Her hair was clipped short and her jaw had a long angularity that gave her face a sharpness, an intensity that was of a piece with her piercing green eyes. She carried herself with a controlled bearing that seemed almost robotic, each movement calibrated to deliver maximum function with minimal exertion. A scar roped up the side of her neck and trailed behind her left ear—thick and ribbed and pink, the color of bubblegum.
“Dr. Nelson?”
“Yes.”
She offered her hand. “Alice Sykes. Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy. But feel free to call me Al. Paul Simon may come sniffing around for royalties, but I can deal with that hassle personally.”
Luke liked her immediately—yet he got a sense of forced jocularity off of her, too: her smile was screwed on too tight.
She turned to Felz. “I take it you’ve filled Dr. Nelson in on the magical goo in deep freeze?”
Dr. Felz stood up straight. “Yes, we’ve covered just about everything.”
“Fine. We gotta get this show on the road.” Alice’s expression darkened. “Have you spoken to him about what’s surfaced?”
Felz said, “No. I thought…”
“That’s okay. It’s not an easy matter. Let’s hop to it.”
A four-seat golf cart waited on the deck. Al sat up front, Felz and Luke behind.
“A hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Al said to Luke as they careened through the floating minicity. Each building was painted a reflective black; the sun knifed off every angle, painfully bright. Luke caught sight of the sea through a gap between the buildings—the horizon shimmered, the sky a searing blue against the plate-glass water. Everything looked new and modern, but so many of the structures seemed to be half built or unused. It reminded Luke of those model communities on the outskirts of Las Vegas, built in anticipation of a boom that never came. The Hesperus had that same ghost town feel—it was a place built for great things that had not quite come to pass.
Al craned her head around to see if Luke was taking it all in—Luke diverted his gaze. He’d been focused on the scar that went all the way around the back of Al’s neck, a pink band that petered out at her right earlobe. It looked as though someone had tried to slit her neck, starting at the back. If she noticed him looking, she was tactful enough not to mention it.
“Who paid for all this?” Luke said.
“Everyone who earns a paycheck,” Al said. “You, me, the butcher, the baker. Not just American greenbacks, either: Japanese yen, British pounds, Chinese yuan, German deutsche marks.”
“That would be euros,” said Felz, fussily. “They replaced the deutsche mark in 2002.”
“Thank you, Dr. Felz, for your scrupulous attention in regards to matters of international currency.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Anyway,” Alice went on, “what you see here is the whole world, holding hands. We got a lot of support from private enterprise, too. CEOs, CFOs, magnates, philanthropists. Everyone’s smashing their piggy banks. Everybody’s lost something to this by now, y’know? And what’s money worth if there’s no future to spend it in?”
“Why is it all Americans, then? I mean, down on the Trieste? Dr. Felz said the researchers are all from the U.S.”
“I guess because America always rides point,” Al said.
They stopped beside a compact submarine. Fifteen feet long with a porthole window at one end. It lay in a massive canvas hammock. It looked like a huge lozenge—a vitamin pill for Neptune.
“Challenger 5,” Al told Luke. “It’s being prepped for your descent.”
Luke said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I have no idea how to operate this.”
“Yeah, that would take some serious training. Thankfully, you’ll be in the company of a skilled pilot.” Al thumped her chest. “Like I said, tight squeeze.”
She leaned over the seat, jammed her face close to Luke’s own.
“Breathe on me.”
“What?”
“I said, breathe on me. Come on, don’t be shy.”
Luke did as she asked, too startled to refuse. Al sniffed.
“Okay, good. Nothing worse than being cooped up for hours with a guy with bad breath.”
Luke exhaled, chuckling now. “I’ve got Tic Tacs in my bag.”
She winked. “Even better.”
If I have to journey eight miles beneath the water’s surface, Luke thought, this Alice Sykes seems as fine a companion as any.
“Dr. Westlake came up in Challenger 4,” Al said. “It’s still under quarantine.”
Luke said, “Dr. Westlake?”
“Dr. Felz hasn’t mentioned him yet?” Al darted a glance at Felz, a darkness settling into her eyes. “He was the third member of the team. Dr. Cooper Westlake. He was a—remind me what was his job again, Doctor?”
“Computational biologist,” Felz said as the cart got rolling again.
“I got to know Dr. Westlake pretty well,” Al said. The forced jocularity was gone. In its place was somber concern. “I liked him a hell of a lot. He seemed put together. But it’s incredibly hard down there. Not just the physical pressure; there’s the added pressure of what they’re trying to achieve. Dr. Westlake surfaced nine and a half hours ago, while you were in transit. Let me ask—has your brother ever mentioned him?”
Luke said: “I’ve never met Dr. Westlake. Never even heard his name.”
“I believe that’s the truth as you know it,” said Al.
The cart stopped before a building with a red cross on its exterior. Al rested her gaze gently upon Luke’s.
“What’s behind that door,” she said, “is Dr. Westlake. What surfaced of him. You don’t have to look… but maybe you’ll want to, seeing as you’ve agreed to go down.”
“What happened to him?” said Luke.
Alice showed him her palms, same as Felz had done. A helpless gesture.
“It’s still our world down there, Dr. Nelson,” she said, “but that’s like saying that the ice ten thousand feet beneath the arctic icepack is, too. Yeah, it is, but not anything we know. Our government has spent thirty trillion dollars on space exploration, and less than 1 percent of that to explore the world underneath us right now. But it’s just as unknown. You’ll be entering another world, really and truly.”
“It’s Luke,” he told her. “Call me Luke. And I’ll go. I’ll see.”
Al’s clipped nod made Luke think she wished he’d chosen otherwise.
14.
THE AIR WAS MEAT-LOCKER COLD on the other side of the door with the red cross. Luke’s arms instantly broke out in gooseflesh.
The room was uncluttered. Halogen lights buzzed down on a bank of steel vaults. Luke had visited morgues as a veterinarian, most recently to perform an autopsy on a police drug dog that’d died after ingesting a perforated balloon of heroin.
“Every vault is empty save one,” Al said. “We’ve been lucky lately with the ’Gets. A few in quarantine, but none dead and no new cases reported in a week. Must be the sea air.” A gravedigger’s smile. “Sorry. Poor taste.”
They walked with aching slowness toward the vaults.
“Dr. Westlake and the others had settled into their roles inside the Trieste. The station was holding up. Electrical function, oxygen purification, waste disposal—all systems operational, which on the technical side of things was the main concern.
“Mentally, the crew seemed sound. Your brother was the point man—he gave the majority of the updates, so our perceptions up here were filtered through him. But we watched the other two on the monitors. They were eating, sleeping, engaged in productive labor. You’d see them talking and laughing with one another.