DISCONTINUITY

  By

  William Meikle

  Part 1

  If you're determined to drill six miles into the earth's crust, then the best—and worst—place to do it is off the coast of Mexico near Guadalupe. Trust me, I know.

  I was in London in the spring of '58 when the call came through asking me to get involved in the latest attempt to reach the Mohorovic Discontinuity. I had a two month tenure in the City College lecturing on deep sea sedimentation but neither I nor my increasingly bored students were getting much out of it, so I jumped at the chance to show the world what I could do.

  The trip back across the pond then down to the Gulf cost me most of my meager savings and took the best part of three days but I wasn't complaining. I had the big dream in front of me—worldwide patents, million dollar franchises and all that happy talk. Ever since 1909 when Andrija Mohorovičić discovered a discontinuity between the crust and the mantle and noted a zone where seismic waves speed up when they should be slowing down, people have been itching to drill and find out what's there. Nobody—until last year at least—had got more than a couple of hundred feet. But a group of seismologists had recently identified a new weak spot in the Gulf where the crust was thin and with that knowledge—and my drill of course—we had a chance to make history.

  What I'd conveniently forgotten was just how boring history can be. I arrived on THE MOHO VOYAGER in mid-May, full of excitement and hope. By early June I was spending most of my time in the mess with the mainly Mexican crew watching the World Cup and drinking tequila while they tried to fix my drill bit to the rest of the gear on the drilling rig we were moored alongside. By the time it came round to July and we still hadn't started drilling I was just about climbing the walls. I tried listening to the radio but there was only so much drivel about Elvis's time in the Army a grown man could take, so I stuck to the tequila and made my way through the small collection of books and magazines that lay strewn around the mess. I was just getting interested in Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar when a buzz of excitement went through the room.

  We were finally ready to start drilling.

  I was given the honor of pushing the button but it was all a little anti-climactic. I said a few words—something I hoped was uplifting—and away the drill went.

  It did fifteen feet in that first hour and just a little bit more the next. It was only then that I did the calculations in my head—even at that rate we were looking at months of nothing but waiting. I was going to have to find a supply of more Tarzan novels.

  As it turned out, I was kept busier than I would have hoped. The drill bit did its job—for the most part—but the sediment, then rock, we drilled through varied wildly in porosity and density so that we never knew from day to day how deep we would get, or what we might dredge up. I spent my days on the rig in the vicinity of the drill shaft trying to ensure the smoothest operation possible and my evenings in the mess with Tarzan, then John Carter alongside a never-ending procession of tequila shots and packs of Marlboro. When I ran out of books I took to getting beat by the Captain at chess. The little man was quiet but he had a mind like a steel trap and a game to match; I forced a couple of draws out of him but that was as far as I was able to get.

  In early August we had a celebration when we passed the three-mile down mark and I'm afraid the lure of tequila got the better of me. I woke with a stinking headache, made all the worse by the loud ringing of an alarm and the incessant honking of our fog horn despite the fact that bright sunlight lanced in through the porthole above my bunk.

  I went out onto the main deck and into a scene of almost comedic chaos.

  Roberto, the cook, stood at the gunwale, smacking something at his feet with a frying pan, again and again until whatever he was hitting was just a streak of pulpy mush on the deck. Elsewhere the crew seemed mostly to be stomping and yelling in a kind of macabre, badly choreographed, dance. It was only when I saw what the Captain was holding at bay outside the bridge door that I realized this was no laughing matter.

  At first I took them for Horseshoe Crabs—they were about the same, oval, dinner-plate size—but these had claws under the carapace—almost talons—instead of pincers and a squat, stubby rectangular tail that rose in the air as they scuttled across the deck. I finally identified it as one stopped, raised its head and tasted the air with a long pair of frontal feelers—it was an isopod—Bathynomus Giganteus—normally a carnivorous bottom feeder. They weren't anywhere near the bottom now; the whole deck swarmed with scores of them. The one that had tasted the air turned on scuttling legs and came straight for me. I didn't think twice—I stepped forward and kicked it, hard, sending it soaring away over the gunwale.

  "I need some help here," the Captain shouted. He was at the bridge door, trying to close it against a frenzied attack of tens of the isopods. I and three of the deck hands did what we could, stomping and kicking our way up the stairs to his aid, leaving sticky trails of mush and slime behind us. The man next to me bent and tried to lift one of the things in his hands—it turned on him immediately, stripping two of his fingers to the bone with its rough mouth. Our stomping got more frenzied after that but even then the sheer number of the things threatened to overwhelm us. The noise of talons scratching on the steel steps sounded like tearing metal and the tap-tap of their legs on the deck was like rapid gunfire. Everywhere I turned there were more of them and I finally saw the source; they came up the side of drill shaft and across the gangplanks from the rig, dropping down in a wave onto the deck of the VOYAGER. We must have disturbed a colony on the seabed—enough for them to get curious—or hungry.

  That didn't bear thinking about.

  I kept kicking and stomping. Down on the deck one of the hands yelled in pain, bent to grab at where his ankle had been attacked—and immediately had three of the things scuttling up his arms and over his body. I saw his left ear get ripped off, then he fell, immediately submerged in a threshing, squirming pile of the isopods, all eager to get to him and strip the flesh from his bones. His screams were terrible—but thankfully did not last long.

  By this time we had almost reached the Captain at the bridge door. He had a wound on his left cheek streaming blood but he was laying into the attacking isopods hard with a long tire-iron that cut swathes through the beasts like a swinging sword. Between the four of us we managed to clear the doorway and were finally able to drag ourselves in and close the door behind us. We all just stood there, looking at each other for long seconds, each wondering what the hell had just happened—was still happening. We saw through the bridge window that the whole deck swarmed with the beasts, crawling and scuttling over each other in a frenzied search for food. I couldn't see any of the crew—I was just hoping that, like us, most of them had made it to relative safety.

  "Now what?" one of the crew with us said. I realized it had been directed at the Captain.

  "Now we get these boogers off my bloody ship," he said, his features set in grim determination. "Brute force obviously works—but lets try something a bit faster. Fetch the kerosene—we'll burn the bastards out."

  So began the longest day of my life. The Captain dispatched crews all over the boat with only one remit—find the isopods and get rid of them by any means necessary. As it turned out, fire was damned efficient, sending the things skittering away in search of respite from the flames. We were able to herd large numbers of them into an empty cargo hold where they burned, crisping and cracking like hastily cooked bacon. I was while I was helping to get ten more of them into the dark hole that I saw the luminescence for the first time. It was only a faint blue shimmer at that point, for there was bright sunlight coming in from above that did much to dim the effect. But now that I'd seen it I started to notice it in other dark corners where we found the beasts hiding—the light they used to hunt by down in the depths was giving them away up here on the boat.

  As the day drew on and the sun moved round I started to see the glow even stronger—and along with it came a high, whining hum. I had to get up close to one of the things to find the cause—it rubbed its two largest limbs together, fast and furious and, like a cricket, sent out a message that only its fellow isopods had a hope of understanding. But just getting in close showed me something else—and it was something that needed further investigation. Much to the Captain's disgust, I insisted on capturing a live specimen of the things for study—we finally caught one in a fishing net and I had it transported to the lab above the drill shaft out on the rig. I had no time to have a look at it just then though, for the ship was far from clear of the things and it was several weary hours later before the Captain pronounced himself satisfied.

  The last act of that long day was to go out onto the rig and pour a flow of kerosene drown the outside of the drill shaft then set it alight. I didn't hear any more of the high whine but I saw several small bodies fall, flaming, into to the sea far beneath the drill moorings. As night fell we scoured the boat for any luminescence but found none. It seemed the job was done. The captain set a guard on the rig just in case and I dragged myself wearily off to my bunk—I doubted whether even Tarzan or John Carter had ever felt so spent—and fell, fully clothed, into a welcome oblivion.

  Once again I was rudely woken, this time it was by the Captain tugging at my shoulder.

  "We missed one," he said as I rose.

  "It's alive?"

  "Not any more," he said. "But there's something I need you to see and something we need to talk abo ut."

  He led me down to the kitchen and through to the large larder beyond. It looked like a gale had blown through it, with food strewn here, there and everywhere. But that wasn't what he'd brought me to see. The remains of one of the isopods were squished into a mass of pulp on the floor—mere inches from its obvious entry point—a hole that had been made—scratched or eaten—in a half inch thick steel bulkhead.

  We left the cooks to clean up the mess and went up to the Captain's cabin where, without asking, he poured us three fingers of Tequila each that went down the hatch so quickly I hadn't even got my smoke lit before he poured another.

  "Tell me again about the discontinuity," he finally said after we were both lit up.

  I knew that there was little he didn't already know but I also knew that he needed to talk—the appearance of the isopods in such numbers—and the loss of the crewman to them—had us all rattled. So I laid it out for him again as we made our way down the Tequila bottle. I spoke again of how the Russian scientist had discovered the anomalous layer between the mantle and the crust where sound waves behaved differently and the theories as to what might be the cause, from a porous rock stratum to large oil deposits or even, possibly, a liquid metal layer.

  At first I thought he might not reply but then I noticed that he'd definitely been thinking and along lines I had not even considered myself.

  "These things—isopods you call them—you say they live on the bottom?"

  I nodded, unsure where he was going.

  "But they only came up the shaft when we passed three miles. And here's what I'm thinking about—what if they came up from there and not the ocean floor. You saw how it ate through the bulkhead? What if that's what your discontinuity is—these things, down there, eating through rock and sediment and whatever the hell they can find?"

  I shook my head.

  "The pressures and temperature would be too great. It's not possible…"

  He interrupted me.

  "And it's not possible for one of them to eat through a metal wall. And yet here we are." He didn't give me time to reply. "And if they are just bottom feeders that we have disturbed, why didn't they come up when we started drilling and not at three miles down?"

  His questions reminded me of something I'd forgotten—the reason why I'd requested a live specimen.

  "I don't have any answers for you—yet. But maybe the one we caught will tell us something."

  We made our way out onto the deck and across to the rig and the lab above the drill shaft. But our trip was wasted—the glass box lay half on and half off the shelf, clearly having been smashed from the inside.

  "I think we've found where the one we missed came from," the Captain said dryly. "Was there something in particular that caused you to collect it?"

  I hesitated to mention it but worry had suddenly taken root and I wanted, more than anything else, to head back to the tequila and dive into it. The Captain wouldn't take my silence for an answer and insisted.

  "You're not going to like it," I said.

  "I'm already bloody unhappy," he replied. "How much worse can it get?"

  "That's what I'm worried about," I replied, keeping my voice low so that only the Captain might hear. "I didn't get a really good look but I'm pretty certain that the ones that came aboard today were all juveniles—and all recently born at that."

  After that the Captain also decided that more tequila might be needed. Back in his cabin we argued backward and forward as to whether we should abandon the drilling, neither of us being too eager to quit, both of us too scared not to.

  The tequila won in the end. We finished the bottle just as the sun was coming up, having failed to come to any firm conclusions. The simple fact that there had been no further incursions of isopods during the night was enough to firm the Captain's resolve.

  We kept drilling.

  The next three weeks drilling went smoother and faster than any that had gone before, as if we'd broken through into an easier passage. We made more than twenty feet an hour, over thirty for long periods. There were no more Isopod attacks, no sign of them at all. I'd spent several nights after the first swarm standing up on the rig, smoking Marlboro and staring down into the black waters. I watched for signs of luminescence, praying that I didn't see any.

  It was only as we passed the five mile depth and kept going that I started to relax a fraction. Records were being broken and it would be churlish of me not to at least try to take some joy in the achievement. Besides, there was some interesting stuff coming back up the shaft with the slurry. I found particles of strange igneous rock formations the like of which I'd never seen, schist riddled with a translucent green mineral that might even be new to science. And there was the smell—a ripe, almost putrid stench of decay and rot that had us all staying clear of the drill while it lasted. As we approached the zone where the mantle met the crust I was back to being excited about the whole exercise, as giddy as I had been when I first got the call back in London.

  Now that the going was easier we kept the drill going on a twenty four hour operation with rotating shifts. I found myself, as often as not, spending all my waking hours on the rig, either in the lab or sitting on top of the kerosene drums. The Captain had insisted on the fuel's placement on the rig in case of further isopod incursion. I used the drums as a point from which to watch the drill, dangling my feet, chain smoking Marlboro and watching our depth gauge as we crept ever closer to the six mile mark.

  It came one late evening in September. The Captain brought out the Tequila and we had a toast as the gauge hit the mark but if I was expecting anything more it wasn't to be. In the end it was all rather anti-climactic—the drill shaft farted out another waft of toxic odor that forced us back onto the deck of the VOYAGER but there was no other indication that we'd achieved anything of any significance.

  We kept drilling.

  The significant moment arrived four days and a few hours later—near midnight, on a moonless night and at first we scarcely noticed it. If it hadn't been for a slight tremor in the shaft I might have ignored it completely.

  I hadn't been able to sleep—I knew we must be getting close to the discontinuity and I couldn't bring myself to stay away from the drill rig for any great length of time. Even then I only noticed the tremor as I was lighting a smoke—despite a flat calm night the match head seemed to tremble as I introduced it to the end of the cigarette. Then I felt it—the faintest of shakes underfoot but definitely noticeably different from the normal slight sway brought about by the ocean swell.

  Jose Truano was up on the rig walkway above me and he let out a yelp of surprise as he almost lost his footing. At the same time the drill shaft let out a loud creak as if it had come under some greater pressure from below. The drill revved, like a motorcycle being started, then leapt faster, still going down, yards at a time as if there was nothing beneath it to hold it back.

  I shouted up to Jose.

  "Get the Captain. We're through. We've done it."

  My hands shook as I finally lit the smoke—this time it wasn't the tremor from below but sheer excitement and anticipation. Whatever was down there in the discontinuity would already be on its way back up the shaft.

  I was only minutes away from making history.

  The Captain arrived minutes later, still buttoning up his shirt and tucking it into his pants. He took a Marlboro when I offered.

  "You're sure this is it this time?" he asked.

  I pointed at the drill. It was still making fast progress—four, five, six yards a minute. The whole rig trembled and shook and there was a deep, incessant gurgle coming up from far, far below.

  "Any minute now," I said. "Our names will be made for life."

  By the time we had finished our smokes the slurry was clearing from mud and rock to something much more liquid. An oily, rainbow sheen hung overhead and the air tasted thick, almost greasy. I heard a rasp and a clatter, then the shaft coughed up a lump of something heavy—something that Jose had to drag out of the slurry channel with a tire iron. It fell to the rig's decking with a moist thud as the Captain and I went in for a closer look. The oily sheen was much more pronounced now and it hung, shimmering in the air all around us.

 

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