Jon Breen - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

As the two techs checked each suited diver and helped them on with the belt and gloves, Owen Foster said to them, “I want maximum slack today, beginning at sixty-eight feet. Understand?”

“You don’t want to push it, Owen,” cautioned Harley. “It won’t do the project any good if you end up grounded too.”

“Just give me the slack,” Foster ordered. “I know what I’m doing.”

Harley looked to Drake for approval as team leader. Drake nodded. “Give me the same slack,” he told Harley.

Outside, at the lip of the ten-foot dive hole down the fourteen-foot icy cylindrical walls, at the bottom of which the men could see the cerulean water the shelf covered, the techs placed on each diver in turn the heavy, globelike helmet through which they would receive air and voice communication from the surface. Each diver sat down on an empty equipment crate and waited patiently as his suit was pressurized and the radio reception checked. Several minutes later, they were ready to go.

“Okay,” said Harley, “here’s the routine but required safety speech. Your dry suits are safe in water of this temperature to a depth of eighty feet. You will have maximum slack of depth plus twenty feet during this dive to accommodate lateral movement only. The suit environment gauges are in the control panel on your left sleeve just below the elbow. When the panel lid is opened, there is an illuminated digital screen on its underside, with command buttons for all functions directly under it. Watch your suit pressure and temperature, watch your heart rate, and watch your depth.” He gave each of them a double pat on top of their helmet. “Good luck.”

Protocol required that Drake enter the water first. With a powerful underwater lantern secured over his right shoulder, he backed up to the hole and laboriously descended a metal ladder spiked to the inside wall. In less than a minute, his heavy, weighted boots reached the water, and seconds later he hand-walked the final few rungs and submerged.

Owen Foster quickly followed him.

For Pat Drake, being in the water under the ice shelf was like diving back into prehistoric time. He had never been in a body of water that large and that deep, yet devoid of visible, moving sea life. He felt almost as if he were in a synthetic world, a place surreal and unnatural. Inside the diving helmet, his eyes were wide with wonder, his lips parted in silent exclamation. The powerful high-intensity, mercury-metallic iodide incandescence of his lantern, spreading from fourteen inches square to a light the size of a small theater screen twenty feet in front of him, illuminated for him a domain that few humans would ever see. Its terrain, much like that above the shelf, was pitched with crags, crevices, and fissures that once had been above the water and walked on by creatures long extinct, perhaps even scientifically unknown.

Drake’s reverie was interrupted by the sudden intrusion of a second shaft of light as Owen Foster descended to the level where Drake was treading with one hand on a protrusion of rock. As Foster glided near him, Drake flipped open the control panel on his sleeve and pressed the blue depth button. The digital screen immediately read: 48. He switched on his radio.

“Harley, this is Drake, reporting both divers at forty-eight. Beginning further descent.”

When Foster came into Drake’s field of light, Drake saw that he had in his hand the serrated knife he had wielded the previous night when he intruded in Drake’s tent. Drake trod backward a little along the rock and held his left hand up, palm out, to indicate that he wanted no trouble. He pointed to Foster, then downward with a thumb, signaling for him to take the lead in the dive. Foster pushed off and began to descend.

At fifty-eight feet, Foster paused for several moments. Drake came down to within a few feet of his depth, but kept well away from him in the lateral distance between them. His mind was racing. I’ve got to do this, he told himself, having now admitted to himself that he wanted Claire back, and that the only way for him to get her was for them to be free of Owen Foster. The previous night, after he and Claire had left the blockhouse and parted, he had gone to sleep thinking how wonderful it had felt being with her again, touching her, loving her. But later, in a nightmarish dream, he had seen her naked body black and blue from her husband’s fists, and he had awakened sweating and angry. It was then that he got out of bed and rummaged in the drawers of the utility wall until he found a box of ice nails. Four inches long, their points needle-sharp, they were used on surface ice and rocks, hammered in as hangers for collection vessels. Selecting one of them, he took the cork from an open bottle of wine he had in the tent, cut off an inch of it to push over the nail’s point, and had carried it with him to the dive site that morning. When no one was looking, he slipped it into one of the cases on his dive belt, where it now lay.

Drake reported his depth to the surface again, certain that Foster had done the same, then waited while Foster continued his descent. He saw that Foster still had the knife in one hand, and continued to keep a sensible distance between them. Presently he descended to sixty-five feet and began moving his lantern over a small ridge of crags, looking for signs of mat colonization. He knew that Foster, several feet farther down, could see that Drake was holding back to allow Foster first look in the deeper water. I’ll wait, he thought, until he finds something worth collecting, until he begins to concentrate on his job, and then I’ll drop silently behind him and puncture his suit with the ice nail —

Suddenly Drake’s attention was caught by several dots of color down the wall of the crag. It manifested in the light for only a split instant, but Drake could have sworn it was a very light green, almost lime in hue. Could it possibly have been algae? he wondered. Algae without any blue or black, which were the colors produced by colder water? Squinting, frowning, he moved deeper, closer into the crags. Glancing over, he saw that he was now several feet farther down than Foster, but Foster’s fight was pointed away from him now, and Foster seemed to be occupied with his own search.

Momentarily dismissing the other diver from his mind, Drake began to carefully examine the crag area where he thought he had seen the fight green color. In only a matter of seconds, he had found it: a microbial mat formed by a multitude of millions, perhaps billions, of microscopic organisms that had to have been, because of their fight green color, getting a source of comparative warmth from somewhere.

This is it! Drake thought excitedly. This will be enough to keep the project going, to get more money, deeper diving gear, to let us go far enough down to prove the warming theory —

“Pat, what’s your depth?” he heard Harley’s voice from the surface.

Drake flipped open his control panel and pressed the depth button.

“Seventy-one.”

“That’s deep enough,” said Harley. “Run a gauge check.”

Drake glanced over at Foster. It looked as if he had moved farther away; his light source was about five feet higher and some twenty feet off to Drake’s right. Drake ran the gauge test, pressing a sequence of buttons on his sleeve panel.

“Pressure okay,” he reported. “Valves okay. Power okay. Everything’s fine, Harley.”

“Don’t go any deeper, Pat.”

“Ten-four.”

If I hurry, Drake thought, I can collect this sample, then take care of Foster on the way up. Looking over, he saw that Foster’s light was still in the same place. Quickly unsnapping a collection tube from his utility belt, he used a sand brush to carefully begin moving the light green algae into the tube. When he felt he had enough, he capped the tube and had just attached it back to the belt when he sensed a presence close to him.