Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet) Read Online Free Page B
Author: Ian Sales
to hang before her. She starts to smile: zero-G . She made it, she’s in orbit, she’s above the sky. The capsule turns around and she sees the curve of the Earth below her, it’s so very blue and it glows and it’s streaked with clouds; and she can’t help saying, Oh the view is tremendous.
And there’s the booster, she can see it tumbling away, glinting as sunlight flashes from its white sides, a pencil of brightness against the blue, falling back to Earth, unable to escape as she has done.
You have a go, Hart tells her, for at least seven orbits.
Cobb closes her eyes, clasps her hands before her and bows her head as much as she is able in the helmet. She reflects on the glory of God’s creation and her current heavenly perspective upon it, she thinks of the part He has played in her life, she thinks of everything she went through, everything she did, to be here in orbit, the second American, the second woman, in space, and the first American to travel about the Earth 160 miles above its surface.
I’m coming back, she tells God silently. This is my first visit but it will not be my last.
She may have to fight Cochran for a second or third flight, or even more, but she will prevail. He will make sure of that.
DOWN
The trail ball, hanging thirty-five feet beneath the Trieste II’s keel, tells them they’ve reached bottom, so McIntyre orders some ballast dropped to give them neutral buoyancy. Taylor is busy trying to get a signal on the Straza Industries Model 7060 deep ocean transponder interrogator from any of the dots, but he’s having no luck. McIntyre kneels and peers out through the window—there’s not much to see, only the expected blurred and powdery sand of the bottom, tan shading to grey and then black thirty feet away at the limits of the search lights’ radiance. If there’s life down here, he can’t see it—and he tries to imagine what could survive with a pressure of four tons per square inch pressing on skin and eyeballs, compressing internal organs and cells...
Hey, wait a minute, he says.
He’s just seen something, a dark shape looming in the blackness on the edge of the light from the search lights. He can’t tell what it is—it’s not the wall of the trench, they’re more than half a mile from that; and another three hundred yards from the drop-off to the Puerto Rico Trench’s true floor.
You got anything on the sonar? he asks Taylor.
It’s unlikely: the minimum range on the sonar is thirty yards, so anything close enough for him to see is not going to be on its screen.
Got what? says Taylor. Hey, that’s strange. Multiple contacts. They just kind of appeared.
But McIntyre is still trying to figure out what it is he’s looking at. He lifts a hand and signals for Stryker to use the bow thruster to swing the bathyscaphe to port, and the sea bottom beneath the pressure-sphere rolls smoothly away to one side, the undulations seeming to propagate like waves across stationary sand.
Give her one third ahead on the centreline motor, he says.
The bottom current is about a quarter knot, but it’s pulling the bathyscaphe to starboard, so Stryker compensates.
Something vertical and sheer and flat looms out of the darkness.
Full stop, McIntyre orders, hold us steady.
It’s the hull of a ship, a tall slab of darkness covered in lumpy streaks of red and brown, rendered in washed-out greyish pastels by the Trieste II’s search lights. McIntyre can see a line of portholes, black circular maws in the steel.
Take us up about sixty feet, he says, and reel in the trail ball to fifteen feet.
What you got? Stryker asks.
It’s a ship, replies McIntyre. Looks like some kind of freighter.
They are above the gunwale now, and light from Trieste II spreads across an area of deck, revealing the dark shafts of cargo hold hatches, ventilators covered in knobbly lines of rust laid one upon the other like wax on a candle, and
And there’s the booster, she can see it tumbling away, glinting as sunlight flashes from its white sides, a pencil of brightness against the blue, falling back to Earth, unable to escape as she has done.
You have a go, Hart tells her, for at least seven orbits.
Cobb closes her eyes, clasps her hands before her and bows her head as much as she is able in the helmet. She reflects on the glory of God’s creation and her current heavenly perspective upon it, she thinks of the part He has played in her life, she thinks of everything she went through, everything she did, to be here in orbit, the second American, the second woman, in space, and the first American to travel about the Earth 160 miles above its surface.
I’m coming back, she tells God silently. This is my first visit but it will not be my last.
She may have to fight Cochran for a second or third flight, or even more, but she will prevail. He will make sure of that.
DOWN
The trail ball, hanging thirty-five feet beneath the Trieste II’s keel, tells them they’ve reached bottom, so McIntyre orders some ballast dropped to give them neutral buoyancy. Taylor is busy trying to get a signal on the Straza Industries Model 7060 deep ocean transponder interrogator from any of the dots, but he’s having no luck. McIntyre kneels and peers out through the window—there’s not much to see, only the expected blurred and powdery sand of the bottom, tan shading to grey and then black thirty feet away at the limits of the search lights’ radiance. If there’s life down here, he can’t see it—and he tries to imagine what could survive with a pressure of four tons per square inch pressing on skin and eyeballs, compressing internal organs and cells...
Hey, wait a minute, he says.
He’s just seen something, a dark shape looming in the blackness on the edge of the light from the search lights. He can’t tell what it is—it’s not the wall of the trench, they’re more than half a mile from that; and another three hundred yards from the drop-off to the Puerto Rico Trench’s true floor.
You got anything on the sonar? he asks Taylor.
It’s unlikely: the minimum range on the sonar is thirty yards, so anything close enough for him to see is not going to be on its screen.
Got what? says Taylor. Hey, that’s strange. Multiple contacts. They just kind of appeared.
But McIntyre is still trying to figure out what it is he’s looking at. He lifts a hand and signals for Stryker to use the bow thruster to swing the bathyscaphe to port, and the sea bottom beneath the pressure-sphere rolls smoothly away to one side, the undulations seeming to propagate like waves across stationary sand.
Give her one third ahead on the centreline motor, he says.
The bottom current is about a quarter knot, but it’s pulling the bathyscaphe to starboard, so Stryker compensates.
Something vertical and sheer and flat looms out of the darkness.
Full stop, McIntyre orders, hold us steady.
It’s the hull of a ship, a tall slab of darkness covered in lumpy streaks of red and brown, rendered in washed-out greyish pastels by the Trieste II’s search lights. McIntyre can see a line of portholes, black circular maws in the steel.
Take us up about sixty feet, he says, and reel in the trail ball to fifteen feet.
What you got? Stryker asks.
It’s a ship, replies McIntyre. Looks like some kind of freighter.
They are above the gunwale now, and light from Trieste II spreads across an area of deck, revealing the dark shafts of cargo hold hatches, ventilators covered in knobbly lines of rust laid one upon the other like wax on a candle, and
Readers choose
Max Brand
A W. Exley
Robin Cook
Vivek Shraya
Chantelle Shaw
Goldsmith Olivia
Elisabeth Roseland
Janette Oke, T Davis Bunn
Danielle Jaida & Bennett Jones
Patricia A. Knight