CHAPTER 62
Two days later, Penny stood at the railing on the foredeck looking out upon the sea. Here and there, seaweed that had been sucked up to the surface by the dome’s departure still remained, but most of it had sunk down to the depths again. The glow they had seen the first night had not returned. This morning, Navy ships, including research and salvage vessels, had arrived without incident and were cruising back and forth as if celebrating their restored dominion. After the departure of the dome, there no longer seemed any reason to object to their presence. Life on the Valentina was back to what would have to pass for normal.
“I looked for you this morning,” Chiffrey said as he walked up to Penny. He leaned back on the railing and squinted into the sun, his wrap-around sunglasses perched uselessly on top of his head. His face appeared older.
“Your people giving you grief?” she stated more than asked.
“My immediate superior is mad that I ‘let the fish get away,’ while some of those less close to the action are starting to believe I fell for a line that would be rejected by the worst tabloid. Or maybe they’ve just decided to think that way. It’s becoming inconvenient to be associated with what is now deemed by some to have been little more than a greased pig chase.”
“No one really believed Matthew when all this began,” she said. “Not even me, really.”
“Yeah, and now it’s my turn. The irony has not gone unnoticed.”
“Still, you’ve got hard evidence. The propellers, the divers. The lost time of the sub crews and their chronometers. They can’t ignore that.”
“They can find easier explanations for some of these incidents. And the propellers have gone missing.”
“What?”
“At first I thought our teleporting dome was behind it,” Chiffrey said. “Now it looks like they may have just been ‘mislaid’ after they were moved for safekeeping. There are people that just want all this to go away, because there’s no box to put it in. It doesn’t help that the various components of all the incidents have been classified so tightly by so many competing agencies that no one has the full picture anymore.”
Chiffrey smiled wanly and sighed as he looked away before saying, “You haven’t heard anything from Matthew, I suppose?”
“You never quit, do you?”
He shrugged. “Anything at all would be appreciated.”
“We’ll never have it all.”
“Maybe, but I have to hand in a report tonight. What I have so far is going to go down like a three-day-old corndog. But forget that for a moment, and let me run this by you.” He cleared his throat and looked down for a few seconds, then said, “All ancient cultures had those who were believed to have some special relationship with divine or semi-divine beings of one kind or another. Some came back from their encounters to utter wisdom and prophecy. Or as heroes. Others came back mad, their minds broken.”
“You got that from my father.”
“Indeed I did and, disturbing to me as this sounds, it’s starting to make some sense to me. Your father also told me that if the dome was around long before we got here, then it’s possible that humankind’s early encounters with it might explain some of our legends and myths. Or maybe all of them! Wouldn’t that just irritate some people no end, especially since you called the dome ‘she’ the other night.”
“Listen,” Penny said, “it doesn’t have a sex in anything like the usual sense. Don’t make that into more than it was. And it’s not God.”
“But some would make it that way, while others would be enraged at even the smallest suggestion of such a thing.”
“Even if the dome had never been here, we would have come up with our own stories of why our lives are the way they are and where we will spend eternity if we just behave and beseech the right idols. Survival first, which means some way we can explain the world to ourselves that we can live with. Truth, if at all, comes a distant second. It’s that or go mad for most of us.”
“Like Jack Ripler?”
“The same fire so cozy in the hearth can blaze the heart to a char.”
“Amen,” Chiffrey said, finally bringing his sunglasses down to his eyes.
She watched as some passing gray whales fed, probably on the krill or plankton that had temporarily become abundant in the area. Stopping to eat was a rare act for them during migration. Yet the whales’ behavior wasn’t abnormal. The buffet may have simply been too rich for them to pass up. It was unusual behavior but still within norms. There had been no sign of Matthew’s whale. No sign of Matthew or the dome. There wouldn’t be.
“But you can see why we have to be careful,” Chiffrey continued after a while. “Lot of people would go all kinds of crazy if presented with the fact that a godlike entity has come back uninvited. And, with still no idea why, what would we tell them? It would be the social equivalent of weapons grade plutonium if it got out. You understand that, I hope.”
She looked at him and saw questions hovering like moths around his face. She shook her head slowly. “The closer we think we’re getting to understand this, the further away from it we probably are.”
“Really? I hoped we might be coming to something.”
“Trying to talk it out is just putting one empty box into another. But that’s what your people want to do, box it and bury it, right?”
“That would not be my choice if the decision was mine to make.”
She turned and walked away, knowing that, indeed, it wouldn’t be.