Abyss

worked for or with had told her that she was too intense for her own good. That she worked so fast — like a maniac sometimes — that she was bound to make mistakes. Science was supposed to be slow and steady. Her rejoinders from the beginning had been simple: Check my data. And it had shut most of them up most of the time.

But now she realized that she had been pushing herself too hard, since the accident aboard the Big G and especially since Kirk McGarvey had shown up at her side in Hutchinson Island and since Oslo. Her project had become more than a scientific experiment. Practically every eye in the world was turned her way. Academics, engineers, big oil, the media, and even the religious right, most of them either expecting her to fail or wanting her to fail. They’d given her enough rope with which to hang herself, and they were sitting back now waiting for her to drop.

Upstairs at the door to her room, she hesitated for a few moments, swaying on her feet, but then she was in Don’s arms, and he was kissing her and she was kissing him back passionately, their hands all over each other. And she couldn’t stop, she didn’t want to stop, except that for a brief instant when she looked up into Don’s face she saw Kirk McGarvey’s green eyes, but it was just a fleeting feeling, like suddenly jerking awake in bed because you had the sensation of falling.

They went into her room, not bothering to lock the door, pulling their clothes off and falling into bed, their bodies intertwined tightly, and they made love. Fast and with more passion than love or any feeling of tenderness; just two people, hungry nearly to the point of starvation for a lifesaving connection, for the sexual release, with no expecations for any sort of a future.

Afterwards, Eve vaguely remembered Don leaving, getting out of bed, and until he covered her with the sheet and blanket, a sharp feeling of coldness, but she never saw him get dressed nor did she hear the door close when he left.

* * *

Don went over to the dining hall and had a couple of pieces of surprisingly good pizza and a couple of Cokes, then went up to the control room where he joked around with everyone with an easy smile that people always seemed to respond to. They worked for a couple of hours, mostly calibrating their monitoring equipment and setting up the data link between their onboard computers and the mainframe at the lab back in Princeton.

“Where’s the boss lady?” someone asked at one point.

“She was dead on her feet, so I put her to bed,” Don told them.

“She was practically asleep on her feet all afternoon,” Lisa said.

And he glanced out one of the windows. It was getting late and although the drizzle had stopped, the wind across the deck was twenty-five knots with higher gusts, yet Defloria’s crew had begun work on the second tripod, and by the looks of it they would be at it all night. Stupid bastards, he thought.

“Let’s call it a night, guys,” he said turning back. “I think we all need some R and R. Back up here at 0800.”

“Slave driver,” one of the techs said, but they laughed tiredly, switched off the equipment they’d been using, and trooped out laughing and talking, ready to party at least until midnight or later. They’d deal with 0800 at 0800. Science could be fun.

He checked his and Eve’s e-mails one last time, but nothing pressing had come in, only a couple of bon voyages from fellow faculty members, and he switched off the lights and went back to the windows to watch the work on deck and Schlagel’s flotilla still circling the rig and tug.

He’d been attracted to Eve from the moment he’d read the first paragraphs of her “Studies on the Problems of World Energy Needs in the Face of Finite Reserves of Fossil Fuels and the Predicted Lack of Commercially Viable CO₂ Capture and Sequestration Technologies.” Like a moth to an open flame, he thought, with a lot of anger and resentment. Her project was his. He’d come up with the solution first, well before she’d published her first paper in Nature and later as a less technical popular science piece for Scientific American. But his had been much broader in scope; energy from the ocean currents, in his estimation, was only the first step. Energy would have to be produced wherever possible — inland from the winds, in a large measure because even the U.S. did not have a national power grid. Electricity produced off the East Coast could not be exported much beyond the Ohio River, and certainly not as far as California. And solar power would have to be produced in the Southwest desert, and in the Gobi and Sahara and Australia’s Great Victoria, Chile’s Atacama, and Antarctica’s five and a half million miles of arid landscape — at least during the summer months when the sun was shining.

But Eve had NOAA’s backing, while despite his superior education he’d become nothing more than another of her postdocs, and when the time came to hand out grants and recognition, it was Eve who’d received the Nobel, and it was she who’d been given Vanessa Explorer and the promise of one billion dollars from the bank in Dubai.

Christ, it rankled. Right now to the soles of his feet, gnawing, pulling, dissolving his gut, making him fuzz out so badly sometimes that his default mode had become a smile so broad it crinkled his face at the corners of his eyes, when all he really wanted to do was lash out. Pull out a pistol and shoot someone, or beat the bitch to death with a baseball bat.

“Doctor Price,” someone said behind him.

Price, caught totally off guard, turned away from the window so fast he almost lost his balance and he forgot to smile. “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing up here?”

“My name is Boris Gurov, and I was sent here to become your new best friend. Can we talk?”

FIFTY-FIVE

Otto Rencke had been in a blue funk for the past four days, so totally wiped out that he’d made no progress in the search for the contractor, and so contrary because of it, that his wife Louise threatened to take Audie and go back to Wisconsin to visit her parents until he came to his senses. But a telephone call from Eric Yablonski at eight this morning just before he was about to leave for Langley had changed everything.

Afterwards he’d stared out the window for the longest time, until he became aware of his wife watching him, and he smiled and began hopping from one foot to the other. “Oh, boy,” he said. “I just talked to a genius.”

Louise was grinning, and the baby clapped her hands. “And what did he tell you?”

“How to find our contractor.”

“Who’s your genius?”

“Eric Yablonski from the NNSA,” Otto said, and he tapped his fingers against his forehead in frustration. “And it was right there in front of my big nose all the time. But I was so wrapped up in letting the programs do the work that I forgot to do my own. Machines are incapable of thinking out of the box.”

Louise was enjoying this. “Pun intended?”

And Otto looked at her for a moment until he got it. “Pun indeed,” he said, and he went to get his jacket, then came back to the kitchen and explained what Yablonski had come up with.

“I’ll make a couple of calls,” Louise told him. Until last year when she’d taken an early retirement she had been chief of imagery analysis at the National Security Agency, and she still had a lot of contacts at Fort Meade.

“Send it to the Dome,” Otto told her.

* * *

Eric was waiting for him at the visitors center around noon and they shook hands. “I’ve been wanting for a long time to meet you face-to-face. It’s a rare honor, Mr. Rencke.”

Otto was embarrassed, and he just nodded his head. “Anyway, my name is Otto, and you have a hell of a rep yourself.”

“Nothing like yours.”

“Well, I didn’t come up with the solution,” Otto practically shouted and the three security officers behind the bulletproof glass looked up.

“Everything okay, Mr. Rencke?” one of them asked.

“Nope, ’cause I just met a guy smarter than me. But I’ll survive.”