Nita felt a chill. “Right,” she said. “I’ll hang out here till they leave. Then I have to find Kit—“
“He went down to the general store just before you got up,” Dairine said. “I think he was going to call somebody.”
“Right,” Nita said again.
There was the briefest pause. Then: “Whales, huh?” Dairine said, very softly.
Nita got out of there in a great hurry.
The sign on top of the building merely said, in big, square, black letters, TIANA BEACH. “ Tiana Beach’ what?” people typically said, and it was a fair question. From a distance there was no telling what the place was, except a one-story structure with peeling white paint.
The building stood off the main road, at the end of a spur road that ran down to the water. On one side of it was its small parking lot, a black patch of heat-heaved asphalt always littered with pieces of clamshells, which the gulls liked to drop and crack open there. On the other side was a dock for people who came shopping in their boats.
The dock was in superb repair. The store was less so. Its large multipaned front windows, for example, were clean enough outside, but inside they were either covered by stacked-up boxes or with grime; nothing was visible through them except spastically flashing old neon signs that said “Pabst Blue Ribbon” or “Cerveza BUDWEISER.” Beachgrass and aggressive weeds grew next to (and in places, through) the building’s cracked concrete steps-The rough little U.S. Post Office sign above the front door had a sparrow’s nest behind it.
Nita headed for the open door. It was always open, whether Mr. Friedman the storekeeper was there or not; “On the off chance,” as Mr. Friedmam usually said, “that someone might need something at three in the morning… or the afternoon…” Nita walked into the dark, brown-smelling store, past the haphazard shelves of canned goods and cereal and the racks of plastic earthworms and nylon surf-casting line. By the cereal and the crackers, she met the reason that Mr. Friedman’s store was safe day and night. The reason’s name was Dog: a whitish, curlyish, terrierish mutt, with eyes like something out of Disney and teeth like something out of Transylvania. Dog could smell attempted theft for miles; and when not biting people in the line of business, he would do it on his own time, for no reason whatever — perhaps just to keep his fangs in.
“Hi, Dog,” Nita said, being careful not to get too close.
Dog showed Nita his teeth. “Go chew dry bones,” he said in a growl.
“Same to you,” Nita said pleasantly, and made a wide detour around him, heading for the phone booth in the rear of the store.
“Right,” Kit was saying, his voice slightly muffled by being in the booth. “Something about ‘the Gates of the Sea.’ I tried looking in the manual, but all I could find was one of those ‘restrictEd’ notices and a footnote that said to see the local Senior for more details—“
Kit looked up, saw Nita coming, and pointed at the phone, mouthing the words “Tom and Carl.” She nodded and squeezed into the booth with him; Kit tipped the hearing part of the receiver toward her, and they put their heads together. “Hi, it’s Nita—“
“Well, hi there yourself,” Tom Swale’s voice came back. He would doubtless have gone on with more of the same if someone else, farther away from his end of the line, hadn’t begun screaming “Hel-LOOOOOOO! HEL-lo!” in a creaky, high-pitched voice that sounded as if Tom were keeping his insane grandmother chained up in the living room. This, Nita knew, was Tom and Carl’s intractable macaw Machu Picchu, or Peach for short. Wizards’ pets tended to get a bit strange as their masters grew more adept in wizardry, but Peach was stranger than most, and more trying. Even a pair of Senior wizards must have wondered what to do with a creature that would at one moment deliver the evening news a day early, in a flawless imitation of any major newscaster you pleased, and then a second later start ripping up the couch for the fun of it.
Cut that out!” Nita heard another voice saying in the background, one with a more New Yorkish sound to it: That was Carl. “Look out! — She’s on the stove. Get her — oh, Lord. There go the eggs. You little cannibal!—“
“It’s business as usual around here, as you can tell,” Tom said. “Not where you are, though, to judge from how early Kit called… and from what he tells me. Kit, hang on a minute: Carl’s getting the information released for you Evidently the Powers That Be don’t want it distributed without a Senior s supervision. The area must be sensitive right now.”
Nita made small talk with Tom for a few minutes while, in the back-ground, Peach screamed, and Annie and Monty the sheepdogs barked irritably at the macaw, who was shouting “Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!” at them — or possibly at Carl. Nita could imagine the scene very well — the bright airy house full of plants and animals, a very ordinary-looking place as far as the neighbors were concerned. Except that Tom spent his days doing research and development on complex spells and incantations for other wizards, and then used some of the things he discovered to make a living as a writer on the side. And Carl, who sold commercial time for a “flagship” station of one of the major television networks, might also make a deal to sell you a more unusual kind of time — say, a piece of last Thursday. The two of them were living proof that it was possible to live in the workaday world and function as wizards at the same time. Nita was very glad to know them.
“The link’s busy,” she heard Carl saying, at some distance from the phone. “Oh, never mind, there it goes. Look,” he said, apparently to one of his own advanced-level manuals, “we need an intervention authorization for an offshore area — yeah, that’s right. Here’s the numbers—“
Kit had his manual open to the spot where he’d found the notification. Nita looked over his shoulder and watched the box that said RESTRICTED INFORMATION suddenly blink out, replaced by the words SEE CHART PAGE 1096. “Got it?” Tom said.
“Almost.” Kit turned pages. Nita looked over his shoulder and found herself looking at a map of the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Virginia. But the coast itself was squeezed far over on the left-hand side, and individual cities and states were only sketchily indicated. The map was primarily concerned with the ocean.
“Okay, I’ve got it in my book too,” Tom said. “All those lines in the middle of the water are contour lines, indicating the depth of the sea bottom. You can see that there aren’t many lines within about a hundred miles of Long Island. The bottom isn’t much deeper than a hundred feet within that distance. But then — you see a lot of contour lines packed closely together? That’s the edge of the Continental Shelf. Think of it as a cliff, or a mesa, with the North American continent sitting on top of it. Then there’s a steep drop — the cliff is just a shade less than a mile high—“
“Or deep,” Nita said.
“Whichever. About a five thousand foot drop; not straight down — it slopes a bit — but straight enough. Then the sea bottom keeps on sloping eastward and downward. It doesn’t slope as fast as before, but it goes deep-some fifteen thousand feet down; and it gets deeper yet farther out. See where it says ‘Sohm Abyssal Plain’ to the southeast of the Island, about six or seven hundred miles out?”
“It has ‘the Crushing Dark’ underneath that on our map,” Nita said. “” that the whales’ name for it?”
“Right. That area is more like seventeen, eighteen thousand feet down.”
“I bet it’s cold down there,” Kit muttered.
“Probably. Let me know when you get back,” Tom said, “because that’s where you’re going.”
Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock. “But I thought even submarines couldn’t go down that far,” Nita said.
“They can’t. Neither can most whales, normally — but it helps to be a wizard,” Tom said. “Look, don’t panic yet—“
“Go ahead! Panic!” screamed Picchu from somewhere in the background. “Do it now and avoid the June rush! Fear death by water!”
“Bird,” Carl’s voice said, also in the background, “you’re honing for a punch in the beak.”
“Violence! You want violence, I’ll give you violence! No quarter asked or given! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Don’t give up the AWWWKI”
“Thanks, Carl,” Tom said, as silence fell. “Where were we? Oh, right. You won’t just be going out there and diving straight down. There’s a specific approach to the Plain. Look back closer to the Island, and you’ll see some contours drawn in dotted lines—“
“Hudson Channel,” Nita said.
“Right. That’s the old bed of the Hudson River — where it used to run a hundred thousand years ago, while all that part of the Continental Shelf was still above water. That old riverbed leads farther southeast, to the edge of the Shelf, and right over it… there was quite a waterfall there once. See the notch in the Shelf?”
