“You have a contact?” asked Morton.

Kaiser didn’t answer immediately but went on listening for a few more moments. At last he pulled up the phone over his left ear and muttered, “This is crazy.”

“Crazy?”

“I’m getting a signal that shouldn’t be.”

Fazio shook his head as if agreeing. “Beats me.”

“Care to let me in on your secret?” Morton asked impatiently.

“I’ll put it on the speaker,” said Kaiser.

Morton and several officers and men who had received the news of a strange contact by osmosis gathered around the sonar enclosure, staring up at the speaker expectantly. The sounds were not perfect but they were clear enough to be understood. No high-pitched squeak of whales, no whirring crick of propeller cavitation, but rather voices singing.

And every night when the starfish came out. 

I’d hug and kiss her so. 

Oh, what a time I had with Minnie the Mermaid 

Down in her seamy bungalow.

Morton fixed Kaiser with a cold stare. “What’s the gag?”

“No gag, sir.”

“It must be coming from that Chinese junk.”

“No, sir, not the junk or any other surface vessel.”

“Another submarine?” Morton inquired skeptically. “A Russian maybe?”

“Not unless they’re building them ten times tougher than ours,” said Fazio.

“What range and bearing?” Morton demanded.

Kaiser was hesitant. He had the look of a little boy who was in trouble and afraid to tell the truth.

“No horizontal compass bearing, sir. The singing is coming from the bottom of the sea, five thousand meters straight down.”

12

YELLOWISH OOZE, MADE up of microscopic skeletons from a marine plant called the diatom, slowly drifted away in serpentine clouds, shrouded by the total blackness of the abyssal deep.

The bottom of the gorge where the NUMA mining station once stood had been filled by silt and rock slides into a broken, irregular plain littered with half-buried boulders and scattered wreckage. There should have been a deathly silence after the final rumblings of the earthquake died away, but a warped chorus of “Minnie the Mermaid” rose from under the desolated wasteland and rippled out into the liquid void.

If one could have walked over the debris field to the sound source, they’d have found a single antenna shaft, bent and twisted, poking up through the mud. A grayish-pink ratfish briefly inspected the antenna but, finding it unsavory, flicked its pointed tail and lazily swam into the dark.

Almost before the ratfish disappeared, the silt a few meters from the antenna began to stir, swirling in an ever widening vortex that was weirdly illuminated from below. Suddenly a shaft of light burst through the ooze, joined by a mechanical hand shaped like a scoop and articulated at the wrist. The steel apparition paused and straightened like a prairie dog standing on its haunches and sniffing the horizon for a coyote.

Then the scoop arched downward, gouging through the seabed, excavating a deep trench that began to ascend at one end like a ramp. When it struck a boulder too large to fit in the scoop, a great metal claw appeared magically alongside. The claw’s talonlike pincers bit around the boulder, yanked it free from the sediment, and dropped it clear of the trench in a billowing mud cloud. The claw then swung clear, and the scoop continued digging.

“Nice work, Mr. Pitt,” said Plunkett, grinning with relief. “You’ll have us out and driving through the countryside by teatime.”

Pitt lay back in a reclining seat, staring up at a TV monitor with the same attentive concern he usually reserved for a football game. “We’re not on the road yet.”

“Boarding one of your Deep Sea Mining Vehicles and running it into the air pressure lock before the major quake hit was a stroke of genius.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Pitt muttered while programming the vehicle’s computer to slightly alter the angle of the scoop. “Call it theft of Mr. Spock’s logic.”

“The air-lock walls held,” Plunkett argued. “But for fickle providence, we’d have been crushed like bugs.”

“The chamber was built to withstand four times the pressure of the other project structures,” Pitt said with a quiet unarguable assertion. “Fickle providence, as you call it, gave us time to pressurize the lock, open the outer door, and move forward enough for the scoop and claw to operate before the avalanche struck. Otherwise we’d be trapped for longer than I care to think about.”

“Oh, bloody hell.” Plunkett laughed. There was little that fazed him. “What does it matter so long as we cheat the grave?”

“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘grave.’ “

“Sorry.” Plunkett sat in a seat beside and slightly to the rear of Pitt. He stared around the interior of the DSMV. “A damned fine machine. What’s its power source?”

“A small nuclear reactor.”

“Nuclear, heh? You Yanks never cease to amaze me. I’ll wager we can drive this monster right across the bottom and onto Waikiki Beach.”

“You’d win your bet,” said Pitt with a faint grin. “Big John’s reactor and life-support systems could get us there. The only problem being a flat-out speed of five kilometers per hour. We’d die of starvation a good week before we arrived.”

“You didn’t pack a lunch?” Plunkett asked humorously.

“Not even an apple.”

Plunkett gave Pitta dry look. “Even death would be a treat if I didn’t have to hear that blasted tune again.”

“You don’t care for ‘Minnie’?” Pitt asked in mock surprise.

“After hearing the chorus for the twentieth time, no.”

“With the telephone housing smashed, our only contact with the surface is the acoustic radio transmitter. Not nearly enough range for conversation, but it’s all we’ve got. I can offer you Strauss waltzes or the big band sounds of the forties, but they wouldn’t be appropriate.”

“I don’t think much of your musical inventory,” Plunkett grunted. Then he looked at Pitt. “What’s wrong with Strauss?”

“Instrumental,” Pitt answered. “Distorted violin music can sound like whales or several other aquatic mammals through water. Minnie is a vocal. If anyone on the surface is listening, they’ll know someone down here is still sucking air. No matter how garbled, there’s no mistaking good old human babble.”

“For all the good that will do,” said Plunkett. “If a rescue mission is launched, there’s no way we can transfer from this vehicle to a submersible without a pressure lock. A commodity totally lacking on your otherwise remarkable tractor. If I may speak realistically, I fail to see anything in the near future but our inevitable demise.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘demise.’ “

Plunkett reached into a pocket of his big woolen sweater and produced a flask. “Only about four swigs left, but it ought to keep our spirits up for a while.”

Pitt took the offered flask as a muffled rumble shook the big tracked vehicle. The scoop had screeched into a mass of stone and attempted to lift it clear. Far beyond its load safety level, it struggled and groaned to hoist the debris. Like an Olympic weight lifter straining for the gold, the scoop heaved its massive burden above the seafloor and dumped it in a growing mound along the trench.

The outside lights failed to penetrate the mud clouds, and the monitors inside the control cabin showed only constantly merging colors of yellow and gray. But the computer monitor gave a three-dimensional sonar image that displayed the extent of the excavation.

Fully five hours had elapsed since Pitt began the digging operation. At last he could see an enhanced display showing a narrow but reasonably clear corridor slanting toward the surface of the seabed.