Vitals by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online Page B

closed and capped the tube, and it rolled out of the way like a spent round in a gun.
    Another tube was chambered, and, seconds later, another specimen-- a segmented stalk--kinked and slipped neatly into the plastic prison. A third tube, and I had a small sea flower, each petal a separate cell covered with tiny hairs, like an arrangement of sea gooseberries.
    Their jewel-like translucence gave me the final clue. These were not made of the tiny-celled tissues found in more familiar organisms. The sub's golden light warped through thick cellular membranes with a peculiar refraction, like interference between two layers of glass. Lovely, oily little rainbows.
    The Sea Messenger had eight pressurized drawers for keeping specimens alive. Recording temperature and pressure for each tube, I ejected them into the drawers.
    Samples of ambient seawater were analyzed by a miniature NASA chemical lab, the data stored for transmission on the next uplink. Labs on board the mother ship would soon begin preparing aquarium inoculants.
    "What are you going to do with them?" Dave asked.
    I sucked up another specimen, chambered another tube. "They're wonderful! I've never seen anything like them."
    Dave gave another groan. His face was pallid and green in the reflected light from the seafloor.
    "Are you all right?"
    "I feel really weird. I swear I didn't eat any dessert."
    For a moment, making an effort, I forgot the manipulator arm and the precious specimens and sat up. "You look like you've got a chill." I reached out to touch Dave's forehead. He batted my hand away.
    "Son of a turtle" he said.
    "Goddammit," I said, simultaneously, and I was suddenly, irrationally furious, as if a flashbulb of rudeness had gone off in my head. "Are you going to screw this up because of something you ate?"
    He cringed and clutched his stomach, eyes going blank under another wave of pain. "Don't take the Lord's name in vain around me,
    buster," he said. "Grab your specimens and let's get out of here. Quick!" he growled.
    I pulled back in my seat, jerked the arm toward the drawers, and spewed the last tubes out, one, two, three, into their receptacles. So many more to collect. But training and humanity beat science.
    Dave looked bad. He drew his knees up in the chair.
    A pungent, tropical odor filled the sphere. It wasn't flatulence. It came from Dave's sweat, from his skin, and it was starting to make me feel ill, too.
    Topside was straight up, eight thousand feet. Three hours minimum.
    I took a last look at the Garden of Eden--what Mark McMenamin had called the Garden of Ediacara. Serene, untouched, isolated, downwind from the geyser spew, just as I had seen it in the photos-imagined it in my dreams--my triumph, the highlight of my exploring, perhaps the key to all my research ... "Let's go," I said.
    "Diddly," Dave muttered. His eyes went unfocused, wild, like an animal caught in a cage. He rapped his hand against the smooth inner surface of the sphere with a painful thwonk. The sphere was six inches thick--no risk of cracking it with bare knuckles. "It's too ... darned small in here," he said. "Colder than a witch's tit," he added, eyes steady on mine, as if to receive applause, or criticism, for a dramatic performance.
    Clearly not an experienced blasphemer. I stifled a laugh.
    "I can call you Hal, or Henry, can't I?" he asked, peppering the honey of sweet reason with sincerity.
    "Sure," I said. "Dave, we have to go up now."
    "I got to ask you." He held out his hand, and the fingers twitched as if grasping something in the air between us. A little to the left, and he would have been strangling me. "I don't really give a ... horse's patootie ... I don't give a dung heap if you know Owen Montoya. But did he ever give you a phone call?"
    "Yeah, I suppose he did. Dave--"
    "Did he ever tell you what to do with your life?"
    This made no sense. "Maybe," I said.
    "Did your Dad ever call you, long after he was dead?"
    "No," I said. This shook me, and I started to get