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hundreds of miles across the fracture zone and be worth as high as eight million dollars a square kilometer.”
    “Providing you could scoop it up from the surface, five and a half kilometers away,” Plunkett added.
    Salazar instructed Plunkett on what direction to explore as Old Gert soared silently over the nodule-carpeted sand. Then something gleamed off to their port side. Plunkett banked slightly toward the object.
    “What do you see?” asked Salazar, looking up from his instruments.
    Stacy peered downward. “A ball!” she exclaimed. “A huge metal ball with strange-looking cleats. I’d guess it to measure three meters in diameter.”
    Plunkett dismissed it. “Must have fallen off a ship.”
    “Not too long ago, judging from the lack of corrosion,” commented Salazar.
    Suddenly they sighted a wide strip of clear sand that was totally devoid of nodules. It was as though a giant vacuum cleaner had made a swath through the middle of the field.
    “A straight edge!” exclaimed Salazar. “There’s no such thing as prolonged straight edges on the seafloor.”
    Stacy stared in astonishment. “Too perfect, too precise to be anything but manmade.”
    Plunkett shook his head. “Impossible, not at this depth. No engineering company in the world has the capability to mine the abyss.”
    “And no geological disturbance I ever heard of could form a clean road across the seabed,” stated Salazar firmly.
    “Those indentations in the sand that run along the borders look like they might match that huge ball we found.”
    “Okay,” muttered Plunkett skeptically. “What kind of equipment can sweep the bottom this deep?”
    “A giant hydraulic dredge that sucks up the nodules through pipes to a barge on the surface,” theorized Salazar. “The idea has been tossed around for years.”
    “So has a manned flight to Mars, but the rocketry to get there has yet to be built. Nor has a monster dredge. I know a lot of people in marine engineering, and I haven’t heard even a vague rumor about such a project. No mining operation of this magnitude can be kept secret. It’d take a surface fleet of at least five ships and thousands of men working for years. And there is no way they could pull it off without detection by passing ships or satellites.”
    Stacy looked blankly at Salazar. “Any way of telling when it happened?”
    Salazar shrugged. “Could have been yesterday, could have been years ago.”
    “But who then?” Stacy asked in a vague tone. “Who is responsible for such technology?”
    No one immediately answered. Their discovery did not fit accepted beliefs. They stared at the empty swath with silent disbelief, a fear of the unknown trickling down their necks.
    Finally Plunkett gave an answer that seemed to come distantly, from outside the submersible. “No one on this earth, no one who is human.”

4
     
     
     
    S TEEN WAS ENTERING into a state of extreme emotional shock. He stared numbly at the blisters forming on his arms. He trembled uncontrollably, half mad from the shock and a sudden abdominal pain. He doubled over and retched, his breath coming in great heaves. Everything seemed to be striking him at once. His heart began beating erratically and his body burned up with fever.
    He felt too weak to make it back to the communications compartment and warn Korvold. When the captain of the Norwegian ship received no replies from his signals to Steen, he would send another boarding party to see what was wrong. More men would die uselessly.
    Steen was drenched in sweat now. He stared at the car with the raised hood and his eyes glazed with a strange hatred. A stupor descended over him, and his crazed mind saw an indescribable evil in the steel, leather, and rubber.
    As if in a final act of defiance, Steen took vengeance against the inanimate vehicle. He pulled the Steyr automatic he’d found in the captain’s quarters from under his waistband and raised the barrel. Then he squeezed the trigger and pumped the