Wormholes (6 page)

Finally, she hauled herself up as best she could to peer through the hole, leaning over sideways in the harness. Her eyes came into line with the hole. Her head blocked part of the laser beam, but she could see that the hole passed all the way through the tower. Beyond, she could see the shimmering waters of San Francisco Bay. That’s where whatever-it-was had gone into the ground, making the seismic trace. Maybe the next phase of this search would be underwater. If she got the Deus Foundation grant. She took more pictures. This was getting weirder and weirder.

“Pull me up,” she said tersely into the microphone. “We’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

D
inner on the supertanker was mock turtle soup, Caesar salad, veal marsala, asparagus with hollandaise, a potato soufflé the chef had invented on the last voyage, and peach melba for dessert. The drink was an excellent sparkling water.

With a final sip from the crystal goblet, the captain stood and nodded contentedly to the officers, who were preparing to adjourn to the wardroom for after-dinner sodas, and the nightly card game, and later a movie. They didn’t ask him to join. He had clamped his pipe between his teeth. They knew it was a sign he would spend the next hour strolling the vast deck in the darkness, breathing the cool sea air and thinking about whatever it was he needed to think about.

At that moment he was thinking of his pipe. He would have dearly loved to light it. He admitted he was simply torturing himself. But given that the supertanker Castile carried four million barrels of thick Arabian crude in its cavernous steel tanks, there was the usual rule that it was a no-smoking ship, and even though he was the captain, he was not about to break that rule. He thought of the pipe as a reminder that in two weeks they would be docked at Fos-sur-Mer. The chief officer and the pumpman would do their duty, and he could leave the tanker to the experienced men and go ashore to meet his wife and smoke his pipe.

He was a small, spare man, with sharp Mediterranean features, thinning dark hair, and intense, dark eyes. But the crew swore that he grew much larger when he became angry, which was seldom. When a seaman did well, he offered as reward a half-smile. Together with the twinkle in his eyes, it was a sufficient communication of approval for any of his longtime crew.

And so he was happy tonight. Four days to the Strait of Gibraltar, good seas, and only the single significant valve problem, which would be fixed long before they reached the sea dock.

He climbed the stairs to the bridge deck, entering the darkened control room with its long row of monitors, indicator lights, buttons and switches. The radiance from the computer screens was more than sufficient to overwhelm the faint starshine outside. And there was not much of a moon to contribute its light. He sauntered along the row of instruments. At each station, the mate on duty tensed slightly, prepared to report verbally if necessary the status of his watch. But the captain merely nodded at each and glanced at the screen to glean the information himself.

Although the captain had begun his career before the age of computer controls, he had taken great care to learn them.

He completed his control room inspection and stepped out the door into the night. He descended to the main deck, walking around to the catwalk. Under the single tall deck light amidship, the catwalk stretched down the center of the great ship for most of its thousand-yard length. He loved this walk, along the very spine of this gigantic moving island that he oversaw. But he didn’t admit it. He insisted that this was a nightly inspection trip. He started along the catwalk, his hand now and then brushing the cool rail with his fingertips to mark the rhythm of his walk. The only sounds were the faint metallic thunk of his shoes on the steel grating, underlain by the delicate distant whisper of the breeze. The gigantic screw that drove the supertanker was held deep underwater by the weight of its cargo. And the bow, his objective, was almost a quarter-mile ahead. That destination represented the only real contact he had with the ocean on this immense vessel. He loved to lean over the bow in the darkness and watch the ocean being relentlessly cleaved into a curling, hissing froth by the advance of the ship’s bulbous prow.

He reached the midship deck light suspended high on a pole and proceeded beyond toward the darkness of the bow. The first mate knew to briefly extinguish the bow lamp for him when no other ships were on radar. And since the broad windows in the looming superstructure behind him were heavily curtained, the darkness on deck was profound, and to some, frightening.

Peering out at the ocean, he was just able to make out the faint white frosting of foam on the occasional breaker. He didn’t like perfectly calm seas. He liked seas that had some character, some intricate interweaving of waves that offered a challenge to a mariner’s sea sense.

He looked downward occasionally as he walked, scanning the familiar labyrinth of pipes and valves below the catwalk that allowed the great mass of ebony liquid to be transferred and managed. He knew every component of that system, and when the offending malfunctioning valve passed beneath, he gave it an especially reproachful look.

He stopped in the darkest part of the catwalk and looked up at the stars. Only the brightest ones shone through the faint haze that marked the nearness of the African continent, even though they were a hundred miles at sea. This region was the nursery for hurricanes that would begin as mere storms in the warm ocean, drawing strength and power to slam against the East coast of the U.S. He always gave this part of the Atlantic the proper respect. Again, he looked out across the dark sea stretching away to the horizon. He remembered his beginnings as a seventeen-year-old seaman on an ocean-going tug. He had been close to the sea then, learning the infinity of its fluid moods. Now he commanded this floating island that rode apart from the sea’s governance, a law unto itself.

His reverie quickly faded, though, eroded by a growing realization that the water had grown strangely visible. He stared hard at the sea. Yes, he was sure. It had begun to glow with a faint greenish phosphorescence that he could only barely discern. This was new. This was unsettling. He watched for a while to make sure it was not some trick played by the night on his middle-aged eyes. Or maybe it was like the faint bioluminescence called the white sea he’d seen many times in the Arabian Sea. No. Indeed, there
was
a new, an unusual, source of light somewhere below the surface. He decided the glow was strongest to port, clenched his pipe between his teeth and strode briskly along the catwalk to a portside ramp and hurried along it toward the railing. Around him the glow rose to suffuse the ship in a half-light that he had never seen before, giving the familiar steel clutter an eerily ghostly aspect. He reached the railing and leaned over, peering into the water.

Despite the surface chop from the ship’s wake, he could make out the glow deep in the water. It had brightened, revealing the immense depth of the deep green ocean beneath the ship.

He inhaled deeply, his nostrils filling with a salty aroma marking heated seawater. He felt steam rising against his face, moistening it.

The ocean erupted. Huge boiling fumaroles burst to the surface, launching curling clouds of salty vapor high into the air. The light deep below intensified into a yellowish glare that overcame even the ocean’s light-absorbing abilities. He scanned the horizon. Far out beyond the ship, he could see the usual smooth progress of the waves suddenly overcome by the boiling. He looked over the side once more and was met with a scalding geyser of water. He staggered back, his face and hands stinging from the heat. A heart-pumping fear rose within him, but was promptly suppressed by his discipline, by the weight of responsibility.

He turned and ran back to the main catwalk and on to the aft superstructure, pounding up the metal stairs to the bridge deck and into the wheelhouse. He found the watch crew desperate for his presence. Their questions piled one upon the other.

“What is it?”

“What’s that light?”

“You seen that before, cap’n?”

He waved them off. Before any speculation could be done, he had to know the status of his ship and its now-ominous cargo. The chief officer’s strained face, lit by the glow of the computer screen and the growing light from outside, told there was a problem.

“Temperature’s rising,” he said quietly, frowning at the screen as if a stern expression would set things right. But as they watched, the numbers on the screen inexorably advanced.

“Core up?”

“Not yet, but peripheral’s up. What think?”

“Jesus. Undersea explosion of some kind. Maybe a volcano.” The captain turned to the first mate, a sandy-haired young man, who stood ready to do just about anything the captain asked. The mate was tense with the certain knowledge of the consequences of a rising temperature in the tanks. “Ernesto, get up on the monkey island. Take a radio; tell me what you see.” The mate grabbed a portable radio and hurried out. The captain scanned his gaze back and forth across the row of computer screens. He motioned to the radioman. “Start sending out a full description of this … event. Put Ernesto on speaker. Tell whoever you raise that best we can figure it’s an undersea volcano. Get this out.”

“
S.O.S.
, captain?”

“Not yet. Don’t know the fix we’re in yet.” But, in fact, he did as he watched the tank temperatures continue to rise. He’d never seen anything like this. He also knew that the middle of the Atlantic crustal plate was no place for a volcano. Nuclear submarine explosion? Possible. He looked out the window. The glow from the ocean bathed the ship in an undulating liquid light that approached daylight. Ernesto’s voice came over the loudspeaker from the monkey island, the ship’s topmost deck.

“Cap’n, it’s boilin’ all around. The steam’s rising and great spurts of water goin’ up.”

“How far?”

“Mile around maybe.”

“Anyplace we can make for, to get out of this?”

There was a pause, filled by a crackle over the speaker. The captain held his breath.

“Starboard,” came the answer. “I can see maybe reg’lar seas forty degrees starboard!”

“Okay, good work.” The captain turned calmly to the helmsman, who looked back at him with frightened twenty-year-old eyes. “Starboard forty, full ahead.” But the captain knew it was a meaningless act. A supertanker took miles to make any maneuver. But it was something to do.

“Jesus!” said Ernesto over the speaker. “Cap’n, I wish you’d come up. I just can’t figure—”

But the captain was already out the door, taking the stairs two at a time. He felt wet tropical heat billow around him as he reached the monkey island and stood among the antennas and the radar dish whirling overhead, peering out.

The ocean had transformed into a glowing, boiling cauldron for a mile around, and the gargantuan tanker was a mere toy floating trapped in its midst. The rising light from below had caused the sky to withdraw into an unfathomable blackness. They seemed to be situated near the middle of the seething eruptions. He looked down on the deck, suddenly aware of the oily smell from the heating cargo that was rising from vents.

“Transmit
S.O.S.
,” he said quietly, and the first mate relayed the message through his radio.

A new sound rose. The fiery hissing roar of a giant blowtorch. The unmistakable smoky tang of melting metal. A blindingly intense light growing portside.

“God, captain! God! We—”

But his voice was drowned out by the deafening explosion that ripped the heart from the ship and unleashed a dark, glistening wave of oil onto the boiling ocean.

With the banshee shriek of tearing steel plate, the immense vessel began to rip itself in half. The oil burst into flame between the separating halves, giving birth to a monstrous cloud of carbon-dark smoke and a roiling orange-red fire reaching into the sky.

The captain staggered back as the deck listed crazily, but he recovered and pulled himself to the railing. Ernesto leaped down the stairs and away. The captain looked down in horror as the crew scurried for their lives below, wrestling life rafts to the side and over into the demented fiery sea. His whole being reached out in grief to these men, these doomed men whom he had loved. He sobbed as they slid desperately down swinging ropes into the boats to be enveloped by the roiling flames or die screaming in the seething ocean.

He stood desperately clutching the railing, watching the main deck become awash in burning oil and steaming water. As the swirling maelstrom rose toward him, boiling and crackling, the shattered stern of the tanker tilted back to face the inky sky. Oil streamed from the jagged wound and the heavy superstructure weighted the stern, driving it down into the flaming waters.

But the captain refused to release the railing, as if his unyielding grip would somehow pull the ship back together and lift it from this hellish death. He held on even when the fireball burst forth, the storm of flame that marked the explosion of the largest tanks. His body was buffeted by a hurricane of wind that rushed in to feed the fireball, which rolled upward for a mile, carrying flaming oil, smoke and a fine mist of black vapor. The captain suffered only a brief searing agony as the flames charred his skin into shriveling cooked flesh before the burning surface rose to cover him.

And then he was gone.