The three scientists sat in the lab, at the lowest level of the ship. The lab had no windows, but several very large monitors revealed what the outside cameras were seeing, even in the darkest ocean. The lab was a single large room with a few freezers, refrigerator units, holding tanks, large tables with sinks, and various items found in any other state-of-the-art laboratory. It was very well lit with overhead LED fixtures. The perimeter of the room was round like every other deck on the ship, and there were workstations with comfortable chairs and large plasma screen monitors everywhere.
Ian sat in a large chair reading a manual on decompression.
“Ya know,” he said. “Even if we are lucky enough to get a live animal in one of the entry tubes, we’d have to decompress it for months to be able to bring it aboard without having it explode. By the time it was safe to bring it in, it would be dead from starvation anyway.”
“It won’t be months—maybe a week or two,” said Theresa. “And there’ll be the bait in the tubes. The sea creatures at these depths are used to going for long periods without food. It’s why their mouths and stomachs are so huge—they don’t get many opportunities to feed.”
“Yeah, Theresa, I’m quite familiar with the feeding habits of deep-sea animals, thank you. But I’m also reading the timetables for decompression. This is all theoretical bullshit. No creature’s gonna go from twenty thousand feet of pressure to thirty-three feet and not just fuckin’ explode internally.”
She smiled and crossed her arms. “Wanna bet?”
Ian smiled back. “What’s the bet?”
“That we can decompress whatever we catch in less than a week and bring it aboard our holding tanks without killing it.”
“And if we can’t, you have to get naked,” he said with a huge grin.
“You wish. If we can’t, I’ll publish a report that credits you with your prediction. And if we do have any success, you have to write a report that says ‘the brilliant Dr. Meyers, in contradiction to accepted theory, was able to safely keep a deep-sea creature alive, etc., etc., etc.’ The animals at these depths have developed without air spaces. It’s the air spaces that get compressed and then cause all the problems. I think these creatures can be decompressed much faster than the generally accepted theories.”
Mike chimed in. “I like the idea of you having to get naked better.”
“Yeah? And if Ian loses, you wanna see him naked, too?” she asked.
“Good God, no. I’d be scarred for life.”
“Yeah, well, me too!” she laughed.
Ian stood up and sucked in his small belly. “Come on now! It’s not that bad!”
Mike made a serious face, deep in thought. “Let’s give it a test run,” he said.
“The tubes?” Theresa asked.
“Yeah. Why not? We’ll bait ’em up and see if we can catch anything.”
“We’re doing twenty knots, genius,” she said. “You going to try and go trawling from the inside of a tube?”
Mike thought about it. “Yeah. We’ll use the bluefish bait on wire leaders so they extend to the end of the tube. That stuff stinks to high heaven. It should attract something that can swim twenty knots.”
Theresa and Ian looked at each other and shrugged. “Better clear it with the skipper first.”
Mike was just about to call up to the bridge when he started laughing. “Holy crap—I just got it.”
“Got what?” asked Theresa.
“We’re explorers, right? Our leaders are Lewis and Clark! That’s funny!”
Ian and Theresa shook their heads. They hadn’t made the association either, but now that Mike had, it was obvious and ironic. Mike called the bridge and explained to “Meriwether” that they would like to run a test on the Animal Capture and Decompression Units. The ACDs looked exactly like oversized torpedo tubes. Although they had been water-tested many times, they had never actually tried to capture any fish in them. Although Commander Lewis, who didn’t know that the science team was now referring to him as Meriwether, didn’t think they’d be able to snag any fish at twenty knots, he agreed to the drill.
Mike baited a large hook with some bluefish out of their freezer and attached the metal leader to the back of the tube on a mechanical line feeder. He then opened the inner door, attached the line, and sealed the door shut. The seal on the outer door was then opened slowly and the tube was allowed to flood. Once the tube was full of water, the outer door was opened and an interior robot arm was used to release the baited hook out into the strong current, where it sailed along next to the giant sphere.
Up on the bridge, the MC announced in its calm female voice, “ACD door one has been opened . . .”
Inside the lab, the three scientists repositioned the camera to be able to keep an eye on their bait. For fifteen minutes, nothing happened and the three of them grew bored. Just as they were about to go on to other tasks, a medium-sized yellowtail hit the bluefish bait and tried to take off. The hook caught its strong jaw and the fish darted wildly up and down the side of the hull. Mike grabbed the controller for the winch, and slowly the line began retracting. The large arcs the fish made through the water grew smaller as the line pulled it tighter toward the outer hatchway. The strong fish tried its best to fight, but the contest wasn’t fair, and the mechanical winch would not grow tired. Eventually, the exhausted fish ended up confined inside the ACD, and Mike closed and sealed the outer door.
“We got us a fish!” Mike exclaimed victoriously.
“And a tasty one, too,” said Theresa as she looked at it closely on the monitor. “It’s a yellowtail amberjack. My favorite sushi on the planet. Please tell me we have wasabi and soy sauce aboard this vessel.”
Ian laughed. “I doubt it. Nice grab, though. I didn’t think we’d catch shit.”
The three of them got up and pulled over the smaller containment tank. It was basically a fifteen-hundred-gallon glass fish tank on wheels. The specs were different than a typical household fish tank, which typically had one-inch-thick glass even on a tank this size. These tanks were three inches thick, with metal-reinforced corners designed for high pressure. A large hose fit over a cowling at one end of the tank that attached to the flooded ACD.
As the ACD was slowly depressurized through an interior hose, its inner door was opened and the contents—water and fish—were dumped down into the containment tank. The only complication was the fact that the fish was still hooked to a line which now ran through the hose back to the interior of the ACD. Mike used the mechanical arm to cut the line and clear it, then resealed the inner door. Thirty minutes after they had baited their first hook, the three of them stood with huge grins, watching a nine-pound fish freak out inside their fish tank.
“It will be a bit more complicated when the fish is coming in from twenty thousand feet, you know,” said Ian.
Theresa called up to the captain. “Skipper, is there wasabi in the galley?”
A pause. “You kidding me? You catch a fish?”
“Yellowtail. No kidding.” She was quietly beaming with pride.
“Impressive, Doc. Sorry to say, I don’t recall seeing wasabi on the manifest. Typical government operation. Drop us into the ocean with no preparation for fresh seafood.”
The three doctors could hear Tony upstairs in the background of the transmission. “Probably because they figured the fish had a better chance of having fresh beef than we had of fresh seafood.”
“I did see ketchup in the galley,” said the skipper.
“See? And I bet no hot sauce or salsa. Discrimination in the workplace again,” said Tony.