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Midgaard's voice stopped abruptly, and Steen could hear the sounds of retching.
"Midgaard, are you sick?"
"Please hurry, sir."
Then the line went dead.
Stem yelled at Sakagawa. "What button do I push for the engine room?"
There was no reply. Stem stepped back into the chart room. Sakagawa was sitting there pale as death, breathing rapidly. He looked up and spoke, gasping the words with every breath.
"The fourth button. . . rings the engine room."
"What's wrong with you?" Steen asked anxiously.
"Don't know. I. . . I feel. . . awful. . . vomited twice."
"Hang on," snapped Steen. "I'll gather up the others. We're getting off this death ship." He snatched the phone and rang the engine room. There was no answer. Fear flooded his mind. Fear of an unknown that was striking them down. He imagined the smell of death pervading the whole ship.
Stem took a swift glance at a deck diagram that was mounted on a bulkhead, then leaped down the companionway six steps at a time. He tried to run toward the vast holds containing the autos, but a nausea cramped his stomach and he weaved through the passageway like a drunk through a back alley.
At last he stumbled through the doorway onto C cargo deck. A great sea of multicolored automobiles stretched a hundred meters fore and aft. Amazingly, despite the buffeting from the storm and the list of the ship, they were all firmly in place.
Stem shouted frantically for Midgaard, his voice echoing from the steel bulkheads. Silence was his only reply. Then he spotted it, the oddity that stood out like the only man in a crowd holding aloft a sign.
One of the cars had its hood up.
He staggered between the long rows, falling against doors and fenders, bruising his knees on the protruding bumpers. As he approached the car with the open hood, he shouted again. "Anyone here?"
This time he heard a faint moan. In ten paces he had reached the car and stared frozen at the sight of Midgaard lying beside one tire.
The young seaman's face was festered with running sores. Froth mixed with blood streamed from his mouth. His eyes stared unseeing. His arms were purple from bleeding beneath the skin. He seemed to be decaying before Steen's eyes.
Steen sagged against the car, stricken with horror. He clutched his head between his hands in helplessness and despair, not noticing the thicket of hair that came away when he dropped them to his sides.
"Why in God's name are we dying?" he whispered, seeing his own grisly death mirrored by Midgaard.
"What is killing us?"
The deepsea submersible Old Gert hung suspended beneath a large crane that sat on the stern of the British oceanographic vessel Invincible. The seas had calmed enough to launch Old Gert for a scientific probe of the seafloor 5,200 meters below, and her crew were following a tight sequence of safety checks.
There was nothing old about the submersible. Her design was the latest state of the art. She was constructed by a British aerospace company within the past year and was now poised for her maiden test dive to survey the Mendocino fracture zone, a great crack in the Pacific Ocean floor extending from the coast of Northern California halfway to Japan.
Her exterior was a complete departure from other aerodynamic submersibles. Instead of one cigar-shaped hull with a pregnant pod attached beneath, she had four transparent titanium and polymer woven spheres connected by circular tunnels that gave her the appearance of a jack from a child's game.
One sphere contained a complex array of camera equipment, while another was filled with air and ballast tanks and batteries. The third held the oxygen equipment and electric motors. The fourth sphere, the largest, sat above the other three and housed the crew and controls.
Old Gert was built to withstand the immense pressures found at the deepest parts of the world's seabeds. Her support systems could keep a crew alive for forty-eight hours, and she was powered to travel through the black abyss at speeds up to eight knots.
Craig Plunkett, the chief engineer and pilot for Old Gert, signed the last of the check-off forms. He was a man of forty-five or fifty, with graying hair combed forward to cover his baldness. His face was ruddy and his eyes a medium brown with a bloodhound droop. He had helped design Old Gert and now treated her as his own private yacht.
He pulled on a heavy woolen sweater against the expected chill from the cold bottom water and slipped his feet into a pair of soft furlined moccasins. He descended the boarding tunnel and closed the hatch behind him. Then he dropped into the control sph
ere and engaged the computerized life-support systems.
Dr. Raul Salazar, the expedition's marine geologist from the University of Mexico, was already in his seat adjusting a bottom sonar penetrating unit.
