Seven-Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson Read Free Book Online Page A

afternoon the noise of lighter engines detaches itself from the background roar of the ship’s funnel. An unmarked grey P3 Orion flies past very low off the starboard bow, its two inboard propellers feathered. Ahead, it makes a wide sweep, banking so its wings flash against the storm clouds like a fulmar’s, then returns for another pass. Coming from in front, its crew will easily be able to read the great blue logo painted below Farnella ’s bridge: a circle containing an anchor and the legend ‘US Geological Survey’. This identification will be superfluous since the aircraft is one of the US Navy’s long-rangeanti-submarine patrols and will automatically have dropped sonar buoys to learn what we are up to. They will already have heard our cacophony of pulses and identified GLORIA’s correlation signal. A hand is raised behind a cockpit window as the plane drones by. It climbs away to the west trailing dark exhaust and is soon lost in the cloudbase. The ocean feels momentarily emptier for its departure.
    There is a real oddness in all this watching and listening. Held firmly in the US Navy’s electronic gaze as we are, the Farnella is herself sizzling with codes which enable us to listen to the seabed and define it, while undoubtedly provoking the attention and maybe even aggression of untold creatures below. Nobody is listening out for them at the end of this bizarre acoustic chain, however, and they will only be heard if the wavelengths of their signals happen to coincide or interfere with those of the scientists’ finely tuned sensors. Certainly, no human ears are on the alert for them. In the meantime we are also listening to ourselves via our own weather reports. The ocean which surrounds and supports us manages not to impinge on our senses except to induce queasiness in one or two people.
    ‘I’ll never go on another geophysical cruise, I swear it,’ Pattiann says next morning. ‘They’re so boring . A sampling cruise is much more interesting. The dredge brings up lovely great chunks of stuff. At least it’s something to paw over and get your hands mucky on. All these computers – that’s not my idea of geology.’
    She assumes I am as bored as she, but I deny this.
    ‘Still, next time I’d go on one of our sampling trips,’ she recommends. ‘Or a JOIDES drilling and coring cruise where you get to see real stuff from below the bottom. Bits of the living planet, you know. This electronic surveying’s too hands-off for people like us.’
    Pattiann, who must be somewhere in her forties and hence among the older of the scientists aboard, may be making a rhetorical gesture implying a companionable solidarity, or else the more radical point that scientists’ differing views of the technology at their disposal might have much to do with their age. Pattiann’s lineage is from the nineteenth-century oceanographers who were excited by touching and smelling and tasting whatever they studied. In fact, a certain scepticism about modern high technology, not least itsprohibitive cost, is detectable in all but the youngest scientists at one time or another. Obviously there is no cheap way to map a seabed accurately from a distance of 5 kilometres; yet an elusive feeling of there being a discrepancy somewhere lies on the printouts like a glaze. It is as though discovering what there is beneath the sea, learning about places on Earth which no one has ever seen, ought to be momentous, even personal. Yet it is largely automatic, done even as we sleep. Machines make the signals, listen for their return, gather navigational data, juggle it around in digitised fashion, convert the digits to a visual analogue and produce an image for a geologist to tap his teeth over. All well and good; but to requote Roger’s maxim: in science, as elsewhere, you can’t get something for nothing. At some point there is always a debt, a deficit, a loss. A law suggests itself, to the effect that the way any data is read is a function