Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

THE NEXT afternoon was a gorgeous mid-October day, perfect for jeans and sweatshirts. While Monique and Craig dropped sonar buoys in strategic locations at sea, Jason, Lisa, Darryl, and Phil were at the busy Monterey docks, waiting to be picked up. Watching one yacht after another enter the marina, Jason anxiously drummed his fingers on a guardrail.

“Excuse me, Jason?”

He turned. Phil Martino was standing there. “Hey, Phil, what’s up?”

“Can we talk really quick?” Phil seemed to mean in private, away from Lisa and Darryl.

“Sure.” They walked down the dock then stopped. “What’s up?”

Phil raised his camera. “I sure take some great pictures, don’t I?”

“You really do, Phil. I’m glad we have you.”

Phil nodded sadly. A white lie from a friend. “Jason, I don’t feel like I’m a part of the team.” He rubbed his curly hair and looked out at the fancy boats. “I haven’t felt like I’m a part of the team for some time.”

“Oh.” Jason nodded, quietly disappointed. Phil had been the Expedition ’s whipping boy for as long as he could remember. Maybe Darryl’s outright snub the night before had finally pushed him over the edge. “You’re not saying you want to quit, are you?”

“Not at all. I’m just wondering if I can do anything else to contribute.”

“Hmm.” Jason scratched his chin. He had no idea what else Phil Martino could do.

“So I was thinking. Since you and everybody else are so busy, maybe I could transcribe all of your findings, analyses and all that, into the laptop. There’s tons of stuff floating around among all of us, and I figure things can get lost or whatever. This way we’d have a written record on a hard drive. What do you think?”

“That’s a fantastic idea, Phil.”

“Yeah, you like it?”

“I love it. I’ll still write up my own stuff, but for the others, it could be very helpful.”

Phil chuckled to himself. Of course Jason would still write up his own stuff.

Jason thought there could be other positives. The Species Council was a demanding twelve-person committee with very strict procedural requirements that tended to favor analyses written by multiple scientists. Formalizing Craig’s findings on GDV-4, Lisa’s on plankton, and Darryl and Monique’s on migratory habits could be extremely useful in the credibility department. Also, any excuse to have Phil deal directly with the others on a daily basis could have more… touchy-feely benefits as well. If his efforts actually made Darryl and Craig’s lives easier, maybe they’d finally stop giving him such a hard time.

“Let’s discuss this with the others, but I think it’s a great idea.”

Phil Martino smiled like an encouraged child. “Excellent.”

Suddenly Darryl yelled from farther down the dock. “Hey, Jason! Are these your buds?!”

Jason turned as a towering two-hundred-foot research behemoth cum yacht entered the marina. Sid Klepper and Ross Drummond had just arrived.

“HEY, GUYS!” Leading the others, Jason bounded up the stairs of the massive boat toward two men waiting enthusiastically at the top.

“Hey, Jason!”

“Great to see ya, buddy!”

Klepper and Drummond smacked him hard on the back, lost chums reuniting. As Lisa arrived, she smiled at the genuine camaraderie. Drummond and Klepper were a happy pair, with sizable bellies, freewheeling demeanors, and the clothes to match. Klepper wore baggy blue sweats, a V-neck sweatshirt with a gold chain, and fluffy moccasins. Drummond had on a faded long-sleeved T-shirt, jungle-green camouflage pants, and $1.99 flip-flops. Millionaire hippies. After intros to Lisa, Darryl, and Phil, Ross got down to business. “We still going to those same coordinates, Jason?”

“Yep.”

Ross walked toward the controls. “Be there in twenty minutes.”

“So someone has a submersible license?” Sid Klepper asked.

Darryl raised his hand. “Me.”

Sid looked him up and down. “Big dude. You’re really gonna have to squeeze in.”

“Yeah.” Darryl glanced down at his own crotch. “I’m used to that.”

Everyone laughed, and Lisa shook her head. Then Darryl’s cell started ringing. “Excuse me. Must be one of my groupies.” He fumbled to remove the little device from his pocket.

“ Come on, Darryl, pick up.”

The Expedition very slowly moved north, on autopilot, as Craig eyed what looked like a desktop computer monitor but was actually a sonar analysis station set up on the back wall. On-screen was an interactive computerized map of the twisting coastline: land colored white, and ocean colored blue. In the middle of the blue was a blinking black dot the size of a pencil head that Summers had been staring at for ten minutes. Standing behind him with a cell phone to her ear, Monique was staring at the dot too, wondering where the hell her husband was. “ Come on, Darryl, pick u—”

“What up, Wife?”

“Darryl, we found the rays immediately, and we’re trailing them. Can I talk to Jason?”

“Hold on.”

Monique drummed her fingers. She couldn’t believe how quickly it had happened. She and Craig had dropped buoys over a wide swath of ocean, hooked up the station, tuned it to the appropriate UHF signal, and crossed their fingers. Almost immediately, the blinking black dot had appeared. Its source was just two miles offshore.

“Still moving north, Monique?” This was Jason’s voice.

She looked forward as they approached a yellow triangular buoy bobbing in the sea. “Yeah, Jason, slowly but surely.”

“Any chance you’ll actually see one?”

“Think we’ll see one, Craig?”

Summers shook his head. “No way. They’re nearly three miles down.”

“Way too deep, Jason.”

“Stay on it. Maybe they’ll go into shallower waters.”

She hung up, and the blinking black dot continued up the coast.

SID KLEPPER turned to Darryl. “Want to see my equipment now?”

The toothy grin flashed. “If it can measure up, bro.”

“Come on.” In his sweats and fluffy moccasins, Klepper led them along the giant deck, past half a dozen Jet Skis and a massive gray crane, stopping at a tiny yellow sub perched on rudders. The sub was the length of a car but much thinner, almost like a hot dog, the words DEEP DIVER printed on its side. Klepper gently touched it.

“Three of you will go down on this, two inside the sub, one outside it, the latter wearing special equipment and standing on that little deck. You see it?” The deck on the rear of the sub looked like the world’s tiniest apartment terrace, a bright red platform with a waist-high railing. “We’ll lower you to the bottom with the crane so you won’t use the sub’s internal engines until you get there. Darryl, as big as you are, whoever goes down with you inside should be physically small, but I’ll let you guys decide that. Jason, I assume you’ll be the one in the suit?” The “suit” referred to the atmospheric diving suit, a highly specialized piece of equipment with a $2 million price tag.

Eyeing the little red deck, Jason swallowed nervously. “We’ll be going, what, more than a third of a mile down?”

Watching him, Lisa suddenly felt bad for Jason, clearly scared as hell, probably like some people felt before getting on an airplane, except much worse. She hardly blamed him. The prospect of being alone in a pressure-filled world that could crush you to death in a millisecond if anything went wrong would make anyone nervous. His eyes were wider than normal, and he kept swallowing. It was the first time Lisa had actually seen Jason Aldridge scared. Strangely, she liked it. It made him less of a machine, more human, even attractive. Little things like this had been building for months, and despite her better judgment, Lisa Barton was becoming… interested in Jason. She wished he could relax, though. You’ll be fine, she thought, you’ll be fine.