He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah. Refrigerator. We could use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”
“What about the house?”
“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But not this morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”
They puttered away. Bly and another man continued to watch the screen, arguing mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even before the flood,” Bly explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a couple hundred years, ever since the empire ended.”
“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.
“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and all the little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time ago.”
Finally Bly killed the engine, looked at the others. In their whiskery faces Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy anticipation. “There then.”
The other men started getting out underwater gear:full wet suits, tanks, face masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Bly said. “He was a giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker, one without feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a complete helmet. “There’s booties of his too.”
“Let me try them on.”
So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the wet suits, sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the tight collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the left side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it was very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other divers, named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right then, for one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him on the side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”
“I will.”
Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly felt huge. Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an agony— a fatal blow— how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a minute, two? Rolling in agony, in the dark. . . .
He pulled himself out of an intense recreation of Eric’s end, feeling shaken. They got a breathing rig attached to his upper arm and face mask, and abruptly he was breathing cold dry air, pure oxygen they said. Bly asked again about going down, as Nirgal was shivering slightly. “No no,” said Nirgal. “I’m good with cold, this water isn’t that cold. Besides I’ve already filled the suit with sweat.”
The other divers nodded, sweating themselves. Getting ready was hard work. The actual swimming was easier; down a ladder and, ah, yes, out of the crush of the g, into something very like Martian g, or lighter still; such a relief! Nirgal breathed in the cold bottled oxygen happily, almost weeping at the sudden freedom of his body, floating down through a comfortable dimness. Ah yes— his world on Earth was underwater.
Down deeper, things were as dark and amorphous as they had been on the screen, except for within the cones of light emanating from the other two men’s headlamps, which were obviously very strong. Nirgal followed above and behind them, getting the best view of all. The estuary water was cool, about 285 K Nirgal judged, but very little of it seeped in at the wrists and around the hood, and the water trapped inside the suit was soon so hot with his exertions that his cold hands and face (and left ribs) actually served to keep him from overheating.
The two cones of light shot this way and that as the two divers looked around. They were swimming along a narrow street. Seeing the buildings and the curbs, the sidewalks and streets, made the murky gray water look uncannily like the mist up on the surface.
Then they were floating before a three-story brick building, filling a narrow triangular space that pointed into an angled intersection of streets. Kev gestured for Nirgal to stay outside, and Nirgal was happy to oblige. The other diver had been holding a cable so thin it was scarcely visible, and now he swam into a doorway, pulling it behind him. He went to work attaching a small pulley to the doorway, and lining the cable through it. Time passed; Nirgal swam slowly around the wedge-shaped building, looking in second-story windows at offices, empty rooms, flats. Some furniture floated against the ceilings. A movement inside one of these rooms caused him to jerk away; he was afraid of the cable; but it was on the other side of the building. Some water seeped into his mouthpiece, and he swallowed it to get it out of the way. It tasted of salt and mud and plant life, and something unpleasant. He swam on.