Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above by Ian Sales

Author:Ian Sales [Sales, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780957188365
Google: DVIknwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 19016240
Publisher: Whippleshield Books
Published: 2013-11-14T11:00:00+00:00

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Though he never said anything, McIntyre was surprised when the kludge worked as intended and scooped up the bucket from the ocean bed. The bucket is not exactly intact—it hit the sea surface pretty goddamned hard, has split down one side, and long snakes of film have escaped from the stacks and now hang down through the bars of the kludge. McIntyre tells Stryker to drop the shot ballast—not all at once, because they don’t want to strain the damaged bucket too much or give the kludge an excuse to drop what it carries. And as the Trieste II begins its effortless rise from the ocean bottom, so McIntyre feels his spirits begin to lift, and his mind flies across the miles to the Washington Navy Yard and he knows more than ever he made the right move when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. He’s not enjoyed this dive and he feels no real sense of accomplishment at having retrieved the bucket. The Trieste II is too fragile a mistress, and though this descent has gone relatively smoothly—nothing broke!—he remembers all too well others where one damn thing after another went on the fritz. Which is not to say saturation dives are always snafu-free, or that mistakes and malfunctions cannot also prove fatal.

But, he has to admit, spending hours inside a steel ball seven feet in diameter cannot compare with the freedoms of saturation diving, the ability to move about underwater unrestricted, chained only by an umbilical—because at those pressures air in bottles would last mere minutes—limited only by his own physical endurance. True, the Trieste II can take him so much deeper—he’s here now on his way back up from 19,500 feet beneath the surface!—while the deepest he’s dived on helium-oxygen is 600 feet, and he had to spend six days in a steel can decompressing afterwards.

He looks across the pressure-sphere at the tiny window which gives the only direct view the three men have on the world outside. It’s a circle of inky blackness in the curved steel, and his eyes play tricks and he sees it as a pool of infinite depth, an opening without end in the steel, a shaft through the abyss and the hadal zone into who-knows-where and who-knows-what...

Then, nine hours later, as they near the surface and reach the depth at which sunlight can penetrate the water, the black window begins to pale and fade to blue, day dawning on their submarine world, and it glows ethereally like a beacon signalling sanctuary. So McIntyre gets down on his knees and peers through the window, and there’s the kludge and trapped in its tines the bucket, and strips of films are hanging out of it like those fronds of rusty growth on the wrecks deep below, but they’re fluttering like kelp in the vortices generated by the bathyscaphe’s ascent.

At thirty feet, Taylor pays out the cable on the kludge, so when the Trieste II breaches the surface, the bucket will stay

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