The Victoria Stone

by Bob Finley

  "Don't you have to refuel these things every so often?" Frank Sheppard interjected.

  "Yes. You remember the Nautilus, of course," Marc asked. Sheppard wryly grinned at the inadvertent slap at his age but only nodded that he did.

  "Well, she got 62,000 miles on her first ‘tank of gas’ and 93,000 on her second. We carry only seventy-five milligrams of four-percent enriched uranium oxide, which is a fraction of the Nautilus' payload, and we've already exceeded 100,000 miles on our first fueling. We're not quite halfway of the expected seven-year life of the core."

  "I still don't understand the size of this reactor, Marc," Masters insisted, "it's as if it's been miniaturized."

  "Apparently you do understand, Ben, because that's exactly what's been done," Marc agreed.

  "But how?" Masters wanted to know.

  "I'm afraid that part of it is classified, Ben, but I'm not sure I could explain it even if it weren't," Marc answered.

  "This much I can tell you, though. Certain breakthroughs made during nuclear propulsion research for the space program, coupled with the development of a radically new lightweight polymer shielding material were utilized by Babcock and Wilcox to product the reactor you see here. Its size is the sole factor that enables us to use it in this ship."

  The two men were uncharacteristically silent.

  "Well, let's have a look at number six and then we'll go forward." Marc skirted the reactor, performing a practiced, unconscious scrutiny of the complex array of lights and levers of the reactor control panel on the left wall as he approached the closed door on the far side of the room. He glanced at a dial incorporated in the door. Satisfied, he spun a wheel on the door which undogged it, and pushed it open.

  "The dial on this door must register ‘neutral’ before the door will open," he informed them. "It's an air lock." He ushered them into the small cubicle and secured the door.

  "You understand the reason for this airlock?" he asked.

  "I think I've read that your diving compartment is open to the sea, isn't that right?" Frank Sheppard volunteered.

  "That's right, Frank. Not at this moment, of course, because we're underway. But during diving operations, the ‘floor’ of the dive room is simply a large hole with the sea sloshing around in it. Naturally, it's necessary to keep the sea from filling the sphere entirely, so we pump air into the sphere at a pressure equal to that of the sea at our depth. It's like inverting a drinking glass and pushing it under the water in your kitchen sink: though the glass is completely underwater, as the VIKING is, the air inside won't allow the water to enter the glass but just so far. And if you increased the amount of air in the glass, it would force the water out until there was practically no water in it at all. So that's what we do. Of course, the deeper we go, the greater becomes the pressure of the sea. To offset this we merely increase the air pressure inside the dive room proportionately until the pressure outside and the pressure inside are equal. Then we can open the hatch in the floor and divers may enter the sea outside simply by dropping through the open hatch as if they were stepping into a very deep swimming pool.”

  "And to pressurize just the dive compartment, instead of the whole sub, these doors are necessary," added Frank.

  "Exactly. And the airlock permits access to the diving area while it's under pressure without allowing the pressurized air to enter the rest of the sub and cause decompression problems," Marc explained.

  "That's right," Masters suddenly spoke up. "I hadn't thought of the necessity for decompression. I imagine that's a nuisance, isn't it?"

  "It used to be," Marc said. "During the Sealab experiments back in the late sixties, the aquanauts had to spend close to a week cooped up in a decompression chamber after a saturation dive to six hundred feet or so, to keep the ‘bends’ from crippling or killing them. But developments since then allow us now to put men at a thousand feet or more for as long as necessary and decompress them in only forty-five minutes, right in the dive room. But here, I got to talking and kept you in the airlock with no reason at all."

  He turned to the door opposite the one they'd entered, checked the gauge and spun the wheel until the door popped open. Pushing it aside, he stepped through and turned to help his passengers navigate the high-silled door.

  As they entered they saw that this room was white. White outdoor carpet was unaffected by water dripping off tired divers. A row of vents surrounded the walls from which exotic breathing gasses for work at great depths could be released. Lockers containing a tremendous array of diving-related gear and equipment occupied a quarter of the wall space. A stall on one side of the room harbored a hot fresh-water shower. Several shelves contained a small but well-stocked library for passing the time during decompression. The entire room was brightly illuminated. "What's this big pole here in the middle of the room?" Ben Masters asked, stroking its polished surface and looking up where it was attached to the ceiling.

  “That's an elevator for divers, Ben," Marc answered.

  "An elevator?" Masters incredulously echoed. "It doesn't look like any elevator I ever saw," he added.

  "That pole there telescopes and is attached to the circular disc in the floor you're standing on," Marc explained. “There’s a bigger version of it over there for our minisub.”

  Masters looked down at the six-foot-diameter circle within which he was standing.

  "When activated, the diver simply stands where you are, the pole telescopes downward, and the diver steps off seven feet below the ship and swims away."

  "Below the ship?" Masters asked quickly. "You mean where I'm standing just drops away into the sea?"

  "Something like that," Marc replied.

  Masters stepped with surprising agility out of the circle and stood looking at it as if he expected it to suddenly turn into water.

  Marc Justin chuckled at the resemblance of the man to a scarecrow.

  "Anything ever come crawling out of that hole that shouldn't?" Frank Sheppard inquired.

  "Not really," Marc smiled, "we've had visits from turtles, a porpoise, and a few inquisitive groupers but the bad guys stay away."

  "Fortunately," Frank quipped.

  "Well, the VIKING's equipped with shark repulsion devices located around the dive hatch which continually emit sound which we've found effective in repelling sharks. I've never seen one come any closer to the hatch than the sixty foot range of the device," Marc assured them.

  "So you don't have to wonder when you drop through the dive well whether you're about to be a meal for a hungry shark, huh?" Frank asked.

  "The management hopes not," Marc smiled. "Bad for public relations, you know." Frank Sheppard grinned. Ben Masters wasn't quite sure whether he should smile or not.

  "Well, that's about it back here. The only two spheres left are control and the sleeping quarters."

  “One other question, if you don’t mind,” Ben said. Marc nodded. “These…’spheres’?…are made of some kind of special glass, you said.

  “‘Acriliglass’,” Marc clarified. “It’s a blend that makes it stronger. More flexible. It’s been around since 1928 under different names. We just tweaked it to work in this application.”

  “Well, still,” Ben thought out loud, “at the depths you work, the outside pressure is tremendous. So, if the average depth of the ocean is, say, 12,000 feet, then you’ve got 174,000 pounds of pressure, 87 tons, for every square inch of surface.”

  “Your engineer is showing, Ben,” Marc observed. But Ben was on a roll.

  “Well, what I’m saying is, for every hole you drill in these ‘spheres’ to run cables or pipes or whatever through, you increase the probability of leaks. Which, at that pressure, I’m sure would be lethal.”

  “You’re right, of course, Ben. Which is why we don’t punch holes in them.”

  Ben looked perplexed. “Then, what do you do?”

  Marc smiled. “We use lasers. For example, the ‘joy stick’ on my steering console is mounted on a gimbal. When I move it in any direction
, a coherent laser beam fires through the acriliglass to a ‘honeycombed’ laser detector mounted on the outside surface. Depending on which of the tiny receivers in the honeycomb the moving laser points at, a signal is sent to the motherboard on the thruster controls outside to change direction of the vectored thrusters. The jet of water is redirected, kind of like pointing a garden hose in different directions. And there are other receivers mounted in various place on the outside of the acriliglass that control other functions, as well. Bottom line…no holes.”

  Ben thought about it. “Very ingenious,” he admitted. “And, comforting.”

  Marc smiled and walked back to the airlock, followed by Ben and Frank. They negotiated the airlock and walked to the forward part of the ship. Passing once more through the observation sphere, they entered number two. A three-and-a-half-foot-wide passageway ran the length of the sphere. On the right, halfway the hall, was a door labeled "CREW'S QUARTERS”.

  Underneath was the notation "PLEASE KNOCK." On the port side of the passageway a couple of feet beyond the door to the crew's quarters was another door, this one bearing the label "PASSENGERS' QUARTERS." Beyond, at the end of the passageway, was a narrower door marked "HEAD."

  Bypassing the crew's quarters, Marc went directly to the passengers' quarters and, opening the door, stepped aside to allow Ben and Frank to enter. They were greeted by blackness, for the rooms, as well as the passageway, were coal black: carpet, walls, even the furniture.

  "We've found that black is conducive to sleep," Marc offered. "Especially when it becomes necessary occasionally to sleep in shifts while there's activity going on `round the clock." With a nod of his head he said, "Adjoining bathroom's through that door over there, marked 'HEAD'. Since you know what a bed is, and now you know where it is, shall we finish up the tour with the control room?"

  They both agreed quickly and followed Marc from the room. Closing the door behind them, Marc led the way up the passageway. Nearing the door at the end of the hall, Marc's weight triggered a pressure plate hidden under the carpet and the door to the control room whooshed open instantly. Stooping, Marc entered the low door, the two passengers close on his heels. A massive hatch door, swung back and secured to the wall in the hallway, caught the attention of Frank Sheppard. Inside he noticed its mate swung back and secured out of the way and made a mental note to ask Marc Justin about them and about the small size of the door itself compared to the other doors in the sub.

  The room, normally a deep blue, was now bathed in red light which seemed to amplify the darkness of the depth at which the ship was running. Sitting in the gloom fifteen feet across the room, Kim maintained a critical vigil on the eerily-glowing instruments before him.

  "I was just about to call you, boss," Kim quietly stated. "We’re coming up on the course correction off Freeport.”

  "Thanks, Kim," Marc affirmed.

  “What happens there?" Frank quizzically asked.

  "That's where we make a course change that will line us up for the hundred mile slalom down the Grand Bahama Canyon and drop us out on the other side of the Continental Shelf into deep water. We’ll go from about 2,000 feet down to about 15,000 feet in a short period of time. We just call it The Wall, no matter what part of the world it's in," Marc explained. "Take a look over Kim's shoulder and you'll ‘see’ us start the descent."

  They crossed the room to stand behind the high-backed pilot's chair into which Kim was strapped, feet almost touching the 4-inch-thick acriliglass in front of him. Marc went around the chair and pointed to the curved bank of screens on the console. "Watch this one here," he indicated.

  The "picture" on the screen was more detailed than the best home television screen Ben Masters had ever seen and his curiosity was aroused.

  "How do you get a picture of the sea floor like that when I can't see a thing but darkness down there?"

  "It's not actually a ‘picture’, Ben, in a television sense, though the detail is obviously better. This gadget is Carl Huxley's brainstorm. He's one of my engineers. He blended rapid-impulse sonar scanning with holographic imaging, digitally processed it through CAD software, and projected it sequentially to the plasma monitors here, in front of the pilot. So, what you get is a high resolution, three-dimensional picture on the monitors that'll make you think you're looking out the windows of an aircraft that’s hugging the treetops in the mountains on a clear day...even though you're actually in a sub five thousand feet down, doing a hundred knots in total darkness.

  "That's fantastic!" Masters admired.

  "Yeah, it is. Carl's good at what he does. We call it a HolarScope…like sonar, but with a 3-D, holographic image. This mission ought to finish up the field trials on it and we'll be ready to market it. It'll revolutionize naval submarine navigation.

  "'Coming to 119°," Kim murmured. "Nine seconds."

  A hush fell over the group. Drenched in red, their heads bowed to better see the illuminated screen before them, they appeared to be in an attitude of reverence ...as well they might. A tiny cluster of four men in their huge ship, itself tiny in comparison with the prodigious proportions of the landscape around them, tearing headlong through the darkness of an alien atmosphere at far better than a mile a minute might well give one cause to ponder the sanity of it.

  Though they were ripping along at eighty miles an hour, their ‘altitude’ above the floor caused the illusion, as from a jet aircraft, of slowly creeping along.

  When ‘The Wall’ came into view, it didn't flash past, but seemed to creep slowly from the top of the screen to the bottom. The illusion of three-dimensional terrain on the monitor imparted the same dizzying sensation as flying low over a cliff and seeing the ground abruptly and dramatically plummet away from under an airplane. The depth compensator instantly began to tumble as the depth increased faster than it could keep pace with. It seemed to dance on and on as if there were no bottom to the sea. No one seemed willing to leave, content to stand quietly and watch the depth constantly drop lower and lower until, finally, it slowed and gradually leveled off at 12,721 feet.

  "Impressive, isn't it?" Marc broke the silence. No answer was necessary.

  “Coming to zero five six degrees,” Kim announced, as he turned to the heading that would take them to Bermuda, more than eight hundred miles northeast of them.

  Masters cocked his head to one side. "What's that sound?" he asked.

  Justin held up his left wrist and laughed. "It's my watch. I discovered one day, like you did just now, that when we pass within a mile of a Sonobuoy, its electronic signal sets up a harmonic response with my watch and it buzzes. A bit of a distraction sometimes, but no real problem." He turned to his assistant.

  "Take her down to five thousand and run us up to a hundred knots, Kim. I'll be back to relieve you in a few minutes."

  Chapter 9

  As Marc ushered his two passengers from the control sphere into the passageway, he said, "I assume you both had rather short nights since you arrived in Miami as early as you did, so I would suggest that you get a few hours’ sleep between here and Bermuda. One of the problems we have down here is that light only goes down to about 2200 feet, and most of the time we're deeper than that. So we have to keep an eye on the clock and remind ourselves to go to bed. Which is why our clocks are on military time, so you know whether it’s one in the morning or one in the afternoon. In fact," he smiled, "we sometimes get so involved in a mission that we forget to sleep."

  "What time will we reach Bermuda, Marc?" Frank Sheppard asked as he opened the door of the passengers' quarters.

  "Well, let's see," Marc looked at his watch, "it's 10:40 A.M. We're a little over two and a half-hours out of Miami, over the Wall, and just laying on speed. We’re gonna drop down to ten thousand feet and run flat out the rest of the way to Bermuda. So, by six-thirty this evening," he concluded, "we should be in rendezvous position off Bermuda."

  "Fantastic!" Sheppard shook his head in awe. "That's really moving on! The only way to get there any faster would b
e to fly!"

  Marc smiled, proud of his ship's speed, almost four times greater than that of a military nuclear submarine.

  “Marc,” Frank Sheppard said, “why is the entry door to the control sphere different from the other doors I’ve seen?”

  “It has to be, to accommodate the VIKING’s survival protocols. In a worst case scenario, with the ship down and no realistic hope of rescue, we can all gather in the control sphere, seal the set of double doors between it and the rest of the ship, and manually blow a set of explosive bolts that detaches the control sphere and allows its slightly positive buoyancy to rise to the surface. From there, we can radio for rescue. Later, we can come back and salvage the rest of the ship.” The thought of such a situation arising left the two men somber and quiet.

  "When you wake, we'll have some ‘lunch’," he called over his shoulder as he headed up the passageway to Number One to assume the watch from Kim, his bleary-eyed crew of one.

  Alone, finally, in the hushed, cool solitude of the control sphere, Marc dimmed the red running lights until the room was almost completely dark. He accelerated until he maxed out the standard drive, then ‘went to afterburner’ as Kim referred to it, by switching to supercavitation mode. The rear vertical stabilizer auto rotated to a near-horizontal position and the elevator planed flat to trail in the ship’s wake and reduce drag and cavitation. His view was instantly blocked by a screen of microbubbles that flowed past, adhering to the hull’s surface. Depending now on his panel of holographic screens for navigation since he was enveloped in blackness anyway, the wall of bubbles had no effect on his ‘view’. The red glow from the maze of dials and monitors, more pronounced in the near-darkness, lent his features the unearthly appearance of an invader from another world, plummeting through the black void of space. He was, in fact, exactly that: an alien invader, hurtling through the hostile darkness of another world, wrapped snugly in a cocoon of fragile delicacy. Strapped into the pilot's station and separated from a crushing, instantaneous death only by the curving wall of reinforced glass before him, he experienced the almost physical sensation of the blending of himself with his ship until there was, in his mind, only one machine, finely honed, delicately sensitive, streaking through the darkness at 180 miles per hour. More than eight hundred miles ahead lay Bermuda, like a spear that had been thrust butt-first into the floor of the Atlantic Ocean with only its tip above water.