Epilogue

 

Down in the watery depths, down farther than human eyes could see and human lungs could breathe, down farther still, deep on the hidden floor of the black ocean rests the wreckage of man.

 

Sunlight can penetrate a full half mile into the sea, feeble light that didn't even come close to where the crushed hull of the USS Raleigh rested. Paper-thin creatures drifted past, blind in the dark. No bubbles of air escaped the many fissures where the welds of the plating of the once mighty submarine had given way.

 

The Raleigh and her crew were dead.

 

A man trapped down there would implode, fold inward on himself from the pressure. No human could survive such a crushing defeat. Poseidon had been wrong. He was no lord of the sea. He was a man, and man, despite his inventions and scientific magic that allowed him to travel beneath the sea, belonged on the land, not down there in the deep.

 

But what about a man who took the name of a god and caressed the three-pronged trident of power and dared to emulate the most fearsome of Olympians and shake storms of radioactive dust from his own great beard, claiming the title of Admiral and the command of his followers that went with the title. What about him?

 

Listen closethere were no sounds here, yet still, there was a tapping.

 

Down there, where there was no air, one man drank deep of the ocean and still lived.

 

Down there, in the silence, one man raged on

 

Not dead.

 

Not yet.