Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank M Sheldon

CHAPTER 42

  An hour later, Penny was still on the foredeck, drinking lukewarm coffee and waiting, for what she wasn’t really sure. Malcolm rushed up with anger and despair, like siblings locked in bitter rivalry, battling for control of his face.

  “We’re screwed, that’s what!” he said, and planted himself in front of her as if there were no need to say or do anymore.

  Andrew had dropped the Valentina’s speed down to a crawl, and they had been slowly cruising back and forth, checking the bottom. The sonar gave no indication of anything unusual, but that had been expected. Penny had hoped they would be able to take their time and open the curtain on whatever was down there gradually, maybe even letting it reveal itself when it was ready. But looking at Malcolm now, she saw her hope drifting away like a toy boat on an outgoing tide.

  When she didn’t respond, he finally said, “Why would anyone want to steal…” Hands on hips, he shook his head muttered, “My fault, should have double checked…”

  “What are you talking about?” Penny said.

  Becka was nearby, checking some of the new gear. She overheard and said, “Malcolm, calm down and—”

  “Calm down? You know what this means?”

  “No,” Penny said, “because you haven’t told us what happened yet. Details, please.”

  Malcolm gazed back and forth between Penny and Becka, his brow so deeply furrowed that it appeared to have gone into permanent spasm. He let out a big breath.

  “The ROVs, okay?” he said. “Important parts have been removed. And the few spares we had, well, when I last checked them, I thought we were good, but whoever it was just stuffed the boxes with junk, so they’re gone too. I should’ve checked. Maybe we could have gotten more on the resupply, but now it’s too late. We’re here, and the ROVs are useless, dead. Without them, we’re blind.”

  “Did you check the minisub?” Becka asked as she got to her feet. “Malcolm? Did you have a look at the Bluedrop?”

  “No, I was so…you know…Why would anyone take those parts? There are more valuable things around, I mean, if you’re going to go swipe something, there’s—”

  "Excuse me for stating the obvious," Penny said, “but that’s not why they were taken.”

  “Go tell the Captain,” Becka said to Malcolm. “Now. You have to. I’m going to have a look at the Bluedrop.” She ran toward the aft deck. Malcolm watched her go and without looking back at Penny ran off, hunched-over, in the general direction of the bridge.

  A short time later, they stood on the aft deck looking at the minisub where it rested in its cradle. The famously misnamed Bluedrop was painted bright yellow, and its design was the result of years of refinement by her father. Originally, it was to be used on this trip to shoot video of gray whales feeding on the bottom of the Bering Sea and to survey the current levels of their food source.

  “It’s okay as far as I can tell,” Becka said, emerging from the hatch. “I went through the whole preflight, twice, plus the master list from the original build. We looked at every other thing we could think of and found nothing wrong.”

  “Good to hear,” Andrew said. “Still need a sea test to be sure.”

  Her father nodded agreement. “This is encouraging. All is not lost.” He looked around the gathering. “We are now right at the epicenter. So far, no problems. Also encouraging. All seems normal except those sea birds. Wouldn’t expect to find them out here, or at least so many.” He gazed up at the sky

  “Dad,” Penny said, “you’ve got a saboteur onboard.”

  “And that is most definitely not encouraging. Does anyone know where Lieutenant Chiffrey is?”

  “He’s talking to someone on his sat-phone.”

  “I think we need to meet with him and look at how we might best continue. Becka? Can you get the Bluedrop ready for testing?”

  “Right away,” she said.

  “Get a few hands on it,” Andrew told her. “As many as you need.”

  That afternoon, after the sea tests on the Bluedrop had been conducted, Penny went to the media lab to look at the video again. She got there to find Becka and Chiffrey already watching it. Their heads almost touched as they peered at the screen.

  “Am I interrupting?” she said.

  “No, no,” Chiffrey said. “Just viewing the clip again. Becka, as you might know, has extensive experience evaluating underwater video. Join us, please.”

  “I thought you'd be working on the Bluedrop,” Penny said

  “I was,” Becka replied, “and it passed everything I could throw at it. Then Malcolm wanted to install some diagnostic gear to quadruple check something, so I decided to have another look here.” She glanced at her watch. “He must be done by now, so I should be getting back.”

  Pausing in the hatchway, Becka aimed a smile and a little wave at Chiffrey. After she was gone, he looked at Penny. “You want to see it, right? Just a sec.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  They watched the video a few times, finally leaving on the screen the enhanced still image of the final feature, the cave-like opening.

  “Going back to an earlier premise you and some others put out,” Chiffrey said, “just being undetectable on sonar does not prove hostile intent, but I am convinced the effect is deliberate, a ‘stealth’ effect if you will, to make us think there is nothing there.”

  “So what? It’s hiding, Camouflage is a common survival strategy in the plant and animal world.”

  “Camouflage can be a passive weapon.”

  “Hiding from danger is not aggression.”

  “Sorry, but it can be. Camouflage in one form or another, and its cousin, misdirection, is always a part of an offensive strategy. The famed element of surprise used in virtually every war. Hiding your ass until the right moment, so your enemy is caught unaware, can make the difference between victory and defeat. Sure, it could be a nicey-nicey we have down there. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s just trying to stay out of harm’s way. Or it could be waiting for the right moment to rip our throats out for lunch. Apologize for putting it so crudely, but this is a point you really have to get.”

  “It’s much too early to be drawing that kind of conclusion.”

  “If it’s too soon for conclusions, how about we draw some inferences?”

  “Such as?”

  He held up his hand and started counting fingers. “One, there is intention behind its efforts to obscure its existence. Two, a keen intelligence is at work here, perhaps even surpassing our own, if judged by the capabilities we have witnessed. Three, the dome, or whatever it is we saw on the ROV video, is almost certainly connected to Matthew’s whale.”

  “Please stop calling it ‘Matthew’s whale.’”

  “Fine, but that connects to my final point. This dome is almost certainly the prime source for all the unusual occurrences since the Honey Pot. What happened around the dome and the whale was way too similar to call it coincidence. Sure, I don’t really have the facts behind the connection, but I’d bet my left hand on it.”

  “I won’t completely disagree with anything you’ve stated, as long as you use ‘intelligence’ in the broadest sense.”

  “As broad as the wide Missouri, if you like. But it all comes down to one question. What is the intent?”

  “It may not ever be possible to assess intent.”

  “Almost word for word what Becka said a while ago. She didn’t see any signs of malevolence, no hostile agenda at all. Sees it as beneficent until proven otherwise. Part of her rapture-of-the-whales experience, apparently.”

  “I’m not saying there is no danger,” Penny said. “Quite the opposite, but we should make no trouble where there is no trouble.”

  Chiffrey smiled and moved back to his country boy speech rhythms. “My old Grampy used to say, ‘bees are busy at their business, and if you don’t want to get stung, don’t be their business.’ Good one, huh?”

  “Life just does what it does. It’s not personal. By definition, it’s just natural.”
>
  “You see this as natural? Part of our world that somehow we overlooked?”

  “So far. Until someone comes up with something better.”

  “Then what sort of life? Am I supposed to accept that thing down there as just some kind of overqualified mollusk?”

  “We’re simply shocked because our conceit won’t allow us to believe that something else in our living world might equal or even surpass us. To deal with it, we’re making it some kind of ‘other.’ Either a benevolent supernatural force or a dark enemy calculating our doom.”

  “I get it,” he said, but nodded too quickly. “So tell me, why does this thing suddenly choose now to make itself known?”

  “Maybe it didn’t. It might have been around forever, but an event of some kind, maybe even something we did, low-frequency sonar or whatever, caused it stress and led it to move out of its usual territory.”

  “Attack of the Creeping Coral or something? Come on.”

  “You can be a real ass, you know? One minute you’re telling us how deadly serious this all is and the next you’re back to your lame jokes. By militarizing the situation, you’re running the risk of provoking the very thing you least want.”

  “We wouldn’t do anything without just cause.”

  “Really? You, or someone above you, are likely to create that cause, bringing in all these attack and defend scenarios.”

  “Well, it’s ‘defend and attack,’ for one thing, but as long as we are talking assumptions, we can’t assume this phenomenon is not personal. Just as we shouldn’t assume that it is hostile, we shouldn’t assume that it ain’t. I have to insist on that, especially after two Navy ships get their props sheared, and the power goes dead on another just when things were getting interesting. Not personal? Don’t know yet. Not dangerous? Adrift on the open sea certainly could have been for those ships.”

  “You’re just arguing against yourself.”

  Her father appeared in the hatchway. “Pardon me for interrupting,” he said, before entering. “Couldn’t help hearing the end of that. One thing to keep in mind, Lieutenant, is that we are the invaders here.”

  Chiffrey looked at him for a moment. “On that, I’ll have to disagree, Doctor.”

  “To clarify, I mean in the context of the sea not being our natural habitat, especially the undersea. The good news here has to be that no one has been hurt.”

  “Well, I hope that continues to be the case.” Chiffrey got up from his stool, walked to a porthole and looked out. “Doctor Bell, I’d like to ask you something. From what I’ve been hearing from Penny and a few others, I gather that there is a theory this phenomenon could be some kind of intelligent marine species we somehow never noticed all these years. Correct?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “What I witnessed goes way beyond what would be considered ‘possible.’ If I was just reading the reports in an office somewhere, I wouldn’t believe any of it.”

  Her father furrowed his brow. Silence hung in the air and somehow continued despite his words. “We should be open to the possibility that, though intelligent, it may not be anything like our kind of intelligence.”

  “Hard to imagine.”

  “Exactly my point. It may have nothing like the kind of agenda we can grasp. It may be so far outside our own experience that we could never understand it.”

  Chiffrey looked unconvinced.

  “Only thinking out loud,” her father said. He smiled. “Not making the case, at least not yet.”

  Malcolm appeared in the hatchway, shifting back and forth like he had to pee, hovering like an agitated moth.

  “Well, there is something down there,” Chiffrey said, “and I’d really like to know what. Any ideas, Malcolm?”

  “Everywhen,” was all he said.

  “Pardon?” Chiffrey gave Malcolm a look, half puzzled, half intrigued.

  Malcolm, still uneasy, replied in a soft voice, “Not time as a river, more like one big circular now. Hard to explain, but I’ve been wondering about it. Lately.”

  “Good, keep on wondering, but does this have anything to do with our new neighbor down below?”

  Malcolm looked startled. “Who?”

  “The dome, Malcolm, the big bright round thing we saw on the video, which is now directly below us.”

  “I thought you meant…Okay, think of time as more of a place than a flow, and places are all flow, but without sequence. I mean, there’s really only one ‘place’ and one ‘time’ and it’s everywhere and everywhen.”

  “Is this something you read about?”

  “A while back yes, but it’s just been somehow happening with me more, lately I mean directly, direct experience. Like it’s the way things are. Really are.” He rubbed his eyes a few times, then continued. “Sometimes I get just a glimmer but, now and then, so strong that, it’s like I’m dancing in between the spaces. Everything’s mostly space after all, you know, the whole song…”

  Malcolm looked up finally and must have noticed the blank expressions on everyone’s faces, because he slowly, and with a rare sense of gravity, said, “Okay, if the dome can access and influence even some of what underpins the basis of what we take as a universe of matter and energy, then all that’s happened, from things and people slipping in and out of the matter stream, to the way people have become—to the way even I am now—might seem not only possible, but inevitable.” He paused and shut his eyes tightly as if he were trying to keep all light out, before finally saying, “Because it doesn’t defy the laws of how things are, but is the ways things are. We’re just blind to it.”

  Chiffrey looked around and said. “Well, that’s a lot to consider. Agreed, we should be open to new ideas.”

  “I studied this stuff once!” Malcolm said, suddenly breathing hard.

  “A class and a half in theoretical physics. But when you were only fifteen, so impressive.”

  “How did you…what?”

  “Relax,” Chiffrey said. He shrugged his shoulders. “We did background checks on everybody. Routine protocol for the security clearances that all of you were given, to one degree or other.” He put his a hand out, but Malcolm shook his head and backed away.

  “Sorry, Malcolm. I wasn’t discounting what you presented, only I didn’t really understand it. Maybe you can run it by me again later.”

  Malcolm spun around and left without another word.

  “Well, that could have gone better,” Chiffrey said, looking after Malcolm as if at a missed bus. He turned back to Penny and her father. “So, we all need to keep our minds open, and now it’s your turn, because I got a little theory of my own.”

  “Not another dump of gibberish, please,” Penny said.

  Chiffrey’s smile returned. “I’ll keep it simple. If there’s life inside that thing, the dome, then just because it’s in the sea, doesn’t mean it’s from the sea. Or at least from our sea. Might have arrived fairly recently, and we might have even witnessed the event, but didn’t have all the numbers at the time to do the math.”

  “I’m not going to start guessing,” Penny said, “so what on earth is your point?”

  “‘What on earth,’ indeed. With the capabilities we have all seen demonstrated, plus the initial radar jamming, and a landing site well chosen to evade detection, if you add it all up, it is literally unearthly. E.T.”

  Penny burst out laughing. “Extraterrestrials! I don’t believe I’m hearing this! Especially from you. You’ll lose your commission if you pass that on.”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this, either, and certainly not saying I’m convinced yet, but, you know, ‘when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

  “Good quote,” her father said, “but in this case, your conclusion is far from being elementary. We really have not eliminated all other possibilities, have we?”

  “If not, I’m ready to hear the rest. For now, the possibility that this is our first visitor from the stars does not seem any
more incredible than some of the other alternatives I’ve heard bandied about.”

  “One of the few things we agree on, then,” Penny said.

  Chiffrey smiled, cocked his head to one side, and looked at her. “Now it’s time for practicalities. We don’t have the option of using the ROVs any more without being resupplied again and that takes time and carries risks. We feel the next step is your minisub. The Bluedrop.”

  “Forget it!” Penny yelled, then brought her voice down. “That doesn’t make any sense, after all the stuff you’ve been saying about how this might be hostile.”

  “The clock is running, is why,” Chiffrey said. “I made a strong case to my people that we needed more time, but the decision was to go ahead. There is an urgency about this, and they don’t see us making any progress.”

  “Things take time,” she said. “And bees sting. Remember?”

  “Time, yes, but we may be running out of it.”

  “You keep saying that, but why?” she asked. “I don’t see the urgency.”

  “Let’s watch some of the video from the Honey Pot again, and I’ll show you. Think I can get this running if I can find it. Here it comes.”

  They watched the several minutes of video again. The swirling light was dazzling, the colors all over the spectrum. Penny was sure the sound had overwhelmed the microphone in the same way a large waterfall can. It must have been deafening. When the playback was over, Chiffrey stood pointedly in front of the monitor.

  “Our first assumption was that this was either some kind of natural phenomenon or an accident. Now we don’t think so. We’ve had warships disabled without a fight. Wait. Hear me out, please. Picture that capability, and add to it the kind of power we just saw in the video. From what my science team tells me, there was an unimaginable amount of energy being expended. They can’t say how, but I wasn’t happy when I heard ‘beyond nuclear.’ And yes, the possibility exists that this power could be directed. ‘Vectored’ was the word used by one of the best theoretical physicists in the world. Do you understand the implications of that? I’m not saying that I believe that is about to happen, but the results would be horrendous if that force were directed at a city. My point is that we have no idea how to protect against it. I’m sorry, but this is no longer just the pursuit of knowledge. It’s a matter of national defense. Maybe even our survival as a species.”

  Her father shook his head. “What we saw in this video is certainly powerful, I’ll grant you, but I saw nothing hostile.”

  “We are playing with fire. Real fire.” Chiffrey tapped the monitor screen. “You saw it.”

  “Then why the hurry to jump down its throat?” Penny asked.

  “Because waiting may be even more risky. They’ll give us more time and any resources we need, if we go down in the Bluedrop.”

  “Blackmail.”

  “No, it’s not,” Chiffrey said. “They are giving us a carrot and a stick. I’ll go with the carrot, because I believe we have the best shot at getting to the heart of this, and we’ll lose that chance with the stick, because they’ll be the ones carrying it. If the heavy guns are called into action, and that’s not just a metaphor, they might make it hostile, just as you feared. We have a responsibility here. A window is open for us, but we have a few days at best.”

  “I suggest we let this all sink in a bit,” her father said, “and resume our discussion later.”

  Penny looked at him. “‘Sink’ is exactly what I’m afraid of, if we rush this.”