“What the hell was that?” I ask.
“A fish. And there are tubeworms and shrimp and crab down here. And slugs. Also, it’s currently sixty degrees Celsius out there. It’s even warmer closer to the vent.”
“Sixty Celsius—” I try to remember formulas I haven’t had to use since college. “About one-forty Fahrenheit?”
“Not about,” Ness says. “Exactly one-forty. Nice.” He seems impressed. “That’s why I had to switch from the heater to the cooler when we crossed the thermal barrier. Otherwise we’d cook in here. As it is, we can’t stay long or the battery will go dead.”
“What if that happens?”
“They’d have to send the other sub down with a cable to retrieve us. It’s happened before. We’d be fine for a couple of hours, but it does get uncomfortable. Anyway, this is just a sideshow, one of those really cool things you have to see while you’re in the neighborhood. The real magic is over here.”
Ness grips the controls, and we lift from the sea floor. I watch the floodlit sand for more signs of life. I see what look to be shrimp running. “I think we had all of two days in class about these lifeforms,” I say, marveling at the sight. “Exo-something organisms?”
“Two days, huh? What’s amazing is that the biodiversity down here is almost as great as in a rainforest. They discovered these ecosystems back in the 1970s. It defied everything we thought we knew about life, where it could live, what it could adapt to. Now we know that life can live practically anywhere, that it even grows like lichen on the surface of the space station. I was thinking about this one day, down here, getting some samples. And it struck me both how robust and how fragile nature can be. It seems as though life can adapt to anything, but then a small change wipes out an entire species.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then picks up where he left off.
“The crazy thing about these vents is that the chemistry of the sea is completely different here. There’s no sunlight to get everything going. The base unit of energy is hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic to the creatures we know up top. Resemblance between these animals and the non-vent kind can fool you. But they do share ancestors.
“Here. Check out this gauge. That’s our current sea temp. You can see how quickly the temp falls away as we leave the vent. If we keep going, it falls below zero. The pressure and salinity are the only reasons the water doesn’t freeze.”
The readout shows nineteen degrees Celsius. I think that’s about seventy degrees Fahrenheit, but I’m rounding. “Right now we have something like surface sea temp,” I say.
“Right. But go either direction, and you get something warmer or something cooler. The temperature gradients form rings around the vents. It got me wondering: If life exists in these extreme ranges, why did it get hammered by a few degrees rise in the rest of the ocean? Look.”
He sees something I don’t. Ness bursts into activity, driving the sub down to the bottom and then controlling the arms, scooping something up. A fountain of sand erupts where the arm attachment hits the sea floor.
“Gotcha,” he says. It’s the most excited I’ve seen him. He works the arms back toward the sub, then throws more switches. “Won’t be sure until we get back to the surface, but that looked like a good sample.”
“Of what?” I ask.
“I’ll show you when we get back to the estate—”
“Jesus, Ness, enough of this. What the hell are we doing here? And yes, I’m skipping to the end of the story. I don’t care anymore. None of this makes sense—”
“Breathe,” Ness says. And I realize I’m panting. Hyperventilating.
“I need out of here,” I say. My heart is racing. I feel trapped, first by Ness and his meaningless clues, and now by the thought of twenty thousand feet of water above us, the creaks and groans of solid steel as the sea is trying to crush us, and the realization that there’s nowhere to go, not for hours, and I swear the air in that tin can is growing stale, is getting thin, is running out—
“Look at me,” Ness says.
“I—can’t—see—” I labor between pants for air.
Ness floods the submarine with that red light. I only see a spot of it; the rest of my vision has closed in around the edges, irising shut. I feel Ness’s hands on either side of my face, supporting me. Making me look at him. He has arranged himself sideways in his seat. He is asking me to breathe in, to hold it. I try.
“Let it out,” he says. “Slowly.”
Puh puh puh. The best I can do is three short and rapid exhalations. And then I’m gasping for air again.