Glinn motioned him over. “Dr. Sax is explaining what she and her team plan to do with this specimen.”
Gideon had not had much contact with Sax, who was a short, stocky, serious woman with brown hair pulled back tight, glasses, about forty—smart and all business. He shook her hand and she turned back to the coiled tentacle.
“What we have here,” Sax said quietly, “is humanity’s first real example of exobiology. That is beyond outstanding. But it presents all kinds of challenges. For example, under normal circumstances we’d be running the most painstaking and meticulous sterile procedures possible. But we don’t have time for that. We need to know as much as we can about this thing, as fast as possible. Quick and dirty. The more we know, the better we’ll be able to prepare.”
“No quarantine procedures?” Gideon asked. “We don’t want an Andromeda Strain event.”
“The fact is, the ship itself is a kind of quarantine—the ultimate quarantine. Before we return to port, we’ll incinerate this thing and any other parts of the creature we bring up, then sterilize the lab.”
Gideon hesitated. He was still in shock, dazed from what happened to Alex, and he found it hard to focus. “Do you feel the ship is at risk from any sort of disease or microbes this thing might be carrying?”
Sax looked at him, brown eyes clear. “In a word: yes.”
“This creature is already exposed and open to the ocean,” Glinn said. “So whatever microbes it might be carrying are already present in the environment.”
“What I find remarkable,” said Sax, “is that this specimen reached the surface, where the pressure is about four hundred times less, intact, with no obvious alteration. Normally, when you bring a deep-sea specimen up to surface pressure, it completely falls apart.”
“So this thing can live at all depths?” Gideon asked.
“A reasonable inference.”
Sax went on to describe the plan of research, starting with sections of the specimen for various scans and examinations—frozen, microscope, SEM, TEM, histological. Also, she said, CAT scans, MRIs, electrical impulse tests, microbiological and biochemical analyses. “We don’t know what this is,” she told them. “Plant, animal, or something else entirely. We’re not sure what it’s made of. Does it have DNA? Is it even carbon-based? The most elementary questions still have to be answered. But by the time we’re done, our tests will tell us about its anatomy, nervous system—if it has one—the flow of fluids and electrical impulses, its cellular energy cycles—assuming it even has cells—its biochemistry and molecular biology. But for the time being…” She shook her head. “It’s like landing on an unknown planet.”
“Then we’ll let you proceed with all haste.” Glinn turned, indicating for Gideon to follow him. Once out in the hall, and alone after turning a corner, Glinn halted. “There’s something I want to talk to you about—in confidence.”
“Of course.”
“Back there in the meeting, I squelched speculation on Lispenard’s last words.”
Gideon took a deep breath. “I noticed.”
“There’s something profoundly disturbing about them, and I don’t want a lot of speculation about it.”
“You’re…um, you’re referring to the timing?”
Glinn looked at him steadily. “Prothero is working on that, and I do believe it has to be some kind of glitch. No: I’m referring to what she said. The meaning. Let me touch your face.”
Gideon said nothing. She had spoken those words to him, or something very similar, the night they had spent together. My God. Was it just last night?
“I said it was some sort of rapture of the deep. But I don’t believe that’s true. The sphere was crushed immediately. And at two miles down, there’s no ‘rapture’—death at that pressure is absolutely instantaneous. In listening to those words…I sense there’s real meaning in there, not some random, crazy utterance of a failing brain. This is something…” He paused. “Something beyond our understanding.”
He turned his piercing gray eyes on Gideon. “This is a line of inquiry that you and I will pursue, quietly—just the two of us. I know, Gideon, what Alex’s death meant to you. I know this isn’t easy. But I also know this anomaly is something you won’t let drop until you get to the bottom of it. Prothero is working on the timing glitch. I want you to keep tabs on what he’s doing—and make sure rumors about anything he might discover aren’t disseminated haphazardly. We’ve lowered a camera to the seafloor and placed it about two hundred yards from the creature. We’re going to be watching it twenty-four seven.”
“All right,” Gideon heard himself say.
Glinn looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then, with the briefest of nods, he turned and headed back in the direction of mission control.
22
ELI GLINN DIMMED the lights in his stateroom and began undressing for bed. He slipped off his shirt and paused to examine his left arm. It was the one most injured during the sinking of the Rolvaag; the limb had taken the brunt of the explosion. Despite the low light he could still see smooth, shiny areas that had once been knotted burn scars, along with rills and ridges of wounds and shrapnel cuts. He flexed his arm and the muscles rose under the skin, their power slowly returning, helped along by his daily workouts.
The bones in his arm had fractured into dozens of pieces, which the doctors had to reassemble, like jigsaw pieces, screwing everything back together with plates and rods. Most of the metal had now been removed—a few fresh scars attested to that.
He raised his hand and stared at it. It amazed him how that awful claw, which he’d thought he would never use again, was now almost normal. He held it up and moved his fingers. He’d never be a concert pianist, but at least he could now dine at table like a human being instead of an animal, spilling his food and barely able to dab his own lips with a napkin.
He flexed his fingers, then his arm again, rotating it this way and that, enjoying the freedom of movement, the lack of stiffness or pain. He turned with a sigh. This was unlike him; he was not the kind of person to admire his own body, to take pleasure in it. At least, he hadn’t been. But now, with his injuries almost healed, he was far more aware of—and grateful for—his healthy limbs. Somehow, that gratitude made him recall those who hadn’t survived—one in particular—and he felt the old guilt and sadness come creeping back in, like the tide.
Stripping down to his underwear, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth before the mirror. His face looked better, the bad eye healed up. Strangely enough, its color was a slightly different shade of gray: just a touch darker. Fresher. Younger.
The lotus root he’d ingested, on that strange distant island two months before, had performed nothing less than a miracle.
He washed his face, dried it, combed his thinning hair, and returned to his stateroom. From his closet he removed a silk dressing gown, slipped it on, then went to the nearest porthole. Undogging it, he pulled it wide and breathed in the fresh, incoming air—the scent of salt and ice. A nearby berg was a mere gray shape in the darkness, dimly illuminated by the lights of the ship. The sea was calm, the moonless night full of stars.
With a sigh he moved away from the porthole and lay on the bed, putting his hands behind his head, his thoughts, like water in a well-worn groove of rock, inevitably going back to the terrible events of the sinking of the Rolvaag.