Deeptide Vents . . . of Fire Read online

  Deeptide

  Vents … of Fire

  A Novel

  Donald Ray Schwartz

  and

  Steven Evans

  Copyright © 2017 by Donald Ray Schwartz and Steven Evans.

  ISBN: Softcover 978-1-5245-8714-7

  eBook 978-1-5245-8715-4

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

  product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

  and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

  Rev. date: 03/31/2017

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  CONTENTS

  1 Gulftide

  2 Coasttide

  3 Deeptide

  4 Coasttide

  5 Undertide

  6 Ventide

  7 Subtide

  8 Cooltide

  9 Epiloguetide

  Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

  Thomas Henry Huxley, The Coming of Age of

  The Origin of Species, 1880

  Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.

  Albert Einstein, personal note

  In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.

  Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the

  Description of Nature, 1934

  Only by appreciating the fine nuances in their ecologies can human beings hope to understand how their actions, on the macro level, affect their micro competitors and predators.

  Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague

  Without a decisive Naval force we can do nothing definitive. And with it, everything honorable and glorious.

  George Washington, letter to

  Lafayette, November 15, 178

  1

  Gulftide

  Susan Arthknott stood at the shore of the sea. The surf, oddly rough one hundred yards out and gentle when it played the shore, caressed in foam her bare feet and ankles. She sloshed through the rough-gentle waves. She began to feel centered. She always felt centered when she saw the sea, when she was with the sea. She could be on the sea. She could be under the sea. She could be alongside the sea as she sloshed through the foam at the edge of the sea. She was part of the sea. The sea was part of her. Always had it been so. Always, for unaccountable fathoms of her life.

  The water is warmer here. The surf plays out beyond the shore’s edge. Then the waves roll in smooth, like soft white foam peaks atop blue crystalline hillocks. Warmer than just about any other place in the earth’s ocean.

  She gazed out over the waters. She thought she heard the sand give way behind her. She knew she sensed rather than heard Jennifer approaching. That too had always been the way.

  “It’s beautiful here.”

  “Yes,” Susan said. White sand beaches, as they said.”

  “Full of these little shells though. Ouch! A person has to be careful here,” Jennifer said.

  “Come into the surf, silly. You’re standing at the line residue of high tide.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Oouch. Oh. Ah. There. That’s better. Wow. Water’s so much warmer here.”

  “Hmm—mm. When you think about it, the Gulf is a huge bay. The water is deep as an ocean. See how green it is out there. But here on the coast, it’s as warm as an inlet.”

  “It’s beautiful. I think I like it as well as our ocean.”

  Susan gazed at her friend and colleague, Jennifer Littleton. There she stood, long blonde hair and blue eyes, a slightly large jaw that seemed to be a standard for beautiful woman and handsome men. How absurd that she should in her professional and social life link up with some perverted standard of American beauty. Why couldn’t she have been a classically beautiful African-American princess, or at least short and stout? No, the woman who complimented her work and could do the work better than anyone she knew was this Scandinavian bombshell. Really, it was too ridiculous.

  Now this woman, her partner really, stood on the western shore of the eastern state of Florida, at Clearwater Beach at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort. It was about two hundred yards of private beach down to the shore. This friend and colleague, the woman with a brilliant mind, whose physical appearance usurped the breath of most men and some women stood in the sand surf of the sea as the lessening waves washed over her large feet with toenails painted bright red. That was her one feature that didn’t quite fit her Miss Universe face and body. Those huge feet—shovels that displaced tons of sand when walking and gallons of water when swimming.

  The breeze blew open her light cover dress, revealing her breasts (at least they were small, tiny almost, yet, as with everything about Jennifer, alluring) and stomach and thighs, lithe of course, in the bikini. Whilst she, the ugly duckling, stood thin, hunched, knobby-kneed, her shoulders almost fragile and birdlike, her own thighs thin, cris-crossed with veins, her light-brown hair tied back in a bun.

  She pushed her glasses back up on her nose, knowing within minutes they would fall down. They stood, then, together, these two women, so different, so alike, as they stared at the sea.

  She asked what they both knew she was waiting to ask.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Yes,” Jennifer said. “I had to turn on a little charm. He wants to hear a presenter, a particularly interesting paper on genome mapping in the mitochondria at seven. He’ll meet with us for ten minutes at ten after ten. Ten after ten he called it.”

  Jennifer turned. She looked at Susan. After all these years, she did not know what to call her. Physician? Marine ethno-microbiologist? All were correct. The woman had three doctorates, and had already published several incisive articles while still in graduate school. She watched her push her glasses up the bridge of her nose. She knew in advance it was an exercise in futility.

  Now Susan was among the very first in her department already mastering CRISPR—a genome-editing tool that allowed you to edit DNA—removing or adding DNA coding like you were adding or deleting LEGO pieces of some sculpture. With one of her doctorates in Bioinformatics she was a natural in implementing a sequence alignment so that she could identify DNA regions of similarity between two sequences. She was a research powerhouse and Jennifer simply hung onto her coattails for dear life.

  Jennifer always thought Susan was more beautiful than she thought of herself. If the woman would stop crinkling her nose all the time, trying to keep those ridiculous spectacles on which made her look bug-eyed, a not altogether easy feat considering they were half-glasses and she gave an intimidating look over them. Her hair could be let down from that tight bun, which always had wild strands finding their way this way and any which way; the frizz could be made curly. And posture. Jennifer had tried early on to get her friend to improve her posture. Finally after the woman had gotten a bit irritable, she had given up
. She and Susan didn’t always get along. Fine. Still, they worked well together. Susan had a mind that was so brilliant, it made the smart envious. She made the connections at once, miles ahead of anyone else. She, Jennifer, on the other hand, was not quite brilliant, she knew that. But if they gave her enough time, and saw past her face and body, she could almost always emerge with a creative solution. That was it, she guessed. That was how she compensated for not having a mind like Susan’s. Her creativity.

  “Satisfactory, Jennifer,” Susan said.

  Satisfactory. That was the highest compliment she could ever muster from her friend. Susan continued.

  “Our visuals are in order? Good. Well then. In, ah, his hotel room? I see. Then let’s go in, have some dinner you and I, and go over our approach again. Ten minutes. Just setting up will—well, we can only take in the hand-held. I have to change clothes and shower anyway.

  At last they turned and sand-walked hack to the heated pool. A few opportunistic night-owl gulls begged or raided human caches for one last morsel of pool-side food. The cries of families and children met them as they walked the crooked sidewalk covered in durable, all-weather, water resistant carpet that led from the beach around the pool up to the side door of the hotel lobby.

  They climbed the stairs to the second floor. Then they took the elevator up to their room. Jennifer had reminded Susan once that walking a flight of stairs, parking farther rather than nearer could help condition the body. Since Susan believed mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy body produced a healthy mind, she had taken the advice most seriously.

  In their business suits, neck wear, hose, and pumps, they clicked down the hallway of the hotel lobby. Just outside the door to the restaurant, Jennifer stopped and glanced down the hall. She peered intently. Susan, about a head shorter than her friend, looked up at her eyes, then down the hall where she gazed.

  “Jennifer?”

  “The convention’s being held at that end of the building. I wanted to see if I could catch a glimpse of him.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. He must already be inside,” Jennifer said.

  “Well, let’s get something to eat. We’re going to need all our strength soon.”

  They ate in silence, each thinking at times the same and other times disparate thoughts. After the waitress and bus help cleared their table, they took out their papers from their satchels. Susan’s satchel never seemed to close properly. One of the latches hung askew. In a constant act of assured futility, on each needed occasion, the scientist tried to tape over the damaged latch. Then, inevitably, the shredded brown packing tape hung over the edge, useless. Jennifer kept half an eye on Susan’s briefcase for security reasons.

  “We only have ten minutes. I think in such a case less would be more,” Susan said. “Jannasch’s and Mottl’s summary article on the geomicrobiology of deep-sea hydrothermal vents would be a good opening and an effective prequel.”

  “I think I can put these photographs we took into a composite that will grab his interest. Like you said, we won’t have time to set up the Power Point.”

  They worked – the creative one, the more analytical one, hunched over their charts, pictures, designs, texts, articles, appliance internet screens, the long blonde hair and the bobbed brown hair, giving little clue to the furious and rational thoughts within their highly developed brains.

  “You have the plans for the explorer.” Susan looked up at Jennifer.

  The woman gazed into her eyes, a look she typically reserved for men that interested her, a look she had given Cornelius Barnstone.

  “Yes, blueprints, photos, and our secret weapon.”

  “If he has a, well, of course he’ll have a DVD.”

  “Correct. Of course. He has it. HD screen of course.”

  They glanced at their watches. The night wore on. Calibrated together, they agreed it was 10:00 straight up.

  Suddenly she recalled the waitress had shown some interest in their work; for a moment they feared that Carstairs or another group had placed an undercover spy. Later they snickered and sniffed at their paranoia. It would be some months longer upon a strange rock island outcropping, gazing out over the living waters again, and a chill running up and down her spine, Jennifer would recall the incident and the fear. Still, at this stage, as she stood tableside now, as far as they knew, no one else had come upon the site, no one else had come as far as they, no one else had had this cockamamie idea.

  At 10:05, they walked down the hall to the elevators. Jennifer glanced down at her friend. She was always amazed at the speed the woman’s mind worked. At the instant they had with serendipity witnessed the phenomenon, Susan had conceived the entire plan, all the designs, even the probable time frame.

  Even more amazing, Jennifer realized that she likely thought even faster than that, that Susan had conceived it all even as the phenomenon unfolded. Like some 1960’s calculator which eerily bounced about on the table as it chugged out its long series of correlations of coefficient, of combinations and permutations, the woman’s body quivered as her magnificent mind extrapolated the time frame intervals from the lesser eruptions to this greater one.

  She recalled that almost instantly, Susan had said, “This will only last about a year and a half. We’ve got to start right away. Eighteen months. Two years at most.”

  At 10:08, they departed the elevator on the twenty-first floor. They sauntered down the hall, seeking suites 2104-06.

  At 10:10, they looked each other over. Jennifer dug out her mirror to check her make-up. She pointed to Susan’s skirt. Susan wriggled and straightened the wrinkle as best she could. For a moment, her skirt rode up. Actually, she’s not a bad looking woman; she could be quite sexy, with those thin arms and legs, Jennifer thought. It was her posture. If only she would stand a certain way, a way most women instinctively understood. With one knee slightly bent, the opposite hip ever slightly pushed out. Even fourteen year old girls knew that. She had known that. Honestly. I’ve worked on this woman for over six years. Maybe someday.

  She brushed Susan’s jacket. It occurred to her that Susan appeared odd in a suit, uncomfortable, out of place. They gathered up their briefcases and portfolios. Susan knocked on the door. There was a pause. She began to knock again. The door opened.

  A woman with a link-chain, silver, attached to her triangle-rimmed glasses cracked open the door. The link-chain permitted her to allow the glasses to fall upon her chest when idle.

  The triangle-spectacled woman peered at them, then looked them up and down. Jennifer discerned her myopia. She noticed the woman held a clipboard, with a thick pen, attached by a cord to the clip. She took up the pen. She scribbled notes on the paper captured by the clipboard. Jennifer Littleton knew they already stood at disadvantage. A person with a clipboard and link-chain spectacles started from a position of superiority.

  “Dr. Arthknott. Ms. Littleton. Please, come in. Enter. Dr. Barnstone appreciates your promptness.”

  Jennifer grew aware that although the secretary (Administrative Assistant?) had used courtesies, the tone of her voice had an edge to it.

  The women looked each other over, each envious of the other’s particular best feature body part. Jennifer could almost hear the hum of their thoughts. “If I had hair like hers … eyes like hers … upper arms like hers, fingernails like hers … breasts like hers … legs like hers … this last was typically directed to her. She had been told this from an early age. She took up swimming to keep them in shape. Her breasts never seemed to grow all that much more than the pathetic little teen knobs. Except for when she became very excited -— or aroused. Then her breasts would swell, their erection so obvious under any blouse or sweater. There was simply nothing she could do about it. But enough. Shapely. And she didn’t mind.

  “Promptness promotes excellence.”

  Jennifer was sure that was something the secretary with the triangle-rim
med glasses and myopic eyes and clipboard muttered all the time, after hearing her boss say it once.

  “Please ladies. Right this way.”

  The suite was not as large as she imagined it would be. There was a kitchenette to the left and another to their right as they entered. Then the room opened to about the size of three hotel rooms. He stood to the left. He held some papers in his hand. Another woman sat in a corner chair, but not far. She held a drink. She looked buff, Jennifer thought. Wiry. A woman of action.

  “Dr. Arthknott. So pleased to meet you. I’ve been looking over some of your articles. The literature is fascinating. After Ms. Littleton spoke to me this afternoon, I investigated your work. Quite impressive. Ms. Littleton. Good to see you again. Please, ladies, would you like a drink? Good. Daiquiri. Scotch on the rocks. Why, Ms. Littleton, I am even more convinced now you are a woman after my own heart.”

  Jennifer felt a familiar weakness in her knees, and a warm flush in places she knew she should not at this interview be sensing. She crossed her arms across her upper torso as nonchalantly as possible.

  He fixed the drinks himself. He was surprisingly in good shape, rather fit, Jennifer thought. She remembered thinking that this afternoon. He had to be in his late 50’s, yet his body seemed well-formed and firm. He either had a full shock of hair or the best toupee money could buy. But it was his eyes—deep blue and piercing. Jennifer suddenly felt warm and not only under her armpits, suddenly realizing she could comprehend how younger women could fall for older men. She noticed for the most part he addressed Susan. But he couldn’t keep himself from looking at her. She was suddenly conscious of her feet. They were so huge. It was the body part she hated the most. She thought they must look like shovels to everyone else, huge scoops. But she knew that they had helped her in her swimming meets. Now, she couldn’t get them to cease quivering. Her sweater problem grew even more pronounced but there was simply nothing to be done about it.