Mer-Cycle. Piers Anthony
undue secrecy. Gaspar seemed to be the only one qualified to do anything or learn anything here. Don himself was a misfit, as was Melanie—and what was a man like Eleph doing here? Not a geologist, not a biologist, not even an undersea archeologist—but a physicist! His specialty could have little relevance here. A mysterious mission like this was hardly needed to check out the performance of the phase-shift under water—if that were really what Eleph was here to do. The man wasn’t young and strong, and certainly not easy to get along with. He could only be a drag on the party. At least Melanie wasn’t a drag.
“It’s Miami,” Gaspar said, startling him.
“Who?”
“Those coordinates. Offshore Miami. Must be another inexperienced man.”
Don shook his head ruefully. “I wish I had your talent for identifying places like that! I can’t make head or tail of those coordinates.”
“It’s no talent. Just understanding of the basic principle. The Earth is a globe, and it is tricky to identify places without a global scale of reference. On land you can look for roads and cities, but in the sea there are none. Think of it as an orange, with lines marked. Some are circles going around the globe, passing through the north and south poles. Those are the meridians of longitude, starting with zero at Greenwich, in London, England, as zero, and proceeding east and west from it until they meet as 180 degrees in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at the International Date Line. The others are circles around the globe parallel to the equator; they get smaller as they go north and south, but each is still a perfect circle. Thus we have parallels of latitude. Since we happen to be north of the equator and west of England, our coordinates are in the neighborhood of twenty five degrees north latitude and eighty degrees west longitude. Just keep those figures in mind, and you’ll know how far we go from where we are now.”
It began to register. “Twenty five and eighty,” Don said. “Right here. So Miami is—”
“Actually those particular coordinates would be about ten miles east of Miami, and fifty miles south of it,” Gaspar said. “We’re on the way there. I meant our neighborhood on a global scale.”
“Just as all of man’s history and prehistory is recent, on the geologic scale,” Don said wryly. “Fifty miles is pinpoint close.”
“Yes. Our bicycle meters give us our immediate locations.”
“Still, I’ll remember those numbers. It will give me a notion how far we are from Miami, and that’s a location I can understand. Southern tip of Florida.”
“Well—”
“Approximately!” Don said quickly. “In geologic terms.”
“Approximately,” Gaspar agreed, and Don knew he was smiling.
Don returned to the matter of their next group member, glad to have company in his misgivings. “What do you think he is? An astronomer? An electrician? A—”
“Could be a paleontologist. Because I think I know where we’re heading, now. The Bahamas platform.”
“What?”
“The Bahamas platform. Geologically, a most significant region. It certainly made trouble for us in the past.”
Don would have been less interested, had he not wanted someone to talk to. “How could it make trouble? It is whatever it is, and was what it was, wasn’t it, before there were geologists?”
“True, true. But trouble still, and a fascinating place to explore. You see, its existence was a major obstacle to acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics.”
“Of what?”
“Drifting continents.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Don said. “They’re moving now, aren’t they? An inch a century?”
“Faster than that, even,” Gaspar agreed wryly.
“But I don’t see why those little islands, the Bermudas—”
“Bahamas. The thesis was that all the continents were once a super land mass called Pangaea. The convection currents in the mantle of the earth broke up the land, spreading the sea floor and shoving the new continents outward. North and South America drifted—actually, they were shoved—to their present location, and the Mid-Atlantic ridge continued to widen as more and more lava was forced up from below. But the Bahamas—”
“You talk as if the world is a bubbling pot of mush!”
“Close enough. The continents themselves float in the lithosphere, and when something shoves, they have to move. But slowly. We could match up the fractures, showing how the fringes of the continental shelves fitted together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. All except the Bahamas platform. It was extra. There was no place for it in the original Pangaea—yet there it was.”
“So maybe the continents didn’t drift, after all,” Don said. “They must have stayed in the same place all the time. Makes me feel more secure, I must admit.”
“Ah, but they did drift. Too many lines of evidence point too firmly to this, believe you me. All but that damned platform. Where did it come from?”
“Where, indeed,” Don muttered sleepily.
“They finally concluded that the great breakup of Pangaea started right in this area. The earth split asunder, the land shoved outward in mighty plates—and then the process halted for maybe thirty million years, and the new basin filled in with sediment. When the movement resumed, there was the half-baked mass: the Bahamas platform. Most of it is still under water, of course, but it trailed along with the continent, and here it is. The site of the beginning of the Atlantic Ocean as we know it.” The man’s voice shook with excitement; this was one of the most important things on Earth, literally, to him.
But Don wasn’t a geologist. “Glory be,” he mumbled.
“That’s why I find this such a fascinating region. There are real secrets buried in the platform strata.”
But Don was drifting to a continental sleep. He dreamed that he was standing with tremendous feet straddling Pangaea, the Paul Bunyan of archaeologists. But then it cracked, and he couldn’t get his balance; the center couldn’t hold. The more he tried to bring the land together, the more his very weight shoved it apart, making him do a continental split. “Curse you, Bahama!” he cried.
Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.
Acknowledging.
Status?
Four members introduced, final one incipient. Progress good. Group is melding. They are as much concerned with interpersonal relations as with the mission, but unified in their perplexity about it. The likelihood of success seems to be increasing.
That is good. We have lost another world via the straightforward approach. If your experiment is effective, we will try it on the remaining worlds.
But the outcome is far from assured. Human reactions are devious and at times surprising.
How well we know!
Offshore Miami: the continental shelf was narrow here, but they could not approach the teeming metropolis too closely. The rendezvous was just outside the reefs, thirty fathoms deep and sloping.
Gaspar tooted on his whistle. The answer came immediately. Before they could get on their cycles the fifth member of the party appeared, riding rapidly. Don noted the turned-down handlebars and double derailleur mechanism first: another ten-speed-or-more machine, perhaps an expensive one.
“It’s