Lucy Lusitania

Lucy Lusitania. (2230 words.)

You’re seated in the back of the room when the Chairman gavels for order. “We have been charged with the task of investigating the tragic implosion of the submersible vehicle Lucy,” he says. “We are not here to assess blame or culpability, people. Not at this time, so, let’s all try to be civil.” The grumbling in the room subsides to the point that you can hear the traffic noise from outside. You watch him as he gazes at the assembly of witnesses, their friends, family, lawyers, congressman, photographers, journalists, and the public. ‘The curious.’ “All right,” the Chairman nods to the clerk. “Who’s our next witness?”

~~~

You attend the hearing out of curiosity, but were not connected to the tragedy in any way—because serendipity intervened, delaying a wire transfer by two and a half days. Had it not been for a break in a wire somewhere, you would have lost about a hundred-million dollars. You had every intention of investing in that submersible machine and its’ creator, just days before its implosion and the inventor’s sudden death. This left you troubled, since you are not the type of person who makes such errors in judgement.

Three mysterious details about the accident intrigued you. The first was the inventor, who also piloted the craft. His genius was undeniable, and yet, the accident proves some obvious flaw in his thinking. Since he designed, operated and died in the vessel; where he miscalculated is still an absolute mystery.

The second puzzle was revealed by the recovery. Every crushed part of the vehicle has been retrieved, except for the carbon-fiber tube, in essence, the main body of the craft and its biggest single component. There are several theories to account for its absence.

The third mystery is the most baffling: An inordinate focus on strange sounds that were heard after the pilot’s last communication; a moment in time beyond which it is assumed that he was already dead, along with all four of his unfortunate passengers. Despite numerous recordings and witnesses, the source of these hollow knocking, or rattling sounds had not, so far, been identified. Several sophisticated acoustic experts could not determine the source or true nature of the sounds either, due in part to the properties of water.

Some, of course, tried to attribute the sounds to members of the doomed sub after its implosion, but that, of course, was physically impossible. This is the moment when you begin your investigation in earnest.

If you had lost a hundred million on this calamitous venture, you would have hired a team of experts to ferret out your exact errors and to extract revenge wherever necessary. However, since fate has smiled upon your larcenous soul, you pursued the matter on your own, with casual but practiced determination. But it should be noted that you have no regard for the inventor or any of his fellow victims. You were merely curious, in your own deviously criminal way.

~~~

One key witness was the volatile owner of a carbon fiber firm, Mr. Oki, whose company designed and manufactured the cylinder for the bathyscape. His testimony was emphatic.

“Why it implode? He broke it. Extreme pressure okay. Constant pressure, bad. Extreme plus constant lead to frequent maintenance, and failure. You put that much pressure on a pencil you gonna get a toothpick. If you are lucky. Carbon-fiber very strong, but every substance has limitation.”

“So, Mr. Oki, can you tell us what it is? How it’s made?”

“Yes and no. It made of fibers, of graphite, very strong, light material, woven in several directions all held together with glue.”

“With glue?”

“Glue is amazing compound. Start out as liquid, gradually turn to solid, forever. Make ribbon of cross-hatched graphite. Apply ribbon to any shape, it dries, very hard.”

“I see,” the woman said. “So, this is put down in several layers.”

“Many. Many, many, many layers, and glue, and more layers, and…”

“And more glue.”

“Yes. More glue.”

“All right, and, am I to understand that the thickness of this, this tube is five inches?”

“Yes. It was. The skin of the tube was five inches thick.”

“And those were all carbon-graphite layers?”

“Yes ma’am. And glue.”

“How would you describe, in your words, the nature of a carbon-fiber filament failure?”

“In a word? Catastrophic, very terrible. Sudden. Catastrophic. That is being the most accurate word.”

“Is it explosive?”

“Most definitely,” Mr. Oki replied. “It is a lightweight engineering answer to many an engineering problem. The same or better strength could be achieved with ordinary metals, but the weight become a problem. This is true in aircraft design as well as undersea engineering.”

“So you say it does explode when it fails? Does it have some inner energy?”

“No. No, no, no, no, Miss, you misunderstand me. Carbon fiber is used in many high-stress, high-pressure, high-tension apprications. When something under great stress, as this submersiber was, it was not so much a detonation as it was annihiration. The, enormous pressure at that depth obliterated the carbon fiber. That is why you have not found it.”

“But not even a trace, Mr. Oki? Why haven’t they found pieces of it? Not even a shard?”

“Pulverized. Wash away with currents. You will not find.”

~~~

The hearing revealed one other fascinating nugget: A single witness, in defiance of all the rest, who claimed that he heard nothing, and passed himself off as a Petty Officer in the Coast Guard; Officer Martin Hughes.

When he was told, “You do realize sir, that 17 witnesses have testified that they all heard noises.”

He shrugged and replied, “A lot of people heard a lot of strange sounds that day, most of them were imaginary.”

“Why? What would make you say that? We’ve heard the recordings. They certainly weren’t imaginary.”

“No,” he says. “But they weren’t from the ‘Lucy’ either. As soon as communications failed, they were already dead.”

You know that his assertions are accurate, if blunt. The implosion would happen suddenly, and the communication link would change as soon as the link was destroyed. This was an incontrovertible fact. It would determine the precise moment of their death—and little else.

There were no more questions for the Officer and he was excused from the proceeding. You follow him out to the street where a cab takes him to his hotel.

~~~

Subsequent inquiries reveal that there is no Petty Officer named Martin Hughes in the western hemisphere. Oddly enough.

But there is an Ensign Hugh Martin. It seems to you that this particular Ensign is living under a false name, hiding his true identity. His involvement with anything other than the destruction of the submersible ‘Lucy’ seems impossible to prove, but isn’t that enough for further investigation? You’re even willing to bet that keeping his identity a secret would be worth a lot of money to a character like that.

Your sources caution you about dealing with him directly. Too dangerous. One source speculates that he might be a deep cover spy. ‘For who?’ you ask. But he doesn’t say. Claims that who he works for isn’t important. And he’s right. It’s of no importance to you.

A few thousand dollars in bribes can move virtual mountains in certain parts of the world. You uncover Ensign Martin’s location, and you arrive at the wharf just as they’re raising the gangways. You hop aboard with a small bag just as the ship is drifting away from the dock.

It’s not that unusual for civilians to board small Navy ships. You approach one of the deckhands, and he points you in the direction of the Officer’s quarters.

 You tracked him all the way to this tiny cabin on the top deck of this rusty buoy-tender, heading toward the mouth of the harbor and open sea. You’re alert, armed, friendly and sober as you prepare to rap on his cabin door.

He welcomes you in with a smile and a firm, brief handshake. He must have known you were coming somehow. You exchange fake pleasantries, and then he looks at his watch. “We have about a half-hour window when you can take the launch back to port. After that, you’ll be stuck on board until our next port of call.”

You tell him their next port of call is only nine hours distant. A launch won’t be necessary.

“You’ve done your homework then,” he says. “Very well. What do you want?”

When you ask him if he has any information about the Lucy submersible, he frowns. As a matter of fact, he knows all about it. “Pretty fucked up engineering,” he says. “Five people crammed into an eight-foot long, claustrophobic underwater sightseeing tube. One kid, a couple of rich entrepreneurs. They went down, but none of them ever came back up.”

“So you were there when it happened,” you say.

“You know I was there,” he says, “and I’m gonna tell you something, and you’re the only person I’m gonna tell it to, it’s too gruesome to tell anyone else and I’d just as well forget it as soon as I can.”

A compressor kicks on somewhere but does little to relieve the stuffy, metal quarters. “I worked on the hydraulics and pneumatic lines,” the ensign freely admits, “but strictly as a consultant. I didn’t touch anything but a mouse and a keyboard.” A metal door creaks open and then clangs shut somewhere nearby. “Everything worked fine,” he continues. “The owner and pilot was always checking his systems and sub-routines. The entire sub got the once-over three or four times a day,” he swore. “She got more attention sittin’ on the launch platform then she did when she was in the water.”

This sounds like exaggeration, but still, essentially relevant. If there was a failure it was not from lack of attention. “What about those sounds?” You say, “You really didn’t hear anything?”

“Of course I did,” the Ensign says. “Everybody heard them. Seventeen witnesses testified. They recorded them.” He feigned an effeminate shudder, then gets up and opens a cabinet in the bulkhead and retrieves a half bottle of whisky.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “You know what those sounds were?”

“I do,” the Ensign says, as he pours a couple of shots into each glass, and then looks at his watch. “I have a couple of friends who work at one of those government labs, Oak Ridge. Every hear of it?”

You shake your head, empty the glass of whisky, and wonder why you didn’t think of doing that.

The Ensign continues. “Everyone understands that at the depth of the implosion, the pressure is so high it ignites the oxygen, and even the air that’s present.”

“That would be the explosion,” you say, “that further splinters the carbon-fiber tube.”

“Except that it doesn’t,” he says. “At that depth and pressure, with the additional heat of a detonation in the tube, at the instant of ignition, the carbon-graphite fibers become flexible, on the verge of molten. They would expand, then contract, a little.”

“Are you saying those people were shrink-wrapped?”

“Well, no. They were incinerated. Instantly.”

“Then—why did you lie at the hearing?” You ask.

He pours another double-shot into your glass. “It’s very likely that the carbon-fiber tube did not shatter at all, but turned into a hollow ball. Once the ends were blown off the carbon tube” he says, “the physicists I spoke with said there were any number of shapes the tube may have acquired in a fraction of a second. With the caps off the ends, the pressure would be equal on both sides of the tube. Essentially locking it into whatever that shape was.” He lets that sink in, like the warmth spreading through your guts as you take a sip of the whisky.

 He says, glancing at his watch again. “You know why no one could identify the sound? It was a bunch of bones rattling around in a hollow graphite ball,” he leans forward and whispers, “…the current pushing it around, this way and that, back and forth on the sea floor, not something you hear every day, bones rattling in a graphite ball.”

You’re stunned, mouth hanging open. He stands over you.

“Would you like a tour of the bridge? They’re pretty impressive,” he says, “even on an old scow like this.” 

You nod, “Sure,” feeling a little numb. He helps you to your feet and you grab your bag just before he ushers you through the companionway door, out into the twilight. It feels a little light.

“And it’s completely dark down there, you know. They’ll never find it.”

 A good stiff sea breeze does not seem to sober you up much.

“This way, mate,” he says, “we’ll have the Captain order the launch readied while I show you around the bridge.”

“Sure,” you say, the cabin is on the port side, well aft of the… “but I won’t need the launch.” You plan on having far more serious negotiations with this sinister old spook.

The ship’s horn emits a tremendous blast as you feel yourself being lifted off your feet. You reach for the railing and miss as you realize you’re being heaved over the side of the ship. The face of Ensign Martin is the last thing you see just before you hit the water.