belong with them, she caught a glimpse of what it felt like.
But most of her life had been like this. Watching a family from outside. For the longest time she had believed "closeness" was a myth - like her own family, her mother and sisters, the only way they were "close" was that her sisters allowed Mother to run them like trained chimps. Her dad, he knew that these group things were all fake. All pep club and locker room fakery.
Except that Bud's crew was real - she knew that. Maybe that was one of the reasons she couldn't stop harping at him in front of them - she wanted in, and couldn't forgive him for the fact that she never really was in. Always a stranger, always a visitor. And now these SEALS. They weren't just faceless military robots. They were individuals, different from each other, she could see that. But despite their differences, somehow they were really together, they were one. And she wasn't part of it.
"You guys know any songs?" she asked. They didn't answer her - probably didn't hear her. It was her little joke, for an audience of one.
One of the bad things about life in Deepcore was that sometimes you just had to sit around and do nothing. Up top, the Benthic Explorer was having a terrible time making way through the heavy seas ahead of Hurricane Frederick, but down below Deepcore was moving along calmly and steadily, Flatbed leading the way. Except for the handful of people on duty at any given moment, driving Flatbed and piloting Deepcore, everybody else had to find ways to entertain themselves.
And there weren't all that many ways. They only piped down TV from the Explorer when there was nothing else more important to send over the video lines - which is to say, never. Listening to cassettes is fine, but you get through forty albums in about three days, and then you repeat, repeat, repeat. You can lift weights till your muscles burn, but your brain doesn't do much more than count to ten a lot. And on Deepcore there aren't enough people off duty at the same time for a decent game of basketball - even if the ceilings were tall enough for a hook shot.
Which is why rig crews are about the most literate people in the world. Not literary, mind you. But they do read. They read everything, and then they read it again, and then they read it to each other.
Catfish, Jammer, and Hippy were keeping each other company outside the pressure chamber. Catfish was tending the mixture for the pressure chamber - he actually had a real job at the moment. Hippy was playing with Beany and eating Cap'n Crunch out of the box. Jammer was doing occasional oral readings from a Louis L'Amour paperback everybody had already read at least once.
Between checks on the gauges, Catfish watched Hippy play with Beany. It wasn't like Hippy was so crazy he thought Beany was a person or anything. It was more like Hippy was so nervous he needed to keep touching the rat, needed to have the rat keep touching him. "Hey, Hippy. Why'd you name that little turdmaker Beany, anyway?" asked Catfish.
Hippy grinned. It was one of his favorite stories, and he thought he'd already told it to everybody in Deepcore twice each. Somehow he'd missed Catfish.
"God, not that again," said Jammer. "It was the TV show 'Beany and Cecil.' "
Hippy was annoyed. Jammer didn't have a right to shut down his story, especially when Catfish asked for it. "That's not even half of the story anyway, Jammer," he said.
Jammer knew he'd been out of line. He pulled the book up in front of his face more and pretended not to be listening.
"I had this snake, see, named Cecil," said Hippy. "Big old buck snake, not poisonous, but it made people shit bricks when they saw him cause everybody thinks all snakes are deadly."
"Whereas in your case it's only the snake's owner," said Jammer.
"If I brought a girl over and she wasn't treating me like she ought to, I'd let Cecil out of the closet. Used to freak 'em to see me pick him up and kiss him right on the mouth. His tongue flicking out on my lips."
"What I always wanted to know," said Jammer, "is did the snake give head?"
Catfish slapped Jammer's leg. "Not everybody can fit his dick between a snake's teeth like you, Jammer." Once again the book went up in front of Jammer's face.
"The best thing," said Hippy, "was when I fed Cecil in front of some girl. All Cecil ever ate was live white rats. I must've kept Furry 'Friends Pet Store in business all by myself, buying rats."
"You mean like Beany?" asked Catfish. The way Hippy babied that rat, it was plain crazy to think of him ever letting some snake swallow it whole.
"I never got to know any of those rats then," said Hippy. "Anyway I had this one girlfriend that I liked enough that she kind of moved in, only when I was gone on the rig I was working then, she had friends over to visit."
"Men friends," said Catfish.
"Man, if you ever saw that babe, you'd know there's no way she ever had a girl friend in her life. She had king-size pillows on a twin-size bed."
"So she had a friend over."
"I don't know if it was an accident or she did it on purpose, the way I always used to," said Hippy, "but somehow Cecil got out of the closet where he stayed all day. Only this guy she's humping, he gets scared all right, but he doesn't run out screaming, he jumps down off the bed and stomps on Cecil. Squished his head like an egg."
"With his bare feet?" asked Catfish.
"With his boots, of course.
"
"He stopped to put his boots on?"
"He already had his boots on. This girl, you didn't stop to take your shoes off when she was ready for you. Anyway, I come home and the girl's gone and there's bloody footprints all over my floor and Cecil's brains are spattered all over in my bedroom. I admit it, I cried like a baby."
"Did the girl ever come back?"
"I would've strangled her with the snakeskin. One of the girls where she worked told me what happened. Said she puked for three days straight. Anyway I had this one rat left over. He was meant for that day's feeding. He was the only living thing I had to remind me of Cecil. So I named him Beany."
"You mean this rat watched Cecil die?" asked Catfish. "No wonder he's psycho."
"Not this rat. This one's Beany the Fourth. Rats don't live all that long."
"Neither do snakes," suggested Jammer. "And you can't make a belt out of a dead rat."
"That's a real lousy thing to say, Jammer," said Catfish.
"But he did it," said Jammer. "Made a belt out of Cecil."
"Well what was I supposed to do?" said Hippy. "Bury him? Stuff him? Bronze him?"
"I hope I don't ever die around you," said Catfish. "Probably make a jacket out of my skin."
"I'd probably make you into a two-man pup tent," said Hippy. He stuffed a handful of Cap'n Crunch in his mouth.
At that moment Jammer found a libidinous double meaning in one of the sentences in the western he was reading. "He was a tough man, born of hard days when men were hard."
"And sheep were nervous," said Catfish.
Nobody laughed. Not at that, not at anything in Hippy's saga of the death of Cecil. You didn't have to laugh out loud after a few weeks together. You could hear something funny and just appreciate it. Hippy got up and walked over to the window into the pressure chamber.
Hippy was the only one who couldn't keep himself from peeking in at the SEALs, but he wasn't the only one thinking about them. Lindsey was trouble, but they knew exactly how much trouble and she didn't worry them. But the SEALs - they had a reputation. Jammer had been Navy once, and he told them about SEALS, about them being the toughest bastards in the U.S. military and therefore probably the toughest in the whole world. Of course, a lot of military groups thought they were tough. Green Berets, Airborne, the U.S. Marines. The SEALS thought of Marines as pussies, but the Marines and everybody else thought of the SEALS as a bunch of psychos, always going on suicide missions. "If the tough guys think you're insane," said Jammer, "then that's true toughness."
But the SEALS weren't the meanest in the world - that was reserved for the KGB, because they didn't have to follow any rules. For instance, the KGB could kill pop-ups during gun battles, no questions asked. But SEALS followed rules. They didn't go around wasting civilians just because they happened to panic and stand up in your line of fire.
But if you happened to be the enemy a SEAL group was assigned to destroy, you might as well make out your will and put it in a safe place. Jammer had a friend who was a Marine in Beirut, and he said that the people there didn't really hate Americans in general, not even the Marines. Even when they blew up the Marine barracks there, it wasn't that they hated the individual Marines, just what they represented as a group. But SEALS now, that was different. SEALS had done real damage in Beirut, and they hated them. "You know that Navy diver those hijackers killed on that plane back then?" Jammer had told them. "Kicked him and beat him to death?"
"You mean he was a SEAL?"
"I don't know," Jammer told them. "But two things tell me he was. First thing - the government only identified him as a Navy diver. That's the closest the government ever comes to identifying a SEAL when he's caught on a mission. Now there really are Navy divers in the world, but I just don't believe a regular Navy diver would have been on that plane at that time. And the second thing - the way they killed him. It was mean. It was personal. They killed him with their own hands and feet. Not a bullet. Not a bomb. Not tossing him out of the plane. They wanted him to die at their hands. And a third thing - "
"You said there was two."
"There's three. They said he didn't make a sound when the Shi'ites were killing him. Didn't make a sound except when they kicked him in the chest and forced air out of his lungs. That's a SEAL. That's how tough they are. You can't torture them, you can't make them whine, because nothing you can do to them short of killing them is as bad as what they already went through during training. That's what they say."
Well, that kind of talk made the four SEALS inside that pressure chamber seem like they were bigger than life, like if they wanted to they could tear open the pressure door with their bare hands. Hippy was the most intrigued by them. Couldn't help himself. He had to go look at them through the window. And then he had to say something stupid about them afterward.
"Those are the SEALS?"
Catfish knew better than to say something like, No, they're meter readers. Hippy could be just a little bit paranoid, so you had to be careful about making him feel like you were making fun of him. That's just one of the things everybody knew about Hippy without having to say it. So Catfish didn't make fun of the stupid question. But he also didn't leave it alone there's such a thing as being too nice. "Yeah," said Catfish. "Those guys ain't so tough. I fought guys plenty tougher'n them."
Hippy didn't know people were always careful about teasing him - he had no such restrictions about teasing back. "Now we get to hear about how you could've been a contender?" He pulled back the neck of Catfish's shirt and poured some Cap'n Crunch down his back.
That was too much for Catfish. Bad enough to pour cereal down his back, but to make fun of his old boxing days was going too far. He whirled around and slapped Hippy a couple of times with his cap. Then he held up his fist. "You see this? They used to call this the Hammer." Catfish was mostly demanding that Hippy take him seriously as an ex-boxer. But he was also, just a little bit, warning Hippy not to go too far.
Jammer spoke up. "Hippy wasn't born then." You're an old guy, Catfish, and Hippy's a dumb kid. Don't take him seriously.
Catfish got the message. He unclenched a little. "Hippy never was born." He pulled some Cap'n Crunch out of the bottom of his shirt and threw it at the boy. "Here, eat some of this."
Hippy still didn't get the idea that Catfish was really annoyed at him. He threw more Cap'n Crunch, hitting Catfish in the back of the head. But Catfish ignored him and went back to work. That's part of the reason Catfish made a good crew member - even when he really was pissed, he didn't do more than growl; if that didn't work, he withdrew and ignored the other guy. He might've been a boxer once, but he didn't throw punches now, not down here, anyway.
And when Catfish just ignored the last salvo of Cap'n Crunch, Hippy finally understood that Catfish wasn't going to play. That's why Hippy made a good crew member, too. He might be a little bit paranoid, might be a little bit insensitive, but then you have to be crazy and antisocial to want to live on the bottom of the sea. But another kid, a topside kid, a kid who didn't belong on a rig crew, he might have kept throwing cereal until Catfish finally did blow up, until there really was a fight. Topside people can do that, because after the fight they can go away somewhere. Not on a Gulf rig or down in Deepcore. You get in a fight, you still got to eat with the guy and work with him and cover his ass and trust him to cover yours. Crazy or dumb about people he might be, but Hippy still knew how to stop before the joke went too far.
Lindsey was bored beyond belief. Coming on impulse as she had, she hadn't brought anything of her own with her - no books, no papers, nothing. The SEALS didn't have that problem. They managed to keep busy - in shifts. Right now Monk and Wilhite were asleep, while Coffey and Schoenick were intent on reading documents.
No doubt top-secret reports, thought Lindsey. That was what bothered her most about this business of turning over Deepcore to the government. They'd be expected to tell these SEALS everything, but in return the SEALS would say nothing. After all, nobody on Deepcore had sec
urity clearance. Didn't they realize how dangerous that was? How easy it would be for one of the crew to make some trivial mistake because they didn't know the consequences? It was even more likely that the crew would fail to do something, fail to give some warning because it never occurred to them what these top-secret, eyes-only boys were about to do. Somebody's going to die because of your secrecy.
She shook off the idea. Pure paranoia on her part. Nobody was going to die, beyond the kids on the sub. They were certainly dead. Lindsey knew that, even if people like Kirkhill still thought there was a chance. Even if she didn't know what pressure could do to a damaged sub at that depth - let alone an undamaged one - she would have known it from the way these SEALS were acting. They didn't make one inquiry about provisions Deepcore might have for any rescued seamen. They didn't even try to find out how they might manage getting survivors from some compartment of the sub - presumably still at one atmosphere - into this pressure chamber, so they could get blown down to sixty atmospheres in order to stay alive in Deepcore. No, the military knew that there were no survivors on the sub.
Which meant that the whole purpose of sacrificing her test well was just to keep some damned secret for the government. What, were the Russians going to slip in some super-secret equivalent of Deepcore during a hurricane and snatch all the secrets out of the sub? Steal all our warheads? Nonsense - they didn't even have an equivalent of Deepcore. She knew this because if the Russians had one, then the U.S. government would have panicked and built their own in order to keep up in some meaningless submersible-platform race. Which they hadn't, which is why somebody like Lindsey was the only one working on the problem in any serious way. Now the government decided a platform like Deepcore was useful. Now she was expected to sacrifice everything for the government. Where were they when she was looking for development money?
Lindsey didn't like secrets. She especially didn't like secrets on Deepcore.
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