The interior of the gondola was fitted into angles but here and there a section of wall beyond the instruments showed its basic sphericity. To Javan, the instruments seemed to be an extension of his arms; his eyes and hands moved over them lightly, almost lovingly.
"We're all checked out," he said, "but I like a last-minute look-over; we'll be facing a thousand atmospheres down there." His finger touched a contact, and the round door closed massively inward and pressed against the beveled rim it met.
"The higher the pressure, the tighter that will hold," said Javan. "Take your last look at sunlight, Mr. Demerest."
The light still shone through the thick glass of the window. It was wavering now; there was water between the Sun and them now.
"The last look?" said Demerest.
Javan snickered. "Not the last look. I mean for the trip…I suppose you've never been, on a bathyscaphe before."
"No, I haven't. Have many?"
"Very few," admitted Javan. "But don't worry. It's just an underwater balloon. We've introduced a million improvements since the first bathyscaphe. It's nuclear-powered now and we can move freely by water jet up to certain limits, but cut it down to basics and it's still a spherical gondola under buoyancy tanks. And it's still towed out to sea by a mother ship because it needs what power it carries too badly to waste it on surface travel. Ready?"
"Ready."
The supporting cable of the mother ship flicked away and the bathyscaphe settled lower; then lower still, as sea water fed into the buoyancy tanks. For a few moments, caught in surface currents, it swayed, and then there was nothing. The bathyscaphe sank slowly through a deepening green.
Javan relaxed. He said, "John Bergen is head of Ocean-Deep. You're going to see him?"
"That's right."
"He's a nice guy. His wife's with him."
"She is?"
"Oh, sure. They have women down there. There's a bunch down there, fifty people. "Some stay for months."
Demerest put his finger on the narrow, nearly invisible seam where door met wall. He took it away and looked at it. He said, "It's oily."
"Silicone, really. The pressure squeezes some out. It's supposed to…Don't worry. Everything's automatic. Everything's fail-safe. The first sign of malfunction, any malfunction at all, our ballast is released and up we go."
"You mean nothing's ever happened to these bathyscaphes?"
"What can happen?" The pilot looked sideways at his passenger. "Once you get too deep for sperm whales, nothing can go wrong."
"Sperm whales?" Demerest's thin face creased in a frown.
"Sure, they dive as deep as half a mile. If they hit a bathyscaphe-well, the walls of the buoyancy chambers aren't particularly strong. They don't have to be, you know. They're open to the sea and when the gasoline, which supplies the buoyancy, compresses, sea water enters."
It was dark now. Demerest found his gaze fastened to the viewport. It was light inside the gondola, but it was dark in that window. And it was not the darkness of space; it was a thick darkness.
Demerest said sharply, "Let's get this straight, Mr. Javan. You are not equipped to withstand the attack of a sperm whale. Presumably you are not equipped to withstand the attack of a giant squid. Have there been any actual incidents of that sort?"
"Well, it's like this-"
"No games, please, and don't try ragging the greenhorn. I am asking out of professional curiosity. I am head safety engineer at Luna City and I am asking what precautions this bathyscaphe can take against possible collision with large creatures."
Javan looked embarrassed. He muttered, "Actually, there have been no incidents."
"Are any expected? Even as a remote possibility?"
"Anything is remotely possible. But actually sperm whales are too intelligent to monkey with us and giant squid are too shy."
"Can they see us?"
"Yes, of course. We're lit up."
"Do you have floodlights?"
"We're already past the large-animal range, but we have them, and I'll turn them on for you."
Through the black of the window there suddenly appeared a snow-storm, an inverted upward-falling snowstorm. The blackness had come alive with stars in three-dimensional array and all moving upward.
Demerest said, "What's that?"
"Just crud. Organic matter. Small creatures. They float, don't move much, and they catch the light. We're going down past them. They seem to be going up in consequence."
Demerest's sense of perspective adjusted itself and he said, "Aren't we dropping too quickly?"
"No, we're not. If we were, I could use the nuclear engines, if I wanted to waste power; or I could drop some ballast. I'll be doing that later, but for now everything is fine. Relax, Mr. Demerest. The snow thins as we dive and we're not likely to see much in the way of spectacular life forms. There are small angler fish and such but they avoid us."
Demerest said, "How many do you take down at a time?"
"I've had as many as four passengers in this gondola, but that's crowded. We can put two bathyscaphes in tandem and carry ten, but that's clumsy. What we really need are trains of gondolas, heavier on the nukes-the nuclear engines-and lighter on the buoyancy. Stuff like that is on the drawing board, they tell me. Of course, they've been telling me that for years."
"There are plans for large-scale expansion of Ocean-Deep, then?"
"Sure, why not? We've got cities on the continental shelves, why not on the deep-sea bottom? The way I look at it, Mr. Demerest, where man can go, he will go and he should go. The Earth is ours to populate and we will populate it. All we need to make the deep sea habitable are completely maneuverable 'scaphes. The buoyancy chambers slow us, weaken us, and complicate the engineering."
"But they also save you, don't they? If everything goes wrong at once, the gasoline you carry will still float you to the surface-. What would do that for you if your nuclear engines go wrong and you had no buoyancy?"
"If it comes to that, you can't expect to eliminate the chances of accident altogether, not even fatal ones."
"I know that very well," said Demerest feelingly.
Javan stiffened. The tone of his voice changed. "Sorry. Didn't mean anything by that. Tough about that accident."
"Yes," said Demerest. Fifteen men and five women had died. One of the individuals listed among the "men " had been fourteen years old. It had been pinned down to human failure. What could a head safety engineer say after that?
"Yes," he said.
A pall dropped between the two men, a pall as thick and as turgid as the pressurized sea water outside. How could one allow for panic and for distraction and for depression all at once? There were the Moon-Blues-stupid name-but they struck men at inconvenient times. It wasn't always noticeable when the Moon-Blues came but it made men torpid and slow to react.
How many times had a meteorite come along and been averted or smothered or successfully absorbed? How many times had a Moonquake done damage and been held in check? How many times had human failure been backed up and compensated for? How many times had accidents not happened?
But you don't payoff on accidents not happening. There were twenty dead-
Javan said (how many long minutes later?), "There are the lights of Ocean-Deep!"
Demerest could not make them out at first. He didn't know where to look. Twice before, luminescent creatures had flicked past the windows at a distance and with the floodlights off again, Demerest had thought them the first sign of Ocean-Deep. Now he saw nothing.
"Down there," said Javan, without pointing. He was busy now, slowing the drop and edging the 'scaphe sideways.
Demerest could hear the distant sighing of the water jets, steam-driven, with the steam formed by the heat of momentary bursts of fusion power.
Demerest thought dimly: Deuterium is their fuel and it's all around them. Water is their exhaust and it's all around them.
Javan was dropping some of his ballast, too, and began a kind of distant chatter. "The ballast used to be steel pellets and they were dropped by electromagnetic controls. Anywhere up to fifty tons of it were used in each trip. Conservationists worried about spreading rusting steel over the ocean floor, so we switched to metal nodules that are dredged up from the continental shelf. We put a thin layer of iron over them so they can still be electromagnetically handled and the ocean bottom gets nothing that wasn't sub-ocean to begin with. Cheaper, too…But when we get out real nuclear 'scaphes, we won't need ballast at all."