Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet) Read Online Free
Author: Ian Sales
done below in about ten minutes.
The boat is near enough so the sailor scrambles into it. The prow swings away and the boat moves out to a position thirty feet away, its outboard still snorting and gurgling. McIntyre gives a wave, then enters the sail and climbs into the access tube. He shuts and locks the hatch above him, then descends the ladder to the pressure-sphere. Stryker and Taylor turn round and look up at him as he appears, and he’s struck anew at how small the sphere is and that he’s going to have to spend maybe six or seven hours in a space four feet by four feet square and five feet nine inches high. With two other guys.
All set? he asks.
Taylor nods and then speaks quietly into the mike of the headset he is wearing. McIntyre worms through the hatch, then he and Stryker swing it closed and seal it.
Flood the access tube, McIntyre orders.
He peers through the window in the hatch and watches as water splashes against the thick glass and quickly climbs up it. McIntyre settles on the low stool beneath the hatch, hands on knees, and says, I guess this is it. Phil, flood forward and aft water ballast tanks, let’s go see what it’s like down there.
Stryker is pilot for this dive and Taylor is on sonar duty. McIntyre’s handling the navigation, which for the moment is straight down. And then they’ll have to creep around on the sea bed 19,500 feet below, hunting the deep ocean transponder dropped next to the bucket because the bathyscaphe descends in a spiral.
He picks up the underwater telephone handset and informs the USS White Sands that the dive has commenced. See you in the morning, he says.
He puts the handset down and thinks, this is not diving. He’s wearing his khakis, he’s bone dry and will remain that way, and the nearest he’ll get to the water is looking at it through a window four inches in diameter and 5.9 inches thick. He’s been down to a simulated 1,000 feet in the NEDU pressure chamber, and spent a week there; he’s dived to 600 feet in the North Atlantic, and spent six days in decompression afterwards. The chipmunk-voice from breathing helium-oxygen, air so thick it’s a struggle to pull it into his lungs... 260 psi... 18 atmospheres... Ascend to the surface too fast and the bends is the least of his worries.
Sitting in this steel ball is not real. The sea has been a part of his life for decades, he works in it, it’s something he can touch and feel and in which he can immerse himself, it’s something he can become a part of. But this, there’s an air of falsity to it, experiencing the water mediated by technology and cold steel, separated from it. He doesn’t feel like a visitor to this submarine realm, he feels like an invader. Now, belatedly, he realises why he joined NEDU, why he turned his back on the Trieste II and walked away from her.
Strange, then, that he should only discover this by returning to her.
UP
Cobb lies on her back in the Mercury capsule she has named Destiny and waits patiently for the countdown to begin. It’s been over three hours since they bolted the hatch but she knows patience, she’s been in situations like this before. Not lying on her back in a pressure suit, of course, though she has done this in simulations; nor those long, silent and black hours in the sensory deprivation tank at the Oklahoma City Veterans’ Hospital three years ago—and when she heard some of the other lady astronauts spent even longer in the tank than she did, she wanted to do it all over again. No, her mind is drawn to the time she flew across the Caribbean through burning blue skies for Fleetway, the time the engine of the T-6 she was delivering to Peru went “pop” and threw oil all over her canopy and more oil seeped into the cockpit, over her instruments and herself. Though Jack Ford was there flying alongside, insisting she ditch, she prayed she’d make it safely to land. And so she did.
The boat is near enough so the sailor scrambles into it. The prow swings away and the boat moves out to a position thirty feet away, its outboard still snorting and gurgling. McIntyre gives a wave, then enters the sail and climbs into the access tube. He shuts and locks the hatch above him, then descends the ladder to the pressure-sphere. Stryker and Taylor turn round and look up at him as he appears, and he’s struck anew at how small the sphere is and that he’s going to have to spend maybe six or seven hours in a space four feet by four feet square and five feet nine inches high. With two other guys.
All set? he asks.
Taylor nods and then speaks quietly into the mike of the headset he is wearing. McIntyre worms through the hatch, then he and Stryker swing it closed and seal it.
Flood the access tube, McIntyre orders.
He peers through the window in the hatch and watches as water splashes against the thick glass and quickly climbs up it. McIntyre settles on the low stool beneath the hatch, hands on knees, and says, I guess this is it. Phil, flood forward and aft water ballast tanks, let’s go see what it’s like down there.
Stryker is pilot for this dive and Taylor is on sonar duty. McIntyre’s handling the navigation, which for the moment is straight down. And then they’ll have to creep around on the sea bed 19,500 feet below, hunting the deep ocean transponder dropped next to the bucket because the bathyscaphe descends in a spiral.
He picks up the underwater telephone handset and informs the USS White Sands that the dive has commenced. See you in the morning, he says.
He puts the handset down and thinks, this is not diving. He’s wearing his khakis, he’s bone dry and will remain that way, and the nearest he’ll get to the water is looking at it through a window four inches in diameter and 5.9 inches thick. He’s been down to a simulated 1,000 feet in the NEDU pressure chamber, and spent a week there; he’s dived to 600 feet in the North Atlantic, and spent six days in decompression afterwards. The chipmunk-voice from breathing helium-oxygen, air so thick it’s a struggle to pull it into his lungs... 260 psi... 18 atmospheres... Ascend to the surface too fast and the bends is the least of his worries.
Sitting in this steel ball is not real. The sea has been a part of his life for decades, he works in it, it’s something he can touch and feel and in which he can immerse himself, it’s something he can become a part of. But this, there’s an air of falsity to it, experiencing the water mediated by technology and cold steel, separated from it. He doesn’t feel like a visitor to this submarine realm, he feels like an invader. Now, belatedly, he realises why he joined NEDU, why he turned his back on the Trieste II and walked away from her.
Strange, then, that he should only discover this by returning to her.
UP
Cobb lies on her back in the Mercury capsule she has named Destiny and waits patiently for the countdown to begin. It’s been over three hours since they bolted the hatch but she knows patience, she’s been in situations like this before. Not lying on her back in a pressure suit, of course, though she has done this in simulations; nor those long, silent and black hours in the sensory deprivation tank at the Oklahoma City Veterans’ Hospital three years ago—and when she heard some of the other lady astronauts spent even longer in the tank than she did, she wanted to do it all over again. No, her mind is drawn to the time she flew across the Caribbean through burning blue skies for Fleetway, the time the engine of the T-6 she was delivering to Peru went “pop” and threw oil all over her canopy and more oil seeped into the cockpit, over her instruments and herself. Though Jack Ford was there flying alongside, insisting she ditch, she prayed she’d make it safely to land. And so she did.
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