trellis and switched the transponder and beacon on. The latter began to flash, once every ten seconds. Deckhands undid the sphere’s lashing. From the winch, the cable now ran up through the A-frame’s block and then out around the starboard rail, where the bosun cotter-pinned it to a grommet at the sphere’s south pole. Sutherland, obviously better at this job than me, took over on the winch. My new job was to keep the line from fouling on the rail. As I leaned against the cold steel, and stretched my arms out over the water in a seemingly beseeching gesture, cable slack across my numb and pruning palms, the waves heaving past seemed close enough to touch. They had been gray all day long, but here, up close, in the glare of the deck lights, they were turquoise and crystalline, shot through with light, and tempting somehow—so close, so beautiful, so cold, so deep. Out beyond the edge of the light, a glaucous gull floated contentedly on a swell, a white dot of sentience in the icy dark.
Now a deck crane lifted the yellow sphere into the air, dangling it like a colossal Christmas tree ornament or the yo-yo of a god, then swung it over the side, and let it fall. The splash was tremendous, a great diadem of droplets bursting from beneath it. The cable came alive in my hands, and I pulled it taut. It felt as though I’d hooked an enormous fish, an enormous, yellow, spherical fish. The sphere drifted out and then aft, and I drifted with it, following it to the stern, keeping the cable clear of the rail, until Ostrom gave the yell, “Let it go!” and I set the cable free. Away the sphere went over the waves, its beacon flashing, and my heart leapt with a curious exhilaration. Its yellow form was bright against the blue waves, which is why, of course, oceanographers paint their floats and buoys the color of a rubber duck, the color that in the gray-green welter of the sea is easiest to spot. It was the only bright thing out there, the only symmetrical thing out there, the only human thing—or at least the only human thing visible to the naked eye.
Measured in meters and minutes, the night slowly unspooled. My hands grew numb, the sphere’s flashing beacon fainter and fainter as it receded behind the intervening waves, a distant star that you had to wait to catch a glimpse of. And then it was gone, and with it went the last remnants of my exhilaration. It was impossible to stay warm and dry. The cold rain and the cold wind sneaked in at my collar and cuffs. Besides the rain, there was the spindrift. Everything was wet, and blurry. Water blurred my vision, fatigue blurred my mind. I wished I’d taken a nap that afternoon.
A foot or two from the stern’s edge, the men in jumpsuits wrestled instruments onto the black cable—the current meters, the thermometers, the SALPs loaded with yellow floats—and then coaxed them overboard one by one. It seemed a wonder that none of them tumbled after. Every so often, Ostrom would yell commands in my direction—“Donovan, man the air tugger!” “Donovan, up on the winch, give Dave a break!” “When I point down, you pay it out, goddammit!” These were the easy jobs, but in my numb, sleep-deprived inexperience, they seemed plenty hard, and grew harder as the night wore on. At the winch, I stood braced with worry, muttering to myself, “Down means out, down means out,” trying my best to keep my mind from wandering when all it wanted to do was wander off to sleep.
Late—how late exactly I don’t know, at three in the morning, or maybe four—Ostrom pointed at a rope and commanded me to take it over there, to the corner, behind the deck crane, and coil it up, neatly, the way he’d shown us that sunlit afternoon our second day at sea. The rope was a tangled mess, and that corner of the deck was slippery with grease. I hydroplaned around in my boots. Time seemed to slow, and the world to diminish, until there was nothing but me and that damn rope, my adversary, locked in slippery battle. It took me forever to untangle the thing. I kept falling down, stumbling into the crane, or into the starboard rail, where the waves no longer seemed tempting, but menacing. I was shivering uncontrollably by then, feeling