She leaned over to wake him up, gave him a little shake. “Dr. Brambell?”
No response. The poor man had been going thirty-six hours straight and was out like a light. He had locked the door and she noticed his cell phone on the lab table counting down the seconds. She picked it up. He had set it for a ten-minute nap and had two more minutes to go.
The poor tired man—ten minutes seemed like nothing. Seeing him asleep so peacefully made her feel the lure of sleep, herself. The shot Brambell had given her seemed to be wearing off, or at least it was no longer able to counteract the tidal wave of fatigue that pressed at her mind. She was aware that her rationality was still somewhat affected by the shot, that she wasn’t thinking as clearly as she normally did—but who could be expected to, after the ordeal they had just gone through?
God knew the doctor needed a longer rest; and so did she. What risk would there be in a half-hour nap? That would be a lot more effective than ten minutes. The door to the clinic was securely dogged. And surely Glinn’s no-sleep edict did not apply to herself and Brambell, who needed to be as sharp as possible if they were going to be effective.
She reset the phone alarm to go off in thirty minutes, and then eased herself into a lab chair and sat back, placing her feet up on the table, closing her eyes, and falling almost immediately into a delicious sleep.
52
GIDEON LEFT HIS cabin and headed for mission control, where he knew he would find Glinn. As he walked down the corridor, he heard, as he passed through crew quarters, voices raised in querulous complaint. A man came careening down the hall, smelling of alcohol, bumped into him, gave him an elaborate bow, and staggered on. As he passed the open door to the crew’s mess, he saw that a crowd had gathered, talking urgently among themselves.
He hurried on. Glinn was right: they had very little time before things fell apart on the ship, if they weren’t beginning to already. He wondered how the man would react to the news he was carrying.
The door to mission control was locked, but after identifying himself on the intercom he entered. Glinn was there, along with McFarlane. Both were hunched over a monitor. It was a view of the Baobab from the stationary camera. It was horribly active, the mouth extruding and swelling, then retracting, as if it were exercising some grotesque sex organ.
“The simulation is finished,” said Gideon.
They both looked up.
Gideon had been debating in his mind the best way to say it, but when actually faced with the task his carefully crafted explanation vanished. “It won’t work,” he said simply.
“Won’t work?” McFarlane repeated sharply.
“Not even close. The sediments act like a blanket. The shock wave won’t reach that cluster of brains.”
“I don’t believe it,” McFarlane said harshly. “Bury the nuke in the mud and set it off there. That’ll excavate a crater down to them.”
Gideon shook his head. “I already considered that. The simulation looked at various detonation altitudes above and within the seafloor. The best location is about two hundred meters above the bottom. The water pressure would propagate the shock wave to a larger area of seafloor, where it would penetrate the farthest. But not far enough.”
“Let’s see those simulations,” said Glinn.
“They’re on the ship’s network.” Gideon turned to the monitor, pulled up a keyboard, logged on, and ran the video simulation with all its various permutations, starting with the nuke exploding at the level of the seafloor, and then working up to a detonation half a mile above the Baobab. Each simulation showed the shock wave moving in slow motion through the water, hitting the ground, and continuing on—damping down and petering out in five to six hundred feet of depth. None of them reached the cluster of eggs, at a thousand feet deep.
“I can’t believe it,” McFarlane exploded. “This is a fucking nuclear weapon! You’ve set the parameters wrong.”
“No,” Gideon said. “The problem is, these deep-sea pelagic sediments are like a wet blanket. If it were solid rock it would be totally different. But it’s not—it’s like Jell-O.”
“So what’s the answer?” McFarlane asked furiously. “What have we got more powerful than a nuke? Can we go get an H-bomb? What else can we do? This is fucked up. Why wasn’t this simulation done six months ago?”
He halted his tirade, breathing heavily. Gideon looked at him. He felt utterly defeated. And to think he’d seriously considered reprogramming the nuke’s onboard computer so he could override an abort code, just in case the others got cold feet. What a joke. Now there was no question: everyone wanted to use the nuke. And every hour counted. But the damned thing wouldn’t be enough to kill the entity.
Glinn spoke quietly. “Are there any options, Gideon?”
Gideon shook his head. “One nuke. One shot.”
53
ROSEMARIE WONG HAD locked the door to the marine acoustics lab and was straightening up, trying to put the lab back into a semblance of order after Garza and his team had swept the place for worms. Prothero would have a fit if he came in and found it like this. Although it was just as messy when Prothero was there, he always claimed to know where every little thing was. And it was true: if she moved so much as a pencil in one of his staggering piles of crap, he would notice and berate her.
She was deeply concerned about what was happening on board the ship. Several times in the past hour she had heard groups of people passing by in the narrow corridor outside the lab, talking in loud, angry voices, their boots ringing on the metal floor. Some of them sounded like they had been drinking, while others appeared wired from the amphetamines that were being passed out like candy.
Where was Prothero? He had been working on his whale lexicon for much of the night, but then had excused himself and left, saying he’d be back in fifteen. But it had been almost an hour and he still wasn’t back. Had he gone to sleep, defying regulations? That would be just like him; the way to get Prothero to do something was to ask him to do its opposite.
Wong told herself she shouldn’t be worried. Prothero maintained a completely unpredictable schedule, coming and going at all hours of the day and night, never eating in the mess but instead chowing down in the lab itself, at random times, on pizzas and sodas brought in from the canteen. He would typically kick the trash into a corner, and it would then be up to her to retrieve it, put it in the garbage, and then empty the garbage at regular intervals to get rid of the oniony smell of pizza, which she loathed…
Once again through the door she heard a group pass by; once again she heard the muffled, angry voices. This was truly disturbing. Where was security? But she knew the answer to that: Garza had commandeered them all in the search for the worms. In the meantime, the ship’s discipline was rapidly heading for a complete breakdown.
She heard the door rattle; a gasp. “Hey, Wong! Open up!”
Prothero. She got up, unlocked the door, opened it. He rushed in, slamming the door and locking it. He was gasping for breath, sweaty, his hair askew, sucking in air.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “The motherfuckers have gone crazy. It was only five minutes, maybe ten at most, I swear—”
There was a sudden thundering of footsteps outside the door; a rattling of the doorknob. “Prothero? Prothero!” a voice called, with an eruption of other voices behind.
Prothero backed away from the door. “Tell them I’m not here,” he whispered to Wong.
Wong swallowed. “He’s not here,” she said through the door.