Dangerous Descent

Just because Mike was a billionaire, didn’t mean he didn’t need to listen to his wife. Cathy patiently waited for him to finish explaining all the details of his new gadget, an ACH160 business helicopter, as they ate dinner.

After his lengthy monologue, Cathy jumped in to fill him in on a topic that was much more dear to her heart.

“My sister is having her 25th anniversary party. It's in Sheboygan, this July.”

“That’s nice.” He said, while chewing on the white asparagus appetizer, obviously still thinking about helicopters. One needs to be direct with men, she thought.

“I need you to attend the anniversary with me, so you’ll need to finish your little scuba trip before then.”

“It's not scuba. It's a submersible. And it’s not just me, we have an entire team. The world’s best aquatic engineers have been working on this project.”

“If you don’t dive this year, that shipwreck will still be there next year.” A simple truism to sum up the situation. She hoped he could guess at where this verbal reasoning would go next if he wasn't flexible about his schedule.

“You're right, babe. As always. I’ll tell them to speed things up.”

**

In Pensacola, Florida, submersible engineers Jake and Seth opened a pair of Panhandle IPAs. They had spent a long day testing the high pressure characteristics of the Little Gulp’s titanium hull.

“Everything looks ready to get this hull down to 12,000 feet,” Jake said. “It all work. We now just need to wire everything together.” Jake was the visionary of the company and kept things moving forward.

Seth was the company naysayer. “Anderson Controls says there’s a four-month lead time to delivering a control panel.” Seth was also the one who handled all the pesky details of invoices and inventories.

“Four months? Disappointing,” Jake fretted. “Our customers are impatient. If we don’t make this work, those billionaires will hire someone else.”

He took another swig of beer, and went over to turn on their company's PlayStation. Now and then, they’d play a few rounds before going home. It would be good to get Seth to relax a bit, brainstorm and think out of the box.

“Come on. A round of Stellaris?” Jake said, putting a controller into Seth’s hands.

When Seth was fully immersed in sending starships out for intergalactic conquest, he looked happy with the world again. Ideas would flow from his engineering mind.

**

The dishes of their 6-course meal were being cleared away by the kitchen staff, after dinner espresso was being served, and Cathy felt deeply content with her life. It was nice to have Mike at home for a change, too.

“Don’t you ever want to go out, live a little?” he asked.

“What sort of live-a-little do you mean?” she asked. They had some fun adventures in their 20s in San Francisco.

“Eat baked beans out of a can in a camping tent. That sort of thing, instead of all this.”

“Not an overnight trip to Paris? Or a rock concert? Camping?” She chuckled. “I don't think so. That’s for you, not for me.” 

“Live a little?”

“I let you have your adventures, get it out of your system. But, do you really think it’s a good idea to go down in a submarine to the Goositania?”

“I’ve climbed Everest, Kilimanjaro, trekked to the North Pole. What else could be next?”

Cathy didn't have an answer for that. “I'd say be home for dinner to anyone else. But for you, all I have to say is to be back for my sister's anniversary.”

The media said Mike was a force of nature. She had grown to accept that she could divert that force, but she couldn’t always completely stop it.

**

Standing in front of the Little Gulp, Seth was in a pessimistic mood as usual.

“Climbing Mount Everest is technically far safer than descending to the Goositania.”

“Think positive. We’re going to do this.” Jake fist bumped his shoulder. 

“Think about it: the top of Mt. Everest has 1/3 of the air pressure of sea level, when you reach the Goositania, the pressure is 375x sea level.”

“Crossing the road has risks. Taking an airplane flight has risks. We tested the hull multiple times. We can deal with pressure,” Jake said. “We already dealt with that from Mike Greenham didn’t we?”

**

At least she could get him to do something for her on his trip to keep her in mind.

“If you’re so intent on going, at least bring me back a few things. They had great chinaware in the movie,” she asked her husband.

“We will be in a high pressure hull, looking out a tiny porthole.”

“Looking out a porthole? What’s the point of going, then? Wouldn’t it be better to just watch footage on TV?”

“There’s a difference in really being there,” he said. “For your birthday, do you want a fake diamond, or a real one? It's the same difference.” 

Mike was getting very worked up about it, so Cathy changed the subject back to what gift they would buy her sister for her anniversary. Getting involved in his plans was risky territory, but having him buy things for her for was never a problem.

**

Two months later, Jake and Seth were piloting the Little Gulp 6000 feet below the surface, descending ever further down. It was due to be a long trip, so they had a full tank of oxygen, a stock of food (mostly baked beans at Mike Greenham’s request), and a fully functioning latrine system.

The steady hum of the propulsion motors, the hypnotic rhythm they’ve been listening to for hours, suddenly went quiet.

“The controls have stopped responding,” Seth said in his on-the-job robotic voice, the one he insisted in speaking in whenever he was piloting any craft, no matter how big or small.

“Just smack it against something.” Jake reached over and took the PlayStation controller they rigged to the maneuvering engines last month. He tapped it against the hull. The sound of the motor restarted. “Good as new!”

A minute later, things went quiet again. Tapping the controller didn’t work this time. Jake and Seth began to go through their contingency plans.

“We need to keep moving.” Their customer, Mike Greenham, interrupted their review of the contingency plans. “We need to stay on schedule. Let me give it a try.”

It’s hard to say no to a billionaire. Mike Greenham reached over Jake and grabbed the controller out of Seth’s hands. He studied it, apparently trying to see what Jake did with it last time, and then hit it hard against the aluminum pipe that was the side of his chair. The PlayStation controller’s cover popped off and little pieces of plastic burst out like confetti.

Seth went back to the checklist he had been studying. The Little Gulp’s contingency plan checklist had been a rushed affair. Jake didn’t like to ‘dwell on the negative’. After reviewing all the items for oxygen and carbon dioxide leaks, and emergency plans for spills and fires, Seth disappointingly didn’t find anything related to the PlayStation controller. 

Seth’s eyes rested on the item on the bottom of the list, and he showed it to Jake.

Jake got the attention of the billionaires on board.

“We brought emergency supplies to deal with exactly the situation that we are in.”

Jake opened a small cooler that was stored beneath his seat. He opened it and handed out 5 bottles of ice-cold Panhandle IPA.

**

After dinner, Catherine called her personal assistant Amanda in to give her an update on Mike. Outside the sound detected-identified as an empty glass bottle being tapped against a metal hull-there hadn’t been any other good news. 

Amanda gave Catherine a look of deep sympathy.

“This is unacceptable,” Catherine said. “Can you get the CEO of that submersible company on the line?”

“He’s on the submarine too.”

Catherine was pragmatic. Having grown up in a dysfunctional family, and now having a husband who was almost never around, she learned to take decisive action when needed.

“At least that saves me the hassle of a lawsuit,” Catherine said. “One other thing.”

“Anything.”

“With Mike at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, I’ll need someone else to drive me to Sheboygan next week.”

**

At the US Navy Intelligence's listening post in Norfolk, Virginia, ensign Smith was listening to the anomalous sound received from buoy 734. He would need to report this upstairs.

“There appears to be sounds of human activity close to buoy 673,” he told his commanding officer. The buoy, along with hundreds of others, held some of the world's most advanced listening devices in a crisscross pattern across the North Atlantic.

“It's just a fishing boat.”

“Sorry, sir. The sound heard are in the pattern of an SOS signal.”

“You realize the FOCAR-37 network is for detecting Russian nuclear submarines. We are not the Coast Guard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”