With the barrage still echoing into the submarine, we lurch into the control room and find the professor there feverishly consulting his instruments. He finesses the lever that controls the ballasts and submerges the submarine just enough so that the pounding turns to the soft thud of sinking rocks slowed by several feet of water. Junior rushes to Jimmy’s side and stands guard over the passageway with his fur bristled up.
“What the hell was that?” I ask, still catching my breath.
“Hominidae,” the professor slurs, fear etched on his face.
I hold out my hand and show him the stone that I scooped from the passageway floor. “You mean to say that people threw these at us?”
“Close,” he says. “But no. The other great apes.”
“Apes ain’t no people,” Jimmy jumps in.
“That’s exactly what many of my colleagues argued,” the professor replies. “But others of us worried that the apes might evolve to fill the vacuum left by humans. We considered adding them to the extinction project. It was a close vote.”
“You voted?” I ask. “I thought you said you weren’t very involved in the decisions?”
“Well, I wasn’t,” the professor answers, turning back to his instruments as the pelting from above fades away. “But apes still scare the sleep out of me.”
I look at the rock in my hand and wonder at the thoughts that must have been bouncing around in all those sub-human heads. Why on Earth would they set up to ambush the canal? Or was it simply for sport that they attacked us? Either way, I’m just happy that it’s behind us now.
We cruise into the Caribbean Sea just before daybreak. For the next two days we navigate relatively mild seas, heading north until we enter the Gulf of Mexico and turn east, following a deep-water channel toward the Atlantic. On the morning of the third day, we pass the southernmost island key where Dr. Radcliffe brought Hannah and me for our overnight tour of the park. I scan the shoreline for the bungalow, and I’m almost certain I catch the morning sun reflecting off the windows. But when I try to point it out to Jimmy, he seems unconvinced.
“If you’s say so,” he says. But I jus’ dun’ see it.”
“How can you not see it?” I ask. “The sun’s glinting off the glass. Look. Right there!”
“Maybe ya jus’ miss her.”
“You think I’m making up seeing the bungalow because I miss Hannah? Well, that’s just silly.”
“It’s normal, ya know,” he says, after a brief silence.
“What’s normal?”
“Missin’ someone.”
“I guess. Maybe I do miss her a little. And I’m worried too, you know. You think they’re all right?”
“Her and Red?”
“Yeah.”
“I ain’t sure about Red ’cause she’s prob’ly runnin’ him around like a slave, but I’ll bet my skin she’s jus’ fine.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Dun’ worry so much.”
“Okay. I’ll try not to.”
“Oh!” he calls. “There it is.”
“What?”
“The bungalow. I see it now.”
CHAPTER 8
Discovering ‘Merica
“Did he answer?”
“No,” Jimmy says. “He’s still locked in the bunkroom.”
“Come on, it’s been two days already. I’m tired of sitting at these controls. It’s boring.”
“Why you tellin’ me? I’m sittin’ right here with ya.”
“Sorry. I’d just like to go up top and get some air.”
“Bring us up,” he says. “I’ll watch the controls.”
“No. It’s okay. We’ll stay together until he snaps out of his stupid mood. I wish we had a shock table on board.”
Jimmy steps up beside me and nods to the throttle lever. “Let’s see how fast she can go.”
The look of mischief in his eye makes me smile.
“Okay.”
We’ve been submerged and moving at a steady fifteen knots for over two days, and it feels good to press the throttle down and feel the screw wind up and push us faster through the water. The gauge climbs to twenty-five knots, then to thirty, but other than the brief acceleration, it’s just as boring as going fifteen. I back the throttle off. As we slow to around ten knots, a pod of dolphins overtakes the submarine, one of them swimming alongside the window and looking straight in at us.
When the dolphins veer right, Jimmy says: “Follow them.”
I turn the wheel and adjust our course, hitting the throttle and speeding after them. We quickly overtake the pod, so I drop our speed again and allow them to catch up. Several of the dolphins take turns swimming to the windows, looking in and tapping the glass with their noses, as if playing a curious game. Then they break left and swim away again. Again I chase after them. Jimmy points up through the windows.
“Up there!” he shouts. “They’re runnin’ on the surface.”
I flip the switch to blow water from the ballasts and use the planes to steer us toward the surface. But I miscalculate the angle, and we launch from the water like a giant dolphin, the windows going sky-blue before the nose of the sub slaps down hard onto the surface. We stabilize at our normal surface-level depth and continue on. I shoot a glance at the door, expecting to see the professor storm in at any second.
Jimmy regains his footing, laughing uncontrollably, and rushes to the windows, which are now just beneath the water’s surface. I set the throttle at ten knots and leave the controls and join him. We watch as the dolphins stampede all around us, riding the bow wake, leaping into the air, appearing to double in size from our vantage point beneath the water’s surface, their silhouettes trembling there on the liquid lens above like melted version of themselves, only to shrink again to their normal size before piercing through the waves and racing on ahead of us. I count ten, twenty—no, there must be at least fifty dolphins rushing ahead of us in some kind of aquatic jubilee.
Then a terrific screech is followed by a terrible boom, and Jimmy and I hurl forward at a frightening speed, and my head bounces against the acrylic window with an explosive cracking sound that makes me sick to think it came from my own skull. I fall in seeming slow-motion forever toward the floor.
“You little idiots!”
The professor stands over me with his hands on his hips. I can feel every heartbeat in my aching brain. Jimmy lies next to me, and Junior cowers in the corner licking his paw.
I reach out and shake Jimmy.
“You okay?”
He moans. “I’m all right.”
As we pick ourselves off the floor, the professor storms to the controls and shuts down the engines. The submarine isn’t moving. It is, however, tilted slightly on its side with the port window yet fully beneath the water and the starboard window half above it, showing blue sky. I stagger to the window and lift to my tiptoes and look out above the water line. A small set of waves rolls past the submarine, obstructing my view, but as they get farther away, they shrink into the horizon, revealing an island. Just a glimpse of green. Then a new set of swells blocks the view again.
I turn and see Jimmy checking Junior’s paw. The professor inspects his charts, a look of furious consternation on his brow. My head is still throbbing with an audible pulse of pain and I can hardly hear my own voice when I ask: “What happened?”
“What happened?” the professor slurs, mimicking me. “Nothing happened. Rather, what ensued as a result of your idiocy, and I mean idiocy in the classical definition of one who hasn’t enough apparent intelligence for simple self-survival, is that you and your simpleton sidekick here ran us up on a reef.” Here he pauses to turn his anger toward the chart book, which he tosses against the wall.
“Which makes even less sense when there isn’t even supposed to be a reef here.”
While the professor rants, I wave Jimmy to the window and point out the island.
“What?” he asks.
“Wait for the wave to pass.”
“Th
ere,” he says. “I see it.”
“What are you two gawking at?” the professor asks, storming to the window himself. “Just great,” he says, when he glimpses the island. “Just fricken great.”
We pop the hatch and climb onto the tilted deck. The professor pokes his head out and immediately withdraws back into the submarine, shielding his eyes with his forearm. It hits me that not once has he been above deck when the sun is up.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” he replies. “Just tell me what you see?”
“Well, it looks like there’s a wide lagoon of sorts. It’s pretty calm, protected by the reef. And there’s an island. Pink sand. Some kind of green grass on the hills. Palm trees.”
“How far are we on the reef?”
“I can’t tell from here. Wait. Jimmy just dove in to check it out. I’m gonna go check it out, too.”
The professor calls from behind me as I head toward the edge of the deck: “Be careful; that stuff will cut you to shreds.”
I dive off the back, and swim around to join Jimmy on the protected side, facing the island shore. The water is cool but refreshing after so much time stranded inside the submarine. Jimmy points toward the nose where it appears to be resting on the reef, and we both take a deep breath and dive under.
The clear water provides nearly limitless visibility at this shallow depth, and we follow the submarine’s hull all the way around, seeing that nearly the front quarter is stranded on the reef. The titanium hull of the submarine has ripped through the white and pink coral, exposing a deep gash of darker layers beneath. A glint catches my eye, and I swim closer and brush aside the crushed coral, uncovering what looks like a piece of brass. Brass? In coral? I surface for air and bob in the water, waiting for Jimmy, since he can hold his breath much longer than I can. Finally, he comes up looking like a seal with his dark hair slicked back against his head.
“It’s stuck pretty good,” Jimmy says.
“Hey, does something seem funny about this stretch of reef to you?” I ask.
“Whataya mean?”
“Well, for one thing the part we’re stranded on is much higher than the rest of the reef. And it appears to be a kind of patch of its own in the middle of nowhere. I mean, look—the natural reef starts over there.”
“I dunno,” Jimmy shrugs. “Let’s dive again and look.”
“Okay, but let’s swim out on the deep side and see if it looks different from out there. Plus, we’ll be able to see how bad the sub is hung up.”
“Submarine,” Jimmy corrects me, laughing as he mimics the professor’s voice. “Never sub and never ship.”
We swim around to the seaward side and paddle about twenty meters from the stranded submarine. Then we gulp lungs full of air and descend beneath the waves and look back toward the reef. Sure enough, only about the front fourth of the submarine is resting on the reef, but it’s the reef itself that has my attention. It’s a hulking rectangle of coral, seemingly out of place as it towers above the line of much lower reef near the seafloor. Then it hits me. The familiar shape. One end wide, the other end angled nearly to a point. The side a sheer wall of coral-filled windows, waving with strange sea flowers and odd tentacled creatures. The narrower base. The nearly perfect cylinder rising from the reef like a giant coral smoke stack. It’s a ship! Or at least it used to be a ship before the sea turned it into the very reef it wrecked upon. I know what kind too. I’ve seen images of these cruise ships before, in educationals, down in Holocene II.
“Unbelievable,” the professor says, shaking his head as we stand dripping before him. “All the pristine ocean in the world to travel upon, and you manage to strand us on top of another stranded ship. Get back in the water. Both of you.”
“What? Get back in the water?—”
“Why?” Jimmy asks.
“To lighten the load while I try to back us off.”
We climb out the hatch and jump back in and tread water, watching from a safe distance as the professor full-throttles the screw in reverse, managing to churn up a noticeable amount of wash, but not budging the stranded submarine an inch.
Next, we try to kedge. At least that’s what the professor calls it. He releases the anchor from where it tucks into the aft ballast, and Jimmy and I take turns diving down and walking it along the bottom, away from the reef. When we’ve walked it out as far and deep as we possibly can, the professor wrenches it back, trying to get it to grab. We nearly exhaust ourselves to the point of drowning, dragging the anchor out again and again, but it just won’t take hold in the soft bottom. I suggest we try hooking it to the coral ahead and maybe pull ourselves sideways off the shipwreck-reef, but the professor says it’s too likely to compromise the hull. So we all gather again in the control room while the professor consults his tide charts.
“Hey,” I say, looking out the window again at the island. “I’ve got an idea.”
“This should be good,” the professor mumbles.
“What if we swim to the island there and chop down one of those palm trees and float it back? Maybe we could use it as a kind of lever to lift our nose off the reef while you reverse the engines, and we might just slide off.”
The professor looks up from his charts.
“You know, that’s not a half bad idea. But you’ve got one major problem.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Well, since you asked,” he says, straightening his stance and clearing his throat as if he’s about to begin teaching a class. “Archimedes said ‘Give me a place to stand, and I shall move Earth with it.’ You might have noticed that we’re here on the thing that is stuck. The load force, if you will. You can’t get any mechanical advantage without having a place to stand.”
“Sure we can,” I answer, “if we wedge the tree beneath the front of the submarine, using the coral itself as a fulcrum.”
“How would you apply any force?” he asks.
“Easy,” I say. “We’ll just climb out to the end of the tree. Our own weight will be multiplied as a force on the other end.”
The professor scratches his head. He turns over one of his charts and writes on its other side.
“Let’s see,” he mumbles. “You two together—maybe 150 kilograms—figure two meters from fulcrum to load—eight meters to the effort—divide by point-two-five—makes a load force of over six hundred kilograms.” He looks up from his equations. “By Jupiter, that may just be enough to do it. Very impressive, young man. But I’m afraid you have one larger problem yet to solve.”
“Oh, yeah?” I say, feeling confident. “What’s that?”
“How will you cut down the tree?”
“What do you have on board for tools?”
The professor leads us to the engine room and shows us the collection of tools, mostly wrenches and electrical supplies, but nothing in the way of an axe or a saw. Jimmy snatches up a coil of titanium wire and a small cutter.
“We’ll jus’ use this.”
“To fell a tree?” the professor asks.
“Sure,” Jimmy says.
“It’s your plan,” the professor shrugs.
We eat a quick meal and drink our fill of water and climb the ladder to the submarine deck, carrying nothing but a coil of wire and a pair of cutters. The professor stands in the shadows below watching us go.
“Try and be back before high tide.”
“When’s that?” I ask.
“An hour after sunset,” he calls up.
“We better be back before that,” I reply.
Jimmy leans into the doorway.
“Hey, leave the hatch open so Junior can get some fresh air, will you?”
I hear the professor mumbling profanities as he walks the passageway back to the control room.
“It doesn’t look too far.”
“Nah,” Jimmy says. “We’ve swum farther. All right, Junior. You stay here and keep an eye on the old man for us, okay?”
Junior sits on the deck whimpering as we sl
ide off into the water and push away from the submarine. Of course, it’s a longer swim across the lagoon than we figured.
By the time we drag ourselves panting onto the warm, pink sand and look back, the stranded submarine is just a black dash that could easily be a piece of floating driftwood if it weren’t suspiciously sticking out motionless from the water.
“We better get on,” Jimmy says.
We climb the sandy bank to the grassy edge of the island and walk up a gentle hill toward the palm trees that cover the upper plateau. Jimmy stops along the way and uses his knife to hack down a cedar sapling, carrying it with him and stripping off the little branches as we go.
“We’re gonna need something a little bigger than that to pry the submarine free,” I say, picking fun with him a little. Jimmy just smiles and keeps on whittling his piece of wood.
Soon we come upon strange lumps on the ground, almost like abandoned turtle shells, if turtles had hair. I kick one over and see it’s some kind of shell. By the time we reach the grove of palms, we realize that they aren’t just palms after all—they’re coconut palms. Clusters of coconuts cling to the treetops, and coconut shells litter the ground, making it impossible to walk without stepping on them.
We select a tree that is tall and straight, thick enough to be sturdy, but not so thick that we won’t be able to carry it back by ourselves, or at least roll it down the hill to the water’s edge. Jimmy takes out the spool of wire and measures out a length a little more than twice as long as the piece of cedar he’s been cutting on and snips it free. He folds the wire in half and wraps one length of wire around the other in a continuous spiral, finishing it off with a loop on each end. Then he bends the cedar sapling and slips the wire loops into angled notches he’s cut into its ends, and when he finishes, he holds up a perfect wire bow-saw.
“Brilliant!” I say, genuinely impressed. “Think it’ll work?”
“Never know ‘til ya try,” he says, setting the wire against the palm’s trunk and sawing back and forth.
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