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"Initiating dive."
Tiny bubbles began to stream past the portholes. For just a moment, the green-blue of the water outside matched the green-blue of the interior, as though the thick metal walls of the submersible had turned to glass. Then the light from the portholes dimmed to a deeper blue, and the illusion was broken.
"Twenty fathoms."
Hank Rearden swept his gaze over the bank of dials in front of him. "Interior temperature and pressure constant," he reported.
The evening blue of the ocean outside was rapidly darkening to black.
"Fifty fathoms."
"You know I can read that for myself," he told the man in the other seat.
"Of course I know it," Francisco d'Anconia answered. "I am announcing it in anticipation of the satisfaction of announcing one thousand."
"One thousand is going to look a lot like nine hundred ninety-nine," Rearden answered. "I would think you would be more interested in thirteen hundred."
"The depth of my copper sulfide deposits, you mean?"
"The theoretical sulfide deposits, yes."
"That will be a time for action, not announcements."
Rearden shot a look at his companion. Small lights on the instrument panel let them read their gauges, and let him see Francisco's profile, intent on the controls, but did not cast enough light to sketch or write notes. Smoking seemed ill-advised in the small, sealed space and limited oxygen supply.
"You're bored," he surmised.
"Restless," Francisco admitted. "It isn't like flying an airplane. Gravity is doing most of the piloting here."
"We could turn on the exterior lights," Rearden suggested, "Maybe try to find you a giant squid to fight."
He heard Francisco snort, but he did also flick on the forward lamp.
Rearden looked out his porthole curiously. Tiny floating animals swirled like snowflakes in the featureless night, falling upward as the submersible sank past them.
He remembered an evening years ago when Lillian had thrown a party, and he had looked out a window into the dark, watching the wind assail a slender tree. He had thought how remarkable it was that his work had made a place of light and warmth in the cold and emptiness, an oasis for flowers and naked shoulders.
The night outside the portholes was infinitely more hostile; that crushing dark would annihilate him in an instant if the shell of the submersible were breached. And yet he was safe here, in this bubble of Rearden Metal - safer than he had been at the party.
He set one hand against the metal wall. It was cold, from thermal conduction from the frigid seawater, and damp with condensation, and performing exactly as he had calculated.
"I have been meaning to ask you," he said to Francisco, "Why didn't you ask John to come with you? It's his motor that will propel us around your copper deposits."
"I did not want to ask John," Francisco answered.
"Why didn't you ask Ragnar?" Rearden continued. "He's surely the most practiced in marine navigation."
"I didn't want to ask Ragnar," Francisco answered again. His face did not change, but Rearden heard a smile in his voice.
"You could have asked Dagny."
"I didn't want to ask Dagny either," Francisco said, and this time, Rearden thought, he did not smile.
"When we were fabricating the pressure sphere," Rearden said, "I never expected to experience it in use." He looked around at the metal walls again. "Thank you," he added.
"Even if you hadn't designed it," Francisco said sharply, like he was correcting an error, "I still would have asked you. You're the one I want next to me." Biting off the end of his sentence, as if he had said too much, or was about to, he abruptly flipped off the exterior light, returning them to the deeper darkness of the instrument lights alone.
Rearden looked at the dials. Four hundred fifty fathoms - barely more than half a mile. On land, laid flat, he would walk it in ten minutes. It was deeper than he had ever been underground, but not by much; he wouldn't have thought anything of it, to be that far below some mountain-top, inspecting some detail of a mining operation.
But in the water the distance felt much further. It was strange - he knew that if they dumped their ballast now, they would surface in (he calculated quickly) less than twenty minutes. And yet their support ship, floating somewhere above them, seemed like it belonged to an entirely different world than this black void. Here, he and Francisco might have been the only two men in existence, and the universe the diameter of the pressure sphere.
Dagny, he thought. In a universe of two, he would want to share it with Dagny. But before he could even complete the thought, he knew that it was false. The knowledge that Dagny would not choose to share the bubble with him rendered her unsuitable fodder for such a fantasy - Dagny, if squeezed into the submersible, would loose the ballast, rocket to the surface, tear open the hatch, and swim her way back to land and John and trains before the support ship could pick her up.
And it was false otherwise, he acknowledged. The submersible was fine work, and well worthy of pride no matter the occupant, but that it was Francisco inside it, Francisco it enclosed and carried safely to the bottom of the sea, was an acute pleasure particular to Francisco, as if the Rearden Metal shell was the concrete form not only of his mind's work, but also his protective regard for the other man.
It was the anniversary party, he recalled suddenly. The night he had looked out the window had been Lillian's anniversary party, and Francisco had thanked him for shelter from the storm. It had been the night they had met.
"Are you seeing this?" Francisco asked him abruptly, jarring Rearden from his thoughts.
"Doubting the evidence of your senses?"
"Hallucinations are a sign of nitrogen narcosis."
Rearden made a quick check of his gauges. "Interior pressure is steady," he said, "Gas ratio good... carbon dioxide scrubbers in order."
"I am seeing lights," Francisco said. He sounded almost apologetic.
Rearden squinted out his porthole, and blinked. There were indeed lights out there, tiny blue specks and streaks. It was impossible to tell, in the featureless dark, how distant they were, or how large.
"Are there sea fireflies?" he asked bemusedly.
"I do not know," Francisco answered. He switched on the exterior lights. The blue lights were instantly lost in the brightness, but the beams were once again full of tiny floating animals.
"Perhaps they signal each other," Francisco said thoughtfully. "Even here where there is no light, these creatures want it and make it for themselves."
"Are you interested in biology, now?"
"We are five hundred fathoms yet from mineralogy," Francisco said. "Or I would not waste your time on any irrelevant subject."
Rearden looked at Francisco, and there was nothing in his face that departed from his usual open manner. Only a certain note in his voice, perceptible only to someone who knew him very well, suggested something held back.
It was enough: Rearden was struck by understanding.
It was unexpected and irreversible, a process he had long since thought completed only now reaching its full and final end. It was as if he had been climbing a mountain, and, reaching a peak, had sat down to rest and enjoy his triumph, never noticing until now that an even higher summit rose just beyond. Having seen it, it was impossible to ignore, or to wish to ignore - how had Francisco resisted attempting those slopes? And why? Could too many years of denial and deception act like some sort of poison, a sort of slow nitrogen narcosis of the spirit?
He looked again at Francisco. It was impossible. Had Francisco failed to see it either? No, that was his own failing, to fail to question. Never Francisco's. It was impossible to imagine that Francisco was ever less than fully deliberate, fully conscious, in any area of his life. The only possibility was that he was somehow not in possession of all the facts.
"Nothing you could say to me would ever waste my time," he told Francisco. "There are no irrelevant subjects between us."
"Ragnar never takes John's physics courses," Francisco said, "And they are no less friends for it."
"Deflection, Francisco?" Rearden asked severely.
"Would you have me push at Dagny that which is unnecessary and unwanted? That is the logical end of what you suggest."
"Dagny made a choice," Rearden said. "I hadn't."
Francisco could only turn so far, in the narrow seats, while keeping his hands on the controls, but he turned as fully as he could to stare at Rearden.
"You're the one I want next to me too," Rearden said. Francisco sucked in a breath. "You didn't mean only here in the submersible, and I don't either. Next to me... beneath me... above me..."
"There is no room in this submersible for the proper response to that declaration," Francisco said hoarsely.
Rearden reached awkwardly across his body to set his hand on Francisco's. Francisco's hands remained steady on the controls, but Rearden saw him swallow. He closed his eyes for a moment, to more purely feel only the sensation of Francisco's hand moving beneath his. When he opened them Francisco was grinning at him, and he knew nothing more needed to be said.
"Will deep sea extraction really be profitable compared to conventional mining?" he asked instead.
Francisco laughed. "Probably not," he said. "But someone will want that copper someday, so I want the finding of it, now."
Rearden grinned back, and waited with interest to see what awaited them at the bottom of the sea, and beyond.