Abyss

“Goddamnit, what the hell are we supposed to do if the bastards start shooting at us?” Stefanato demanded angrily.

“Keep out of sight, someplace where you can abandon ship if need be,” McGarvey said.

“Christ,” the construction engineer said.

* * *

Eve Larsen’s techies generally avoided the construction crew and only four of Defloria’s people were in the dining room when McGarvey came in and got his dinner, ordering his steak rare with French fries and a small salad. The food was very good around the clock, and although there was no alcohol aboard there was plenty of iced tea and soft drinks and the coffee was outstanding.

He was just sitting down when Gail showed up and joined him. “Buy a girl dinner?” she asked. She was smiling, which McGarvey had learned was usually a cover-up when something was bothering her.

“Sure, anything on the menu,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s the waiting,” she said, almost too quickly. “And the constant noise. And the feeling that we’re overlooking something right in front of our noses.” She was strung out. “It’s like the cartoons where a ten-ton weight has been pushed over a cliff, and like a dummy you’re standing at the bottom without a clue what’s about to happen to you.”

It was the lack of knowledge that was driving both of them crazy.

“We know the name of our contractor,” he said, and she brightened.

“Jesus, you talked to Otto?”

“He’s an ex-South African Buffalo Battalion lieutenant colonel by the name of Brian DeCamp,” McGarvey said, and he told her everything that Otto and Eric had come up with, along with the likelihood that Joseph Bindle was a legitimate journalist.

“So it still leaves us with no clear description of the bastard, other than what my receptionist at Hutchinson Island gave me and what I saw in the corridor, and it’s a safe bet he was in disguise.”

“Otto’s following the money trail. Somebody somewhere must have come in physical contact with him at some point. The real him.”

“And lived,” Gail said. “And in the meantime we sit it out waiting for the ten tons to drop.”

“Five days,” McGarvey said. “Maybe six.”

“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Same old?”

“Something like that,” McGarvey said.

Gail looked away for a moment, and when she turned back she wasn’t smiling. “What about your lady scientist and her mob?”

What about them? McGarvey asked himself for the hundredth time, because something wasn’t right. Call it a gut feeling, even paranoia, but he was convinced that not all was as it seemed in her shop. He knew enough about scientists, especially of Eve Larsen’s and Don Price’s caliber, to understand that professional jealousy was the norm — the supernorm. But everyone up there absolutely loved their doc, loved her work, loved the fact she’d won the Nobel Prize, even though it wasn’t for physics.

What about them indeed.

“They’re doing their thing, and we’re going to stay out of the way for now.”

“And wait?”

“And wait,” McGarvey said.

She nodded a little grumpily. “How about that dinner you promised?”

FIFTY-EIGHT

Eve Larsen had not slept well for at least a week, even though she’d thrown herself into the work of getting the rig ready for Hutchinson Island and the impellers, and the work was going well, and everyone seemed to be having the time of their lives. Normally under circumstances like these she would have collapsed into bed at odd times for a few hours of deep sleep, then wake with a hundred new ideas bursting inside her head like shooting stars.

But instead of ideas, she’d been having the dream; not one in which monsters were chasing her down a long dark tunnel, not even the one in which she had to be someplace, and she knew where it was, but she just couldn’t seem to get there, no matter how hard she tried, and no matter the urgency of the thing. This was the one where she was called back to Oslo in disgrace to give back the Nobel Prize. It was the same room at city hall, with the king and queen and the same people in the audience, only no one was applauding her; everyone, including the king, was booing. Shouting that she was a fraud, that she wasn’t a real scientist, that she was a liar and user whose wish was fame, not discovery. Outside, the gunman’s aim had been perfect and she could almost feel the bullet plowing into her brain.

And the most frightening part of the nightmare wasn’t the shame, or the hostile reception she was getting, it was the certainty in her own mind that they were right. She was a fraud. And each night the dream got worse; she could see how the impellers in the Gulf Stream and the Humboldt Current and the Agulhas would never produce the electricity she’d predicted, and she’d developed the mathematics to prove it. She could see the partial differential equations marching in front of her mind’s eye so clearly that when she would awake in a cold sweat she would try to write them down. But as close as they were in her head, she was unable to do it. And it was all the more frustrating, because when she was awake she knew that she could prove her dream equations wrong so that her self-confidence would return.

Last night the nightmare got even worse, much more intense. This time it was Bob Krantz in the audience in Oslo and he threw the copy of Nature in which she’d proposed her World Energy Needs project up on the stage.

“You know that this thing doesn’t work!” he’d shouted. “It’s impossible to do what you want. There will be unintended consequences that you’re hiding from us. Catastrophic consequences. Change the weather indeed. Who do think you are, God?”

And in her dreams she knew that Bob was correct. She was able to see exactly why her experiment was bound to fail, and yet she knew that she could never admit it publically. The shame and humiliation would be too awful to bear. She would be alone and isolated, and just before she’d awakened this morning she’d dreamed that she was back home in England. It was winter, and no one was there at the train station to meet her, just like no one had come to see her off to America.

And when she awoke at dawn she was freezing cold, and during the day she’d had the chills so bad at times that Don had asked her if she was coming down with something and he’d put the back of his hand to her forehead.

He’d seemed nervous off and on all day, and his concern had touched her. Getting ready now to go down to the dining hall for dinner, she went over to where he was seated at one of the computer monitors working on his study of mid-Gulf eddy currents against temperature, salinity, and suspended particle gradients. It was a continuation of his own project that they all hoped might have some bearing on the placement of the impellers. Perhaps a little far-fetched, in Eve’s estimation, but she’d never suppressed independent studies by anyone on her team so long as they did their primary work.

“Anything interesting showing up?” she asked.

He was startled and he looked up at her, his eyes a little wide as if he were a kid just caught with his hand in the cookie jar. But he recovered nicely and smiled. “Still collecting data, but my programs haven’t turned up anything useful yet.” His hypothesis was that the formation of some eddy currents might depend in part on a physical event or trigger presence, like raindrops forming around particles of dust.

“I’m going to get something to eat. Do you want to come along?”

“Might as well,” he said. “Everyone else has already gone down.”

And Eve had been so absorbed in her own work that she’d actually not noticed it was just her and Don up here, and that it was beginning to get dark outside. “I thought it was too quiet without Lisa’s wisecracks,” she said a little sheepishly.