Free Ultra Deep by William H. Lovejoy Page B

camera, putting the image on the center screen. Nice clear picture of black.
    Brande eased in some forward speed with the left joystick and watched the screen. Slowly, out of the blackness, came nodules of rock, veined with cracks, appearing blue-white under the halogen lights.
    “Cliff face,” Dokey said.
    Brande hit reverse for a second, then centered the stick. The DepthFinder stabilized. There was a current, but a mild one. The sub drifted southward minutely.
    “I think we’re close enough,” Anderson said quickly.
    Brande suspected that all of them were thinking about what could come tumbling down from above. Alvin , the submersible that had been used to locate the Titanic , had once been trapped in a crevice on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for over four hours at 9,000 feet of depth. Only a successful effort by the pilot had resulted in his banging his way out of the rocky overhang.
    “Let’s see what Atlas sees,” Brande said.
    “On the way, Chief.”
    Dokey took a loving grip on his controls, and the Remotely Operated Vehicle soon appeared on the center screen, moving slowly out of its sheath on the underside of the sub, trailing its Kevlar-shielded cable behind it. The cable floated in the water like a weary snake. Atlas looked like a small sled, a rectangular fiberglass housing mounted on a pair of steel skids. It was painted white with diagonal yellow stripes rising up its sides to aid in visibility. It maintained its position in the water with three multibladed propellers mounted at odd angles — two aimed obliquely upward, and one mounted at a 45-degree angle to its stern. Attached to the front of the sled, in addition to the fixed 35-millimeter camera and the video camera which transmitted its images to the sub via fiber-optic cables, was a manipulator arm designed by Dokey. It had six axes of movement, and the claw at the end of the arm could deposit its findings in a shallow wire basket fixed between the skids of the ROV.
    Brande reached over to Dokey’s panel, flipped a switch, and the video image from the ROV’s camera appeared on the submersible’s starboard screen.
    The three of them watched in near awe — the fascination never seemed to wane — as the ROV advanced slowly on the cliff face. The image on the screen danced as the robot shifted in the currents.
    The face of the cliff became clearly apparent under Atlas’ s pair of lights.
    “Looks like about a fifty-degree slope,” Dokey said. 
    “I agree,” Brande said. “I wouldn’t want to work it with DepthFinder. ”
    The ROV closed to within five feet of the trench side, the details standing out more clearly as the robot approached and the floodlights dissipated less energy into watery space. There was no visible life, no flora or fauna. Anything with life would be microscopic. The soil looked soft, swirled like lava where it had drifted in the currents. The rock outcroppings were jagged. Cracks and depressions in the rock were ebony where the light did not penetrate.
    At moments like this, Brande always had to force himself to remember that eons might have passed since light of any kind had shown on the bottom. He felt pretty insignificant, lost in all that time and history.
    Dokey reset the range on the sonar readout screen and, using the sonar signals as his guide, manipulated his controls. Atlas moved up and down the cliff face, sliding from side to side. The picture on the screen was monotonous until…
    “There!” Anderson shouted.
    “Hey, damn, Brandie,” Dokey said. “I can hear you”
    It was a corner of a gold ingot, barely protruding from the soil. Dokey moved the robot in close to it. The manipulator arm appeared in the picture, twisting slightly, reaching out, opening its claw, scraping at the earth. Translated through a complex computer program, the arm was controlled from a third joystick on Dokey’s panel and the two fingers and one thumb of the claw reacted to slide switches that Dokey moved with two fingers and