mouth to tell him he's full of shit, but the words won't emerge. An Auditor ward, I think, choking on my tongue and beginning to panic, but right then my larynx relaxes and I'm able to close my jaw. Angleton smiles sepulchrally. "There's a good fellow."
I try to say blow me, but it comes out as "brief me" instead.
It seems I'm allowed to speak, so long as I stay on topic.
"Certainly. I have explained the history of the Glomar Explorer, and Operations JENNIFER and AZORIAN. What I did not explain — this goes no further than your dreams, and the inside of your own eyeballs, especially when Ramona is awake — was that JENNIFER and AZORIAN were cover stories. Dry runs, practical experiments, if you like. To retrieve artifacts from the oceanic floor, in the zones ceded by .humanity to BLUE HADES — the Deep Ones — in perpetuity under the terms of the Benthic Treaties and the Agreement of the Azores."
Angleton pauses to take a drink from a glass of ice water beside his blotter. Then he flicks the slide advance button on the projector. Click-clack.
"This is a map of the world we live in," Angleton explains. "And these pink zones are those that humans are allowed to roam in. Our reservation, if you like. The arid airswept continents and the painfully bright low-pressure top waters of the oceans. About thirty-four percent of the Earth's surface area. The rest, the territory of the Deep Ones, we are permitted to sail above, but that is all. Attempts to settle the deep ocean would be resisted in such a manner that our species would not survive long enough to regret them."
I lick my lips. "How? I mean, do they have nuclear weapons or something"
"Worse than that." He doesn't smile. "This — " click-clack " — is Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma. It is one of seventy-three volcanoes or mountains located in deep water — most of the others are submerged guyots rather than climbable peaks — that BLUE HADES have prepared. Threequarters of humanity live within 200 miles of a sea coast. If they ever lose their patience with us, the Deep Ones can trigger undersea landslides. Cumbre Vieja alone is poised to deposit 500 billion tons of rock on the floor of the North Atlantic, generating a tsunami that will be twenty meters high by the time it makes landfall in New York. Make that more like fifty meters by the time it hits Southampton. If we provoke them they can wreak more destruction than an allout nuclear war. And they have occupied this planet since long before our hominid ancestors discovered fire."
"But we've got a deterrent, surely ..."
No." Angleton's expression is implacable. "Water absorbs the energy of a nuclear explosion far more effectively than air. You get a powerful pressure wave, but no significant heat or radiation damage: the shock wave is great for crushing submarines, but much less effective against undersea organisms at ambient pressure. We could hurt them, but nothing like as badly as they could hurt us. And as for the rest of it — he gestures at the screen " — they could have wiped us out before we discovered them, if they were so inclined. They have access to technologies and tools we can barely begin to imagine.
They are the Deep Ones, BLUE HADES, a branch of an ancient and powerful alien civilization. Some of us suspect the threat of the super-tsunami is a distraction. It's like an infantryman pointing his bayonet-tipped assault rifle at a headhunter, who sees only a blade on a stick. Don't even think about threatening them, we exist because they bear us no innate ill will, but we have at least the power to change that much if we act rashly."
"Then what the hell was JENNIFER about"
Click-clack. "A misplaced attempt to end the Cold War prematurely, by acquiring a weapon truly hellish in its potential.
The precise nature of which you have no need to know right now, in case you were thinking of asking."
I'm looking down on a gloomy gray scene. It takes me a few seconds to realize
I try to say blow me, but it comes out as "brief me" instead.
It seems I'm allowed to speak, so long as I stay on topic.
"Certainly. I have explained the history of the Glomar Explorer, and Operations JENNIFER and AZORIAN. What I did not explain — this goes no further than your dreams, and the inside of your own eyeballs, especially when Ramona is awake — was that JENNIFER and AZORIAN were cover stories. Dry runs, practical experiments, if you like. To retrieve artifacts from the oceanic floor, in the zones ceded by .humanity to BLUE HADES — the Deep Ones — in perpetuity under the terms of the Benthic Treaties and the Agreement of the Azores."
Angleton pauses to take a drink from a glass of ice water beside his blotter. Then he flicks the slide advance button on the projector. Click-clack.
"This is a map of the world we live in," Angleton explains. "And these pink zones are those that humans are allowed to roam in. Our reservation, if you like. The arid airswept continents and the painfully bright low-pressure top waters of the oceans. About thirty-four percent of the Earth's surface area. The rest, the territory of the Deep Ones, we are permitted to sail above, but that is all. Attempts to settle the deep ocean would be resisted in such a manner that our species would not survive long enough to regret them."
I lick my lips. "How? I mean, do they have nuclear weapons or something"
"Worse than that." He doesn't smile. "This — " click-clack " — is Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma. It is one of seventy-three volcanoes or mountains located in deep water — most of the others are submerged guyots rather than climbable peaks — that BLUE HADES have prepared. Threequarters of humanity live within 200 miles of a sea coast. If they ever lose their patience with us, the Deep Ones can trigger undersea landslides. Cumbre Vieja alone is poised to deposit 500 billion tons of rock on the floor of the North Atlantic, generating a tsunami that will be twenty meters high by the time it makes landfall in New York. Make that more like fifty meters by the time it hits Southampton. If we provoke them they can wreak more destruction than an allout nuclear war. And they have occupied this planet since long before our hominid ancestors discovered fire."
"But we've got a deterrent, surely ..."
No." Angleton's expression is implacable. "Water absorbs the energy of a nuclear explosion far more effectively than air. You get a powerful pressure wave, but no significant heat or radiation damage: the shock wave is great for crushing submarines, but much less effective against undersea organisms at ambient pressure. We could hurt them, but nothing like as badly as they could hurt us. And as for the rest of it — he gestures at the screen " — they could have wiped us out before we discovered them, if they were so inclined. They have access to technologies and tools we can barely begin to imagine.
They are the Deep Ones, BLUE HADES, a branch of an ancient and powerful alien civilization. Some of us suspect the threat of the super-tsunami is a distraction. It's like an infantryman pointing his bayonet-tipped assault rifle at a headhunter, who sees only a blade on a stick. Don't even think about threatening them, we exist because they bear us no innate ill will, but we have at least the power to change that much if we act rashly."
"Then what the hell was JENNIFER about"
Click-clack. "A misplaced attempt to end the Cold War prematurely, by acquiring a weapon truly hellish in its potential.
The precise nature of which you have no need to know right now, in case you were thinking of asking."
I'm looking down on a gloomy gray scene. It takes me a few seconds to realize
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