“Good for us?”
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted.
She sipped from her straw.
Dokey had his head resting on a wadded-up parka, and he had a Coke resting on his stomach. He moved the Coke and sat up.
“I don’t want to disturb you,” she said.
“You know me. I like disturbances.”
“I’m never sure if I do know you.”
“That’s a relief. If I get predictable, nobody will love me”
“Are those lyrics?”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Could be. I’ll have to find someone who can pound a piano with gusto and try it out. You want to talk, Kaylene?”
“Well, no. I just had a minute…”
“About Dane?”
“What about Dane?”
“We could switch places.”
“You and Dane switch places?”
“No, you and me switch places. I’ll move in with Ingrid. She’ll love it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, love. It’s a small ship.”
“Okey…”
“And believe me, no one gives a damn, Kaylene. Roll with it.”
“Okey, I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Sure you do. You just haven’t realized it, yet.”
Thomas swung her head from side to side.
“Okay, let’s talk about nukes.”
“This particular nuke?” she asked.
“No. I don’t have any material on it. But,” he said, leafing through some photocopies and coming up with a stapled sheaf of paper, “I do have some data on the Topaz Two that I got from the Navy.”
“Let me see.” She reached for it.
“You’re not cleared.”
“Neither are you, damn it!”
“Oh. That’s right.”
He gave her the bundle and she thumbed through it. There were lots of diagrams and schematics.
“I’m lost already,” she said.
“It’s straightforward stuff. Our people just copied down what they found on the Topaz Two.”
“Is it a good design?”
“From a robot engineer’s point of view? It looks pretty efficient, but there are a few things I don’t like.”
“Like?”
“Like the operations module for the control rods.”
“Don’t get technical on me, Okey.”
“Jesus, hon! I’ll let you know if I get technical.”
“What don’t you like?”
“If they used the same design on this Topaz Four down there, I think we’ve got a problem.”
She studied his face carefully.
“There’s an integrated circuit that trips switches based on the information it gets from different sensors. Like a sensor that tells it the damned thing has crashed. I think it’s wired wrong. If it trips, it opens the control rods, rather than closes them.”
“Not good?” she asked.
“Disastrous”
“And no one has raised this issue?”
“Not that I know about,” Dokey said. “I don’t know why the nuclear experts haven’t mentioned anything. It’s a question I’d like to pose, anyway.”
Thomas slid out of the booth, went back to the last booth, and picked up the phone. Dokey followed her.
It took three minutes to track down Hampstead.
“Good afternoon, Kaylene.”
“We’ll know in a minute.”
“Uh-oh.”
She told him about the control module, the integrated circuit, and the wiring problem.
“Yes?” Hampstead said.
“Find out about it, goddamn it!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he told her.
Brande was at the controls of DepthFinder and Kim Otsuka was in the right seat, ʻflyingʼ SARSCAN with the controls in front of her. Connie Alvarez-Sorenson sat in the right-angled jumpseat behind them, monitoring the environmental and sonar recording systems.
SARSCAN did not have a great deal of maneuverability. Towed a couple of hundred feet behind and below them, it could be encouraged to climb or dive a little, or to draw off to one side or the other.
Alvarez-Sorenson’s primary job was to keep Brande aware of his altitude above the bottom, which he tried to maintain at a thousand feet. Otsuka’s primary goal was to fly SARSCAN at about 800 feet above the bottom, allowing the sonar to overlap the path of their last leg.
SARSCAN had been designed for intensive bottom searching, and the sonar did not have a lot of range, but it was very powerful and very accurate downward for a thousand feet and sideways for three thousand feet. The images it picked up were transmitted through the fiber-optic towing cable and displayed on the starboard screen in front of Otsuka. She had squelched down the audible ʻpingʼ sonar returns so they only sounded off if SARSCAN was within thirty feet of colliding with something solid and hard.
Her job included not letting SARSCAN hit anything.
They had just passed westward over the seamount that Captain Gurevenich had first reported. Its highest point was 6,011 feet below sea level, and a steep slope on the western side was falling rapidly. Brande had been slowly taking on ballast in order to descend with the slope.
The view through the forward portholes, lit by the floodlights, was limited to about thirty feet. All they saw at shallower depths was the occasional darting of a fish avoiding the strange new monster, imitated on the center CRT by the submersible’s video camera. On the port screen was the waterfall display of the DepthFinder\s forward-looking sonar.
The sonar outline of the sea bottom terrain ahead of them suggested an undulating landscape, getting lower on the left, or south, side.
“Report time, Connie,” he said.
“Right, Dane.” She picked up the acoustic telephone and spoke into it. “Who’s on the desk?”
The response could be heard on the instrument panel speaker. “Hey, darlin’, it’s me.”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to be guiding the ship, Mel. Remember?”
Her husband said, “With NavStar and with Kenji on the wheel, who needs me? I’m giving someone a break.”
“Okay, update time. We’re descending the western slope of the seamount. Position same latitude, longitude now three-three seconds. Depth one-one-six-seven-seven. We’re showing a high ridge, maybe two-zero-zero higher, to the northeast. We got an outline of a possible wreck three thousand feet behind us and a thousand feet south. Magnetometer results were negative. We’ll check it on the next pass, but we don’t believe it ever flew before.”
Brande leaned back and Connie held the phone to his lips. “Mel, let’s mark that contact on our own chart, but keep it to ourselves, if it doesn’t prove out.”
“You thinking about our future, Dane?” Sorenson asked. “A possible dive site?”
“I haven’t got Rae here to do it for me,” Brande said, “so I’m playing goals-and-objectives.”
Alvarez-Sorenson took the phone back and said, “We’re out for now.”
Brande was starting to get cold again. It was never possible to find a comfortable temperature. They dove wearing two pairs of woolen socks, a pair of long johns, and the standard jumpsuits. As the temperature cooled off at depth, they donned thick sweaters.
Everyone looked bundled up and warm, but appearances were deceiving. The chill of the water at depth transferred through the pressure hull and fought the feeble efforts of the cabin heater.
“How are you doing, Kim?” Brande asked.
“I’m fine, Dane.”
Flying the sonar array took a great deal of concentration and could fatigue operators quickly.
“You get tired,” Alvarez-Sorenson said, “just let me know, and I’ll switch places with you. I need to learn how to fly that baby.”
“You giving up surface travel, Connie?” Brande asked.