Dead Space™

by B. K. Evenson

  “I’m still a little shaky,” said Hendricks. “I lived with Moresby, after all. If it’s all the same with you, I’ll let you drive.”

  Though a little shaky himself, Altman was happy to have the distraction of working the instruments. He eased them slowly down. Before long they were resting steady on the ocean floor.

  “How deep are we?” asked Altman.

  “Not nearly as deep as we’ll be in the center of the crater,” said Hendricks. “Two thousand meters, I’d guess.”

  “Have you ever been this deep before?”

  Hendricks shook his head. “Almost,” he said, “but not quite.”

  It was peaceful there, thought Altman, soothing almost, like they had come to the end of the world. He liked listening to the quiet whir of the air recirculators, liked watching the dark, almost empty world outside.

  35

  A week later, they arrived, and everybody was eager to get to work. They started by taking readings from the surface, from a launch that rose and fell with the swell of the waves. Field was with him at first, taking readings of his own and double-checking Altman’s, though he became greener and greener as the afternoon went on. He spent the last hour of the day hanging over the launch’s side, retching.

  By the next morning, a groaning, vomit-flecked Field had been shipped back to the floating compound and it was just Hendricks and Altman. They brought the bathyscaphe down a thousand meters and took their readings there, waiting for confirmation from Markoff to descend farther. When it came, they went down to two thousand meters and repeated the process.

  “Seems straightforward,” said Altman.

  Hendricks shrugged. “More or less,” he said. “Only problem is that down this deep, communication gets erratic. It’s hard to know if they’ll receive the data we’re sending.”

  “We might be cut off?” asked Altman.

  “It comes and goes,” said Hendricks. “Really nothing to worry about as long as nothing goes wrong.”

  Through the front observation porthole, Altman thought he could see pinpricks of light from the excavation below, from the robotic diggers. But it was too far away to make anything out. “We could go down to three thousand meters, take readings, and then come back up,” said Altman. “We’ve got more than enough air for it. You’re the boss. Up to you.”

  Hendricks said, “Have you heard the stories about the other bathyscaphe?”

  “I’ve seen the vid,” Altman said.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Altman.

  “Doesn’t it worry you at all?”

  “I don’t know,” said Altman. “I want to know what happened, but I’m not worried exactly. Does it worry you?”

  Hendricks nodded. “Let’s take it slow. There’s no point in rushing things,” he said. “On the other hand, if I’m reading the data right, the pulse signal is starting again.”

  “Really?” said Altman, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Are you certain?”

  Hendricks hesitated, then nodded slowly. “It’s very slight—I caught it at two thousand meters but not at one thousand—but it’s there.”

  “What does it mean that it’s back?” asked Altman. “Maybe we should keep going down after all. Who knows how long it will last? We need to record it while it’s still broadcasting.”

  But Hendricks had one hand cupped over his earpiece. “Too late,” he said. “They’re ordering us back up.”

  They looked at each other a long moment. “You said yourself that communications are intermittent,” said Altman. “How will they know we got the message?”

  Hendricks shook his head. “If we don’t get the okay to go down to three thousand meters, we’re to go back to the surface anyway. That’s protocol. If we disobey, what do you think the chances are of them letting us near a bathyscaphe again? We can’t do it.”

  A half dozen counterarguments fired through his head and then quickly dissolved. Hendricks was right. They had no choice. The signal would have to wait.

  A contingent of guards was waiting for them by the time they opened the hatch and stepped out in the submarine bay. They were hustled down to the command center, which was already occupied not just by Markoff but also by a half dozen researchers, all of them part of Markoff’s inner circle. Not men from Chicxulub. They looked stern, serious.

  “The pulse signal has started again?” asked Markoff. “You’re sure about this?”

  “Why the hell wouldn’t we be?” said Altman. “The instruments don’t lie.” He gestured at the other researchers. “But you apparently wanted a second opinion. Why don’t you ask them?”

  “It’s much weaker than it was before,” said one of the men.

  “We noticed,” said Altman.

  “Maybe it’s not the same signal after all,” said another. “Maybe it’s static and feedback from the MROVs and robotic units that are handling the excavation.”

  “Just barely possible,” said Altman. “But not at all likely. It’s the same signal.”

  “Did you feel anything unusual? Sense anything strange?” asked Markoff.

  Altman shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “What about you, Hendricks?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said Hendricks.

  “You don’t know?”

  “When I reached two thousand meters, I started to feel a little strange. It felt like a premonition or something.”

  “Stevens,” said Markoff, and one of the researchers came forward. He was distinguished looking, but had a relaxed, kind face. “Take Hendricks and work up a full psychological profile. If you get any sense of a problem, you’re authorized to take him off duty. If he looks fine to you, we’ll have both of them in the bathyscaphe first thing tomorrow.”

  That night Altman’s dreams began again. He woke up drenched in sweat in the middle of the night and found he could not move. He was jittery, little flashes of light going off behind his eyelids, and he had a sense of dread that refused to leave him. It took a long time for him to become aware that he wasn’t back at his house in Chicxulub, but when he did, the imagined shape of the room around him became amorphous and vague.

  His heart began to pound heavily, and he could hear the blood in his ears. The space around him remained undetermined in the darkness. It was like he was in a place that wasn’t a place at all, like he was suspended in a void. He tried again to move but still couldn’t. Am I still dreaming? he wondered.

  And then, only very slowly did he realize where he might be, in the floating compound, that sound just beside him the sound of Ada breathing in her sleep.

  And suddenly he found he could move again. He got up, drank a glass of water, and got back into the bed again. Ada moaned in her sleep. He wrestled with trying to fall back asleep, when he heard a knock on his door.

  It was Stevens.

  “Altman, isn’t it?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” Altman said.

  “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

  Altman slipped into his pants and a shirt and tiptoed out of the room, following Stevens down the hall. The man keyed an empty lab open, ushered Altman in.

  “What’s this about?” Altman asked.

  “You haven’t noticed anything unusual about Hendricks, have you?” asked Stevens.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Nothing wrong with the scans,” said Stevens. “Nothing wrong with the tests either. But there’s still something bothering me. I can’t quite put my finger on it. He seems normal, stable, but different somehow.”

  “He seems the same to me,” said Altman.

  “Maybe it’s just the pressure,” said Stevens. “Maybe he’s nervous. But it feels like he’s holding something back.”

  Altman nodded.

  “Since you’re going to be alone with him in the bathyscaphe and the one to suffer if things go wrong, I thought I’d talk to you about it.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Altman. “He seems fi
ne to me. I’ve never had any problems with him on a dive, never sensed any nervousness. I trust him. No,” he said. “I’m not worried about him. In fact, I’m a lot less worried about him than I’d be being confined in the bathyscaphe with many of the other people in this facility.”

  Stevens nodded. “We want to be careful,” he said. “You can understand that, considering what happened with the last bathyscaphe. We don’t want anything going wrong. All right,” he said, “I’ll tell them we can move ahead.”

  36

  “No reason to be nervous,” Hendricks said. “It’s just like any other day.”

  Altman got the feeling that he was saying it to try to convince himself. “No worries,” he said. “It’ll be a piece of cake.”

  They went down to one thousand meters, the sickly sea life at first present and then slowly dwindling. Then two thousand, the sea becoming more and more deserted, but still a few flickers of life, the photophores of a viperfish passing and spinning away into the darkness. A bony fangtooth, caught briefly in the lights, looking like a half-formed thing. A bathyscaphoid squid that resembled a disembodied head made of glass.

  At 2,700 meters, they could make out the lights below, no more than pinpricks in the darkness. Slowly they grew larger. Altman was still watching them when he heard a whimper behind him.

  He turned. Hendricks was pale and stiff faced. Tears were dripping slowly from his eyes. He didn’t seem to notice them. Oh God, thought Altman, something’s wrong. Maybe I was wrong to tell Stevens to let Hendricks go ahead with the dive.

  But even then he didn’t feel nervous for himself, only worried for Hendricks. Hendricks would never do anything to hurt him.

  “What’s wrong?” Altman asked.

  “I don’t want to die,” he sobbed.

  “You’re not going to die,” said Altman. “Don’t worry.”

  “Hennessy and Dantec. What happened to them? We’re not meant to be down here, Altman. I can feel it.”

  Altman slowed the bathyscaphe until it was descending almost unnoticeably. “If you want to go up, we can go up,” said Altman in a level voice, trying to make Hendricks look him in the eye. “I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. But now that we’re here, we should take the readings. You don’t mind doing the readings, do you?”

  Hendricks took a deep breath, blinked his eyes, seemed to grab hold of himself. “Yes,” he said. “I’m good at the readings. I can do that. I need something to do.”

  He let Hendricks busy himself with the machinery while he continued to ease the craft down. Hendricks began, running through them rapidly, Altman checking his work. The signal pulse was there, much stronger at this level. They should measure it again at two thousand feet on the way back up, Altman thought—maybe the signal was growing even stronger.

  Then Hendricks tried to measure it again. This time there was nothing; the signal pulse was gone. Altman took a reading himself just to make sure. Same result. He tried yet again and it was back.

  So, Altman thought, the signal was pulsing on and off, sometimes there, sometimes not. Maybe a problem with the transmitter, some irregularity or corrupted circuit. Or maybe it was deliberate. Maybe it was sending them a message.

  He glanced over at Hendricks. Was he going to be able to hold it together? Should he try to get him up to the surface as quickly as possible?

  “Good, Hendricks,” Altman said. “These are excellent readings. Let’s change our strategy for a moment. Instead of trying to record the level synchronically, let’s take a diachronic profile and see if we can figure out what the pulse is doing over time.”

  “Would Markoff want that?” asked Hendricks.

  “I think he’d welcome it,” said Altman. “I think he’d congratulate us for taking the initiative.”

  “How long will it take?” Hendricks asked.

  Altman shrugged, holding his face utterly neutral. “Not too long,” he claimed.

  When Hendricks nodded, he showed him how to recalibrate the device and start it recording. Altman himself kept the bathyscaphe descending, extremely slowly now. Below them, maybe fifty meters farther down, were the robotic dredgers and the MROVs. Most of the MROVs had stopped, he saw, were on standby, waiting for the next command from the surface. The signal wasn’t reaching them. He made a mental note to suggest that arrangements be made to control the MROVs from the bathyscaphe rather than from the floating compound.

  The machines that were still working had cleared a large circle of the ocean floor of muck and slurry, digging down to more solid rock. They had begun to break this up as well and cart it away, digging downward to form a funnel. The machines at the bottom were perhaps another two hundred meters down. It was difficult to judge; the water there was murky with mudrock particles and matter of other sort from the rock they were removing. They were deeper than Altman had thought they would be; Markoff must have started them digging well before the floating compound was moved into position.

  He descended a few meters into the cone the MROVs had dug out and then stopped. If he went too much farther, he would risk being jostled by one of the robotic dredgers moving into and out of the hole. He decided to wait until he could control the dredgers and MROVs from the bathyscaphe and move them out of the way. Besides, there was Hendricks to consider.

  He turned back to Hendricks. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “My head hurts,” said Hendricks.

  “That’s normal,” claimed Altman, though he wasn’t entirely sure it was. His own head didn’t hurt, or at least not any more than usual, and since the cabin was pressurized, their descent shouldn’t have had any effect. “It’s just from the pressure,” he lied. “It’ll go away soon.”

  Hendricks nodded. “Oh, right,” he said, and gave a weak smile. “Normal.” And then he squinted at the observation porthole. “I think my father’s out there,” he said, his voice filling with wonder.

  Startled, Altman asked, “What did you say?”

  “My father,” Hendricks said again. He waved. “Hi, Dad!”

  Altman started the bathyscaphe ascending, gently, never taking his eyes off Hendricks. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Jason. It doesn’t seem possible.”

  After a moment staring out the glass, Hendricks gave a little laugh.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “He’s explained it to me. He is dead, and so the pressure can’t hurt him.”

  “If he’s dead, he’s not here,” said Altman. “If he’s dead, he’s not anywhere.”

  “But I see him!” said Hendricks, starting to get a little angry. “I know what I see!”

  “All right, Hendricks,” said Altman, smiling and keeping his voice level. “I’m sorry.”

  Hendricks turned back to the observation porthole, mumbling to himself. Altman risked glancing down at the instruments. The pulse signal had increased in intensity just around the time that Hendricks had started seeing his father. He told himself that that wasn’t logical, that it was just coincidence, but it was hard for him to believe that. It dipped back down again and he watched Hendricks’s eyes, which had been intensely regarding the observation porthole, suddenly go out of focus. He snapped his fingers in front of his eyes.

  “Hendricks,” he said. “Look at me. Look here.”

  Hendricks began to and then stopped, his eyes drifting back to the porthole. Another glance: the signal had gone up again, was even stronger than it had been before.

  “He wants to come in,” said Hendricks. “He’s cold out there. Don’t worry, Dad, we’ll help you.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Altman.

  Hendricks got up from his chair and stumbled to the observation porthole, knocking his head against the glass. He hit it with his head again, and again.

  “Hendricks,” said Altman, grabbing his arm. “Don’t!”

  Hendricks shook Altman off and then elbowed him hard in the face, knocking him out of his chair.

  “Come in, Dad!” he was shout
ing now. “Come in!”

  Altman pulled himself up and moved to the far end of the cabin. The controls, he realized, had been knocked in the struggle; they were descending again, slowly, and he hoped he could stop it before they plowed into a dredger. Hendricks was pounding on the porthole with his fists now, stopping only to claw at its edges with his fingernails.

  Altman searched frantically for a weapon. There was nothing, at least nothing he could immediately see. He searched his pockets, his person, nothing.

  He crept forward, crouching. He reached past Hendricks’s waist and flicked the lever even, was trying to nudge it forward to make the craft rise when Hendricks cried out and knocked him to the floor.

  “Don’t touch him!” he was screaming.

  Dazed, Altman stared at the base of the console. He’s going to kill me, he suddenly realized. I was wrong. I signed my death warrant when I cleared him.

  He didn’t want to die. There had to be a weapon somewhere.

  Slowly, trying not to alert Hendricks, he wriggled backward and away from him. Once he was as far away as he could get, he sat up with his back to the bulkhead and removed his shoes.

  The shoes were modified bluchers, with a pebbled Vibram sole but a hard heel in back, the sole flexible and with a snap to it. He stood up, took hold of each shoe by the toe box, made a chopping motion with his arms. Yes, he thought, it might be enough.

  “You’re not going to get him inside that way,” said Altman. “You need to bring him through the hatch.”

  Hendricks stopped, turned around to look at him. “I thought you didn’t want him to come in,” he said suspiciously.

  “Are you kidding?” said Altman. “I heard your father was a great guy.”

  “He is a great guy,” said Hendricks, and smiled.

  “Fine,” said Altman. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s get him in here.”

  Hendricks stumbled toward the hatch, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said slowly. “Why are you holding your shoes?”

  Oh, shit, thought Altman, but tried to stay calm. “They’re my favorite shoes. I thought I’d give them to your father,” he said.