“It’s all over now,” said Grant, “but it still sounds screwy to me. What is it this time? Mars or Venus?”
“Neither one,” said Hart smoothly. “This time it really will be a little vacation jaunt. Down to sea bottom. I got it all fixed up. You’ll take a sub tonight down to Coral City and from there you’ll go to Deep End.”
“Deep End!” Grant protested. “That’s the jumping-off place. Right on the rim of the deep.”
“Sure,” snapped Hart. “What’s wrong with that?”
Grant shook his head sadly. “I don’t like it. I’m a claustrophobiac. Can’t stand being shut up in a room. And down there you got to wear steel armor. Take Coral City, now. That’s not a bad place. Only a couple hundred feet under and you meet nice people.”
“Nice bars, too,” suggested Hart.
“Bet your neck there are,” Grant agreed. “Now, I could go for a couple of weeks in Coral City.”
“You’ll go for Deep End, too,” declared Hart grimly.
Grant shrugged wearily, felt the comforting bulge of the bottle in his pocket.
“All right,” he said. “What’s the brainstorm this time?”
“There’s some sort of trouble down there on The Bottom,” said Hart. “Rumors, unconfirmed reports, nothing we’ve been able to get our teeth into. Seems the glass and quartz used in suits and domes hasn’t been standing up. There have been tragedies. Entire communities wiped out. A story here, a story there, over the period of months, from all parts of The Bottom. You’ve read them yourself. Inquiries that have gotten nowhere.”
“Forget it,” said Grant. “That’s only what’s to be expected. Any damn fool that goes down a half mile underwater and lives under a quartz dome is asking for trouble. When it comes he hasn’t got anybody but himself to blame. When you go monkeying around with pressures amounting to thousands of pounds per square inch you’re fooling around with dynamite.”
“But the point,” said Hart, “is that every catastrophe so far reported has occurred where one manufacturer’s quartz is being used. Snider quartz. You’ve heard of it.”
“Sure,” said Grant, unimpressed, “but that don’t add up to anything. Most of the quartz used down there is Snider stuff. It’s no secret Snider has a pull with the Underocean Colonization Board.” He looked at Hart squarely. “You aren’t figuring on sending me out on a one-man crusade against Snider quartz, are you?”
Hart stirred uneasily.
“Not exactly,” he parried. “You won’t be working alone. The Evening Rocket will be behind you.”
“Behind me is right,” snorted Grant. “A long ways behind. A hell of a lot of good the Evening Rocket will do me if I get into a jam a half mile down.”
Hart tilted forward in his chair. “The point is this,” he said. “If we can find there’s something wrong with Snider quartz, we’ll put the heat on Snider. And if we find the UCB has been winking at Snider stuff when they know it’s wrong, we’ll have them across the barrel, too.”
“What a sweet nature you have,” said Grant. “The sort of a guy that would send his old grandma to the gallows for a ninety-six-point streamer.”
“We have a duty to the public,” said Hart solemnly, looking almost like an owl. “It’s our duty to work for the common good of mankind.”
“And for the good of the dear old Evening Rocket,” said Grant. “Up goes the circulation list. Full-page ads telling the readers how we exposed the dirty crooks. And maybe, after we smack Snider quartz flat, there’ll be another quartz company just dying to insert about a million bucks’ worth of advertising in our columns.”
“It isn’t that,” snarled Hart, “and you know it isn’t.” He became oratorical. “Out there is a great empire to be conquered. The ocean bottom. An area two and one half times as great as all the land areas on the Earth. A great new frontier. We’ve made a start at conquering it. Out there are pioneers—”
Grant waved him to silence. “I know,” he said. “Vast riches. Great fields for exploitation. A heritage for the future. I know it. But save it for an editorial.”
Hart leaned back in his chair. “The latest reports of quartz failure come from the rim of the Puerto Rico deep,” he said. “You job will be to find what’s in the cards.”
“I warn you,” said Grant. “When I get back from this one I’m going to get drunk and stay drunk for a month.”
Hart reached into his desk and drew out an envelope. “Your tickets for the sub,” he said. “The bank at Coral City will have instructions to let you draw expenses.”
“O.K.,” said Grant. “I’ll catch you an octopus for a pet.”
The water was blue, shading to violet—a dusky blue like the deeper shade of twilight but still with a faintly luminous quality about it. Long ago the more showy seaweed beds had been left behind and the character of the sea bed had changed. No more beautiful stretches of sand with vegetation and fishes of unearthly colors, delicate and shifting. No more waving sea plumes or golden sea fans. No more unbelievable brilliancy of color.
Now one seemed to be moving into the maws of night. The blue of the water deepened and blurred only a short distance away and even the powerful light of the underwater tank penetrated for only a hundred yards or so.
There was muck underneath, muck and ooze that was deepening as Grant followed the contour of the bottom down toward the deep. Once the tank floundered into a muck trap with its treads spinning helplessly, and he had been forced to use the retractable gear to lift it out—the gear acting like legs, searching for and getting solid footing, heaving the massive tank along.
The character and pattern of life was changing down here, too. Changing to a grimmer pattern—a more ferocious, unrelenting life.
A thing, that was little more than a living mouth, swam across the vision panel, turned back, pressing its blunt face against the glass, mighty mouth agape, wicked fangs shining. A dark shape slithered by, just outside the beam of light.
Grant dropped his eyes to the instruments. Five hundred and fifty feet down. Pressure two hundred fifty-three pounds per square inch.
The other instruments were shivering slightly, but all read correctly. Everything was going fine.
Grant wiped perspiration from his face. “Running this damn tub gets on my nerves,” he told himself, but instantly was reassured with the thought of the massive steel walls, constructed to maintain a maximum of resistance to buckling and bending, of the ports of shatter-proof quartz, laminated, one with the rest of the construction.
But quartz sometimes didn’t stand up—that was what had brought him here. Quartz sometimes went haywire and when it did men died, men who had put their trust in it—men who otherwise could not have hurled their challenge into the teeth of The Bottom with its chilly depths, its monstrous pressure.
The thing that was all mouth had retreated from the vision glass, but another nightmare of the twilight zone had replaced it—a grotesque thing that resembled nothing that ever should have lived.
Grant cursed at it—swung the spotlight back and forth, trying to pick out landmarks. But there was nothing—he was moving across what appeared to be a murky plain, although the indicator showed it had a decided downward slope.
Down there, somewhere ahead, was the Puerto Rico deep, one of the deepest—five and a half miles down. Down there the pressure ranged around six and a half tons a square inch. Too deep for man as yet. Conquest under the four-mile mark would have to await work in the industrial laboratories, would have to wait on man’s ingenuity to build steel and glass that was a little stronger, man’s ability to design new engineering kinks that would give greater strength—or perhaps the construction of a force screen or some other approach as yet merely speculative.