"How's she handling?" Helen's voice crackled through his earpiece.

"Beautifully. I want one of these babies for my own." She laughed. "Be prepared to write a very big check, Steve. You spot the nodule field yet? It should be dead ahead." Ahearn was silent for a moment as he peered through the watery murk. A moment later he said, "I see them." The manganese nodules looked like lumps of coal scattered across the ocean floor. Strangely, almost bizarrely, smooth, by minerals solidifying around stones or grains of sand, they were a highly prized source of titanium and other precious metals. But he ignored the nodules. He was in search of a prize far more valuable.

"I'm heading down into the canyon," he said.

With the joysticks he steered Deep Flight over the plateau's edge. As his velocity increased to two and a half knots, the wings, designed to produce the opposite effect of an airplane wing, dragged the sub downward. He began his descent into the abyss.

"Eleven hundred meters," he counted off. "Eleven fifty ... "

"Watch your clearance. It's a narrow rift. You monitoring water temperature?"

"It's starting to rise. Up to fifty-five degrees now."

"Still a ways from the vent. You'll be in hot water in another two thousand meters." A shadow suddenly swooped right past Ahearn's face. He flinched, inadvertently jerking the joystick, sending the craft to starboard. The hard jolt of the sub against the canyon wall a clanging shock wave through the hull.

"Jesus!"

"Status?" said Helen. "Steve, what's your status?" He was hyperventilating, his heart slamming in panic against the body pan. The hull. Have I damaged the hull? Through the harsh sound of his own breathing, he listened for the groan of giving way, for the fatal blast of water. He was thirty-six feet beneath the surface, and over one hundred atmospheres of pressure were squeezing in on all sides like a fist. A breach in hull, a burst of water, and he would be crushed.