She’d hit the eject.
The creature writhed horribly. But the sub didn’t emerge; didn’t break free. More air erupted.
“No!” Gideon cried.
Now the trunk was warping toward him, bulging grotesquely like a puff adder.
“Gideon!” came Lennart’s voice. “What you’re doing is suicide. Get the hell away from it!”
He lit his torch, waving it at the creature as he motored forward. A tiny voice in his head told him that this was crazy, David coming at Goliath, but he pushed it aside. Through the forward viewport he saw one of the strangely thin tentacles of the creature whipping sinuously across the ocean floor. He had to do something now. He pushed the joystick down, reached the root, halted, and extended his torch, slashing at it, the heat making it pop and sizzle like seared meat. The tentacle coiled frantically, causing silt to cloud the water. He slashed again, each movement riling up more silt and engulfing him in hazy darkness.
An all-too-familiar message popped on the screen:
CONTROL TRANSFERRED TO SURFACE
He felt the joystick stop responding.
“No!” he cried.
“We’re getting you out of there.”
And now the sub started to rise. The silt cleared and Gideon—in a last, spontaneous move—grabbed a long, floating section of root that he’d chopped free with the mechanical arm and stuffed it into the science basket, next to the black boxes.
And then a voice came through the hydrophone. It was Alex’s voice: calm, pleasant, remote as the stars.
“…Let me touch your face.”
19
THE SEEDILY DRESSED man wheeled his cheap roller bag down Santa Fe’s West San Francisco Street. He passed a Starbucks and hesitated, craving a venti macchiato—or even a single shot of espresso—but realized he didn’t have the money. Turning down Galisteo Street, he stopped at a shopfront with a sign identifying it as PROFESSOR EXOTICA. It sported a window stuffed with bizarre and fantastical rocks, minerals, gems, and fossils. There was a cave bear skull, mounted; a dinosaur egg; a mummified crocodile; a spectacular azurite geode; a four-inch tourmaline; and a large, sectioned meteorite with its etched face displaying a riot of Widmanstätten lines.
The man paused at the window. He hadn’t called ahead to make an appointment, but the proprietor, a guy named Joe Culp, was almost always there. Besides, an appointment hadn’t seemed like a good idea—the last one hadn’t gone all that well, and he’d been afraid of being turned away before he even got in the door.
He collapsed the handle of the roller bag, then picked it up. Jesus, it was heavy—maybe eighty, ninety pounds—but that weight was what was going to buy his dinner and a place to spend the night. He pushed through the door, bells tinkling, and lugged the bag down the staircase into the basement shop, crammed floor-to-ceiling with natural wonders.
“Hey, hey, Sam McFarlane!” Joe Culp came around from behind the counter, arms spread wide, and gave the man a big embrace. McFarlane didn’t like to be hugged, but it seemed prudent not to object. “What you got for me? Where you been? Teaching?”
“I was teaching. Didn’t work out. So I headed to Russia.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Primorye.”
At this, he saw Culp’s face take on a faint look of disappointment. He glanced at the suitcase. “These are Sikhote-Alin specimens?”
“Yeah.”
“All of them?”
“Trust me, these are good ones. The best. Shrapnel, thumbprints, oriented—all unique. One with a hole in it.”
“Let’s take a look,” said Culp with what McFarlane sensed was slightly forced, artificial cheer.
McFarlane unzipped the roller bag to reveal a row of shoe boxes of sorted specimens, each labeled with a Sharpie.
“Let’s take a look at the ones with regmagylpts,” said Culp.
McFarlane pulled out a box and laid it on the counter. He opened it up. Inside he had wrapped the specimens in paper towels. He sorted through them and picked out a few of the biggest, then unwrapped them. Culp brought out a velvet-covered board and placed it on the counter to keep the meteorites from scratching the glass.
“How about that?” said McFarlane, laying his best specimen on the velvet. “Thumbprints on one side, fusion crust. Totally unique.”
Culp grunted and picked it up, examining it. “How’d you get these?”
“There’s a lot of guys in Primorye with metal detectors that go out there, sweep the area. There’s still tons of shit out there.”
Culp turned the piece around in his hand and finally put it down. “What else?”
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just that we specialize in unique stuff. This…well, there are pieces like it selling on eBay. Let’s see the one with the hole in it.”
McFarlane searched through the box until he found it, unwrapped it, and laid it on the velvet.
Again he saw disappointment in Culp’s face, which annoyed him. When Culp didn’t pick it up right away, McFarlane took it in hand. “See?” He peered through the hole. “This is pretty unique.”
“It’s also pretty small. I might be able to sell it, though. How much you want for it?”
“Twelve hundred.”
“Whoa! No way can I get twelve hundred. Or even six. Sam, you know I’d be lucky to get two.”
McFarlane felt his irritation grow. “Bullshit. It cost me three thousand bucks to get to Primorye. Who’s going to pay for that? And I had to pay the guy who found it two hundred!”
“Then I would say you overpaid.”
“Come on, Joe. How many Sikhote-Alin specimens have thumbprints and a hole?”
“The market’s awash with Sikhote-Alin. Just go on eBay and look.”
“The hell with eBay. This is way better than eBay.” McFarlane reached into the box and pulled out another. “Look at this—wicked good piece of shrapnel, two hundred grams. All twisted up. And this—” He unwrapped another, then another, with increasing rapidity. “And how about this? Beautifully oriented with flow lines and fusion crust.”
Culp spread his hands. “Sam, I just don’t need them. I’ve got meteorites, unique meteorites, selling for ninety, a hundred grand. This is not the kind of stuff I handle. Now, if you had a really good pallasite, say, I would definitely be interested. Like that incredible Acomita pallasite you brought me five years ago—if you could get me another slice like that, I could sell it tomorrow.”
“I told you, I just got back from Russia. I spent my last nickel on these meteorites. Surely you need some less expensive stuff in this shop—I mean, who can afford hundred-grand meteorites?”
“That’s my clientele.”
McFarlane hesitated. “I’ll sell you the whole collection for six grand. Take them all. Forty kilos of iron—that’s only fifteen cents a gram!”
“Honestly, Sam, your best option is eBay. There’s no shame in that. And then you wouldn’t have to absorb the dealer’s cut.”
“So after all the great stuff I’ve brought you, all the money you’ve made off me—you want to shuffle me off to eBay?”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just offering advice—you do what you want.”
McFarlane felt the disappointment and rage building. “eBay,” he said, shaking his head.