The arm was jointed like a dentist’s drill. Eighteen feet long, it could be fitted with a wide variety of tools; now it held a powerful lamp. Tarp watched it unfold in the green glow of Vairon’s lights, uncannily like a living thing. The lamp at its end came on.
Tarp saw rivets. Then the edge of a steel plate. The arm moved slowly. Jagged metal. A hole. More plating. Steel cable like plaited hair.
“We will never see it whole,” Jean-Marie said. “I haven’t the light.”
“I want to do a circuit around it.”
“As you like. But I have only six hours of fuel left.”
“How long to get us back?”
“Two hours.”
“With the current?”
“Eh, maybe we could ride the current. I don’t know. I don’t want to count on it.”
“All right, let’s start searching.”
“Bon. What are we looking for?”
“A habitat, I think. We’ll know when we find it.”
They found it in the lee of the Homburg’s stem, in an anomaly of the ocean bottom where there was protection from the current. There, sheltered like a house protecting itself under a mountain, the steel structure stood on three pylons anchored to the ocean floor. The main part stood twelve feet above the bottom, a flattened sphere protected by the darkness and the depth. “What is it?” Gance said.
“You know what it is.”
“Yeah, but here! It’s a sea lab. Is there anybody in there now?”
“Let’s find out.”
He touched Jean-Marie’s shoulder. “We’re going out.”
Jean-Marie was looking at the structure. “It’s eerie, you know?” he said.
“Why?”
“I spent two months in one in the Indian Ocean. Down only sixty feet. But still…” He shrugged. “Like finding your mother’s picture in somebody else’s pocket.”
“Is it exactly like the one you were in?”
“Mm, no. But very close. I recognize the pylon structure. That is a French-made ambience marine all right. There will be an entrance underneath, in the middle — you go up into an airlock. If somebody is inside, the airlock may be closed. The airlock is a cylinder, with all the controls on the wall. But where do you suppose the power comes from? An ambience marine uses a lot of power.”
“The thermals would be my guess. Maybe heat exchange, maybe some kind of windmill.”
Jean-Marie moved his head in approval. “That is quite an achievement, that thing out there. Do you know that?”
“I know.”
“Look, my friend — I know that thing; I can go out there and—”
“Absolutely not. You’re in charge of the Vairon; I’m in charge of the mission. You have to get us back.”
Tarp and Gance helped each other with the helmets; then each turned on the suits’ systems and checked for leaks and malfunctions. Readouts appeared inside the helmet itself, just above the transparent face plate. The suit became noisy with its work, even as the body is. Tarp equalized the pressure between suit and cabin and felt the suit thicken as it pressurized. He took a belt of tools from a rack and buckled it on and then a cylindrical carrier that held the things he had hoped to be able to use — camera, radioactive test gear.
Tarp pointed with a gloved thumb toward the airlock. Gance nodded.
He entered the tubular airlock headfirst. The cylinder followed. He slid forward to the far end and heard, like a distant drumbeat, the closing of the watertight door behind him.
Like a torpedo in a tube. He worked a hand lamp free of the belt and shone it on the controls. He and Gance had run this time after time while the Vairon sat on the tanker’s deck. Seals. Closure. Warning. Water. Red light; that’s good. Filled. Check suit. Good. Hatch. Green light. Go.
He shone the light on the hatch that was only inches from his face plate and pressed a button, then pushed on the hatch. It opened into blackness.
Like a baby.
The umbilical was just outside the hatch so that it could be attached as he left the airlock. Tarp felt the current on his arm as he reached for the cord. He fastened it to his belt and slowly pulled himself out, exiting headfirst into darkness.
The suit crushed against him but held; it was a little like wearing waders in fast water. This was the suit’s natural environment, and it felt both lighter and more flexible. The noise of the undersea current was louder than the noises of the suit; he could hear the cavitation of Vairon’s propellers as they held her steady. He thought of the whales he had seen from the tanker. They were at home here, while he was so alien that only this curious suit, which carried a tiny pod of his own environment, protected him.
The airlock opened and Gance’s light appeared. His hand followed, grasped his umbilical. Seconds later he was sliding out, borne into the cold water.
They worked their way forward, clipping the umbilicals to rings welded to Vairon’s hull as they moved. When he reached the bow Tarp signaled to Gance to stay there, and he began to make his way forward along the flexible arm. The steel members were as thick as his wrists, slippery, white as bone in the brilliance of the light. He could hardly bend at all. He tried moving on the side of the arm from which the current flowed, but it pushed the suit so tight against the metal he could hardly move, and he slid back and went to the outside, feeling it try to sweep his feet away. Behind him Gance paid out the umbilical, without which he would sail into the void like an astronaut untethered from his vehicle.
He moved into the lee of the Homburg ten feet from the first pylon. The current buffeted him less there. Five feet from the pylon he was able to keep his feet with ease, and when he reached the structure itself he was able to let himself slowly down the metal rungs he found there, using only his hands. As he left the Vairon’s skeletal arm it followed him, shining its light in a circle that seemed to protect him.
There were handholds set into the ocean floor. He had no need for them, the suit’s weighted feet keeping him upright, but he guessed that there must be times when the currents here made it impossible to walk. Still, he moved slowly, careful of his slight negative buoyancy.
At the center of the triangle formed by the pylons, as Jean-Marie had said, was a steel ladder. It rose into a cylinder that projected down from the floor of the habitat itself. The hatch was open.
He climbed, using only his hands.
There were six rungs up to the hatch. He pulled himself inside and shone his light around. The cylinder, now filled with water, was about four feet across, with the hatch in the middle of its floor. Tarp tugged at his umbilical but got no response because the current tore at it too vigorously for Gance to feel the pulse. He detached it from his belt and fastened it outside the hatch.
There were controls on the cylinder wall. Their markings were painted on the white metal in Spanish, but there was a brass plate below them that read Agence Maritime Française.
He closed the hatch and worked the control that emptied it. Compressed air forced the water out from top to bottom. As the cylinder began to empty, bright lights came on.
Seventy seconds later he was standing in an air-filled, white-walled cylinder with only a small puddle of seawater on its floor. Steel rungs rose to a hatch in the habitat floor above him.
Clumsily, he climbed.