This was one of those crazy Prothero leaps. “So what’s it saying?” she asked.
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” said Prothero, and laughed hilariously at his own lame joke.
“Here’s what I think,” she said, when Prothero had stopped wheezing.
“You know I don’t give a shit what you think. But tell me anyway.”
“It’s randomly playing back sounds it recorded. They mean nothing.”
Prothero shook his head. “This thing’s intelligent—I’ll bet anything on that. And it’s sending us a message.”
“So how exactly are you going to translate it?”
“You mean, how are you going to translate it. You, Wong, are going to find the closest digital match between that Baobab sound and the blue whale vocalizations in my database. And then we’re going to find out what the blue whale was doing when it was recorded making that sound—and that’ll give us an idea of the meaning. Like, was the whale chasing prey? Was it a mother calling her calf? Was it fucking?” Prothero laughed again.
Wong shook her head. “If it’s trying to communicate, why not by some other means than whale calls?”
“No doubt it’s highly attuned to sound. Sound is the best way to communicate underwater. Electromagnetic fields dissipate, and light can’t penetrate more than four or five hundred feet. This thing evolved to live in the dark depths of a watery world. It developed a sonar-resistant skin; it used sonar to “look” at Gideon Crew when he was down there collecting the wreck of Paul. Naturally it uses sound to communicate. And whale calls are all it has heard.”
“Digital sound. Which means it’s a machine. There’s no way for a biological system to evolve so as to produce digital sound.”
“Wong, Wong, Wong…” Prothero shook his head. “Maybe it’s a machine, maybe it’s a biological system, maybe it’s a combination of the two. Whatever it is, it’s talking to us. Now get your ass to work and find out what it’s talking about.”
30
DR. PATRICK BRAMBELL chewed on a Mars bar as he stared pensively at the crushed ball that had formerly been the DSV Paul, sitting on a tarp in the hangar deck. The immediate area had been cordoned off with yellow curtains. Two engineers and as many roustabouts were wheeling in a bizarre device they had jerry-rigged in order to dismantle the submersible so they could extract the remains of Lispenard’s body from the wreckage. It looked like nothing so much as a large, villainous Jaws of Life. Glinn stood silently in the background, taking in everything.
The workers began positioning the jaws of the contraption at two sides of the wreckage, in order to draw apart the wrinkled, shattered mass of the titanium sphere; huge eyebolts had been affixed at the two places and the machine was now set to draw them apart, unfolding the metal the way someone might unfold a balled-up piece of paper.
Brambell turned to his medical assistant, Rogelio, who was standing next to a polished stainless-steel gurney. This gurney was where they would reassemble the body. The idea did not overly disturb Brambell—he had seen far worse—but he was worried about his assistant, who looked a bit green around the gills.
“We must recover every, ah, piece, no matter how small,” Brambell told the workers. Glinn’s silent presence in the back made him nervous. He felt like a student teacher being monitored by the principal. He had never liked Glinn—the man was cold, remote, a cipher. Never mind the fact he was largely responsible for what had happened to the Rolvaag.
The assistant nodded weakly.
The “jaws” were affixed to each eyebolt and a deep hum started up as the machine began to spread them apart. With a creaking, cracking noise, the crumpled ball began to separate along its fracture zones, and water began draining from within it.
“Halt!” Brambell called. Immediately, the machine stopped. Rogelio rolled the gurney in close and, with large, rubber-tipped tweezers Brambell and his assistant began picking out mashed pieces of flesh and pulverized bone, mingled with bits of clothing, and laid them all out on the gurney in turn.
After a few moments he turned to the assistant. “Rogelio, how are you doing?”
“Hanging in there,” Rogelio said in a strangled voice.
“Good man.”
It took at least ten minutes to remove every little bit from the fissure in the wrinkled titanium, and then they backed off and signaled the engineers to continue.
The procedure went on for hours, prying first one piece of metal apart, then another, and another, in between stopping to pick out the remains, sometimes with the help of a portable magnifier on wheels with built-in illumination. At least it was a cool day, the good weather holding; the temperature inside the hangar was about sixty degrees—not bad, Brambell mused, for the preservation and handling of human remains. And a large proportion of the remains were of workable size, which was also a good thing: he’d feared the corpse might have been little more than tomato paste.
Slowly the body began to take shape on the gurney—in a grotesquely altered state. Brambell and his assistant had been able to identify virtually all of the pieces by a combination of their position in the wreck, the bone fragments, and the clothing present. By chance, they had started working from the feet upward. Brambell knew that recovering the head and skull would be the last, and most difficult, part.
As he worked, Brambell was mightily impressed by the immense forces that must have been applied to the submersible—especially the titanium sphere—to crush it so violently. In some areas, the pressure had been so intense and so sudden that it appeared to have softened or even melted the metal.
It was disagreeable work, and Rogelio bore up relatively well under it, not losing his lunch as Brambell had feared. The two roustabouts operating the machinery, and the two engineers, were another story: turning their backs, looking away whenever possible, averting their eyes assiduously to avoid seeing the remains to the point where Brambell had to speak to them sharply to keep their eyes on the job. Glinn, on the other hand, was just the opposite: watching the entire procedure in silence, face expressionless. He could have been observing a golf match. Nobody spoke except the fellows operating the jaws, and then only to communicate tersely about the equipment.
Now they separated the personnel sphere, laying the pieces out in jigsaw position on a large tarp spread precisely for that purpose. As they pried apart the last two large pieces, the upper torso, neck, and crushed head became visible.
Brambell glanced at Rogelio and was dismayed to see the man had gone pale. The two roustabouts were not even bothering to cover up their horror and disgust. An engineer turned away, retching. Only Glinn seemed unmoved.
“All right, let’s keep going,” said Brambell, moving in with a pair of rubber-tipped forceps and picking up the jaw, teeth and skin still adhering. He laid it all on the gurney. Another piece followed, then another. The face itself had survived almost entirely whole, flattened without being mashed to a pulp. Rogelio worked on the opposite side of the gurney while a great silence collected in the hangar. As they continued, Brambell found himself becoming disturbed by something. It wasn’t the gruesomeness—it was an odd feeling that something was not quite right. But he said nothing. He didn’t want to seem like a crank—or, worse, cause a panic.
As they neared the end of the dismantling process, the titanium sphere lay in neatly arranged and numbered pieces on the spread tarp, along with mashed equipment from inside the sphere. Everything had been thoroughly picked over by Brambell and Rogelio, and all the remains were laid out on the gurney. Brambell, bending over them, putting body pieces into place like a puzzle, felt a presence behind him. It was Glinn.