Meg: Origins Read Free

a nightmare or real.
    The familiar gray cabin walls assured him it was a dream.
    And then the room began to spin.
    He closed his eyes, but the nausea said no and he reopened them. The suddenness of the vertigo returned him to a similar sensation experienced a decade earlier as he lay semiconscious on a grass football field, the junior tight end’s head ringing and Beaver Stadium rolling sideways in his vision. Penn State’s team physician had shouted his name over the crowd noise. “Don’t move, J.T.! Focus your eyes on one spot until your vision clears!”
    His first choice back then had been to focus on the football, still clutched in his hands; the choice now was the porthole, but with the ship swaying he held up his left hand and stared at his wedding ring.
    As his pupils locked on, the vertigo passed.
    An insistent knock demanded his attention.
    “Shut up already and come in.”
    Michael Royston entered, the DSV pilot’s East Tennessee State University tee-shirt soaked in sweat from a morning workout. “Sorry to wake you, boss. Heller wants you in sick bay for the pre-dive. Jonas, you okay? You look like hell.”
    “Been there. Three times in the last eight days. Don’t have a fourth in me. Not today anyway.”
    Royston’s eyes widened behind his glasses. As the mission’s back-up hydronaut, the twenty-seven year old was accustomed to playing Robin to Jonas’s Batman. Twice in the last year he had accompanied his mentor to the bottom of the Middle America Trench, but co-piloting a DSV at 20,000 feet and making a solo dive to 36,000 feet suddenly seemed worlds apart—the equivalent of asking a Single-A pitcher to strike out Micky Mantle in game seven of the World Series.
    “Jonas, you think I’m ready? I mean, hell yeah, I’m ready. I’m your back-up, right? If you need me to stand in, then sure, let’s do it.”
    It was a bad play. Royston’s cockiness was gone, replaced by trepidation. A healthy dose of fear was warranted before any deep sea dive; what concerned Jonas was that his young co-pilot was a better actor than this. Clearly he wanted to be bailed out.
    “Let’s see what Heller says. Tell him I’ll be there in five.”
    · · ·
    From his porthole, Jonas could see the shadow of the DSV as it rocked back and forth within its harness, forcing its “pit crew” to hold on. Thirty feet long, with a twelve foot forward beam that tapered back to an eight foot propeller shaft, the Sea Cliff (DSV-4) and her sister ship, Turtle (DSV-3) had been the Navy’s workhorses since they were commissioned back in 1968. White with an orange-red dorsal hatch, the sub was designed around a six-feet-in-diameter, four-inch-thick titanium sphere that held its three-man crew. The exterior hull was neutrally buoyant fiberglass, supporting a propulsion unit, ballast and trim system, lights, cameras, steel weights, grappler arms, and a series of collection baskets.
    What few people outside the Pentagon knew was that the Sea Cliff had recently received an extensive overhaul, the titanium pod and aluminum chassis upgraded to withstand 18,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. Life support capacity was doubled to thirty-two hours, descent weight increased by eight hundred pounds—features necessary when taking an elevator to a bottom floor whose basement exceeded Mount Everest’s height. Of course, if something failed on Everest’s summit, the pressure didn’t implode your skull.
    It took a cool customer to pilot a DSV; it took the best the Navy had to offer to guide the upgraded Sea Cliff into the Challenger Deep , the deepest most unexplored realm on the planet. Only four men had ever ventured into these depths—both in 1960 aboard bathyscaphes. In either case there was no piloting involved, the vessels simply went down and came back up. On one of these dives, the lone viewport had actually cracked, four inches of reinforced glass buckling under 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure.
    In the three decades