Master of the Abyss Page #4

the boats and my friends,

and not being able to think of

any pithy saying

which might echo down the ages,

I said nothing, crawled painfully

over the steel bolts,

fell inside and curled up on the cold,

hard bottom of the sphere."

On deck, John Teevan supervises

the mission.

He has served William Beebe

for half his life.

Now Beebe's life is in his hands.

Beebe and Barton are big men-

both of them, six feet tall,

crammed into a sphere less than

five feet across.

Heavy hammers pound steel bolts tight,

a deafening experience

inside the sphere.

Gloria Hollister will communicate

with Beebe by telephone-

the first to record his observations,

or to hear his final words

in the event of a catastrophe.

The final bolt.

On deck, the team is tense,

each person concentrating,

hoping for the best,

imagining the worst.

Nothing has been left to chance,

yet no one has ever attempted

anything like this before.

At one PM, on June 6, 1930,

the bathysphere is swung

over the side.

In less than a minute,

they are sixty feet down, the range

of Beebe's old copper helmet.

They are suspended by

a thread of steel,

with a mile and a half of

ocean beneath them-

and no hope of rescue

if their equipment fails.

Barton closely monitors

the oxygen supply.

Too little, and they will

slowly suffocate.

Too much, and they can

become disoriented.

At 600 feet, Beebe speaks from

a place no living man has ever been.

"Only dead men have sunk below this."

Beyond the tiny windows,

the two ocean pioneers

witness an eerie twilight.

"We were the first living men to look

out at the strange illumination:

an indefinable translucent blue."

Then, at 800 feet,

with all going well,

Beebe suddenly calls off the descent.

His instincts tell him, stop.

"Some hunch-some mental warning

which I have had at half a dozen

critical times in my life,

spelled bottom for this trip."

At this depth, Beebe knows that

the ocean pressure would kill them

in a way much more terrifying

than drowning.

"There was no possible chance

of being drowned,

for the first few drops

would have shot

through flesh and bone

like steel bullets."

He orders Teevan to haul them home.

Two strangers in a strange device

have dived deeper than

any living men in history.

Consumed by the operation of

the sphere itself,

Beebe has paid little attention to

the world of the deep-

but he has proven that humans can

descend into the abyss and return alive.

His team greets him with

congratulations, elation, and relief.

William Beebe and Otis Barton

will descend again,

deeper - not just for adventure,

but for science.

Their journey has only begun.

The unlikely partnership of William

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes