“And your calculations show the nuke will destroy the thing?”
“The blast effects will destroy the trunk and branches. The shock wave emanating from the detonation is essentially a P-wave so strong it will destroy even the creature’s cellular structures—turn them, in effect, to mush. That’s where the four-hundred-atmosphere water pressure really comes in handy.”
“And what lies below the seafloor? Will it kill that, too?”
“The pressure wave will propagate into the ground and destroy the root structure.”
“How far will it propagate, exactly?”
This was where the simulation began to break down, even pushing the limits of the onboard supercomputer. But he wasn’t going to tell McFarlane that. “Well, it seems likely it’ll sterilize the ground within a mile radius, to a depth of at least six hundred feet.”
“Six hundred feet.” McFarlane’s eyebrows rose. “And just how extensive is the root system of the creature?”
“We’re not sure. There’s always been an assumption that if we kill the structure above the seabed, we’ll kill the whole creature.”
“Isn’t that a risky assumption?”
“We think not. We can clearly see what we believe is the creature’s brain inside the top of the trunk.”
“What if it has other brains underground?”
Gideon took a deep breath. “Listen, Sam—may I call you Sam?”
“Of course.”
“We can speculate all day. I’ve got a lot of work to do here. Maybe you should take these questions up with Glinn.”
He found McFarlane looking at him rather intensely. “I’m taking them up with you.”
“Why?”
“Because I have no respect for either Glinn or Garza. I saw how both of them operated during the last hours of the Rolvaag’s existence. Glinn is a neurotic obsessive. Manuel is a superb engineer with no imagination whatsoever, which makes him doubly dangerous—talent married to convention.”
“I see.”
“If you want my opinion…” He paused, looking at Gideon. “Do you?”
Gideon was tempted to say he didn’t, but decided the better course was to hear him out. “Sure.”
“Your nuke’s not going to work. It’s going to kill the structure above the seafloor, sure, but I’ll bet the main body of the creature is underground. It’s too well engineered to be that vulnerable. You won’t get it all—the nuke’s not powerful enough.”
“So if not a nuke, what?” Gideon asked with no little exasperation.
“Before you make that decision, you need more information.”
“Such as?”
“Many years ago, when I was just getting started as a freelance meteorite hunter, I got a temporary job as a roughneck. Near Odessa, Texas. I was part of a team prospecting for oil. You know how they look for oil? They set an array of small explosive devices on the surface of the ground, along with seismic sensors. They detonate the explosives, which sends a pulse of seismic waves through the ground, which are then picked up by the sensors. A computer can process the information and draw a picture of what’s underground—the layers of rock, the fault lines, the discontinuities—and, of course, the hidden pools of petroleum.”
“Are you suggesting we do that here?”
“Absolutely. You need to map what’s underground. You need to be sure you’re going to get it all.”
Gideon looked at McFarlane. The man was leaning toward him, his pale-blue eyes glittering in a way that made Gideon uneasy, breathing a little too hard. He was rail-thin and dressed in such a slovenly fashion he might have been a homeless person. And yet, despite everything, despite what he knew about the man and his history, Gideon recognized the suggestion was a good one. A very good one.
“We could do that.”
“I sensed you were a person who would listen.” He extended his hand, took Gideon’s, and shook it. “I’ll design the array. You set up the explosives and seismic sensors. We’ll work together—partners.”
“Not partners. Collaborators.”
42
TWO DECKS HIGHER, in the marine acoustics lab, Wong and Prothero were monitoring an acoustic device that techs in the control center had lowered to within half a mile of the creature. Wong had on a pair of earphones and a headset in which she could hear Prothero’s nasal voice.
“I’m ready to start broadcasting the who are you? blue whale vocalization,” he said. “It’s the sound two blue whales make when approaching each other from a distance—the whale hello, you could say. Let’s see how the Baobab responds. Are you set?”
“Set.”
“It’s going to sound different from what we’ve been hearing so far. Those sounds were sped up ten times for clarity. The real vocalizations are in the ten-to-thirty-nine-hertz range. A human can’t hear below twenty hertz, so it’ll sound really low, almost like a stutter, and you probably won’t catch it all.”
“I understand.”
“I’m going to broadcast for a minute, then give it a five-minute rest.” Prothero fiddled with some dials. “Broadcasting.”
It sounded to Wong like a series of extremely low groans and stutters. It went on for a minute, then fell into silence. Wong listened for a response. Five minutes went by. Nothing.
“I’m going to try it again,” said Prothero. “Upping the amplitude.”
He broadcast the whale greeting again. When it ended, there was a silence of about a minute—and then Wong heard another deep sound, very different: a long, drawn-out groan, followed by a stutter that faded over time into silence. A second sound followed, also long and low. She felt her heart accelerate. This was as unexpected as it was incredible: the thing had responded. They were communicating with an alien intelligence. Furthermore, she could hear that the Baobab was not simply repeating back what they had just played: rather, this was a new communication.
“You hear that?” said Prothero, his voice so excited it was squeaking like a teenager’s. “Motherfucker! It’s talking to us! There goes your theory that it’s just mindlessly playing back shit.”
“I concede the point,” Wong said. She wondered briefly what would happen if she told Prothero what she really thought of him. No…that could wait until later. When they were back in home port, maybe.
“Okay. I’m going to repeat who are you.”
The blue whale vocalization sounded. And the response came back, more rapidly this time.
“Did you get it on tape?” Prothero asked eagerly.
“Of course.”
“I don’t know what it means, but we’ll sure as hell find out. Let’s do it again.”
They repeated the same message, getting the same response.
“Wong, put that sound into the acoustic database and see what matches we get.”
“Already done.”
It didn’t take long for the computer to find a dozen matches in Prothero’s vast database of blue whale sounds. Once again, she looked up the circumstances under which the sounds had been recorded and forwarded the results to Prothero’s workstation. He labored for a while in silence.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve sort of got a translation. The Baobab’s response was three distinct sounds. The first one seems to have something to do with time. It’s really drawn out, though; I figure that means ‘long time.’”
More typing. Prothero was muttering to himself, a number of Jesum Crows and Fuckin’ A’s that she heard, unwillingly, broadcast through the headset.
“Okay,” he said again. “The second vocalization involves distance. It, too, is abnormally drawn out. So it probably means something like ‘long distance.’ Or more like ‘far away.’ That’s it! We asked it: Who are you?” and it answered: “Long time. Far away.”