The Abyss

by Orson Scott Card

  There were a lot of bodies, and between the currents caused by the divers' movements and the way their lights kept moving, changing the patterns of shadows on the walls, it kept looking like the corpses were alive, waving, pleading for help or else gesturing mildly, a faint movement of an arm, as if they were conversing, inviting you to sit down for a minute, got something to tell you, don't go off like that, can't you see I want to talk to you?

  Bud got control of himself. They had work to do, and they'd be no good if they kept looking at how dead people could get when they lost air this far down. Bud looked at the others. Right away he saw that Jammer's helmet was fogging up - he was breathing too fast. It'd be lousy if Jammer hyperventilated right now. You can't exactly give smelling salts to a guy who faints in a helmet. Somebody'd have to drag him out, watching all the time to make sure Jammer's breathing mix stayed connected and balanced. No good - Jammer had to snap out of it. "Hey, Jammer, you doing all right?"

  Jammer made a show of nodding his head. Bud could hear over his F-O that his on-demand breathing apparatus was slowing down. The hyperventilation episode was over. Bud turned to the others they weren't much better off. "How are you guys doing?"

  "I'm all right," said Finler. "I'm dealing."

  Catfish sounded kind of sheepish. "Triple time sounded like a lot of money, Bud. It ain't. I'm sorry."

  This was no time for laying blame, even when it was well deserved. "Yeah, well, we're here," said Bud. "Let's get it done."

  Bud moved from man to man, touching, making contact, reassuring them. He was sweating rivers inside his helmet, partly because he wasn't fully recovered himself from the shock of what they saw, partly because he knew how dangerous it would get if they didn't keep control.

  Coffey didn't just stand there while Brigman got the civilians to stop wetting their pants over a few bodies. While men were alive you did all you could to keep them that way. But that was over. Dead was dead and there was work to do. The most important thing was to find the captain.

  And there he was. Coffey turned him over, looked him in the face. I don't know what happened, he said silently, but if it was your fault, you died knowing that you killed your men, and that's punishment enough. At least you did your duty and got your position marker off. At least you made it possible for me to get here. That's something. You pulled something out.

  So did Coffey. He reached into neck of the man's shirt and pulled out the chain that held the missile arming key. It was the power of nuclear war, right there in a little piece of metal; that's how much America trusted its boomer captains. The key was useless now the safeguard systems aboard the sub would never be used. Coffey had to take the key so that there was no chance of it ever falling into enemy hands. He'd never use the key himself.

  Yet still he knew the trust had passed to him. He held onto the key and gave it a hard yank. The captain would feel no pain now from the key coming off. But Coffey felt it like a pain himself, to have it. It was so light he could hardly tell he was holding it; it was so heavy that he could barely hang on. I've got the power to make one of these babies blow, thought Coffey. And if we get to Phase Three, I'll have to do it. That's something no boomer captain in history had ever had to do - actually use the key and set a warhead off.

  Coffey stowed the key in the pouch at his belt. He'd trained almost as much in gloves as bare-handed - he had no problem manipulating even something as small as the key. He looked around - none of the civilians had seen him take it. Good. Fewer questions, fewer lies to tell. Yet he was vaguely disappointed, too. There should be some ceremony for the passing of this key. Like a scepter or a magic wand - it gives more power than any king or wizard ever had.

  He saw that Brigman had his crew under control. The man was good at what he did, and Coffey was able to rely on that. "Brigman, take your men and continue aft. Split into two teams. Let's get moving. We head back in fourteen minutes."

  Brigman did it, just like that. The man knew when and how to take an order. Just like me, thought Coffey.

  As soon as the civilians were out of the control center, Coffey went to the wall safe and, consulting the plastic card they'd given him back in Houston, he spun the dial until the safe door sprang open. Inside were several plastic binders. The code books. Except for a map of the location of all the nuclear subs, which was impossible to get since the Navy didn't even know, these binders were the things the Russians would most love to get their hands on. But now Coffey's hands were on it, which mean the Russians would never get it. America's security was safe in Coffey's hands.

  He checked through the binders, making sure all the material was there. It was. He put the codebooks back into the safe. Then he took an underwater thermite grenade out of his pouch, pulled the pin, put it in the safe, and closed the door. He backed away. A moment later there was a flash. One danger eliminated. There were a lot more of them - electronic circuitry that Soviet hardware experts could translate or imitate. But then, Coffey had a lot of thermite grenades.

  Bud led his men along the corridor until they came to a companionway leading down. Toward the missiles. It wasn't necessary for them all to go down there in order to check them out, and for safety it was better to leave men at the halfway point, in case something went wrong. Besides, they could make themselves useful, check out these compartments. "OK, Cat, Lew," said Bud. "I want you guys to stay on this level. Check it out. Me and Jammer are going down below."

  "OK, you got it," said Catfish. There was no question that Catfish would be in charge when Bud was gone.

  "I want you to be back here in ten minutes sharp." Bud watched as Catfish and Finler checked their watches. Underwater, ten minutes meant ten minutes. This wasn't a bunch of kids promising to meet their mom somewhere at the mall.

  "Ten minutes," said Catfish. "Okie-dokie."

  And a last word of warning. "Be careful." As if the warning was necessary. What it really meant was, I care about you. Maybe it wasn't so different from a mom turning her kids loose at the mall, after all. Bud dropped down into the hole in the deck, using his hands to push himself feetfirst down the ladderway. Jammer came right after.

  Bud had originally chosen Jammer to come with him because if something was wrong, some physical obstruction, Jammer was the biggest and strongest. But now he was glad to have him along because he wanted Jammer where he could keep an eye on him. Bud was still worried about how he'd responded to the bodies in the control room. Everybody was thrown a little, but Jammer had it the worst. Jammer was on the edge right now.

  Bud led the way through a long, claustrophobically narrow corridor. There were more bodies, but now Bud was getting used to them. They didn't seem so personal. Just crumpled shapes in khaki or blue. They reached a hatch, undogged it, opened it up. Beyond it the space was so big their lights couldn't find any wall at all.

  They went through into the darkness. Now, instead of walls, their lights struck forty-foot vertical tubes, extending up through three levels, divided by floors made of open steel grillwork. An ant's-eye-view of crayons inside a Crayola box.

  "Where are we?" asked Jammer.

  "Missile compartment," said Bud. "Those are the launch tubes." It worried Bud that Jammer had to ask. He'd been there when they were briefed. If Jammer was thinking straight, he would've known right off.

  They swept their lights around the chamber. It was huge - a hundred and twenty feet long. But it was something small that caught their eye. Jammer's light fell across something moving, and so it drew his gaze. A seaman in coveralls was turning slowly in the eddying current. In Jammer's light, they watched as small albino crabs crawled slowly over the man's face. One crab scuttled out of his gaping mouth.

  Jammer went bugfuck. "Lord God Almighty. Shit, aw shit, aw shit!" He turned away, as if he was trying to escape. Bud reached out, caught his arm, turned him back around, held him there helmet to helmet. Jammer couldn't hold still, couldn't stop clenching and unclenching his hands.

  Bud asked him, "Hey, you OK?" but he sure a
s hell wasn't. Jammer was hyperventilating now, and from his face Bud guessed that he was close to puking. Vomit inside a helmet was worse than a mess. It could screw up the breathing system. It could kill.

  "Deep and slow, big guy," Bud said. "Deep and slow. Just breathe easy."

  "I they're all dead, Bud. Everybody's dead."

  Right, Jammer, but let's not add to the total. "I'm taking you back out," Bud said. It was the only sensible decision. If anything else happened, Jammer would surely panic. Better to get out now while Jammer could still do his own swimming.

  But Jammer knew what that meant - part of the job aborted, Bud having to get him back to one of the Cabs, the Cab heading back to Deepcore prematurely. Somebody else having to come in here and do his share. A lot of extra work, all because Jammer lost control. "No no no! I'm OK." He didn't mean that he was OK He only meant that he didn't have to go back right away. Jammer was no fool he knew the danger. "I can't go any further in."

  If Jammer had pretended he could go on, Bud would have known his judgment was shot, would have insisted on taking him back immediately. But because Jammer knew his limitations, Bud was pretty sure he could trust him to stay in place, not do anything that might lead him to panic again. "OK, Jammer, no problem. You stay right here, all right. I have to go down there to the end of this thing. We'll stay in voice contact. You'll be able to see my lights, right?" Like a father telling his kid not to be afraid of the dark because there was a nightlight plugged into the wall. But that was all right, that was what Jammer needed right now. When things started going wrong underwater, anybody could turn into a frightened child. There was a five-year-old inside everybody, just waiting to get scared out of hiding. "Just hold onto the rope," Bud said. "If you have any problems, tug on it twice, right? Five more minutes. Relax, OK?"

  "Yeah, OK. OK."

  Bud made his way farther in, checking the integrity of the launch tubes, paying out lifeline as he went.

  Jammer felt like a shit-eating fool. Of course everybody'd been listening in. Everybody knew that it was Jammer who lost it, Jammer who couldn't take it. He knew that it might've happened to anybody, that they were always on edge down there, that you never know who's going to blow. But the fact was that it was him this time, calm cool Jammer, and even now he was still so jittery that it took real effort to breathe slow and steady. The worst thing was that Bud's lights weren't always visible. Sometimes he'd go behind something. And now he was just plain getting too far. This room was too big. It was possible to lose the lights at the far end of the room, if they were pointed the wrong way. Jammer clenched and unclenched his hands. It's OK. Bud's still there, I've got his tether. He'll be back, I've just lost him for a minute, as least I still have my lights, I can still see what's going on right here except I just don't want to look, that's all, I don't want to see - what I saw before. Just keep looking for Bud, for his lights, and -

  Suddenly Jammer's own light faded. It didn't just blink off, it faded down to nothing, as if it was powered by a rat in a treadmill and the rat was slowing down for a rest. Trouble was, Jammer knew there was no way that could happen. A power fade, from batteries? And now he was alone in the darkness. This was not a good thing to happen. He knew he might panic. He knew he was on the edge. In fact, worrying about panicking might make him panic. This was just a bad thing to happen, really bad, a very bad thing to happen. "Bud? Bud! I just lost my lights! Bud, Bud! You reading me? Bud?" It was completely black all around him. He couldn't see anything. He was going to lose it, he knew that. He pictured an albino crab crawling on him; he could feel it, even though he knew it was just imagination. He imagined a crab inside his helmet, finding a way in somewhere and crawling across his faceplate.

  No, he shouted silently, don't think about that. Don't think of the crab scuttling to the side of the faceplate and moving over onto your cheek. Don't think of it crawling across your face, trying to find your mouth, trying to crawl inside.

  Bud's own lights were flickering, dimming - but not completely to black. It wasn't supposed to happen, he didn't understand it, didn't know if it was dangerous. But his first concern was Jammer - if this was happening to him, he could lose it all, right then, and if Bud's lights went out while Jammer was panicking, there'd be no help for it. "How you doing, Jammer? Are your lights dimming on you?" Keep it calm, make it sound like it's no problem.

  But Jammer didn't hear Bud, and Bud didn't hear Jammer, because the power was down on their speaking systems, too, UQC and F-O alike. The explanation was simple enough. The builders pulled their energy from any ambient source, setting up highly conductive molecular chains to draw it in. They didn't think about it any more than we humans think about making our hearts beat or our stomachs digest. We know it's happening, but since it's keeping us alive it doesn't occur to us that we might want to stop the process.

  So as a builder came near to Jammer, by reflexively drawing from the ambient energy source it shut down most of the electrical functions of his suit. It didn't drain his batteries that was potential energy, not actual electrical flow. But it did siphon off whatever current the batteries were putting out. She knew, of course, that humans were fragile at this depth, and that the current they were using was probably important to their survival, so as quickly as possible she slackened her own energy demands, trying to leave the human as much as she could. Enough that his lights still glowed dimly. Enough that his air regulator continued to function, though sluggishly. Not enough for their F-Os to send signals strong and clear enough to be made into words on the other end of the thread.

  The builder hadn't gone to the Montana in order to meet with humans. As far as the builders knew, all the humans there were dead, their memories and bodies long since recorded. The city was working steadily, trying to decode human memory and comprehend the functions of the strange, fragile human body. Whatever they learned was immediately disseminated by direct memory transfer among all the builders in this city, and by messenger would soon be known in every city under the sea.

  So this builder, like any other, knew that as the danger from human beings became steadily more serious, it became more and more urgent to make some kind of contact with the living creatures, not just with their abandoned dead. She was working on the nuclear warheads in the Montana, studying how they might be destroyed without being detonated, when she felt the warmth and movement and smells from human beings and their machines coming nearer, coming right into the sub. This might be important. She waited until two of them came directly into the same large chamber where she was working, waited until they separated, one remaining stationary, the other exploring further. Then she approached the stationary one, hoping to make contact, using what had been learned so far about the human body and mind.

  Because she was not riding in a porter or performing a particular, specialized function, she appeared in her natural state; and because she was absorbing energy not only from Jammer's and Bud's batteries, but also from the nearby vehicles, she glowed brightly with the channels of energy flowing through her.

  Jammer couldn't hear anything - he realized that along with the loss of his lights, his speaker was out. He wasn't hearing anything from the others, not even the chig-chigchig of their regulators controlling the flow of oxygen. He was alone. The only thing he had left was the tether linking him with Bud. As his lights began to return, he tugged on the line. Urgently. Sharply. With all his strength. The line resisted so stubbornly that surely Bud had felt him with all Jammer's pulling he might well be dragging Bud back toward him.

  The taut line abruptly relaxed. Jammer rocked backward with the sudden release of tension. Then, as he recovered and pulled in the line, he saw that it had been severed only ten feet away. The tether must have caught on a snag, and his pulling had cut it. Probably cut Bud's F-O thread, too. Bud was completely alone down there. And Jammer was completely alone up here.

  He looked all around in the darkness, trying to see Bud's helmet lamp, trying to see something. Hysteria was only a few quick b
reaths away. Then he became aware of a soft radiance flickering over the walls, over the launch tubes. He turned gratefully toward the source of the light. It was coming from under the steel grating of the deck. Bud must have gone down to the level below, and now that the tether was broken he was coming back. "Bud, is that you?" he asked.

  Jammer shielded his eyes, staring into the source of the light. Something was wrong. It wasn't a pinpoint source, like Bud's headlamp. It was much larger, more general. And it was too big to be Bud, whatever it was. Oh, God, it wasn't Bud at all. It wasn't a person at all. It was glowing with light, it had huge, towering shoulders - or were they wings? - and the eyes were staring into him, right into his soul. It was coming for him. How did he know that? It was coming for him, it wanted him; the nearer it came, the more powerful the feeling of dread and loss that swept over him. Everybody was dead, everybody was going to die, this was the angel of death, it was coming to take him, to take everything out from inside of him, to crawl inside his head and eat his mind out like one of those crabs. Jammer screamed and turned away, gulping air, clawing hand over hand through the wreckage, trying to get away, trying to get up where Catfish and Finler were, up where this thing couldn't see him, couldn't crawl inside his head. Only he couldn't get away, he was caught on something, he was snagged - no, it had him; and now he banged his backpack against a wall, trying to get away. Then something went wrong with his breathing mix. He really was going to die. That thing, that angel of death, it had cut off his air, it was killing him, he was going to die, just like the sailors, just like the dead men floating all through this sub.

  The builder tried to communicate. It sent invisible tendrils out into the water, reaching until they found the man. Then they swarmed over his suit, probing until they found an opening large enough to get through. Surface tension kept the water from breaking through, but these intelligently guided tendrils weren't blocked. In moments they were inside the man's helmet, into his ears and nostrils. The builder sent molecular codes along the tendrils, which duplicated them inside the man's brain, reordering the electrical patterns enough to give him back some of the memories they had taken out of the dead men on the Montana. This seemed to get the man's attention - he was standing, frozen, staring at the builder as she came nearer and nearer. She had no way of knowing that she was sending into Jammer's brain the point-of-death panic and despair that had filled a sailor's mind in the final moments of his life.