Medusa (NUMA Files 8)

CHAPTER 6

THE B3 PASSENGERS HAD DECIDED TO REPORT THEIR OBSERVATIONS like sportscasters. Joe Zavala would do the play-by-play, Max Kane would provide the color using William Beebe’s writings.

At two hundred eighty-six feet down, Kane announced, “The torpedoed ocean liner Lusitania is resting at this level.”

At three hundred fifty-three feet, he noted, “This was the deepest any submarine had ever gone when Beebe made his bathysphere dives.”

When the bathysphere reached six hundred feet, Kane slipped the lucky skullcap from his head and held it in his hands.

“We’ve entered what Beebe called the Land of the Lost,” he said in a hushed tone. “This is the realm that belongs to the human beings who have been lost at sea. Going back to the Phoenicians, millions of human beings have descended this far, but all of them have been dead, the drowned victims of war, tempest, or act of God.”

“Cheery thought,” Zavala said. “Is that why you said hello to Davy Jones’s Locker . . . where drowned sailors go?”

Zavala had rigged a switch to turn off the TV camera and microphone. Kane reached out and said, “Joe and I are taking a short break. We’ll be back with more observations in a few minutes.” He pushed the button. “I need a breather,” he said with a smile. “You asked about the Locker . . . It’s the nickname my colleagues gave to the lab.”

“The marine center at Bonefish Key?” Zavala said.

Kane glanced at the camera. “That’s right, Bonefish Key.”

Zavala wondered why anyone would compare a sunny Florida island on the Gulf of Mexico with the grim domain of the drowned. He gave a mental shrug. Scientists were strange birds.

“Beebe sounds morbid, but he had a relatively benign view of the ocean,” Kane said. “He knew the dangers were real, but he thought the hazards of the deep overblown.”

“The millions of drowning victims you mentioned might disagree,” Zavala said. “I respect everything Beebe and Barton did, Doc, but from an engineer’s point of view I’d say they were just plain lucky they didn’t become part of that Land of the Lost. The original bathysphere was an accident waiting to happen.”

Kane greeted the blunt assessment with a chuckle.

“Beebe was a realist as well as a dreamer,” he said. “He compared the bathysphere to a hollow pea swaying on a cobweb a quarter of a mile below the deck of a ship rolling in midocean.”

“Poetic but not inaccurate,” Zavala replied. “That’s exactly why I built safety features into the new diving bell.”

“Glad you did,” Kane said. He switched the microphone back on and turned his attention to the scene visible through the porthole.

The B3 rocked slightly from time to time, but its descent was signaled more by changes in the light coming in through the portholes than by any sense of motion. The most drastic color change comes at the start of a dive. Red and yellow are wrung from the spectrum as if from a sponge. Green and blue dominate. Deeper still, the water color shifts to navy and finally becomes an intense black.

In the early stages of the dive, pilot fish, silver eels, motelike clouds of copepods, and strings of lacelike siphonophores drifted past the windows like tiny ghosts, along with shrimp, translucent squid, and snails so tiny that they resembled brown bubbles. Long, dark shapes could be glimpsed at the extreme range of the B3’s searchlight beam.

At seven hundred feet, Zavala switched the searchlight off. He looked out the window and murmured an appreciative exclamation in Spanish. Zavala had grown up in Santa Fe, and the view through the porthole looked like a New Mexico sky on a clear winter’s night. The darkness sparkled with stars, some alone, others in groups, some continuously flashing, others just once. There were floating threads of luminescence, and glowing smudges that could have been novas or nebulas in a celestial setting.

The cabin was as hushed as a cathedral; the loudest sound was the low hum of the air-circulation motor, so when Kane saw an undulating form float by the porthole his response was like a gunshot.

“Wow!” Kane exclaimed. “An Aurelia jellyfish.”

Zavala smiled at Kane’s excitement. Although there was no denying the beauty in the jellyfish’s undulating motion, the creature outside the bathysphere’s porthole was only a few inches across.

“Had me for a second there, Doc. Thought you’d seen the Loch Ness Monster,” Zavala said.

“This is so much better than Nessie. The medusae are among the most fascinating and complex animals on the face of the earth or under the sea. Look at that school of fish lit up like the Las Vegas Strip . . . lantern fish . . . Hey,” Kane said, “what was that?”

“You see a mermaid, Doc?” Zavala asked.

Kane pressed his face against the porthole. “I’m not sure what I saw,” he said, “but I know it was big.”

Zavala flicked on the searchlight, a green shaft of light edged with purple-blue stabbing the darkness, and he peered through the porthole.

“Gone,” he said, “whatever it was.”

“Beebe spotted a big fish he thought might have been a whale shark,” Kane said to the camera. “Until the bathysphere’s dive, his fellow scientists never believed that he had seen fish with glowing teeth and neon skin. He got the last laugh when he proved the abyss abounded with such strange creatures.”