Back at the doorway Kev and the other man were helping a small metal safe through the doorway. When it was clear they kicked upright, in place, waiting, until the cable rose almost directly overhead. Then they swam around the intersection like a clumsy ballet team, and the safe floated up to the surface and disappeared. Kev swam back inside, and came out kicking hard, holding two small bags. Nirgal kicked over and took one, and with big luxurious kicks pulsed up toward the boat. He surfaced into the bright light of the mist. He would have loved to go back down, but Bly did not want them in any longer, and so Nirgal threw his fins in the boat and climbed the ladder over the side. He was sweating as he sat on one bench, and it was a relief to strip the hood off his head, despite the way his hair was yanked back. The clammy air felt good against his skin as they helped him peel the wet suit off.
“Look at his chest will you, he’s like a greyhound.”
“Breathing vapors all his life.”
The mist almost cleared, dissipating to reveal a white sky, the sun a brighter white swath across it. The weight had come back into him, and he breathed deeply a few times to get his body back into that work rhythm. His stomach was queasy, and his lungs hurt a little at the peak of each inhalation. Things rocked a bit more than the slosh of the ocean surface would account for. The sky turned to zinc, the sun’s quadrant a harsh blinding glare. Nirgal stayed sitting, breathed faster and shallower.
“Did you like it?”
“Yes!” he said. “I wish it felt like that everywhere.”
They laughed at the thought. “Here have a cup.”
• • •
Perhaps going underwater had been a mistake. After that the g never felt right again. It was hard to breathe. The air down in the warehouse was so wet that he felt he could clench a fist and drink water from his hand. His throat hurt, and his lungs. He drank cup after cup of tea, and still he was thirsty. The gleaming walls dripped, and nothing the people said was comprehensible, it was all ay and eh and lor and da, nothing like Martian English. A different language. Now they all spoke different languages. Shakespeare’s plays had not prepared him for it.
He slept again in the little bed on Bly’s boat. The next day the escort gave the okay, and they motored out of Sheerness, and north across the Thames estuary, in a pink mist even thicker than the day before.
Out in the estuary there was nothing visible but mist and the sea. Nirgal had been in clouds before, especially on the west slope of Tharsis, where fronts ran up the rise of the bulge; but never of course while on water. And every time before the temperatures had been well below freezing, the clouds a kind of flying snow, very white and dry and fine, rolling over the land and coating it with white dust. Nothing at all like this liquid world, where there was very little difference between the choppy water and the mist gusting over it, the liquid and the gaseous phasing back and forth endlessly. The boat rocked in a violent irregular rhythm. Dark objects appeared in the margins of the mist, but Bly paid them no attention, keeping a sharp eye ahead through a window beaded with water to the point of opacity, and also watching a number of screens under the window.
Suddenly Bly killed the engine, and the boat’s rocking changed to a vicious side-to-side yaw. Nirgal held the side of the cabin and peered through the watery window, trying to see what had caused Bly to stop. “That’s a big ship for Southend,” Bly remarked, motoring on very slowly.
“Where?”
“Port beam.” He pointed to a screen, then off to the left. Nirgal saw nothing.
Bly brought them into a long low pier, with many boats moored to it on both sides. The pier ran north through the mist to the town of Southend-on-Sea, which ran up and disappeared in the mist covering a slope of buildings.
A number of men greeted Bly—”Lovely day eh?” “Brilliant”— and began to unload boxes from his hold.
Bly inquired about the Asian woman from Vlissingen, but the men shook their heads. “The Jap? She ain’t here, mate.”
“They’re saying in Sheerness she and her group came to Southend.”
“Why would they say that?”
“Because that’s what they think happened.”
“That’s what you get listening to people who live underwater.”
“The Paki grandma?” they said at the diesel fuel pump on the other side of the pier. “She went over to Shoeburyness, sometime back.”
Bly glanced at Nirgal. “It’s just a few miles east. If she were here, these men would know.”
“Let’s try it then,” Nirgal said.
So after refueling they left the pier, and puttered east through the mist. From time to time the building-covered hillside was visible to their left. They rounded a point, turned north. Bly brought them in to another floating dock, with many fewer boats than had been moored at Southend pier.