Книга - Mer-Cycle

Mer-Cycle
Piers Anthony


A discreet advertisement brings a group of apparently disparate individuals together to a bizarre rendezvous – on the ocean floor.The reasons for their selection are unclear: Don, an archaeologist, chronically shy, Gaspar, marine biologist, suffering from terminal directness, middle-aged Pacifica, and Melanie, whose normal exterior masks a strange genetic inheritance, seem, on the face of it, to have little in common – except their feeling that they are part of a greater plan … a feeling that grows as they embark on their strange odyssey across the bed of the ocean …For the underwater explorers, the mystery of being out of phase with the world above water is heightened by that surrounding the mysterious Eleph – a mystery which is ultimately revealed to be more significant and bewildering than they could ever have imagined …







PIERS ANTHONY

Mercycle












COPYRIGHT (#ulink_06d89e97-f452-5cd8-b3bd-6aeff88c0100)


HarperVoyager

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Published by Grafton 1993

First published by Tafford Publishing Inc. 1991

Copyright © Piers Anthony 1991

Piers Anthony asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A cataklogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780586214510

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780008249359

Version: 2017-05-03




CONTENTS


Cover (#uf7b12d82-a5d7-5035-abd0-d146025c5881)

Title Page (#u67bdc204-5b09-5c22-9f30-a14863dab723)

Copyright (#ulink_73216ed0-56d2-5640-9ec4-f59545be1910)

1. Don (#ulink_99756f20-e234-59ae-a3d6-c9413d8e49d1)

2. Gaspar (#ulink_8b00d83c-afa0-5b29-b24a-33d251d301e9)

3. Melanie (#ulink_63102b06-0a9f-54e0-9e94-12e9af20a1da)

4. Eleph (#ulink_a4f812ff-ab4f-5785-aee7-bd3e31385192)

5. Pacifa (#ulink_2f688373-152a-52e2-8bb3-81b66ca444a7)

6. Mystery (#litres_trial_promo)

7. Crevasse (#litres_trial_promo)

8. City (#litres_trial_promo)

9. Glowcloud (#litres_trial_promo)

10. Decoy (#litres_trial_promo)

11. Ship (#litres_trial_promo)

12. Splendid (#litres_trial_promo)

13. Minos (#litres_trial_promo)

14. Atlantis (#litres_trial_promo)

15. Crisis (#litres_trial_promo)

16. Mission (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_20a029d2-ccc9-5646-9967-63b7c65388b5)

DON (#ulink_20a029d2-ccc9-5646-9967-63b7c65388b5)


Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.

Acknowledging.

Status?

Four locals have been recruited and equipped. They are waiting for the signal to commence.

They are ignorant of their mission?

They believe they have missions, but none know the true one. They have been given a cover story relevant to their interests. By the time they realize that the cover story is irrelevant, they should be ready for the truth.

Contraindications?

One is an agent of a local government.

Why is this allowed?

The recruitment brought the response of this person. It seemed worth trying. That one can be eliminated if necessary. Such involvement might prove to be advantageous.

With the fate of a world at stake?

We do not know what will be most effective. It is no more risky than the exclusion of such persons might be.

It remains a gamble.

Any course is a gamble.

True. Proceed.

Acknowledged. I will start the first one through the phasing tunnel.

Don Kestle pedaled down the road, watching nervously for life. It was early dawn, and the sparrows were twittering in the Australian Pines as they waited for the picnickers, but nothing human was visible.

Now was the time. He shifted down to second, muttering as the chain caught between gear-sprockets and spun without effect. He still wasn’t used to this multiple-speed bicycle, and it seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. He fiddled with the lever, and finally it caught.

He bucked the bike over the bank and into the unkempt grass, moving as rapidly as he could. He winced as he saw his thin tires going over formidable spreads of sandspur, though he knew the stuff was harmless to him and his equipment. That was because, as he understood it, he wasn’t really here.

Soon he hit the fine white dry sand. He braked, remembering this time to use the hand levers instead of embarrassing himself by pedaling backwards, and dismounted automatically. Actually it was quite possible to ride over the sand, for it could not toss this bike—but anyone who happened to see him doing that might suspect that something was funny. A bicycle tire normally lost traction and support, skewing badly in such a situation.

In a moment the beach opened out to the sea: typical palm-studded Florida coastline. Seagulls were already airborne, raucously calling out. A sign warned NO SWIMMING, for there were treacherous tidal currents here. That was why Don had selected this spot and this time to make his cycling debut; it was least likely to harbor prying eyes. He had been given a place and a time to be there; his exact schedule was his own business.

The tide was out. Don walked his bicycle across the beach until he reached the packed sand near the small breaking waves. Myriad tiny shells formed a long low hump, and he realized that early-rising collectors could appear at any moment. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Yet when else could he enter the water, clothed and on a bicycle, by daylight? He simply had to risk it.

Beyond the shell ridge, the sand was wet and smooth. He looked carefully, both ways, as if crossing a busy intersection. Was he hoping that there would be someone, so that he would have to call it off?

No, he wanted to do it, Don reassured himself. In any event, his timing was such that he could not spare the hours an alternate approach would require. He had chosen dawn at this beach, and now he was committed. He had been committed all along. It was just that—well, a bit hard to believe. Here he was, a healthy impetuous fair-complexioned beginning archaeologist with a bicycle—and a remarkable opportunity. What could he do except grasp it, though he hardly comprehended it?

Don remounted and pushed down hard, driving his machine forward into the flexing ocean. The waves surged through the wheels, offering no more resistance than air. He moved on, feeling the liquid against his legs as the force of gentle wind. He didn’t really need more power, but he shifted into first anyway, bolstering his confidence. It remained hard to believe that he was doing this.

The bottom dropped, and abruptly he was coasting down into deeper water. Too fast for his taste. Now he did backpedal, futilely. There was no coaster brake on this machine!

The water rose up to his thighs, then his chest, then his neck. Still he coasted down. In another instant it was up across his face, and then it closed over his head. Don did not slow or float; he just kept going in.

He could see beneath, now. There was a rocky formation here, perhaps formed of shell. He would have investigated the local marine terrain more carefully, if only he had had time. But the whole thing had been set up so rapidly that he had barely had time to buy his bike before going through the tunnel. Now here he—

He realized that he was holding his breath. He forced himself to breathe, surprised in spite of himself that he still could do it. He had tested it by plunging his head into a tub of water, but somehow the surging sea water had restored his doubt. He applied his handbrakes.

The bicycle glided to a halt. Don braced it upright by spreading his legs, and rested in place for a moment with his eyes closed. This way he could breathe freely, for he couldn’t see the surrounding water.

Don found himself cowering. He knew he was not physically courageous, but this seemed to be an overreaction. In a moment he realized why: it was the noise.

He had somehow imagined that the underwater realm was silent. Instead it was noisier than the land. Some was staccato sound, some was whistling, and some was like the crackling of a hot frying pan. Grunts, clicks, flutters, swishes, honks, rattling chains, cackling hens, childish laughter, jackhammers, growls, knocking, whining, groaning, mouse squeaks—it all merged into a semi-melodious cacophony. He had no idea what was responsible for the assault, but was sure that it couldn’t all be inanimate. The nearest commercial enterprise was twenty miles away!

Could fish talk? Probably he would soon find out. It would be no more fantastic than the other recent developments of his life.

He was way under the water, standing and breathing as if it didn’t exist. How had he gotten into this?

“Well, it all started about twenty three years ago when I was b-born,” he said aloud, and laughed. He was not unduly reflective, but he did stutter a bit under tension. So maybe it wasn’t really funny.

Don opened his eyes.

He was down under, all right. He could see clearly for perhaps twenty feet. Beyond that was just bluegreen water-color wash. Above him, eight or ten feet, was the restless surface: little waves cruising toward ruin against the beach. Beneath him was a green meadow of sea grass, sloping irregularly down.

Now that he was stationary, he did not feel the water. He waved his hands, and they met no more resistance than they might have in air. It was warm here: about 88° Fahrenheit according to the indicator clipped to his bicycle. The temperature of subtropical coastal water in summer. He would be able to work up a sweat very quickly—unless he chose to descend to the deeper levels where the water got cold. He did not choose to do so, yet. Anyway, he was largely insulated from the water’s temperature, as he was from its density. That was all part of the miracle of his situation.

A small fish swam toward him, evidently curious about this weird intruder. Don didn’t recognize the type; he was no expert on marine biology. In fact he didn’t know much about anything to do with the ocean. It was probably a nondescript trash fish, the kind that survived in these increasingly polluted waters. This one looked harmless, but of course even the deadliest killer shark was not harmful to him now. He was really not in the water, but in an aspect of reality that was just about 99.9% out of phase with what he saw about him. Thus the water had the effective density of air.

In impulse, he grabbed at the fish as it nosed within reach. His hand closed about its body—and passed through the flesh as if it were liquid foam. The bones of his fingers hooked into the bones of its skeleton without actually snagging.

Don snatched his hand away. Equally startled, the fish flexed its body and shot out of range. There had been a kind of contact, but not one that either party cared to repeat. No damage done, but it had been a weird experience.

It was one thing to contemplate a reality interaction of one part in a thousand, intellectually. It was quite another to tangle with a living skeleton.

Well, he had been warned. He couldn’t stand around gawking. He had a distance to travel. The coordinate meter mounted beside the temperature gauge said 27°40’—82°45’. He had fifteen hours to reach 27°0’—83° 15’. He had been told that a degree was sixty minutes, and a minute just about a mile, depending on location and direction. This sounded to his untrained ear like a mish-mash of temperature, time, and distance muddled by an incomprehensible variable. It seemed that he had about thirty miles west to go, and about forty south, assuming that he had not become hopelessly confused. The hypotenuse would be fifty miles, per the three-four-five triangle ratio. Easy to make on a bicycle, since it came to only three and a third miles per hour average speed.

Of course he probably wouldn’t be able to go straight. What was his best immediate route?

He didn’t want to remain in shallow water, for there would be bathers and boaters and fishermen all along the coast. His depth meter showed two fathoms. That would be twelve feet from bike to surface. Entirely too little, for he must be as visible from above as those ripples were from below. How would a boater react if he peered down and saw a man bicycling blithely along under the water?

But deep water awed him, though he knew that pressure was not a significant factor in this situation. Men could withstand several atmospheres if they were careful, and he had been told that there were no depths in the great Atlantic Ocean capable of putting so much as two atmospheres on him in his phased-out state. He could ignore pressure. All of which somehow failed to ease the pressure on his worried mind. This business just wasn’t natural.

He would take a middle course. Say about a hundred feet, or a bit shy of seventeen fathoms. He would stick to that contour until he made his rendezvous.

Don pushed on the left pedal—somehow that was his only comfortable starting position—and moved out. The seagrass reached up with its long green leaves, obscuring his view of the sloping floor. But his wheels passed through the weeds, or the weeds through the wheels, and so did his body. There was only a gentle stroking sensation that affected him with an almost sexual intimacy as plant collided with flesh. The grass might be no denser than the water, but it was solid, not liquid, and that affected the contact.

He didn’t like it, this naked probing of his muscle and gut, but there was nothing he could do about it. Except to get out of this cloying patch of feelers.

At nine fathoms the grass did thin out and leave the bottom exposed. It needed light, and the light was dimming. Good enough. But this had a consequence for Don, too. Just below the surface things had looked normal, for the limited distance he could see. Now the color red was gone. It had vanished somewhere between three and four fathoms, he decided; he hadn’t been paying proper attention. He had a red bag on his bicycle that now looked orange-brown. The effect was eerie and it alarmed him despite his awareness of its cause.

“S-steady,” he told himself. “The water absorbs the red frequencies first. That’s all there is to it. Next orange will go, then yellow, then green. Finally it will be completely dark.” He found his heart pounding, and knew he had succeeded only in bringing out another fear. He just didn’t feel safe in dark water.

He had somehow supposed that the ocean floor would be sandy and even, just like a broad beach. Instead it was a tangled mass of vegetation and shell—and much of the latter was living. Sponges grew everywhere, all colors (except red, now) and shapes and sizes. His wheels could not avoid the myriad starfish and crablike creatures that covered the bottom in places.

But at least he was getting his depth. The indicator showed ten fathoms, then fifteen, then twenty. Down far enough now to make headway toward the rendezvous.

But he had to go deeper, because the contour would have taken him in the wrong direction. He had been naive about that; if he tried to adhere strictly to a given depth, he would be forced to detour ludicrously. The ocean bottom was not even; there were ridges and channels, just as there were on land.

The medley of mysterious sounds had continued, though he had soon tuned most of it out. Now there was something new. A more mechanical throbbing, very strong, pulsing through the water. Growing. Like an approaching ship.

A ship! He was in the harbor channel for the commercial ships using the port of Tampa. No wonder he had gotten his depth so readily.

Don turned around and pedaled madly back the way he had come. He had to get to shallow water before that ship came through, churning the water with its deadly screws. He could be sucked in and cut into shreds.

Then he remembered. He was out of phase with the world; nothing here could touch him. He had little to fear from ships.

Still, he climbed out of the way. A ship was a mighty solid artifact. The hull would be thick metal—perhaps solid enough to interact with his bones and smash him up anyway. After all, the bicycle’s wheels interacted with the ocean floor, supporting him nicely. Could he expect less of metal?

The throbbing grew loud, then terrible. There was sound throughout the sea, but the rest of it was natural. Now Don appreciated the viewpoint of the fish, wary of the alien monsters made by man, intruding into the heart of their domain. But then it diminished. The ship had passed, unseen—and he felt deviously humiliated. He had been driven aside, in awe of the thing despite being a man. It was not a fun sensation.

Don resumed his journey. He followed the channel several miles, then pulled off it for a rest break. The coordinate meter said he had traversed only about four minutes of his fifty, and he was tiring already. He was wearing himself down, and he had hardly started. Cross-country underwater biking was hardly the joy that travel on land-pavement was.

Wouldn’t it be nice if he had a motorcycle instead of this pedaler. But that was out of the question; he had been told, in that single compacted anonymous briefing, that a motor would not function in the phase. So he had to provide his own power, with a bicycle being the most efficient transportation. He had accepted this because it made sense, though he had never seen his informant.

Something flapped toward him. Don stiffened in place, ready to leap toward the bike. He felt a chill that was certainly not of the water. The thing was flying, not swimming! Not like a bird, but like a monstrous butterfly.

It was a small ray, a skate. A flattened fish with broad, undulating, winglike fins. All quite normal, nothing to be alarmed about.

But Don’s emotion was not to be placated so simply. A skate was a thing of inherent terror. Once as a child he had been wading in the sea, and a skate had passed between him and the shore. That hadn’t frightened him unduly at the time, for he had never seen one before and didn’t even realize that it was really alive. But afterwards friends had spun him stories about the long stinging tail, poisonous, that could stun a man so that he drowned. And about the creature’s cousins, the great manta rays, big as flying saucers, that could sail up out of the water and smack down from above. “You’re lucky you got out in time!” they said, blowing up the episode as boys did, inventing facts to fit.

Don had shrugged it off, not feeling easy about taking credit for a bravery he knew he lacked. But the notion of the skate grew on him, haunting him retrospectively. It entered his dreams: standing knee-deep or even waist-deep in a mighty ocean, the long small beach far away, seeing the devilfish, being cut off from escape, horrified at the approach of the stinger but afraid to wade out farther into that murky swirling unknown. But the ray came nearer, expanding into immensity, and he had to retreat, and the sand gave way under his feet, pitching him into the abyss, into cold smothering darkness, where nothing could reach him except the terrible stinger, and he woke gasping and crying.

For several nights it haunted him. Then it passed, being no more than a childish fancy he knew was exaggerated. He never had liked ocean water particularly—but since he didn’t live near the shore, this was no handicap. For fifteen years the nightmare had lain quiescent, forgotten—until this moment.

Of course the creature couldn’t get at him now, any more than it could have in the dream. Not when its body was phased out, with respect to him, to that one thousandth of its actual solidity. Or vice versa. Same thing. Let it pass right through him. Let it feel the brushing of bones.

The skate veered, birdlike—then came back unexpectedly. It was aware of him. Without conscious volition Don was on the bike and pedaling desperately, fleeing a specter that was only partly real. The thing’s flesh might be no more than a ghost to him, but that very insubstantiality enhanced the effect. The supernatural had manifested itself.

Adrenaline gave him strength. By the time he convinced himself that the skate was gone, he was miles farther along. He had never been overly bold, but this episode had certainly given his schedule a boost.

Next time, however, he would force himself to break out his camera and take a picture. He couldn’t afford to run from every imaginary threat.

He had lost track of the channel. The meter now read eight fathoms. He had moved about three minutes west, and would have to bear mainly south henceforth. But he could use some deeper water, as patches of weed still got in his way.

But deep water was not to be found. Sometimes it was nine or ten fathoms, but then it would shrink to six. He had to shift gears frequently to navigate the minor hills and dales of this benthic terrain, for he was tired. The wind—really the currents of the water—made significant difference. Some spots were hot, others cool, without seeming pattern. Some were darker, too, as if polluted, but this could have been the effect of clouds cutting off the direct sunlight.

Don was tired of this. The novelty had worn off quite quickly. His time in the water had acclimated him; what could there be in the depths more annoying than this? He cut due west again, knowing that there had to be a descent at some point. The entire Gulf of Mexico couldn’t remain within ten fathoms.

His legs protested, but he kept on. Miles passed—and gradually it did get deeper. When he hit fifteen fathoms he turned south, for he was now almost precisely north of his target area.

There was still enough glow for him to see by, which was good, because he didn’t want to use his precious headlamp unnecessarily. Actually this objection was nonsensical, he realized, because it had a generator that ran from his pedaling power. But he was still having trouble overcoming his lifelong certainties: such as the fact that one could use a flashlight only so long before the battery gave out. Besides, a light might attract larger creatures. He didn’t care how insubstantial they might be; he didn’t want to meet them.

Don had thought it ridiculous to enter the water fifty miles from his destination, and doubly so to do it alone. What did he know about the ocean? But now he was able to appreciate the rationale. He had a lot of mundane edges to smooth before he could function efficiently in this medium. Better to work it out by himself, and let the others do likewise; then they would all three be broken in and ready to function as a team, minus embarrassments. That was the number he had guessed; each would have a relevant specialty for the mission. Strangers, who would get along, perforce.

Reassured, he stopped for lunch. Actually it was only nine a.m. and he had been under the water about three hours. But it seemed like noon, and he needed a pretext to rest.

There was a radio mounted within the frame of his bicycle. It was not for news or entertainment, but for communication with his companions, once he had some. He didn’t see the need for it, as sound crossed over perfectly well. But of course there could be emergencies requiring separation of a mile or two. The radios would not tune in the various bands of civilization, he had been told; they were on a special limited frequency. But they should reach as far as necessary.

Idly, he turned the ON switch. There was no tuning dial or set of station buttons; all he would get from this thing would be an operative hum.

“Hello,” a soft feminine voice said.

Surprised, Don didn’t answer.

“Hello,” she repeated. Still he was silent, having no idea what to say, or whether he should speak.

“I know your set is on,” the voice said. “I can hear the sea-noises in the background.”

Don switched off. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody on the line! Especially not a woman. Who was she, and what did she want?

By the coordinates, he had come barely ten or twelve miles. It was hard to figure, and not important enough to warrant the necessary mental effort. Three or four miles an hour, average. On land, the little distance he had gone, he was sure his rate had been double or triple that. He could have walked as fast, down here. And with less fatigue.

No, that was not true. He had to be honest with himself. He was carrying considerable weight in the form of food and clothing and related supplies. He even had a small tent. Then there was the converter: portable plumbing. And complex miniaturized equipment to keep the humidity constant, or something. His instrumentation was formidable. That coordinate meter was no two-bit toy, either. He had not known that such things existed, and suspected their cost would have been well beyond his means. Regardless of their miniaturization, they weighed a fair amount. His bicycle weighed about forty pounds, and the other things might total a similar amount. Half his own weight, all told. He would have felt it, hiking, and would not have been able to maintain any four miles an hour.

Naturally the bike was sluggish. Even the quintuple gearing could not ameliorate weight and terrain and indecision. Once he found a good, smooth, level stretch without weeds or shells, he could make much better time.

Even so, he was on schedule. Fortunately he was in good physical condition, and recovered quickly from exertion. How good his mental state was he wasn’t sure; small things were setting him off unreasonably, and he was hearing female voices on a closed-circuit radio.

He unpacked the concentrates, having trouble finding what he wanted. These were supposed to be packages of things that expanded into edibility when water was added.

He had a bulb of water: a transparent pint-sized container. There was a second pint in reserve. After that he would have to go to recycled fluid, a prospect he didn’t relish.

There were a number of things about this business that did not exactly turn him on. But two things had overwhelmed his aversions: the money and the chance to be involved in something significant. The mission, he had been told, would be done within a month, and the pay matched what he would have had from a year with a good job in his specialty. And if he did not agree that it was a mission he was proud to be associated with, that pay would double. The money had been paid in advance, in full; there was no question about that. So he had been willing to take the rest on faith, and to put up with the awkward details. They were, after all, necessary; he could not drink the water of the sea because it was both salty and phased out, and he could not eat the food of it either. He had to be self sufficient, except for the supplies which would be found in depots along the way.

Don inserted the syringe into the appropriate aperture of his food-packet and squeezed. The wrapping inflated. The principle was simple enough; he could have figured it out for himself if he had not been told, and there were instructions on the packets. He kneaded it, feeling the content solidify squishily. He counted off one minute while it set. His meal was ready.

He tore along the seam, exposing a pinkish mass. Cherry flavored glop, guaranteed to contain all the essential nutrients known to be required by man, plus a few good guesses. Vitamins A, B, C; P and Q; X, Y, and Z? It looked like puréed cow brains.

Don brought it cautiously to his nose and sniffed. Worse. Had he done something wrong? This smelled as if he had used urine as the liquid ingredient. He would never make his mark as a chef!

He suppressed his unreasonable revulsion and took a bite. After all, what could go wrong with a prepackaged meal? He chewed.

He spat it out. The stuff was absolutely vile. It tasted like rotten cheese laced with vinegar, and his stomach refused to believe it was wholesome. He deposited the remains in the converter, for even this must not be wasted.

Now he had sanitary needs. The hard labor of travel had disturbed his digestion. Or was it the experience with the foul glop? No, neither; it was the emotional strain of traversing the ocean floor in this remarkable phase state. He had practiced breathing in that tank of water, just after tunneling through, so that he had known it was feasible. But that had hardly prepared him for the psychological impact of pedaling a bicycle under the heaving sea.

He had to admit that this was an interesting adventure, even in its bad aspects. He knew already that he would not be demanding double pay. He had not been told he would like every aspect, just that it would be significant, and that it was.

He wound up with a plastic bag of substance. He hesitated, then reluctantly deposited it, too, in the converter. This stuff was in phase with him, and there was not much way to replace it; it must not be wasted. The unit would process it all, powered by a spur from his pedaling crank just below, reducing the solids to ash and filling another pint container with potable water.

Water, water, everywhere—how odd that he should be immersed in it, yet have to conserve it rigidly lest he dehydrate. There was a dichotomy about this phaseout that he wasn’t clear about. The sea was like air to him, yet it remained the sea to its denizens. Fish could and did swim right through him and his bicycle without falling or gasping for gill-fluid. So it wasn’t air at all, merely water at one one-thousandth effective density. So how was he able to breathe it? That little matter had not, in the rush, been clarified.

Don was no chemist, but he knew that H


O did not convert to—what was it? N


O? No, air wasn’t that kind of combination, it was just a mixture of gases. Anyway, the O, for oxygen, in H


O could not be asssimilated for respiration. He knew that much. Water vapor wasn’t breathable. Even the fish had to sift their oxygen from the air dissolved in water, not the water itself. Yet even if he could have breathed the water, he would have been getting only one thousandth of the oxygen it contained, or maybe one five-hundredth what he was accustomed to. That was extremely slim pickings.

He was wasting time. He had perhaps forty miles to go yet—a good four or five hours even on a decent surface. Twelve hours at his present rate. Which left him no time at all to rest or sleep. He had to keep moving.

Maybe his contact was expecting him. Was he in radio range? He flicked the radio switch.

“Now don’t turn me off,” the female voice said, “before I—” But he had already done so.

Now as he rode he tried to analyze his motive. Why did he object to hearing from a woman? So maybe she had somehow tuned in on this private band; that did not make her a criminal. She evidently had some notion where he was. What harm would there be in talking to her?

He got under way and tuned out the scenery. Not that he had paid much attention to it so far. What had he seen, actually? Fish, sponges, a blur of water, the shift of digits on the meters, and the irregular terrain of the sea floor.

Somehow the radio voice seemed one with the scenery. Both needed to be tuned out. Yet he knew that this was nonsensical. The scenery was already over-familiar, but the woman was a stranger. Why wouldn’t he talk to her?

He realized that he couldn’t blame it on the secrecy of the mission, because he knew no secrets yet, and was not responsible for radio security. It was the fact that she had caught him by surprise, and that she was a sweet-voiced young woman. That voice conjured a mental image of an attractive creature—the kind that paid no attention to a studious loner like him. So he had tuned out immediately, rather than get involved and risk the kind of put-down that would inevitably come. It was a virtually involuntary reflex.

So now he understood it. That didn’t change it. He was afraid to talk to her.

He moved, he rested, he moved less, he rested more, he ground on, he tried another meal—and quickly fed it into the converter. It couldn’t be his imagination! That food was spoiled. Fortunately his appetite was meager.

Don woke from his travel-effort oblivion to see to his dumbfounded joy that he had picked up on his schedule and could afford an hour’s break. So he propped his bike, lay down on the strangely solid sand, and sank into a blissful stupor until the alarm went off. The world outside his little sphere became as unreal as it seemed.

Just so long as he didn’t miss his rendezvous. He thought of himself as a loner, but that was mainly with respect to women. He had been alone more than enough, in this odd region on this strange mission.

He made it. He was on 83°15’ west longitude already, and bearing down on 27° north latitude. It was a few minutes (time, not distance) before nine in the morning. Nothing was visible, of course. It was dark above, and even with his headlight on he could not see far enough to locate anything much smaller than an active volcano. Water in his vicinity might feel like air, but it still dampened vision in its normal fashion. Except that the lamp restored full color, blessedly. Even if he could have seen for miles, the problem of pinpoint location would be similar to that in a dry-land wilderness. His meter was not that precise.

As his watch showed the moment of scheduled contact, Don stood still and listened. The ever-present noises of the sea crowded in annoyingly. Sound: there was the key. Here in the ocean, sound traveled at quadruple its speed in air, and it carried much better. Light might damp out, and radar, but sound was in its element here. Make a noise in the sea and it would be heard.

Don heard. It was the faint beep-beep of a signal no marine creature made—he hoped. It was Morse Code. And it had an echo: the slower arrival of the impulse through the air of the phase?

When it paused, he answered. He did not know Morse himself, except as a typical pattern of dots and dashes, so he merely sounded three blasts on his whistle. After a moment the same signal was returned.

Contact had been made.




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_c25d9e0f-7d8f-57d4-b5a8-cd5a1533ca5f)

GASPAR (#ulink_c25d9e0f-7d8f-57d4-b5a8-cd5a1533ca5f)


Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.

Acknowledging.

Status?

The first three recruits have been sent through the phase tunnel and the fourth alerted. The mission is proceeding as designed.

Contraindications?

The first recruit refuses to hold a radio dialogue. This may indicate an intellectual problem that did not manifest itself on the initial screening. He is otherwise normal, and seems to be pursuing the mission in good faith. The second recruit is more assertive, and may override this attitude or incapacity in the first. This foible does not appear to pose a threat to the mission.

There are always peculiarities of local situations. If this is the extent in your case, you are well off. 5–12–5–16–9 has a suicidal recruit.

That world may be lost!

Not necessarily. A suicidal person may be in a position to understand the loss of a world.

And may not care.

True. But what we offer does seem preferable to complete destruction.

“Gaspar Brown, marine geologist,” the man said. He was short and fairly muscular, dark-haired and swarthy and looked to be in his mid thirties.

“Don Kestle, archaeologist,” Don responded. “Minoan.”

The bicycles drew together and the men reached across to shake hands. Don was phenomenally relieved to feel solid flesh again. He found himself liking Gaspar, though he had never met the man before. At this stage he liked anything human. The specters of his loneliness had retreated immeasurably.

“S-so you know about the ocean,” Don said, finding nothing better as conversation fodder at the moment. He had never been much for initiating a relationship, and hoped Gaspar was better at it.

“Almost nothing.”

“W-what?”

“I know almost nothing about the ocean,” Gaspar said, “compared to what remains to be discovered. I can’t even identify half these fish noises I’m hearing. They’re much louder and clearer and more intricate than normal.”

Don smiled weakly. “Oh. Yes.”

“That’s why I welcome this opportunity to explore,” Gaspar continued, warming. “This way we don’t disturb the marine creatures, so they don’t hide or shut up. Think of it: the entire ocean basin open to us without the problems of clumsy diving suits, nitrogen narcosis, or the bends.”

“N-nitrogen—?”

“You know. Rapture of the deep. Nitrogen dissolves in the blood because of the pressure, and this makes the diver drunk. This can kill him faster than alcohol in a driver, because it’s himself at risk, not some innocent pedestrian. So he comes up in a hurry, and that nitrogen bubbles out of his blood like the fizz in fresh soda, blocking blood vessels or lodging in joints and doubling him up like—”

“You’re right,” Don agreed quickly. “Nice not to have to worry.”

“Hey, have you eaten yet? I’ve been so excited just looking around I haven’t—”

“W-well, I—” Don was abashed to admit his problem with the food, so he concealed it. “I haven’t eaten, no.” Gaspar was carrying the conversational ball, and that was a relief. Don was happy to go along, letting his compliance pass for social adequacy. Once he knew a person, it was easier.

“Great.” Gaspar hauled out his packages and chose one. “Steak flavor. Let’s see whether it’s close.”

Don dug out a matching flavor from his pack, not commenting. If Gaspar could eat this stuff …

They squeezed the bulbs and the packages ballooned. Gaspar opened his first and took a bite. He chewed. “Not bad, considering,” he said. “Not close, but not bad. Maybe it would be closer if it didn’t have the texture of paste. Better than K-rations, anyway.”

Don got a grip on his nerve and opened his own. The same rotten odor wafted out.

“Hey, is your converter leaking?” Gaspar inquired.

“Not that I know of. Why?” As if he didn’t know!

“That smell. Something’s foul. No offense.”

Wordlessly Don held out his package.

Gaspar sniffed, choked, and took it from him. In a moment it was in the converter. “You got a bad one! Didn’t you know?”

“They’re all like that, I thought. I was afraid—”

“They can’t be! These things are sterile. Let me check.”

“B-be my guest.”

Gaspar checked. “What a mess! I can tell without having to use the water. Did you actually eat that stuff?”

“One bite.”

Gaspar laughed readily. “You’ve got more grit than I have. What a rotten deal! Have some of mine.”

Don accepted it gratefully. Gaspar’s cherry glop tasted like cherry, and his steak like steak. Texture was something else, but this wasn’t worth a quibble at this stage.

“H-how do you think it happened?” Don asked as his hunger abated.

“Oh, accident, I’d say,” Gaspar decided. “You know the government. Three left feet at the taxpayer’s expense. We’ll share mine, and we’ll both reload at the first supply depot. No trouble, really.”

The man certainly didn’t get upset over trifles. But Don wondered what kind of carelessness would be allowed to imperil this unique, secret mission, not to mention his life. For a man had to eat, and they could only assimilate food that had been phased into this state.

“Is it a government operation?” Don asked. “I thought maybe a private enterprise.”

Gaspar shrugged. “Could be. I wasn’t told. But somebody went to a pretty formidable expense to set us up with some pretty fancy equipment. If it’s not the government, it must be a large corporation. This looks like a million dollar operation to me, apart from what they’re paying us. But you’re right: the big companies get criminally sloppy too. It could be either. Let’s hope their quality control is better on the other stuff.”

That reminded Don about the female voice on his radio. Had it been mistuned, so that it connected to someone not with this mission? If so, he had been right to cut off contact, though that was not why he had done it. Obviously that person wasn’t Gaspar. Did she speak on both their radios, or only his own? Or had he imagined it? Should he ask?

Yes, he should. “D-did you t-turn on your—?”

“Say, look at that!” Gaspar cried.

Don looked around, alarmed. It was a monstrous fish, three times the length of a man, with a snout like the blade of a chain saw.

“Sawfish,” Gaspar exclaimed happily. “Isn’t she a beauty! I never saw one in these waters before. But then I never rode a bike here before, either. My scuba gear must have scared them away. What a difference that phase makes. Not that I’m any ichthyologist.”

“I thought sea-life was your specialty.”

“No. The sea bottom. I can tell you something about rock formations, saline diffusion, and sedimentary strata, but the fauna I just pick up in passing. I know the sawfish scouts the bottom—see, there she goes, poking around—and sometimes slashes up whole schools of fish with that snout, so as to eat the pieces, but that’s about all. Relative of the rays, I believe.”

That ugly chill returned. The fish was horizontally flattened, with vaguely winglike fins. It did resemble a skate, from the right angle.

“Y-you know, w-we aren’t completely apart,” Don said. “The bones—they interact—”

“Oh, do they?” Gaspar asked, as if this were an interesting scientific sidelight. As of course it was, to him. “I suppose they would, being rigid. There has to be some interaction, or we would sink right through the ground, wouldn’t we? In fact, I’m surprised we don’t; it isn’t that solid, normally. Sediment, you know.”

The sawfish vanished, and Don was vastly relieved. “You’re right! If we intersect the real world by only a thousandth, why don’t we find the sand like muck? If anything, it’s harder than it should be. My tires don’t sink into it at all. And how is it we can see and hear so well? I should think—”

“I’m no nuclear physicist, either. I have no notion how this field operates, if it is a field—but thank God for its existence.”

“Maybe it isn’t exactly a field,” Don said. He was glad to get into something halfway technical, because it was grist for conversation, and he was curious himself. “Why should we have to ride through that tunnel-thing—you did do that?—to enter it, in that case? But if we were shunted into another, well, dimension—”

“Could be.” Gaspar considered for a moment. “Maybe one of the others will know. I’m just glad it works.”

“Others? I thought this was a party of three.”

“Oh? Maybe you’re right. I wasn’t told, just that there would be more than one. I thought maybe four.” Gaspar seemed to sidestep any potential disagreement, inoffensively. “Do you happen to know his specialty?”

“Me? That official was so tight-lipped I was lucky to learn more than my own name. And we’re not supposed to tell each other our last names, I think.”

“Necessary security, I suppose,” Gaspar said. “I clean forgot. Well, you just forget mine, and I’ll forget yours. Did you get to see anyone?”

“No, it was just an interviewer behind a screen. A voice, really; it could almost have been a recording.”

“Same here. I responded to this targeted ad on my computer, and the pay and conditions—I was about ready for a job change anyway. I still don’t know what the mission is, but I’m already glad I’m here.” He glanced at Don. “How’d you get into this project, anyway? No offense, but archaeology is mostly landside, isn’t it? Digging trenches through old mounds, picking up bits of pottery, publishing scholarly reports? There can’t be much for you, under the sea.”

“That’s a pretty simple view of it,” Don said, glad to have a question about his specialty. His reticence faded when he was in his area of competence. “But maybe close enough. The fact is, a great many archaeologists have combed through those mounds and collected that pottery, on land. They’ve reconstructed some fabulous history. If I could only have been with Bibby at Dilmun …” He sighed, knowing that the other would not comprehend his regret. No sense in getting into a lecture. “But I came too late. Today the major horizon in archaeology is marine, and the shallow waters have been pretty well exploited, too. No one knows how thoroughly the Mediterranean Sea has been ransacked. So that leaves deep water, and I guess you know better than I do why that’s been left alone.”

“Pressure,” Gaspar said immediately. “One atmosphere for every thirty four feet depth. A few thousand feet down—ugh! But I was asking about you. I don’t want to seem more nosy than I am; I just think we’d better have some idea why and how we were picked for this mission. Because the sea is formidable, even phased out as we are; make no mistake about that. The depths are a greater challenge than the moon. So it figures that the most qualified personnel would be used.”

Don laughed, but it was forced. “I—I’m the least qualified archaeologist around. My only claim to fame is that I can read Minoan script, more or less—and there’s precious little of that hereabouts.”

“I’m not the world’s most notable marine geologist, either,” Gaspar agreed. “Any major oil company has a dozen that could give me lessons. But what I’m saying is that for this project, they should have used the best, and they could have, if they cared enough, because they evidently do have the money. Instead they placed little ads and hired nonentities like us, and maybe we aren’t quite even in our specialties. You’re—what was it?”

“Minoan. That’s ancient Crete.”

“And I specialize in marine impact craters. Want to know what there’re none of, here in the Florida shallows? If they had taken us down to the coast of Colombia, as I had hoped—” He shrugged.

“What’s there?” Don asked.

“You don’t know? No, I suppose that’s no more obvious to you than Crete is to me. That’s where we believe the big one splashed down: the meteor that so shook up the Earth’s system that it wiped out the dinosaurs.”

“The extinction of the dinosaurs!” Don exclaimed.

“Right. But the site has about sixty five million years worth of sediment covering it. So it will take an in depth—no pun—investigation to confirm it, assuming we can. But instead of sending me there, they sent me here. We’d have to bike across the Puerto Rico Trench to reach it, which is pointless and probably impossible. So either they have some lesser crater in mind for me, or they don’t care whether I see a crater at all. I’m out of specialty, just as you are. See what I mean?”

Don nodded soberly. “Maybe we’re expendable.”

“Maybe. Oh, I’m not paranoid about it. This phase thing is such a breakthrough that I’d sell my watery soul for the chance, and I think I mean that literally, to explore the ocean floor at any depth, unfettered by cumbersome equipment—that’s the raw stuff of dreams. But why me? Why you?”

“I can’t answer that,” Don said. “All I can do is say how I’m here. I wasn’t the bright boy of my class, but I was in the top quarter, with my main strength in deciphering. The lucrative foundations passed me up, and anyway, I wanted to go into new territory. Make a real breakthrough, somehow. Too ambitious for my own good. The prof knew it, and he made the contact. Swore me to secrecy, told me to buy myself a good bicycle and ride it to the address he gave me—well, that was two days ago, and here I am.”

“You’re single?”

“All the way single. My father died about five years ago, and my mother always was sickly—no s-sense going into that. I’ve got no special ties to this world. Maybe that’s why the ancient world fascinates me. You, too?”

“Pretty much. Auto accident when I was ten. Since then the sea has seemed more like home than the city. So nobody is going to be in a hurry to trace down our whereabouts. I think I see a pattern developing. We must have had qualifications we didn’t realize.”

“Must have,” Don agreed. “But you know, it’s growing on me too. I don’t know a thing about the sea, or even about bicycles, but I do know that the major archaeological horizon is right here. Not that I have the least bit of training for it. I guess I just closed my mind to the notion of going to the sea. But now that I’m in it—well, if I have to risk my life using a new device, maybe it’s worth it. All those ancient hulks waiting to be discovered in deep water—”

“Sorry. No ancient hulk is in the ocean,” Gaspar said. “Not the way you’re thinking, anyway. Ever hear of the teredo?”

“No.”

“Otherwise known as the shipworm, though it isn’t a worm at all. It’s a little clam that—”

“Oh, that. I had forgotten. It eats wood, so—”

“So pretty soon no ship is left. Modern metal hulks, yes; ancient wood hulks, no.”

“What a loss of archaeology,” Don said, mortified. “I could wring that clam’s neck.”

Gaspar smiled. “Of course the ship’s contents may survive. Gold lasts forever underwater, and pottery—”

“Pottery! That’s wonderful!” Don exclaimed.

For the first time Gaspar showed annoyance. “I’m just telling you what to expect.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic. Pottery is a prime tool of archaeology. It breaks and gets thrown away, and so it remains for centuries or millennia, undisturbed, every shard a key to the culture that made it. Who wants broken pottery—except an archaeologist? There is hardly a finer key to the activities of man through the ages.”

Gaspar gazed at him incredulously, or so it seemed in the fading light of the headlamps, whose reservoirs were running down now that the bikes were stationary. “It really is true? You do collect broken plates and things? You value them more than gold?”

“Yes! Gold is natural; it tells little unless it has been worked. But pottery is inevitably the handiwork of man. Its style is certain indication of a specific time and culture. Show me a few pottery shards and let me check my references, and I can tell you where and when they were made, sometimes within five or ten miles and twenty years. It may take time to do it, but the end is almost certain.”

Gaspar raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, friend. If we find a wreck, I’ll take the gold and you take the broken plates. Fair enough?”

“I’ll have the better bargain. You can’t keep the gold, by law, unless it’s in international waters; but the shards could make me famous.”

“You archaeologists may be smarter than you look!”

“I should hope so.”

Gaspar smiled. “Let’s sack out. We’ve got a long ride tomorrow, I fear.”

“What’s the position?”

“The coordinates for the next rendezvous? I thought you had them.”

“N-no. Only this one. The same one you had, it seems, so we could meet.”

Gaspar tapped his fingers on his coordinate meter. “What a foul-up! They should have given one of us the next set.”

Don’s eyes were on Gaspar’s fingers, because he couldn’t meet the man’s eyes. “I guess I should have asked. I just assumed—” He paused. Next to the meter was the radio. He had been about to ask Gaspar about that, when they had been interrupted by the sawfish. “Maybe the—did you check your radio?”

Gaspar snapped his fingers. “That must be it. I just came out here, gasping at the sea-floor and fish, never thinking of that.” He flicked his switch.

“Leave it on!” the female voice cried immediately.

Startled, Gaspar looked down. Unlike Don, he was not dismayed, and he did not turn it off. “Who are you?”

Don kept silent, relieved to have the other man handle it. Maybe he should have had more confidence in his own judgment about both this and the bad glop, but he couldn’t change his nature.

“I’m Melanie. Your next contact. Why haven’t you answered before?”

“Sister, I just turned on my set for the first time! What are your coordinates?”

“I’m not going to give you my coordinates if you’re going to be like that,” she responded angrily.

“M-my fault,” Don said, “I—I heard her voice, and thought—no one told me it would be a woman.”

Gaspar looked at him, comprehending. Then his mouth quirked. “Give with the numbers, girl,” he said firmly to the radio, “or I’ll turn you off for the night. Understand?”

She didn’t answer. Gaspar reached for the switch.

“Eighty one degrees, fifty minutes west longitude,” she said with a rush, as if she had seen him. “Twenty six degrees, ten minutes north latitude.”

“That’s better,” Gaspar said, winking at Don. “What’s the rendezvous time, Melanie?”

“Twenty four hours from now,” she said. “You did make it to the first rendezvous point?”

“Right. We’re both here. Just wanted you to know who’s in charge. Don, turn yours on so we can all talk.”

Don obeyed. Gaspar had covered nicely for Don’s prior mismanagement of the radio, and he appreciated it. Why hadn’t he realized that the woman could be one of their party? He had simply assumed without evidence that it was to be three males. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to face the prospect of working with a woman, especially a young one. He wished he could do something about his shyness.

“A day,” Gaspar said. “Ten miles an hour for twelve hours, cumulative, and we can sleep as much as we want. That’s in the vicinity of Naples, Florida, you see.”

Don hoisted up his nerve. “Are—are you—have you gone through the tunnel already? You’re in phase with us?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I’m still on land, but I’ll come into the water at the right time to meet you there.”

“D-do you have the coordinates for the next one?”

“Yes, for all of them. I’m your coordinate girl. But I’m allowed to tell only one rendezvous point at a time. You just be thankful you’ve got company. I’m alone. That is, alone in phase. It’s weird.”

“Wish you were here,” Gaspar said generously.

“Did they tell you what the mission is?” Melanie asked him.

“Nope. They told us no more than you. I answered an ad, believe it or not, and they checked my references—which were strictly average, and sent me out to get a bike. Same as you, probably.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“I think this secrecy kick is overdone.”

“It certainly is,” Melanie agreed. “I never even applied, actually. But here I am.”

“There must be some rationale,” Don said. “I’m archaeological, you’re geological, she’s—”

“Hysterical,” Melanie said.

“The next member is mechanical, I hope,” Gaspar said. “Suppose the phase equipment breaks down when we’re a mile under? Do you know how to fix it?”

“N-no.” Don shuddered. “I wish you h-hadn’t brought that up.”

“We’re going to click out for about five minutes, Melanie,” Gaspar said. “Nothing personal. Man business.” Before she could protest, he turned his set off, gesturing Don to do the same.

“Your stutter,” Gaspar said then. “Does it affect your decision-making ability in a crisis? I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t suspect that my life may be subject to your ability to act, at some point.”

Don could appreciate why Gaspar had an undistinguished employee record. He was too blunt about sensitive issues. “N-no. Only the v-vocal cords. Only under stress.”

“No offense. Ask me one now.”

“Not n-necessary,” Don said, embarrassed.

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. My friends—of which I have surprisingly few—all tell me I’m nice but stubborn and sometimes insensitive. The less tenable my position, the worse I am. They say.”

Don shrugged in the dark, not knowing the appropriate response.

“So if it’s something important, don’t come out and tell me I’m crazy, because if I am I’ll never admit it. Tell me I’m reasonable, jolly me along—then maybe I’ll change my mind. That’s what they say they do.”

“Okay!” Don didn’t laugh, because he suspected this was no joke. Gaspar had given him fair warning.

They turned on their radios again. “Okay, Melanie,” Gaspar said. “We’re turning in now. No point in leaving the sets on; might run ’em down, and anyway, all you’d hear would be snoring.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed. “I suppose so. I need to sleep too. I’ve been hyper about listening for the contact, but now it’s done. They do run down; you have to keep the bike moving, for the radio, too. Check in the morning, will you? I do get lonely.”

Don felt sudden sympathy for her. She sounded like a nice girl, and Gaspar was treating her rather callously. Did he have something against women?

“Good enough,” Gaspar said, clicking off again. Don reluctantly followed suit. Now that the ice had been broken, he would have liked to continue talking with Melanie. But of course he would be meeting her tomorrow, and they would be able to talk without the radio. If his nerve did not disappear in the interim.

It was hard to sleep, though he was quite tired. Don had never cycled such a distance before, and the muscles above his knees were tense, and the rest of his body little better off. The tiny ripples against his face that were all he could see or feel of small fish swimming disturbed him by their incongruity and made him gasp involuntarily. The temperature bothered him as well; he was accustomed to a drop at night, but here it still felt about 80°F.

“Are you as insomniac as I am?” Gaspar inquired after a while.

“Dead tired and wide awake,” Don agreed. “I’m afraid I’ll poop out tomorrow and miss the rendezvous, and that doesn’t soothe me much either.”

“I was thinking about your inedible food. I said it was an accident, but now it strikes me as a pretty funny mistake. Now I wonder whether there are any other mistakes.” He paused, but Don offered no debate. “Tell me if this is paranoid: we both have the same kind of food packs. They should have come from the same batch. Could yours have been deliberately spoiled?”

Don’s jaw dropped. He was glad he could not be seen. “That does seem farfetched. What would be the point?”

“To test us, maybe. See just how resourceful we are.”

“Why should anyone care? We’re just ordinary folk.”

“White rats are selected to be absolutely ordinary. That’s the point. How would regular folk survive in a really strange, isolated situation?”

“B-but that would be—be inhuman!”

“What do we really know of the motives of our employer?”

“B-but to just assume—”

“So it’s paranoid.”

“But m-maybe we should keep a good watch out,” Don said. He had been shaken by Gaspar’s conjecture; it had a horrible kind of sense. If there were dangerous new conditions to test with uncertain equipment, how would a company get volunteers? Maybe exactly this way.

“That’s my notion. I don’t think it’s the case, but there’s this ugly bit of doubt in my mind, and I thought I’d discuss it with you in private before we join the lady.”

“Th-thanks,” Don said without irony.

After that he did drop off to sleep, as if the awful notion had actually eased his mind. Maybe it merely gave his fears something more tangible to chew on.

In the dark morning they ate again and moved out. They gradually ascended, but the slope was generally slight and Don found himself moving better than he had. Gaspar’s presence seemed to give him strength; perhaps he had been dissipating some of his energy in nervous tension, and now was more relaxed. Or maybe it was that Gaspar seemed to have a knack for picking out the easiest route. That made sense; the man was conversant with the sea, after all.

As the day ended, they were back in the offshore shallows, having traveled a hundred and twenty miles in about ten hours of actual riding time.

Now it was time to rendezvous with Melanie. Don felt his muscles tightening. It had become excruciatingly important to him that she match his nebulous mental image of her. He might be riding hundreds of miles with her. Suppose—?

Gaspar turned on his radio. “You there, Melanie?”

“Yes,” she replied immediately. “Are you close?”

“Close and closing,” Gaspar said.

The next contact was upon them.




CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_f5ffae43-9d1f-503e-89d1-adeec426830b)

MELANIE (#ulink_f5ffae43-9d1f-503e-89d1-adeec426830b)


Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.

Acknowledging.

Status?

Situation developing. First recruit has discovered his defective food supplies, and the second recruit conjectures that this was an intentional lapse. They suspect that it is a test of their survival skills. They are now linking with the third recruit.

Each recruit has a liability?

Yes. The third recruit’s liability is inherent; I did not need to interfere with her situation.

This seems like a devious way to convert a world.

The direct approach has been known to fail.

Apology, Proxy; it is your show. Proceed as you see fit.

I have no assurance that this approach will work. Only hope. Much depends on the interaction of the recruits, and how they react when they learn the truth.

True.

They zeroed in on Melanie, proceeding from radio range to voice range, until she came into sight. She was a figure in a blouse and skirt, standing with a loaded bicycle.

A skirt, under the sea? But Don realized that his reaction was mistaken; a skirt was as sensible as any other clothing, here in this phased state.

As they came up, he saw that not only was she female, she was quite attractively so. She was not voluptuous, but was very nicely proportioned in a slender way. Her face was framed by curls so perfect they could have been artificial, and was as pretty as he had seen.

All of which meant that it would be almost impossible for him to talk to her. This was exactly the kind of woman who had no business noticing a man like him.

“Well, hello Melanie!” Gaspar said without any difficulty. “I’m Gaspar, and this is Don.”

“I recognize you by your voice,” she said. She turned her eyes on Don. They were as green as a painting of the sea. “Hello, Don.”

He tried. “H-h-hel—” He gave up the effort, chagrined.

She smiled. “Were you the one who kept cutting me off?”

Don nodded, miserable.

“Because you were shy?”

He nodded again.

“That’s a relief! It makes me a whole lot less nervous about meeting you. I thought maybe you had a grudge.”

“N-no!” Don protested.

“You’re like me: single, unemployed, no prospects?”

“Y-yes.” She had answered a question he had been too timid to ask, while seeming to ask one. But Don was unable to follow up on the conversational gambit.

“What’s the coordinate for the next person?” Gaspar asked when a silence threatened to develop.

“Twenty four degrees north latitude, thirty minutes,” she said immediately. “Eighty one degrees, fifty minutes west longitude. Twenty four hours from now.”

“Key West,” Gaspar said. “We’ll have to move right along, but we can do it.” He looked around. “That’s just about due south of here, but it should be easier riding downhill. Why don’t we coast out to deep water where it’s cooler? That way we’ll make some distance, even if it isn’t directly toward Key West, and we can sleep when we can’t stay awake any more.”

Melanie shrugged. “Why not? As long as you know how to find the way. I memorized the coordinates, but I don’t have much of a notion what they mean.”

Don was glad to agree. His earlier fear of the deeps seemed irrelevant, now that he had company. Gaspar would not have made the suggestion if he had thought there was any danger, and the man did know something about the ocean.

“Of course we’re a good distance from the edge of the continental shelf,” Gaspar continued as he started moving. Melanie fell in behind him, and Don followed her. It was easier to hear him even at some distance, because of the carrying capacity of the water. “Too far to get any real depth. But we might make it forty or fifty fathoms. Extra mileage but easier going. Worth it, I’d say.”

That reminded Don of something. “Key West—how did you figure that out? Do you have a map?” He was able to speak more readily to Gaspar than to Melanie.

“I know the coordinates of places like that. Same way you know types of pottery, I suppose. Nothing special.”

“Oh.” Stupid question.

“You know pottery?” Melanie asked.

“Y-yes. I-I’m an a-arch-archaeologist.”

“I envy you. I have no training at all. I don’t know why they wanted me here.”

Ahead, Gaspar turned on his headlight. They followed suit. The trend was down, and it did make the cycling easier, which was a relief. Melanie might be fresh, but Don wasn’t. The temperature did seem to be dropping.

She had spoken to him, and Don wanted to answer. But it remained difficult. What could he say about her lack of training?

Gaspar saved him the trouble. “I’m a marine geologist, and he’s an archaeologist, but we’re both out of our specialties here, so we’re essentially amateurs. We thought we were selected for our skills, but that may not be the case. Maybe we just happened to be available. Were you out of work, Melanie?”

“Yes. But I didn’t even apply. I just got a phone call telling me that there was a job for me that would be interesting and challenging and paid well. I was suspicious, but it did seem to be an opportunity, and the more I learned about it, the more intriguing it seemed. So here I am.”

They rode twenty miles southwest before quitting. Don felt ashamed for looking, but he admired Melanie’s form during much of that travel. It was easy to watch her, because she was right ahead of him. He wondered why she had been both out of work and unmarried. She should have been able to get work as a receptionist readily enough, and any man she smiled at would have been interested.

Gaspar called a halt at what he deemed to be a suitable location. Then they broke out the rations, and Melanie learned about Don’s bad food and expressed sympathy, and shared hers with him. She was very nice about it, not prompting him to talk.

They took turns separating from the group in order to handle natural functions. This was in one sense pointless, as each person was self contained in this respect, but the protocol of privacy seemed appropriate to accommodate the two sexes.

Then they lay down beside their bicycles for sleep, in a row of three, Melanie in the middle. Don lay awake for a while, appreciating the proximity of the woman though he knew her interest in him was purely that of mission associate. Then he slept, for suddenly the night-period passed.

They proceeded to a point seventy five miles west of Key West, moving well. “To avoid the coral reefs,” Gaspar explained. “We’d have to cross them, otherwise, to get to the rendezvous, and it’s a populated area. No sense scaring the fish there, either. Also, it’s cooler and less cluttered here in deeper water.”

“You’re the geologist,” Melanie agreed.

Indeed, he was. Their depth had, in just the past few miles, changed from forty fathoms to two hundred, and the coasting had allowed Don to recover some strength in the legs. He had seen the colors change from orange to green to blue-black, and the headlights were now necessary at any hour. The fish, too, had changed color, whether by the dim “daylight” or the headlamps. First they were multicolored, then two-tone—black above, light below—and finally silvery.

Camouflage, he decided. Near the surface all colors showed, so color was used to merge with the throng. Farther down only the silhouettes showed from below, so the bottoms were light to fade into the bright surface, and the tops dark to fade into the nether gloom when viewed from above. In the truly dim light, color didn’t matter much.

But the crawling crustaceans had become bright in the depth, and he saw no reason for that. Unless they used color to identify themselves to each other, like women with pretty clothing. Maybe they were not easy for fish to eat, so did not have to hide.

“However, we should keep alert,” Gaspar said. “There aren’t many dangerous things on the Gulf side of Florida, and you can’t fall off the shelf. But here below the Keys we’ll hit deep water.”

“I noticed,” she said.

“I mean five hundred to a thousand fathoms—on the order of a mile. We’re still fairly high.”

“D-dangerous things?” Don managed to inquire.

“Living things can’t touch us, of course. But rough terrain might.”

They didn’t talk any more, because now they were climbing, gradually but steadily. Don shifted down to second, then to first, and that gave him plenty of power. Melanie had only three gears, and was struggling. Gaspar, who had just the one ratio, stopped.

“Tired?” Don called, surprised, for Gaspar had seemed indefatigable despite his lack of gearing. Don had survived only because of those five speeds.

“Broken chain,” Gaspar said.

So it was. “Too bad,” Don said. “But not calamitous. You have a spare chain, don’t you?”

“Do. But I want to save that for an emergency.”

“This is an emergency. You can’t ride without a chain.”

“I’ll fix this one.”

“But that will take time. Better to use the spare, and fix the other when there’s nothing to do.”

“No, I’ll replace the rivet on this one.”

“But you don’t have t-tools.”

“I have a pen knife and a screwdriver and a bicycle wrench,” Gaspar said, taking out these articles and laying them on the ground beside the propped bicycle. “Haven’t done this since I was a kid, but it’s not complicated.”

“B-but it’s unnecessary.”

Gaspar ignored him and went to work on the chain.

Belatedly Don remembered the warning about stubbornness. He had been arguing instead of thinking, and now he was stuttering, and Gaspar had tuned him out. His first “but” had probably lost his cause, and he wasn’t certain his cause was right. Why not fix the chain now? They did have time for that, and he needed a rest. The muscles of his legs were stiff again.

He saw that Melanie was being more practical: she was lying beside her bicycle, squeezing in all the rest for her legs she could. Her skirt had slid up around her full thighs. Oh, her limbs looked nice!

Don returned his gaze to Gaspar’s bicycle, before he started blushing or stuttering worse. He tried a new approach. “A chain shouldn’t break like that. It must have been defective, or—”

“Oh, it can happen. Stone tossed up—”

“Here?”

Gaspar laughed. “Got me that time! Stone couldn’t do much unless it was phased in. But this is an old bike—I never was one to waste money, even if Uncle Sam or whoever pays the way. Ten dollars, third hand. Got to expect some kinks.”

Ten dollars! A junker would have charged that to haul the thing away! Yet it was now loaded with what might be a hundred thousand dollars worth of specialized equipment. “S-so you don’t think that anyone—” But it sounded silly as he said it. How could anyone sabotage a third-hand bicycle that hadn’t yet been bought? And what would be the point? It was obvious that it could readily be fixed, so that was no real test of the man’s survival skills.

He walked his own bike back to where Melanie lay, wishing he had the courage to start a dialogue with her. He turned around so that he would not be peering at her legs when he lay down, though he wished he could do that too.

“I heard,” she said, though he had not spoken to her. “What’s this about something happening?”

Don managed to get his mouth going well enough to explain about the possibility of sabotage. “But it was just a conjecture,” he hastened to say. “Probably p-paranoia.”

“I’m into paranoia,” she said, surprising him.

“You are? Why?”

“Maybe some time I’ll tell you. For now, just take my word: I’m more diffident about people than you are, for better reason.”

“You?” He was incredulous.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Let’s change the subject.”

“I—I can’t find a subject.”

She laughed, tiredly. “Then I’ll find one. It’s nice talking to you, Don. So much better than waiting around for the radio to sound, with a pile of books and packages of ugh-y food.”

He chuckled, surprised that he was now able to do that in her presence. She was making him feel more at ease than he had a right to be.

He glanced at Gaspar. The chain was still off, and the man was doing something with the little screwdriver and pliers. It would be a while more before the job was done.

“Y-you were just waiting?”

“For you, yes. Two days. But my life was much the same before that, mostly alone. Books are great company, but I would have enjoyed them more if I’d had live companions. So when I took this job, hoping my life would change, and then for two days it was just more of the same, well, I had to do something.”

“I-I can’t believe you were alone!”

“I could make you believe, but I don’t want to.” She rolled to her side and angled her head to face him. “You’re really interested, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll try to explain. When I was just waiting for you, I walked down to the beach.”

“The beach?”

“In the early morning, when no one was around. I didn’t want anyone to see me, because of the phase.”

“I know. I came into the water at dawn.”

She laughed again. “Here I’m telling you something that’s not meant to be understood, and you’re understanding.”

“I—uh—”

“Don’t apologize! It’s not meant to be understood, just felt. But you feel it too, don’t you?”

“Yes.” This conversation was becoming odder and more comfortable. He could lie here forever, talking with her like this, his shyness ebbing.

“I enjoyed the beach,” she continued. “It was raining. Just a little cool. There was a stiff wind—I couldn’t really feel it, but I saw the sea-oats leaning. I just had to go out and walk along the surf a way. Right near the edge of the water. In my bare feet. Except there wasn’t anything to feel, it’s just sort of neutral in phase, and I had to walk the bicycle right along. You know—so I could breathe. That’s one thing that doesn’t wind down when the bike stops moving: the oxygen field. Lucky thing, or we’d never be able to rest or sleep. Batteries, I guess, that recharge for that. I tried to breathe away from the bike, and couldn’t. I’m married to the bike, now. We all are.”

“Yes.”

“So I had to pretend. I had the whole beach to myself with only the gulls for company. They stood on the sand facing the wind. I saw a horseshoe crab, and I tried to pick it up—it was the first horseshoe crab I had ever seen.”

“They’re not crabs,” Gaspar said without looking up from his work. That surprised Don; he had thought the man had tuned them out. “They’re related to the scorpions and are the only living members of a large group of extinct animals. They’ve survived unchanged for two hundred and fifty million years.”

“All the more wonderful to behold,” Melanie said. “The beach has a powerful internal significance for me that I’ve never quite been able to understand. This one I experienced was wonderfully dramatic. They all are. I never just have seen a beach. It’s a total experience. The sand under my feet, warmth, wind, smells, sound, and motion. The beach just is. And I am there walking along looking for seashells and somehow I feel that I belong there. For the moment. It feels like something I can always come back to. Something almost unchanged in a sea of change.”

Like the horseshoe crabs, Don thought. Unchanged since the dinosaurs. Perhaps man, when he gazed upon the beach, remembered his ancestor who fought the extraordinary battle to free himself from the grip of the sea, and this was that battleground.

“My life so easily slips into things and experiences with labels,” Melanie said. “But the beach somehow for me always slips the compass of a label and asserts the primacy of existence.” She paused. “If that makes sense to you.”

All he could say was “Yes.” It wasn’t just her perspective on the beach, it was the fact that she had presented it to him as a fellow human being, as if he deserved to have this insight. What a wonderful experience!

Gaspar completed his repair, and they resumed riding. The difference between a slight decline and a slight incline was enormous, when they were pedaling it. But they could not go down forever. Don had been pleased at how well he was keeping up, but now he wondered whether there was something wrong with his own bicycle. He pushed and pushed on the pedals, but the machine moved slowly, and he was out of breath doing a bare five or six miles per hour. Melanie was struggling similarly.

Gaspar abruptly stopped again. This time his rear wheel was loose, so that it rubbed against the frame with every revolution. Thank God! Don thought guiltily, offering no argument about repairs. He dropped to the ground and let life soak back into his deadened limbs.

Gaspar was tough. If he was tired, it didn’t show. Don had never been partial to muscle, but would have settled for several extra pounds of it for this trip.

Melanie dropped beside him, almost touching. Even through his fatigue, he felt the thrill. “Talk to me, Don,” she murmured.

This time he was able to perform. “You know, Gaspar and I are both only-survivors in our families. We think that’s because our employer selected for singleness. Maybe they don’t want people wondering where we are. In case—you know. Uh, you said you’re single, but otherwise—is it the same with you?” He had even asked her a direct personal question!

“Almost,” she said. “My father died ten years ago. He married late. My mother was thirty five when I was born. I haven’t seen her for a couple of years. So it’s the same, I guess. I’m uncommitted. But I’d be uncommitted even if I had a massive crowd of relatives.”

“You keep saying that,” Don protested. “But you’re such a lovely young woman—”

She looked at him. “I guess I’d better take the plunge and show you. Get it over with at the outset. That’s maybe better than having it happen by chance, as it surely will otherwise.”

“Show me what?”

“Look at me, Don.” She sat up.

He sat up too, uncertain what she had in mind. He tried to keep his eyes from the firm inner thighs that her crossed legs showed under the skirt, but that meant he was focusing on her evocative bosom. He finally had to fix on her lovely face.

Melanie put her hands to her head and slid her fingers in under her perfect hair. She tugged—and her hair came off in a mass. It was a wig—and beneath it she was completely bald.

Don simply stared.

“I’m hairless,” she said. “All over my body. My eyebrows are glued on, and my eyelashes are fake. It’s a genetic defect, they think. No hair follicles.” She lifted one arm and pulled her blouse to the side to show her armpit. “I don’t shave there. No need to. No hair grows.” She glanced down. “Anywhere.”

Don was stunned. She had abruptly converted from a beautiful young woman to a bald mannequin. She now looked like an alien creature from a science fiction movie. Her green eyes shone out from the face on the billiard ball head, as if this were a doll in the process of manufacture.

“So now you know,” the mouth in the face said.

Don tried to say something positive, but could not speak at all. Her beauty had been destroyed, and she had been made ludicrous. It might as well have been a robot talking to him.

Gaspar righted his bicycle. “Ready to go,” he said. “We shouldn’t use up the batteries unnecessarily.” Then, after a pause: “Oh.”

“Oh,” Melanie echoed tonelessly.

“I wasn’t paying much attention when it counted, it seems,” Gaspar said. “Disease? Radiation therapy?”

“Genetic, from birth,” she said.

“Why show us?”

“Because Don was starting to like me.”

He nodded. “Hair is superficial. We know it. Now all we have to do is believe it.”

Melanie put her wig back on, and pressed it carefully into place. It was evident that it had some kind of adhesive, and would not come loose unless subject to fair stress. She resumed her former appearance. But now, to Don’s eyes, she looked like a bald doll with a hairpiece. She had set out to disabuse him of his notions of her attractiveness, and had succeeded. Evidently she didn’t want to be liked ignorantly.

They resumed travel without further comment. The coordinates were 24°20’–82°30’. Forty minutes west of their rendezvous, ten south. Depth was one hundred fathoms. They must have been traveling well, indeed, downhill, before starting the laborious climb. Don was amazed to realize that they were now beyond their target, and he had never been aware of their passing it. They had time, plenty of time, thank the god of the sea.

They had climbed six hundred feet in the past two miles, and it didn’t look steep, but it was grueling on a bicycle. Now he was glad for the continued struggle, because it gave him something other to think about than Melanie’s hair. She had figured him exactly: he was getting to like her, because she was pretty and she talked to him. And now his building illusion had been shattered. He should have known that there would be something like this.

Twenty miles and seventy fathoms east and up, with a break for another bicycle malfunction—this time Don’s, whose seat had come loose and twisted sideways—the way abruptly became steep. Gaspar, in the lead, dismounted and walked his bike up the slope. Don and Melanie were glad to do the same; it was a relief to change the motion.

Suddenly Don saw a rough wall, almost overhanging. Jagged white outcroppings and brown recesses made this a formidable barrier, and it extended almost up to the surface of the sea.

“This is it,” Gaspar said with satisfaction as they drew beside him.

“But how can we pass?” Don asked. “What is it, anyway?”

Gaspar smiled. “Coral reef. Isn’t she a beauty!”

Don, not wanting to admit that he had never seen a coral reef before, and had had a mental picture of a rather pretty plastered wall with brightly colored fish hovering near, merely nodded. It looked ugly to him, because he couldn’t see how they were going to get across it. There might be a hundred feet of climbing to do, scaling that treacherous cliff—and how were they going to haul up the bicycles?

He glanced at Melanie, who had not spoken since her revelation. Could she be likened to a coral reef? His mental image suddenly disabused by the reality? Unfortunately, it was the reality that counted.

They did not have to scale the reef. Gaspar merely showed the way east, coasting down the bumpy slope to deeper water. This was why they had come this way: to go around the reef instead of across it. Don was now increasingly thankful for Gaspar’s knowledge of the geography of the sea. When they struck reasonably level sand they picked up speed. They went another ten miles before he called a halt.

“We’re within a dozen miles,” Gaspar said, breaking out the rations. “I guess we’d better get inside the reefs, next chance. Rendezvous is only a couple miles out of Key West.”

“Get inside the reefs?” Don asked, dismayed. “I thought we already went around them.”

“No, only part way. But this is a better place to cross them, I think.”

“Why is the rendezvous so close to civilization?” Don mused. “Can this next person know even less about the ocean than I do?”

Melanie remained silent, and Gaspar discreetly avoided the implication. “The reefs are rough—literally. The edges can cut like knives, and the wounds are slow to heal. It’s no place to learn to swim, or ride. So we’ll have to guide him through with kid gloves. He probably does know less than you—now.”

A left-footed compliment! “So how do we get through?”

“Oh, the reefs are discontinuous. We’ll use a channel and get into shallow water. Have to watch out for boats, though; we’ll be plainly visible in twenty foot depth.” He considered briefly. “In fact, as I recall, there’s a lot of two fathom water in the area. Twelve feet from wave to shell in mean low water, which means barely six feet over our heads. That’s too much visibility.”

Don agreed. He would now feel naked with that thin a covering of water. He was tired, and wanted neither to admit it nor to hold up progress, but here was a valid pretext to wait. On the other hand, he was increasingly curious about this close-to-land member of the expedition. If the man were not knowledgeable about the marine world, why was he needed at all?

But Melanie wasn’t knowledgeable either. What was her purpose here? Unless this really was a testing situation, a maze for average white rats. How would those rats find their way through? How well would they cooperate with each other? He remembered reading about a test in which a rat could get a pellet of food by striking a button. Then the button was placed on the opposite side of the chamber from the pellet dispenser. Then two rats were put in the same chamber. When one punched the button, the other got the pellet. That was testing something other than wit or mechanical dexterity. Could this be that sort of test?

They cut into the reef. This time Don observed the myriad creatures of this specific locale, and the reef began to align better with his former mental image. The elements were there, just not quite the way he had pictured them. The fish in the open waters had generally stayed clear of the odd bicycle party, probably frightened by the lights and machinery, so that he had ignored them with impunity. But this stony wall was well populated. Yellow-eyed snakes peeped from crevices, teeth showing beneath their nostrils, watching, waiting.

Beside him, Melanie seemed no more at ease. She tried to keep as far from the reef as possible without separating from the human party.

Gaspar saw their glances. “Moray eels,” he said. “No danger to us, phased—but if we were diving, I’d never put hand or foot near any of these holes. Most sea creatures are basically shy, or even friendly, and some of the morays are too. But they can be vicious. I’ve seen one tackle an octopus. The devilfish tried to hide, but the moray got hold of a single tentacle and whirled around until that tentacle twisted right off. Then it ate that one and got hold of another.”

“Why didn’t you do something?” Don asked. He had no love of octopi, which were another group of childhood nightmares, but couldn’t bear the thought of such cruelty.

“I did,” Gaspar admitted. “I don’t like to interfere with nature’s ways, but I’m not partial to morays. Actually the thing took off when I came near. Good decision; I would have speared it.”

“The-the octopus. Did you have to—kill it? With two arms off—”

“Course not. Tentacles grow back. They’re not like us, that way.”

“I guess not,” Don agreed, looking again at the morays. They might not be quite in his phase, but he would keep clear of them regardless. Certainly there were prettier sights. He spied zebra-striped fish, yellow and black (juvenile black angelfish, Gaspar said), red fish with blue fins and yellow tails (squirrelfish), purple ones with white speckles (jewelfish), greenish ones with length-wise yellow striping—or maybe vice versa (blue-striped grunt), and one with a dark head, green tail, with two heavy black stripes between (bluehead wrasse). Plus many others he didn’t call to Gaspar’s attention, because he tended to resent the man’s seemingly encyclopedic nomenclature. Melanie seemed similarly fascinated, now that they had gotten among the pretty fish instead of the ugly eels.

“Good thing you didn’t ask me any of the difficult ones,” Gaspar said. “There’s stuff in these reefs I never heard of, and probably fish no man has seen. New species are discovered every year. I think there are some real monsters hidden down inside.”

But the surface of the coral reef was impressive enough. They passed a section that looked like folded ribbon (stinging coral-stay clear), and marveled at its convolutions.

Then the reef rounded away, and they pedaled through. Melanie almost bumped into a large ugly green fish and shied away, still not completely used to the phaseout. But that reminded Don of something.

“We ride on the bottom because that’s inanimate,” he said. “The living things are phased out. But aren’t the coral reefs made by living creatures? How come they are solid to us, then?”

“They’re in the phase world,” Gaspar said. “They’re part of the terrain. They may not be the same reefs we see, but they’re just like them. So we have to take them seriously. Otherwise we could have ridden straight through them, and saved ourselves a lot of trouble.”

Of course that was true. Don was chagrined for not seeing the obvious.

They climbed into the shallows, passing mounds and ledges and even caves in the living coral. For here it was not rocklike so much as plantlike, with myriad flower-shapes blooming.

Gaspar halted as the ground became too uneven to ride over. “Isn’t that a grand sight?” he asked rhetorically. “They’re related to the jellyfish, you know. And to the sea anemones.”

“What are?” Don asked, perplexed.

“The coral polyps. Their stony skeletons accumulate to form the reef—in time. Temperature has to be around seventy degrees Fahrenheit or better, and they have to have something to build on near the surface, but within these limits they do well enough. They strain plankton from the water with their little tentacles—”

“Oh? I didn’t see that,” Melanie said, finally speaking. Apparently her revelation of her condition had set her back as much as it had Don, and she had withdrawn for a time. Now she was returning, and maybe it was just as well.

“They do it at night, mostly,” Gaspar explained. “We’re seeing only a fraction of the fish that live on the reef; night is the time for foraging.”

“You certainly seem to know a lot about sea life,” Melanie said. “Are you sure you’re a geologist?”

Gaspar laughed. “You have to know something about the flora and fauna, if you want to stay out of trouble. Sharks, electric eels, poisonous sponges, stinging jellyfish—this world is beautiful, but it’s dangerous too, unless you understand it.”

“I believe it,” she said.

“And there are practical connections to my specialty,” Gaspar continued, gazing on the coral with a kind of bliss. “I could mistake coral for a limestone rock formation, if I didn’t study both. Actually it is limestone—but you know what I mean. It tells me about historical geology, too. Because of the necessary conditions for the growth of coral. If I spy a coral reef in cold water, and it’s five hundred feet below the surface—”

“Say!” Don exclaimed, catching on. “Then you know that water was once seventy degrees warm, and that the land was higher.”

“Or the sea lower. Yes. There are hundreds of things like that. Fossils in sediments, for example. They account for an entire time scale extending through many hundreds of millions of years. Check the fossils and you know when that material was laid down and what the conditions were.”

“Like pottery shards!” Don said. “Each one typical of a particular culture. Only your shards are bones and shells.”

“You’re right,” Gaspar agreed, smiling. “Now I understand what you do. You’re a paleontologist of the recent past.”

“Recent past! I wouldn’t call several thousand years exactly—”

“Geologically, anything less than a million years—”

“Maybe we’d better make our rendezvous,” Melanie suggested.

They moved on, drawing nearer to the surface. The water inside the reef was barren in comparison: pellucid, with a flat sandy bottom. Don did spy a number of swift-moving little silvery fish scooting across the floor, and once something gray and flat flounced away as his front tire interacted with its bones.

Then they hit a field of tall grass—except that it wasn’t grass. Some was green and flat, some was green and round. The stalks offered little effective resistance to the bicycles, but Don still had the impression of forging through by sheer muscle. It was amazing to what extent sight, not knowledge, governed his reactions.

He glanced covertly at Melanie. She looked perfect: still slender and feminine. Had she not shown him her bald head …

Finally they came to the “patch” reefs that marked their rendezvous. Between these little reeflets and the shore he knew there was only more grass flat.

“Maybe if someone comes—a boat, I mean,” Melanie said, “we could lie down and be hidden by that grass.”

Gaspar nodded. “Smart girl. Keep your eye out for suitable cover.”

They drew up beside a great mound of coral, one of the patches. All around it the sand was bare. “So much for my smarts,” Melanie said ruefully.

This section was as bald as her head, Don thought, and wished he could get that matter out of his mind.

“Grass eaters,” Gaspar explained. “They graze, but don’t go far from their shelter. So they create this desert ring by overgrazing.”

“I would never have thought of that,” she said. “But it’s obvious now that you’ve pointed it out. Penned barnyard animals do the same.”

“Yes, the absence of life can be evidence of life,” Gaspar agreed.

The two were getting along together, Don noted with mixed feelings. He had talked with Gaspar, and he had talked with Melanie, but so far there had not been a lot of interaction between Gaspar and Melanie. Yet why shouldn’t there be? It was evident that Gaspar, though surprised by her hairlessness, had not really been put off by it. He had broader horizons than Don did, and greater tolerance. Why should Don be bothered by that?

“Rendezvous is at dusk,” Gaspar said. “To let him slip into the water unobserved, probably. We’re early, so we can rest a while. Out of sight, if we can. Should be an overhang or maybe a cave.”

“Is it safe?” Melanie asked. “We aren’t entirely invulnerable.”

“Not much danger here, regardless,” Gaspar said confidently. “Why would the little fishes use it, otherwise?” He began pedaling slowly around the reeflet. The others, disgruntled, followed.

There were several projecting ledges harboring brightly colored fish who scattered as the bicycles encroached. Then a large crevice developed, and they rode between sheer coral walls. These overhung, and finally closed over the top, and it was a cavern.

The area was too confined for riding, and the floor was irregular. They dismounted and walked on inside, avoiding contact with the sharp fringes. Don was reminded of the cave paintings of Lascaux: the patchwork murals left by Upper Paleolithic man some fifteen thousand years ago, and one of the marvels of the archaeological world. Primitive man had not been as primitive as many today liked to suppose.

But this was a sea-cavern, and its murals were natural. Sponges bedecked its walls: black, brown, blue, green, red, and white, in dabs and bulges and relief-carvings.

There was life here, all right. The smaller fish streaked out as the men moved in, for their eyesight was keen enough to spot the intrusion even though its substance was vacant. One man-sized fish balked, however, hanging motionless in the passage.

“Jewfish,” Gaspar remarked—and with the sound of his voice the fish was gone. Sediment formed a cloud as the creature shot past, and Don felt the powerful breeze of its thrust. He appreciated another danger: just as a stiff wind could blow a man down on land, a stiff current could do the same here in the ocean. If his position happened to be precarious, he would have to watch out for big fish. Their bones could tug him if their breeze-current didn’t.

“Looks good,” Gaspar said. “I’m bushed.” He lay down beside his bicycle and seemed to drop instantly to sleep.

Don was tired, but he lacked this talent. He could not let go suddenly; he had to rest and watch, hoping that sleep would steal upon him conveniently. It probably wasn’t worth it, for just a couple of hours.

“I envy him his sleep, but it’s beyond me,” Melanie said, settling down to lean cautiously against a wall.

“Me too,” Don agreed, doing the same. The real wall might be jagged, but the phase wall wasn’t, fortunately.

“You’re not stuttering now.”

“Maybe I’m too tired.”

“Or maybe you know I’m no threat to you.”

“I didn’t say that.” But it might be true. Before, there had been the frightening prospect of social interaction leading into romance.

“You didn’t have to. Now you know why I read books. They don’t look at you.”

“But people don’t—I mean, they don’t know—”

“I know.”

“Well, I read too. Mostly texts, but—”

“I read fiction, mostly. Once I fell asleep during a book, and dreamed the author had come to autograph my copy, but we couldn’t find him a pen.”

“You like signatures?” he asked, not certain she was serious.

“Oh, yes, I have a whole collection of autographed books, back home.” She spoke with modest pride.

“Why? I think it’s more important to relate to what the author is trying to say, than to have his mark on a piece of paper.”

She was silent.

After a moment he asked, “You want to sleep? I didn’t mean to—”

“I heard you. I wasn’t answering.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Maybe we’d better change the subject.”

“Why?”

“You couldn’t expect me to agree with you, could you? I mean, I collect autographs, don’t I? So what am I supposed to say when you say you don’t think they are very much?”

What was this? “You could have said you don’t agree.”

“I did.”

“When?”

“When I didn’t say anything. I think that should be obvious.”

“Obvious?”

“Well, you seem to use different conversational conventions than I do, and it’s unpleasant to talk to someone who doesn’t understand your silences.”

“Why not just say what you mean? I have no idea what’s bothering you.”

“No more than I did, when you kept cutting me off.”

Oh. “I’m sorry about that. I just had this notion it was all men on this circuit, and I thought something had gone wrong, the way my food did. I would have answered if I had realized.”

“Well, then, I’ll answer you now. I don’t want to be placed in the position of having to defend something I know you don’t like. I mean, if I answered you there would be all kinds of emotional overtones in my voice, and that would be embarrassing and painful.”

“About autographs?” he demanded incredulously.

“Obviously you didn’t mean to be offensive,” she said, sounding hurt.

“What do you mean, ‘mean to be’? I wasn’t offensive, was I?”

“Well, I shouldn’t have said anything about it.”

“Now don’t go clamming up on me again. One silence is enough.” He was feeling more confident, oddly.

“I was trying to hint that I didn’t agree with you.”

“About meaning being worth more than a signature?”

She was silent again.

“Oh come on!” he snapped. “What do you expect me to say to a silence?”

“I’ve already told you why I don’t want to talk about it any more. You could at least have apologized for mentioning it again.”

“Apologized?”

“What kind of unfeeling barbarian culture did you grow up in, anyway?”

“Primitive cultures are not unfeeling!”

There was no answer.

“You’re right,” he said with frustration. “We do have different conversational conventions.” Sane and insane, he was tempted to add.

And so they sat, leaning back against the spongy coral wall, watching the little fish sidle in again. Don wondered what had happened.




CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_a6e93931-504e-58e2-a85f-f4ad7da059cb)

ELEPH (#ulink_a6e93931-504e-58e2-a85f-f4ad7da059cb)


Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.

Acknowledging.

Status?

Three recruits are in motion, with the fourth incipient. The liability of the third has been established, with what impact is uncertain. The group seems to be melding satisfactorily.

Such melding is a two-edged tool. If they unify against the mission, it will be lost.

I mean to see that they react properly. They will not be advised of the mission until the time is propitious.

And if that time does not manifest?

This group must be abolished and another assembled.

You are prepared to destroy them?

No.

Though the alternative is to lose their world?

I will abolish the group without invoking the mission. The individual members will return to their prior lives.

And if you invoke the mission, and they oppose it?

Then we shall have a problem.

“There it is!” Gaspar cried. “Right on time.”

Don jolted awake. It was night, and the rendezvous was upon them. He had slept when he hadn’t expected to, and it seemed that Melanie had done the same.

They scrambled up and walked their bikes out to catch up with Gaspar, who was standing at the mouth of the cave. Then, together, they advanced on the lone figure beyond.

The third man was Eleph: perhaps fifty, graying hair, forbidding lined face. There was a tic in his right cheek that Don recognized as a stress reaction similar to his own stuttering. Don would have had some sympathy, but for the cold manner of the man.

Gaspar tried to make small talk, but Eleph cut him short. He let it be known that he expected regulations to be scrupulously honored. Obviously he was or had been associated with the military; he would not bend, physically or intellectually. There was an authoritative ring in his voice that made even innocuous comments—of which he made few—seem like commands. Yet he also telegraphed a formidable uncertainty.

Don decided to stay clear of the man as much as possible. Gaspar, undaunted or merely stubborn, used another approach. “Look at that bicycle! How many speeds is that, Eleph?”

Eleph frowned as if resenting the familiarity, though they were on a first name basis by the rules. He must have realized that it was impossible to be completely formal while perched on a bicycle anyway. “Thirty six,” he replied gruffly.

Don thought he had misheard, but a closer look at the machine convinced him otherwise. It had a thick rear axle, a rear sprocket cluster, three chainwheels, and a derailleur at each end of the chain. The triple gearshift levers augmented the suggestion of a complex assortment of ratios. The handlebars were turned down, not up or level, and were set with all the devices Don had, plus a speedometer, horn, and others whose functions Don didn’t recognize. What paraphernalia!

“Don here’s an archaeologist,” Gaspar said. “I’m a geologist. Melanie knows the coordinates for our various encounters. How about you?”

Eleph hesitated, oddly. “Physicist.”

“Oh—to study the effects of this phaseout field under water?”

“Perhaps,” Eleph vouchsafed no more.

It was shaping up to be a long journey, Don realized.

“Melanie, where next?” Gaspar asked.

“Twenty five degrees, forty minutes north latitude,” she said. “Eighty degrees, ten minutes west longitude.”

“Got it. Let’s get deep.”

Gaspar led the way through the shallows, pedaling slowly so that there was no danger of the others losing sight of his lights. Eleph came next, then Melanie, and Don last. That put the least experienced riders in the middle, out of trouble.

All four of them would have to douse their lights and halt in place at any near approach of a boat. So far they were lucky; the surface was undisturbed. Once they reached deeper water there would be no problem unless they encountered a submarine. That was hardly likely.

The barren back reef had come alive. Great numbers of heart-shaped brown sea biscuits had appeared. Delicate, translucent sea anemones flowered prettily. Fish patrolled, searching for food; they shied away from the beams of light, but not before betraying their numbers. Some were large; Don recognized a narrow barracuda, one of the few fish he knew by sight.

The outer coral reef had changed too. The polyps were in bloom, flexing rhythmically, combing the water with their tiny tentacles, just as Gaspar had said they would. In one way they were flowers; in another, tiny volcanoes; in yet another, transparent little octopi. What had seemed by day to be forbidding rock was by night a living carpet.

Now Don observed the different kinds of coral in the reef. Some was convoluted but rounded, like the folds of a—yes, this had to be brain coral. From it rose orange-white spirals of fine sticks: yet another kind of flower that Don was sure was neither flower nor even plant. He swerved toward one, reaching to touch it though he knew he couldn’t. As his hand passed through its faint resistance, the flower closed and disappeared, withdrawing neatly into a narrow tube-stem.

Yet there were dull parts, too. In some regions the coral featured little or no life. It was as if tenement houses had been built, used, and then deserted. But surely the landlords hadn’t raised the rent, here!

“Pollution is killing the reefs,” Gaspar remarked sourly. “Also over-fishing, sponge harvesting, unrestrained memento collecting, the whole bit. The sea life here isn’t nearly as thick as it used to be, and species are dying out. But the average man doesn’t see that, so he figures it’s no concern of his.”

“They are wiping out species on land, too,” Melanie pointed out.

“You think that justifies it?” Gaspar asked sharply.

“No! I think it’s horrible. But I don’t know how to stop it.”

“There are just too many people,” he said. “As long as there keep being more people, there’ll be fewer animals. It’s that simple.”

Don gazed at the barren sections of the reefs. Was it that simple? He distrusted simple answers; the interactions of life tended to be complex, with ramifications never fully understood. Still, it was evident that something was going wrong, here.

The moray eels were out foraging. One spied Don and came at him, jaws open. Don shied away despite his lack of real alarm, and it drifted back. Melanie, just ahead of him, was veering similarly.

Then, remembering his own initial reactions, Don looked ahead to see how Eleph was taking it. This was a wise precaution, for Eleph reacted violently. Two eels were investigating him, as if sniffing out the least secure rider.

Both Eleph’s hands came off the handle bars to fend off the seeming assault. The bicycle veered to the side and crashed into the sand.

Don and Melanie hurried to help the man, but Eleph was already on his feet. “The phase makes the predators harmless,” Don explained reassuringly. “All you can feel is a little interaction in the bones.”

“I am well aware of that!” And Eleph righted his machine and remounted, leaving Don and Melanie to exchange a glance.

Angry at the rebuff, Don let him go. For a physicist specializing in this phase-field, Eleph had bad reflexes.

“And they say that pride goeth before a fall,” Melanie murmured.

Don had to smile. Then he seized the moment. “Melanie, whatever I said before, I’m sorry. I—”

“Another time,” she said. But she smiled back at him.

Then they had to follow, orienting on the lights ahead.

Lobsterlike crustaceans were roving the floor, making free travel difficult. Swimming fish were easy to pass, and living bottom creatures, but inanimate obstructions could be every bit as solid as they looked. When a living creature obscured a rocky projection or hole, and the wheel of the bicycle went through the living thing, it could have trouble with the other. Successful navigation required a kind of doublethink: an object’s position and permanence, not its appearance, determined its effect. More or less.

They coasted bumpily down past the outer reef and into deeper water. But more trouble erupted.

A blue-green blob with darker splotches rose up from the sand in the wake of a scuttling crab. Gaspar’s light speared it—and suddenly the green became brighter as tentacles waved. It was an octopus, a large one.

Gaspar slowed, no doubt from curiosity. Don caught up, while Melanie remained behind. But Eleph, in the middle, didn’t realize what they were doing or what was there. He sped straight on—into the waving nest of mantle and tentacles.

Ink billowed. Eleph screamed and veered out of control again, covering his head. Meanwhile the octopus, who had been traversed and left behind, turned brown and jetted for safer water. Each party seemed as horrified by the encounter as the other.

For a moment Don and Gaspar stared, watching the accidental antagonists flee each other. Then a chuckle started. Don wasn’t sure who emitted the first choked peep, but in a moment it grew into uncontrollable laughter. Both men had to put their feet down and lean over the handlebars to vent their mirth. It was a fine release of tension.

When at last they subsided, Don looked up to find Eleph standing nearby, regarding them sourly. Melanie stood behind him, her face straight. Abruptly the matter lost its humor.

Gaspar alleviated the awkwardness by proceeding immediately to business. “We’re deep enough now. Eleph, do you have the instructions for our mission? We have been told nothing.”

“I do not,” Eleph replied. The episode of the octopus had not improved his social inclinations. “Perhaps the next member of the party will have that information.”

Don had thought there would be three members, and Gaspar had guessed four. Evidently there were five.

Gaspar looked at Melanie. “How long hence?”

“Sixty hours,” she replied. She had evidently known, but had kept silent, as it seemed she was supposed to.

Gaspar grimaced, and Don knew what he was thinking. Another two days and three nights before they caught up to the final member of their party and learned what this was all about. Maybe.

“Well, let’s find a comfortable spot to turn in,” Gaspar said. “Maybe we’ll find a mound of gold ingots to form into a camping site.”

“Gold?” Melanie asked.

“From sunken treasure ships. There are a number, here in the channel between Florida and Cuba, and they haven’t all been found by a long shot. Whole fleets of Spanish galleons carried the Inca and Aztec treasures to Spain, and storms took a number of them down. That cargo is worth billions, now.”

“Maybe that’s our mission,” Don said. “To explore this region and map the remaining treasure ships.”

“I’d be disappointed if so,” Gaspar said.

“Yes,” Melanie agreed. “We have to hope that something more than greed is responsible for us.”

“We can best find out by getting on with the mission,” Eleph said. That damped the dialogue.

Gaspar led the way to the more level bottom and located a peaceful hollow in the sand. There was no sign of gold. This time they pitched their tents, which they had not bothered to do before: one for Eleph, one for Melanie, and one formed from Don and Gaspar’s combined canvas.

This really was more comfortable than sleeping in the open, though the difference was more apparent than real. There was nothing to harm them in their phased state anyway. But Don liked the feeling of being in a protected, man-made place. Appearances were important to his emotions. Which brought him back to the subject of Melanie. Her appearance—

He shoved that thought aside. The emotions were too complicated and confused. That business about the autographs—where had he gone wrong? Suddenly he had run afoul of her, and he didn’t quite understand how it had happened. So it was better to let it lie, for now.

“That wig,” Gaspar said.

So much for letting it lie! “You noticed it too,” Don said with gentle irony.

“I want to be candid with you, because it might make a difference. Melanie is one attractive woman, and I’d be interested in her. Except for that wig. If she meant to see whom it fazed, she succeeded.”

Fazed. A pun, since they were all phased? Evidently not. “But there’s more to a woman than hair,” Don said, arguing the other side.

“I know that. You know that. Everybody knows that. But I have a thing about hair on a woman. I like it long and flowing and smooth. I like to stroke it as I make love. My first crush was on a long-haired girl, and I never got over it. So when I first saw Melanie I saw a nice figure and a pretty face, but the hair didn’t turn me on. Too short and curly. But hair can grow, so if she was otherwise all right, that could come. But then she took off that wig, and I knew that her hair would never grow. A wig won’t do it, for me. The hair has to be real, just as the breasts have to be real. I don’t claim this makes a lot of sense, but romance doesn’t necessarily make sense. Melanie is not on my horizon as anything other than an associate or platonic friend, regardless of the other aspects of our association.”

Don was troubled. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I can see you are shy with women. You wouldn’t want to go after one actively. You sure wouldn’t compete with another man for one. Well, maybe you don’t have the same hang-up as I do. In that case, I just want you to know that there’s no competition. If you can make it with Melanie, I’ll be your best man. The field is yours.”

“B-but a woman can’t just be p-parceled out!” Don protested.

“There’s a difference between parceling and non-commitment. I think Melanie needs a man as much as you need a woman. In fact I think you two might be just right for each other. If you were with her, you’d keep her secret, and she’d love you for it, and other men would wonder what she saw in you, and she would never give them the time of day. Ideal for you both, as I see it. I can see already that she’s got her quirks, but is one great catch of a woman. But matchmaking’s not my business. I’ll stay out of it. Just so you know that no way am I going to be with her. She lost me when she lifted that wig, and she knows it. You are in doubt. I mean, she doesn’t know whether you can handle the business of the hair. When you decide, that will be it. I won’t mention this again.”

“Th-thanks,” Don said. His emotions remained as confused as ever. He knew that the best thing he could do was to put all this out of his mind and let time show him the way of his feelings and hers. He would just relax.

Yet sleep was slow, again. He told himself it was because of his recent nap in the patch-coral cave, but he knew it was more than that. There was a wrongness about this project, and not just in spoiled rations or breaking bicycle chains or undue secrecy. Gaspar seemed to be the only one qualified to do anything or learn anything here. Don himself was a misfit, as was Melanie—and what was a man like Eleph doing here? Not a geologist, not a biologist, not even an undersea archeologist—but a physicist! His specialty could have little relevance here. A mysterious mission like this was hardly needed to check out the performance of the phase-shift under water—if that were really what Eleph was here to do. The man wasn’t young and strong, and certainly not easy to get along with. He could only be a drag on the party. At least Melanie wasn’t a drag.

“It’s Miami,” Gaspar said, startling him.

“Who?”

“Those coordinates. Offshore Miami. Must be another inexperienced man.”

Don shook his head ruefully. “I wish I had your talent for identifying places like that! I can’t make head or tail of those coordinates.”

“It’s no talent. Just understanding of the basic principle. The Earth is a globe, and it is tricky to identify places without a global scale of reference. On land you can look for roads and cities, but in the sea there are none. Think of it as an orange, with lines marked. Some are circles going around the globe, passing through the north and south poles. Those are the meridians of longitude, starting with zero at Greenwich, in London, England, as zero, and proceeding east and west from it until they meet as 180 degrees in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at the International Date Line. The others are circles around the globe parallel to the equator; they get smaller as they go north and south, but each is still a perfect circle. Thus we have parallels of latitude. Since we happen to be north of the equator and west of England, our coordinates are in the neighborhood of twenty five degrees north latitude and eighty degrees west longitude. Just keep those figures in mind, and you’ll know how far we go from where we are now.”

It began to register. “Twenty five and eighty,” Don said. “Right here. So Miami is—”

“Actually those particular coordinates would be about ten miles east of Miami, and fifty miles south of it,” Gaspar said. “We’re on the way there. I meant our neighborhood on a global scale.”

“Just as all of man’s history and prehistory is recent, on the geologic scale,” Don said wryly. “Fifty miles is pinpoint close.”

“Yes. Our bicycle meters give us our immediate locations.”

“Still, I’ll remember those numbers. It will give me a notion how far we are from Miami, and that’s a location I can understand. Southern tip of Florida.”

“Well—”

“Approximately!” Don said quickly. “In geologic terms.”

“Approximately,” Gaspar agreed, and Don knew he was smiling.

Don returned to the matter of their next group member, glad to have company in his misgivings. “What do you think he is? An astronomer? An electrician? A—”

“Could be a paleontologist. Because I think I know where we’re heading, now. The Bahamas platform.”

“What?”

“The Bahamas platform. Geologically, a most significant region. It certainly made trouble for us in the past.”

Don would have been less interested, had he not wanted someone to talk to. “How could it make trouble? It is whatever it is, and was what it was, wasn’t it, before there were geologists?”

“True, true. But trouble still, and a fascinating place to explore. You see, its existence was a major obstacle to acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics.”

“Of what?”

“Drifting continents.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Don said. “They’re moving now, aren’t they? An inch a century?”

“Faster than that, even,” Gaspar agreed wryly.

“But I don’t see why those little islands, the Bermudas—”

“Bahamas. The thesis was that all the continents were once a super land mass called Pangaea. The convection currents in the mantle of the earth broke up the land, spreading the sea floor and shoving the new continents outward. North and South America drifted—actually, they were shoved—to their present location, and the Mid-Atlantic ridge continued to widen as more and more lava was forced up from below. But the Bahamas—”

“You talk as if the world is a bubbling pot of mush!”

“Close enough. The continents themselves float in the lithosphere, and when something shoves, they have to move. But slowly. We could match up the fractures, showing how the fringes of the continental shelves fitted together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. All except the Bahamas platform. It was extra. There was no place for it in the original Pangaea—yet there it was.”

“So maybe the continents didn’t drift, after all,” Don said. “They must have stayed in the same place all the time. Makes me feel more secure, I must admit.”

“Ah, but they did drift. Too many lines of evidence point too firmly to this, believe you me. All but that damned platform. Where did it come from?”

“Where, indeed,” Don muttered sleepily.

“They finally concluded that the great breakup of Pangaea started right in this area. The earth split asunder, the land shoved outward in mighty plates—and then the process halted for maybe thirty million years, and the new basin filled in with sediment. When the movement resumed, there was the half-baked mass: the Bahamas platform. Most of it is still under water, of course, but it trailed along with the continent, and here it is. The site of the beginning of the Atlantic Ocean as we know it.” The man’s voice shook with excitement; this was one of the most important things on Earth, literally, to him.

But Don wasn’t a geologist. “Glory be,” he mumbled.

“That’s why I find this such a fascinating region. There are real secrets buried in the platform strata.”

But Don was drifting to a continental sleep. He dreamed that he was standing with tremendous feet straddling Pangaea, the Paul Bunyan of archaeologists. But then it cracked, and he couldn’t get his balance; the center couldn’t hold. The more he tried to bring the land together, the more his very weight shoved it apart, making him do a continental split. “Curse you, Bahama!” he cried.




CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_5edd3f03-250d-55cb-a108-1138afcc3d1c)

PACIFA (#ulink_5edd3f03-250d-55cb-a108-1138afcc3d1c)


Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.

Acknowledging.

Status?

Four members introduced, final one incipient. Progress good. Group is melding. They are as much concerned with interpersonal relations as with the mission, but unified in their perplexity about it. The likelihood of success seems to be increasing.

That is good. We have lost another world via the straightforward approach. If your experiment is effective, we will try it on the remaining worlds.

But the outcome is far from assured. Human reactions are devious and at times surprising.

How well we know!

Offshore Miami: the continental shelf was narrow here, but they could not approach the teeming metropolis too closely. The rendezvous was just outside the reefs, thirty fathoms deep and sloping.

Gaspar tooted on his whistle. The answer came immediately. Before they could get on their cycles the fifth member of the party appeared, riding rapidly. Don noted the turned-down handlebars and double derailleur mechanism first: another ten-speed-or-more machine, perhaps an expensive one.

“It’s a woman,” Gaspar said.

Don and Melanie peered at the figure. It was female, but neither buxom nor young.

She coasted up, turned smartly, and braked, like a skier at the end of a competition run. “Pacifa,” she said. Her hair was verging on gray, obviously untinted under the hard helmet.

The others introduced themselves.

“Well,” Pacifa said briskly. “If I had known you would be three handsome men and one pretty girl, I’d have sent my daughter. But she’s all shape and no mind and this is business not pleasure, so we’re stuck with each other for the duration. Any problems with the bikes?”

They assumed that this was small talk, so demurred. Don saw Melanie react at the reference to “pretty girl,” but she did not speak. He wasn’t sure whether it was the first word or the second that bothered her.

“No, I’m serious,” Pacifa said with peppery dispatch. “I’m your mechanic, in a couple of ways, and I can see already that none of you except Gaspar knows the first thing about cycles, and he doesn’t know the second thing. Three of you have insufficient and the fourth too much. Can’t be helped now, though. Who has the coordinates?”

“Twenty four degrees, fifteen minutes latitude,” Melanie said. “Eighty four degrees, fifty minutes longitute.”

“But that’s—” Don started, trying to figure it out.

“Right back the way we came,” Melanie said. “Eleph was at 24°30’, and this is 24° 15’.”

“But farther along,” Gaspar said. “In fact, offshore northern Cuba.”

“We’re picking up a Cuban?” she asked.

“Unlikely,” Gaspar said. “If there was supposed to be another person, he should have joined us at the same place Eleph did, not close by. Now I think we’re complete. A larger party would be unwieldy. So it’s more likely the site of our mission—or a supply depot.” He sounded disappointed. It seemed they were not going to the Bahamas platform.

“Let’s go,” Pacifa said. She mounted and moved out with such smoothness that the three were left standing.

Gaspar filled the leadership gap again. “Don, you catch her and make her wait. Eleph, I saw a map in your pack. Let’s you and I check it and find out more specifically where we’re going, because Cuba just doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe there’s something in the Gulf of Mexico I’m missing.”

Don took off. But Pacifa was already out of sight, lost in the vague dark background wash that was the deep ocean at dawn. There were not tire tracks, of course. It was hopeless.

“Fool woman,” he muttered.

“Whistle for her,” Melanie called. He hadn’t realized that she was following him, and indeed she wasn’t very close, but it was a good suggestion. He blew his whistle.

Pacifa answered at once, just a short distance to the side. “Are you lost, young man?” she inquired solicitously as he drew up to her.

“No. You are—were. Wait for the rest of us!”

“Why?”

“W-we have to operate as a p-party,” he said, annoyed.

“I’m glad that’s settled. Let’s get on with it.”

They returned to find Gaspar and Eleph poring over the paper held before one headlight. Gaspar lifted his bike and spun a wheel by hand when the headlight began to fade, to keep the light bright. There were a number of sections of the map, each overlapping the boundaries of the next, so that they could travel from one to another without interruption. It looked to Don as if the entire Gulf of Mexico was covered, and perhaps more.

Gaspar looked up. “It’s in an American explosives dumping area,” he said.

“A what?” Pacifa demanded. “That can’t be right.”

“It’s the location Melanie gave us,” Gaspar said evenly. “Got any other?”

“Do I understand correctly?” Eleph demanded. “Must we venture into a munitions dump?”

“I have no knowledge of munitions dumps,” Pacifa said. “I don’t know anything about undersea coordinates either. It does seem strange, but if they want to keep our ultimate destination secret, this is as good a waystation as any, I suppose.”

“That must be it,” Don said. “For some reason they don’t want us to know our mission any sooner than we have to. But it must be far enough away so we’ll have to reload on supplies.” He would be glad to get good rations to replace his bad ones; so far there had been plenty for the others to share with him, but it made him feel as if he wasn’t carrying his own weight.

“But an explosives dump!” Gaspar said.

“Can’t hurt us,” Don reminded him. “We’re out of phase.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Our weight is still real, and if we were to ride over an old live depth bomb—”

“They do not dump that way,” Eleph said. “Those weapons are sealed in.”

“How do you know?”

Eleph hesitated. “I have had military experience.”

So there was a military background, Don thought. That explained the man’s military bearing and attitude. But it still didn’t explain his presence here.

“Probably it was easier to dump supplies on a regular run,” Gaspar said after a moment, evidently not wishing to appear unduly negative. “But it’s a good three hundred and fifty miles from here. And if that’s only half way to our goal—”

“Our goal may be even farther,” Don said. “Because we’ve been riding back and forth with our initial supplies.”

“Of which we still have plenty,” Melanie said. “Even sharing.”

“Sharing?” Pacifa inquired alertly.

“Don’s are bad,” Melanie explained. “We don’t know if it’s poor quality control or what.”





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