Vitals Read Free

tall as industrial smokestacks and grew broad horizontal fans like tree fungi. Sulfurous outflow fizzed through cracks and pores everywhere. Magma squeezed out of deeper cracks like black, grainy toothpaste, snapping like reptiles in combat. Close by, at depth, through the hydrophone, you could hear the vents hissing and roaring. Wags had named one huge chimney "Godzilla?"
    Gargantuan Earth music.
    Down there, the water is saturated with the deep's chemical equivalent of sunshine. Hydrogen sulfide soup feeds specialized bacteria, which in turn prop up an isolated food chain. Tube worms crest old lava flows and gather around the vents in sociable forests, like long, skinny, red-tipped penises. Royal little white crabs mosey through the waving stalks as if they have all the time there is. Long, lazy, rattail fish--deep-water vultures with big curious eyes--pause like question marks, waiting for death to drop their small ration of dinner.
    I shivered. DSV pilots believe the cold keeps you alert. Dave coughed and took a swig of bottled water, then returned the bottle to the cup holder. Nadia had been much more entertaining: witty, pretty, and eager to explain her deep-diving baby.
    The little sphere, just over two meters wide, filled with reassuring sounds: the ping of a directional signal every few seconds, hollow little beeps from transponders dropped months before, another ping from sonar, steady ticking, the sigh and whine of pumps and click of solenoids.
    I rolled on my butt and bent the couch back into a seat, then doubled over to pull up my slippers--thick knitted booties, actually, with rubber soles. I stared between my knees at a shimmer of air trapped in the sub's frame below the sphere. The silvery wobble had been many times larger just forty minutes ago.
    Two thousand feet. The outside pressure was now sixty atmospheres, 840 pounds per square inch. Nadia had described it as a Really Large Guy pogo-sticking all over your head. Inside, at one atmosphere, we could not feel it. The sphere distributed the pressure evenly. No bends, no tremors, no rapture of the deep. Shirtsleeve travel, almost. We wouldn't even need to spend time in a chamber when we surfaced.
    The sub carried a load of steel bars, ballast to be dropped when we wanted to switch to near-neutral buoyancy. Dave would turn on the altimeter at about a hundred feet above the seafloor and let the ingots
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    rip like little bombs. Sometimes the DSV held on to a few, slaying a little heavy, and pointed her thrusters down to hover like a helicopter. A little lighter, and she could "float," aiming the thrusters up to avoid raising silt.
    An hour into the dive. Twenty-seven hundred feet. The sphere was getting colder and time was definitely speeding up.
    "When did you meet Owen Montoya?" Dave asked. "A few weeks ago," I said. Montoya was a fascinating topic around the office water cooler: the elusive rich guy who employed everyone on the Sea Messenger.
    "He must approve of what you're doing," Dave said.
    "How's that?" '
    "Dr. Mauritz used to have top pick for these dives." Stanley Mauritz was the Sea Messengers chief oceanographer and director of research, on loan to the ship from the Scripps Institution in exchange for Montoya's support of student research. "But you've had three in a row."
    "Yeah," I said. The researchers on board Sea Messenger fought for equipment and resources just like scientists everywhere.
    "Nadia's trying to keep the peace," Dave added after a pause.
    "Sorry to upset the balance."
    Dave shrugged. "I stay out of it. Let's do our check."
    We used our separate turquoise monitor screens to examine different shipboard systems, focusing first on air. Mary's Triumph maintained an oxygen-enriched atmosphere at near sea-level pressure.
    Dave raised his mike and clicked the switch. "Mary to Messenger. We're at one thousand meters. Systems check okay." '
    The hollow voice of Jason, our shipboard dive master and controller, came back a few seconds later.