14 CALLING ON OSCAR
Why are these things always called Jim?’ said the reporter who had intercepted Bradley at St. John’s Airport. He was surprised there was only one, considering the excitement his mission seemed to be generating. One, of course, was often more than enough; but at least there was no Bluepeace demonstration to contend with.
‘After the first diver who wore an armored suit, when they salvaged the Lusitania’s gold back in the thirties. Of course, they’ve been enormously improved since then. . . .’
‘How?’
‘Well, they’re self-propelled, and I could live in Jim for fifty hours, two kilometers down — though it wouldn’t be much fun. Even with servo-assisted limbs, four hours is maximum efficient working time.’
‘You wouldn’t get me into one of those things,’ said the reporter, as the fifteen hundred kilos of titanium and plastic that had accompanied Bradley from Houston was being carefully hoisted into a Chevron helicopter. ‘Just looking at it gives me claustrophobia. Especially when you remember — ‘
Bradley knew what was coming, and escaped by waving goodbye and walking toward the chopper. The question had been put to him, in one form or another, by at least a dozen interviewers hoping to get some reaction. They had all been disappointed, and had been forced to concoct such imaginative headlines as THE IRON MAN IN THE TITANIUM SUIT.
‘Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?’ he had been asked — even by other divers. They were the only people he had answered seriously.
‘Why should I be?’ he had always replied. ‘Ted Collier was my best friend; God alone knows how many drinks we shared.’ (‘And girls,’ he might have added.) ‘Ted would have been delighted; no other way I could have afforded Jim back in those days — got him for a quarter of what he’d cost to build. State of the art, too — never had a mechanical failure. Sheer bad luck Ted was trapped before they could get him out from that collapsed rig. And you know . . . Jim kept him alive three hours longer than the guarantee. Someday I may need those three hours myself.’
But not, he hoped, on this job — if his secret ingredient worked. It was much too late to pull out now; he could only trust that his encyclopedia, which seemed to have let him down badly in one important detail, had been accurate in other matters.
As always, Jason was impressed by the sheer size of the Hibernia platform, even though only a fraction of it was visible above sea level. The million-ton concrete island looked like a fortress, its jagged outline giving a field of fire in all directions. And indeed it was designed to ward off an implacable, though nonhuman, enemy — the great bergs that came drifting down from their Arctic nursery. The engineers claimed that the structure could withstand the maximum possible impact. Not everyone believed them.
There was a slight delay as the helicopter approached the landing platform on the roof of the multistoried topside building; it was already occupied by an RAF chopper, which had to be rolled aside before they could touch down. Bradley took one glance at its insignia, and groaned silently. How did they know so quickly? he wondered.
The president of World Wildlife was waiting for him as soon as he stepped out onto the windswept platform, and the big rotors came slowly to rest.
‘Mr. Bradley? I know your reputation, of course — I’m delighted to meet you.’
‘Er — thank you, Your Highness.’
‘This octopus — is it really as big as they say?’
‘That’s what I intend to find out.’
‘Better you than me. And how do you propose to deal with it?’
‘Ah — that’s a trade secret.’
‘Nothing violent, I hope.’
‘I’ve already promised not to use nukes . . . sir.’
The Prince gave a fleeting smile, then pointed to the somewhat battered fire extinguisher which Bradley was carefully nursing.
‘You must be the first diver to carry one of those things underwater. Are you going to use it like a hypodermic syringe? Suppose the patient objects?’
Not a bad guess, thought Bradley; give him six out of ten. And I’m not a British citizen; he can’t send me to the Tower for refusing to answer questions.
‘Something like that, Your Highness. And it won’t do any permanent harm.’
I hope, he added silently. There were other possibilities; Oscar might be completely indifferent — or he might get annoyed. Bradley was confident that he would be perfectly safe inside Jim’s metal armor, but it would be uncomfortable to be rattled around like a pea in a pod.
The Prince still seemed worried, and Bradley felt quite certain that his concern was not for the human protagonist in the coming encounter. His Royal Highness’s words quickly confirmed that suspicion.
‘Please remember, Mr. Bradley, that this creature is unique — this is the first time anybody has ever seen one alive. And it’s probably the largest animal in the world. Perhaps the largest that’s ever existed. Oh, some dinosaurs certainly weighed more — but they didn’t cover as much territory.’
Bradley kept thinking of those words as he sank slowly toward the seabed, and the pale North Atlantic sunlight faded to complete blackness. They exhilarated rather than alarmed him; he would not have been in this business if he scared easily. And he felt that he was not alone; two benign ghosts were riding with him into the deep.
One was the first man ever to experience this world — his boyhood hero William Beebe, who had skirted the edge of the abyss in his primitive bathysphere, back in the 1930s. And the other was Ted Collier, who had died in the very space that Bradley was occupying now — quietly, and without fuss, because there was nothing else to do.
‘Bottom coming up; visibility about twenty meters — can’t see the installation yet.’
Topside, everyone would be watching him on sonar and — as soon as he reached it — through the snagged camera.
‘Target at thirty meters, bearing two two zero.’
‘I see it; current must have been stronger than I thought. Hitting the deck now.’
For a few seconds everything was hidden in a cloud of silt, and — as he always did at such moments — he recalled Apollo 11’s ‘Kicking up a little dust.’ The current swiftly cleared the obscuring haze, and he was able to survey the massive engineering complex now looming up in the twin beams from Jim’s external lights.
It seemed that a fair-sized chemical factory had been dumped on the seabed, to become a rendezvous for myriads of fish. Bradley could see less than a quarter of the whole installation, as most of it was hidden in distance and darkness. But he knew the layout intimately, for he had spent a good deal of expensive, frustrating, and occasionally dangerous time in almost identical rigs.
A massive framework of steel tubes, thicker than a man, formed an open cage around an assembly of valves, pipes, and pressure vessels, threaded with cables and miscellaneous minor plumbing. It looked as if it had been thrown together without rhyme or reason, but Bradley knew that every item had been carefully planned to deal with the immense forces slumbering far below.
Jim had no legs — underwater, as in space, they were often more of a nuisance than they were worth — and his movements could be controlled with exquisite precision by low-powered jets. It had been more than a year since Bradley had worn his mobile armor, and at first he overcorrected, but old skills quickly reasserted themselves.
He let himself drift gently toward his objective, hovering a few centimeters above the seabed to avoid stirring up silt. This was a situation where good visibility was important, and he was glad that Jim’s hemispheric dome gave him an all-around view.
Remembering the fate of the camera — it lay a few meters away in a tangle of pencil-thin cabling — Bradley paused just outside the framework of the manifold, considering the best way of getting inside. His first objective was to find the break in the fiber-optic monitor link; he knew its exact routing, so this should not present any problems.
His second was to evict Oscar; that might not be quite so easy.
‘Here we go,’ he reported to topside. ‘Coming in through the tradesman’s entrance — Access Tunnel B . . . not much room to maneuver, but no problem. . . .’
He scraped once, very gently, against the metal walls of the circular corridor, and as he did so became aware of a steady, low-frequency thump, thump, thump . . . coming from somewhere in the labyrinth of tanks and tubes around him. Presumably some piece of equipment was still functioning; it must have been very much noisier around here when everything was running full blast. . . .