Inessa went white and her ankles buckled. Her eyes rolled up into her head, before she crumpled to the ground, the skirt spread around her.
Ludmila couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes from the blood seeping across the silk.
The American shoved by her.
People poured in behind her, the KGB, the other models. Vladlena was there, shaking Ludmila, turning her head forcibly to get her to look away, to focus on something other than the lifeless model. “What is the meaning of this? Have you lost your mind?” Vladlena slapped her.
“She was spying. Using my dress…” Ludmila managed, her voice hoarse and painful. Her knees went weak and her whole body began to shudder convulsively.
She hadn’t realized she was sobbing until Vladlena pulled her head down to her shoulder and murmured, “My dear.”
Conversations happened, but Ludmila couldn’t understand the words. Vladlena spoke too, but it was as if Ludmila were far far away. Disjointed phrases were spoken but they had nothing to do with her.
“She must have slipped and fell.”
“Scissors.”
“Dead. She’s dead.”
“A dreadful accident.”
“Traumatic. Too much for her. A breakdown.”
Ludmila wasn’t aware of leaving the Coliseum or returning to the hotel or going to the airport the next morning at dawn with Vladlena in a limousine. Her body felt heavy, her mind dull, her eyes unable to focus. Vaguely, she understood she was to be put on a flight to Moscow.
At the gate, Vladlena held her hands, squeezed them, and kissed her warmly on both cheeks in farewell. “You’ve done the Soviet Union a great service, my dear. You’re a hero of the revolution.” Then, apparently overcome with uncharacteristic emotion, she embraced Ludmila and said in her ear, “You’re fine. There’s nothing to worry about now. In gratitude for your services the Party will reward you well. Your career is made.”
“But my dress,” Ludmila whimpered into the collar of Vladlena’s elegant black suit.
DEEP SUBMERGENCE
BY JOSEPH WALLACE
Monterey Bay, California. October 1968.
A thousand feet down. Water pressure: About 435 pounds per square inch.
The creature hung outside the porthole, fragile and crystalline as a chain made from blown glass. Lit only by the gleams of sunlight filtering down from the surface far above, and by the dim glow of the submersible’s running lights. Not bothered at all by the cold, the dark, or the pressure.
Jack Harbison put his face up to the porthole’s three-inch-thick window to get a closer look.
“What do you see?” one of the other two men in the cabin asked.
Harbison didn’t reply, though he could have. He was no scientist, but if you worked as a sub pilot for long enough you couldn’t help but learn something.
He was looking at a giant siphonophore, a whole mess of little individual organisms—each of which had its own job, hunting, digesting, excreting—that had joined together to form one huge animal. Working as a unit to scare away predators that would gobble up any one of them on its own.
Harbison could see only a portion of this one, but he guessed it might be fifty feet long. He knew he wouldn’t take it on, not if he were on the other side of the glass.
Not even if he could survive out there.
As the Deep Submergence Vehicle Alvin sank through the midwater, the siphonophore drifted away. Harbison craned his neck to keep it in view, hoping for the show, knowing it would come.
And then it did. Something startled the enormous creature. A stray current, perhaps, a touch from one of the sub’s two robotic arms, or merely some electrical impulse transmitted through whichever individual comprised its brain. All at once, the entire chain flared with light. An unearthly blue-green outlined its shape, and at its core, jagged crimson webs like lightning.
Even though Harbison had seen such things many times before, his breath caught. Nearly everything out here in the murky midwater could light up, glow with cold fire, but the sight always awed him.
He watched till the siphonophore, dark again, drifted out of sight. The view outside the window was empty… except for some shadowy forms that never came close enough for him to make out. Sharks? Giant squid? Something big and dangerous, most likely.
It didn’t matter. Nothing was breaching the submersible, not from outside. The three of them were safe inside the personnel sphere. Cramped—the capsule was less than seven feet in diameter—but protected by its reinforced steel walls.
Harbison straightened, checked the instruments. They’d passed two thousand feet, and everything was fine.
Everything was always fine with Alvin. In public, Harbison always called it “the tugboat,” as if he found its tiny dimensions absurd. That twenty-three-foot-long hull, the spindly arms with their Erector-set claws, thruster propellers that resembled nothing so much as the ones that you wound up with rubber bands to make your toy ship speed across the bathtub. Ridiculous.
But the truth was, though he never said this out loud, Harbison thought that in some strange way Alvin was alive. Sentient. After dozens of dives aboard the diminutive sub, he felt he barely had to give it orders. The slightest touch on the controls would take him wherever he wanted to go.
Harbison shook his head. Stephens, the older of the two other men in the sphere, looked up. His lips thinned, and the furrows on his cheeks, like matching dueling scars, deepened.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
Harbison said, “Nothing.”
“You want the kid to take over?” Stephens asked.
The kid, Michaels, the third one in the sphere. The youngest, at twenty-five, more than a decade younger than Harbison. The back-up pilot on this crucial mission.
“No,” Harbison said. “I’m fine.”
A lie.
Woods Hole, Massachusetts. August 1968.
It’s happened again.
The word had run through the cafeterias, dorms, laboratories, and offices of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, just as it had two years earlier. Like some vast neural pathway linking everyone’s brain. A human hive mind, like the one bees used.
Harbison had just left Bigelow Laboratory when someone told him. Without thinking, he’d turned his head and looked down Water Street. Seeing, as almost always in this season, the horde of summer people gathering around the shops and restaurants or just wandering aimlessly as they waited for their ferries to carry them to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
At the best of times, Harbison felt like the tourists were a different species. He spent months each year out at sea, while for them the staid forty-five-minute ferry ride to the Vineyard was an ocean adventure. He journeyed to depths and saw things they could not imagine, while they stayed on the surface, oblivious.
He knew when the United States lost a nuclear weapon, as it had now. Again. He knew when it happened, and what it meant, and what the consequences could be.
If the government had its way, the rest of them, the world’s innocents, never would.
“Where?” he asked when they were all together. Eight of them around a conference table. Fewer than Harbison would have guessed, given how the military usually worked. It looked like this was going to be a quick and dirty operation.
The director of the Oceanographic Institution, who was Harbison’s boss. A representative of the U.S. Navy and one from the Air Force, in elegant suits, not uniforms. Two men from the Defense Department, in slightly less spiffy suits. Harbison and Michaels, the pilots.