The Ghost from the Grand Banks Page 5

  “I’ll do my best to be gentle. Definitely no nukes—not even a small one.”

  The first bite of his now tepid steak triggered a wry memory. Several times, Bradley recalled, he had eaten octopus—and quite enjoyed it.

  He hoped he could avoid the reverse scenario.

  13. PYRAMID POWER

  When the sobbing Ada had been sent to her room, Edith and Donald Craig stared at each other in mutual disbelief.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Edith at last. “She’s never been disobedient before; in fact, she always got on very well with Miss Ives.”

  “And this is just the sort of test she’s usually very good at—no equations, only multiple choices and pretty pictures. Let me read that note again…”

  Edith handed it over, while continuing to study the examination paper that had caused all the trouble.

  Dear Mr. Craig,

  I am very sorry to say that I have had to suspend Ada for insubordination.

  This morning her class was given the attached Standard Visual Perception Test. She did extremely well (95%) with all the problems except Number 15. To my surprise, she was the only member of the class to give an incorrect answer to this very simple question.

  When this was pointed out to her, she flatly denied that she was wrong. Even when I showed her the printed answer, she refused to admit her mistake and stubbornly maintained that everyone else was in error! At this point it became necessary, for the sake of class discipline, to send her home.

  I am truly sorry, as she is usually such a good girl. Perhaps you will talk to her and make her see reason.

  Sincerely,

  Elizabeth Ives (Head Mistress)

  “It almost looks,” said Donald, “as if she was deliberately trying to fail.”

  Edith shook her head. “I don’t think so. Even with this mistake, she’d have got a good pass.”

  Donald stared at the little set of brightly colored geometrical figures that had caused all the trouble.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” he said. “You go and talk to her and calm her down. Give me ten minutes with a scissors and some stiff paper—then I’ll settle it once and for all, so there can’t be any further argument.”

  “I’m afraid that will only be tackling the symptoms, not the disease. We want to know why she kept insisting she was right. That’s almost pathological. We may have to send her to a psychiatrist.”

  The thought had already occurred to Donald, but he had instantly rejected it. In later years, he would often remember the irony of this moment.

  While Edith was consoling Ada, he quickly measured out the necessary triangle with pencil and ruler, cut them from the paper, and joined up the edges until he had made three examples of the two simplest possible solid figures—two tetrahedrons, one pyramid, all with equal sides. It seemed a childish exercise, but it was the least he could do for his beloved and troubled daughter.

  15 (a) [he read]. Here are two identical tetrahedrons. Each has 4 equilateral triangles for sides, making a total of 8.

  If any of the two faces are placed together, how many sides does the new solid have?

  It was such a simple thought experiment that any child should be able to do it. Since two of the eight sides were swallowed up in the resulting diamond-shaped solid, the answer was obviously six. At least Ada had got that right…

  Holding it between thumb and first finger, Donald spun the little cardboard diamond a few times, then dropped it on his desk with a sigh. It split apart at once into the two components.

  15 (b). Here are a tetrahedron and a pyramid, each with edges of the same length. The pyramid, however, has a square base as well as 4 triangular sides. Altogether, therefore, the two figures have 9 sides.

  If any two of the triangular faces are placed in contact, how many sides does the resulting figure have?

  “Seven, of course,” Donald muttered, since two of the original nine will be lost inside the new solid…

  Idly, he tilted the little cardboard shapes until a pair of triangles merged.

  Then he blinked.

  Then his jaw dropped.

  He sat in silence for a moment, checking the evidence of his own eyes. A slow smile spread across his face, and he said quietly into the housecom: “Edith—Ada—I’ve got something to show you.”

  The moment Ada entered, red-eyed and still sniffling, he reached out and took her in his arms.

  “Ada,” he whispered, stroking her hair gently, “I’m very proud of you.” The astonishment on Edith’s face delighted him more than it should have.

  “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. “The answer was so obvious that the people who set the paper never bothered to check it. Look…”

  He took the five-sided pyramid and stuck the four-sided tetrahedron on one face.

  The new shape had only five sides—not the “obvious” seven…

  “Even though I’ve found the answer,” Donald continued—and there was something like awe in his voice as he looked at his now smiling daughter—’I can’t visualize it mentally. How did you know that the other sides lined up like this?”

  Ada looked puzzled.

  “What else could they do?” she answered.

  There was a long silence while Donald and Edith absorbed this reply, and almost simultaneously came to the same conclusion.

  Ada might have little comprehension of logic or analysis—but her feeling for space—her geometrical intuition—was altogether extraordinary. At the age of nine, it was certainly far superior to that of her parents. Not to mention those who had set the examination paper…

  The tension in the room slowly drained away. Edith began to laugh, and presently all three of them embraced with almost childlike joy.

  “Poor Miss Ives!” chortled Donald. “Wait until we tell her that she’s got the Ramanujan of geometry in her class!”

  It was one of the last happy moments of their married life; they would often cling to its memory in the bitter years to come.

  14. CALLING ON OSCAR

  Why are these things always called Jim?” said the reporter who had intercepted Bradley at St. John’s Airport. He was surprised there was only one, considering the excitement his mission seemed to be generating. One, of course, was often more than enough; but at least there was no Bluepeace demonstration to contend with.

  “After the first diver who wore an armored suit, when they salvaged the Lusitania’s gold back in the thirties. Of course, they’ve been enormously improved since then…”

  “How?”

  “Well, they’re self-propelled, and I could live in Jim for fifty hours, two kilometers down—though it wouldn’t be much fun. Even with servo-assisted limbs, four hours is maximum efficient working time.”

  “You wouldn’t get me into one of those things,” said the reporter, as the fifteen hundred kilos of titanium and plastic that had accompanied Bradley from Houston was being carefully hoisted into a Chevron helicopter. “Just looking at it gives me claustrophobia. Especially when you remember—”

  Bradley knew what was coming, and escaped by waving goodbye and walking toward the chopper. The question had been put to him, in one form or another, by at least a dozen interviewers hoping to get some reaction. They had all been disappointed, and had been forced to concoct such imaginative headlines as THE IRON MAN IN THE TITANIUM SUIT.

  “Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?” he had been asked—even by other divers. They were the only people he had answered seriously.

  “Why should I be?” he had always replied. “Ted Collier was my best friend; God alone knows how many drinks we shared.” (’And girls,” he might have added.) “Ted would have been delighted; no other way I could have afforded Jim back in those days—got him for a quarter of what he’d cost to build. State of the art, too—never had a mechanical failure. Sheer bad luck Ted was trapped before they could get him out from that collapsed rig. And you know… Jim kept him alive three hours longer than the guarantee. Someday I may need those th
ree hours myself.”

  But not, he hoped, on this job—if his secret ingredient worked. It was much too late to pull out now; he could only trust that his encyclopedia, which seemed to have let him down badly in one important detail, had been accurate in other matters.

  As always, Jason was impressed by the sheer size of the Hibernia platform, even though only a fraction of it was visible above sea level. The million-ton concrete island looked like a fortress, its jagged outline giving a field of fire in all directions. And indeed it was designed to ward off an implacable, though nonhuman, enemy—the great bergs that came drifting down from their Arctic nursery. The engineers claimed that the structure could withstand the maximum possible impact. Not everyone believed them.

  There was a slight delay as the helicopter approached the landing platform on the roof of the multistoried topside building; it was already occupied by an RAF chopper, which had to be rolled aside before they could touch down. Bradley took one glance at its insignia, and groaned silently. How did they know so quickly? he wondered.

  The president of World Wildlife was waiting for him as soon as he stepped out onto the windswept platform, and the big rotors came slowly to rest.

  “Mr. Bradley? I know your reputation, of course—I’m delighted to meet you.”

  “Er—thank you, Your Highness.”

  “This octopus—is it really as big as they say?”

  “That’s what I intend to find out.”

  “Better you than me. And how do you propose to deal with it?”

  “Ah—that’s a trade secret.”

  “Nothing violent, I hope.”

  “I’ve already promised not to use nukes… sir.”

  The Prince gave a fleeting smile, then pointed to the somewhat battered fire extinguisher which Bradley was carefully nursing.

  “You must be the first diver to carry one of those things underwater. Are you going to use it like a hypodermic syringe? Suppose the patient objects?”

  Not a bad guess, thought Bradley; give him six out of ten. And I’m not a British citizen; he can’t send me to the Tower for refusing to answer questions.

  “Something like that, Your Highness. And it won’t do any permanent harm.”

  I hope, he added silently. There were other possibilities; Oscar might be completely indifferent—or he might get annoyed. Bradley was confident that he would be perfectly safe inside Jim’s metal armor, but it would be uncomfortable to be rattled around like a pea in a pod.

  The Prince still seemed worried, and Bradley felt quite certain that his concern was not for the human protagonist in the coming encounter. His Royal Highness’s words quickly confirmed that suspicion.

  “Please remember, Mr. Bradley, that this creature is unique—this is the first time anybody has ever seen one alive. And it’s probably the largest animal in the world. Perhaps the largest that’s ever existed. Oh, some dinosaurs certainly weighed more—but they didn’t cover as much territory.”

  Bradley kept thinking of those words as he sank slowly toward the seabed, and the pale North Atlantic sunlight faded to complete blackness. They exhilarated rather than alarmed him; he would not have been in this business if he scared easily. And he felt that he was not alone; two benign ghosts were riding with him into the deep.

  One was the first man ever to experience this world—his boyhood hero William Beebe, who had skirted the edge of the abyss in his primitive bathysphere, back in the 1930s. And the other was Ted Collier, who had died in the very space that Bradley was occupying now—quietly, and without fuss, because there was nothing else to do.

  “Bottom coming up; visibility about twenty meters—can’t see the installation yet.”

  Topside, everyone would be watching him on sonar and—as soon as he reached it—through the snagged camera.

  “Target at thirty meters, bearing two two zero.”

  “I see it; current must have been stronger than I thought. Hitting the deck now.”

  For a few seconds everything was hidden in a cloud of silt, and—as he always did at such moments—he recalled Apollo 11’s “Kicking up a little dust.” The current swiftly cleared the obscuring haze, and he was able to survey the massive engineering complex now looming up in the twin beams from Jim’s external lights.

  It seemed that a fair-sized chemical factory had been dumped on the seabed, to become a rendezvous for myriads of fish. Bradley could see less than a quarter of the whole installation, as most of it was hidden in distance and darkness. But he knew the layout intimately, for he had spent a good deal of expensive, frustrating, and occasionally dangerous time in almost identical rigs.

  A massive framework of steel tubes, thicker than a man, formed an open cage around an assembly of valves, pipes, and pressure vessels, threaded with cables and miscellaneous minor plumbing. It looked as if it had been thrown together without rhyme or reason, but Bradley knew that every item had been carefully planned to deal with the immense forces slumbering far below.

  Jim had no legs—underwater, as in space, they were often more of a nuisance than they were worth—and his movements could be controlled with exquisite precision by low-powered jets. It had been more than a year since Bradley had worn his mobile armor, and at first he overcorrected, but old skills quickly reasserted themselves.

  He let himself drift gently toward his objective, hovering a few centimeters above the seabed to avoid stirring up silt. This was a situation where good visibility was important, and he was glad that Jim’s hemispheric dome gave him an all-around view.

  Remembering the fate of the camera—it lay a few meters away in a tangle of pencil-thin cabling—Bradley paused just outside the framework of the manifold, considering the best way of getting inside. His first objective was to find the break in the fiber-optic monitor link; he knew its exact routing, so this should not present any problems.

  His second was to evict Oscar; that might not be quite so easy.

  “Here we go,” he reported to topside. “Coming in through the tradesman’s entrance—Access Tunnel B… not much room to maneuver, but no problem…”

  He scraped once, very gently, against the metal walls of the circular corridor, and as he did so became aware of a steady, low-frequency thump, thump, thump… coming from somewhere in the labyrinth of tanks and tubes around him. Presumably some piece of equipment was still functioning; it must have been very much noisier around here when everything was running full blast…

  The thought triggered a long-forgotten memory. He recalled how, as a small boy, he had silenced the speakers of a local fairground’s PA system with well-aimed shots from his father’s rifle—and had then lived for weeks in fear of being found out. Maybe Oscar had also been offended by this noisy intruder into his domain, and had taken similar direct action to restore peace and quiet.

  But where was Oscar?

  “I’m puzzled—I’m right inside now, and can see the whole layout. Plenty of hiding places—but none of them big enough to conceal anything larger than a man. Certainly nothing as big as an elephant! Ah—this is what you’re looking for!”

  “What have you found?”

  “Main cable trunk—looks like a plate of spaghetti that’s been dropped by a careless waiter. Must have taken some strength to rip it open; you’ll have to replace the whole section.”

  “What could have done it? Hungry shark?”

  “Or angry moray eel. But no teeth marks—I’d expect some. And teeth, for that matter. An occi’s still the best bet. But whoever did it isn’t at home.”

  Taking his time, Bradley made a careful survey of the installation, and could find no other sign of damage. With any luck, the unit should be operational within a couple of days—unless the secret saboteur struck again. Meanwhile, there was nothing more that he could do; he began to jet his way delicately back the way he had come, steering Jim in and out of the maze of girders and pipes. Once he disturbed a small, pulpy mass that was indeed an octopus—perhaps as much as a meter across.

  “
Cross you off my list of suspects,” he muttered to himself.

  He was almost through the outer framework of massive tubes and girders when he realized that the scenery had changed.

  Many years ago, he had been a reluctant small boy on a school tour of a famous botanical garden in southern Georgia. He remembered practically nothing of the visit, but there was one item that, for some reason, had impressed him greatly. He had never heard of the banyan, and was amazed to discover that there was a tree that could have not one trunk, but dozens—each a separate pillar serving to support its widespread canopy of branches.

  In the present case, of course, there were exactly eight, though he did not bother to count them. He was staring into the huge, jet-black eyes, like fathomless pools of ink, that were regarding him dispassionately.

  Bradley had often been asked “Have you ever been frightened?” and had always given the same answer: “God, yes—many times. But always when it was over—that’s why I’m still around.” Though no one would ever believe it, he was not in the least frightened now—only awed, as any man might be by some unexpected wonder. Indeed, his first reaction was: “I owe an apology to that diver.” His second was: “Let’s see if this works.”

  The cylinder of the fire extinguisher was already grasped by Jim’s left external manipulator, and Bradley servoed it up toward the aiming position. Simultaneously, he moved the right limb so that its mechanical fingers could work the trigger. The whole operation took only seconds; but Oscar reacted first.

  He seemed to be mimicking Bradley’s actions, aiming a tube of flesh toward him—almost as if imitating his hastily modified fire extinguisher. Is he going to squirt something at me? Bradley wondered…

  He would never have believed that anything so big could move so quickly. Even inside his armor, Bradley felt the impact of the jet-stream, as Oscar switched to emergency drive; this was no time for walking along the seabed like an eight-legged table. Then everything disappeared in a cloud of ink so dense that Jim’s high-intensity lights were completely useless.