Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

They don’t call it the abyssal zone for nothing. The abyss. Eternal darkness, temperature 35º to 37º Fahrenheit, pressures up to five tons per square inch. Yet there is an even deeper zone, the hadal zone, down in the trenches, past 20,000 feet, where the pressure reaches seven tons per square inch. There are only a handful of places on the planet that qualify—and the Puerto Rico Trench is one. If the bucket from that spy satellite had not landed on a shelf, but sank all the way to the bottom…

He remembers the French Navy descended to the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench five years ago, and their Archimède could maybe have retrieved the bucket. Back in 1960, the old Trieste, she went all the way down to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the earth’s oceans, 36,000 feet beneath the surface. But the Trieste II is not the same boat, she doesn’t have the same pressure-sphere from that record-breaking dive, she doesn’t have the same float, the same systems. She’s a real operational submersible now, though she can no longer go as deep.

Abruptly, the sea about the bathyscaphe lights up, a ghostly radiance beneath the surface, as if the water itself has turned luminescent. McIntyre leans out and looks down, and he can see the flank of the Trieste II curving away beneath the waves, pale and spectral, blurred in the softly stirring water, a phantom whale basking in the night sea. He shivers at the thought—they’re only testing the bathyscaphe’s search lights, but the fancy makes something unearthly of it.

Ten hours it took them to ready the Trieste II , after they had flooded the USS White Sands ’ aft dock well and towed the bathyscaphe out into the Atlantic; and soon they’ll be spending hours in the depths of the ocean, hunting for the bucket from this spy satellite. A long day— No, a long night . McIntyre was glad to give up nights like this when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, but he has to admit that right now he’s feeling a little of the old excitement.

He checks his Seamaster, they’re scheduled to dive at 2230, around twenty minutes from now. The water about the Trieste II suddenly turns black, and one of the sailors in the boat shouts something but McIntyre misses it. The boat’s outboard fires up with a cough and a roar, and then burbles away throatily. The boat bounces on a wave, its bow slapping down onto the sea surface.

Whatever the problem was it’s gone, sir, says the sailor from the steering thruster.

He’s standing by the small boat standoff now, hanging onto the rail, as the boat noses in close to the bathyscaphe.

Right, McIntyre replies, we’ll be all done below in about ten minutes.

The boat is near enough so the sailor scrambles into it. The prow swings away and the boat moves out to a position thirty feet away, its outboard still snorting and gurgling. McIntyre gives a wave, then enters the sail and climbs into the access tube. He shuts and locks the hatch above him, then descends the ladder to the pressure-sphere. Stryker and Taylor turn round and look up at him as he appears, and he’s struck anew at how small the sphere is and that he’s going to have to spend maybe six or seven hours in a space four feet by four feet square and five feet nine inches high. With two other guys.

All set? he asks.

Taylor nods and then speaks quietly into the mike of the headset he is wearing. McIntyre worms through the hatch, then he and Stryker swing it closed and seal it.

Flood the access tube, McIntyre orders.

He peers through the window in the hatch and watches as water splashes against the thick glass and quickly climbs up it. McIntyre settles on the low stool beneath the hatch, hands on knees, and says, I guess this is it. Phil, flood forward and aft water ballast tanks, let’s go see what it’s like down there.

Stryker is pilot for this dive and Taylor is on sonar duty. McIntyre’s handling the navigation, which for the moment is straight down. And then they’ll have to creep around on the sea bed 19,500 feet below, hunting the deep ocean transponder dropped next to the bucket because the bathyscaphe descends in a spiral.

He picks up the underwater telephone handset and informs the USS White Sands that the dive has commenced. See you in the morning, he says.

He puts the handset down and thinks, this is not diving. He’s wearing his khakis, he’s bone dry and will remain that way, and the nearest he’ll get to the water is looking at it through a window four inches in diameter and 5.9 inches thick. He’s been down to a simulated 1,000 feet in the NEDU pressure chamber, and spent a week there; he’s dived to 600 feet in the North Atlantic, and spent six days in decompression afterwards. The chipmunk-voice from breathing helium-oxygen, air so thick it’s a struggle to pull it into his lungs… 260 psi… 18 atmospheres… Ascend to the surface too fast and the bends is the least of his worries.

Sitting in this steel ball is not real. The sea has been a part of his life for decades, he works in it, it’s something he can touch and feel and in which he can immerse himself, it’s something he can become a part of. But this, there’s an air of falsity to it, experiencing the water mediated by technology and cold steel, separated from it. He doesn’t feel like a visitor to this submarine realm, he feels like an invader. Now, belatedly, he realises why he joined NEDU, why he turned his back on the Trieste II and walked away from her.

Strange, then, that he should only discover this by returning to her.

Cobb lies on her back in the Mercury capsule she has named Destiny and waits patiently for the countdown to begin. It’s been over three hours since they bolted the hatch but she knows patience, she’s been in situations like this before. Not lying on her back in a pressure suit, of course, though she has done this in simulations; nor those long, silent and black hours in the sensory deprivation tank at the Oklahoma City Veterans’ Hospital three years ago—and when she heard some of the other lady astronauts spent even longer in the tank than she did, she wanted to do it all over again. No, her mind is drawn to the time she flew across the Caribbean through burning blue skies for Fleetway, the time the engine of the T-6 she was delivering to Peru went “pop” and threw oil all over her canopy and more oil seeped into the cockpit, over her instruments and herself. Though Jack Ford was there flying alongside, insisting she ditch, she prayed she’d make it safely to land. And so she did. She’s always known God is there for her, that these things happen to her because He makes them happen and He brings her through them.

Remembering that flight, she thinks of Jack, who passed eight years ago, he’d directed her into a landing at Montego Bay International Airport and told he’d loved her. And for two years they had shone so brightly together.

She can hear the blockhouse and the control centre speaking to each other in her helmet headset, but she tunes it out. The gantry has been rolled back and she can see blue sky through the capsule’s window. She recalls the excitement she felt when she watched Cagle’s Mercury-Redstone 3, America, lift from the launch-pad, rising up through a pale and hazeless Florida sky on a column of fire and thunder, such a pure and wonderful sight. Cobb doesn’t feel that thrill now, she is focused on her upcoming mission; she feels only a need to get everything right, to show Cochran and the others that she deserves to be right here right now.

The delay drags on. Through the periscope she can watch grey waves scudding across the Atlantic; in a mirror by the window, she sees the grey blockhouse. Below her, she hears pipes whine and creak, and then everything shakes and bangs as the ground crew check the engines’ gimbal mechanism. She thinks about the new president’s speech back in June—after Cagle’s flight President Kennedy was talking to Congress and he said they should set as a national goal “landing an American on the Moon and returning them safely to the Earth before ten years are up”, and she’s already thinking past this flight. She hasn’t even been into space yet but that’s what she wants: to be the first American to walk on the Moon’s surface.