“He said it’s dome-shaped.”
“Like a dome, yes. A very uneven dome. Like a cave.”
“Any sign of metal yet?”
“Nothing. But we’re out of range of some sounders yet.”
They flew on. There was radio chatter. The pilot called Tarp forward. “The other aircraft is burning up fuel because of the load! If we don’t find anything soon, we have to put the vessel into the water. Then we’ll refuel and put out more probes!”
Tarp grimaced. Once the submersible was in the water, getting it out again would be very difficult, perhaps impossible. It was hoped that, if they had to scuttle it, they would have found the Homburg first. If, however, it was put into the water miles from where the Homburg lay, and it then had to traverse those miles under its own power, they would lose time and the Russian satellite might track them.
They flew on. Minutes passed. The pilot shook his head. Fifteen minutes more.
“Eh, the sweetheart,” Tarp heard the navigator say. The boy looked up with a beatific smile on his face. “Voilà,” he said.
“You’ve got it?”
The grinning kid fiddled with a dial and a high-pitched ping! sounded above the engine noise. “Metal!” he cried. “Lots of lovely metal!”
“Big enough to be a ship?”
“Absolutely! A big ship!” His voice rose. “A German cruiser, at least!”
He turned the gain up still more. The sonar return was like an enormous tuning fork in the throbbing space. “It’s got a German accent!” he shouted happily.
Chapter 36
In wet suits they jumped from the helicopter to the water thirty yards from the submersible. It floated in its disorderly rings of inflated tubing like an egg surrounded by sausage.
Tarp hit the water first and felt it like a thrill of excitement, as if the cold were a pulse along his nerves instead of something outside his own body. The wet suit seemed first colder, then warm, and he reached the surface already looking for the vessel. He swam toward it, welcoming movement as the second and astonishing shock of the cold reached him. The Vairon rose on a wave and disappeared, its collar moving supplely with the water like a raft of grasses.
He could not pull himself up on the slippery tubing, which collapsed under him because it was not fully inflated; he had to find one of the lines that bound the long boom into coils and slide up and over with its help until he could get a foothold in the yielding mass. Supporting himself against the white side of the sub, he watched Gance grasp a line on the other side. Beyond him, Jean-Marie was swimming toward the collar.
Gance heaved himself up and began to tear off his flippers. “Cold, man. I mean, that’s cold.” An iceberg about the size of a suburban house floated a hundred yards away, and he pointed at it.
“Let’s get this thing under as soon as we can!” Tarp shouted. “Those clouds are going to break up soon!” The wind blew into his mouth and almost choked him. Jean-Marie was pulling himself up on the collar. “Vite, vite!” Tarp shouted at him.
Jean-Marie was lying on his belly on the soft collar. He looked up at Tarp with great disgust, pulled himself to a sitting position, and slowly began to take off his flippers.
Tarp grinned. “Pas si vite?” he shouted.
Jean-Marie nodded. He clambered up the rows of the collar and began to undo the entrance hatch. “We make haste slowly,” he said. “I am the captain now.”
Tarp and Gance worked to loosen the collar. They had hoped to open it into one large ring that would serve as a protective boom for the submersible in the waves, most of all when they tried to reattach the cable for the return to the tanker.
“No way we’re gonna move this mother,” Gance said. “You can’t budge this stuff. It’s like soft concrete.”
Tarp signaled a line down from the chopper. They attached it to an end of the boom and the aircraft pulled it away from the Vairon, then changed course and pulled another section free.
“He is moving us!” Jean-Marie shouted.
“It can’t be helped!”
Tarp and Gance pushed the next coil of tubing free, and Gance put his fins on again and went into the water to reattach the cable close to the submersible. Another ring straightened, and then Vairon was enclosed in a single layer, the rest curving behind like the tail of a comma.
“Enough!” Jean-Marie shouted.
“We have to attach the ends!”
Jean-Marie disappeared down the hatch. Tarp put on fins again, bracing himself for the water and then welcoming it when he was in it. They reattached the cable and saw the tubing pulled into a circle, with the Vairon spinning slowly at the other end as the last coil opened. When the ends were joined, however, the egg floated within the protective ring of yellow tubing. They pulled themselves aboard the vessel.
“Cold,” Tarp said to Gance.
“My ass it is!”
“I didn’t think that would work.”
“I knew it wouldn’t! How come it did?”
Gance signaled to the helicopter and one of the free-dive suits started down. It looked like a big corpse being lowered.
Like Frankenstein’s monster. It died on the ice. Spray blew from the whitecaps, beyond which chunks of ice rolled like rudderless ships. He thought briefly of the crewmen of the Homburg, trying to swim here. It was not a thought to dwell on. His teeth were chattering as he stood in the wind. It was warmer in the water, given the wet suit for protection.
Gance detached the suit while Tarp held it by the feet, and the cable snaked up to the chopper. Gance braced himself between the Vairon and the boom and began to work his way into the suit.
“This isn’t the way you were meant to get into these mothers, Tarp!”
“I know!”
“They got special racks for these mothers at La Jolla. You walked into them, no shit! With an attendant! Christ, I’m freezing. They didn’t mean you to wear a wet suit in the thing, either!”
“Here comes the other one.”
Gance looked ready for a space walk. He lashed his helmet to one of Vairon’s booms and moved to help Tarp with the second suit.
Tarp found the suit deadening. He had had it on three times, and he was still not used to it. He loved the freedom of scuba; this suit was like a walking prison. There was a necessary tradeoff between freedom and safety; especially out of the water, the suit was ponderous, with both chestpack and backpack, and the clumsiness of a multilayer fabric that would be inflated between the layers with compressed air.
“Let’s go.”
Tarp climbed up the metal steps that led to the hatch, undogged it, and swung it open. The effort of getting above the hatch in the suit had him panting. He looked at Gance in disgust.
“Piece of cake!” Gance shouted.
“Right.”
Tarp went down the hatchway with an inch to spare on each side. When he crouched inside the Vairon he was surrounded by instruments on every side. He reached up the hatchway for his helmet, took it and then Gance’s, and moved one shuffling step forward and one to the right to squeeze himself into the crewman’s chair. Gance came down the ladder and fastened the hatch behind him, then turned slowly with his arms held at his sides and wedged himself into the deck space between Tarp and Jean-Marie.
“Ready?” Jean-Marie said.
“When you are.”
The pilot flipped four switches above his head and watched a row of lights that told him that they were watertight. “Allons,” he said.
It was very quiet. After the helicopter and the wind, the dive was like a dream. There was no sensation of descent, but merely the end of the rise and fall of the waves. The light beyond the ports changed from silver to gray to green, and they were under the water.
Tarp went over the final sonar readings on the table in front of him. Two of the depth probes had picked up echoes from the mass of metal that he hoped was the Homburg, eleven miles west under the ice. The ice was thirty-seven meters thick there and the metal mass lay at about seventy meters on
an undersea ridge running roughly north-northeast. The bottom dropped away from it toward the polynya.
“Sonar on,” Jean-Marie said in a singsong voice. “Check.”
“Picture,” Tarp said.
On his screen was a computer simulation of the bottom and the ice ahead of them, made from composite signals of a coned forward sonar and two side-lookers.
“Switching to scan.”
A more conventional sonar circle appeared. The metal mass appeared as a bright pulse just inside the screen’s edge at thirty-five degrees.
“Distance?”
“Nineteen point three kilometers.”
“Check.”
The hum of the engines filled the space. As they went deeper there was a gurgling, as if they were being swallowed by an enormous belly.
“Pressure?”
“Two point seven.”
Tarp saw water in the floor of the submersible and he opened his mouth to shout, then realized the water was from his own suit. I’m spooked. I’d have liked a test dive in this thing.
Gance was watching over Jean-Marie’s shoulder intently, his tongue stuck out a little between his lips. His face was sweating.
“We are under the ice, my friends. Descending.”
“Depth?”
“Thirty meters.”
Tarp switched to the computer composite of the sonar scans. The ice roof above them was uneven, exactly like the roof of a cave, as the helicopter navigator had said, and, although its average level was well above them, it reached down toward them with long fingers.
“I’m taking it twenty meters lower.”
The electric motors hummed. It was black outside the ports. “Anything to see out there?” Gance said.
“No. Anyway, he’s saving power.” Jean-Marie touched a control. “The outside temperature is rising, Tarp.”
Figures began to move across a fluid costal display.
“What are those?” Gance said.
“Temperature and depth.”
“Dieu!”
“What is it?”
“Heavy current. Very heavy. It wants to take us north. Merde.”
“Can’t you overcome it?”
“Of course, but it takes fuel. Merde, merde. Eh-eh-eh …”
Tarp itched. He knew that he was going to be uncomfortably hot soon. His skin would be wrinkling, turning white. Bad planning. Done too quickly. He looked down at Gance, who held up a thumb and grinned. Good for him.
He made his mind smooth, smooth as the surface of the Vairon. A white plain, curving to infinity. Featureless. Timeless. Without concerns.
“One kilometer,” he heard Jean-Marie say.
Tarp tightened the sonar scan to three kilometers, and there was their target, big and bright and dead ahead.
Temperature 6°C … profondeur 63m …
“Why’s the temperature going up?” Gance whispered.
“Maybe thermal activity on the bottom. Whatever it is causes the polynya to form.”
“What’s this, then, Hot Springs, Antarctica?”
“Why not?”
Tarp shifted to French. “How are the currents?”
“Very rough.”
“Thermals, I think.”
“I think so, too. Maybe moving in a circle that forms the polynya. When you get out there, it’s going to be like moving in a heavy wind.”
He switched the sonar picture down to a six-hundred-meter scan. The metal mass was a bright line almost eighty degrees long. In composite simulation, it was possible to see its height, even the elevation on one side that could be a superstructure.
“If it’s the ship, we’re coming in on one quarter,” Jean-Marie said. “Looks as if she may lie on her side somewhat.”
“Can you veer off and approach dead on the beam?”
“Of course.”
The image shifted and lengthened and took up most of the screen’s midline. Above it the fainter signals from the ice were enhanced by the computer into a tracery of lines that curved above the heavier image of the target.
“It’s certainly big enough, Tarp.”
“I know.”
The sonar separated out three distinct features rising from the large horizontal mass.
“What’s the direction of the current?”
“Quartering from left to right from our bow.”
Tarp looked at Gance, who gave the thumbs-up sign again. Jean-Marie turned and looked at him. “Eh bien?”
“Take it in.”
When they were a hundred meters away, the lights went on. The ports changed from black to opalescent green. Jean-Marie switched the interior lights off, and they found themselves looking into a swirl of brilliance.
“We will see nothing until we are right on it,” Jean-Marie said. “This is going to be tricky in this current.”
The Vairon slowed. Tarp waited for what seemed many minutes.
“There!” It was Gance who saw it first. “See it?”
Tarp saw the window change color from green to a mottled green-brown. He looked at it, trying to get some sense of scale. “Stop!” he cried.
“I stopped some time ago, my friend.”
“What are we looking at?”
“The Prinz von Homburg, I hope.”
Tarp was leaning forward over the navigation table to get closer to the port. Now he saw something move beyond it. “What’s that?”
“I am putting one of the arms out. Calm yourself.”
The arm was jointed like a dentist’s drill. Eighteen feet long, it could be fitted with a wide variety of tools; now it held a powerful lamp. Tarp watched it unfold in the green glow of Vairon’s lights, uncannily like a living thing. The lamp at its end came on.
Tarp saw rivets. Then the edge of a steel plate. The arm moved slowly. Jagged metal. A hole. More plating. Steel cable like plaited hair.
“We will never see it whole,” Jean-Marie said. “I haven’t the light.”
“I want to do a circuit around it.”
“As you like. But I have only six hours of fuel left.”
“How long to get us back?”
“Two hours.”
“With the current?”
“Eh, maybe we could ride the current. I don’t know. I don’t want to count on it.”
“All right, let’s start searching.”
“Bon. What are we looking for?”
“A habitat, I think. We’ll know when we find it.”
*
They found it in the lee of the Homburg’s stem, in an anomaly of the ocean bottom where there was protection from the current. There, sheltered like a house protecting itself under a mountain, the steel structure stood on three pylons anchored to the ocean floor. The main part stood twelve feet above the bottom, a flattened sphere protected by the darkness and the depth. “What is it?” Gance said.
“You know what it is.”
“Yeah, but here! It’s a sea lab. Is there anybody in there now?”
“Let’s find out.”
He touched Jean-Marie’s shoulder. “We’re going out.”
Jean-Marie was looking at the structure. “It’s eerie, you know?” he said.
“Why?”
“I spent two months in one in the Indian Ocean. Down only sixty feet. But still …” He shrugged. “Like finding your mother’s picture in somebody else’s pocket.”
“Is it exactly like the one you were in?”
“Mm, no. But very close. I recognize the pylon structure. That is a French-made ambience marine all right. There will be an entrance underneath, in the middle — you go up into an airlock. If somebody is inside, the airlock may be closed. The airlock is a cylinder, with all the controls on the wall. But where do you suppose the power comes from? An ambience marine uses a lot of power.”
“The thermals would be my guess. Maybe heat exchange, maybe some kind of windmill.”
Jean-Marie moved his head in approval. “That is quite an achievement, that thing out there. Do you know that?”
&
nbsp; “I know.”
“Look, my friend — I know that thing; I can go out there and —”
“Absolutely not. You’re in charge of the Vairon; I’m in charge of the mission. You have to get us back.”
Tarp and Gance helped each other with the helmets; then each turned on the suits’ systems and checked for leaks and malfunctions. Readouts appeared inside the helmet itself, just above the transparent face plate. The suit became noisy with its work, even as the body is. Tarp equalized the pressure between suit and cabin and felt the suit thicken as it pressurized. He took a belt of tools from a rack and buckled it on and then a cylindrical carrier that held the things he had hoped to be able to use — camera, radioactive test gear.
Tarp pointed with a gloved thumb toward the airlock. Gance nodded.
He entered the tubular airlock headfirst. The cylinder followed. He slid forward to the far end and heard, like a distant drumbeat, the closing of the watertight door behind him.
Like a torpedo in a tube. He worked a hand lamp free of the belt and shone it on the controls. He and Gance had run this time after time while the Vairon sat on the tanker’s deck. Seals. Closure. Warning. Water. Red light; that’s good. Filled. Check suit. Good. Hatch. Green light. Go.
He shone the light on the hatch that was only inches from his face plate and pressed a button, then pushed on the hatch. It opened into blackness.
Like a baby.
The umbilical was just outside the hatch so that it could be attached as he left the airlock. Tarp felt the current on his arm as he reached for the cord. He fastened it to his belt and slowly pulled himself out, exiting headfirst into darkness.
The suit crushed against him but held; it was a little like wearing waders in fast water. This was the suit’s natural environment, and it felt both lighter and more flexible. The noise of the undersea current was louder than the noises of the suit; he could hear the cavitation of Vairon’s propellers as they held her steady. He thought of the whales he had seen from the tanker. They were at home here, while he was so alien that only this curious suit, which carried a tiny pod of his own environment, protected him.
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