Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

Hixson reads back capcom’s figures, and the business of powering-down the spacecraft’s manoeuvring system to conserve fuel for their remaining time in orbit provides a routine Cobb can use to focus on the here and now. She looks up from the instrument panel and sees the Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics Company Perk-Up Stick back-up commander Wally Funk has taped there as a joke; and she peers through the window in the hatch before her and now they’re in darkness she can see the continents of the black Earth below patterned and limned in lines of light. It is even more jewel-like than the Earth in daylight, but the hand of Man is written across it in that tracery of artificial light and she feels perversely disappointed that God’s creation should be spoiled so…

And yet she would not be right here right now, 170 miles above it all, if it were not for Man’s ingenuity.

This is weird; this, he can’t think of an explanation for it. The USNS De Steiguer’s search fish took photographs of an abyssal desert, a sea-bottom clear of rock formations and life, just an endless expanse of grey-tan soft and floury sand. And now the Trieste II floats above a graveyard of ships and planes, different ships, different planes, passing in and out of the globe of light the bathyscaphe has brought down with her from the surface. Though McIntyre can only see out to thirty feet in the light from the search lights, the darkness beyond seems to possess a texture hinting at yet more wrecks. He speculates maybe some current swept the ships and planes here into the trench, but he’s more angry than curious— No, maybe “angry” is too strong; he’s thinking how are they going to find the bucket given the zero dot isn’t responding to the Straza and there’s all this metal littering the ocean floor.

If the plot on the NAVNET computer is to be believed, they can’t be too far from the bucket. They’ve been down here over two hours now, the chill has seeped through the steel of the pressure-sphere, he’s shivering and they’ve covered no more than two nautical miles. No one expected them to descend right on top of the bucket, but maybe a few hundred feet away wasn’t too much to hope for—

I have one of the dots, says Taylor. Number three.

McIntyre consults his plot. They’re about 2,000 feet away, but if they follow a line between dot #3 and where they think the zero dot is… well, maybe they’ll find the bucket. Now they have some data, some idea of their relative position, it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier. McIntyre remembers the photograph from the search fish and he hopes the bucket is far enough from any wrecks to give a clear sonar contact.

They drive toward dot #3, passing over more wrecked ships, more cracked fuselages of planes, and McIntyre peers out through the window at these shadowed shapes in the depths and he feels a chill more profound than that brought on by the cold abyss through which the bathyscaphe propels herself. Pensate profunde, he thinks; but now he doesn’t want to think too deeply about anything except the mission objectives, about finding the goddamned bucket and heading up to the sunlight and air and the beating rays of the sun.

The sterns of ships drift by, fading into and out of the light, their names clearly legible on scarred and discoloured transoms: Cyclops and Cotopaxi and Sandra and Marine Sulphur Queen… And spread all about, the warped and broken bodies of aircraft: a C-54 Skymaster… a Constellation or maybe a Super Constellation, its livery unrecognisable… a C-119 Flying Boxcar… and even a jet, a Boeing 707— no, he can see a USAF roundel, a KC-135 then…

When the Straza tells them they’re within six feet of dot #3, Stryker puts the Trieste II on a course due north, compensating for the bottom current, and they drive forward at one knot. The echo sounder tells them every time they pass over a wreck, but they’re staying well above them and they’ve shortened the trail ball cable so it won’t snag, McIntyre is keeping watch through the window for masts or funnels or anything they might hit or catch. The sonar at least is working beautifully, with each ship and plane showing up clearly on the screen, and now the contacts are starting to thin out a little, not just hundreds of feet apart but hundreds of yards. And as they sail over one more freighter, with a complex and tangled arrangement of derricks half-collapsed across her main deck and streaked with wax-like runnels of brown and red, McIntyre thinks maybe one day someone should come down here and explore this place thoroughly.

As the wreck slips beneath the pressure-sphere, McIntyre orders Stryker to reduce speed, and he can now see clear uninterrupted sea-bottom out to the thirty-foot limit of the search lights. As he watches, the sphere of light to port appears chopped off, as if a chord has been cut from it and it’s a second or two before he realises what he’s seeing is the edge of the shelf.

The bucket should be somewhere around here, he thinks; it’s not going to be easy to find without the deep ocean transponder working, but at least the bottom is clear and if they take their time they should be able to cover the search area. So they inch forward at half a knot, Taylor bent over the sonar, and McIntyre staring out through the window at the abyssal waters, both in their own way passing their searching gaze over the undulations of the ocean floor.

A shadow flutters in the bottom current off to starboard, just on the edge of the search lights, and McIntyre at first takes it for sea-bottom flora… before he remembers that down here, 19,500 feet below the surface, there’s no light and so no plant-life. He orders Stryker to swing the Trieste II to starboard and the bathyscaphe creeps up on the dancing swaying living thing. As they near it, McIntyre sees it is a strip of nylon webbing attached to a piece of bent metal, and it looks fresh, like it hasn’t been down here very long. Debris from the bucket, he decides; it’s debris from the bucket, some piece of it that broke off as it sank. And he knows they’re near their target now, it’s somewhere around here, hidden by the darkness, invisible beneath the blackness that presses down around them at four tons per square inch…

And though they’ve been down here now for over five hours, he’s thinking it won’t be much longer before he gets to see the sun once again.

After disengaging from the Agena, mission control tells Cobb and Gorelick they have a new target for them to rendezvous. The Gemini 10 spacecraft is in an orbit with an apogee with 167 miles, but now they have to get higher and meet up with an object at 240 miles. Capcom is being cagey and won’t divulge what the object is, Cobb thinks it might be the Agena from Gemini 8 but she thinks that’s in a much higher orbit.

When she asks capcom just says, We’re not at liberty to discuss it at this time.

It’s been over a year since her flight on Gemini 4 and her EVA. Cobb was the first American to spacewalk, but it was another record the Russians beat them to. She has learned to be resigned about it. There’s still the Moon, beckoning silver in the sky every night, and she prays each day for the opportunity to tread its airless seas of grey dust. Gemini 10’s mission is a step toward that dream, they are up here to practice the rendezvous techniques which will be required for a flight to Luna.

And now the Gemini spacecraft is in the higher orbit, their target is on the radar, and the rendezvous will have to be by eye—but even then capcom won’t say what it is. They’re close enough to make out what they’re aiming for, but Cobb still can’t tell. A satellite? It looks a bit like an Agena, a bright cylinder with a nose cone. But it is devoid of markings, and without those it’s impossible to judge size or distance.