| |
PACIFIC OCEAN. 60 MILES WEST OF VANCOUVER ISLAND, BRITISH COLOMBIA:
Mike Tanner steps out from the control bridge of his white and light blue, two-hundred-foot ocean research ship, the Mystic, and stares down at the open deck on the stern. His research company in Seattle has developed a new type of ultrasound system capable of finding methane hydride, a compressed methane gas held together by frozen water molecules, and only found in deep water.
An hour ago, the ultrasound unit on the ship located a large deposit, and he sent a two-person submarine down to retrieve a sample. After decades of burning fossil fuels, everyone is desperate for a clean energy source, such as methane.
He leans his arms on the railing behind the bridge and listens to the quiet humming from the hydraulic pump, as the extension arm on the hoist raises a fifteen-foot white submarine from the ocean. Water dribbles across the dull-gray deck as the submarine swings around and is lowered onto a storage bracket on the left side of the stern.
A moment later, the winch shuts down and Mike stands and looks at the slim Scandinavian man standing beside him at the railing. “They said it’s a pretty big slab of methane, John.”
Captain John Dieter grins at his boss. He has waited years for an opportunity like this, but it’s not to be the Captain of the Mystic and searching for methane. He has a far grander need for this high-tech ship and its submarine. For now, he’s a dutiful Captain and friend. “It appears your new unit is working as promised, Mike,” he says with a slight accent.
They walk down the outside stairs to the deck and across to the submarine. The deckhand leans a white fiberglass ladder against the side of the sub, and both men look up at the sound of the hatch being opened.
Lisa Harding climbs up through the opening of the submarine and waves down at Mike and Dieter waiting on the deck below. “It’s what we expected, Mike,” she hollers, then turns around to climb backward down the ladder.
Mike smiles as he remembers meeting Lisa at the alternative fuels seminar in Las Vegas, Nevada two months ago. At the end of the seminar, the slender five-foot-four woman had timidly followed him to the lounge and asked to sit at his table. Her hazel eyes stared at him through thin steel-rimmed glasses, as she stated she is a chemical specialist and he needs her expertise. He liked her self-confidence about her ability and told her when she would start working for him here on the Mystic.
When Lisa steps down on the deck and turns around to face him, Mike notices the concern in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure. There’s something else mixed in with the methane.”
“Is it dangerous?” Dieter inquires.
“No. The methane has an odd color, but it’s not dangerous.”
They hear the hatch close and look up at the operator standing on top of the sub.
Okana, (O’Conna), runs his hand through his shaggy blond hair. “I have a recording you should look at, Mike. We saw something strange going on with the methane.” He turns around and climbs down the ladder.
Mike looks at the six-foot-one, solidly built man from San Diego, California, and is even more curious about the methane. “Josh is waiting for us in the lounge. Let’s go take a look.”
They follow Mike across the fifty-foot-wide, by sixty-foot-long open deck, and through the double doors centered in the rear bulkhead of the ship. The doors open into a long walkway that continues straight through the center of the main deck to Mike’s office and personal living quarters at the bow.
Just inside the doors, they pass a single door on the left that goes into Lisa’s laboratory, and twenty-feet farther, they turn right through a ten-foot-square opening in the wall. Just inside the opening on the right, a set of stairs goes up to the bridge. On the left, across from the bridge stairs, another set of steps goes down to the individual cabins, bathroom facilities, and the engine control room on the lower deck.
They go past the stairs into the large open lounge and dining area, with smoke-tinted windows spaced along the far wall. On the right side of the room, a serving counter divides the open kitchen from the dining table and chairs, and on the left side of the table is the lounge area.
A burly man stands up from a desk in the corner near a window. “I hear you found the mother lode,” Joshua Mason states in his baritone voice.
Mike thinks the six-foot-six gentle giant from the Midwest looks more like a lumberjack than the computer and electronics expert for the ship.
Josh grins at Mike. “I get stock options for this, don’t I boss?”
Mike grins and points at Okana. “Before you start counting your riches, he has a recording we need to see.”
Josh takes the flash-drive from Okana and inserts it into the computer on his desk. A fifty-eight-inch flat screen television mounted to the forward wall shows the recording. The brilliant lights from the submarine illuminate the gray-green slab of frozen methane on the ocean floor. The massive oval-shape is roughly three-hundred-yards-long by two-hundred-yards-wide and close to thirty-feet-thick. Oddly, it appears to be growing upward from a long, large crack in the ocean floor.
Lisa walks over, stands next to the television, and points at the slab. “What has me concerned is the green color. It could be some type of algae. Maybe we’ve found a new species that lives in methane.”
“Here it comes,” Okana tells them. “We saw this on our approach. Keep an eye on the area beyond the methane.”
A mass of white bubbles wobble up beyond the slab and everyone looks at Lisa for an explanation.
Lisa shrugs her shoulders. “I have no idea. At that temperature and pressure, the methane cannot be melting on its own.” She holds up a small silver tube. “I’ll take this sample of gas to my lab for analysis. Maybe the strange color is a new type of organism and the bubbles are a waste product.”
Mike follows Lisa out of the lounge and across the walkway into her laboratory. She sits in front of her worktable and screws the end of the pressurized stainless steel cylinder into the mass spectrometer. She enters a command into the computer, and moments later, the results appear on the computer monitor.
Mike sees her puzzled expression. “Is something wrong?”
Lisa looks up and nods yes. “There is something wrong with the composition of the methane. It contains large amounts of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, fluorocarbons, sulfur dioxide, and several other chemicals that you probably won’t recognize.”
“What does it mean?”
“Those elements are only found in the atmosphere, not underwater. I can’t explain why they are in the methane.”
Mike leans back against the worktable as he looks at Lisa. “So what do we do?”
“I really don’t know. As far as using it for an alternative power source, it’s too contaminated to be worth the trouble of retrieving.”
“Okay, I can live with that. Still, I’d like to know more about those bubbles. You mentioned it might be a new life form.”
“I think the bubbles were coming up through the methane and not from behind it.”
“I’ll talk to Okana about going back down for a closer look. We’ll take the remote rover to explore the area. It can maneuver around the methane much faster than the sub can.”
“You won’t make any money that way, Mike.”
Mike nods agreement. “I don’t care about the money, Lisa. I have more than I could ever spend. I just want to satisfy my curiosity and discover new things. If I can solve some of the world’s problems while I’m doing it, that’s great. Like you said, maybe it’s a new life form, and the bubbles are part of its metabolism. If it attracts those chemical elements you mentioned from the atmosphere, maybe it could help clean up our mess.”
“I agree. We’ll need a sample from a bubble to learn more, and we should do an ultrasound with the new rover unit. The one here on the ship only found the methane for us, but it couldn’t penetrate deep enough to tell us how far down it extends. Maybe the rest of the methane in the crack will be worth recovering. Give me a little more time and I’ll go back down with Okana.”
“No, this time I’m going down. Why should you have all the fun? It’s my turn.”
Lisa smiles up at Mike. Sometimes her five-foot-seven boss reminds her of a fifty-year-old boy. He isn’t what people consider handsome, but decent looking. “You just want to play with your new toy.”
Mike grins. “That’s the best part of being the boss.”
***
Okana checks the gauges inside the submarine one last time, then looks in the rearview mirror mounted above the thick, clear bubble window that is the nose of the submarine. Mike is sitting directly behind him, with a wide grin and a sparkle in his eyes.
Okana grins at Mike’s childlike enthusiasm. “Mystic, this is Wizard. We’re going down,” he says into his headset.
Mike feels the g-force as Okana engages the rear thruster and they are finally underway. He’s excited about operating the new remote controlled rover, one of three carried on the Mystic. Each is designed by the ship’s engineer for a specific purpose. Besides its telephoto lens, this rover is equipped with a miniature version of the new ultrasound unit. It will enable them to look through the slab of methane and determine what’s beneath it in the crack.
Mike sees Okana’s reflection in the mirror. “You never told me what you did after you graduated from college, Okana. That was eight years ago, wasn’t it?”
Okana likes Mike, and wishes he could tell him he worked for the CIA, but it’s classified. “Let’s just say I traveled a lot. Places you probably never heard of.”
Mike knows how tight-lipped Okana is about his past. He met the thirty-six-year-old at a beach-side bar in San Diego, California when they were both smiling at two bikini-clad women who strolled in. Okana had smirked and indicated to the women, and before he knew it, they were sitting at a table with the two lovely ladies. He said his name is just Okana, he has a degree in mechanical engineering, and was currently unemployed. When Okana signed the contract to work for him two months ago, he had put the letter ‘F’ for a first name without an explanation. He still doesn’t know what the ‘F’ stands for.
Twenty minutes later, at a depth of 3,900 feet, the greenish white slab of methane hydride appears through the front window. Okana maneuvers the sub to a level area and sets down on the seafloor. “It’s all yours, Mike.”
Mike sets the joystick control unit on his lap and watches the video display from the rover on a small screen mounted to the back of Okana’s chair. He presses the button to release the latches and maneuvers the rover forward to the methane.
“We’ve got a good picture up here, Mike.” Lisa’s voice tells him through his headset.
Lisa and Josh are sitting in her laboratory, watching the wireless video transmissions from the sub and the rover. The new technology developed for the ultrasound allows the transmissions to reach the Mystic with no degradation to the signal, so they do not need a long cable. A design he leased to the U.S. Government.
Mike maneuvers the rover down to the edge of the slab, and that’s when they notice a change in color. The slab of methane is divided horizontally from the ice in the crack by a sixteen-inch thick layer of black material.
“Could you zoom in a little closer, Mike?” Lisa asks.
“Yeah, hang on a second.” Mike maneuvers the rover and adjusts the camera lens. “How’s that?”
Lisa sees a clear picture of the black material. “That’s good. It must have been covered by the algae, so we didn’t see it last time.”
Above the black line, the green-tinted ice is the mixture of the methane and other gases they sampled, but below the line, transparent ice disappears down into the crack in the seabed.
“What do you make of that, Lisa?” Mike asks.
“I’d say the lower ice is made of purified water, but that’s impossible. Maneuver over the center of the slab and we’ll do an ultrasound.”
“Understood.” Mike maneuvers the Rover to the center of the slab and slowly brings it down onto the surface. “How’s that?”
“Perfect. Here we go, 3, 2, 1, on.”
Brilliant blue light flashes in front of the sub for a fraction of a second. Okana blinks furiously trying to remove the blue dot in his vision, but it seems burnt into his retinas.
Something slams into the sub, tossing it around like a toy and bouncing it against the seafloor. Okana struggles to regain control as the sub rolls repeatedly through the water, away from the methane, but the disorientation makes his efforts useless.
The spinning tosses Mike out of his seat and pins him against the wall of the sub. The turbulent action makes him nauseous, and he fights desperately to hold it down.
The sub bounces end over end across the sea floor before finally slamming onto the muck, then it slides through the muddy sediment for a few seconds before stopping. All the lights blink off, and the only sound is their rapid breathing.