“I going in to see if I can find Li’s notebook that went missing with him according to the crew’s last accounts.”
“Yeah I remember that. And how did that extra person get into the station before he disappeared. That’s yet to be explained by anything we’ve found. See if you can find evidence of that. I’m going back to examine Li’s clothes and pockets for more clues. Maybe he left a note.”
Back with the bodies, I held my breath to keep from throwing up. Lt. Li’s face was distorted with the blood drained out and his pupils were dark holes with almost no iris showing. I quickly drew his eyes shut and began checking his pockets. After searching his coat and shirt pockets and finding nothing, I tried his jeans. From the left hip pocket, I withdrew a small folded piece of paper that seemed to be a page from a notebook. Quickly I dropped the note into my jumpsuit pocket and headed back to tell Briscoe.
Subtly at first from the pod bay’s closed door, a bizarre moaning noise swept over the bay. An ominous sound I had heard before and dreaded, it gave me goose bumps and shudders that ran up my spine.
“Did you hear that?” said the Chief, startled, poking his head out from the whale-ship’s cockpit.
“What? That mournful growl? Hell yeah, I heard it. It’s the same sound I hear when I accidentally scrape my sub’s hull on a hidden ocean boulder.”
Listening for more he stood motionless as I joined him by the sub. Shortly a high-pitched screeching noise like metal scraping metal reverberated through the bay.
“That must be some big ass whale out there scraping its barnacles off,” he said. “Sounds like giant fingernails scraping a billboard-size blackboard. Sends chills up my spine.”
“Me too. Except I always anticipate the final crunch of a collision with a dock or another ship.”
“In my realm it’s always car versus car or 18-wheeler. Same sound but much faster and there are usually casualties involved.”
Drifting down from Quad 2 through the pod bay’s open hatch, Ivy’s pleasant but firm voice echoed.
“Alerting Condition Yellow! Repeat the station is now in Condition Yellow! I am detecting an unusual vibration in the station near Pod Bay 2 but there are no sonar signatures showing near the dome. This is a non-sequitur condition. Divers please investigate. Message will be repeated in five minutes.”
Chapter 18. Dali Actualized
“There’s our call, Marker. Let’s go. SeaPod 1 okay with you?”
“Oh, but of course Chief. I’m driving though. You attend to the siren and PA.”
We flew up the ladder through Quad 2 then the core room and into Quad 1 in seconds. Shortly we were in SeaPod 1 waiting for the bay to flood.
Watching the pod bay door open into blackness, I wondered what we would find out there. Another crashed whale-ship? A sperm whale knocked unconscious by impact? Or something else. That something else worried me the most.
Slowly I brought the SeaPod out of the bay and steered to starboard toward bay number 2 while maintaining a safe distance from the floor to avoid the monopole lying twenty meters ahead of us.
“See anything yet, Chief?” I asked
“Just midnight as usual. And maybe a few anglerfish off in the distance fishing for a meal. Wish I could be fishing for a meal right now on Big Bear Lake.”
“What? And miss all this fun?”
“Yes. I’d do it in a second. And since our mission here seems almost complete I’m already smelling the mountain pines and tasting the cold beer flowing down my throat.”
“Oh stop it, Chief. You’re making me smell steaks grilling over a roaring wood fire. And that’s impossible in this sealed plastic bubble. Now pull yourself back to reality and find out what’s causing those sounds. Check the tractor frame and see if there’s anything rubbing against it. It has to be huge to create those grinding vibrations we heard and felt.”
Briscoe went silent for moments peering out and down through the bubble. Then he jerked in his seat and pointed downward to the location where I expected the monopole to be.
“Down there,” he said, “Where the ROV once was—”
“What do you mean ‘where it once was?’” I interrupted.
“There is something by the monopole but it’s not the ROV. Looks like a wax model of it that’s been in the heat too long. That quarter-ton pound ROV is melting flowing across the ocean’s floor in a brilliant glowing two-meter-long river of blue magma like lava seeping from a volcano. The water around the lava flow is boiling and bubbling up like crazy.”
He repositioned himself in his seat and shielded his eyes from the control panel’s glare.
“Can you turn the floods toward it Marker? I need more light down there.”
“Roger that, Chief.”
Carefully while watching the instrument panel for changes I pivoted the SeaPod downward facing into the monopole. With the floods pointing down, we gasped when we witnessed a vision we were not prepared to see. As in Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory painting, objects around the monopole were acting strangely like the melting clocks on his surrealistic landscape. And, as my mind’s eye imagined that imagery the surreal drooping watches were ticking in reverse.
“Can you see it flowing, Chief? Moving?”
“No, it’s barely creeping like molasses on a cold morning.”
“Well that’s comforting,” I said. “We still have some time left.”
“Suppose that movement could make those creepy sounds we heard, Marker?”
“Yes. They were weird, Chief, because we probably heard the sounds in reverse like a record played backward. Time is not flowing forward around it.”
“Oh good God!” he exclaimed, “Look over there at that tractor wheel near the monopole’s glow. It’s beginning to melt too but it’s barely out of round so far: it’s just warping.”
Thinking back to Franklin’s warning I uttered:
“I’m afraid we’re watching the beginning of spaghettification of Discovery One. If the station remains here for very long we’ll all be sucked into its nucleus never to exist again.”
“Or maybe tumbled through space-time into another dimension.”
“Oh don’t be ridiculous, Chief. That’s impossible.”
“You mean like the object we’re looking at right now?”
His retort shut me up when I realized that our understanding of the monopole’s existence was far beyond the reach of any rational imagination. It couldn’t exist yet it did. We were observing a theoretical curiosity actualized into real life: a monopole, a God particle, a singularity, or whatever it was called; it was a physical impossibility. Yet, were drifting toward it slowly succumbing to its power.
“Hey, Marker, wake up!” he yelled tugging my arm. “Our power is dropping and the console clock has slowed to a crawl. Better back away from its grasp or we’ll be joining that ROV in its fiery grave.”
Fortunately, he had noticed the problem. My eyes had been fixed on the visual impossibility to the point of ignoring the controls. As I slammed my attention back to our reality, I saw he was right. We were in the field of the object and being pulled closer by the second.
I jammed the joystick toward my stomach and the propulsion motors roared into reverse vibrating the SeaPod’s structure trying to escape its pull.
“Not working, Chief,” I yelled. “The motors are straining and we’re barely holding our position. If they weaken more we’ll be sucked right in. Options?”
“Hey, Marker, you’re beginning to sound like Bowman now but that’s not a bad thing; blow the damn ballasts and get us some lift. Those motors need some help against that monster’s gravity.”