by Bob Finley
Marcus Justin couldn't think of anything to say. Whatever he said would be tantamount to surrender.
Janese Cramerton broke the silence. She reached behind her back to the single snap somehow holding the bra of her bikini in place.
"Would you have me change right here?" she asked.
His face reddening and realizing his defeat, Marc mumbled tightly, "Kim, take Ms. Cramerton to the crew's quarters and see that she's taken care of. I'll be in number one!" He brushed roughly by her and made for the airlock.
"I'm disappointed, Captain," Janese Cramerton called after Marcus Justin. "I had hoped you might be the one to do that."
Marc turned briefly to look at her.
"Do what, Ms. Cramerton?" he asked.
"‘Take care of me’,'" she sweetly thrust at his retreating figure. “By the way,” she called after him, “nice bathing suit.”
Turning to Kim, she smiled. Then, Marc out of sight, he smiled. Then they both burst out laughing. "I'm Kim, Doctor Cramerton. Co-pilot and crew of one. I'll show you to the crew's quarters."
"And I'm Janese. Not ‘doctor,’ not ‘miss,’ and certainly not ‘Ms.’ She smiled to soften her pronouncement. They left the room with Janese Cramerton apologizing for the danger to which she had inadvertently exposed them in the shark incident and Kim apologizing for his boss's behavior.
Chapter 12
Fourteen hours later, Marc Justin cruised the black depths of 13,300 feet in search of MARS III. He relied solely on the complex instrumentation array before him to locate the sluggish three-man submarine research vessel, whose secret mission was scouting for installation sites for a new system that would forewarn against an unusual concentration of enemy submarines. The problem today, he mused, wasn't so much in knowing where the enemy was, but in who the enemy was. And what was worse, and far more dangerous, he thought, was the likelihood that the "enemy" most of the time was domestic, not foreign. Whether you're killed by another country's missiles or by a drug abuser from across the street, dead is dead.
Climbing at a rate of ninety vertical feet per mile, Marc had let his ship follow the contours of the foothill slopes until he could slide into the east/west Oceanographer Fracture Zone three hundred or so miles south of the Azores. Then he had "flown" his ship at almost a hundred miles an hour down a vast canyon thousands of feet deep and over four hundred miles long, with vertical walls on both sides, like a fighter pilot flying tree-top level down Fifth Avenue in downtown New York City. Now on final approach, he had backed off the throttle until the VIKING was crawling along at only fifteen miles per hour. Rising from the 11,000-foot depths of the Sohm Abyssal Plain, the razor-backed peaks of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge finally crested 4,000 feet above the ocean floor. Cruelly jagged and jumbled, the 12,000 mile-long Ridge was part of the 40,000 mile-long Mid Ocean Ridge that stretches from pole to pole in the Atlantic, around southern Australia, and then up to equatorial South America in the Pacific. And as yet, 95% of the Ridge was unexplored, much less charted with any dependable accuracy. If MARS wasn't near its last reported position, finding it could be impossible.
It was now nine in the morning, Miami time, of the day following Marc's urgent pre-dawn call from the Secretary of the Navy. In 28 hours Marc had swapped a warm bed 200 feet under the Miami seas for a pilot's chair three thousand miles out and two and a half miles under the 38° Atlantic Ocean.
Approaching the area of the last known radio transmission by MARS III, dread of the sight of the mangled wreckage of the MARS station began to intrude on his consciousness. He almost wished that he'd never find the manned research station.
Kim entered the room and came to stand behind Marc.
"Good morning," Marc said without turning.
"Let's hope so. I felt you rein 'er in," Kim commented, as much aware of what probably lay ahead as was Marc. Marc's reply, but a brief glance, nevertheless conveyed his agreement.
"Dim the light, would you?" he asked.
Kim turned a dial on the console and the red light that was used in the control sphere at depths below 1800 feet died away until only a faint glow struggled to illuminate the room. Except for it, the only other light in the great bubble of a room emanated from the instruments on the pilot's console. The dim bank of red lights lent the faces of pilot and co-pilot a ghoulish countenance.
Contour ‘flying’ up the face of the Ridge, Kim gazed with awe at the chaotic configurations of the terrain revealed by the three-dimensional HolarScope as it virtually ripped apart the veil of blackness beyond the glass ‘wall’ of the VIKING.
"How much farther?" Kim inquired.
"A shade over a mile," Marc replied.
"Do you think we'll actually find it?" Kim pressed.
Marc shook his head uncertainly. "I don't know," he half-sighed. "There may not be enough left to recognize," he added.
"Did they have any kind of transponder aboard?" Kim asked hopefully.
"Yeah, according to the specs the Navy sent over, MARS was equipped with a sonar signal in case the Navy had to locate it in a hurry. But," he added, "it doesn't matter anyway."
"Why not," Kim asked, puzzled.
"Well," Marc glanced over his shoulder at Kim, "for two reasons. One, if MARS crushed, as is most probable, the power source that operated the signal is probably dead. Secondly, even if by some miracle the power source survived, the vehicle would most likely have piled into the bottom of a canyon somewhere and the mountains between us would block the signal. And," he added ruefully with a gesture at the HolarScope, "there are thousands of valleys along the Ridge it could have gone down in."
"But wouldn't the number of valleys it could have fallen into be limited by the area in which it was last heard from?" Kim challenged.
"Sure, if they didn't move the MARS after their nine P.M. signal," Marc replied. "But," he went on, "the station was mobile, just like we are. Of course they only had a five knot top speed but it's been over thirty-five hours since they were last heard from. Theoretically, it's possible for them to be almost two hundred miles from here by now."
Sobered by this possibility, Kim was silent a moment. Then he asked quietly, "You think that's likely?"
Marc shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe not. But," he emphasized, "it is possible."
For several long minutes Kim stood in the semi-darkness and watched the HolarScope screen. Finally, Marc broke the silence.
"You wanta try your luck on the homing sonar?"
"D' you mind?" Kim eagerly queried.
Marc looked over his shoulder at his young assistant and grinned.
"Does it matter?" he asked.
"Well, the less you object, the sooner I'll be able to wear down you down," Kim grinned back.
Marc turned back to his instruments with an amused shake of his head at his protégé’s perseverance. "It's worth a try, I suppose," he mused.
Kim immediately switched on the receiver.
"The coded transmission frequency is in my briefcase," Marc indicated a small door on the lower part of the console. Kim withdrew the briefcase and, thumbing through it, extracted a sheet of paper. He punched in the frequency and fine-tuned it to scan slightly to both sides in case the signal drifted. He was visibly disappointed when no sound issued immediately from the receiver.
Marc watched intermittently as Kim ranged the neighboring frequencies without success. The VIKING rose purposefully out of the great abyssal depths, probing the precipices and crevasses that catacombed the savage mountains.
"Coming up on Table Rock," Marc murmured.
"What's ‘Table Rock’?" came Frank Sheppard's voice over the intercom.
Marc brought up the observation sphere monitor and glanced briefly at it.
"Mornin' Frank. Should have known you'd be on the job. Table Rock is the name somebody hung on a flat piece of real estate up here on the edge of the mountain we're just about to top out on. It's where MARS was when it...where its last known transmission came from."
Clearing a jagged peak at 1
2,621 feet by thirty yards, Marc dropped his fragile craft over the other side and began a coasting descent into a valley of magnificent proportions and ruggedness. The HolarScope revealed the spectacle as clearly as had he been able to pierce the absolute blackness with his own eyes. Marc nosed over into a wide left turn and approached Table Rock in an arc that let him recon the area. He brought the ship to a near hover a hundred feet out. Table Rock lay ahead and below them.
"Nothing," Kim said it all.
"Whaddyathink?" Marc asked.
"I dunno."
There was a silence as both men considered the situation.
"Let's go in, visual. No ventral thrusters. Check for ‘pod prints," Marc suggested.
Staring hard over Marc's shoulder at the HolarScope, Kim said "Okay. But let me set up a ‘jump’ first, in case there's a surge." He crossed quickly to the parallel computer console next to the CommPuter and began hammering in commands.
"What's a ‘pod print’, Marc?" Sheppard asked. "And what does he mean, ‘a surge’"?
"We're gonna use the lights instead of the HolarScope to check visually for imprints that might have been made by MARS's landing gear, Frank, to see if we can tell whether it's been here. If we use the maneuvering thrusters under the ship, we might fan away the evidence. But we don't want to be caught unawares by a wayward current that could shove us into the side of the mountain. So Kim's posting the computer as guard. If it senses a sudden change, it'll automatically blast us away from the wall...quicker than I could."
Kim returned to stand just behind Marc.
"Roll cameras," Marc instructed.
Reaching around Marc, Kim switched on the digital recorders.
"Rolling."
"Lights."
Kim cued "Lights/External" and five million candlepower blazed into the black void before them.
"Wow!" exclaimed Frank Sheppard.
"Yeah," Marc agreed, blinking away his night vision.
"Okay," he breathed. "Let's do it."
The VIKING glided little by little toward the curious forty by sixty foot step cut into an otherwise sheer canyon wall. The lights turned eternal night into intense day as Marc allowed the ship's unpowered forward momentum to carry her over the edge of the Table, in a slightly-nose-down attitude. With the deck canted forward beneath them, both Marc and Kim had ring-side seats just fifteen feet above the rough-textured rock surface.
"There! See it"? Kim stabbed a finger. "And there...there's another one!"
A round depression, four feet wide and an inch or so deep in the lightly silted rock surface passed beneath their feet; then, several feet to their left, another.
"Okay," Marc tilted his head slightly in thought, "then there should be two more around here someplace. How far apart were those prints, fifteen feet"?
" ‘Bout that," Kim agreed.
"Then they're either the front or back sets...so there should be another pair thirty or forty feet behind them in..." he tweaked one of the video cameras forty-five degrees to port "...about...that direction."
"Bingo! There's one!" Kim announced. "And I think that's the other one just beyond it, on the edge of the light."
"Check the tapes."
Kim replayed the digital vid, then fast-forwarded through the far left monitor.
"Got it," he confirmed.
"Then let's get outta here, mo' ricky tick," Marc said. He applied the forward brakes, kicking up clouds of silt out in front of the ship, but killing their forward momentum. Then he kicked in the ventral and starboard thrusters and the VIKING crabbed upwards and to the left, pulling away from the cliff wall and turning out toward the openness of the canyon. The powerful lights were useless in the clouds of silt kicked up by the water jet thrusters, but Marc knew they'd cleared the edge of the Table when the depth compensator clicked from fifteen feet to four hundred thirty-eight feet. Then they were suddenly back into clear water and Marc took a deep breath. He didn't like flying blind. He pulled away from the canyon wall fifty yards, did a one-eighty pivot, and hovered. Pulling the video cameras back to a wide-angle shot, he aimed his lights back where they'd just been. The water was clear enough that, from their vantage point a hundred-fifty feet away and a hundred feet above, they could see Table Rock begin to emerge as the silt drifted away in the slight current.
"Well. Now what"? he asked no one in particular.
"Pan a three-sixty and check the 'Scope," Kim suggested.
With his left hand Marc depressed a pre-programmed button on the arm of the pilot's station. The VIKING slowly pirouetted left until they'd come full circle.
"Might I make a suggestion?" Frank Sheppard quietly interjected.
"I wish somebody would," Marc answered.
"From the HolarScope, it looks like this canyon does a right turn about a quarter-mile ahead. Since it seems we're going to do a bit of searching, would anyone mind humoring a geologist and searching in that direction?"
Marc and Kim exchanged a look. Kim shrugged.
"Might as well," Marc agreed. He wheeled the VIKING's head around and dropped into the seventy-yard wide canyon whose sheer V-shaped walls plummeted almost four hundred feet to a narrow, sandy, trough-like bottom.
"Ripples in the sand," Kim murmured.
Marc nodded. That meant a strong current through this canyon some time or other. Running his fingers delicately over the buttons of the control panel on the left arm of his chair, Marc maintained tight control over the responsive ship as it glided between the menacing walls of the canyon.
"We might be missing something here," Kim mused.
"Such as?" Marc's faith in his co-pilot cum computer guru had been justified many times.
"We're only searching RF bands. Maybe we ought to look at thermal and nuclear imaging as well."
Marc pursed his lips and nodded his approval. "Good idea. Do it."
Kim left the homing sonar receiver active, just in case, and set up the necessary scanners for an omnidirectional grid search. Then he fetched them both a cup of coffee and stood behind Marc in order to see the HolarScope while sipping the hot brew.
"Marc, would it be possible to steer close enough to the canyon wall to actually see it? The HolarScope is great, but for a geologist, nothing beats first-hand observation."
"Sure, Frank," Marc volunteered, "I'll run in close and use the side spots."
Goosing the port maneuvering thrusters, Marc crabbed his ship sideways. The side-scanning sonar indicated that the distance between the wall and the ship was narrowing, though except for the HolarScope, Marc could perceive nothing outside the cone of light probing directly ahead. He kept a guarded eye on the sonar's range indicator as the sub came ever closer to the wall...eighty feet...fifty...forty-five.
"Frank, I'm going to stand off the cliff at forty feet to give the ship's elevators some clearance in case of turbulence," Marc called to his passenger. "Will that be close enough?"
"Great, Marc. Thanks," Sheppard replied over the intercom.
"Is the starboard observation window open?" Marc asked of Frank.
"No," returned Frank.
"Well, I'm coming up to the cliff on that side so if you will, just open that window and swivel your chair around to face that way," Marc instructed his passenger.
Frank Sheppard electrically trundled the four-by-four foot metal window shield to its "open" position and settled back in one of the four plush observation chairs. But he wasn't to sit placidly there for long.
"Squared away back there, Frank?" Marc called.
"Yep," Sheppard smiled at Marc through the closed-circuit TV monitor. "Let the show begin!"
Marc smiled in return. He liked the man's open, unassuming character.
"Kim, where are the other passengers?" Marc inquired of his co-pilot.
"Masters is still asleep and Janese...Miss Cramerton... is having breakfast," Kim replied through his steaming mug of coffee."
"Stand by Frank, I'm going to turn on the lights," Marc called into the intercom. "Take the hel
m for a few minutes, will you Kim?"
"Gonna have a little breakfast?" Kim grinned knowingly.
Marc gave him his "Shaddup" look but grinned in spite of himself.
"Yeah," he drawled. "I've had eight hours to think about it , and what I think is, a little crow for breakfast might be appropriate."
He reached across the console to his right and flipped a toggle switch. Two spheres back, Frank Sheppard gasped and bolted out of his chair. As Marc passed through on his way to the galley, he noted with satisfaction that Sheppard looked like a kid glued to the window of a toy store. It pleased him when other people got as excited about exploration as he did.
Outside, the water was so clear it seemed not to exist. The stark whiteness of the searing lights defined every minute detail of the cliff wall. Gray rock face slabbed its way across the broad cone of intense light, jagged vertical cracks creating abstract shadows that shifted as the VIKING slid past, taking with it the only light to have come this way in thousands of centuries.
As the VIKING angled downward toward the sandy bottom, the blazing suns on her sides revealed jumbled piles of rock debris that had fallen from far above, creating a pile of talus seventy feet deep that tapered away from the opposing cliff faces until only a narrow strip of sand separated them where they tailed out.
As the ship glided down and leveled out forty feet above the bottom, Frank gasped at the color that appeared below them. Three-foot-tall sea pens slowly undulated, resembling a child’s “jacks” on stalks of yellow, orange-red and purple. Olive green, red, blue and flesh-hued anemones waved their tentacles gently from their attachments on the rocks and deposits of pillow lava. Mysterious tracks that crossed and crisscrossed the thin sediment on the bottom led to acorn worms or to translucent sea cucumbers that almost glowed in their purple, maroon and violet hues as they dredged their meals. Other strange holes in symmetrical patterns were explained as Sheppard watched a brilliant red brittle star quickly burrow its way into the bottom when the big ship thrummed past. Frank looked up at the monitors, hoping all this was being filmed so he could watch it again later.
