Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

The order comes through to top off the lox tanks. This is it. The countdown is finally going ahead. Minutes later, Cobb hears an infernal thunder as the main engines light and the hold-down clamps release with a decisive thud. The rocket begins to rise, slowly, ponderously, balanced atop its roaring pillar of flame. The top of the gantry slides past the window. Cobb offers up another silent prayer, this time one of thanks. She has much to be grateful for and she knows it—she was not first, but the Russians beat America to that, anyway. But she will beat the Russian record for number of orbits about the Earth.

The Mercury-Atlas rolls and shudders a little. Forty-eight seconds have passed, the rocket hits max-Q and the capsule vibrates, the dials and gauges before her blur. She wills herself to remain calm, none of this is unexpected, Cagle remarked on it happening during her flight. But that noise, that hellish roar, and the G-forces pressing her down into her seat, it makes it all real , this is no simulation. Oh this is what she wanted, this is what she prayed for—she feels such a sense of peace, despite the shaking and the demonic clamour and the weight upon her.

Twenty-four seconds later, the vibrations abruptly cease, the ride is smooth and clear and Cobb knows she is at last reaching for the heavens. After a minute, the booster engines cut off and the G-forces drop back to one as the boosters fall away. The sustainer engine continues to fire and the Gs build up once again, pushing Cobb back into her seat. The sky outside the window is black, and she says as much to Hart, the flight’s capsule communicator.

Cabin pressure holding at 6.1, she adds. Coming up on two minutes, fuel is 101-102, oxygen is 78-102, Gs are about six now.

Reading you loud and clear, replies Hart. Flight path looked good.

The jettison rockets on the escape tower fire, she sees it tumble away, and relays the fact to mission control. Capsule is in good shape, she reports.

Roger, you’re going for it, Jerrie, says Hart. Twenty seconds to SECO.

The sustainer engine cuts off as programmed, and Cobb is no longer pressed hard into her seat, it’s almost as if she’s falling forward. She relaxes her arms and her hands float up to hang before her. She starts to smile: zero-G . She made it, she’s in orbit, she’s above the sky. The capsule turns around and she sees the curve of the Earth below her, it’s so very blue and it glows and it’s streaked with clouds; and she can’t help saying, Oh the view is tremendous.

And there’s the booster, she can see it tumbling away, glinting as sunlight flashes from its white sides, a pencil of brightness against the blue, falling back to Earth, unable to escape as she has done.

You have a go, Hart tells her, for at least seven orbits.

Cobb closes her eyes, clasps her hands before her and bows her head as much as she is able in the helmet. She reflects on the glory of God’s creation and her current heavenly perspective upon it, she thinks of the part He has played in her life, she thinks of everything she went through, everything she did, to be here in orbit, the second American, the second woman, in space, and the first American to travel about the Earth 160 miles above its surface.

I’m coming back, she tells God silently. This is my first visit but it will not be my last.

She may have to fight Cochran for a second or third flight, or even more, but she will prevail. He will make sure of that.

The trail ball, hanging thirty-five feet beneath the Trieste II ’s keel, tells them they’ve reached bottom, so McIntyre orders some ballast dropped to give them neutral buoyancy. Taylor is busy trying to get a signal on the Straza Industries Model 7060 deep ocean transponder interrogator from any of the dots, but he’s having no luck. McIntyre kneels and peers out through the window—there’s not much to see, only the expected blurred and powdery sand of the bottom, tan shading to grey and then black thirty feet away at the limits of the search lights’ radiance. If there’s life down here, he can’t see it—and he tries to imagine what could survive with a pressure of four tons per square inch pressing on skin and eyeballs, compressing internal organs and cells…

Hey, wait a minute, he says.

He’s just seen something, a dark shape looming in the blackness on the edge of the light from the search lights. He can’t tell what it is—it’s not the wall of the trench, they’re more than half a mile from that; and another three hundred yards from the drop-off to the Puerto Rico Trench’s true floor.

You got anything on the sonar? he asks Taylor.

It’s unlikely: the minimum range on the sonar is thirty yards, so anything close enough for him to see is not going to be on its screen.

Got what? says Taylor. Hey, that’s strange. Multiple contacts. They just kind of appeared.

But McIntyre is still trying to figure out what it is he’s looking at. He lifts a hand and signals for Stryker to use the bow thruster to swing the bathyscaphe to port, and the sea bottom beneath the pressure-sphere rolls smoothly away to one side, the undulations seeming to propagate like waves across stationary sand.

Give her one third ahead on the centreline motor, he says.

The bottom current is about a quarter knot, but it’s pulling the bathyscaphe to starboard, so Stryker compensates.

Something vertical and sheer and flat looms out of the darkness.

Full stop, McIntyre orders, hold us steady.

It’s the hull of a ship, a tall slab of darkness covered in lumpy streaks of red and brown, rendered in washed-out greyish pastels by the Trieste II ’s search lights. McIntyre can see a line of portholes, black circular maws in the steel.

Take us up about sixty feet, he says, and reel in the trail ball to fifteen feet.

What you got? Stryker asks.

It’s a ship, replies McIntyre. Looks like some kind of freighter.

They are above the gunwale now, and light from Trieste II spreads across an area of deck, revealing the dark shafts of cargo hold hatches, ventilators covered in knobbly lines of rust laid one upon the other like wax on a candle, and bollards mysteriously clean and untouched. He briefly wonders what it would be like to swim through the shattered corpse of this ship, to eel in and out of the gaping hatches, explore her passages and compartments by flashlight—but that’s nearly 600 atmospheres out there. The muted reds and oranges and browns and greens of whatever it is that covers the steel, the depth and richness of it, the wax-like runnels hanging from the rails and yardarms, he’s guessing this ship has been down here for more than a couple of decades. He’s not surprised it’s not on the charts—who would look for wrecks this deep?

I’m getting more, Taylor says.

More what? asks McIntyre.

More sonar contacts. Looks like there’s a whole damn fleet down here.

McIntyre doesn’t understand. The bottom should be clear here, the USNS De Steiguer never mentioned any wrecks, nor did the photographs she took with her search fish show any.

What the hell is going on? he demands. We’re still on the plot, right?

He checks the NAVNET computer himself and yes, they’re still within the search triangle they plotted back up on the surface, and though Taylor has yet to find dot zero using the Straza, they can’t be all that far from it.

McIntyre can see the freighter’s superstructure, what’s left of it, most of it has collapsed into itself leaving only a tall triangle of steel at one corner, jagged and thick with those streaks of rusty brown, its edges fading into blurred darkness. The rail passes below the pressure-sphere and now there’s darkness beneath—