They turned. It was Jason, wearing the atmospheric suit except for the helmet.
Darryl looked him up and down. “Like Neil Armstrong.”
Phil snickered. “Or maybe the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
The suit indeed looked like something an astronaut would wear. White, with big bubble-shaped body parts. But instead of puffy fibers, it was constructed of a hard magnesium alloy that made it nearly impossible to walk in.
His junky flip-flops slapping the deck, Ross approached Jason from behind. “Before we get going, I’m just gonna check there aren’t any holes or cracks in this thing.” This wasn’t a joke. At one third of a mile, roughly two thousand feet, a hole the size of a pinprick in the suit would mean certain death. Ross quickly inspected every bulge and seam. “Everything looks fine. Oh, but…” He checked the casing around the heels. “Yep, fine.” Then he saw Jason’s face. The guy looked terrified. “Loosen up. Your friends will be with you every step of the way, and Darryl knows what he’s doing. There won’t be any problems, I promise.”
“Can anything go wrong with the tube?” Lisa asked.
Ross turned to her. The tube was the size of a vacuum cleaner’s and screwed into the back of the suit’s neck. “No. The tube’s reinforced with magnesium alloy and steel. It’s been crush-tested to thirty thousand feet. It can’t get tangled; it can’t implode; it can’t explode, either. A shark could bite down on it without making a dent.” He got in Jason’s face. “You’ll be fine. Try to relax and have a good trip down.”
Jason nodded tightly. “Let’s do this before I chicken out.”
Seconds later, he stood on the red platform holding a helmet as Ross screwed a tube into his back.
“How you two doing in here?”
Crammed into a sub the size of a phone booth, Darryl and Lisa looked up as Sid Klepper dropped in two men’s ski jackets. “There’s no heat in this thing and it can get down to thirty-five degrees on the ocean floor. Sorry they’re so big, Lisa, but Ross and I love fried food and hate exercise. I’d put them on now.”
They did, and Lisa was indeed swimming in hers.
“Both of you OK?”
They nodded.
“All right, have a good trip.” Sid closed the containment door, sealing them in like sardines.
“Jason, I’m gonna lift the sub now.” Ross walked over to the crane’s controls. “So grab ahold of the railing.”
Jason clutched the red terrace’s guardrail as best as he could with his clunky hands.
“Got a good grip?”
Jason nodded.
“OK, here we go….” Ross flipped a switch and the crane’s electric motor raised the sub straight up into the air, carried it twenty feet away from the boat, then slowly lowered it into the ocean.
Inside, Lisa smiled as sloshing blue seas appeared in front of a viewing pane the size of a big TV. Darryl ignored the view. At the controls, he began fiddling with switches and knobs.
Then a voice sounded from the ceiling. “Darryl, everything OK?”
He flicked a switch. “Fine, Ross. All systems go.”
“Lisa, you too?”
“Fine, Ross, thanks.” She eyed a monochrome monitor of Jason in the back of the sub, fully submerged now in the sun-dappled seas.
“Jason, everything OK?” Ross asked.
From the back platform he looked up at a watery sun. “Yeah, Ross, fine.”
“OK, all of you, listen up. A cable will take you all the way to the bottom then disengage. Once you get down there, you’ll have a fully active sub. And Jason, you’ll be able to walk around as much as you want. That’s it. Any questions or problems?”
No one said anything. Inside the sub and out, they were ready to go.
“All right, I’m gonna cut out. Have a safe trip, guys.”
The sub lurched slightly as a big steel cable began turning. Then Darryl Hollis, Jason Aldridge, and Lisa Barton descended toward the darkness.
CHAPTER 27
BUBBLES STREAMING past his helmet, Jason eyed the departing boat’s underside. His gaze leveled, and he took in the sun-dappled world surrounding them. The water was bright blue, almost turquoise. He didn’t feel nervous anymore. He felt fine, even relaxed. The only sound was from his own machine-assisted breathing. The sea was like a great vacuum, quiet, peaceful, and immense. He stared into its blueness as they descended thirty feet, then fifty, then seventy. Jason had spent a large part of his life in the water, but the ocean still awed him. Inside his helmet, he thought of how foolish the three of them had to look, invading the gargantuan silent world with the aid of their tiny man-made contraptions. As a scientist, Jason had tremendous respect for man’s inventions, but there was something about the vastness of the sea that made them seem puny. He often wondered if astronauts felt similarly in space. He’d never be an astronaut, of course, never look down at the earth from a distant, cold, faraway place, but he’d read the accounts of those who had and imagined himself being there. It was strange, but at the moment, he felt like he actually was. The sunlight was disappearing. The water was darkening.
At the three-hundred-foot mark, he descended toward a few thousand cod, their silver bodies swimming effortlessly. He whirred down and past them. Looking beyond his hard white boots, he saw that what had been blue only moments ago was now a chasm of darkness. His gaze leveled. The water in the immediate vicinity was now a grayish shade, similar to early evening on land. He turned back up to the cod, but they were already gone, silently dissolving. He noticed the cable, their lifeline, and remembered the boat at the surface. It, too, was only a memory now.
Inside the sub, Darryl glanced at a depth gauge as they passed five hundred feet. “Keep the lights off, Lisa?”
“Yes.”
Darryl flicked a switch. “Keep the lights off, Jason?”
“Definitely.”
None of them had actually been this deep before. They wanted to see the darkness, to feel it, to experience it, a silent, watery darkness that didn’t exist anywhere else on the planet.
They passed seven hundred feet then eight. And then, very gradually, it became totally black.
Alone on the platform, Jason’s eyes were wide open but saw nothing.
“Passing one thousand feet,” Darryl’s calm voice said inside his helmet.
Jason enjoyed the mystery of being here. Not long ago, the basic laws of marine biology had said no marine life at all existed in the zone they’d just entered. But as everyone now knew, those “laws” had never been laws at all but fundamentally flawed beliefs. Who were we kidding? We still don’t know anything about life down here. Staring into the pitch darkness, Jason thought of all the species that had only recently been discovered—the red shrimp, gelatinous squid, black fishes, and so many others. But what about those that hadn’t been discovered, that were still unknown? Were any of them close?
They passed 1,200 feet then 1,500.
Then the lights came on. Not from the sub but from fish, several thousand light-emitting jellyfish, each a few inches long and shaped like an ice-cream cone. The jellies suddenly surrounded Jason, and he just watched them, lit up in blues, reds, and whites, a platoon of slowly rising champagne corks, climbing straight up into the darkness. Whirring down and past them, he twisted his neck, marveling as their pulsing forms ascended. And then they were gone, fading into the abyss in seconds. It became pure black again.
Jason looked around. “If you guys are ready, I wouldn’t mind having my vision back.”
“And then there was light,” the voice in his helmet said calmly.
Like a spaceship, several dozen headlights illuminated from all angles, and the water became bright blue again. Jason looked around anew. The light had a range of just a few hundred feet. Beyond were vast walls of blackness in every direction.