Deeptide Vents . . . of Fire

by Donald Ray Schwartz

  Classified still at this writing is the Nebraska’s underwater visual scope with both full pressure lens and laser guided miniature (nearly microscopic) camera on the needle of her prow. A separate imaging system allows the viewer gazing through the little window at the top of the periscope shaft an actual and TV-generated forward split screen underwater view.

  “Underwater view scope. Activate on my mark. Mark.”

  Corvales peered through the small window with special glasses. “Sharks.”

  “Captain.”

  “A wall of sharks. Hundreds. X0.”

  “Aye Captain. School of sharks sighted.”

  “Have Egerton report to the bridge.”

  “Sonar.”

  “Sonar aye.”

  “Report to bridge. ASAP Mr.”

  “Copy that X0. ETA twenty seconds.”

  “Sharks,” Corvales said. “A wall of sharks.”

  “Sonar reporting as ordered, sir.”

  Corvales removed his glasses. “Never saw so many sharks. I think they sense something.”

  “Sir?”

  “Or they’re running from something.” Corvales paused.

  His men worked their screens and stations. They wiped sweat from their brows. They had been at deep depth for over two hours. “Did you see the sharks, Mr. Egerton?”

  “Sharks. Aye, Captain. Begging the Captain’s pardon, sir, I didn’t think they would—”

  “No. No, no. It’s quite all right, son. I was merely curious. Status of the hostile.”

  “Your strategy worked, sir. At least for a while. She turned. The Ex-Gee spiraled in. It was something. I never thought they’d be able to maneuver—”

  “Current status, Mr. Egerton. Of the hostile.”

  “Sir. Just hanging out, so to speak at the vent entrance.

  “Occasionally turns toward us. I, it sounds crazy I know.”

  “Go on.”

  “I think eventually she plans to fire a torpedo at us.”

  There was silence. “I mean, she does seem to be working with some probes she sends out to the edges. But I think she also …”

  Egerton looked up at his captain. He was sure he would see easy and impatient dismissal on the man’s face, this man he respected as much as anyone he knew and would die in battle for. He had spoken as a first day student at submariner’s school. He had not spoken like a knowledgeable, trained professional his commander and crewmates depended upon, as he depended upon them. It was absurd, anti-physics, and counter-intuitive. It was one thing for an Alvin class submersible to explore the deep beneath the deep, quite another for an underwater rocket. The pressure would cause its implosion in instants. Yes, we had some encapsulated top secret weapons, launched from undersea housings; but the girth demanded would all but eliminate such an object from a relatively small, deep-sea vessel. But his commander’s face was serious, that rock-etched line face of a man always thinking twenty fathoms deeper and twenty miles ahead of everyone else.

  “Roger that Mr. Keep a good eye on that. Mr. Egerton.”

  “Aye Captain.”

  “You’ve had counter anti-pulse variance harmonic training, haven’t you?”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Again the long pause. Chatter of duty stations filtered about the bridge. Corvales continued. By chance, it appeared everyone ceased their chatter at once. For a moment the silence of the ship seemed deafening. Corvales gave the command he had been pondering.

  “Institute full to half pulse harmonics. Random and chaotic variances. At once. Continuous. Three hundred sixty degrees. Long range. Don’t worry about the energy excess, Mr. Egerton. That will be the XO’s concern.”

  “Copy that, Captain. To surface als, all range. Aye sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  The Sonar operator returned to his duty station. He reached about his neck. He brought out a key on a ring. He unlocked a red box to the left of his console. A rheostat resistance switch lay inside. He turned the dial to a label written, “MultiPort Seek Rand Sor.” He pressed it down. A low hum, like a Tibetan Monk chant, filtered throughout the ship. Lights blinked. Somewhere on board a compressor ceased its work. Then, of a sudden, all returned. The hum lowered. The hum disappeared.

  Egerton gazed at his screens, and listened to his headsets. He adjusted the rheostat switch.

  Corvales worried now about the probes at the threshold of the event sent out by the hostile ship.

  Susan Arthknott fought the queasiness and fuzziness in her stomach, in her head. She knew it took well over a day, in some cases, a week for a normally healthy person to recover from severe dehydration. And the people in this redoubtable ship nearly had been boiled alive. They had only about twenty minutes of oxygen left, maybe twenty-five since any tank monitor always had more than what showed. If they made it somehow they could be taken to a good navy hospital on the west coast to recover for a week. That would be all right; in fact, she looked forward to it, especially as long as Hodges were in the next bed.

  Who’da thunk it? Who could have thought it could happen like this, at her age? And a non-scientist. A soldier. Younger. But he was such a masculine specimen.

  For a moment she realized she had been dreaming of something but could not remember what it was. A hospital. Well, as doctor or patient, she knew that when a person desires to surrender as patient in hospital, she recognizes beyond question she must truly be ill.

  One thing she knew. By any standard her ship’s design was a success. Improvements were required, of course. The uranium should be the first line of defense, not within the outer layer. The tiles could be double-spread at angular quality lines … yes, that should work. She would have to figure the calibrations and angles, but it should work.

  They had simply spent too much time in, that’s all. Susan surmised that the computer model had been in error. Pockets of cauldron spots flamed and sparked far hotter even than they had projected. She’d have to let Jennifer know. Jennifer! She’d only been away from her friend and protégé nearly three hours. It somehow seemed like three decades or three millennia ago.

  That was it then. Our lives are eras, unique from any other era on earth or in space or in the fiery middle of the planet. Defined by different periods of time eternal.

  First there was the infant, mewling and puking in her parents’ crib, then the schoolgirl on her way to school, ignoring the vicissitudes of prepubescence, then unable to ignore them, then the young woman, turning to molecular biology, then the doctor-scienti—

  “Susan! For the love of God. Snap out of it. If I read it right, we have only about twenty minutes of air left.”

  Dehydration. The IV drip was only half empty. She needed more.

  “Water.”

  “Here. Drink it all. We’ve got to drink all our rations. At least it didn’t get to 100 Celsius. The water’s still here.”

  They drank. Delores started to come around. Hodges explained their situation to her. Magruder moaned. He thrashed about. Then, at once, he fell asleep or into a coma. They drank.

  “Damn,” Delores said.

  “Glad to have you back, Commander,” Hodges said.

  “Damn. OK,” Susan said.

  Susan explained she was setting in the return coordinates. Or, rather, letting the computer and auto-pilot know they needed to back out by memory as the same approach by which they came in. Delores wanted a systems check. Susan explained that was two to four minutes they didn’t have.

  “Besides, what difference does it make? We can die here or die out there.”

  “Are we, what’s our position relative to the surface?”

  “Only God and our autopilot memory know. And I’m betting on Alfred.”

  “You call the computer Alfred?”

  “Alfred served Batman well. I’m hoping. OK. Alfred says he’s ready. Ready now. Get set
boys and girls. This is it!”

  Sweat dripped off their brows. It coursed down their backs. It collected, nearly pooled, under their arms, even before they left the cool water chamber. They knew not their orientation in relation to surface or depth of sea. The craft once again was about to venture into the most hostile of environments, where no person had ever ventured, the heart of the inferno of the earth. Soon enough, red, yellow, white danced about them. So far, the tiles did not melt. So far the spent uranium reflecting the most radioactive of metals did not begin to break down.

  “It. It’s not as bad for some reason. 105°. 108. 109. Not rising as fast,” Hodges proclaimed.

  “We’re in a channel of steam from the water chamber. It’s giving us a window of some coolant. If this path will coincide with our pathway out, we may be—”

  “Commander, weapons.”

  “Commander, aye.”

  Delores shook her head. The usually strong, stalwart military officer attempted to fight off the blackness in her mind. The disorientation was almost too much. She had been on ships at sea in storms so huge and horrendous, it seemed her boat had been cast to the virtual bottom of the ocean with walls of sea about her, and she was not certain if earth and sky were above or below. But this, this water and fire all about them, it was, oh the hell with it. She would be sick or weak later. This her moment of greatness! Her time of glory!

  “I say again, Commander, aye.”

  She wiped the sweat from her eyes. An exercise in futility. Still it entered under her lids. Damn. It stung.

  “I’ve got two blips. Strange. They’re converging our position. One’s huge. What the heck. It’s above us. I, no. It’s all around us. How is … What the hell—104°; 102; 99; 97; 96; 98; 95. Holding steady at 95-97. Blip’s disappeared.”

  “Hodges, Susan. What’s our oxygen?”

  “Nineteen minutes. Temperature’s steady but we’re going in a different direction. What the hell is going on?”

  “Can we afford to effect visual?”

  “Aye Commander. With all due respect, I don’t think we can afford not to.”

  “Susan.”

  “Copy that Delores. Here we go.”

  The panels spread again. They gazed at what lay beyond them.

  “Mother of God,” the scientist proclaimed. And in spite of herself, she continued to express her awe in a place only of awe. She recognized at last how truly full of awe was this place and she had not known it.

  “Dearest Mother of God. It is so beautiful. It is. Is!”

  The others looked at her, then without again. Susan sat staring in what Delores would later describe a gaze enraptured, as if one who had seen clearly an angel or a demon, a consummate revelation of epiphany.

  Then she looked out. She saw.

  “Oh my dear Holy God!” the military officer said.

  She slipped off her shoes underneath the hull of the ship. She swam. Again she swam in a race. She needed her kick as she had known it.

  Once, years ago, when she knew she took to the water, she swam under a lake’s anchored raft. She was twelve years old. The world of immortality stretched before her, a mighty unending and unyielding ocean stretching beyond boundaries, beyond the horizon. Then, for the scariest of moments, she thought she wouldn’t make it. She knew she drowned. What astonished her was she wasn’t frightened. She simply surmised she would either make it or she wouldn’t, she would either die or live and, oddly, at the moment, for some reason, it didn’t seem to matter. She meant to keep simply swimming. Underwater, she kept her strokes, promising herself she would move her arms and legs until her lungs burst. At last, probably just in time, she felt herself break water beyond the edge of the raft, as a whale bursting past the surface of the water. She inhaled. She exhaled. She breathed deep breaths, gasping, her chest and her mind and her soul swelling with the precious breath of life.

  Where was she? For some reason she had thought of a childhood memory. Her side hurt.

  She swam. The hull of the destroyer seemed to go on forever.

  She felt the waves of the water. It was cold, freezing, but her side was warm. Suddenly she realized she had swum under the hull of the Starr. It had not been easy. The ship was huge. But it shouldn’t have been that difficult. Then she remembered. Something in her side was wrong. Something kept her from her normal strokes and rhythms. It didn’t hurt exactly. Or maybe it did. She could not determine.

  She held something in her hand. It couldn’t be important. But for some reason she wouldn’t let go. What was the reason? What was the object? All she knew: She must hold on. What was the matter with her? She was cold. Very cold. Slipping now. She remembered. She had to find the ladder. Climb up. There were bad people there. Susan depended on her. Susan! Where was Susan? She was underneath the water. But she was in a volcano. How could Susan be in fire and water at the same time? And if she were under the water, why didn’t she see her when she swam under the raft; or was her swim under something else?

  She saw the ladder. She had to climb up it somehow. The answer was at the top of the ladder, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there always a ladder between heaven and earth? But she was in the sea somewhere, wasn’t she? Then how could heaven’s ladder be right above her?

  But the ocean was so cold and the waves cast so much water in her lungs. It would be peaceful now, simply to let the ocean curl about her, encompass her like a womb of watery amniotic fluid.

  To return to the water’s womb like she was meant to return so many years ago when she had cheated the lake spirits. To return down to the depths of the sea. That was it! That was what she was meant to do. She would go meet Susan. They would be absorbed by the cold comforting waters together. Or would sharks sense her blood and—well, either way. It was that old familiar feeling of not really caring.

  She tried one more stretch to the ladder’s first rung. No use. Too far, too wet, too weak. She slipped beneath the surface. She looked down. It was so peaceful. And there was Susan, looking so beautiful like she always knew she would, coming up to her, stretching her arms to embrace her, to comfort her, to welcome her, to take her home. Yes, it was the answer. She felt at peace. Or, well, no matter; let the peacefulness prevail; for thence she felt herself twirling deliberately, spinning slowly, sinking, sinking down beneath the white capped surface of the blue ocean’s mysteries and secrets.

  Egerton listened carefully. He adjusted his dials. He hearkened to the sounds true and sounds phantom, to the sounds of the sea and to sounds that were not sounds of the sea but of its invader, man.

  He never wished to be in a submarine. Who in their right mind did? But when he sat down with his first sonar set-up, he was hooked. It was almost worth the long tours at sea. The stale air, the food long past fresh. Four heads for practically 200 men.

  Now, he listened most carefully. Something strange sounded. Then, at once like that fellow who discovered water displacement and yelled, “Eureka,” he had it! He charted his graphs. And he had it! He knew!

  “X0. Sonar. You’d better come down here.”

  “Roger that. On my way.”

  It took him a while to figure it out and now he had to explain it. But they were good, well trained officers. They’d get it. And quick.

  “All right, Mr. What do you have?”

  “I couldn’t grasp it at first. The pulses always came back negative. Then I realized it wasn’t a chaotic harmonic she generated. It was a simple random distribution, the Fibonacci sequence.”

  “Fibonacci. Adding the last number to the prior one in a sequence of numbers to extend the sequence.”

  “That’s it. One, then 1. One plus 1 = 2. Thus, 1-2. One + 2 = 3. Thus, 1-2-3. Two + 3 = 5. One-2-3-5. Three + 5 = 8. Thus, 1-2-3-5-8-13-21. So on. It’s a natural sequence, occurring in many places in nature. Tulip or rose petals, hair or fur, brachiation of trees or leaves. But usually not—”

 
“Not usually in artificial intelligence, not in man-made sequences. The perfect cover. Devilishly cleaver. A Russian chess master play. Almost perfect.”

  “I sent it back in counter sequences, until I found its highest cardinal number. Turns out it’s 34. It just sent counter pulses one number lower each in the sequence. Half of it was guess work, really, but—”

  “You found her.”

  “Big one. And approaching our good friend upstairs at flank speed. See. Here. And then here. Here’s the full projected plot.”

  “Damn. Twelve minutes I make it.”

  “Twelve minutes 37 seconds. Give or take 10-12 seconds.” “It’s no good. We’re a good 20 minutes from the surface. And another 10 to the coordinates.”

  “Eighteen and 11, actually.” Egerton cleared his throat. “Sir.”

  “And our guy down here?”

  “No change. But when we turn, I suspect he’ll come along for the ride or try something.”

  “Above and below. Well, we have a problem. Two of them. Three, with that cockamamie vessel we’re waiting for on that damn fool’s errand. Never mind that. Good work, Egerton. Stay on it. I’ll alert the Captain.”

  Thomas Olgelby, Executive Officer: He liked the title. His short stature had always been a problem for him; but being XO assigned to the fleet class submarine of the line and thus in the world made him feel as tall as the coning tower. He had had some advantages, it was true. His Brahman Olgelby family upbringing in Boston. His father had wanted him to go into politics. Even when disappointed at his application and acceptance at Annapolis, the old man had already seen his military career leading ultimately to a senate seat and even to the top office. “Then you could be Commander-In-Chief of the entire army. Maybe it was a good choice after all.”

  All he wanted now was this ship. He hated beneath the surface of the sea for so long time. They all did, he knew. But somehow, over the months and years, he had come to love this vessel. And he knew every rivet, every bolt. They had given the command to a, well, to a—the man wasn’t from an old established family on the east coast, after all. But Mitch Corvales had proven himself to this midshipman. Corvales had a top appointment in the fleet. He was up for Admiral next year. Then this XO would become this ship’s Commander. He was sure of it. And he didn’t need his father’s or mother’s help.