Arthur Clarke - The Ghost from the Grand Banks

He was in his office on the forty-sixth floor of the Teague Tower—now dwarfed by Houston’s later skyscrapers—when he received the assignment that was to make him famous. The date happened to be April 2nd, and at first Bradley thought that his occasional client Jeff Rawlings had got it a day late. Despite his awesome responsibilities as operations manager on the Hibernia Platform, Jeff was noted for his sense of humor. This time, he wasn’t joking; yet it was quite a while before Jason could take his problem seriously.

“Do you expect me to believe,” he said, “that your million-ton rig has been shut down… by an octopus ?”

“Not the whole operation, of course—but Manifold 1—our best producer. Forty thou barrels a day. Five flowlines running into it, all going full blast. Until yesterday.”

The Hibernia project, it suddenly occurred to Jason, had the same general design as an octopus. Tentacles—or pipelines—ran out along the seabed from the central body to the dozen wells that had been drilled three thousand meters through the oil-rich sandstone. Before they reached the main platform, the flowlines from several individual wells were combined at a production manifold—also on the seabed, nearly a hundred meters down.

Each manifold was an automated industrial complex the size of a large apartment building, containing all the specialized equipment needed to handle the high-pressure mixture of gas, oil, and water erupting from the reservoirs far below. Tens of millions of years ago, nature had created and stored this hidden treasure; it was no simple matter to wrest it from her grasp.

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“This circuit secure?”

“Of course.”

“Three days ago we started getting erratic instrument readings. The flow was perfectly normal, so we weren’t too worried. But then there was a sudden data cutoff; we lost all monitoring facilities. It was obvious that the main fiber-optic trunk had been broken, and of course the automatics shut everything down.”

“No surge problems?”

“No; slug-catcher worked perfectly—for once.”

“And then?”

“S.O.P.—we sent down a camera—Eyeball Mark 5. Guess what?”

“The batteries died.”

“Nope. The umbilical got snagged in the external scaffolding, before we could even go inside to look around.”

“What happened to the driver?”

“Well, the kitchen isn’t completely mechanized, and Chef Dubois can always use some unskilled labor.”

“So you lost the camera. What happened next?”

“We haven’t lost it—we know exactly where it is—but all it shows are lots of fish. So we sent down a diver to untangle things—and to see what he could find.”

“Why not an ROV?”

There were always several underwater robots—Remotely Operated Vehicles—on any offshore oilfield. The old days when human divers did all the work were long since past.

There was an embarrassed silence at the other end of the line.

“Afraid you’d ask me that. We’ve had a couple of accidents—two ROVs are being rebuilt—and the rest can’t be spared from an emergency job on the Avalon platform.”

“Not your lucky day, is it? So that’s why you’ve called the Bradley Corporation—‘No job too deep.” Tell me more.”

“Spare me that beat-up slogan. Since the depth’s only ninety meters, we sent down a diver, in standard heliox gear. Well—ever heard a man screaming in helium? Not a very nice noise…

“When we got him up and he was able to talk again, he said the entire rig was covered by an octopus. He swore it was a hundred meters across. That’s ridiculous, of course—but there’s no doubt it’s a monster.”

“However big it is, a small charge of dynamite should encourage it to move.”

“Much too risky. You know the layout down there—after all, you helped install it!”

“If the camera’s still working, doesn’t it show the beast?”

“We did get a glimpse of a tentacle—but no way of judging its size. We think it’s gone back inside—we’re worried that it might rip out more cables.”

“You don’t suppose it’s fallen in love with the plumbing?”

“Very funny. My guess is that it’s found a free lunch. You know—the bloody Oasis Effect that Publicity’s always boasting about.”

Bradley did indeed. Far from being damaging to the environment, virtually all underwater artifacts were irresistibly attractive to marine life, and often became a target for fishing boats and a paradise for anglers. He sometimes wondered how fish had managed to survive, before mankind generously provided them with condominiums by scattering wrecks across the seabeds of the world.

“Perhaps a cattle prod would do the trick—or a heavy dose of subsonics.”

“We don’t care how it’s done—as long as there’s no damage to the equipment. Anyway, it looked like a job for you—and Jim, of course. Is he ready?”

“He’s always ready.”

“How soon can you get to St. John’s? There’s a Chevron jet at Dallas—it can pick you up in an hour. What does Jim weigh?”

“One point five tons.”

“No problem. When can you be at the airport?”

“Give me three hours. This isn’t my normal line of business—I’ll have to do some research.”

“Usual terms?”

“Yes—hundred K plus expenses.”

“And no cure, no pay?”

Bradley smiled. The centuries-old salvage formula had probably never been invoked in a case like this, but it seemed applicable. And it would be an easy job. A hundred meters, indeed! What nonsense…

“Of course. Call you back in one hour to confirm. Meanwhile please fax the manifold plans, so I can refresh my memory.”

“Right—and I’ll see what else I can find out, while I’m waiting for your call.”

There was no need to waste time packing; Bradley always had two bags ready—one for the tropics, one for the Arctic. The first was very little used; most of his jobs, it seemed, were in unpleasant parts of the world, and this one would be no exception. The North Atlantic at this time of year would be cold, and probably rough; not that it would matter much, a hundred meters down.

Those who thought of Jason Bradley as a tough, no-nonsense roughneck would have been surprised at his next action. He pressed a button on his desk console, lay back in his partially reclining chair, and closed his eyes. To all outward appearances, he was asleep.

It had been years before he discovered the identity of the haunting music that had ebbed and flowed across Glomar Explorer ’s deck, almost half a lifetime ago. Even then, he had known it must have been inspired by the sea; the slow rhythm of the waves was unmistakable. And how appropriate that the composer was Russian—the most underrated of his country’s three titans, seldom mentioned in the same breath as Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky…

As Sergey Rachmaninoff himself had done long ago, Jason Bradley had stood transfixed before Arnold Boecklin’s “Isle of the Dead,” and now he was seeing it again in his mind’s eye. Sometimes he identified himself with the mysterious, shrouded figure standing in the boat; sometimes he was the oarsman (Charon?); and sometimes he was the sinister cargo, being carried to its last resting place beneath the cypresses.

It was a secret ritual that had somehow evolved over the years, and which he believed had saved his life more than once. For while he was engrossed in the music, his subconscious mind—which apparently had no interest in such trivialities—was very busy indeed, analyzing the job that lay ahead, and foreseeing problems that might arise. At least that was Bradley’s more-than-half-seriously-held theory, which he never intended to disprove by too close an examination.