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With slightly
less than an eight hour flight, I was happy to recline in a leather seat across
from Cassidy, drifting in and out of peaceful sleep, no children screaming, no
neighbors to roll over me on their eighth trip to the bathroom.
    “I could get used to
this,” Flint said behind me. I craned my neck to look back. He was sprawled out
in his seat, fully reclined to the point where it was almost a bed, his arms
and legs splayed out in every direction. A bag of frozen peas rested over his
eyes, and another was draped over his bandaged hand.
    “Where did you get
those?” I asked.
    He jerked his good
thumb toward the back of the plane. “Full kitchen.”
    An overhead speaker
clicked on and Pierre’s voice drifted into the cabin. “I trust everyone is
comfortable? Don’t hesitate to ask for anything.”
    Cassidy looked at the
speaker, then toward the cockpit. The door was open and Pierre sat in the
pilot’s seat, making adjustments on his control panel.
    “I didn’t know he was
also a pilot,” I said.
    “Pierre has a lot of
hobbies.”
    “He can afford to,”
said Flint. “Imagine what I could do if I didn’t have to work.”
    “What about the Antigua ?”
I asked. “Is Pierre just giving up on it?”
    “He likes to have
multiple projects going on at once, so he can bounce between them,” said Cass. “He’s
easily distracted.”
    “You seem to remember a
lot about him,” I said.
    Cassidy stood and
kissed me on the forehead. “I’m going to catch up.”
    She walked to the front
of the plane and plopped into the copilot’s seat. Pierre handed her a headset
and soon the two were chatting and laughing like college buddies.
    “There are more peas in
the freezer if you want ‘em,” said Flint.
    “I don’t want any
peas.”
    “They really help cool
you down.”
    “ No peas ,
Flint.”
    He shrugged. I stood
up, then took Cass’s empty seat, facing the back of the plane.
    Far below, the Pacific
Ocean sparkled like a field of blue diamonds. Wispy clouds zoomed past, pulling
apart in the wind to reveal only more crystal blue beneath us.
    Somewhere down there was
the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on the planet. At one time it was
believed that nothing could live so far down from the surface, so far from the
life-giving sun and the multitudes of organisms that rely on its warmth. It was
quite a surprise to discover that there was indeed life, even in the deepest
part of the ocean.
    Whole microsystems
sprouted up around deep sea vents, sustained by the heat they gave off, some of
it in excess of seven-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. In the deepest reaches of the
ocean, such hydrothermal vents were often populated by extremophiles – organisms
that thrived in environments that were typically fatal to all other life on Earth.
Nearer to the surface, but still in complete darkness and at such enormous
pressure that exploration had been sporadic at best, bacteria, tubeworms, and
even crabs and shrimp lived near the bubbling hydrothermal vents, converting
sulfur into energy for survival.
    Some researchers
believed that life on Earth may have originated in these deep sea vents before
spreading out into the vast ocean.
    I thought about the
vent we saw near the wreckage of the Antigua , and of Cassidy pulling me
back from the edge of the abyss that opened up to swallow the skeleton of the
ship. An uncomfortable thought occurred to me.
    I balled up a napkin
and threw it at the only volcanologist I knew who still wore his hair as if he
were a roadie for a 1970’s rock band.
    “Hey, Flint.”
    The napkin hit the bag
of peas over his eyes and bounced off. He grunted in surprise, then settled
down.
    “Go for Flint.”
    “You don’t think what
happened to us could be a sign of something bigger? Like whatever Levino’s
talking about at Mauna Loa?”
    “Hawaii is smack on the
middle of the Pacific Plate, amigo. We were on the edge, where the action is.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Just that there is