Love and Hydrogen (19 page)

Each Nut Twisted into Its Numbered Place

The barge was anchored in the lee of the island. The next morning before the sun was fully up we settled down to watch sea and sky. Wind and barometer. We were looking for the absence of even the possibility of sudden squalls. It was June 6, 1930. Around five, a young gale blew itself out. The slender tips of the cedars beyond our veranda were motionless.

The sun rose on a calm, slowly heaving sea. We ran up the prearranged flag signal for those on the barge. The tug ferried us out to it and pulled us out to sea through Castle Roads. When we were eight miles offshore we had a mile of water beneath us. I stopped the barge and had it turned upwind and upswell.

A gull sideslipped back and forth above our mast. Everyone but me seemed to be ready. I looked around at the sea and sky, the barge, the tug. Miss Hollister.

“Here we go,” Mr. Tee Van finally said.

Barton and I stood on a step-box and crawled painfully over the steel bolts, fell inside the sphere, and curled up on the cold hard bottom. The notion of cushions occurred to me, and I called for some through the opening. They took a few minutes to be fetched. Barton and I disentangled legs and got set. He grinned at me. The longer we were in the thing, the smaller it seemed to get.

I took up my position at my window. He put on the earphones. Through the quartz I could see Miss Hollister arranging the other set over her ears. The four-hundred-pound door was hoisted and clanged into place, sliding and banging over the ten great bolts. The huge nuts were screwed on, each in its numbered place. Barton made a joke about Poe's “The Cask of Amontillado.”

After the nuts were screwed down as tightly as humanly possible, the wrenches were hammered with sledgehammers to take up all possible slack. The sound threw us about. It made our eyes water.

We complained over the telephone. “Miss Hollister says it must be very hard,” Barton shouted to me, when he was able. I could see her making a rueful expression. It didn't look like she could see us.

He tested the searchlight. He opened the valve on the first oxygen tank and verified the flow at two liters per minute. We began regulating our breathing. I peered out my window at an angle and could see Mr. Tee Van waiting for a signal from the captain. He got one. We felt ourselves tremble, lean over, and lift clear. We revolved, slowly, out on the beam until the barge came into view. Miss Hollister gave a small wave.

We began to swing with the roll of the ship. Barton said, “Miss Hollister wants to know why the Director is swearing so.” I wasn't aware I had been.

She pointed out that my exercise in self-expression had already cost us several liters of oxygen.

We hardly noticed the impact on the surface until a froth of foam surged up over the glass and our chamber was dimmed to a pleasant green. The great hull of the barge came into view. Then the keel passed slowly upward, disappearing into the green water overhead.

A Quarter Mile Down

Word came down that we were at fifty feet. Then one hundred feet. The only change was a slight twilighting and chilling of the green. I knew we were sinking only by the upward passing of small motes of life in the water.

We passed what had been the greatest depth reached in a regulation suit by Navy divers. We passed the depth at which the
Lusitania
rested. We passed the point below which only dead men had sunk.

After so many deep-net hauls, and so much planning, to actually
be
where we were—! It was like an astronomer being allowed to visit Mars.

Barton gave an exclamation and I passed the flashlight over the floor and saw a slow trickle of water collecting. Maybe a pint. It was coming from the door. We watched it. I gave the signal to descend more quickly. As the pressure increased, the stream stopped. We turned the flashlight on the doorsill obsessively the rest of the way down, and saw no more water.

A tiny flaw formed on the rim of my outer window. It did not enlarge.

Barton, who had a lifelong fear of drowning, was unfazed by the flaw. He estimated the total pressure on the sphere would soon be six and a half million pounds. With any breach, there'd be no issue of drowning.

At one thousand feet Miss Hollister sent down word through Barton that a young herring gull was contenting itself flying about their stern. She knew I'd be interested to hear of one this far south. Barton shook his head to himself after passing the information on.

We reached a quarter mile down and were still alive.

We dangled in a hollow pea on a swaying cobweb a quarter of a mile below the deck of our ship.

We were the first human beings to look out on this strange illumination. It was an undefinable blue that worked on our optic nerves like a brilliance, and yet when I picked up my notebook, I could not tell the difference between blank page and print. The color seemed to pass materially through our eyes. The yellow of the searchlight when switched on banished it entirely; yet it returned instantly when the light switched off. It was an entirely new kind of mental reception of color impression.

I switched on a flashlight to mark the moment in my little observation-log. I felt a tremendous wave of emotion, an unnerved appreciation of what was superhuman about the situation. Here I was, privileged to sit and try to crystallize what I observed through wholly inadequate eyes. I wrote, “Am writing at the depth of a quarter of a mile. A luminous fish is outside my window.” I could think of nothing else.

We attempted to pass some of our impressions up to Miss Hollister. Barton reported that she finally responded, with some frustration, that she couldn't understand us.

We told her that language was inadequate to the sensation. She answered back, “Evidently.”

A Seascape from a Motion Picture Film

Over the next two months we attempted seven more dives.

We fastened the Tropical Research house flag of the Zoological Society and that of the Explorer's Club to the cable shackle, and tied a squid wrapped in cheesecloth beneath one of the observation windows. We also set out some hooks, attractively baited.

Three times before we were completely submerged, the horizon and barge appeared across the glass, instantly erased by a green and white smother. Air slipped upward like balloon pearls in its dry, mobile beauty. It formed vertical wakes of iridescence. The surface quilted above us with the undersides of wavelets. On one dive at four hundred feet, tens of thousands of sardines poured past our windows like elongated raindrops.

We conducted more systematic optical investigations. At fifty feet, a scarlet prawn I'd brought along as a color experiment was a deep, velvety black. On a marked spectrum, at one hundred and fifty feet, the orange vanished. At three hundred feet, the yellow. At three hundred and fifty, the green. At four hundred and fifty, the blue, with only violet remaining. At eight hundred feet, the violet evanesced, and only grayish-white remained inside the sphere. Outside remained the deepest blue-black imaginable.

Once, in a Central American jungle, I had had a mighty tree felled. Indians and convicts had worked for many days before its downfall had been accomplished, and after the wrack of branches, leaves, and debris had settled, a small, white moth had fluttered up from the very heart of the wreckage. In that way, life began appearing before us.

Strange, flat little crustaceans flashed like opals in the light. A transparent eel, vertebrae and body organs plainly visible, its eyes and filled stomach its only opacities, nosed our baited hook. A big leptocephalus undulated past like a ribbon of transparent gelatin.

We left the searchlight off. We kept descending. It was only by shutting my eyes and opening them again that I could realize the terrible slowness of the change from dark blue to blacker blue. The warm side of the spectrum was unthinkable. Speech was unthinkable.

Flashes of light sparked all around us. They vanished when we switched on the searchlight. At that point other fish and invertebrates swam up and down the shaft of the illumination like insects around a streetlight. Three myctophids. Pteropods. A big
Argyropelecus.

Strange, ghostly, dark forms hovered in the distance, forms which never came nearer, but reappeared at darker depths. A great cloud of a body moved past us: pale, lighter than the surrounding water. It was maddening, as if astonishing discoveries were just outside the power of our eyes.

I heard Miss Hollister's voice through Barton's headphones. The sunbaked deck on which she sat with her notebook seemed hundreds of miles away.

“Miss Hollister asks me to tell you ‘
Darmstadt
,'” Barton said, mystified, an hour into our fourth dive. He had asked her to repeat the message.

“Why did she want me to tell you that?” he asked, after a few minutes had elapsed.

“Let's keep our minds on our work,” I told him.

At twelve hundred feet, the fishes' iridescence seemed to dissolve into the water. I tied a handkerchief about my face below my eyes, to keep the quartz clear of breath. Barton and I kept as close to the eight-inch windows as we could, straining to see. On the seventh dive, at thirteen hundred feet we kept the electric light going for a full minute of descent and noted two zones of abundance with a wide interval of scanty, motelike life. The transitions were punctuated by milky arrow worms, with their swift darts and pauses.

At fourteen hundred feet we were sitting in absolute silence. I was aware of the cold even through the cushions. One leg was asleep. Barton's face reflected a faint bluish sheen. I marked time to a pulse-throb in my temples with my fingers on the icelike steel of the window-ledge.

How to explain to anyone the experience of such loneliness and isolation? How to articulate the pleasures of that sort of intensity?

The return was made in forty-three minutes, an average of a foot every two seconds. Twice during the ascent we were again aware of indefinite, huge bodies moving about in the distance. What they were we could only guess.

The Pallid Sail Fin

The night before our scheduled attempt at a half-mile dive, Miss Hollister asked if she could have a moment after our meeting on the next day's logistics. She produced a letter which had arrived by packet. Her father had asked that I read it, in order to demonstrate his facility with English.

Brötchen,

I kiss you from across the seas. I want to make quite certain
that you're aware that I'm perfectly well. I'm sorry I was not
allowed to write sooner. I have not been badly treated. The
discomforts which one associates with prison life hardly trouble
me at all. I have enough to eat in the mornings, with dry bread.
(I am allowed a variety of extras such as jams as well.) The need
to take one's bearings and come to terms with one's situation
means that physical things lose their importance. This I find to
be an enrichment of my experience, like a spiritual Turkish bath.
My sole torment has been the fear that you were tormented by
anxiety about me, and so not sleeping or eating properly. I hope
this letter works to reassure us both.

You can imagine that I'm most particularly anxious to hear
about your employer's news at the moment. If only I could
provide something that might help. There is a redheaded thrush
that sings in our prison yard. I cannot remember it from any
of our ornithologies.

I am thinking of you, and your work, and your naturalist
friends, and I am hoping you are having many adventures,

Your Father

“‘Brötchen'?” I asked, once I'd finished. She looked away and began to weep.

“I didn't intend to pry,” I told her.

“It isn't prying,” she said. She crossed her arms and uncrossed them and came forward and put her head to my chest. She touched a hand to my arm, as if to steady me.

“I want to focus on tomorrow,” she said, miserably. “I do.” I heard steps in the passageway outside my door. The steps paused and then continued on their way.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she wept. I could feel her face contorting through my shirt. I closed my own eyes, against the glare of the unshielded bulb on my desk.

“We'll do something about this,” I finally promised. “I'll telephone Mr. Osborn.”

Her entire body responded, startling me. It was what she'd been waiting for. Mr. Osborn had been a longtime supporter, had gotten me my first employment and introduced me to everyone I'd needed to meet. As President of the Society and the Museum of Natural History, his name would reverberate overseas.

Her relief and happiness seemed to distress her even more. She clung to me. She pulled me from the door. Her weight tipped us over onto my bunk.

I regained my balance, and hers. She wiped her face. She was able to look at me again. She pressed her hands to my cheeks as if cradling a single broken egg. “I need to show you how grateful I am,” she said. She kept her voice low. “I need to show you,” she whispered. And then she left.

The Wing Bolt Shoots like a Shell Across the Deck

The next morning we sent the sphere down empty for the half-mile test dive. It came up filled with water under tremendous pressure. With the deck cleared, two of us began to unscrew the giant wing bolt in the center of the door. There was a strange, high singing, a needle of steam, another, and another, and the bolt shot across the deck like a shell from a gun. Thirty feet away it sheared a five-inch notch out of the metal winch cover. A solid cylinder of water cannonaded out behind it with a roar for a good minute and a half.

The Shrubs of the Sea Are Animals

The trouble had been in the packing around the windows. The windows themselves were removed and double-checked and found to be in perfect condition. A coating of white lead was spread over the door flange and the window seals to make the junction of steel with steel as perfect as possible. We delayed only long enough to dry out the sphere and send it down again. This time it came up bone dry.

Three National Broadcasting men were along as well, their equipment arranged on the upper deck of the tug, out of the way of flying spray. It was to be the first time that radio engineers had traveled beyond the territorial waters of the United States to broadcast a program back to their home stations. They would be hooked directly into our telephone line.

“Congratulations on the beginning of your radio career,” I teased Miss Hollister, while we waited for the second test dive.

“Thank you,” she said. Miss Crane, beside her, sniffed. Miss Crane had even shorter hair, marcelled and black.