Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson Read Free Book Online Page B

especially if he intends to penetrate deeply, must conceive of space differently than he does on land. He must think in three dimensions, digesting navigational concepts
—turn left, drop down, then rise diagonally and follow the seam to the right—
that are nonsensical outside water. He must remember everything—every twist, turn, rise, and fall—and he must do so in an environment of few obvious landmarks and where most everything is sweatered in sea anemones. Should his command of navigation slip, should his memory falter, even for a moment, he will begin to ask questions:
Did I swim through three rooms to reach the captain’s quarters or only two? Did I go left-right-right or right-left-right before ascending to this gun turret? Have I changed deck levels without realizing it? Is that the pipe I saw next to the wreck’s exit, or is it one of six other pipes I saw while swimming through here?
These questions are trouble. They mean, in all likelihood, that the diver is lost.
    A diver lost inside a wreck is in grave danger. He has a finite air supply. If he cannot find his way out, he will drown. If he finds his way out but breathes down his tanks in the process, he will not have enough air left for proper decompression. Narcosis, already humming in the background of his brain, crescendos in the lost diver like a broken record, shouting down reason as it reminds him,
You’re lost you’re lost you’re lost you’re lost you’re lost

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He will be tempted to guess at a way out, but if he does so he will become a child in a funhouse, his blind movements virtually certain to deliver him into the ship’s myriad dead ends and false pathways, each of which will only disorient him further. His air drops lower. His time grows shorter. This is how lost divers become corpses.
    Even if a diver manages his navigation, he must still contend with issues of visibility. At 200 feet, the ocean bottom is dark. Inside the wreck, it’s darker, sometimes pitch-black. If visibility were simply a matter of illumination, a diver’s headlight and flashlight would suffice. But a shipwreck is filled with silt and debris. The diver’s slightest movement—a reach for a dish, a kick with the fin, a turn to memorize a landmark—can stir the silt and disturb visibility. At times of such stark darkness, the deep-wreck diver is more a shadow diver, aiming at the shapes of a shipwreck as much as at the shipwrecks themselves.
    The diver’s bubbles do not help. Exhaust from his respiration rises and unsettles overhead silt and rust. Simply by breathing, he has invoked a rainstorm of rust flakes, some as large as peas, many as small as sugar crystals. The bubbles also disturb oil that has invariably leaked from tanks and equipment and spread everywhere in the wreck, and they disperse that oil into a haze and onto the diver’s mask and into his mouth. Visibility is now even worse. There is no longer any such thing as right and left. Over there doesn’t exist anymore. In a fog of silt and rust and oil, rudimentary navigation seems impossible.
    To keep from raising silt clouds, divers learn to travel with a minimum of locomotion. Some move like crabs, using only their fingers to pull themselves along, their fins floating motionless in the water behind them. They do not kick to rise or fall, but rather inflate or deflate their wings, an air bladder between the diver and his tanks used for buoyancy control. When they arrive at an interesting area, they might draw in their knees and arms, adjust their buoyancy, and work while kneeling, their shins only brushing the shipwreck floor.
    These measures are stopgap. A diver who spends time inside a wreck will screw the “viz”; it’s just a matter of how soon and how badly. Once the silt billows and the rust flakes fall and the oil spreads, visibility in the wreck might stay fouled for several minutes, sometimes longer. Even if a diver has a perfect handle on navigation, he cannot see enough to