Beyond the Ice Limit

23

AT EIGHT AM, Gideon knocked on the door to Prothero’s marine acoustics lab with a feeling of foreboding. He had managed little more than an hour or two of sleep the night before—if it could be called sleep.

His instinctual dislike of the sonar engineer had only deepened after the man’s galling comment about the “knight in shining armor”—a comment made all the more offensive by Alex’s death.

“Door’s unlocked,” came the muffled voice within.

Gideon eased it open and was greeted by a wave of electronic heat and a fantastical jumble of electronic gadgetry. There, in the corner, he could see Prothero in a torn T-shirt, hunched over a circuit board with a soldering iron. It was exactly as he imagined the lab would look, a god-awful mess, and Prothero himself was utterly predictable in his shabby T-shirt and disheveled contempt for civility. There was nobody else around; the tall Asian woman who had been at Prothero’s side during the earlier briefing had not yet, apparently, reported in.

He waited while Prothero continued to work.

After a long silence Prothero said, without turning: “Be with you in a sec.”

Gideon looked around, but there was no place to sit. Every chair and table was covered with electronic crap; the very walls were invisible, hidden by racks and shelves of exotic equipment. Even Gideon, who had advanced computer skills, did not recognize some of it, especially the stuff that looked jerry-built. But it was clear enough that much of it—the speakers, microphones, and oscilloscopes—involved acoustics.

Prothero finally gave a loud snort of annoyance, straightened up, put away the soldering iron, and swiveled around on the office chair. He came toward Gideon, still seated, pulling himself along with the heels of his feet, the casters of the old chair creaking.

He came to a halt a foot in front of Gideon. “What is it?” he asked.

“We had an appointment?”

A grunt. “Okay.”

And now Gideon had the distinct feeling Prothero didn’t even recall the appointment.

“I wanted to chat with you about the, ah, last transmission from Alex Lispenard.”

Prothero ran a hand over his limp, longish black hair, combing the greasy strands back with his fingers. He rubbed his neck. He looked like he’d been up all night; but then, he always looked like that.

“Have you managed to figure out the glitch?” Gideon asked.

Prothero rotated his head on his scrawny neck, getting the kinks out. “There is no glitch.”

“Of course there’s a glitch, or some other sort of technical problem. I mean with the timing.”

“Just what I said. No glitch.”

“I saw the mini sub crushed,” said Gideon. “I witnessed it. Then five seconds later, her voice came through the hydrophone. If there was no glitch, then obviously there was some sort of delay in the transmission, some kind of time lag.”

“No delay.”

“Come on. What are you saying?”

“What your hydrophone picked up was a direct acoustic sound coming through the water, at that moment.”

“Impossible.”

A shrug from Prothero; some scratching of his arm.

“So you’re saying a dead person spoke,” Gideon pressed on.

“All I’m saying is, there was no glitch.”

“Jesus Christ, of course there was a glitch!”

“Ignorance combined with vehemence doesn’t make it so.”

Gideon tried to hold down his anger. He took a deep breath. “You’re telling me that Alex spoke when, a, she was dead, and b, she was inside the creature?”

“I haven’t gotten far enough to draw those conclusions. Maybe it wasn’t her speaking at all.”

“It was her. I know her voice. Who else could it have been?”

Another maddening shrug.

“Besides, a person can’t speak underwater anyway. You’re telling me someone was able to speak a sentence clearly through four hundred yards of water? Of course there’s a technical issue here. Whatever she said somehow got stuck in an analog conversion algorithm, or whatever, and took a few seconds to come through to my sub.”

“Hey, Gideon?” Another round of neck rotations. “Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?”

Trembling with rage, Gideon forced himself not to utter his next, escalating comment. This was getting nowhere—and he realized it was partly his fault. He had come in here with a chip on his shoulder; he was way too emotionally invested in the outcome; and he was letting this jackass get under his skin.

“I’m just trying to understand,” he said with barely maintained calm. “You see, a good friend died.”

“Look, I get it. I get that you’re freaked out. I’m sorry about what happened. But don’t come in here telling me my job. I’m way ahead of you.”

“Then how about filling me in on where you are? I would appreciate that very much.” Someday he would kick this son of a bitch’s ass all the way to the South Pole—but not just now.

“Thank you.” Prothero scratched his arm again, like an ape. Gideon waited, letting the silence build.

“I’ve been working on the physics of how that message was actually transmitted through the water. And here’s where I’m at.”

He fell silent.

“Go on,” Gideon said after a minute.

“It’s weird as shit.”

“How so?”

“It was digital.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know the difference between analog and digital sound waves? One looks smooth, while the other is made up of individual samples. Time slices. Little steps, like a staircase. This one was digital. And the wave was constructed to pass through water so it would sound normal when it emerged from the speaker, back in the air, the way it did coming out of your hydrophone.”

“But…how?”

Another shrug. “No biological system produces digital sound. Or digital anything. Only electronics do that. And that blue whale vocalization? Also digital. It came from the Baobab—not from above.”

“The Baobab made a blue whale sound? Digitally?”

“Yup.”

“So…this thing isn’t alive? It’s a machine? It’s like—recording audio signals and playing them back at us?”

“Who knows what the hell it is, or what it’s doing?”

Gideon stared at the engineer. “We don’t have to know what it is,” he said slowly, “to kill it.”