Heading Home

The big dive had been the day before. The submersible was back on deck, salt-rimed and slightly battered. It looked less like a steel pumpkin now, and more like a steel pumpkin that had been to the bottom of the world.

Polly was leaving today. She had begun to feel the pull of her next destination, the way migratory birds feel it: a slow, persistent tug in the chest. Where exactly she was going, she did not yet know.

She made a quiet tour of the ship. First the galley. A small sandwich was waiting on a paper plate. She ate it quickly.

Then the mess. The photograph of the Trieste was still on the wall, with its two cloth-capped men looking out from a winter morning sixty-six years ago.

Then the lab. Yara had labelled the shrunken Styrofoam cup and put it in a small display case, with the date and depth written underneath in neat script.

Then the dive deck. The Limiting Factor sat in its cradle, gleaming. It was waiting to go back to its workshop on land.

At the bow, the captain was leaning on the rail. He looked at her with the same untroubled expression he had used all week. "You'll be off then," he said. She tilted her head. He nodded.

She thought briefly about what she had seen. A small ship over a deep place. A fish whose cells held themselves together with a chemical brace. Two men in cloth caps in 1960, betting their lives on the chemistry of gasoline.

A cup the size of a thimble. A scientist's calm explanation of pressure. A galley that anchored twenty-seven people through bad weather.

None of it had been an adventure. Nobody had needed saving. There had been no twist, no chase, no mystery. There had only been a vast, quiet place at the bottom of the ocean, and a small ship full of people who had decided, for various reasons, to spend their lives paying attention to it.

She did not think she had it in her to live that life. But she liked them very much.

The breeze freshened. Polly opened her wings, glasses settled on her beak, and let the deck push her up. She climbed in a slow spiral until the Pressure Drop was a single white shape on the blue paper of the Pacific. Then she turned, picked a heading, and went. Below her, the trench was as it had been a hundred million years ago: dark, cold, mostly empty, perfectly itself.