He muttered, "Actually, there have been no incidents."
"Are any expected? Even as a remote possibility?"
"Anything is remotely possible. But actually sperm whales are too intelligent to monkey with us and giant squid are too shy."
"Can they see us?"
"Yes, of course. We're lit up."
"Do you have floodlights?"
"We're already past the large-animal range, but we have them, and I'll turn them on for you."
Through the black of the window there suddenly appeared a snow-storm, an inverted upward-falling snowstorm. The blackness had come alive with stars in three-dimensional array and all moving upward.
Demerest said, "What's that?"
"Just crud. Organic matter. Small creatures. They float, don't move much, and they catch the light. We're going down past them. They seem to be going up in consequence."
Demerest's sense of perspective adjusted itself and he said, "Aren't we dropping too quickly?"
"No, we're not. If we were, I could use the nuclear engines, if I wanted to waste power; or I could drop some ballast. I'll be doing that later, but for now everything is fine. Relax, Mr. Demerest. The snow thins as we dive and we're not likely to see much in the way of spectacular life forms. There are small angler fish and such but they avoid us."
Demerest said, "How many do you take down at a time?"
"I've had as many as four passengers in this gondola, but that's crowded. We can put two bathyscaphes in tandem and carry ten, but that's clumsy. What we really need are trains of gondolas, heavier on the nukes-the nuclear engines-and lighter on the buoyancy. Stuff like that is on the drawing board, they tell me. Of course, they've been telling me that for years."
"There are plans for large-scale expansion of Ocean-Deep, then?"
"Sure, why not? We've got cities on the continental shelves, why not on the deep-sea bottom? The way I look at it, Mr. Demerest, where man can go, he will go and he should go. The Earth is ours to populate and we will populate it. All we need to make the deep sea habitable are completely maneuverable 'scaphes. The buoyancy chambers slow us, weaken us, and complicate the engineering."
"But they also save you, don't they? If everything goes wrong at once, the gasoline you carry will still float you to the surface-. What would do that for you if your nuclear engines go wrong and you had no buoyancy?"
"If it comes to that, you can't expect to eliminate the chances of accident altogether, not even fatal ones."
"I know that very well," said Demerest feelingly.
Javan stiffened. The tone of his voice changed. "Sorry. Didn't mean anything by that. Tough about that accident."
"Yes," said Demerest. Fifteen men and five women had died. One of the individuals listed among the "men " had been fourteen years old. It had been pinned down to human failure. What could a head safety engineer say after that?
"Yes," he said.
A pall dropped between the two men, a pall as thick and as turgid as the pressurized sea water outside. How could one allow for panic and for distraction and for depression all at once? There were the Moon-Blues-stupid name-but they struck men at inconvenient times. It wasn't always noticeable when the Moon-Blues came but it made men torpid and slow to react.
How many times had a meteorite come along and been averted or smothered or successfully absorbed? How many times had a Moonquake done damage and been held in check? How many times had human failure been backed up and compensated for? How many times had accidents not happened?
But you don't payoff on accidents not happening. There were twenty dead-
Javan said (how many long minutes later?), "There are the lights of Ocean-Deep!"
Demerest could not make them out at first. He didn't know where to look. Twice before, luminescent creatures had flicked past the windows at a distance and with the floodlights off again, Demerest had thought them the first sign of Ocean-Deep. Now he saw nothing.
"Down there," said Javan, without pointing. He was busy now, slowing the drop and edging the 'scaphe sideways.
Demerest could hear the distant sighing of the water jets, steam-driven, with the steam formed by the heat of momentary bursts of fusion power.
Demerest thought dimly: Deuterium is their fuel and it's all around them. Water is their exhaust and it's all around them.
Javan was dropping some of his ballast, too, and began a kind of distant chatter. "The ballast used to be steel pellets and they were dropped by electromagnetic controls. Anywhere up to fifty tons of it were used in