Petrogypsies (17 page)

Then something brushed my ankle. I’d forgotten about the sharks. Momma Nature was a heartless bitch.

I tried, the best I knew how, to climb on top of that oar. Didn’t work out too well for more than a second at a time.

Don’t thrash around
, I said to myself.
That’ll just attract them even more. Lay still. They’ll get bored and go away eventually.

Then it grabbed me around the waist and dragged me screaming into the depths of the ocean. I hadn’t yet learned how to breath water, so I passed out shortly.

* * *

I woke up lying on my stomach, retching seawater. Doc leaned over me and pounded on my back in a misguided attempt to help me. It broke my rhythm. and I near choked to death.

Finally, I just lay on my side and gasped. I was inside Sprocket. A couple of torches were lit, revealing his central corridor to be crowded with bedraggled sailors and all the crew.

The curtain that led to the outer world flapped open abruptly and Sprocket’s tongue glided inside, wrapped around another limp figure. Doc crawled over to him and pounded his back, too.

I sat up. A sharp
ping-ping-ping
reverberated through Sprocket’s body. It seemed to come from everywhere, including inside my head.

Doc crawled away from the sailor he’d been pounding on. “He’ll be okay, too.” He noticed my head cocked listening to the
ping-ping-ping
. “Yeah. Damnedest thing, ain’t it? I never knew he could make that sound, either. He does seismic testing in three-dimensions, though. Why not sonar location, too? We figure that’s how he found the ones that washed away when the lifeboats capsized.”

“He get everybody?”

“You and that sailor was the last, if we’ve counted correct.”

“What now?”

“I guess we’re all too stupid to give up and die. Maybe we can ride out the hurricane in Sprocket. He blew all the drilling mud out of his bladders and filled them with air. That gives him enough buoyancy to float, but we go wherever the winds and the waves push us. The winds will shove us further out into the Gulf.”

He leaned back against one of the gently moving walls of the corridor. “We got a little food on board. Sprocket oughta have some fresh water in a bladder, if I remember correctly. If he didn’t fill it with air, too. Shipping will be disrupted for awhile after the hurricane. We’ll be adrift in a large empty area.” He grunted. “We ain’t got much of a chance, but it’s better than it was a couple’a hours ago, locked up in that hold.”

I leaned against the wall next to him. The bobbing up and down and side to side might have made me sick at one time, but I was way beyond that right now.

Just when I was starting to relax, a wild hooting sound reverberated through Sprocket’s body. It whooped on a rising note for half a minute, then cut off abruptly. Everybody stopped what they were doing. The only sound was the
ping-ping-ping
and the whoosh of Sprocket and thirty-three men breathing.

In front of me, Sprocket’s tongue stirred, then fed out through his mouth. Doc and me stared at it, mystified.

“What’s he doing that for?” Doc asked. “He’s done got everybody aboard.”

The musky breath that ebbed and flowed down the corridor stopped for a few seconds, then started up again with a faster rhythm.

Sprocket’s body tilted to the right, then the front end dropped down. After a moment, the rocking that had been caused by the waves disappeared. Doc scrambled to his feet and staggered toward the flesh curtain that closed off his room.

“I got a bad feelin’ about this,” he said over his shoulder. He pulled the curtain apart and stared up at the ceiling of his room. Then he turned and shouted down the corridor. “Razer! Big Mac! You boys check a couple of rooms. See if Sprocket has closed down the sphincters of the holes on top.”

A few seconds later, Razer and Big Mac confirmed that all the rooms they had checked had the sphincters shut tight. Sprocket refused to open them when asked to.

“He’s sinking!” Doc shouted down the corridor. “The weight must have been too much for him. We got to lighten his load.”

Razer shoved forward through the crowd. He was dragging the chief along by the elbow with him. He yanked the chief onto his toes. “I know who we can start with,” he said.

Doc frowned at him. “Thought we’d already settled that, Razer. I was figuring we could begin by emptying out the iron room. Them chicksans and long joints would make a difference right quick. I think we got a couple of plug containers and disposal packers in there, too.”

The iron room was just next door to Doc’s room, so we quickly yanked out a couple of chicksans and carried them over to Sprocket’s mouth. But when Doc tried to shove aside the curtain into the back of his mouth, Sprocket clenched it and wouldn’t let him. Doc looked puzzled, then pounded on the wall beside Sprocket’s mouth.

“What’s the matter with you, son?” he shouted. “We need to unload some of this here iron. ’Less you want us all to drown.”

I was surprised, too. Sprocket’s mouth was made so he could have opened up the back of it, then closed it down, then opened up the front and blew out the iron. Wouldn’t have spilled a drop inside his central corridor.

But he was deliberately refusing to allow us to lighten his load.

“Maybe he’s diving on purpose,” I thought aloud. “Maybe he don’t want to be lightened up.”

Doc frowned again. “That don’t make no sense. Ain’t no reason for it.”

I thought on it for a second. Actually, there were a couple of good reasons. “This way we get below the rolling and tossing of the waves. Probably won’t get blown out to sea so much that way. Just float in one place below the surface. And maybe he was getting sea-sick again.”

Doc looked thoughtful. “Huh. Might not be a bad idea at all. What if he springs a leak?”

I looked down the corridor. Sprocket had forty-six sphincters along the top of his body, plus the thirteen on each side which let into various bladders, which cross-connected into his tongue and mouth and various other places. He was a complex network of air and fluid lines, with internal and external sphincters acting as valves to control flow and mixing. If only one of them failed, his interior could be flooded with water within a few minutes.

“Let’s hope he don’t. Besides, he can surface immediately if he has problems.”

Doc shook his head. “Can’t you feel it? We’re still diving. Sprocket’s going deep.”

He was right. We were still angled on a downward slant.

“He’s sinkin’ like a rock,” Doc said. “Hey, Razer! Find Captain Johnson for me!” he shouted.

A couple of minutes later the captain joined us. He had to brace against the wall, as we all did. The angle of Sprocket’s dive had increased sharply.

“I remember it was about five hundred feet to the bottom of the ocean where we were drilling,” Doc said. “But I heard one of your hands say it got deeper not much farther out.

The captain looked as bedraggled as the rest of us. He rubbed his chin. “Right. We got a sonar reading of 529 feet where we had anchored. But we’re near the edge of the continental shelf. It drops off fast, to depths of thousands of feet.”

Doc disappeared into his room for a second and came out thumbing through the pages of the red book.

Doc came to the page he was looking for. “Here we go,” he said. “American Petrogypsy Institute Hydrostatic Pressure and Fluid Weight Conversion Tables.” I’d used that one many times to figure out bottom-hole pressures. A column of drilling fluid exerts increasing pressure in a way that is directly proportional to the depth of the hole.

He flipped back a couple of pages to the Weights and Measures listing. “Let’s figure the water as dense as possible,” he said. “Saturated salt water is 74.7 pounds per cubic foot.” Doc continued. “Pressure gradient would be about .5190 psi per vertical foot. Let’s say we go down 600 feet. The pressure on Sprocket will be, ah …” He pulled out a pencil from a side pocket and scribbled in the margin of the page. “311.4 pounds per square inch.”

I couldn’t keep from putting in my own two bits. “Plus 14.7 for the weight of the atmosphere.”

“Smartass,” Doc replied. He added my numbers to his figuring. “326.5 psi. That don’t sound too bad.”

I didn’t say what came into my mind. Maybe the pressure didn’t sound like much, but it was twenty times what Sprocket’s hide usually encountered. Sure, his mouth could handle pressures of thousands of psi when he used it for a blowout preventer, but the rest of his sphincters never encountered that kind of pressure. And a leak in the wrong place could kill us all. Doc already knew all that, anyway. He was trying to put the best face on it that he could.

And if we had the bad luck to have drifted off the edge of the continental shelf, we could run into pressures three and four times as high as those that he had calculated.

Right then Sprocket’s nose bumped the ocean floor. He bucked and burped. We heard a whooshing, bubbly sound and his body settled more heavily to the bottom.

“I think he just blew the air out of a couple of his bladders,” Doc said. “He’s acting just like a submarine. Increasing his ballast.”

“If he blows too much, we could run out of air to breathe down here real quick,” Razer said.

“I don’t believe so,” Doc said. “I been thinking about why he run his tongue back outside. Smell the air he’s pumping to us. If I got him figured right, he has his tongue at the surface. He’s sucking fresh air through his drillstem.”

The
ping-ping-ping
quit for a second, then resumed. Sprocket started to march. “That son of a gun!” Doc exclaimed. “He can’t swim worth a damn, so he decided to walk back to shore!”

After a minute, the whole corridor reverberated with whoops and laughter. Looked like we was gonna survive this adventure after all. All Sprocket had to do was take a stroll. We’d get surface air through his tongue, while he navigated around obstacles and such with his built-in sonar.

* * *

We found a couple of bottles of heartstarter scattered throughout the rooms in Sprocket. Didn’t look like there was much else for us to do, so most of us proceeded to relax.

Not too much later I found myself feeling pretty good. We’d made it through the hurricane. We’d survived the chief trying to murder us. Because I hadn’t given up while floating alone and lost, I’d survived being stranded at sea, too. I looked forward to holding Star soon and telling her about the big adventure.

Of course, when I started feeling real good about everything is when it hit the fan again.

Me and Big Mac and Razer and Doc lounged in Doc’s room passing a bottle between us. The bottle wasn’t near dead yet, but it had been terribly injured. Just as I reached to take it from Big Mac for another dose, Sprocket’s body rolled over completely. The sphincter in the ceiling relaxed for a second and a jet of water drilled me in the side as I flew through the air.

Sprocket twisted and convulsed, flipping around like a leaf in a high wind. His illumination warts flared, then went dead, so we took more flying lessons in pitch darkness. The sphincter irised shut before water filled the room.

I finally managed to hook an arm around the railing of the bed that was bolted into Sprocket’s wall. Next time another body crashed into me I grabbed it. It was Razer. Between us we got Doc and Big Mac anchored. After that, we couldn’t do a thing except hang on for our lives until it stopped.

Sprocket quit pumping air.

He bucked and twisted for a good thirty minutes, with three or four quiet periods less than a minute in length each. I could hear the screams of everybody inside as it went on and on and on.

Sounded like some folks hadn’t got off easy as us. Doc had broke a finger, he thought, and Razer said it felt like his left leg was wrenched out of the socket. I was okay except for a couple of bruises that were gonna be classics if I lived long enough for them to purple up properly. And you couldn’t hurt Big Mac with anything less than a five-pound sledgehammer.

“I know this sounds stupid,” I said to Doc as he grimly hung on beside me. “But it feels like something has grabbed Sprocket and is yanking him around.”

“There ain’t nothing big enough to do that. Unless …” He almost lost his grip on the bed when Sprocket did another end for end flip. “You don’t think a whale has attacked him, do you?”

Before we could speculate further, Sprocket surfaced. He bounced halfway out of the water, and all of his sphincters blew open simultaneously. For a second there, I thought we was all dead. The rain came down so hard, it almost seemed like he’d opened up while still underwater. But you could tell that we was on the surface from
the screaming howl of the gale-force winds, and the sickening way we lurched up one side of a wave and down the other. I remembered that sensation too well from earlier in the day.

If something had been tossing Sprocket around, it had let him go for the time being. I sucked at the cold air that poured in with the rain.

I knew what I had to do. I didn’t much like it. “Hold on a second here,” I said. “Somebody needs to check out the situation topside.”

I staggered and fell a couple of times, but I made it to the bottom rung of the ladder and climbed it until my head stuck through the hole in the top of the room.