Red Tide Read online

  “What have they been reporting down? Anything?”

  Hannes’ voice was flat. “Nothing.”

  “What about the radio?”

  “Earlier I was getting some scrambled stuff, but it was too fast to take down without a recorder.”

  “Anything about a red tide?”

  Hannes shook his head. “I don’t get that at all. That’s some plankton that makes shellfish no good to eat, isn’t it?”

  “Far as I know.”

  Hannes’ face brightened, looking past him.

  Mattern turned and nearly knocked into Alex. It was the first time in several months he had seen Alex in the frostier light of the Traffic Center, and. he was struck with how much healthier that olive skin made him look against those like himself who relied on sun lamps for their color.

  Alex’s eyes snapped from Mattern to Hannes and back. “What is it?”

  Mattern pushed the message at him. “We’re getting the meteorologists down here, then we have to blow the tower.”

  Alex scanned it, stiffening. “What’s happened?”

  “You know as much as I do. Come on into the Control Room.”

  Alex’s forehead wrinkled. “What about Teawater?”

  “My God, I forgot! That damn squatter! Someone will have to get him. He won’t take to the idea of our blowing up his barge.”

  “He’ll take it all right.” Alex had a faint smile. “I’ll get him.”

  “Five hundred seamounts between here and Hawaii, and he has to choose ours.”

  Alex kept his peace, but Mattern knew what was going through his head. Teawater had chosen it first, and for the same reasons the government had. He supposed the fact that no one had ever brought him to court for claiming that whole 50 square mile plateau as his private ranch meant he had some rights in the matter.

  The Control Room door slid shut behind them. Mat-tern eased into the cupped red seat and fitted the headphones over his ears. He pushed the night alert. A melodious run of four chimes was played then repeated, beamed into every laboratory and sleeping quarter of the Cobb complex. Mattern sat erect and pulled in his stomach before he picked up the mike.

  “Your attention please. We have received instructions to destroy our weather station.’ All section heads will meet in the main dining room at 0800 for further instructions.”

  He waited a minute then repeated the message, articulating clearly for the sleep-thick heads.

  He slammed the mike down and flipped the toggle. The good grey leader. God on high in crepe-soled shoes. He opened the line to the communications room. “Hannes, keep an open line until the antenna goes. Pick up anything you can.”

  “Roger, will do.”

  Alex raised the shield on the instrument panel. “

  “Which way will it fall?”

  “Southwest.”

  “Any chance of its hitting Teawater’s barge before we can get to him?”

  Mattern thought a minute. “Only in the off chance there are winds up there stronger than anything we’ve ever seen. The current will carry it away from him.”

  “Sounds like the supply elevator fastening on.”

  Feet shuffled in the dim corridor.

  “Jesus, it smells funny down here.”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Through here,” Hannes told them.

  Mattern strained to hear. “Take a look. Are they all down?”

  Alex craned out the door. “I count six.”

  A chill swept through Mattern. Amputating the tower, isolation from the world, was something they’d made provision for in a matter of emergency defense. He’d never counted on having to do it. Alone down here with no supplies coming—could they make it? He hesitated.

  Alex looked at him. “Do we have to let them decide?”

  Maybe Alex wasn’t such a hot candidate for second in charge. He had no toughness in him. Hell, why should being a hotshot lab jockey qualify a man for responsibility?

  “They know what’s happening up there. We don’t. We have to trust them to remember we’re here.”

  Alex closed his eyes. “All right.” His right hand moved to the switch. “Ready?” The voice was automatic; at odds with the expression. It seemed to suggest that land men torn by their own catastrophes would scarcely remember a group of laboratories with no strategic significance. But they had remembered enough to send warning.

  Mattern had the faculty of going icy calm in crisis. It was part of what had made him a crack diver. He set his mouth.

  “Roger.” He turned two dials, then watching Alex’s hand move down the panel, threw a switch.

  The chimney of rock which towered over the plateau of the seamount vibrated with the explosion, and even through the concrete and neoprene, the sound of its destruction reverberated. Mattern gripped the edge of the table.

  “That’s it. Throw on the lights outside. Let’s watch her fall past.”

  They sprinted down the corridor. Hannes and the six meteorologists were there. The nine men crowded around the port, waiting. A moment later the derrick-like structure, trailing a plume of bubbles, floated silently outside, an alien metal fish acquiescing to the current, sinking gracefully out of sight.

  Mattern straightened. “That’s it. As far as they know on top, there’s no such thing as Cobb.” He started, finding his face within a foot of one of the meteorologists, a man he knew not at all, a man with soft cheeks and greying hair, and grey eyes streaming unbelieving tears.

  II

  Alex picked out a diving suit and slipped into it. It smelled of the last man to use it, and felt light, almost inadequate, compared with the suit he usually wore. He slipped in a recharged power pack for the suit-warmer, pulled on flipper boots, and lowered himself down the well. He dropped, pushing against the ladder, bracing against the cramping shudder as the cold closed around him and the hiss of escaping bubbles gave way to silence. The pale moon of light from the diving well receded in the cloudy water.

  The shell of the station loomed overhead, studded with light from the double row of ports. The luminous anti-fouling paint kept it smooth except for the windows, where settling organisms clung in bits of live soot.

  Alex turned and kicked hard.

  From the gloom at the far end of the station, an enormous grouper swam waggling out like an outsize dog to tag along. He was always there, looking for a handout.

  They called him Greg—short for gregarious.

  The guide cables fanned out in a spiderweb in six directions to the work locations, labelled at each intersection, guidelines in the dark to prevent divers from becoming lost or carried away in the current.

  He attached the loose ring at his belt to Coordinate B and began a swinging handover-hand pull that made lazy man’s work of the trip. The ping of the rebreather’s capacity signal was a metronome clocking each pull. He didn’t bother with the lantern on his topknot. He’d need it when he ran out of cable at the end of Teawater’s claim, and had to swim across the crab pens; a Pied Piper to the inevitable hordes of fish attracted to his light.

  Crossline 1 glowed dully before him with the fluorescence of new nylon. Alex had helped lay out the original line, and now, section by section as it aged, it was being replaced. It was one of the few signs of passing time. Without seasons or .sunsets, such signs were rare.

  Last week, at the news of an epidemic, some of them had gone back to turning on the TV newscasts. Most TV programs, ridiculous even on top, became unpardonably boring viewed below. The daily news seemed little more than repetitions of the same trivia, with names shifted from day to day to give the impression something besides the newscaster’s hairline was changing.

  Even though the newscasters seemed excited by it, the news of an epidemic didn’t seem that earthshaking. Didn’t the flu go around every year? Then yesterday they’d begun citing deaths.

  Sometime between the time Hannes had called him to watch last night’s news and now, someone had likely decided the disease was neither natural nor accidental
. If it had been a tentative step at biological warfare, it wouldn’t take long to retaliate with hardware. It was too easy to imagine the rest: air bursts over New York; crowded subway tunnels; darkness; panic; death. He’d seen it in technicolor a thousand times; seen it in fiction so often he was numbed to its possible reality.

  Harder to face were the thoughts of a deserted delicatessen on 89th Street, the display case dark, shelves dusty, the tinned smoked salmon which had perhaps come from within a few miles of here having survived longer than the storekeeper who would have sold it…Demetre’s Delicatessen, closed without benefit of lock, with row on row of cheeses and breads molding, and the air still sharp with sage.

  Alex pulled himself faster. It wasn’t from any hurry to “rescue” Teawater. The man would probably have to be dragged back, protesting his rights all the way.

  The closest Alex could come to prayer was the fervent hope that his family were dead; that they were not left among the scarred and hungry crammed into the shelters and doomed to a more lingering death. Younger men might adjust to it; his father would take it as a personal affront.

  He guessed that his mother’s thoughts in death would not have been fear, since she had long lived with the possibility of death with her frail health, but grief that there were no last rites.

  He was breathing too hard. He concentrated on sucking in a slow breath. Cut off! Why did it have to happen before Kombol got here? They needed him. Whether they got back to the top or had to stay down, he was one of the best brains in the business.

  They’d lived together in graduate school, twelve years ago, and now the Black bastard was practically the reigning expert in biochemistry. Kombol had been called to Washington, and had recommended calling in Alex. The two of them had sat before that nicked oak desk with its glass ashtray looking vaguely oily from a dustrag and listened to the rumpled man describe the situation.

  “Suppose,” he had said, “there were an extensive underwater complex under construction—more extensive than Cobb—some 7,000 feet down. Probably pressurized to 200 feet inside. With that depth and their protective facilities, no sub, and certainly no plane or surface ship—or fleet for that matter—could expect to attack it. The only possibility for counteraction would seem to be individuals arriving undetected from the bottom. But as far as we know, divers can’t manage more than a few hundred feet. If you wanted to attack the place, how would you approach it?”

  He had sat back and sucked in his yellow cheeks,^waiting. He hadn’t said whether the facility was Russian,Chinese or imaginary. Or possibly U.S., and they wanted to know how scientific minds would approach an attack so they would know what to be prepared for. Alex wished now he’d pushed a little harder to try to learn whose and where it was.

  Even using cryogenics, a diver couldn’t go deep enough long enough to do anything about a station like that. Alex came up with the idea that hydrogen might serve as a metabolic fuel, if the depth were great enough.

  Kombol was assigned responsibility for developing the aquanaut; Alex was supposed to come up with data about man’s ultimate depth capability, and devise some means for supplying body energy long enough to carry out such a mission.

  That’s how the contract came about, though only Kombol and Alex knew that part of it. To Mattern and to anyone else, it was pure research. Alex went back to Cobb, and Kombol was working on top, out of San Diego.

  He was two weeks over schedule for a progress meeting with Alex. Instead of showing up, he’d sent that strange message:

  “Heading for Eugenia-on-Maro. This is hairy—a real live bomb. Cover for me. Give me a break and don’t try to call me. See you shortly and dazzle you with my stories. Claude.” It was sent from Fieberling Deep Prison.

  What had he been doing there? Trouble over one of his Black activist causes? Why was he taking off for a resort in the middle of a job? Claude Kombol was one of the most compulsive workers Alex had ever known.

  What if that damn resort decided to dump its occupants in the panic of a war, and Kombol was a victim? Cobb needed him.

  If they were to survive, they had to have answers now about depths and their effects on humans.

  He rolled to look overhead. The blackness was unrelieved. It was still dark above.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to convince Mattern to let him use the sub.

  He switched on his helmet light and turned his head slowly, to throw the beam down the cable. A sideways kick fended off Greg, newly curious. Coordinate 5 was just ahead.

  A squid darted toward him to pick off a tiny, vicious looking fish attracted to his light. The squid paused, pulsed, and, fascinated by the light, followed along near his head. There were fewer squid than there had been when he served his first contract six years ago. He hadn’t seen any killer whales since they laid out the work locations. The tangle of cables and lines around the stations probably read too much like a net.

  The cable terminated at a steel shaft which disappeared into the rock at the side of a plateau covered with nodules of stone. Alex released his belt ring and swam over a dark chasm that marked the edge of Teawater’s claim. Greg swam in a tight circle, then reluctantly headed back for the station. Alex wasn’t sure whether it was from knowing the limits of his own yard, or just a healthy sense of survival. Any fish that crossed Teawater’s territory was courting disaster.

  Rounding an abutment of rock, skirting an octopus which flowed back into a recess, Alex made out the silver-grey cylinder of the chamber where Myron Tea-water kept a cantankerous watch over his crab ranch.

  The gently sloping plateau around the chamber was littered with penned off sections alive with yellow-orange Cancer magister crabs, sequined in glittering clouds of stirred-up silt, crawling over each other, making the bottom seeth with movement.

  The chamber had no windows. Alex swam to the diving well at the bottom. The anchor chains were adorned with crabs, climbing them to try to get inside to the source of the food smell. Alex hesitated, his hands on the base of the ladder. There was no way to enter politely. He could only intrude unannounced, and take his chances on being knocked across the head with a fischschlager as he surfaced inside. He pulled a wrench from his belt and banged on the steel wall then, grabbing the ladder, pulled hard and propelled himself up to shoot through the surface fast enough to catch hold of the floor by the elbows and swing up to sit on it.

  Teawater stood across the narrow well with a fischschlager resting in his right hand. His wide shoulders made it appear that he had outgrown his dark vinyl coveralls.

  He was a man compacted for living at this depth. He had the beefy torso and long thick arms of a dirt farmer, short powerful legs; the round, bland face of professorship with hairline receded to an area of patchy red hair, and a voice deceptively gentle and high pitched.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  Alex pulled off his mask, smiling in spite of himself. He coveted Teawater’s independence.

  “I’m Alex Demetre, from the station.”

  “The government! I mighta known,” he spat. “I been waiting for the boat to come for my crabs, got them all netted up and ready to go, and there they set, losing weight. You people standing in their way? So help me, you stop my supply boat I’ll come over there and dynamite you off the mountain.”

  Alex pulled off his flippers and set them beside him to demonstrate that he was not to be frightened into dropping out and swimming away. “We didn’t stop your boat.”

  Tufts of red hair stood on end, punctuating his anger. “Then why are they off schedule? All they got to do is come out here for a boatload of crabs once a week, and they can’t manage it without being hours late. Two hundred and seventy miles from Gray’s Harbor. Way they carry on you’d think it was a thousand. All they got to do is steer the boat out here, that’s all. The boom does the loading for them. Just one grape-picker and an autopilot.

  To hell with them. Six months more and I’m gonna tell them all, including that thief who’s getting rich distributing my cra
bs, and them floundering government agents who come topside in a boat and radio down to me about how I should clear out. I’ll tell the whole works where they can shove this seamount! You know how much I make here?”

  Alex got no chance to open his mouth.

  “Never mind exactly, I’ll just tell you that every week when that ship comes they bring me a little packet of hundred dollar bills. Ain’t a bank up there I’d trust. I’m about to turn this place over to someone else if I can ever find me someone I trust, and let them run the crabbing and I’m going to get out of here and get back full time to working with my experiments.” As he spoke he reached into a tank and pulled out a partition, doubling the space allotted to some yearling crabs.

  Alex watched, fascinated, as he reached into a feed tank and snatched up an eight pound dogfish, stunned it with the schlager, and in one smooth motion slit it open, slashed out the liver, and tossed the still quivering carcass into the grinder for the yearlings.

  “What experiment is it you want to get back to?”

  Teawater eyed him suspiciously, then turned away and said offhand, “Determining the sex of megalops crab larvae.”

  The cylinder was uncompartmented except for a wall near the end which Alex presumed Was a storage area. The clutter of apparatus, tanks, papers with scribbled notes, and diving gear filled and overfilled the space, making it an edging and elbow lifting trip to follow Tea-water to a small table where a half empty mug of coffee sat.

  “All right, you’re here and it wasn’t you kept off my boat. You swear to that and you’re welcome to set and have some coffee and tell me what’s on your mind. But if the boat comes you got to get along, because I’ll have work to do.” He pursed his lips and stared at Alex over the beaker as he poured. “You didn’t come looking for a job, did you?”

  Alex shook his head. “I came to take you to the station. I’m afraid we’re in for it. In addition to all the news broadcasts about epidemics on top, we got orders to blow our tower. It looks like they’ve finally decided the epidemics were man-made.”

  Teawater’s lips tightened. “Damn fools.” Alex felt a momentary nostalgia in the voice before it became rigid again.