Deeptide Vents . . . of Fire

by Donald Ray Schwartz

  Hodges glanced over at the oxygen tank readings. Twenty-eight minutes. Susan was allowing a two minute differential margin.

  “Where are we?”

  I didn’t see it at first. It was the day I gave the lecture. You remember. We played the video. Then I saw it. Maybe I looked away and looked back. Something. But there it was. I thought the camera or disc had an anomaly in it.

  Later, that night, Jennifer and I went back and reviewed our thermal scans. There was no question.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The vents exude, belch black smoke. Black Smokers they are sometimes called. Great degrees of heat rush through the ocean floor. This, of course, we all know, and we in this ship know all too well. But something else, and I should have intuited it. I knew I missed something. I couldn’t figure what it was.”

  “Susan?”

  “Nature abhors a vacuum. One of the most basic principals of science. This is what I missed and should have known: From this great pressure of fire, winds of fire, soil of fire, and, at last, water, vacuums are created. And into these breeches, these …”

  “The ocean water pours in.”

  “Most of these pools are miniscule, burned to steam in instants. But our vent is so huge, the flow is continuous. As long as we stay in this part (I estimate it is about the size of a small lake, roughly a quarter mile average on all tangent sides), close to its entrance, away from the event horizon, we’ll be safe. At least for twenty-four minutes. Unless we can grow gills, live off the fish that come in, and live out our days in this stream-pool.” She giggled her girlish-woman scientist giggle Jennifer found irritating, and Hodges had come to love. Well, almost.

  “Can we slip out through the water stream?” He was fully alert now. Amazing what enough water in the body and mind will do. We are water creatures, as far removed from the fire-life as death itself. Earth’s creatures long ago time left their birthing place behind, so far behind it was now fully hostile and what was once out there was now what sustained all the descendants of being. Really, it was a mystery.

  “Susan?”

  “Hmm? Oh. No. Negative. It’s too narrow. Just some cracks in the rocks. There’s only one way out. How we came in. Hopefully our computer will remember and the auto pilot can get us back.”

  “Your thesis?”

  “There’s a great deal of telemetry. We can review it later if we make it.”

  She wouldn’t admit it. He sensed the disappointment in her voice. The source of life had no doubt been found; but its empirical evidence was as elusive as on the surface laboratories: Like water in a boiling pot when it turns to steam, rises, and vanishes into the ether.

  He gazed out again. He was reminded of those psychedelic posters and paintings of the 60’s and 70’s, a shattering of reds, golds, yellows, greens, a rainbow phantasmagoria of a phantasmagoria. Gregor Samsa flailing his useless stick-legs in psychedelic pattern: They had metamorphosed into the Beetles in their yellow submarine.

  He realized there was no up nor down and they would need the auto pilot memory chip to guide them their way out. Silicon logic to rescue them from silicon hell. How had they arrived here? Had Susan been the only one to survive?

  “Delores? Magruder?”

  “They are starting to come around. Magruder’s the worst for it. I think he bumped his head. I barely got my own IV in before I passed out. I prayed the vector I gave was the right one. I woke up when we were heading along the stream into the horizon-fire. I turned her and somehow got her here. Set her on a circular path. Then I tended to the three of you. Hooked up IV’s, took off clothing to allow for surface skin cooling. I did as much as I could. I, I’m a bit—”

  She fell into his arms. They perspired. They sweated. Not as much as before. The man’s IV tubes intertwined with the woman’s IV tubes, as though two tubule creatures lightly danced and shimmered in a rudimentary mating ritual. The man kissed the woman. The scientist kissed the soldier. For a short while at least, they knew they were still alive. “Come on tough guy. We’ve got much important work to do. And only twenty-two minutes to do it in. Oh my. Oh, that’s not, that’s, I just want to go back to sleep. Sleep forever in this amniotic sac and never venture again into the heat of the world outside.”

  “Susan.”

  “It’s OK. I know. Come on now. We’ll either make it or we won’t. If death awaits us, death awaits us. But we will die trying.”

  Jennifer scanned her instruments. The day waxed. The day waned. It had been over two hours since the two submarines slipped the surface and prowled the great oceanic depth beneath them. Once she thought she caught blip-lights of the larger vessel. But it was the small one she sought somehow returning in safety and that was the one that eluded her. She knew time was running out … or ran out.

  Not back yet meant not back at all. Not ever. Never. Tolkien had been in error. Never was worse than too late, much worse. Unless Susan had somehow found … they had gone over the directional coordinates many times; but the unknown factor, X, the chaos element, the blessing and the bane of science, even a one degree shift in their calculations from a lava flow, or a steam stream or a sudden cauldron could cause her to miss the water pool. Still she hoped, clung to it as a half-drowned woman at sea who had just seen the gentle cold waters close over her lover now clawed her way upon her half-sunken raft loaded with frozen dead men and blew her whistle in a desperate breath-reach for the life-boat that had moments before passed her by.

  She observed an unmistakable feature on horizon sight. Closing fast. Her heart sank, for she knew what it was. At the same instant, she heard them behind her. She had that feeling in her stomach. Like just before the starter’s gun at her swim meets. She also knew what she would find when she looked out at the soldiers on deck.

  “Mr. Wells. Mr. Foxworth. You slipped something in their drinking water this morning.”

  “We’re not cruel, Ms. Littleton.” Joanne Foxworth didn’t sound so eager and innocent any more. “It’s just for forty-five minutes or so. We’ll be gone by then. Or is it an hour and a half? Oh well, they’ll be fine. Or dead if they wake up. Interesting situation for them, don’t you think?”

  Jennifer turned. She stared down the 9mm Glock and the M16. The old “16 Tons” song came back to her at that moment. Strange how the mind works that way. “If the right one don’t get ya, then the left one will.”

  “So, Wells. It was you. All along. Susan was right. Carstairs had people in who knew the codes.”

  “The three of you. Arthknott especially almost had it. The three witches. I barely made it back up the stairs and behind the doors when Delores came down. I thought with your great imagination, her logic deduction, and Delores’ powers of observation, I would be found out. But the two of them were at odds ends. Huh. Interesting oxymoron that. Almost. Odds ends. Don’t you think? Well, anyway, it gave me, us, the time we needed to regroup.”

  “It won’t work. One of the most powerful weapons systems in the world circles beneath us. You can’t outrun her; you can’t out fight her.”

  “We won’t have to. Our own vessel, the Marduk, has cloaking sonar. It’ll disperse the signal and she’ll just think there’s one ship here. Stealth technology, you know. ESSS digital beaming. By the time she finishes her futile efforts, trying to protect the Ex-Gee, we’ll be long gone.”

  “With what? The answer to all this is down there.”

  “Is it? Is it underneath the underneath?” Foxworth said, coyly looking at Jennifer as a lover. Good God. Is the woman coming on to me?”

  “Then what. At the entrance … oh my God. The steam smoke at the entrance. The differential in pressure …?”

  “Keep going. You’re doing fine.”

  “Wait. Wait a minute. That’s it. That’s the connection I needed to make, what bothered me the whole time. I couldn’t figure—the damn energy co-efficients never matched. Always
we had that damn gap.”

  In spite of herself, in spite of her predicament, Jennifer in an instant turned to her computer. Quickly she brought up the simulation program which she had handled many months ago before the project had even officially begun. She began adding embedded functions in the interface state transition matrix, this time carrying the residual energy differences to the output vector.

  “None of us thought, here, I’ll output the energy differential curve. With the heat co-efficients and chemical compounding controlled for and subtracted out, you have, wait, there, wait, there! A phenomenal, vast net energy …”

  Then, like it occurs to all scientists and artists, she had the total discovery in one flash in her highly intelligent brain. The Eureka phenomenon. She thought the Word, and all its implications. Then she said the Word, the Word that the Lord God surely uttered to create the Universe, for even before the beginning of time, there was only the Word; and this is the Word that S/Hhe said:

  “Fusion!”

  “Controlled fusion through a chemical-interface that siphoned off and yielded up a net energy differential from the unique transposition of matter across the vent’s membrane boundary. Replicated underwater to capture a natural cooling exchange, you could generate unbelievable power with essentially no consumption of natural resources.” Another macro-application of the Vent’s uniqueness – yet another mind-blowing prospect neither she nor Susan had anticipated.

  With the rapture of the moment and the depth of insight, every bit as gratifying as any of her most deeply felt orgasms, she let the realization cascade down through her body as she had with her lovers. Each one special; yet Allen … Allen: For a moment, Jennifer almost forgot where she was, that an iron-formed tubule containing the potential of plasma controlled burst-energy expunging a projectile of death was pointed at her heart. She continued to the synthesis of her conclusion.

  “The end of pollution, the reduction and salvation of expensive and depletion-based energy resources, the restoration and return of ecosystems, medical cures, an endless food protein supply.” Her eyes glistened like they had seen the eyes of her teacher, Susan, glisten when her hypotheses, premises, analyses, evidences, and conclusions involved her utterly. Jennifer indeed forgot the danger she was in. For the moment, she dreamt the eternal dream. Her dreams and thoughts continued without regard to where she was, until one of her thoughts slammed into her brain. This heavy thought returned her to her ship-borne reality.

  “Why, with endless energy available we could design …”

  Her voice trailed off

  “Go on. Why stop there?”

  “A weapon of such magnitude all the good could be destroyed in an instant.”

  “Or the threat of its use. Or of a low yield use. It’s all in the permutations and combinations. We think we have it; we know Carstairs does.”

  “Then your submersible never needed to go in, into, to enter—”

  “By George I think she’s got it. Now, then. Why you didn’t drink any water today is most unusual. But if you’ll please come over here, we’ll be glad to tie you—What the hell?”

  Jennifer knew at once it was the whales returning to surface. By chance they came up close (later she would ponder if it was indeed mere random occurrence), very close; it was most unusual, as if they knew to help her, as if they heard her in her mind singing whale song, singing the secret siren song of the sea. Up they broke surface, on the port side, in an uncommon maneuver, the entire pod at the same time. The ship rocked just enough to tip her captors off balance.

  Jennifer, seated, held on. Always take your chance when it comes, and early on, Allen had taught her. Never go to the second phase. You may die trying, but you will certainly die at the second scene of the scenario. She bolted out the door of the pilot house on the starboard side. Onto the outer deck of the bridge she dashed. She needed to get to her quarters. She ran on wet slippery surfaces. She raced without slipping or falling. Her huge feet gobbled up decks as fast, sure, and true as they had gobbled up pool-lane water at a more innocent time of her life when she triumphed over her competition. She had long ago lost or misplaced her trophies.

  She made it halfway before the bullets struck along side her or she heard them whizz past her ear into the ocean beyond.

  She had another odd thought, hoping at that moment with her own life in dire jeopardy that the 20mm and .45 caliber superheated projectiles miss the whales sounding now on this side also.

  A desperate woman in desperate circumstances, she dashed down the companionway toward the poop deck. Just inside the small room, she stopped. She saw it leaning against the wall. It shouldn’t be there. Then she recalled, Hodges had secured it. “You never know,” she remembered him stating. Allen and Hodges. Perhaps two men had saved her life without their knowing. She grabbed it. She headed back up onto the main deck. She saw they were halfway to her now. It was twenty feet to the ocean, a little rough today, and surely cold.

  She didn’t hesitate. She leapt, as from a high dive, remembering her form to dispel the impact of her arrival. Bullets zoomed, whistled all about her leaping body, which, seemingly suspended, hung in a profile icon familiar even to those not in regular attendance at poolside. In an instant, suspended between heaven and earth, air and water, she sensed a warm sensation as she felt her left side whammed by a hammer.

  She tried to maintain the gracile profile of the dive. But the hammer blow was consuming, mighty, powerful. She felt herself spin out of control. She slammed into a high wave of the sea, as if Poseidon had sent the whitecap to break her fall.

  Like the submersibles before her, she slowly sank beneath the surface, her body spinning slowly, a small stream of crimson for an instant about the blue-white circlet of her entrance incarnadine.

  Then the waves of blue and white covered her and the red dissipated, then vanished, as though the lives of the cells had returned from whence they had come.

  The flukes of the whales raised above the ocean surface, on both sides of the ship now, allowing a knowledgeable person who had chosen to follow this pod the unique identification of each individual through the striations and cuts of that fluke. They had received sufficient air. The bullets had whizzed by them. Wisely, they dove again beneath the surface, carrying with them, as they had for eternity, the mystery of the firmament of the sea.

  Captain Mitch Corvales walked the length of his bridge. He walked back to command. Something wasn’t right. He was concerned. If that small submersible had been able to elude his sonar, even on a temporary basis, then it was conceivable it had been more than mere rock that had thrown their operation for a while. He knew, as commanders of every submarine and task force in the fleet knew, that, prior to its breakup, the Soviets had been well along in developing cloaking sonar, an anti-sonar series rapidly shifting harmonics sent in sound wave in omni-directional currents with pulse interludes on piggy-back carrier bands. The result, highly complex and sophisticated, but, in essence, was to jam return signals without the operator realizing interference or jamming occurred. He or she would merely perceive the device as having found nothing to reflect and come back. An empty screen, in effect; nothing out there when something in fact out there lurked.

  What was that ditty in Tolkien’s The Hobbit? ‘By the twitching of my thumbs, something evil this way comes.’ And we, with all this sophisticated software cannot discern it. He felt a sick kick in his stomach.

  The Russians, they knew, had continued their work, perhaps to expand their best economic output, military measures and counter-measures to rogue nations, or bankrolled terrorist groups. Josh Egerton, his Sonar man, was the best or one of the best in the fleet. For what he’d about to ask the boy would need all his training, all his skill, and considerable intuition. He would take his chance. He believed in him. He believed in them all.

  “X0. Go to red. Silent running. Underwater visual on scope.”

  “Aye
Captain. All hands. Switching to red and infra-red on my mark. Three seconds. Mark.”

  Like a photographer’s dark room, the lights on the vessel deep beneath some unknown latitude of the Pacific Ocean transformed red. There could be no glare now. There would be less chance of eye fatigue. There was at this point, Corvales knew, no margin for error. This was what they had trained for.

  Corvales was reminded of the search for the Atomic Bomb. The entire matter had begun as a mere intellectual exercise in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. Only the impetus of World War II and the fear that Nazi Germany developed the device along with ballistic delivery rockets compelled a massive development project orchestrated in the main by escaped Eastern European Jewish scientists throughout the late 1930’s and early 1940’s.

  Now, here he defended what had started as a mere scientific curiosity of biological significance but had quickly caught the attention of military professionals. The more he pondered the matter, the truer the analogy of the two events seemed. The enormous significance of it all was not lost on Corvales nor his superiors in Washington nor at Stratcom in Omaha. For there was something else being pursued that only a few persons in Washington or Langley or Omaha knew about. If it were true, it were amazing and profound.

  Classified still at this writing is the particular design capability that gives the Nebraska its silent non-signature to any Sonar while allowing the ship over eighty per cent efficiency to which noise and vibration ordinarily would be a factor. The major theory concerns a counter-fan turbine run in a calibrated opposing interval, processor matched to the actual outer screws that propel the vessel through surface and deep waters, along a cognate counter water flow produced along the wake.

  “Engineering. Silent running. Counter turbines activated. On my mark. Three seconds. Mark.”