Pressure Drop by Peter Abrahams Page B

scuba limit, looking for evidence he never found, answers to all the questions unanswered at the trial: who was the other man? where was his dive card? how had tank ZB-27 come to be filled with poisoned air?
    Twenty feet below was a smaller shelf, about the size of a king-sized bed. A big brown nurse shark was resting on it now, its still body curved gracefully, like something Henry Moore might have worked on. Matthias hung at the 100-foot level, watching it. He felt a tap on his shoulder.
    He swung around. Brock hovered beside him. He pointed toward the surface. Matthias nodded. Brock was an excellent free diver, especially for a man his size, but he didn’t have Matthias’s bottom time. Brock kicked away; the first stroke of his fins sent a surge of water around Matthias’s head. Looking up he saw the surface, a circle of light far above, and Brock rising toward it, his enormous homemade spear gun hanging from his belt. Brock was an experienced ocean diver and the best divemaster Matthias had ever hired, but like a lot of divers who had learned on the Great Barrier Reef, he dove armed.
    Matthias felt the cough reflex tickle the back of his throat. He controlled it and it went away; this was the dangerous time—the time when carbon dioxide buildup would have forced most people to take in a breath. There would be no other warning, just unconsciousness. Matthias peered down into the blue-black chasm. He saw nothing that shouldn’t have been there.
    Matthias flicked a fin and started up. He passed a big grouper on the way. Each grouper had its hole. This one had probably lived in the same one for years. Matthias looked into its dull eyes, wondering what it had seen on that September day, wishing science could dissect its little brain in some way that would tap into its memory.
    He broke the surface, blew the waste air out of his lungs and sucked in a huge breath. Gold sparkles ignited all around him. He had been down too long. He lay on the surface, inhaling long slow breaths through his snorkel. The dizziness passed.
    Matthias climbed into the boat. Brock, standing behind the console, studied his watch. “Three fifty-two,” he said. “That was a long pull.”
    â€œYeah.”
    Brock looked at him. “One day you won’t come up.”
    Matthias, taking off his mask, said nothing. He already knew that the sea, free diving especially, was like a drug to him. He didn’t want to get into a discussion about it.
    â€œSee anything?” he asked.
    â€œOf course not,” Brock said. “What would be left to see by now?”
    â€œThe other tank.”
    â€œRight. It’s five thousand feet down, Matt. And if you found it what would it prove?”
    Matthias had no answer. Brock hauled in the anchor. Rain started to fall, first warm then cold. It washed the salt from their bodies, flattened the sea and leached all the color out of Zombie Bay. Matthias and his divemaster rode home in a gray silence.

11
    Business had never been better. Living Without Men and Children … and Loving It was still on the bestseller list and bidding for the reprint rights had reached the high six figures. Dr. Lois Filer, with her new body, teeth and haircut, had been on Donahue twice, Oprah once, and local shows from coast to coast. She had even appeared, as the last guest and for only four minutes, on “The Tonight Show,” but she had managed, in her sweet contralto, to get off a little joke that may or may not have invoked similarities between politics and fellatio, which brought down the house and made Johnny toss his pencil in the air. Washington Post Book World had run twenty-two column inches on womynpress, accompanied by a photograph of Brenda Singer-Atwell and M. brainstorming at a famous disco. Word of Nina’s role in all this had spread. Now when she rode her stationary bike, which wasn’t as often as before because she couldn’t get her belly in a comfortable