by Bob Finley
"Easy. Easy. Come in low, otherwise you won't clear the stabilizer. Put your belly about five or six feet off the deck and ease in. I'll watch the top of the stabilizer."
"Ohhhh, I don't like this," Kim said fearfully.
"Neither do I, little buddy. But, if it'll fit, you can drive it."
At an air show at Seymour Johnson Air Base in North Carolina once, Justin had seen a huge B-52 bomber parked three-fourths of the way into a hanger. Only its towering tail section protruded outside the hanger. Marc was sure that if he could be outside, looking in, that's what the VIKING would look like.
"Easy, now. Take 'er down a couple of feet...okay, that's better. Now, hold it right there."
He brought the SQUID up to within six feet of the seventy-five foot ceiling and sighted down the length of the VIKING, which seemed disproportionately huge in this confined space.
"Okay, ease forward. A little more...a little more...whoa. Hold what you got."
He eased the SQUID up again and took a final look.
"You're in."
"I was afraid you'd say that," Kim answered.
"You got about five or six feet under you and about the same clearance above the stabilizer. That's not a lot to play with."
"Tell me about it," Kim admonished.
"Okay...now I'm gonna try to stay far enough ahead of you to be able to see how much clearance you have. But I'm gonna have to back up all the way in order to be able to watch you. So, don't let me back into anything." Marc tried to convert Kim's lack of faith in himself into concern for the SQUID. It was a feeble effort, but he didn't have much to work with.
"Bring all your maneuvering thrusters up to five percent power and synchronize their output. That way, if you need them, they'll already be on line. The second or two you save could keep you from hitting a wall. Oh, and you'd better put a twenty percent ceiling response on them, too, so you don't...accidentally give 'em more juice than you meant to." What he stopped himself from saying was ‘so you don't panic and run it into a wall’.
A small cloud of sediment surrounded the VIKING as Kim ran up the thrusters, but it slowly streamed away behind the great ship instead of obscuring the pilot's vision. Marc quickly understood its significance.
"You're heading into about a one-knot current, Kim. It'll keep your visibility good, but she might try to drift a little, so keep a close eye on it."
"Can't do that," Kim replied.
"Why not?" Marc said, alarmed.
"I've only got two eyes, and they're both already busy."
Justin smiled. At least he hadn't lost his sense of humor. That was a good sign.
"You're doing fine, Kim. I couldn't do it better."
"Thanks. But, if you don't mind, the next rest area we come to, I'd like to switch drivers."
This time, Marc chuckled out loud.
"Bring it on, son, bring it on."
Marc gave the SQUID a little more throttle to put some distance between the two ships. He'd have to be careful, he realized. He'd never driven the little minisub this far in reverse before, and was just discovering its tendency to wander off course.
"I think when we get back, I'm gonna put some rear-view mirrors on this thing," Justin observed.
"I have noticed you crossing the center-line a time or two," Kim responded.
"Uh oh," Frank Sheppard observed.
"What, ‘uh oh’?!" Kim quickly said. "I don't like ‘uh oh’."
Frank was staring past the SQUID, farther down the long, blue-lit tunnel.
"I hate to bring this up, but it looks like the tunnel's curving up ahead."
Marc whipped the SQUID around. He stared hard down the length of the tunnel.
"Are you sure, Frank? I don't see it."
"I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure of it. See how the perspective seems a little off center? Like the vanishing point is fuzzy and a little too high?"
"What's a vanishing point?" Janese asked.
"It's a...a reference point, where lines converge in the distance. Like a long, straight highway, where the straight edges of the roadbed and the center line gradually seem to run together out on the horizon," he explained.
"And you can see that, up ahead?" she questioned uncertainly.
"Well...yeah...I think so."
"Left or right, Frank?" Marc inquired.
"Uh...neither. I think it's...up."
"Up? Up?!" Kim exploded. "I can't go up!" He looked like he'd just been told to bail out without a parachute.
"Okay," Marc said decisively. "Kim, hold up. Cut ‘er back to a crawl. I'm gonna run up ahead and check it out."
Kim inched the controls back so that the VIKING was barely making headway, and concentrated on holding the middle of the road.
"Stay in touch," he admonished. "And when you get back, please tell me Frank is wrong."
"Roger," Marc acknowledged, and accelerated down the vast tunnel, away from his ship.
Perhaps because all his attention had been focused on keeping the VIKING off the walls, Justin's characteristic curiosity hadn't kicked in. Until now. As he pushed the SQUID up to half-speed, he began to more closely examine this remarkable tunnel. Something about it bothered him. Aside from its size...if it was possible to ignore the fact that it was as wide as a four-lane interstate highway...there was...something else. Something...else. He veered toward the left wall and slowed down. What he saw made him back off the throttle and bring the SQUID to a stop, facing the wall. He applied bow and stern left thrusters to keep him from drifting sideways back down the tunnel in the slight current, and turned on the spots.
In the VIKING, a hundred yards back down the tunnel, Janese Cramerton noticed the change in light intensity up ahead. When she mentioned it, Kim was instantly on the radio.
"Marc. We see a light up ahead. Is that you?"
"Yeah. Just taking a look at something."
"What is it? Anything wrong?" Kim asked anxiously.
"No. No problem. But I want Frank to take a look at this. Open a remote video channel."
Kim reached down and switched on one of the monitors before him, then pressed REMOTE/RECEIVE.
"Go ahead," he advised.
A full color, brightly illuminated picture came up on the screen, transmitted directly from the SQUID's onboard video camera.
"Got it?"
"Yeah," Kim replied.
"Okay. Frank, take a look at the rock surface structure."
"Yeah?"
"Notice anything?"
Frank perused the image. Then he bent closer to the screen and stared hard.
"Can we get any closer to that?" he said quietly.
"Yeah, hang on." Marc zoomed in close. The detail on the monitor jumped.
"Well, I'll be..." Frank breathed.
"What is it?" Kim asked. He was looking at the same screen, but it meant nothing to him.
"Magma. That's magma, not rock. I can't believe I hadn't noticed that."
"So...what if it is 'magma'?" Janese Cramerton shrugged and looked to Frank for an explanation.
"It means that this is no man-made tunnel," Marc said over the radio.
"Exactly," agreed Frank.
"I don't understand," Janese shook her head.
"Well, I guess I had just assumed that this was a man-made tunnel, blasted out of the rock. A huge engineering job, but possible, with enough money. But...that isn't just rock lining the walls of the tunnel. It's magma. And there are no shear lines, no drill marks. So, if it's magma...and it is, no doubt...then we have to be..." he paused and looked in awe at the tunnel that stretched beyond the VIKING's clear 'walls'..."inside a really huge, hollowed-out magma vent."
"A what? A vent?" Kim asked.
"Yeah," Frank answered, still staring out into the tunnel. "Liquid magma under pressure...and we're talking serious pressure...will squeeze into vertical cracks that can run for thousands of feet."
"But this isn't vertical," Kim objected.
"No, not yet," Frank agreed. "But, if I'm right, i
t soon will be."
"Don't say that!" Kim looked at Frank in horror. Frank merely shrugged.
"SQUID out," Marc advised, and the image on the monitor spun crazily and then settled down to a view-on-the-run of what lay ahead of the little sub. "I'm gonna leave the camera on so you can run it through the mission recorder, Kim."
They ran slowly on, barely making headway, for almost a minute before Justin spoke again. Frank and Janese ignored the scene immediately before them in favor of the view being transmitted from the SQUID.
"Looks like you're right, Frank," Marc observed resolutely.
"How's that?"
"Well, I've got good news and bad news."
"Oh, no," groaned Kim.
"What's the bad news?" Janese Cramerton asked nervously.
"The floor's rising. It looks like we're going vertical."
"Oh, no!" from Kim.
"You said there's ‘good’ news?" Frank said, hopefully.
"Yep. The whole tunnel's getting wider...spreadin' out like the top of a funnel. It's gone from a seventy-five foot diameter to more like..." he turned on his sonar and tuned it to minimum return..."a hundred. And it's getting bigger, fast."
"Ohhhh, I hope so," Kim said fervently.
"A hundred...nd fif...eet," Marc advised.
"Hold it! You're breaking up, SQUID. Repeat your last transmission!" Kim radioed.
There was no answer.
"Hello, SQUID. Repeat your last transmission. You're breaking up." Kim listened. There was nothing.
"Something's wrong," he said. "Marc...come in. Come in. VIKING to SQUID, come in."
"Wait a minute, Kim," Janese Cramerton put a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Frank...you say the tunnel makes a turn up ahead? That it goes up?"
"Yeah, in fact, Marc said the same thing."
"I think I know what's wrong," she said thoughtfully.
"What?" Kim asked in a strained voice.
"You said you couldn't use your side-scanning sonar because of the ‘scatter’ in close quarters, didn't you, Kim?" she said.
"Yeah, but what's..."
"Well, there's another property of sound that's just as important," she said, and Kim suddenly remembered her specialty. "Sound doesn't bend, either. It has a propensity to travel in a straight line. It'll bounce, like a carom on a pool table, but it won't bend."
Kim shook his head uncomprehendingly and frowned.
"The tunnel bends up ahead," she explained patiently, "but the sound doesn't. All we can get is bits and pieces, from diffraction and diffusion of the sound waves."
"So," Frank took up enthusiastically, "Marc turned the corner, but we haven't got there yet."
Janese smiled. "Right."
Kim finally understood. "So when we get to the turn, we should be able to hear him again?"
She nodded. "I think so."
"Well, let's do it," he responded eagerly.
At their snail's pace, it seemed to take forever to get to the upward turn in the tunnel.
"Hey, you guys mad at me, or what?"
Kim breathed a hearty sigh of relief. It was the voice he wanted to hear.
"Some ‘scout’ you are, running off and leaving us like that. And then you wouldn't even talk to us!"
Frank noticed the smile on Kim's face that overlaid the admonition.
"Yeah, some radio glitch, I guess," Justin said. "Seems to be working now, though."
"Probably diffraction and diffusion of the sound waves caused by their propensity to travel in a straight line, rather than follow the contours of the tunnel," Kim said dead-pan.
There was a silence at the other end. Then Marc Justin said, simply, "Uh huh."
Kim, Janese and Frank all looked at each other and burst out in raucous laughter. It broke the tension.
"What were you saying about the tunnel when we couldn't hear you?" Kim finally asked when he got his breath back.
"I said that, after the upward turn, it gets a lot wider and funnels out. I'm probably a hundred feet above you, sitting dead-center in a pool that's probably two hundred feet wide."
"No kidding?!" Kim said excitedly. "Then I'm not going to have to back this buggy out of the garage?"
"Nope. The good news is that you can turn her around up here without worrying about scraping the fenders."
"Alright! Great!" Kim almost shouted in jubilation.
"Did you say you were sitting in a ‘pool’?" Janese asked carefully and with a measure of foreboding.
"Yep. That's the bad news."
"What do you mean?" Kim was instantly on edge.
"I'm on the surface. Inside some kind of humongous cave. And I'm looking down the barrels of a welcoming committee that isn't very."
Chapter 25
Hugging the glassine floor, and with the rear-facing camera helping him watch the top of the stabilizer as he rose with the curve, Kim felt a great weight lift from his shoulders when the VIKING cleared the tunnel and powered into a vast, vertical shaft.
Kim, Janese and Frank instinctively looked up. Through the transparent acriliglass ‘ceiling’, they seemed to be at the bottom of a fishbowl, looking toward the surface. The vertical lava walls here were more than twice as far apart as the claustrophobic tunnel had been and, though the bluish lighting of the tunnel continued up the walls of the shaft, the sheer size of the shaft rendered it dim. The comparative dimness at the bottom of the shaft served as counterpoint for the great circle of light that dappled the surface a hundred feet above them. And in the middle of that circle the silhouette of the SQUID hung suspended like a guppy waiting to be fed.
"We're here," Kim advised his boss, waiting above. "Now, where's ‘here’?"
"Roger your 10-23, VIKING. But you ain't gonna believe where ‘here’ is."
"I don't like this," Kim told his passengers in a muted voice. "From the sound of it, he's not happy."
Frank and Janese exchanged looks.
"What do you think it is?" Janese asked.
Kim slowly shook his head. "I have no idea," he said, "but I don't think we'll have to wait long to find out."
"Kim."
"Yes, sir."
"Bring 'er up."
"Yes, sir."
"But...slowly. I'm gonna get outta your way, but I'm gonna have to lay her up 'side a rock wall, so don't make waves. Especially, don't make big ones."
"Roger on the sneak 'n peek. Where away?"
"Surface on a heading of eight-oh degrees."
"Roger." Kim gave a two-second burst on the starboard bow thrusters and countered with the port when the VIKING's bow came around to eighty degrees. He checked fore and aft for clearance and charged the ballast tanks.
"Coming up," he announced.
"He's moving," Janese said, as she saw the SQUID edge to one side far above them.
"Thanks," Kim acknowledged. He blew the ballast and there was a rumble beneath their feet as pressurized air forced water from the tanks. The ship began to quickly ascend. Too quickly. Kim cracked the intakes to pump some water back into the tanks and their rise slowed considerably.
"Don't have to worry about how fast we come up at sea," he apologized. "Just blow-and-go."
Kim played delicately with the ballast as the great ship rose straight up the middle of the mysterious shaft. He still had trouble adjusting to the idea that he was driving a sub inside a mountain. That would be something to tell his grandchildren. If he lived to have any. Bad thought. Bad thought.
Just before the towering rear stabilizer broke the surface, Kim simultaneously turned on the camera mounted flush in its upper leading edge, and gulped more water into the ballast tanks.
A monitor before him lit up, as the VIKING slowed abruptly to a sluggish foot-per-second ascent. Even if it did them no good, at least the mission recorder would get a bird's-eye view of whatever was up there from a vantage point thirty feet above the ship.
"Frank...Janese...watch this monitor," he nodded toward the monitor he'd just switched on, "and find out anything you
can about what's topside. I can't watch it and maintain steerage, too."
Four eyes riveted on the monitor.
"There's a small joystick over...there," he nodded again, "that'll let you pan the camera forty-five degrees to the left and right."
Marc moved as far away in the basin as possible and spun the SQUID around to face the surfacing VIKING. He revved up and synched all thrusters to quarter-power to counter backwash from the big ship.
"Stand by to surface," Kim warned.
"Roger that," Marc acknowledged.
"Surfacing."
It was so unusual for Marcus Justin to be on the outside-looking-in when his ship surfaced that he was momentarily startled when the tip of the tall stabilizer eerily thrust from the pool's surface and began to rise from the depths. And it went on and on rising, blade thin and glitteringly wet in the high intensity lights of the cavern, for a full twenty interminable seconds, until it towered twenty-five feet above his small minisub. In an instant of revelation, he realized what the fisherman cum amateur videographer must have felt like three years ago when, in the misty dawn of Loch Ness, Nellie had come swirling to the dark surface and had irrefutably and inexplicably thrust its long, slender neck into the limelight of history.
Suddenly a hundred-foot-long bulge of water rose two feet above the swirling surface and then burst apart as the gleaming titanium hull of the VIKING rose from the depths like a primordial leviathan rising from a prehistoric sea. The bowl-shaped pool heaved under the disturbance and surged outward to the rim, the SQUID rising and falling with the swell. Marc rode it out and then backed his thrusters down.
"Nice piece o' work," he said into his commset.
"Thanks. Are we there yet, Daddy?"
"Yeah, like fish in a barrel," Justin answered uncomfortably. Kim could sense the racing thoughts in the tense answer and knew what the boss was thinking: ‘before you sit at the devil's table, know where the back door is’. Justin was looking for the back door.
Marc heard soft exclamations in his headset. He recognized the excited voices as those of Frank and Janese.
"Wha's happ'nin'?" Justin asked.
"See for yourself," Kim answered, and Marc's monitor lit up. Somebody on board the VIKING was slowly, if somewhat erratically, panning the stabilizer video camera. The elevated perspective gave an unobstructed view of their surroundings.
