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“The old gray matter,” Giordino said, pointing to his head, “has all the answers filed and indexed.”
“As usual, it’s comforting to know you’re so sure of yourself.”
“Sherlock Giordino knows all, sees all No secret can escape my probing mind.”
“Your probing mind better be well oiled,” Pitt said: earnestly. “You’ve got a tight schedule to keep.”
“Just leave it to me,” Giordino said straight faced. ‘Well, it’s about that time. I wish I was coming along. Enjoy your swim and have fun.”
“I intend to,” Pitt murmured. “I intend to.”
Two chimes from the ship’s bell sounded Gunn’s one minute warning signal. Pitt, walking awkwardly in his fins, moved onto a small platform that extended over the side of the hull.
“At the sound of the next tone, gentlemen, we go!” He said no more, partly because each man knew what he had to do, partly because there was nothing else to say that had any meaning.
The divers gripped their spear guns a little tighter and silently exchanged glances. One thought and only one thought was on all their minds at this minute: if the jump isn’t far enough, a leg could be lost in the whirling propeller. At a gesture from Pitt, they arranged themselves in a line behind the platform.
Before he lowered the mask over his eyes, Pitt took another look at the men around him and for the tenth time studied their identifying features, features he would be able to recognize at a distance under water. The man nearest him, Ken Knight, the geophysicist, was the only blond in the group; Stan Thomas, the short, runty ship’s engineer, wore blue fins and was the only member, Pitt surmised, who could probably handle himself in a tough fight. Next came a red-bearded marine biologist, Lee Spencer, then Gustaf Hersong, a lanky six-foot-six marine botanist—both those men seemed to be grinning at each other over a private joke. The anchor man was the expedition’s photographer, Omar Woodson, as true a deadpan character as Pitt had ever seen and who genuinely appeared bored by the whole show. Instead of a spear gun, Woodson carried a 35 mm Nykonos with flash, swinging the expensive underwater unit over the railing, negligently, as if it were an old used box camera.
Pitt pulled the mask down over his eyes, whistling softly to himself, and gazed once more at the water. It was passing beneath the platform at a much more leisurely rate now—Gunn had cut the First Attempt’s speed to a crawling three knots—slow enough, Pitt decided, for a feet first entry. His eyes turned past the bow, looking forward with trance-like fixity at the approximate point in the sea where at any moment now he must dive.
At almost the same instant, Gunn scrutinized the fathometer and the jagged cliffs for the last time. His. hand slowly raised, groped for the bell line, found it,. paused, then gave one hard pull. The metallic clang burst into the hot afternoon air and carried across the surf to the steep coastal wall, echoing in a muted undertone back toward the ship.
Pitt, poised on the platform, didn’t wait for the echo. Holding the mask firmly in place against his face with one hand and clutching the pole spear in the other, he leaped.
The impact shattered the sun-danced water into a blazing diffused pattern of blue brilliance. Immediately after the surface closed over his head, Pitt rolled frontward and kicked his fins as fast, it seemed to him, as a Mississippi River paddle wheeler at full throttle. Five seconds and fifteen feet later, he glanced over his shoulder and watched the dark shape of the ship’s hull slide slowly overhead. The whirling twin propellers seemed frighteningly closer than they really were: their thrashing sound traveled at forty-nine hundred feet per second underwater as compared to less than eleven hundred feet through air, and the light refraction magnified their flashing blades by nearly twenty-five percent.
Teeth clenched on the regulator’s mouthpiece, Pitt swung around and stared in the direction of the shrinking ship to see how the others had fared. His sigh of relief was answered by the hiss of his exhaust bubbles from the regulator. Thank God, they were all there, and in one piece. Knight, Thomas, Spencer, and Hersong, all in a group within touching distance. Only Woodson had dragged his feet; he hung in the water about twenty feet beyond the rest.
The visibility was startling. The long, purplish tentacles of a jelly-like Portuguese Man O’ War were clearly discernible nearly eighty feet away. A pair of ugly looking Dragonet fish swam idly across the bottom, their vivid blue and yellow scaleless bodies topped by high slender gill spines. It was a hidden world, a soundless world, owned by weirdly shaped creatures and decorated by graceful fantasies of form and vibrant hues that defied any attempt at human description. It was also a world of mystery and danger, guarded by a sinister array of weapons, varying from the slaughterous teeth of the shark to the deadly venom of the innocent looking Zebra fish; an intriguing combination of eternal beauty and constant peril.
Without
waiting for signs of discomfort, Pitt began snorting into the mask to equalize the air pressure of his inner ears to that of the water pressure. When his ears popped, he slowly dove toward the majestic seascape under him and became a part of it.
At thirty feet, the reds were left behind, and the depths became a soft blending of blues and greens. Pitt leveled off at fifty and studied the bottom. No sea growth or rocks here, just a patch of submerged desert where miniature sand dunes meandered in unbroken snake-like ripples. Except for an occasional bottom-dwelling Star Gazer fish, buried with only a pair of stony eyes and a portion of its grotesque, fringed lips protruding above the sand, the sea floor
was deserted.
Exactly eight minutes after they had left the First Attempt, the bottom began to slope upward, and the water became slightly murky from the surface wave action. A rock formation, covered with swaying seaweed, appeared in the gloom ahead. And then suddenly they were at the base of a vertically sheer cliff that rose at an unbroken 90 deg. angle until it disappeared into the mirrored surface above. Like Captain Nemo and his companions exploring an undersea garden, Pitt began directing his team of marine scientists to spread out and search for the submarine cave.
The hunt took no more than five minutes. Woodson, who had angled a hundred feet out on the right perimeter, found it first. Signaling Pitt and the others by rapping his knife against his airtank, he motioned for them to come and went swimming off along the northern face of the cliff to a point beyond a weed-encrusted crevasse. There he paused and held up a leveled arm.
And then Pitt saw it; a black and ominous opening just twelve feet below the surface. The size was perfect; big enough for a submarine or, for that matter, a locomotive to have been driven in. They all hung suspended in the clear crystal water, their eyes fixed on the cave entrance, hesitating, exchanging glances.
Pitt moved first, entering the hole. Except for a few dim flashes of light, reflected from the whites of his heels, he disappeared completely from view, swallowed by the yawning cavity.
He leisurely beat the water with his fins and let an incoming swell help carry him slowly through the tunnel. The bright blue-green of the sunlit sea rapidly transformed into a kind of deep twilight blue. At first Pitt could see nothing, but soon his eyes adjusted to the dark interior, and he began to make out a few details of his surroundings.
There should have been a myriad of marine life clinging to the tunnel walls. There should have been darting crabs, winking limpets and barnacles, or crawling lobsters, sneaking about in search of tasty shellfish. There were none of these. The rocky sides were barren, and they were coated with a reddish substance that clouded the water whenever Pitt touched the smooth, unnatural material. He rolled face up and inspected the arched roof, watching in fascinated interest as his exhaust bubbles rose and wandered across the ceiling, like a trail of quicksilver, seeking escape from a vial.
Abruptly the roof angled upward, and Pitt’s head broke the surface. He looked around but saw nothing; a gray cloud of mist obscured everything. Puzzled, he ducked his head back in the water and dove, leveling out at ten feet. Beneath him a cylindrical shaft of cobalt light flowed in from the tunnel. The water was as clear as air; Pitt could see every nook and cranny of the cavern's submerged area.
An aquarium. That was the only way Pitt could describe it. But for the fact that there were no portholes in the walls, the cavern could have easily passed for the main tank at Marineland in California. It was a far cry from the tunnel; marine life abounded everywhere. The lobsters were here, and so were the crabs, the limpets, the barnacles, even a heavy growth of kelp. There were also roving schools of brilliantly colored fish. One fish in particular caught Pitt’s eye, but before he could get closer, it saw his approach and flashed into a protective rock fissure.
For several moments, Pitt took in the breathtaking scene. Then suddenly, he started as a foreign hand grabbed his leg. It was Ken Knight, and he was motioning toward the surface. Pitt nodded and swam to the top. Again he was greeted by the heavy mist.
Pitt spit out his mouthpiece. “What do you make of it?” he asked. The rock walls amplified his voice to a roar.
