Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet) by Ian Sales Read Free Book Online

Washington Navy Yard and he knows more than ever he made the right move when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. He’s not enjoyed this dive and he feels no real sense of accomplishment at having retrieved the bucket. The Trieste II is too fragile a mistress, and though this descent has gone relatively smoothly—nothing broke!—he remembers all too well others where one damn thing after another went on the fritz. Which is not to say saturation dives are always snafu-free, or that mistakes and malfunctions cannot also prove fatal.
    But, he has to admit, spending hours inside a steel ball seven feet in diameter cannot compare with the freedoms of saturation diving, the ability to move about underwater unrestricted, chained only by an umbilical—because at those pressures air in bottles would last mere minutes—limited only by his own physical endurance. True, the Trieste II can take him so much deeper—he’s here now on his way back up from 19,500 feet beneath the surface!—while the deepest he’s dived on helium-oxygen is 600 feet, and he had to spend six days in a steel can decompressing afterwards.
    He looks across the pressure-sphere at the tiny window which gives the only direct view the three men have on the world outside. It’s a circle of inky blackness in the curved steel, and his eyes play tricks and he sees it as a pool of infinite depth, an opening without end in the steel, a shaft through the abyss and the hadal zone into who-knows-where and who-knows-what...
    Then, nine hours later, as they near the surface and reach the depth at which sunlight can penetrate the water, the black window begins to pale and fade to blue, day dawning on their submarine world, and it glows ethereally like a beacon signalling sanctuary. So McIntyre gets down on his knees and peers through the window, and there’s the kludge and trapped in its tines the bucket, and strips of films are hanging out of it like those fronds of rusty growth on the wrecks deep below, but they’re fluttering like kelp in the vortices generated by the bathyscaphe’s ascent.
    At thirty feet, Taylor pays out the cable on the kludge, so when the Trieste II breaches the surface, the bucket will stay thirty-five feet below, where perhaps it will remain intact and not suffer the battering it would receive at the surface. McIntyre, still looking out through the window, sees a column of boiling white turbulence arrow down past the pressure-sphere. The bubbles evaporate to reveal a diver, who gives McIntyre a thumbs-up and then turns to the bucket in the kludge. And as they both watch, a strip of film separates from a film stack and snakes its way downwards, returning to the depths.
    Taylor pumps the access tube free of water, and he and McIntyre open the hatch, while Stryker sets about turning off the onboard systems they won’t need now they’re on the surface. The tube is cold and smells of brine and something infernal, and then the stink generated by three men in a sealed steel sphere overwhelms it. He hears a clanging from above and worms his way into the tube and cranes his neck to look up just as someone opens the hatch and a shaft of clear blue morning sky spears down, causing him to blink and put a hand to his brow. He scrambles upright and clambers up the ladder, and moments later he steps out of the sail onto the bathyscaphe’s fairwater decking. He can’t help pulling in a deep breath of sea air, and he grins at the USS White Sands rocking on the swell a hundred feet away, and the USS Apache on station beside the auxiliary repair dock, and the boat butting up against the Trieste II’s float with a pair of divers hanging from its gunwales.
    He wants to say, By God, it’s good to be back; but he guesses his face says it for him anyway.
    He hears the slap of waves against the bathyscaphe, the bump and scrape of the boat’s prow against the fairwater decking, the guttural burble of its idling outboard; and the sunlight bounces