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 Not at all. Herr Dräeger  you remember him  helped me
design an ultralight full-body aqualung before we set sail. The
Inversuit. Hughes calls it the& oh, comment dit-on, the& Batman.
Only one onboard, I m afraid. You could try it on, if you took a
few of my idiots with you to spot you& 
We headed up to the dry, antiseptic vast back pagoda of the
Research Decks, and didn t stop talking for a true three-hour
tour. After he finished showing me around, I put on the Batman
suit and fell into that silent world like a penitent with my head
low and a Mag-Lite in either hand.
Above me were five of Cousteau s brawniest fish-men, descend-
ing in an arc with magnesium flares and floodlights blazing a trail
of white effulgence and a reverse flood of bubbles, rising/falling
deeper/higher into the vasty hall, into the purest blue, into the
instant LSD trip of nitrogen narcosis.
I m ashamed to say how long it d been since I dove. I m amazed
to say I went ten thousand feet down, and only stopped because
I knew it would take two hours to come back up.
I came back up too fast. But I didn t get sick at all. Cousteau
told me later that Herr Dräeger calibrated the atmosphere of
the Inversuit, as he called it, with notes cribbed from Wehrner
von Braun at NASA over brandy and cigars. Old Dräeger and
the Commander were thick as ticks since Jeek invented the
aqualung.
I promised him I d study the specs. Perhaps I could get
Director Revelle back at Scripps to order one for the Institute.
Poor Roger, who more or less discovered the theory of plate
tectonics and got almost none of the credit. Roger was out at
Mohole with me, a thousand years ago when Bill Bascom took
the highest dose of radiation a human being has ever voluntarily
taken and put his cancer into remission for a whole year.
I remembered Bill Bascom back in  61, crazy with the courage
given a dying man to dredge deeper, dream higher, sail further
and publish more than he ever had in his life, and then live to tell
about it. I wondered how he would advise me.
Bill was there in 1948, for the mad dashes between the Scripps
vessel Spencer Baird and Roger s research boat the Horizon, at a
place called Bikini Atoll. Our Institution had been drilling holes
then, too, much shallower ones in the volcanoes around the
coral atolls as Darwin tried to in the 1850s to prove the general
subsidence of volcanoes beneath the sea. That was Dr Harry
Hess s baby. He weathered the nuke-test with us as well.
We were convinced the test of the atomic device simply
known as  Mike would launch a tsunami wave that would wipe
out most of Oceania, and some of Southeast Asia. We stayed to
hit the panic button ourselves if it did, since our instruments
would only warn our friends on shore when it was too late.
The Horizon ended up being directly under the fallout from
the mushroom cloud. We barely escaped the blast wave. I became
apolitical after that, as much as anyone can. Roger started beating
the drum for disarmament. I never bothered him about it. I saw
what he saw, and ran from it beside him. The Horizon stayed
radioactive and dry-docked until  62, when we sunk it with
dynamite. Do the math.
The last time I d been in this area, Roger had been here, too,
filling my ear with his  global warming theory then, an attempt
to prove a causal link between CO2 and fossil fuels. That was
after Bikini, when we were trying to prove continental drift
by the thinness of the sediment on trench floors from there to
Tonga, following magnetic wiggles in the Earth s gravity, making
grids of them, making maps. Mapping new lands.
But that night, though the dive made me feel creaky and old
even for my puppy age, Dräeger s prototype screamed for further
exploration. I missed having my colleagues around to share this
with. If I got him to sit still long enough, big dopey Roger would
have been able to put my deepening fear of this voyage into a few
words and dispel it in the time it took to crack a few beers.
Until then, I had Jeek& and this strange woman named Ursula
whom I couldn t stop thinking about, the one who was supposed
to be my enemy, but&
 The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I picked myself up and
got off to bed, dreaming of the hole so far down, the nightmare
shapes of the coral, and strange bottom-dwellers who didn t quite
know enough of man to fear us yet.
I wanted to stay down there. I wanted to grow gills. But there
was work up here in the sun. Even in the depths of my unease, I
knew I still had something left to learn.
From the Diary of Dr Walter Munk
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 26 June 1963
Two round-the-clock nights later, we had our first core, our first
sample to analyze. The sample wasn t from the Moho by far yet,
but seven thousand meters beneath the floor of Challenger Deep.
Close. Close and gaining.
It was the greatest night of my life to stand in the clean room
in the middle of the cool, cozy bridge on the Moon Pool, and
touch with Koroseal-gloved hands a chunk of history from
before our ancestors walked on their fins. Far from being yellow
diatomaceous babyshit, this core was pelagic sediment, with the
larger grains settled on the bottom, a red clay swirl overlain by a
layer of globigerina ooze from the end of the last Ice Age. If I had
it right, the next sample would be sixty million years old.
I could clearly see the sediment from the waters which once
covered the whole planet, glowing in the cells of this calcareous
muck. We would find organisms perhaps unclassifiable as virus
or bacterium but something in between, I told them.
 I told you, Munk, Cousteau called out sharply,  someday
is right now. At that, he moved to the electron microscope
snubbing into the clean area from the far side of the glass. With
our hands and the robot grippers inside, we were soon jostling at
the microscope like schoolboys.
(see addt l notes/subhead:  new species /(living organisms which
came into existence before free O2 could be had)/WHM/private
memoirs)
Out on the deck later, I was sorry I stayed awake. A conversation
beneath the stars, meant amicably enough, went rapidly south-
ward. The Boss was back in town, but stayed locked in his room
below decks most of the time. Except when he was sitting in a deck
chair wrecked on codeine and puffing up at me like a pigeon.
We d been talking of science fiction. Hughes ran to his state-
room to grab a book, and returned in a huff.
 My& dear& Doctor& Munk, he said archly,  Jules Verne s
story was an allegorical fable based on events that actually
happened. It ain t no mystery. The cavern went through the Earth
on an angle. And it wasn t in Iceland, either. We checked. Look
right here.
My eyes swam. The Boss was holding an old paperback of
Journey to the Center of the Earth open to its blank flypage. The
cover was well-worn, and hanging by a thread.  See? He pointed
to the blank page.  Doubt that.
 I& should be getting to bed. Long day tomorrow. We have
the first core, and I think we can speed up drilling by at least
three days if we were to just  
But Howard wasn t done.  We built the Nautilus a whoooole
lot better than we ever told you. Loewy and Roth were in on it,
but they ve been well-paid to keep quiet. Cousteau, now, I don t
think he got the full import of what that little baby could do, but
he ain t no scientist.
I jittered on my feet.  Howard, really, I  
 If my calculations are correct, the Nautilus ll dig all the way
down& and I ll be the very first man to& 
This was news.  What?
Hughes s eyes went out.  Cholera. Typhus. Diptheria. Plague.
Them damn niggers across the tracks, Howie, they bring it all in,
so you got to wash up good, especially& right& there& 
His lights were on, but no one was home. I felt like a long, cold
shower and a frontal lobotomy. I settled for a very fast walk back
to my stateroom, a hard slap across my own face, and some sleep
that took a long time to come.
Rod Serling
Field Notes, 27 June 1963 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]