David Hagberg - Abyss

For Laurie, as always, and for Tom Doherty, who provided the genesis, and Bob Gleason, who helped shape the story

Of course for a long time our central dilemma hasnt been humanitys survival. Since the advent of agriculture, people have striven for advancement; huts instead of caves, horses to help with plowing and transportationparticularly after the wheel and axle were inventedand then the internal combustion engine and electricity, but this brought us up against the need for oil. And the explosion began.

In a very real way, however, our quest for the good life could well push us back to the horse-and-buggy daysif not extinction itselfgiven the greenhouse effects generated by the combustion of petrochemicals. In the race between climatic destruction and fossil fuel depletion, the outcome will be apocalyptic no matter which side of the coin comes up.

Still the solution has always been around us. In the major sea currents, in the endless winds that roam the land, and in sunshine from the sky.

The battle lines are being drawn for what could be the largest, most important struggle in human history.

CONTENTS

April

The last day of the experiment was bright and warm on the Atlantic twenty-five miles off Floridas east coast, and Dr. Evelyn Larsen, who was thirty-six, slender, with short-cropped, sun-bleached blond hair, and overly tanned skin, was in a good enough mood now to grant the interview with Fox News after all. George Szucs, the young producer and his camera crew had choppered out to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel Gordon Gunther in the early afternoon and theyd set up on the afterdeck, manned at that moment by only two crewmen operating the winch off the fantail. The sea was flat calm, and Eve, along with the other ten techs and three postdocs up in the main electronics compartment, was in high spirits.

The damned thing works, Dr. Don Price, her chief assistant in his third postdoc year, said when the Big G s generators were shut down and the ships power came entirely from the seajust one tiny impeller only three feet across placed forty feet down in the middle of the Gulf Stream.

Eve had smiled. You had doubts?

Price, who was tall, husky, handsome, and bright, nodded. Sure, didnt you?

Not really, Eve said.

Eve found him attractive except for his ego, which Price could not control or acknowledge, no matter how much his colleagues complained.

He had not been supportive when Eves paper was published in Nature eighteen months ago. Her conclusions were so controversial she was amazed NOAA had actually sprung for two weeks aboard the ship, and funding for the ships crew as well as for her lab, postdocs, and techs. Someone brought out a couple of bottles of good champagne and toasted the Queen of the High Seas, because all of her postdocs and techies loved her easygoing nature, sometimes self-mocking sense of humor, and her absolute devotion to them and the project.

Eve had raised her glass, a tickle deep in her stomach, and a little dose of smugness just at the tip of her tongue. The damned thing works, she thought.

Growing up in Birmingham, England, with a father, three brothers, and assorted uncles and cousins, the public houses and markets and the fields of the Midland Plain had shaped her in some respects that she had tried to grow out of all her life. All the men in the family worked in the mills, leaving the women at home to do the washing, the mending, the babysitting, the cooking, and at night, briefly, the telly for some comfort, unless a soccer match was playing and money was so short the men couldnt watch the match at the pub.

Eves destiny was to marry one of the mill-bound boys in her class, or perhaps one or two forms ahead of her, and settle into the domestic routine of her clan. Each evening before bed her mother would slowly read a few passages from the Bible, her finger tracing each sentence word by word, and Eve, sitting on her lap, following her finger and listening to the sounds of the language, had learned how to read.

By the time she got to school, she thought that she had died and gone to heaven because of the library and all the new books for her to read. The only books in her house were the Holy Bible and the union handbook. At first no one believed that she could readand upside down and backwards at thatso her parents had been called to school to explain why their daughter was nothing but a liar who had learned some parlor trick that they had to work hard to undo.

Thats when the verbal abuse began at home, at family gatherings, and especially at school, so that no place had seemed safe to her, and shed rebelled, pushing herself to learn science, mathematics, philosophy, and languages, to superachieve.

The worst day of her life had been at church when shed told the Anglican priest that the notion of some god with long hair and a beard, who walked on water, brought dead people back to life, and whose mother had conceived him through immaculate parthenogenesis was silly. Shed been sent home in disgrace, her father had beat her with his belt, and shed been sent to a boarding school for recalcitrant girls in the country outside Penrith in the north.

And because of her brilliance, she had excelled for a time until the other girls became jealous. Her troubles and misery increased fourfold, pushing her into withdrawal, forcing her to hide her talent as best as she could, making her sometimes ashamed that she was smarter than the other girls, and even smarter, by the age of eleven, than her instructors.

At fifteen, graduating three years early, she had applied to Princeton in the U.S. on a lark, and shed been accepted with a full scholarship after shed passed the entrance examinations sent to her boarding school. The headmistress was so delighted to be rid of the girl that the school even helped with the money to get her to the States.

No one from her family came to see her off at the train station, or went down to Heathrow. After boarding the airplane she had not looked back.

In England shed been considered a freak, but at Princeton she found herself in a community of students and teachers, many of them just as smart as she was. And shed blossomed.

The low Florida coastline was nothing more than a smudge on the horizon marking the boundary between the gray-green Atlantic and the cloudless blue sky. The Big G rocked gently in the calm swell. Eve, dressed in white coveralls, NOAAs insignia on the breast, hesitated for just a moment before she turned back to the Fox News producer. Her mind had wandered, now that they had come this far. This was just the beginning. And before long the crap would truly hit the fan.

Eve to her friends, or Doc to her assistants, was NOAAs most brilliant climatologist and oceanographer. At this moment she was in her element and yet she felt as if she were trapped, because when they were done with this stage of the experiment she would have to search for funding. It was her least favorite part of real science. God, how she hated askingbeggingfor money.

They stood on the work deck on the fantail of the 264-foot research ship that Eves department at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory had borrowed from NOAAs Marine and Aviations Operations. At 2,328 tons the ship had been originally built as a T-AGOS spy ship for the CIA, but that work was better done these days by satellite. Most of the sophisticated electronic instruments had been left aboard and the stubby ship bristled with antennas, radar, and GPS domes. Tomorrow morning she and the thirteen techs and scientists would be dropped off in Miami and the crew would take the ship back to her homeport of Pascagoula, Mississippi.