Deeptide Vents . . . of Fire Read online

  That was it. With women, she suddenly knew, she was searching deep inside them, for that long ago locked away clue to our origins, hidden in the unyielding depths of the ocean and mirrored somewhere deep inside the astonishing feminine body. Really, women were treasures to be adored. If only more men realized it. Well, they certainly better realize it where she was concerned, when she was with them. Now she knew that was part of the equation as well. She felt her nipples expand. She felt her breasts yearn. She felt wet in her womanhood. She felt at once one with earth and sky and sea.

  But her toe twitched even mightier than before. Her right foot quivered. Her breasts, her toes. Surely everyone would see it. Why did she wear these damn thin blouses and sandals? She would change to a bra and full-covered shoes in the future. Both always looked so huge. As she always did, she tried to find a way to hide. She moved a bit more behind Susan, trying to slide behind her friend’s chair.

  Well, now it was hopeless for these men. She, they, Susan and she had been deceived by this butch-bitch woman and all the queen’s men. She didn’t like it. None of them would get lucky again on this watch. None would know, well, none else would discover what she knew of the beautiful male body and what she could do, if they would only submit to her will and her wiles.

  “But I need to know about this Carstairs.” Quieter. Almost submissive. She was now requesting …

  Jennifer knew the commander was entitled to know. If she didn’t the unit could not protect them from a harm perhaps as dangerous as the way deep they were headed. Susan didn’t like to talk about it, she knew. Jennifer looked down. Her scientist friend took a deep breath. She gazed into space. She peered into the not so distant past. Jennifer had always wondered if …

  “He was a professor of mine at Pacific University and later at Wood Hole. A brilliant mind. He had a theory that the vents intertwined in passages on the other side, were all inter-connected somehow. It was one of those old resurrected flawed scientific hypotheses that began with the discovery of Mammoth Cave in the nineteenth century, reared its fallacious head in the 1920’s, when for some reason, a number of spelunkers in caves around the country were lost and never found. Some of our caves today still bear the names of these lost troglodyte explorers. Basically, it went something like this: All caves and underground channels in the world interconnect; the proof would be if you could locate two underground rivers hundreds or thousands of miles apart, and throw into the one a colored dye, the color would at some later point in time appear in the other.

  It’s been on occasion attempted, but the hypothesis is never supported by evidence. Adherents claim that the experimenters didn’t wait long enough, or that the underground rock filters out the coloring. Once a theory develops, and no evidence can be found, still some adherents will hold on to their ideals. There’s a name for that postulate: The infinite displaced interconnection hypothesis or theorem or something like that.

  “Carstairs’s analogy of inter-connecting-cave-channels in the earth: Therefore, all these vents were somehow connected deep within as well, and, more than this: The theorem expanded, a super-connection in all caves and fissures of the earth no matter how deep or shallow, like cracks in an egg. The grand under-the-earth Northwest passage, he called it. I tried to remind him about the moment of Meriwether Lewis’s antithetical moment of truth, his anti-Epiphany, when he stood at the source of the Missouri River, observed boundless mountains and valleys before him and knew at that instant there never would be found a Northwest passage. He smirked. ‘Lewis, as you know, simply sniffed out the wrong track, ‘he said. ‘And he hunted his prey in the days before nuclear powered submarines. Today the technology exists to prove my theory.’ My protest was waved off.

  “I begged him not to publish this hypothesis, not till we could test it somehow. After all, the cave conceptualization had decades earlier been regarded as crackpot. I knew this line of reasoning could lead only to disaster, academic suicide. I persisted. But Will had a maniacal vein and he could be—”

  She paused. Silence reigned in the compound. Delores fingered her weapon. One of the men looked about, as if someone were invading past the blast door. A compressor revved. Soon dripping as through from a conduit pipe was heard. Jennifer noticed it at once. She was certain Delores noticed it. Susan gently rubbed her left cheek with her right hand, as though she had been slapped there. The compressor hummed. The water dripped. Drip. Drip. Drip …

  “I’m sorry. He could be most persuasive and imperious. Cruel. So cruel, right even when he was wrong.”

  “The article generated some controversy and he lost his post. He lectured for awhile, then took me and other followers …”

  Jennifer had heard the story before. Susan wasn’t telling all of it. The scientist (selectively?) deleted details, most unimportant, one or two significant. Jennifer had met Carstairs once. It was an academic party soon after his controversial article was published. Clearly he was trying to woo the Dean and Trustees to his side. But it hadn’t worked. The six men and two women, dressed in tuxedos and gowns, had left early. The ax had fallen a week later.

  Jennifer allowed that he had piercing light blue eyes, almost translucent. He was captivating, compelling somehow. His company to salvage had made some money, but Susan knew what he was really after. She left when she began to entertain her own, seemingly more realistic premise, although she still maintained a loose connection with the university. More than once he had followed her. She had solved or thought she solved the thermo-pressure problem. She waited for the right vent to blow its top to steam. She was beginning to believe she would never discover it until it was too late for her, when Jennifer’s sharp eyes had caught the strange long green ripple in the ocean surface. Susan told her for some time she thanked her lucky stars for the day she found her. She suddenly recognized Susan hadn’t told her that for some time.

  Susan knew Carstairs wasn’t far behind. Now he closed in, circling like a shark terrorizing its prey before striking with its razor-shearing teeth. She knew these were his subtle touches of espionage. He was too assiduous to leave something by accident. She knew Susan knew it was his signature, his calling card left in her mailbox.

  “If I were you, I’d track that strap. It may have a listening device in it.”

  “We buzzed it already. It had a bug. We’re going to send out false messages,” Delores said. She breathed. She continued.

  “There’s more, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling me.”

  Susan slumped in her chair. For the first time since she knew her, Jennifer noticed a tear in the eye of her friend. She had been right. Carstairs had taken advantage of her in more than one way.

  There was another silence. The compressor stopped. The drips continued. Louder.

  Jennifer put her arm on Susan’s shoulders. The woman’s range of emotions, hidden and now, not so hidden, were becoming complex and somewhat predictable.

  She had never seen her so vulnerable and compliant, and just moments ago—she suddenly hated this man. She vowed he had best not get in her way.

  “Susan.” She bent down. She put her lips close to the scientist’s right ear, nearly touching the flesh. Susan had strange ears that ventured back at an angle, and pointed a bit. Her helix curiosity almost caused her to look like Mr. Spock, the Vulcan, a character drawn so well, that, like Sherlock Holmes, he almost seemed to enter our dimension of reality. In fact, there were significant congruities between the two rich characterizations. Well, and besides, who was she, with her foundation feet, to dwell on someone else’s anatomical peculiarity? She had known several men whose—God, she had to stop it. Things were becoming much too important. “Susan.” Not louder. More intent.

  “I don’t know what uncomfortable feeling grew on me. But I began to come home early. I noticed men leaving the house as I entered my own driveway.”

  Coming home early. Leaving the house. Her own driveway. So the story wa
s complete. She had lived with him. I always thought so, Jennifer thought.

  “One night I came home early and entered through the back. They saw me. They left. But not before I heard some things.”

  “Go on. You’re doing fine now, Dr. Arthknott. Good, Ms. Littleton. I think she can use some water. There. Good. Now. Please. Continue.”

  Well, that’s it, after all. Except. Except I believe I now know who those men were.”

  “Yes. It’s all right. You can say it now.”

  “I now believe, I didn’t want to, that they were Russian, Syrian, and Iranian agents …”

  “And why would they—”

  “Stop. You know why better than I.”

  “Say it Doctor.”

  “It’s obvious now, isn’t it? It’s all too obvious. A whole new source of chemical energy conversion, of food production, used as political weapons. Technical know-how to send to the Chinese, the Columbian cartel, the Russian mafia, the Iranian Quds. They’re all interconnected like some giant octopus or squid sending out its tentacles everywhere. Anything to circumvent the United States, the western alliance, Israel, friendly Arab nations. Big money. Big guns. Big technology. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear? I thought it was X-files paranoia, until that day. And science goes wanting.”

  The compressor waited for that moment to return on. It sounded as though it was sucking in air, perhaps their air. It certainly seemed to be hotter and colder in the room at the same time.

  Jennifer suddenly felt as though this machine, wherever it was in this facility, somewhere in the basement, was the spy or worse, a malevolent entity which was slowly but inevitably draining out their oxygen, as though they were deep and the channel to climb to surface vented a tiny shunt of air. Unconsciously, she held her breath. Susan ran her right hand over her left cheek. She ran it slowly back and forth, forth and back.

  Jennifer shivered. Allen came over to her to put his arm around her. She pulled away, hard, perhaps too hard. She stared at him, a woman’s wilting gaze. He saw the truth. He stepped back a half step. She spun away, with a look in her eye only women were capable of, one they reserved for men who had betrayed them, or thought they had.

  The group finally allowed that exhaustion reigned. They agreed to get some rest. They would return in six hours. Delores had wanted three. Susan, the scientist whose idea had generated all this, and who was in charge, produced a plethora of biological and circadian rhythm rationale and published articles and insisted on six. Delores, realizing that Allen had gotten some sleep, put him on a four hour watch, with orders to wake her for relief. She lay down on a cot in an upper level of the command-control center. The others headed back to their assigned rooms.

  Susan and Jennifer walked side by side. Jennifer matched the fast pace of her colleague, step for step, but at a slower pace, for she was taller with longer strides. She sensed the tension between them. Indeed, when they arrived at the entrance to the converted hotel, Susan walked to the roundabout.

  Jennifer knew now this was no hotel but something military designed to appear and act like one. She suddenly realized one reason was probably to fool satellite photographs. She stopped. She turned. She looked. After a while, she realized that this had probably been some 1920’s or 30’s seaside resort that played out for some reason during the Roosevelt era. She had read there were a string of these seaside remote resorts in those days, most of them defunct in a decade or two. The military had no doubt commandeered this one during World War II using the excuse of national emergency. After the war, intelligence had recognized its remote potential, with a decent infrastructure in place.

  She didn’t want to start and go through this with Susan. She felt drained, exhausted, bone-weary. Jennifer thought of her uncle then, a man she thought of from time to time, as she did all her deceased relatives. He was a sweet man, God rest his soul. He never married. He lived with his sister, Jennifer’s aunt, the aunt’s husband and two children, Jennifer’s cousins. The man, Ben, held a steady job. He contributed to the economy and affairs of the household. He could pack luggage like no one else on earth could pack luggage. He had a strange ocular disorder in which he could see oddly in front of him only if he cocked his head about thirty degrees to the right oblique. He uttered various original bon mots, neither vulgar nor sophisticated epithets of pith that were earthy but astute. One was, for example, when it was time for dinner, and the people yet milled about in their conversations, he drew all to table at once, by announcing clearly, “Food’s ready; park your carcass.”

  I just want to haul my poor tired ass to bed and park my carcass, Jennifer thought. I don’t give a damn about men or ships or undersea monsters or women scientists and their goofy ideas. I just want to—

  “Susan, I’m tired. I’m only thirty-one years old and I’m so tired.”

  “We can’t talk in our room. It’s probably bugged.”

  Jennifer sighed. She dragged herself to the drive circle island. Let’s get this torment over with.

  “There’s something terribly wrong with this whole thing. Forgive a scientist’s poor pun, but something smells fishy.”

  “Yes I know. I think we both know.”

  “No. No. I know you know that. I mean—” Here Susan drew even closer to Jennifer, as one of Brutus’s conspirators might have drawn closer to whisper in his ear just prior to Caesar entering the room. Jennifer’s heart skipped a beat. It always did that when something significant was about to occur. At first she had hated it and hated herself for it. Later, she came to rely upon it as an aura of some sort. Susan whispered in her ear, but it was quite loud resounding against her eardrum. “I think Carstairs has a spy in our group.”

  “My God, Susan. Why? How?”

  “After I realized what kind of alarm system they had, I knew it. The codes are random and complex. The layout of the patterns could not have been discerned or even guessed at.”

  “Allen said they probably used night vision goggles.”

  “That could be it. That could accomplish what they needed to do. However, these patterns change at randomly selected time intervals. Even invaders with night vision goggles would get caught in a fuzzy logic driven vector at some point, unless—”

  “Unless the timing sequence codes for that night had been given to them, so they could download and match, match the pattern precisely.”

  “Even—”

  “Even predict it within what, what tolerance, seconds?”

  “Tenths of seconds, probably.”

  They sat. They stood up. They kept silent for a long while. In near-despair, Jennifer realized she wasn’t sleepy any more. On top of everything else she’d have trouble falling asleep. And I am so tired, she thought to herself, careful this time not to give her complaint voice. Instead, she gave Susan the only logical counter-argument.

  “But they did get caught. That’s how we found out.”

  “A mistake. Human error. The chaos factor. It’s inevitable. But they were out there a long time before it happened. And they did not get caught. Indeed, they were long gone.”

  “OK. OK, you’ve stimulated me back awake.” Susan deserved it and she was going to get it in. “But who?”

  There it was. The question which sent even greater chills up and down their spines. They spent the next few moments going over the personnel. Susan was a bit bitchy when she came to Allen, but Jennifer shrugged it off. Hodges, the big man. Jarrod Wells, the thin guy, the Norwegian-looking one. Jones, they called him, of course, “Jonsey,” a technician of some sort, peeking and probing here and there into their consoles and mainframe stations, like a praying mantis reckoning its prey, and Magruder, that strange short man bulging with muscles who obeyed his orders but made it seem like they were his idea. Almost an aloof, autonomous individual, who seemed to know what was expected of him before it occurred. Jones had not procured a weapon. He was probably a techie only and woul
d stay behind. But the others …

  “Don’t forget Delores,” Jennifer said.

  “I haven’t forgotten her,” Susan said.

  At last, almost in her state of desperation, Jennifer said, “We won’t figure it out here tonight. Let us get our nap. Sleep on it. It’ll be clearer that way.”

  “Very well. Perhaps we can resolve the matter while we sleep. It happens that way sometimes.”

  Jennifer caught herself from letting out a great sigh of relief. She appeared analytical. The scientist was correct on two counts, of course. Our problems can sometimes be helped or resolved in our sleep and dream states; and rest would surely bring more clarity than she could fathom now. Her head burst, full of problems, concerns, CAD designs, men, the sickly-sweet charged odor of electronics and plastics, women, and weariness. She was condescending. Even with these new challenges, she began to feel sleepy again. Anything to get them to their bed. It was always a problem. Susan needed so little sleep, working all hours of the night. She almost always felt tired, and needed to rest. “Yes, Susan. Of course you’re right.”

  They began to walk to the door. In the distance they heard buoy bells, odd with the sun up. Jennifer had one of those strange insight thoughts spark in her brain only when she was too exhausted to make a further connection. For a moment, she stopped.

  “Susan, what did you mean, when you said, ‘Only I know what’s out there?’”

  The scientist, her friend, her colleague, her supervisor, did not stop nor miss a step. Even over her shoulder, she spoke, walking away, difficult for Jennifer to barely make her out.

  “Come on now. We both need to sleep.”’

  Allen blinked his eyes. Immediately, he jerked awake. At least for a moment. It was a court-martial offense to fall asleep on watch detail. He knew it. But the sleep he had had before had been fitful. The woman kept moaning in her dreams. She kept thrashing about. She kept kicking him.