“That’s too much to put on me, Ness. I have to be objective. You can’t use her like that to make me write what you want to see. And you can’t use me like this hoping I’ll write something nice about you. I hate to break it to you, but I’m a resistant cuss. If I like you, I’m just as likely to rip you apart to prove I’m capable of being fair.”
“No, you’re right. It’s too much to ask. And I don’t mean any of it like that. It’s just … I can see how this all plays out, how it has to play out, and I guess I’m thanking you in advance. I shouldn’t do that, I know. Now I’m the one skipping to the end.”
“Yeah. And you should be prepared for me to disappoint you, Ness. Because I probably will.”
Ness adjusts one of the levers on his side of the sub and settles back into his seat. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he says. “I don’t think you can.”
31
Flying commercial as often as I do, I feel trained for this journey to the bottom of the sea. The sub is far more comfortable than coach in a 797. More leg room, better snacks, and no one behind me coughing and sneezing. I read for an hour, wondering when these people are going to get to sea already and get to whaling, and I take occasional breaks to gaze out at the pitch black beyond the glass.
The only thing I see out there is the small bubbles forming on the portholes; it looks like we’re in outer space but with stars that can’t sit still. As we plunge down and down, the sub makes creaking sounds, which Ness tells me at least a hundred times is perfectly normal. He says the military subs do the same thing, that it’s just the metal settling against the phenomenal pressure outside, that at this depth, a watermelon would instantly become the size of a grape.
From what I can tell, Ness is good at a lot of things—but reassuring people is not one of them.
“Probably a good idea to kill the book light,” he tells me. He turns on an interior light, which bathes the interior of the sub in a red glow.
“Is that a bad thing?” I ask. Red is always bad. This is a bad thing. Something is wrong.
“The red light? No, that’s to save our vision. We’re almost to the bottom.”
There seems to be a red glow outside the submersible as well, some kind of dim light beneath us. Ness steers the craft to the side and rotates us. I can hear the motors whirring elsewhere in the capsule.
“That’s the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” Ness says, pointing through one of the portholes. “I’d guess a hundred people have laid eyes on it in person like this. Far fewer than have been in space.”
This factoid gives me goose bumps. The previously surreal in my life now feels banal in comparison to where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m seeing.
“Do you want to steer?”
“Sure,” I say, even though I don’t really.
“I’m slowing the rate of descent.” Ness adjusts a knob. “If you think of the sub as having four wheels, the stick on the left controls the driver’s side wheels, and the stick on the right controls the passenger side. If you want to rotate, move them opposite each other. Try it.”
I do. Hesitantly at first, but then with more force as I feel how slowly the craft responds to input. The light beneath us rotates. It’s also getting brighter outside, the dull red now beating crimson.
“You can control the depth by pushing the controls toward or away from each other. And adjust your pitch by rotating them.”
“I just like spinning in circles,” I say, and Ness laughs.
“The cool thing is you can flip this switch, and then you’re controlling the sampling arms. Usually, one person drives, and the other person operates the floodlights, the arms, and the research tools.”
“Do I need to know how to do all that?” I ask.
“No. This is mostly a sightseeing tour. I just want to show you something, an idea I had one day when I was down here, so you can see where it led me. So the rift here, this is from the sea floor being torn apart. You remember from grade school how Africa and South America fit together—?”
“Plate tectonics,” I say.
“Right. Well, this is the wound from those plates moving apart. That’s magma down there, flowing up through the wound. It cools when it hits the water and throws off a ton of steam. There’re all kinds of temperature gradients down here. It’s one of the ways our oil platforms generate power. But there’s something even more interesting about these vents.”
Ness takes over the controls and brings us down through a cloud of black smoke. He turns the interior lights off again. The sea floor rises up. It looks like a flat expanse of sand and rock, just like the ocean floor I’ve seen while snorkeling in twenty feet of water. But now we’re a thousand times deeper.
“Watch,” Ness says. He flicks a switch, and floodlights bathe the area in front of us. One of the vents is just a hundred or so feet away. The water and smoke swirl there. The crust throbs red. I’m seeing inside the Earth. To me, this is as wild and inhospitable a place as the surface of Mars—
And then there’s a different sort of movement. An erratic, zigzagging shadow. “There,” Ness says, but I already see it. A fish. Or squid. An oblong creature with a fin and a snout, but it’s gone before I make out any more detail.