The Ghost From the Grand Banks and the Deep Range Page 5

On the whole, however, the locals were friendly enough. After all, Edith was an Irish girl who had made good, even if she had married an Englishman. And they heartily approved of the Craigs’ efforts to restore the famous gardens to at least some vestige of their nineteenth-century glory.

  One of Donald’s first moves, after they had made the west-wing ground floor livable, was to repair the camera obscura whose dome was a late-Victorian afterthought (some said excrescence) on the castle battlements. It had been installed by Lord Francis Conroy, a keen amateur astronomer and telescope maker, during the last decade of his life; when he was paralyzed, but too proud to be pushed around the estate in a wheelchair, he had spent hours surveying his empire from this vantage point—and issuing instructions to his army of gardeners by semaphore.

  The century-old optics were still in surprisingly good condition, and threw a brilliant image of the outside world on to the horizontal viewing table. Ada was fascinated by the instrument and the sense of power it gave her as she scanned the castle grounds. It was, she declared, much better than TV—or the boring old movies her parents were always screening.

  And up here on the battlements, she could not hear the sound of their angry voices.

  12

  A MOLLUSK OF UNUSUAL SIZE

  The first bad news came soon after Bradley had settled down to his belated lunch. Chevron Canada fed its VIPs well, and Jason knew that as soon as he hit St. John’s he’d have little time for leisurely, regular meals.

  “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Bradley,” said the steward, “but there’s an urgent call from Head Office.”

  “Can’t I take it from here?”

  “I’m afraid not—there’s video as well. You’ll have to go back.”

  “Damn,” said Bradley, taking one quick mouthful of a splendid piece of Texas steak. He reluctantly pushed his plate aside, and walked to the communications booth at the rear of the jet. The video was only one way, so he had no compunction about continuing to chew as Rawlings gave his report.

  “We’ve been doing some research, Jason, about octopus sizes—the people out on the platform weren’t very happy when you laughed at their estimate.”

  “Too bad. I’ve checked with my encyclopedia. The very largest octopus is under ten meters across.”

  “Then you’d better look at this.”

  Though the image that flashed on the screen was obviously a very old photograph, it was of excellent quality. It showed a group of men on a beach, surrounding a shapeless mass about the size of an elephant. Several other photos followed in quick succession; they were all equally clear, but of what it was impossible to say.

  “If I had to put any money on it,” said Bradley, “my guess would be a badly decomposed whale. I’ve seen—and smelled—several. They look just like that; unless you’re a marine biologist, you could never identify it. That’s how sea serpents get born.”

  “Nice try, Jason. That’s exactly what most of the experts said at the time—which, by the way, was 1896. And the place was Florida—Saint Augustine Beach, to be precise.”

  “My steak is getting cold, and this isn’t exactly helping my appetite.”

  “I won’t take much longer. That little morsel weighed about five tons; luckily, a piece was preserved in the Smithsonian, so that fifty years later scientists were able to reexamine it. There’s no doubt that it was an octopus; and it must have had a span of almost seventy meters. So our diver’s guess of a hundred may not have been all that far out.”

  Bradley was silent for a few moments, processing this very unexpected—and unwelcome—piece of information.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said, “though I’m not sure that I want to.”

  “By the way,” said Rawlings, “you haven’t mentioned this to anyone?”

  “Of course not,” snapped Jason, annoyed at the very suggestion.

  “Well, the media have got hold of it somehow; the newsfax headlines are already calling it Oscar.”

  “Good publicity; what are you worried about?”

  “We’d hoped you could get rid of the beast without everyone looking over your shoulder. Now we’ve got to be careful; mustn’t hurt dear little Oscar. The World Wildlife people are watching. Not to mention Bluepeace.”

  “Those crazies!”

  “Maybe. But WW has to be taken seriously; remember who they have as president. We don’t want to upset the palace.”

  “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 three 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 n
ow—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.