The Seventh Angel - Страница 11

There was irony in that too. The cold was going to kill them, but they weren’t technically going to freeze to death. The core temperatures of their bodies were well down into the range of hypothermia now, more than cold enough to kill them. But they wouldn’t quite freeze. When the cold had sucked the last of the life from their bodies, they would hover in a lethally refrigerated state just a few degrees warmer than the temperature of ice. Not quite popsicles. More like …

Charlie shook his head, sending throbs of pain through his bruised cheek and battered forehead — both still tender from their collision with one of the instrument clusters during the accident. He was losing focus again, his mind wandering down blind alleys; another symptom of hypothermia.

He forced his eyes to focus on the relay panel below the electrical bus, trying to locate the bundle of wires that he’d just been tracing with his eyes.

“Turn off the light.” It was Steve’s voice, floating out of the darkness somewhere behind Charlie.

“I can … fix this,” Charlie said. His speech felt halting and strange. “Just give me … another few … minutes. I can find … the problem.”

“Turn off the damned light,” Steve said again. “And get that stupid dog out of here.”

Charlie didn’t turn off the flashlight. He could feel another round of tremors coming on. “Dog? What … dog?”

“The one in your pocket,” Steve said. “And don’t think I can’t hear you. I’ve got your ass set for speed-dial.”

Charlie’s eyes lost focus on the wires. He blinked several times and tried to will them to work properly. “What … What in the hell … are you … talking about?”

“He’s hallucinating,” Gabriella said. It was the first time she had spoken in over an hour. She was shivering so violently that it was difficult to understand her words. Charlie could hear her teeth chattering.

“Late… stage… hypothermia,” she said. “His… brain is starting to… shut down.”

“I better not catch that dog using my phone again,” Steve said. “I’ll kill him. Him and his damned motorcycle.”

Steve’s voice was muffled and strange, but it didn’t have the stuttering hitch that was present in Charlie and Gabriella’s speech. Steve wasn’t shivering any more. That meant something, but Charlie couldn’t remember what. When a cold victim stopped shivering, something bad was happening. Was Steve already dying?

The flashlight gave one final flicker and died. Damn it! He’d let his attention wander again, and now the last flashlight was dead.

No more light. No more heat, and no more light. Just darkness. And cold.

“I should have done an emergency abort,” he said. “This is my fault.”

Listening to his own words, Charlie realized that the hitch in his voice was gone. He wasn’t shivering anymore. He wasn’t even all that cold. His feet were beginning to feel warm. So were his hands.

This wasn’t a good sign either. He was aware of that in a detached sort of way. “I should have dropped the ballast the second I knew we had a problem.” He was talking to himself now. “This is my fault. This is all my fault.”

The cold was receding now. He knew that the growing warmth in his body was an illusion, maybe a sign that he was sliding into some deeper and more languorous stage of existence. He didn’t care. The cold wasn’t as painful down here. In fact, it was kind of pleasant.

He closed his eyes, not that it mattered much in the pitch darkness that had taken command of the submarine. He could sleep now. Just for a few minutes. And, while he was sleeping, he could trace the wiring harnesses in his mind. When he woke up, he would fix the broken whatever it was, and they would get back to the ship in time for lunch.

Everything was going to be fine now. Charlie knew that. Everything was going to be just fine.

“You never asked me out.”

The words caught him as he was dozing off. “What?”

“You never asked me out,” Gabriella said again. “I kept waiting for you to ask me out, but you never did.”

Charlie smiled languidly. “Now I’m hallucinating.”

Gabriella’s French-Canadian accent was like birdsong in his ears. She wasn’t shivering any more either.

“No you’re not,” she said. “You may be dying, but you are not hallucinating.”

“This is my fault,” Charlie said softly.

“Yes” Gabriella said. “It is your fault. You’ve had plenty of chances, but you’ve never asked me out.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Charlie said. “We’re going to die here. We’re already dying. And it’s my fault.” He was getting sleepy now.

Gabriella sighed, the sound echoing off of unseen surfaces in the darkness. “If you don’t ask me out, I’m going to kill you before the cold does.”

“And that damned dog,” Steve said feebly.

“Right,” Gabriella said. Her voice was getting sleepy too. “You and that damned dog.”

Charlie nodded, although no one could see him. This was all part of the hallucination; that much he knew. But what better time to do the impossible? The unthinkable …

“Would you like to go out to dinner with me?” He winced at the sound of his words. Even in this dying world of frozen dreams, he was terrified of what Gabriella might say.

“That’s the best you can do?” she asked. “You’re in your dying moments, and possibly hallucinating, and you ask me out to dinner?” She snorted. “If this was my hallucination, I’d go straight to the sex.”

Charlie felt himself grin. “Can we go straight to the sex?”

“Of course not,” Gabriella said. “You have to buy me dinner first.”

And with those words, Charlie suddenly knew that it was okay to die. He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness, still smiling. He could feel sleep tugging at him. But he wanted to be awake for another minute or two, to savor the amazing idea that Gabriella actually wanted to go out with him, even if it was only the delusion of a dying brain.

It took him a few seconds to notice the light. It started small, a tiny glowing pinprick moving through the curtain of black water outside the view port. He watched it idly as it grew, moving closer in a series of looping zigzags that reminded him vaguely of a bloodhound sniffing out a trail. Still it moved closer, the light growing to the size of a golf ball, and then a basketball.

Charlie lifted his head to get a better look at it. The thing, whatever it was, came to a stop about ten feet from the nose of the Nereus, and hovered there. Charlie raised a cold-numbed hand to shield his eyes against the light. He squinted into the hallucinatory brightness.

He could see something behind the light now: some sort of bizarre machine, perhaps a quarter the size of the Nereus. It was vaguely disk-shaped, with a pair of heavy-looking mechanical arms, flanked by clusters of lenses. To Charlie’s foggy brain, it looked like a crab riding a Frisbee.

The strange machine turned to the side, revealing a yellow-painted stretch of hull marked with large black lettering. Charlie struggled to force his blurry eyes to focus on the words. ‘Something-or-other DEEP WATER SYSTEMS.’

Then, the machine moved again, curving to the left until it had disappeared from the viewport’s line of sight.

Charlie’s eyes remained locked on the place where the machine had been. Could he have imagined it? He was still trying to figure that out, when the water outside the viewport lit up with an eerie blue-green light. For about a second, the light seemed to strobe and pulse rapidly. Then it was gone, leaving behind only the blackness of the ocean bottom.

“I think I’m having another hallucination,” Charlie said.

Gabriella was almost asleep now. “I already told you,” she muttered. “Dinner first.”

CHAPTER 8

ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

In tracing the roots of modern rocketry, some historians prefer to begin with the ancient Greeks. According to the writings of Roman author and grammarian Aulus Gellius, a Greek philosopher named Archytas built a steam-powered rocket device in approximately 400 B.C. Cast from clay and shaped like a pigeon, this device reportedly flew about 200 yards. The pigeon was attached to a guide wire during its flight, which may have supported the device’s weight, so there is some dispute as to whether or not it was powerful enough to fly without external assistance. Very few details of the flight are known, so it’s difficult to gauge the significance of the Archytas pigeon, beyond the basic fact of its existence.

About three centuries later, a Greek mathematician and engineer named Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria invented another steam-propelled device with rocket-like characteristics. Known as an aeolipile, Hero’s invention consisted of a rotating sphere, driven by steam from a heated kettle of water.

History generally remembers Hero’s aeolipile as the first operational steam engine, but it can (arguably) be classified as a rocket-type reaction engine.

Like the work of Archytas, the direct impact of Hero’s invention on the history of rocketry is difficult to assess. It’s therefore understandable that many historians have opted to discount the earliest attempts of the Greeks, and begin the timeline of rocketry with the Chinese.

Some time prior to the 10th century A.D., alchemists in China stumbled across the formula for gunpowder, possibly while attempting to create the legendary elixir of immortality. Although the combination of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal dust did not have mystical life-extending properties, the unknown alchemists quickly discovered that their new compound would flare and burn vigorously when exposed to flame.