Mike quickly stanched the flow of blood from Eastwood’s head wound. Mike was now faced with disposing of the lifeless body. Opening the door to his room, Mike looked up and down the hall to see if there were any people around. Seeing no one, Mike picked up the corpse of Eastwood, carefully holding him as if he were helping a drunken friend. Mike was surprised how light Eastwood was.
“Must be all those damn sprouts and power lunches,” he said, grim-faced.
Mike carried the body to the service elevator, pushed the down button and waited for the doors to open. As the doors closed on the slumped body of Eastwood, Mike whispered, “Say hi to your pa-pa, asshole.”
1993: Watching
The hatch closed with a metallic clang. A whoosh of air indicated that the passageway to the transfer submersible was being flooded to outside pressure. McHugh climbed down the ladder to the metal grating of the deck.
Two men waited for the older man to reach the bottom of the ladder. In the background, they could hear the metallic sounds of the transfer submersible breaking seal, the gentler, heavier metallic clang of the outer hatch seating itself, and finally the whirring sounds of the transfer submersible’s thrusters fading into the void.
“Welcome, Admiral, we’re glad to have you on board. It’s been a long time,” said Captain O’Shannon. Watch Station One was anchored 18,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.
Watch Station commanders were hand-picked by McHugh. Typically, these men were those whose loyalty and devotion to duty were beyond question. O’Shannon was a perfect example of this devotion to duty.
O’Shannon’s deputy, Joshua Wong, stood quietly by. Wong was a young Annapolis graduate, plucked out of the nuclear Navy at a very young age, primarily because of his post-graduate work at the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography on deep ocean geomagnetic interferometric phase characterization.
“Hello, Bill,” said McHugh. “How have you been, Mr. Wong? It’s good to see you again. You’ve got a thankless job, Bill. Your men are to be commended on their patience and diligence. Not too many men would give up their families and surface life to live on the ocean bottom for six months at a time.”
McHugh was dressed in the special fire-retardant cotton, navy blue jumpsuit that was the required uniform while aboard the Watch Station. On his feet were special grounding boots that discharged any static electricity safely. On the collars of his uniform were embroidered silver stars signifying his rank. Under his jumpsuit, McHugh had remembered to put on his long johns, also made of the same fire retardant cotton material.
Despite all efforts to control the temperature and humidity at the Watch Stations, they tended to be damp and cold, especially to the occasional visitor or new crew member. The dampness and relatively cool temperature of the atmosphere aboard the Watch Station gave the air a characteristic staleness: a metallic, oily, heavy, wet smell.
O’Shannon wore a jumpsuit similar to McHugh’s. Like so many of his crew, a personal headset for a Walkman hung around his neck.
Watch Station One was constructed as a network of eight spherical compartments connected by short crawl ways. Each sphere was segregated from the others by airlocks. Despite the incredible pressures outside the spheres, the pressure inside the spheres was maintained at standard atmosphere or surface pressure. Although passage to each sphere was through crawl ways, the spheres were quite large, enabling all twelve of the crewmen to be quite comfortably gathered in any one sphere at one time.
The main command module was packed with instrumentation and recording devices, including one of the new DataTech Neural Network Supercomputing Systems Mark I. The temperature of the Mark I was maintained by a novel cooling system that provided cooling using solid copper heat conductors connected to an outside heat exchanger. The Mark I computer controlled all the systems at Watch Station One, including the recording of all data.
The main command module was originally the only one that had anything resembling windows — nine centimeter portholes. However, the crew quarters had been outfitted later with one porthole each; dictated by CSAC psychologists as essential for maintaining sanity. Such conveniences were not easily decided upon because of the sea pressures encountered at these depths: the first casualties were portholes.
In order to see out the portholes in the main command module and crew quarters, the interior lights had to be turned off and the outside lights lit. Not that the crew spent much time looking out the portholes. Even with the outside lights on, there just wasn’t anything to see but the immense black mass that lay at the edge of the light. At these depths, there was simply no life to speak of.
About the only activity one could see in the bleak, black void was what most called “snowfall.” What they were referring to was the seemingly constant fall of detritus from the upper reaches of the ocean. This detritus consisted of lifeless remains from the rich biological photic regions of the ocean drifting slowly down to the ocean bottom.
The other spheres at Watch Station One contained living quarters, a kitchen, a workshop and gymnasium, the submersible room, the nuclear reactor that powered the station, and the transfer room. The transfer room was equipped with a docking station and airlock for the submersibles that brought replacement crews, mail, and supplies. The submersible room also contained an airlock for one of the two Benthic Ranger submersibles attached to the Watch Station.
Benthic Ranger was the latest generation of Squid submersibles that had been developed by MacAlear Aviation. Infinitely more comfortable than the Squid, Benthic Ranger could hold up to six people in relative comfort, twelve if absolutely necessary. Each Watch Station had two Benthic Rangers, which served as patrol vehicles as well as escape pods, if the need ever arose. The second Benthic Ranger was accessed from the crew’s living quarters via the submersible room.
All the spheres except for the main command module and the two spheres that served as living quarters were awash in brilliant light. Some psychologist had a theory that programmed lighting, especially bright white light, could control sleeplessness in artificial environments such as this. The living quarters, however, were more softly lit. This was done to encourage sleep and rest. One of the living quarters had been painted a pastel pink. Again, some think-tank psychologist thought that pink would have a calming effect on the crew. The crew especially disliked the pink color. Soon, only newer crew members had to endure it. Rank still had some privileges even among the enlisted men.
The main command module was bathed in red light, in order to facilitate the monitoring of the cathode ray tubes, television monitors and other instrumentation.
The Watch Station’s complement of twelve was divided into two six-man teams, each working twelve hour shifts. As the Watch Station commander, O’Shannon led one of the two crews, called the Gold Crew. His deputy commander, Wong, led the second crew, called the Blue Crew.
The mission of the Watch Station crew was to monitor the geophysical state of an immense dark object about fifty yards from the station for any indication of life, electronic, biological, or otherwise. Data was collected from transponders strategically located on and in the vicinity of the Sentinel.
Besides the general measurements of temperature, biological oxygen demand, salinity, current and water density, more specific measurements were taken of magnetic background with the new generation proton precession magnetometer which over the years had replaced the metastable helium process for measuring magnetic flux. The instrumentation also continuously measured radioactivity, electromagnetic radiation, conductivity, seismic activity, and opacity.