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 shouting 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.

This answer seemed to satisfy Hendricks. He nodded once and turned toward the ladder leading up to the hatch.

As soon as his hands touched the ladder’s rails, Altman was on him. He hit him as hard as he could in the back of the head with the heel of each shoe in turn, employing the shoe like a blackjack. Hendricks swayed, started to turn. Altman struck him again, then again. He crumbled and collapsed into a heap.

“Sorry about that,” said Altman to his unconscious friend. “I couldn’t think of any other way.”

He quickly stripped off Hendricks’s shirt and undershirt. He tore them into strips, twisted them into ropes. These he used to tie Hendricks’s hands and arms behind his back and then hogtie his legs to his hands.

He sat down and put his shoes back on, then examined the controls. Nothing had been hurt that he could see. They were floating just above and to one side of the hole the robotic units had dug out, probably carried there by some deepwater current.

He was about to start back up again when something caught his eye. An odd fish, drifting awkwardly into his lights. It had a flayed, incomplete look. It was less like the prehistoric-looking fishes that he had seen so far on the dive than the corpse of a fish that had been dead and floating in the water a few days. And yet as he watched it, it moved under its own power.

There was something else puzzling about it. Rather than a long slender body like a viperfish or a thick bulbous one like a lanternfish, it looked like a long fish that had been folded in half and then glued together. The head was surmounted by a wavy translucent curtain of flesh that resembled nothing so much as a tail. In the place of fins, it had what looked like little spurs of bone undulating from its sides. As he watched, a snaggletooth entered the lights and the first fish darted toward it. The first fish caught the snaggletooth on its spurs and, undulating, began to tear it apart until the other fish was dead and in pieces. Intrigued, Altman pressed a button and filmed the end of the fight and the fish as it passed in front of them and into the darkness.

And then he saw something else even stranger. Here and there, floating through the water, were patches of what looked like flat, pale pink clouds. At first he thought it was a ray, but it wasn’t differentiated in the way a ray was. It was just a floating, billowing sheet of something. A strange jellyfish maybe? A fungus of some kind? He nudged the bathyscaphe in for a closer look. When the craft touched it, it draped over the hull then split apart, slowly reknitting after their passage. Some of it, though, adhered to the observation porthole and remained there, caught on the rivets.

“Well I’ll be damned,” said Altman.

Behind him, Hendricks groaned. He was tied up, but who knew how long his bonds would hold? They had to get to the surface as quickly as possible.

He turned off the override for the pellet release valve and pressed a button. The bathyscaphe began to rise.