Subramanian was most concerned about the storage room. If it was flooded, most likely the medications would be useless. Although that depended on the packaging. If they were in foil packets or well sealed plastic containers, they might be OK.
The Ledge
(2,700 Feet)
Kate had decided to send the message about the Pheia partly because she was in need of something to occupy the time, and party because she thought she should try to help them understand her situation. Not that it was likely to help her very much. There was simply no way for them to get to her. The Pheia was still at 2,700 feet down and that meant at least nine days to the surface. But she was a scientist, and she felt a responsibility to provide data they might be able to use to do something. “Who are you kidding?” She thought. “Whatever.”
Kate spent an hour working her way through all the status indicators on the control consoles and building up a comprehensive message about the state of the Pheia’s systems. She found this quite therapeutic. It felt more like her normal work collecting data from some biological experiment. She also suspected that her situation, while possibly not unique, was certainly going to be of interest to the academic community if she made it to the surface. So she decided to treat what was happening to her as another experiment. She would collect data and send it to the surface. What they did with it was their business.
As she had worked her way through the gas system status indicators, she had found individual gas gauges for the helium, hydrogen and oxygen storage tanks. They all had gas in them but she had no real idea if there was enough gas. The gas generator system manufactured oxygen from the seawater and stored it in the tanks. The hydrogen and helium tanks were there to maintain the correct mix but neither was consumed by her breathing. The CO2 scrubbers removed the CO2 she exhaled and the loss of oxygen was replaced by the gas system.
She wished she’d looked at this more closely before. It was kind of essential to her survival. But the pragmatic side of her brain shrugged it off. The system was working. If it had failed, she’d likely be dead by now. Since it was apparently running just fine, there wasn’t much point in watching it. And if the indications were out of whack what was she going to do? She knew the basic chemistry involved but had no real idea how the system actually worked. “OK. Too much thinking.”
She completed the system status report and transmitted it to the surface.
After she had sent it, she wondered for a minute if her analysis of the readings was correct. What if something was really wrong and she had missed it? The surface folks would get their undies in a twist for sure. “I guess we’ll see.”
Kate went over to the portal and watched the wall going by. The features varied now and then but the overall appearance was always the same. The section illuminated by the Pheia’s lights showed the light brown rocky surface with its bumps and indentations. Occasionally a piece of trash went by. Kate was looking at a very narrow strip of the wall. She was only looking at it now and then, yet she saw trash go by quite often. If this amount of trash was representative of the rest of Cayman’s entire surrounding wall, then there was an awful lot of garbage on the wall. And if you extrapolated that to the other Caribbean islands that had similar populations and levels of tourists, you had quite a volume of garbage going into the sea.
Some years ago, she had been looking at the East end of Grand Cayman on Google Earth and had come across a picture of trash on the beach. It showed a large collection of flip flops, water bottles and other plastics. She remembered thinking at the time that it was sad that so much plastic was dumped into the sea. Even given the fact that the winds had probably collected this particular pile over some time, it was a lot of plastic to have found on this one small section of beach on Cayman’s East End.
The plastic generally floated, and found its way onto shorelines, or else it ended up in one of the giant plastic whirlpools in the Pacific where sunlight and wave action helped to break it down into very small particles. Those particles stayed in suspension in the sea near the surface. They had been found in fish and other sea creatures, which meant they were in the food chain and that meant they were going to end up in people.
Did it matter? Was plastic harmful in any way? It was mostly chemically rather inert so perhaps it didn’t matter. Just another source of roughage perhaps? Kate smiled at that. It was good to be thinking again. Even if it was a little off topic and perhaps a bit random.
On the surface barge, the rest of the crew from the institute had arrived and were gathered in the galley for a briefing by Williams. He’d gone over the situation below and read them Kate’s last status report about the Pheia’s systems. The consensus seemed to be that even though the Pheia was damaged, it was operating normally and they could expect Kate to survive and arrive at the surface in eight or nine days.
Among the new crew were three more divers. The divers all knew Duncan, White and Perez, but understood their loss as being one of the possible outcomes of very deep diving. In a sense they were like drivers at a race track. They all liked the excitement of working to the limit, and accepted the consequences when things went wrong. Once the Pheia reached 1,000 feet, their mission would be to go down with the barge’s winch cable and secure it to the Pheia. They would then ride back up to the surface with Kate.
Williams was very pleased with the consensus about the Pheia. There was going to have to be an inquiry into the construction of course. The hab should not have separated as it had done, but the inquiry was going to have to wait until the hab could be returned to the U.S. But overall, the hab was in good shape and Kate was not at risk.
Dr. Subramanian had quite a different view. He had little interest in the condition of the hab. In his view, Kate was more of a danger to herself from stress and exhaustion. Even if the Pheia was performing perfectly, once Kate got tired enough she’d make a mistake and cause something bad to happen. It was a common problem. Truck drivers fell asleep after too many hours at the wheel. The sleep wasn’t the issue. It was what happened while they were asleep that mattered. He left the meeting and went back to the comms shack.
Subramanian typed up a short message and sent it. He felt rather helpless. He really wanted to talk face to face with Kate in a couple of comfy chairs. “Absurd really,” he thought. Subramanian decided not to wait for a reply from Kate. He doubted she would follow his advice, and even if she did, he doubted she’d bother to let him know.
Kate was still staring at the wall going by when the ELF radio emitted it’s new message sound.
She walked the few steps to the console and read it.
“Dear Kate. Please forgive my directness. You MUST sleep. There is a supply of zolpidem in the storage area with the other medical supplies. Take two and get some sleep. Please acknowledge.”
Kate thought about it. “Well, that’s more blunt.” She knew she needed sleep but even with the still soggy mattress covered in the table cloth and the towels she had slept only a little and very sporadically. She had recognized for herself that she probably needed more sleep and her rational side knew that sleep deprivation was not good. But the thought of another dive back into the storage area wasn’t very appealing. She decided to think about it.