After the newspaper stories had appeared, of course, there was no point anymore in trying to conceal his presence on Sea Venture. He stayed out of public places as much as he could, anyhow; he disliked the way people carefully did not look at him in his wheelchair, and he disliked crowds. Even Hal was a distraction to him sometimes. He needed to be alone; he needed to think.
The human race had to do something. There were almost six billion people in the world, and five hundred million of them were starving. There was famine in India, Africa, Soutl? America. Acid rains were killing forests all over the Northern Hemisphere. A dozen armed and angry nations were poised with LOW systems to retaliate against any nuclear aggression. It was true that the ocean was an enormous unused resource, vaster than the land. Could it feed and house the billions more to come? Could it relieve the pressures long enough for humanity to solve its problems and survive?
The day after Christmas there was another celebration when they crossed the international date line and Sunday turned into Monday. Higpen called Newland on the phone. “They’ll do some kind of King Neptune performance in the theater, but if you want to see the real thing, come over here about three o’clock.”
“Thank you, Ben,” he said.
In the town square they found what looked to be the whole perm population of Sea Venture. The square itself was packed except for one open lane marked off by ropes; people were sitting on metal bleachers, and others were looking out of windows on the upper level.
“You know you’re one of the stars of the show,” Higpen said in his ear. “You don’t mind, do you? If you’re worried about anything, we can call it off.”
“No, that’s all right,” Newland said with some misgivings.
Higpen left him in a roped-off area with six other people who greeted him shyly. “We’re the greenhorns,” one of them told him. “Our first time over the line—-yours too? Well, don’t worry—they say it isn’t too bad.”
Then a brass band struck up a lively tune. Down the open lane came a curious procession: first the band, high-school students by the look of them, in green and gold uniforms; then a goat in a cart, dressed in a gray jacket and trousers and wearing a hat; then two strikingly handsome people, a man and a woman, dressed in not very much, with pale-green makeup on their bodies and masks on their faces. W'ith a flourish of trumpets, they mounted a platform in front of the fountain.
“Know all ye who are subjects newly come to our realm,” cried the man, “that your fishy king and queen require and demand your fealty. If there be any here who refuse to submit, let them be taken and thrown into our briny deep.”
Another blast of trumpets, and the procession came around again. This time Newland and the rest of his group, Hal included, were ushered to the head of the parade, two by two. When they reached the space below the platform, the green man waved his trident over Newland and Hal, crying, “I baptize you in the name of Father Ocean!” The woman beside him showered them both with green confetti, and then they were being kissed by a number of young women who hung garlands of seaweed around their necks.
After that there was a good deal of shouting and singing; somebody was putting on a skit, apparently, and there was prize-giving, but Newland could not make out much of it. Eventually the meeting began to break up, and Higpen came to rescue them.
“Now you’re citizens of the sea,” he said happily. “That means you belong to our family forever, whether you like it or not.”
“Ben, I like it,” said Newland.
9
The next day Chief of Operations Bliss showed him around the Control Center—it was not called the bridge—a comfortable, brightly lighted place lined with consoles and cabinets. There were four small, very thick quartz windows, the first he had seen in Sea Venture, two looking forward, one port, one starboard. For the rest, they relied on television screens.
Afterward Deputy Ferguson, who was going off shift, took him and Hal down to see the marine lab. Ferguson opened a door marked NO admittance and held it for Newland’s chair to pass through. Beyond was a tiled corridor with doors opening off either side. “This is our marine section,” he said. “We’re quite proud of it—a lot of very valuable work has been done here.”
“Justifying the appropriations,” said Newland with a smile. “What exactly do you do here?”
“Ocean charting, currents, bottom sampling, salinity and temperature measurements, pollutants, that kind of thing.”
Through the open doors Newland glimpsed office desks, filing cabinets, banks of instruments. They crossed a room lined with tanks in which large, bright-colored fish lazily swam. At the end of the corridor was a heavy door, open; beyond it was a room with a large window in the far wall.
“This sill may be a little problem.” said Ferguson.
“No, it’s all right,” Hal answered, and boosted the chair across.
“Is this a watertight door?” Newland asked.
"Yes. We’re right down at the bottom of the hull here, and that section beyond the window is open to the sea. Here’s Randy Geller, he can tell you more about it.”
Geller came forward, a tall, pale young man with a reddish beard. He smiled politely when Ferguson introduced him. “I was just about to take a bottom sample,” he said. “Maybe you'd like to watch?”
“Yes, very much.”
Geller led him over to the window, through which Newland could see a gray-walled chamber. Overhead were tracks with traveling cranes, hoists and cables; below was green water that surged slowly from left to right, slapped against the wall, and surged again.
“The pressure is equalized, I suppose,” said Newland; “that’s why you have to have the window.”
“That’s right,” Geller said with a surprised lift of his eyebrow. “People usually ask, ‘Why doesn’t the water come in and sink the ship?’ We could pressurize this whole section, the way they do in the fishery, but that would mean decompressing every time we leave, and it would be a nuisance.
We can also watch what goes on in there through TV cameras, but their lenses keep getting wet; it’s a convenience to have the window.” He pointed to a bank of television screens, only one of which was turned on: it showed a vague greenish background against which yellow motes drifted. ‘‘This is the dredge camera; it ought to be just about at the bottom by now. It’s a thousand meters here.”
They watched in silence until something began to show up on the screen; a pebbled floor, gray-green at first, then brown, then purple-brown as it came nearer. Geller touched a control. ‘‘This is an anomaly,” he said. “Manganese nodules. Most of them are farther southwest.”
Newland was watching attentively. “How big are the nodules?"
“I’d say these are about ten centimeters. We’ll see when we get the sample up.” He touched the controls again; the view in the screen rotated downward slightly until they could see the leading edge of a complex metal object, greenish-yellow in the light. “Here we go.” The metal edge bit into the bottom; a cloud of sediment rose. Geller threw a switch. “Now we just have to wait for it to come up.” In the screen, the cloudy water slowly receded; they saw the dredge again, with tiny particles streaming downward at an angle.
“One thing I’m curious about,” Newland said. “I notice that the water motion seems to be in a crosswise direction, but I assume that the camera we’re seeing here is facing toward the bow. Now, if we’re moving with the current, why is that?”
“Wind and current,” said Geller.
“Well, but are the currents different on the bottom? That’s what I meant to ask.”