The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

It’s bad tactics to hurry on an underwater operation. If you try to do too much at once, you are liable to make mistakes. And if things go smoothly and you finish in a day a job you said would take a week, the client feels he hasn’t had his money’s worth. Though I was sure I could replace the grid that same afternoon, I followed the damaged unit up to the surface and closed shop for the day.

The Russians hurried the thermo-element off for an autopsy, and I spent the rest of the evening hiding from Joe. Trinco is a small town, but I managed to keep out of his way by visiting the local cinema, where I sat through several hours of an interminable Tamil movie in which three successive generations suffered identical domestic crises of mistaken identity, drunkenness, desertion, insanity and death, all in Technicolor and with the sound track turned full up.

The next morning, despite a mild headache, I was over the site soon after dawn. (So was Joe, and so was Sergei, all set for a quiet day’s fishing.) I waved cheerfully to them as I climbed into the lobster, and the tender’s crane lowered me over the side. Over the other side, where Joe couldn’t see it, went the replacement grid. A few fathoms down I lifted it out of the hoist and carried it to the bottom of Trinco Deep, where, without any trouble, it was installed by the middle of the afternoon. Before I surfaced again, the lock nuts had been secured, the conductors spot-welded, and the engineers on shore had completed their continuity tests. By the time I was back on deck, the system was under load once more, everything was back to normal, and even Karpukhin was smiling—except when he stopped to ask himself the question that no one had yet been able to answer.

I still clung to the falling-boulder theory, for want of a better one. And I hoped that the Russians would accept it, so that we could stop this silly cloak-and-dagger business with Joe.

No such luck, I realized when both Shapiro and Karpukhin came to see me with very long faces.

“Klaus,” said Lev, “we want you to go down again.”

“It’s your money,” I replied. “But what do you want me to do?”

“We’ve examined the damaged grid, and there’s a section of the thermoelement missing. Dimitri here thinks that —someone—has deliberately broken it and carried it away.”

“Then they did a damn clumsy job,” I answered. “I can promise you it wasn’t one of my men.”

It was risky to make such jokes around Karpukhin, and no one was at all amused. Not even me; for by this time I was beginning to think that he might have something.

The sun was setting when I began my last dive into Trinco Deep, but the end of the day has no meaning down there. I fell for 2,000 feet with no lights, because I like to watch the luminous creatures of the sea as they flash and flicker in the darkness, sometimes exploding like rockets just outside the observation port. In this open water there was no danger of a collision; in any case, I had the panoramic sonar scan running, and that would give far better warning than could my eyes.

At 400 fathoms, I knew that something was wrong. The bottom was coming into view on the vertical sounder, but it was approaching much too slowly. My rate of descent was far too low; I could increase it easily enough by flooding another buoyancy tank, but I, hesitated to do so. In my business, anything out of the ordinary needs an explanation; three times I have saved my life by waiting until I had one.

The thermometer gave me the answer. The temperature outside was five degrees higher than it should have been, and I am sorry to say that it took me several seconds to realize why.

Only a few hundred feet below me, the repaired grid was now running at full power, pouring out megawatts of heat as it tried to equalize the temperature difference between Trinco Deep and the solar pond up there on land. It wouldn’t succeed, of course; but in the attempt it was generating electricity, and I was being swept upward in the geyser of warm water that was an incidental by-product.

When I finally reached the grid, it was quite difficult to keep the lobster in position against the upwelling current, and I began to sweat uncomfortably as the heat penetrated into the cabin. Being too hot on the sea bed was a novel experience; so also was the miragelike vision caused by the ascending water, which made my searchlights dance and tremble over the rock face I was exploring.

You must picture me, lights ablaze in that 500-fathom darkness, moving slowly down the slope of the canyon, which at this spot was about as steep as the roof of a house. The missing element— if it was still around—could not have fallen very far before coming to rest. I would find it in ten minutes or not at all.

After an hour’s searching I had turned up several broken light bulbs (it’s astonishing how many get thrown overboard from ships—the sea beds of the world are covered with them), an empty beer bottle (same comment) and a brand-new boot. That was the last thing I found, for then I discovered that I was no longer alone.

I never switch off the sonar scan, and even when I’m not moving I always glance at the screen about once a minute to check the general situation. The situation now was that a large object—at least the size of the lobster— was approaching from the north. When I spotted it, the range was about 500 feet and closing slowly. I switched off my lights, cut the jets I had been running at low power to hold me in the turbulent water, and drifted with the current.

Though I was tempted to call Shapiro and report that I had company, I decided to wait for more information. There were only three nations with depth ships that could operate at this level, and I was on excellent terms with all of them. It would never do to be too hasty and to get myself involved in unnecessary political complications.

Though I felt blind without the sonar, I did not wish to advertise my presence, so I reluctantly switched it off and relied on my eyes. Anyone working at this depth would have to use lights, and I’d see them coming long before they could see me. So I waited in the hot, silent little cabin, straining my eyes into the darkness, tense and alert but not particularly worried.

First there was a dim glow, at an indefinite distance. It grew bigger and brighter, yet refused to shape itself into any pattern that my mind could recognize. The diffuse glow concentrated into myriad spots, until it seemed that a constellation was sailing toward me. So might the rising star clouds of the galaxy appear from some world close to the heart of the Milky Way.

Even then I was not really frightened. I could not imagine what was approaching, but I did not believe that any creature of the sea could touch me inside six inches of good Swiss armor plate.

The thing was almost upon me, glowing with the light of its own creation, when it split into two separate clouds. Slowly they came into focus—not of my eyes, but of my understanding; and I knew that beauty and terror were rising toward me out of the abyss.

The terror came first, when I saw that the approaching beasts were squids, and all Joe’s tales reverberated in my brain. Then, with a considerable sense of letdown, I realized that they were only about 20 feet long—little larger than the lobster and a mere fraction of its weight. They could do me no harm; and quite apart from that, their indescribable beauty robbed them of all menace.

This sounds ridiculous, but it is true. In my travels I have seen most of the animals of this world, but none to match the luminous apparitions floating before me now. The colored lights that pulsed and danced along their bodies made them seem clothed with jewels, never the same for two seconds at a time. There were patches that glowed a brilliant blue, like flickering mercury arcs, then changed almost instantly to burning neon red. The tentacles seemed strings of luminous beads trailing through the water—or the lamps along a superhighway, when you look down upon it from the air at night. Barely visible against this background glow were the enormous eyes, uncannily human and intelligent, each surrounded by a diadem of shining pearls.