Eleph regarded her with severity. “Madam, have you any notion how far that is on a bicycle?”
“I ought to,” she said, smiling. “I have traveled ten thousand miles in the past year on this bicycle, and I didn’t ride much in winter.”
The other four stared at her.
“That’s my business, after all,” she said. “Checking touring paths for bicycle clubs. Terrain, hazards, accommodations available along the way—I earn a few dollars a mile, plus expenses, for doing what I like best. Being independent.”
Don didn’t comment, and neither did the others. Who wanted to be the first to inform an old lady that she was off her rocker?
Eleph finally broke the silence. “This route takes us in an unexpected direction.”
Pacifa shrugged. “So?”
“It’s more than we bargained on,” Don said. “I thought this mission—well, maybe down off the continental shelf to investigate a sunken ship, not that I wanted to—”
“Or to check the configurations of the terrain beneath the Gulf Stream,” Gaspar said. “And the Bahamas platform—”
“To field test the phasing apparatus,” Eleph said. “Which requires no great amount of travel, and is not antipathetic to the other—”
“Or to see how well a group of strangers can get along under the sea,” Melanie said. “Male, female, young, old, with different—”
“Fiddlesticks!” Pacifa snapped. “This tour will obviously give you all your chances to look at the bottom and search for ships and test your equipment and get along together or quarrel incessantly, whatever direction we go. There must be something special at the end—something more important than any of our separate little specialties. The sooner we get there the sooner we find out what that is.”
She was making sense. “But food—water—we can’t survive indefinitely under the sea,” Don said, feeling the dread of the unknown.
“We certainly can,” Eleph said, surprisingly. “These concentrates we carry are pure nourishment. All we need is water—and the recycling system insures the supply. The only really crucial external commodity is oxygen, and the diffusion field takes care of that.”
“So there is a field,” Gaspar said. “I wondered. We seem to be riding in an alternate realm, where there is ground but no water and perhaps no air. What do you know about it?”
“This is within the province of my specialty,” Eleph replied stiffly. “The solid material, animate and inanimate, with which we associate, has been shunted into an alternate framework. That’s what that ‘phase tunnel’ is: the shunting device. That material, which includes our living bodies, will remain in that state until reprocessed. But it is not feasible to recycle oxygen, so within each bicycle is a generator supported by batteries that creates a temporary partial phase, permitting a certain interaction between frameworks. In this manner oxygen is diffused in, and carbon dioxide is rediffused out, enabling us to breathe.”
That explanation relieved one of Don’s main concerns. But only one of them.
“My, my,” Pacifa said. “If one of those generators fails—”
“That is unlikely,” Eleph said.
“But you said that Don’s supplies are bad. Why not some of the equipment too?”
Don found that question painfully on target.
“I am conversant with the mechanism,” Eleph said, “and should be able to repair most malfunctions.”
Gaspar whistled. “You must be some physicist.”
“I’m sure each of us has his particular area of expertise.” Eleph’s tone discouraged further comment.
Melanie, nevertheless, made one. “So carelessness or poor quality control may have wiped out Don’s food, but anything else can be fixed.”
“Precisely,” Eleph agreed.
“I’ll make a note,” Don said. He rummaged in his pack and brought out his pad of paper and pen. Melanie smiled and Gaspar laughed. Don appreciated that.
Pacifa was studying the map. “I see where we are and where we are going. Now must we follow the exact route, or do we have some leeway?”
“What difference does it make?” Eleph demanded.
“Now if we start out grouchy, we’ll never get along,” she snapped back.
Don had to turn away to hide a smile, and he caught Gaspar doing the same. Neither commented directly.
“Because if we do have leeway,” Pacifa continued, “and it seems we have to, because we’re the ones who have to do the job, whatever it is, and you can’t ride a bike from some fat-bottomed swivel chair—it seems to me that we ought to get off the coral shelf and get down under the Gulf Stream—it’s going the wrong way for us, isn’t it?—and coast down around here into the Gulf of Mexico. We have to get down there anyway, and according to this map it is sixteen hundred fathoms deep at our depot—what’s that in real terms, Gaspar?—and the drop-off doesn’t get any—”
“About one and three quarter miles deep,” Gaspar said.
“Don’t interrupt,” Pacifa told him. Don exchanged a glance with Melanie. “The drop-off doesn’t get any easier down beyond the Keys, from the look of this.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Gaspar said. “But don’t go thinking of the continental slope as a sheer cliff. It may have cliffs and canyons in it, and overall it represents a more formidable climb than any mountain we know on the surface, but it is a slope. We can manage it on the bicycles, if we watch where we’re going.”
“You’re the geologist,” she said dubiously. She had caught on to all their names and specialties astonishingly quickly, but it was evident that she was as ignorant as the others about the nature of the sea floor. “Let’s slant down it and be on our way.”
Gaspar shrugged, out of arguments. Pacifa suited action to word, evidently being a person of action. This time Don and Melanie fell in behind her, and Eleph followed them. Gaspar, most familiar with the depths, was this time at the rear.
They dropped down to two hundred feet, three hundred, four hundred. The terrain became more even, though it was hardly the smooth slope Don had pictured from Gaspar’s description. Of course the man had not claimed it was smooth, only that it was a slope. Only flat beds of sand seemed smooth, and there weren’t many of them here. They reached a hundred fathoms, and Don gave up converting to feet. It was easier to go along with his depth meter.
Pacifa abruptly slowed. In a moment Don saw why. A tremendous and weird-looking fish was pacing her. It had a vertical fin like that of a shark, but its head terminated in a horizontal cleaver.
“Hammerhead shark,” Gaspar murmured, coming up. “Average size, maybe fifteen feet. The eyes and nostrils are at the edge of the spread, helping it to triangulate on prey. Very efficient.”
“A science fiction monster!” Pacifa exclaimed, shaken.
“Nothing to worry about,” Eleph said, just as if he had never been frightened by a marine creature. “Only one tenth of one per cent of its mass can affect us, and vice versa.”
The hammerhead looped gracefully, circling them. “You know that,” Pacifa said. “I know that. But does it know—”
The shark charged. All five people leaped for their lives. The wide-flung nostrils and open mouth passed through the party, stirring it further, feeling like a harsh gust of wind. The tail caught Don, and he felt again that disquieting interaction of substance.
They all looked at each other, tumbled unceremoniously. “Well, it is a man-eater,” Gaspar said, apologizing for them all. “Our conditioned reflexes still govern us. That may be dangerous, because they don’t apply in this situation. Maybe I’d better take the lead, now.”
Pacifa, momentarily chastened, acquiesced.
Gaspar moved ahead, and Don took the end spot, and travel resumed. Don was privately satisfied to be following Melanie again; his headlight played at intervals across her well proportioned backside. He liked her body and her personality. If only she didn’t have that condition with the hair!
At a hundred and fifty fathoms the dawn of the near-surface
had become the deepest blue-black of unearthly night. It was cooler, too; the meter said the temperature had dropped almost fifty degrees, and was now approaching what he thought of as the freezing point.
The pace slowed as they navigated a devious stretch, and Don took the opportunity to pull abreast of Eleph. “Should we stop to put on heavier clothing?” he asked.
“The temperature is a function of the heat of the converter, modified by very limited external factors, such as the caloric content of the incoming oxygen,” Eleph said curtly.
“Limited, my foot!” Don said. “My meter says—”
“That meter is oriented on the oxygen, as a guide to conditions in the other framework,” Eleph said. “Surely you are not cold.”
Don was embarrassed to realize that he wasn’t. All this time he had been reacting to the meter, instead of reality. Naturally he couldn’t expect the bicycle temperature to be controlled by that one-thousandth transfer across the phase.
But it did make him wonder again just what the phase world was. Didn’t it have temperature or weather of its own? Why couldn’t they see it? They could feel it, because that was what their tires rode across. Invisible mass?
There were fish about, but not many. Increasingly Don felt alone, though Melanie’s taillight remained in sight ahead of him, and Eleph’s ahead of hers, bumping over the irregularities. Don thought he saw another shark feeding on the bottom, and there were a number of unidentifiable glows. But no vegetation at all, at this depth.
The path turned, until they were going southwest, parallel to the reefs, not away from them. Then Don saw why: the drop-off did become steep. Gaspar was making it easier by descending on the bias.
But it wasn’t easier. The roughness of the ground increased. Large sponges, grotesquely shaped, loomed out of the gloom to force detours. The land seemed formed into irregular rocky ridges which had to be portaged across. No erosion here to smooth things. Finally Gaspar stopped, letting the others catch up.
“This is messier than I figured,” he said as they clustered together, pooling their lights. “We’re riding along an outcropping—Oligocene deposits, I’d say—of rock, and it probably parallels the coast for a hundred miles.”
“Why not check the map?” Don asked.
“Map doesn’t show it; too general. There are sharp limits to what they can do by echo-sounding, anyway—which is why we need people down here to do the job properly. There’s no erosion to speak of at this depth, so every jagged break is as sharp as it ever was. From what I know of this shelf, I’d guess this interruption isn’t broad; two or three miles should traverse it, crosswise. Then it’s fairly easy coasting on to the foot. But here it’s a rough two miles. We’re probably better off going straight across it, then riding the trough—but we may have to go mountain style. Who’s game?”
Pacifa grinned. “Good idea. We have rope, pitons—”
“Rope and pitons!” Eleph exclaimed. “Madam, these are not the Alps!”
“Nor the Himalayas,” Gaspar said. “They’re worse, in places. The greatest mountains on Earth are under the sea.”
“Now don’t exaggerate,” Pacifa said.
“No exaggeration. The great mid-ocean ridge runs forty thousand miles around the globe. The largest single mountain of the world, Hawaii, is far larger than Everest, as an entity. Just be thankful we’re not trying to navigate a fracture zone. As it is, we’ll be seeing moon landscape and Mars landscape before we’re through.”
“Goody,” Pacifa said with almost girlish gusto. “What a marvelous guided tour that would make. Moon and Mars under the sea.”
It occurred to Don that he’d like to meet her daughter—the one who was all shape and no mind. Was her personality like this? But of course he would go into a terminal stuttering attack if he did encounter her, so the fancy was pointless. Better to wrestle with the problem of Melanie’s hair. Melanie just might be attainable, if—
“Guided tour,” Eleph muttered with disgust.
They unlimbered the rope. “Now we’ll have to stay on foot while we’re tied,” Gaspar said. “I don’t know what effect a sharp rope-jerk would have on a rider. No sense risking it.”
“No sense at all,” Pacifa agreed. “We’re a long way from the hospital.”
“But we have to hold the bicycles,” Don pointed out. “How can we climb and hold on to ropes at the same time?”
It turned out to be less of an obstacle than he had supposed. Pacifa looped the rope firmly but not bindingly about each person’s waist and knotted it in place with quick competence. This linked them securely without occupying their hands. She connected the bicycles to short offshoots. The hike would have been more convenient without the bikes right at hand, but of course this was out of the question; the oxygen went with the machines.
Cautiously they proceeded on down the continental slope. A pass opened in the projecting ridge, and they made their way through without difficulty. The steepness leveled off into a smooth, steady, undemanding decline. For miles they trekked downward when they could have been riding, their lights spearing into drab mundane waters, reflecting from harmless sponges and innocuous fish.
At last, embarrassed, Gaspar called another halt. “Wouldn’t you know there’d be a break right when I geared us up for a real climb!”
“Security before convenience, always,” Eleph said with his normal stiffness. Don was beginning to appreciate that the man was fair, if taciturn. Gaspar had erred on the safe side, and that certainly was best.
“Might as well unhitch now and go on down,” Gaspar said. “Should be no more trouble. ’Course we don’t want to get reckless. There is always the unexpected.”
They unhitched. “I’m glad it wasn’t bad,” Melanie confided as Don helped her. He had to agree.
Gaspar led the way southwest, picking up speed—and dropped out of sight.
It was a depression in the ocean floor resembling a sinkhole. A spring of water issued from a hole at its base. Gaspar had held his seat, and the bicycle straddled the hole, making his clothing billow up and out. “Must be a freshwater well,” he remarked. “I had forgotten they were here.”
No harm had been done, but the episode served as a sharp reminder. This was unknown, largely uncharted terrain; no one had ever mapped it in fine detail. Anything, geologically, could be here, and they would have no more warning than that provided by their scant headlights.
They made it down safely. Hours had passed, and Don’s waterproof watch claimed it was afternoon. The depth was 380 fathoms: a scant half mile. It seemed like a hundred miles, with the phenomenal weight of all that water pressing down. The very fact that they could not feel that weight made the experience vaguely surrealistic. This was indeed an alien horizon.
They stopped and ate and rested, but were soon on their way again, because it was cold when they stopped, whatever Eleph might say about imagination. There was something about the depths and gloom that chilled Don from the mind outward.
Gaspar led them another thirty miles in the next four hours, then halted at a partial cave in a hillside. “Let’s camp here,” he suggested, knowing that no one was about to argue. “We have had a good day.”
“We have indeed, considering,” Pacifa agreed, though she looked as fresh as when she had started. “Suppose we join our shelter-canvases together and make one big tent and heat it?”
“Sounds good,” Don agreed eagerly. “But—”
“Now I won’t tolerate any sexual discrimination,” she said briskly. “I’m an experienced camper and I know more than the rest of you combined about setting up. I’ll prove that right now.”
And she did. Her nimble fingers fashioned the tent much more efficiently than the others could have, even working together. She also set up a separate minor tent for sanitary purposes, a refinement the others had not thought of. That eliminated the need to take individual hikes into the gloom. She detached each person’s converter from the bicycles and carried them into that tent, since each person??
?s ecological balance depended on that recycling system. This amazed Don, and evidently the others; they had not realized that this could be done. She set four bicycles inside the tent, bracing the walls, and the fifth beside the privy.
“Now you’ll have to hold your breath to cross between tents, because there’ll be an oxygen shortage,” she warned. “But the one bike will provide for one person in the sanitary tent. You will have to carry your own converter with you to use; that can not safely be shared. Don will have to contribute bad food packages to the other converters at the same rate he borrows good food from the others, to keep the approximate balance. Right, Eleph?”
“There is some oxygen in the alternate framework,” Eleph said. “But this is insufficient without supplementation by the field, yes. And it is true that the converters must remain virtually sealed systems.”
Some oxygen in the other realm. Don wondered about that, but couldn’t quite formulate a specific question. What kind of alternate was that? He wished he had a better notion.
Pacifa set the five converters in the main tent on “high.” The heat wafted through the tent as the accelerated chemical composting proceeded within each unit, processing the wastes of the day. It became a thoroughly pleasant place, walling out the gloom, almost making this seem like a chamber in some civilized city on land. Don felt his fatigue and tension melting away.
“But it will be necessary to relocate periodically,” Eleph warned. “The oxygen dissolved in sea water is limited, particularly at this depth, and unless refreshed by current—”
“You’re right!” Gaspar said, snapping his fingers. “I should have thought of that. We could suffocate in our sleep.”
“I did think of it,” Pacifa said imperturbably. “We are camped in a slight but steady current that should provide fresh oxygen as we need it. Now for supper.” She took the food packages from each supply except Don’s, squeezed water into them, and set the result on top of the center converter. Its surface was now burning hot. In a few minutes she served them a hot meal that seemed vastly superior to what they had had before, even though it had to be the same stuff. “Seasoning,” she confided with a wink.