Chapter 13 Slack Water

Omar Hadid wrote until one in the morning, and then he came into the lookout room with the lantern and stood over the blanket Juna had rolled out on the floor. "Twenty-five minutes," he said. "I do not need twenty-five minutes." "People who say that need forty." He set the lantern on the crate at the end of her bed. "Perrin has the board, and Perrin is not going to stop writing numbers for anybody. When he reaches sixty I am sending Halleck down after you, and Halleck will be cheerful about it in a way you will not enjoy." Juna lay still and let him count. The room held the pitch of the dome under the wind, a low note that came and went, and above it the small hard sound of a boy writing on a board with a grease pencil in the dark. Twenty-five minutes had never been anything to her. She had once rested under a rock overhang at eleven feet with a current running over her ankles for six hours. The four-year-old was asleep against his mother's shoulder with his fingers curled shut. Niko. He had been without shoes since Tuesday and had worked out a way to stand very still on cold granite that made everybody look at the floor rather than at him. At twenty-five minutes she was up and dressed with the mask, the lead belt, and the U-bar in her hand. Halleck was waiting outside with a hand light, sixty feet of salvage cord, and Omar's spare battery pack. Nobody mentioned the rule everybody had been keeping badly since Tuesday, which was that nobody swims alone. "Seven hundred yards of trail, then a mile and a half of water," Halleck said. "You are carrying the drum out?" "I am carrying whatever is in there out." "Then you are carrying it out and I am carrying you out, and we will do the arithmetic on the way back." He shouldered the cord. "The flood came up at ten and it has been falling since about one. Whatever is about to happen in this bay happens on the back of the ebb." They left at half past one. At two in the morning, with the flood on the ebb, the trail was the best it had been in three days. The water lay in the cuts in a thin skin of moving brown, ankle deep at most, and where it ran across the tread it made a sound like silk being pulled. Juna went down in front with the hand light held low, and Halleck followed her with the cord between them, and neither of them spoke for two hours. At twenty to four they stepped off the last switchback onto the granite shelf at the foot of the point, and there, a hundred and ten feet above the drowned town, the ring of foam was still standing out past the harbor mouth. It had been forty feet across two days ago. It was closer to seventy now, turning the way a drain turns, with the clean black water in the middle of it standing perfectly still while the whole bay ran at the edge of it. She suited on bare rock: harbor diver's boots, the mask with the tar seal, lead belt, fins, the U-bar, a light, and the spare cord in a coil on her belt. Halleck set his own light on the shelf and pointed it seaward so she could find the chain by it. "Six-fifty," he said. "Forty-five minutes." "Forty." "You will do forty and you will tell me you did forty, and both of us will know you did fifty-five." At ten to five the bay stopped being a surface and became a lid. She felt it in her hands first, because the light stopped shaking. Then the sound of the water against the point went out of the air the way a voice goes out of a room when the door closes, and what was left was a quiet so complete that she could hear her own heartbeat in the mask. She went in. Eleven feet over the shelf, and the murk came down on her all at once in the first four feet. She kept her light off until fifteen feet and turned it on when the bottom began to show, and then the water went green and then dark green and then the dim blue that means the shock edge of rock is underneath you. The anchor chain met her halfway down, a thick cold rope of iron, and she took a link and pulled herself down hand over hand to the great iron ring at the bottom of it. The shelf was four feet under datum and eleven feet under the water, and the blast face of it stood in a straight horizontal line across the whole width, exactly as it had when she stood here two days ago with a fire extinguisher of a cylinder in her hand. Except that this time there was a seam in it. It ran out of the shadow under her fins and crossed the shelf in a black line about two fingers wide, straight as a ruled mark, and it went past the iron ring, under the mesh panel, through the doorway of the chamber, and out the other side into the dark on the far side of the rock. The water was moving in the chamber. That was the second thing. She had hung in that doorway once and the water in it had been dead. Now it turned in one direction, slowly, and the shredded mesh panel and the pale dust that had been lying on that floor since 1946 were going around with it. She put her head through the doorway and raised the light. The marine-yellow case was where it had been, lid open, boards glowing their same dull orange, hum coming through the water into her jaw. The cable left the back wall through its gland and went into the borehole. The socket where the gray memory cylinder had lived was empty and capped. Above the case, bolted to the rock where somebody had drilled into granite and taken a long time over it, was something she had not seen on her first visit. A recording drum, fourteen inches across, turning at a rate she could not see. Smoked paper wrapped around it, and a pen arm riding the paper at a shallow angle, and on that paper three lines of ink going round and round in bands a quarter inch wide. Underneath the drum, scribed into the brass plate of its own frame in a tiny engineer's hand: 1.0 mm pen equals 0.80 m head. Calibrated by R. Ibarra, 5 yrs prior. Omar had asked her what he could read off the drum. This was it. Then she put her face down to the seam. The water went into it. She had been right about that, and it was worse than she had imagined. She laid her mask against the rock and shone the light down the opening, and the beam went maybe thirty inches and gave up, because the throat below was not a crack. It was a shaft, and the shaft had been cut. The arcs were smooth and even, machine work, the same arcs the county men had cut when they took the sea stack down to a table in 1946 and dumped two thousand tons of granite spoil over the seaward shoulder. She went in head first, to the shoulders, with one hand on the lip and the light in the other. The shaft went down past the reach of the light, turning as it went, and every wall in it was white with the dust of rock that had been pulverized in 1946 and never once stirred until the sea started pouring back through this place. At about the depth of her hip the case behind her changed its note. The hum dropped a tone. She felt it in her teeth. She was in the throat of it, and the water was going down past her at eight or nine feet a second, which is faster than a person falls and considerably faster than a person is comfortable. She came out of the shaft, got her hand on the floor, and lay on her side on the shelf with her heart going and her air going and the light shaking. The drum was still turning. The pen arm had jumped a sixteenth of an inch and stopped. She went back in. The drum came off its bracket in two clamps, and it came off easily, because it had been designed to be lifted out by a diver in a bad current by somebody who charged a great deal of money to build the whole arrangement. Fourteen inches of drum, the smoked paper locked in a sealed cartridge, the clock and the pen arm and the ink reservoir all in one cylinder. It weighed what a small dog weighs. She hooked it in the U-bar, put a wrap of cord through the eye, and clipped it to her belt, and it began immediately to swing between her legs and make every stroke harder. She looked back at the case on her way out. The boards glowed. The memory socket sat empty and capped, and whatever the array thought about the human being who had pulled a cylinder out of its instruments and left with it, it had been thinking that thought for two days and had never needed to shout. Hand over hand up the chain, and the drum swinging, and at fifteen feet the pull came on. She had it in her head before her body finished arguing. The ebb had started early, four minutes early, and it came up the shelf as a slow hard lean, seaward, everything in the chamber going one way at once. The mesh panel stretched out flat like a flag, and her light beam, which had been going down the shaft, went horizontal and vanished. She got the ring with her right hand, and after that it was only work. The drum fought her all the way up, and twice she had to stop and hang and get her air back because her lungs had gone to fire. The chain tore at her gloves. At thirty feet the murk turned brown, and at thirty-five the light above her turned into a coin of gray that came up and met her. She broke the surface at twenty-six minutes past five with an arm over the granite and the drum held over her head like a trophy. Halleck had her in eight seconds. He got the cord on, took the drum off her belt, set it down like it was full of eggs, and hauled. "Six-twenty," he said. "The current came early. Four minutes." "I know. I watched it come. It came up the point like a hand." She lay on the granite with the dome black above her and the whole bay running at the ring out past the mouth, and then she got up and picked up the light. "The trail," she said. "Now. While it is still a skin." "And the board?" "Let it write itself. That was the arrangement." They were two hundred yards up the seventh switchback when the ground moved. It came up through her boots and into her knees and stopped there, held, and let go. It was not shaking. It was a single push, from underneath, the way a floor feels when a truck backs into the building. Halleck stopped walking. "That was not the tide," he said. "Six-forty is in twenty minutes." "Six-forty is for the wave." He stood with one hand on the rock and one hand on the cord, looking up the trail toward the black shoulder of the dome, where nothing could be seen because there was nothing to see. "That came from the same place the machine comes from. I want you to notice that, because in about four minutes you are going to be the only person on this trail who has." Then he started up again, and she went with him, and the water came up the cuts beside them, and eleven switchbacks took a long time. ---