I unclipped my kitbag and beacon from my belt pitched them in then slid through the hatch and sat. Seconds later Briscoe threw in his bag and beacon and followed still coughing. Although he claimed he was fit he struggled through the opening then slammed into a seat across the pilot’s from me with a loud grunt, panting and wheezing.
“Swallowed some saltwater,” he coughed.
She ducked down and sat between us then forcefully slapped him on the back.
“Cough it up,” she said. “By the way I’m Lt. JG Susan Williams at your service. Welcome aboard SeaPod 2.”
Situating himself in his seat the Chief stopped sputtering and stared at her, squinting.
“Does that mean you have pod bay doors on Discovery One? That’s pretty corny.”
“Oh yes of course Mr. — ? Sorry I didn’t catch your name but I was told the older one was Briscoe. Is that you?”
Briscoe had always been sensitive about his age. I knew that from way back when I had once called him an ‘old man’ in jest and he nearly took me down over my comment. His years had given him wisdom and smarts rather than age he told me and I almost agreed.
“Yes ma’am,” he answered. “But young for my age I assure you. I once was the Navy’s best diver.”
“Well as I was saying our architect, Chief Scientist and Station Manager, Dr. David Bowman is quite attached to the allegorical nature of his name and Kubrick’s 2001 if you know of that movie.”
“Certainly. Who doesn’t know of Hal?” he said.
“Well, we call her Ivy down there the same as back at HQ in Point Mugu. He tried to change her name to Hal but couldn’t override Ivy. He’s very egocentric. You’ll see.”
“Oh really?” I said, “I once knew him as a youth and he was my best friend. Of course we were only ten but he seemed like every other normal kid except he was obsessed with sandcastles.”
“He must have changed then,” she said, “Now he won’t even consider letting anyone else named Dave work in the station. He wants to be the only one. In time, you will learn from him as everyone has that he was a Navy brat and child prodigy. He designed and mentored the construction of a unique undersea missile storage facility for the Navy by the time he was fourteen. After that, his parents put him in Annapolis with a special dispensation at age fifteen. He graduated by seventeen, got his PhD by nineteen, then left the Navy and formed his own company by twenty, designing and building subterranean and submersible structures. Truly, a fast-track wonder. His most recent creation was Discovery One and he’s understandably quite proud of it.”
Hearing of his good fortune disturbed me. I should have been proud of him but I was jealous; I could have matched his achievements but my parents—.
“Hatch closing,” she called interrupting my thought.
Glancing around the cabin, she pulled a lever on the small streamlined control panel the likes of which I had never seen. Sleeker and simpler than the Canyon Glider’s it put the controls of my old mini-sub to shame: a Ferrari style sub compared to my militarized Jeep version.
Behind my seat, a motor whined as the hatch-cover arm dropped down over us and seated itself into the hatch with a loud clunk causing my ears to pop. Heated air began to wash through the cockpit bringing the first warmth I had felt in hours. What surprised me the most was the air had a ‘new car’ smell. I loved that smell.
Quickly she reached overhead and twirled the hatch wheel sealing us into the large Plexiglas bubble probably six inches thick and not more than eight feet across sitting on a sturdy yellow motorized propulsion hull. I could hardly wait to see and inspect it in full lighting and marvel at its beauty. Still as I looked around the interior with its subdued blue-white led lighting it impressed me; it was like a showroom ad: a simple and magnificent machine.
“Ready to dive?” she asked.
“Always,” said Briscoe looking behind his seat, “Especially in this chop. Git ‘er down, Lieutenant.”
I glanced back to see what he was looking at and saw meters, indicator lights and pressure gauges on a large panel. In front of her, small flat screen displays covered the space I expected to be the sub’s dashboard. Digital meters, status icons, and moving bar graphs glowed in sectioned regions filling the panes requesting her attention. As I watched mesmerized by the new science, she touched a few buttons and then propulsion motors rumbled and vibrated the cockpit. Then sounds of water rushing into ballasts roared below us. All familiar sounds I recognized from my sub; at least they weren’t changed by new technology.
Reaching forward with a gentle twisting pushing motion she moved the joystick and we headed downward.
“We’re diving at the SeaPod’s maximum speed of three knots,” she said. “The Discovery One currently rests on the floor below us at 985 meters. That puts our ETA roughly twenty-five minutes from now.”
As we dove, I tried to look out through the bubble but my efforts were futile. All I could see were our distorted reflections like those from a fun-house mirror.
“Does this have forward floods?” I asked.
“Of course Mr. Cross but they won’t activate until we’re ten meters down. Can’t see them from the surface then. Remember, visual stealth above all else.”
I had to keep reminding myself at these moments that we didn’t exist so any visual or physical cues to our presence were verboten. My introduction to the extreme secrecy of the black world was slowly sinking in.
I checked the second hand on my watch expecting the floods to illuminate in six seconds at our three-knot or 1.6 meter-per-second descent rate. We had a huge almost 360-degree view through the bubble but it was a bit disconcerting to see nothing out there but reflections.
Seven eight nine… ten.
The submarine environment blazed to life around us. Multi-hued fish wandered up toward us searching for food as we passed through them; plankton, anchovies and other tiny wiggling sea creatures reflected our lights: a moving living fog of existence in otherwise crystal-clear waters.
“Sure beats our tiny DSV viewports doesn’t it, Marker?” said Briscoe open-mouthed looking around.
“Uh yeah,” I said. “It’s like a 3D wraparound aquarium. Not at all what I would have expected.”
Lt. Williams diverted her attention from the controls to our surroundings.
“Yes, it is beautiful up here. Down where we live, not so much beauty except for a few benthic-zone species trying to thrive in the great pressures of the ocean floor. This is the ocean’s rainforest; we live in its desert.”
I had never thought of it that way before but she was right. The earth’s more or less constant-temperature oceans varying less than twenty degrees Centigrade from top to bottom could support most forms of sea life but depth rather than temperature was the defining obstacle for life. For example, an ocean’s pressure ranges from around 14.7 PSI at the surface to one hundred times that or 1,472 PSI at a thousand meters down.
We would be living and working in that. And, figuring an average human body’s surface area of 2,700 square inches at a pressure of 1,472 pounds per square inch, it meant that if we lost protection down there we would be subjected to 1,472 X 2,700 = 3,974,400 pounds, almost four million pounds of pressure, squeezing the life from us. I closed my eyes imagining a squished tube of screaming toothpaste with arms and legs. Not a pretty picture.
I was accustomed to working in those pressures oftentimes even greater but in a sturdy Abrams Tank of a military submarine rather than the comparatively flimsy but quite sporty SeaPod I was trusting with my life.
“Hey, Marker,” he said dragging me from my trance. “You’ve missed a lot. Are you asleep over there?”