Free Ultra Deep by William H. Lovejoy Page A

triangular shapes, to fit into the inside curvature of the pressure hull. The panels contained gauges, digital readouts, cathode ray tubes, switches, rheostats, and circuit breakers. They monitored and controlled such systems as the central processing computer, power routing, graphic recorders, the tracking transponder transceiver, liquid coolant, alarms, various sonar components, the navigation depth plotter, the doppler transceiver, the main propulsion, the manipulator control electronics, and the altitude/depth transceiver, among others.
    Taking a dive in the ocean was not as simple as it sometimes seemed to outsiders.
    In front of Brande was a control panel with two joysticks protruding from it. He was piloting the DepthFinder , using the joysticks to control propulsion and velocity in six different directions. He had managed to bring them to a depth of 5,000 feet in slightly over an hour, not that he had much control over it. Achieving depth was a consequence of the amount of weight added to the exterior hull. Unlike submarines, deep submersibles did not change buoyancy through the use of air and water ballast tanks, although DepthFinder II could pump water in and out of small ballast tanks to stabilize her depth. Taking a dive was not as quickly accomplished as it sometimes seemed that it ought to be.
    It was dark inside the hull. Exterior and interior lights were left off during the long descents in order to conserve electrical power. Only red, amber, blue, and green light emitting diodes and digital readouts provided illumination. On the outside, total darkness had been achieved at 1,200 feet. Sunlight did not penetrate beyond that depth.
    In front of Dokey was a control panel similar to that of Brande, but the joysticks there were used to control the remotely-operated vehicles which could be attached to the DepthFinder on 250-foot cables.
    The air was stale, a consequence of the lithium hydroxide blower which recirculated the air to remove carbon dioxide. Pure oxygen providing life-support was slowly bled into the sphere from tanks located outside the pressure hull.
    “I think you’re taking up too much room, Dane,” Brandie Anderson said.“Iʼd like to stretch my legs out, but you’re in the way.”
    Once inside the sphere, no one stretched anything. There was no room to stand up.
    “You can walk next time,” Brande told her.
    “It’s okay,” Dokey told her. “I’ll walk with you. We can hold hands and things.”
    “Keep your things to yourself, Okey,” Anderson said.
    “It’s your things I was thinking about. Hup! Here we go, Dane.”
    Dokey had the side-looking sonar powered up and displaying an image on the port video screen, though the sound was turned down. Now, he increased the volume, and dozens of tiny pings could be heard on the speaker. The screen showed the sonar returns as they bounced off a few dozen metallic objects. The cliff was not outlined since they were well below its top.
    Nothing could be seen through the portholes. Pure blackness.
    Brande leaned forward and cut in the magnetometer, which measured anomalies in the earth’s electromagnetic field. It, too, displayed several dozen targets.
    “All right, Okey. Let’s power up.”
    Brande hit a pump switch and pumped off enough water ballast to slow, then stop, the descent.
    Dokey used a rheostat to increase the interior lighting a trifle, then turned on the big halogen exterior lights. There were four of them, but six million candlepower only cut into the darkness ahead of them by thirty feet.
    There was nothing out there.
    Brande checked the gyro-compass and saw that their heading was 166 degrees.
    “We want about fifty degrees, don’t we, Okey?”
    “If we’re where we think we are, that’s what we want, Chief.”
    Twisting the knob on top of the right joystick counterclockwise, Brande activated the bow thruster, and the sub revolved to the left.
    Nothing appeared in the porthole, and Dokey activated the exterior video