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  When diving in deep waters before, the pressure had been nearly unbearable—clogging the ears, crushing the chest—like fighting a hostile, alien element. Now it was comfortable, natural. It seemed to flow in and out like lifeblood.

  Now he felt ethereal, a disembodied spirit, energy streaking through ether. His new world had so much more dimension, so much freedom. At last, he was working with the pressure and the current. His body responded, remembering what had been forgotten for so long.

  Gliding effortlessly through his new home, he was a creature new born.

  RED TIDE

  BY

  D. D. CHAPMAN AND DELORIS LEHMAN TARZAN

  A Division of Charter Communications Ine.

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  RED TIDE

  Copyright© 1975 by D. D. Chapman and Deloris Tarzan

  An Ace Book

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotes to be used specifically for reviews.

  for David with special love

  Printed in U.S.A.

  “If the earth were smoothed out to be a perfect sphere the oceans would be a uniform 8000 feet deep over the entire globe, and fish would rule the world. The cliff at Glacier Point at Yosemite is 3,254 feet. At the continental shelf, the earth plunges to depths of 10,000 and 30,000 feet. Four fifths of the oceans are almost two miles deep, and the overall depth is 12,468 feet. The average height of the land is only 2,756 feet above sea level.”

  —C.P. Idyll, The Deep Sea

  “Life reaches its greatest diversity in tropical seas and tropical forests. Warmth, light, moisture, the three essentials for life, are here always present and dependable. It is generally thought that life got its start on this planet, a couple of billion years ago, in warm shallow seas; and these seas continue to provide the most favorable environment for life that we can imagine. Animals and plants have really never learned how to leave the sea. In going on land, they have learned how to take a bit of the sea with them. In a sense all land organisms are packages of sea water, variously wrapped and supported. But all these clever packages “leak” a little, and they must have some way of getting water back.”

  —Marston Bates, The Forest and the Sea

  “All life is distributed in discrete packets; but all life is also continuous—the packets are momentary aspects of an ever flowing stream through time.”

  —Marston Bates, The Forest and the Sea

  “Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite.”

  —Charles Darwin Life and Letters of Huxley, Vol. I

  “Do not even you know that a green drake, and an alderfly, and a dragonfly, live under water till they change their skins, just as Tom changed his? And if a water animal can continually change into a land animal, why should not a land animal sometimes change into a water animal?”

  —Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

  Red Tide

  “Each of us carries in his soul and mind a different notion of what is essential to our survival; a different longing and a personal interpretation, in the largest sense, of what life preservation is about”

  —Romain Gary

  The Roots of Heaven

  I

  The octopus tensed, his eye alerted to motion at the edge of his territory. A crab scuttled cautiously into view, feeling its way around an obstacle. Not sensing the safety and rightness of his own territory, where he knew the burrows and soft spots that meant invisibility, he tested the water carefully and fearfully before crossing a yard of open ground.

  The octopus flowed imperceptibly higher on the concrete wall, his skin as raffled and as dark as he could make it. He was a mountain dweller. Inhabiting an area nine tenths of the way up the 9000 foot mountain, where a rocky plateau stretched into the dim distance, he was nevertheless 450 feet below the surface of the ocean.

  Twenty-seven million years ago, when Cob K Seamount was a volcanic island several hundred miles northwest of the Oregon coast, waves had washed the plateau into one side and, with the subsidence of the ocean floor, the mountain settled with geological patience, until the top of the rock chimney which had once formed part of its cinder cone lay 110 feet beneath the waves.

  The octopus launched himself from the wall, eight powerful arms pushing from a hundred points, his siphon adding its jet to the motion. Skin flaps between the arms billowed out. A giant umbrella engulfed the crab from all directions at once. Immobilizing suckers sought out claws, and covered the hard body surface. In the tiny water space left to the crab, venom from the saliva of the octopus completed the work.

  In a day, crab parts would be meticulously removed from the area of the den, a cavern under the concrete blown out by the siphon of the artisan, where he would lay in wait for the next trespasser.

  The concrete wall which had so greatly increased the wealth of the octopus by diverting crab traffic by his lair, arched into the blackness above, forming a structure from which vibrations came to disturb the octopus during his digestive and waiting periods.

  The structure was one of six strung down the side of the seamount. Near the edge of the plateau, inside the Main Station, two unsleeping men shared a common thought. In a laboratory at the center of a labyrinth of corridors, Alex Demetre finished an autopsy on a beagle and wrapped the body in heavy plastic for disposal.

  His mind wasn’t on the dog. It was fixed on a head of hair the color of an Irish Setter. There were some sad looks around the lab when the staff found out the new redhead wouldn’t be working at the Main Station, but way down, at the levels forbidden them. They’d accused Alex of greed, cold heartedness, and pure blind sin, wasting her on solitary work with an animal colony. Greed, yes. He’d like to keep her to himself.

  He’d tried to bait her. “You may have to spend longer than normal in the decompression trams.”

  Her forehead furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Women sometimes have a little more trouble than men getting the hydrogen out of their system. The adipose deposits are—irregular.”

  “You saying decompression may give me a pain in the ass?” If her voice had been any less crusty…

  He opened the disposal bin and dropped the body. It would be sent back on the supply ship, along with their refuse, to prevent sharks from finding the area attractive.

  When he put through a request for beagles what he’d been doing would come out. Not budgeted for it, Mattern would say…you never had authorization. But he was so damn close. They could eventually survive underwater not as intruders, but at home. Yes, and work like fish to destroy that underwater base, if that had to be the government’s reason for funding pressure study.

  He wished Kombol’s message had been less mysterious. But a man as famous as Kombol could afford to be a little erratic about when he showed up.

  He washed his hands, reflecting how curious it was that the frontiers of space and the sea should both have been bridged by dead dogs.

  It didn’t matter what Mattern thought. Mattern. Little Napoleon. He’d been a damn good diver in his day, Alex supposed, but the best that could be said for him as an administrator was that he didn’t get in the way much. He made pretty good reports to the topside brass, and an impressive tour-guide when they came inspecting. And, truthfully, that’s all anyone expected of the nominal head. He had a great smile on television—that shock of grey hair topping his face made a great public hit—and didn’t he know it. And he had seniority. How many contracts had he served below? Five?

  Alex pushed a hand through his stiff dark hair, which always felt full of
dust, though he knew that was impossible in the monitored atmosphere. He crumpled the papers and brushed a space on the lab bench for his coffee. He wasn’t sleepy. No one else would be up for another four hours. He stretched. The quiet and privacy of the middle of the night were a calming luxury. Maybe he’d drop a cannabis cap and get stoned and just think about her for a while. It would beat the depression of another failure.

  On the floor above, in his sleeping quarters, Lyle Mat-tern had lain awake since midnight, alternately working himself up to pressing the intercom buzzer to Mid-station, then fighting down the urge. It was 0400 hours.

  He had gone through the same thing every night for a week, and every night the outcome was the same. He didn’t call. He had called down twice last week, and was told both times she was at the bottom station, Down Under. If it happened again, he’d start to look silly.

  In another two weeks he would leave Cobb from his fourth contract—his second as manager. He could never return. Although by standards on top forty-five was far from old, it was retirement time for an underwater man. After that age, extensive decompression time got risky.

  His weight stood at only 5 pounds more than it had been in college. He could rap his knuckles on his belly and it was solid. His face was unlined except for the creases by his eyes, and his full head of hair appeared to him amusingly premature in its greyness.

  He knew this didn’t have to be the end of a useful life—Ehrlmann, who had preceded him into retirement, had done pretty well in politics. On the other hand, the man who’d gone before them both had become an innocuous figurehead; the honorary chairman of a department of oceanography—a big title, but no duties beyond the occasional judging of beauty contests.

  Back when 450 feet was a miracle, he’d been proud of being one of the pioneers to live at 15 atmospheres. Now they hired people who couldn’t even dive. They sent them down to that dinky lab 7200 feet down at 200 atmospheres, where God knows what went on, and said he was too old for it. Retirement! Damn but it stung.

  Disquiet circled his room. For the first time in his memory the weekly supply ship had failed to appear. No one could say it was sloppy administration on his part. With some kind of epidemic up there, they had to take unusual care to sterilize all supplies coming below, since bugs spread so fast among people packed as close as they were down here. All the same he didn’t like it.

  He stretched on his back and waved his arms over his head. He liked to feel the air move against his skin, viscous at fifteen atmospheres, supporting. He stretched again and relaxed, muscle by muscle. He had heard that as a man grew older he required less sleep; that he fussed more.

  If he needed evidence to convince himself he was not approaching the sexual Sahara of age, there was Marne. Marne of the short ruff of red hair which she said she shampooed with mayonnaise, and wondered if she’d have to switch; Marne of the light Texas accent it had taken him nearly an hour to identify and finally pin down by the slight rasp; Marne who had lost her husband at an age when most women are seeing their firstborn off to kindergarten.

  He looked at the intercom buzzer again. Planning what he could say, forming the sentences, he fell asleep.

  His intercom jolted him awake at shortly after 0500 hours, an hour before his alarm would have gone off. His fingers fumbled against the soft neoprene wall skin before settling on the receiver. Out of his sleep he heard the garbled voice and reacted automatically, reaching for the filter switch to convert the quacking voice to intelligibility. It was Hannes, the communications chief.

  Mattern tried to clear his head and finally made out the essence of the message. He took a long breath. “Sit tight. I’ll be right there.”

  He sat on the edge of his bunk and let his heart catch up with the sitting position.

  This was serious enough that his second in command should be involved. He picked up the receiver again and pushed the combination for Alex’s room. No answer. Alex was anything but a sound sleeper. As a section head, Alex had a private room; the others all shared. If he were pulling something like having a woman, she’d be there, not the other way around. Then he rubbed his head and came fully awake. With Alex, if he wasn’t in his room it could mean only one thing: he was getting his days and nights turned around again. He’d be in the labs.

  Mattern pushed the combination for the labs, and got an answer after the first ring.

  “Biochemistry.”

  “Alex?”

  “Who’s this?” The voice was sad.

  “Who in hell do you think? Do you know what time it is?”

  “That what you called to find out?”

  “Emergency,” he growled. “Get up to Communications fast.” He rung off, hoping the words hadn’t carried through the walls to waken anyone else. He wanted as little panic as possible until he was certain.

  It would have been more efficient to sleep and work in shifts around the clock, but psychologically they held up better when they adhered to a straight day and night schedule. Besides, the soundproofing wasn’t good enough that anyone could have slept thru someone else’s work shift.

  Alex couldn’t seem to stick to a straight schedule. It would start with working an extra hour or so to finish something in the lab, and progress to his working half the night or more, then falling asleep in the early morning, and being out of it most of the day. And that voice—was he high again on those pills he thought no one knew about?

  Mattern hooked the yellow belt around his coveralls and stepped outside his door. The sign of air through the vent was the only sound in a corridor still quiet with sleep. On his first contract below it had come hard that there was no new sound at dawn to mark the coming of morning—if it could any longer be given that name. No insects whirring, no bird’s cry, no thickened traffic. The boom of morning planes he thought he had become deaf to was a void in the early hours. Only, after the dressing and puttering, the voices began; one, then several, then humanity, on all four floors of the sprawling Main Station.

  At the forward end of the chamber, Mattern scrawled the time and his name into the log book beside the door with its bright lettering, “DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN AT THIS LEVEL MORE THAN 72 HOURS.”

  The traffic center operated from the same power source as the Main Station. It was spitting distance away. Dying distance, if you wanted to look at it that way. It was a short ride in the tram; didn’t take much distance across the mountain to increase 250 feet in altitude. Not much more than the rope tow up a beginner’s ski slope. For those who weren’t divers, it occasionally took some stiff indoctrination via what he thought of as nitwit films, to make it clear why it was necessary to decompress for 72 hours and let the hydrogen out of solution in their blood, before going on up. They showed the effects of bends with about the same sophistication Army films used to show VD.

  It took a firm hold on the door to push it sideways into its recess. Surprised him that some of the women could manage it. It snapped shut behind him, leaving him in the pressure lock between the station and the tram. He cranked the wheel at the center of the circular tram door to release the pressure seal. Always made him feel a little melodramatic, like the submarine captain in the old war movies who used to fight the same kind of wheel to seal out the sea on a panic dive. He pushed the door open and stepped in.

  Each car was an environmental chamber with its own gas supply, pressure gauges, and an exit hatch for maintenance work along the line, or for emergency escape in case anything went wrong. It never had. That was one area in which they’d been luckier than they had any right to expect.

  Minutes later the car attached itself with a light bump. He turned the wheel to unseal the door and stepped out into the Traffic Center, pushing the control to send the car back down so it would be there for Alex.

  The communications room was empty except for Hannes.

  “What’s the story?”

  Hannes’ head snapped up and a look of terror showed through the usual opaque ceramic blue of his eyes. The effect could no
t have been greater if the man had screamed.

  “They cut communications to us in the middle of a message. Last I got was what I read you. Here.” He slapped his hand down on the paper and handed it-to Mattern.

  SITUATION ACUTE. DESTROY WEATHER

  STATION IMMEDIATELY. CURTAIL ALL

  RADIO CONTACTS. REPEAT, ALL RADIO

  CONTACTS. EXPECT ENEMY ACTION. AT

  ALL COSTS STAY BELOW. RED TIDE…

  RED TIDE…

  Red tide? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Didn’t make any sense at all, unless it was some political reference and it wasn’t like the government to be cute.

  Hannes watched Mattern’s face as he read. “That means knock out any trace of ourselves on top, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what it means.”

  His voice was thick. “Will you do it?”

  “Unless you’d like to announce where we are for the benefit of depth charges.” He tapped the paper against his hand. “Who’s up on the platform?”

  “Same six guys, since the supply ship didn’t get here to relieve anyone.”

  “All right. Get the tower on the intercom and tell those men to get into the supply elevator and get down here. They’ve got ten minutes.”

  “Doesn’t give them time to rescue much equipment. And where will they set it up? Down here…” he trailed off, his eyes on Mattern’s face. He flipped the switch and relayed the message.

  Mattern watched the man’s fingers and listened to the voice. Neither betrayed the fear in his eyes. Hannes could be counted on.