Niemand laughed. “You’ll see, I have a lighter side.” He stood, turned off the slide presentation, and walked briskly to the door. “This is a great opportunity for all of us, young man. You want to save your mother, I seek to save the world. I shall notify my crew, and they will take you on a tour of the Conch. You will be very impressed. You’ll see things are not as simple as they may seem.”
“There is no way on earth we would ever help you,” Alex said.
Halfway out the door, Niemand turned. “‘No way’ is not an option, young lady. I’m afraid you are deeply into ‘no choice.’”
21
“WHAT did that slimy, ferret-headed toff tell you?” bellowed a bearded, broad-shouldered man as he bounded into the study. He wore jeans and a ripped forest-green polo shirt, and his hair was pulled back into a thick gray ponytail.
“You’re the guy I saw pulling in the ladder,” Max said.
“Honestly, I’ve seen rats scuttle when Niemand walks down the street!” the man went on. “He scares Halloween clear into Christmas. You outsmarted the little piker, you did. Good for his ego. Bring him down a notch. Now then, you didn’t let him frighten you, did you? Because if he did, I’ll be sure to pull out that silver stripe on his head and plant roses in his scalp. Just for our amusement.”
Alex and Max stared, slack-jawed.
“I can’t believe you just said that,” Alex said.
The man slapped his own forehead and then extended his hand. “Forgive my bad manners. I’m Basile, the captain. In my position, I can say whatever I want. I’ve known Stinky for a long time.”
“S-S-Stinky?” Max said.
“Sorry, my accent too thick?” Basile said. “I’m a Londoner, you know. Most people think Australia. Yes, Stinky Niemand. Stink. Key. He was my college roommate. Until he flunked out.”
From the hallway, Niemand poked his head in and said, “Basile, you know I did not flunk out. I took a semester off. And if you continue to spread falsehoods and call me names, I shall fire you.”
“Yes, sir, indeed, sir,” Basile said with an exaggerated bow.
As Niemand ushered in three other people, Basile turned to Alex and Max and inserted his fingers into his mouth as if barfing.
The three other crew members eyed Alex and Max curiously. They were all wearing black uniforms with a silver swoosh across the front and an NE logo on the left breast.
“Are you smelling ham?” Alex murmured to Max. “Ham is confusion, right?”
“Yes, but it’s canceled out by the smell of dark chocolate.”
“What’s that?”
“Relief. Because there’s someone on this planet who isn’t afraid of Niemand.”
“ . . . And these are the rest of my international team of geniuses,” Niemand said. “Sophia is from Nigeria and speaks six languages. She is our chief engineer.”
A deeply dark-skinned young woman with high cheekbones grinned and gave a tiny curtsy. “Welcome.”
“André is German and the best mechanic in the Western Hemisphere. He keeps the Conch shipshape,” Niemand continued, gesturing toward a gloomy-looking, rail-thin man with a shaved head and snake tattoos that ran up all sides of his neck. He didn’t say a word, staring at Max with green eyes that seemed to glow from within.
The green was so bright, so unnatural, that Max had to turn away.
“And Pandora is our resident cartographer and navigator,” Niemand went on, “fresh from university in Brazil.”
Pandora had olive skin and dark, smiling eyes. She glanced uncomfortably toward the mechanic. “Pleased to meet you. Forgive André. He doesn’t speak much.”
“Hrrtz,” André seemed to say.
“Good then, I shall get back to my post,” Basile announced. “Alex, Max, promise to stop by when you’re finished with the tour?”
“I’ll be sure they do,” Niemand said.
“Or what—you’ll bite their noses off?” Basile retorted with a blustery laugh.
As Niemand and Basile walked away, arguing, Sophia led everyone else out of the study. They emerged into a corridor wide enough to fit four people shoulder to shoulder. The walls were a white-gray metal with a brushed texture. Max expected the hallway to go straight, but it curved to the left as they walked.
“Most submarines are cylindrical—sort of a fish shape with all the inner spaces crammed and piled atop one another,” Sophia said. “The Conch is unique. Mr. Niemand wanted a design inspired by the Nautilus that Jules Verne described in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. At the center of the sub, I have created the massive circular space we are in. Like a great disk. Come.”
Max followed her down the curving corridor, lined with doors on both sides. Sophia pushed open a door on the left to reveal a room with a perfectly made bed, a slanted desk, and posters of forest landscapes. “These are my living quarters,” she said. “All our rooms are on the inside of the circle, so no windows, but still very pleasant. The most interesting rooms are on the right—along the perimeter of the circle.”
The first was a game room lined with beanbag chairs and a futon. Metal shelves were stacked with board games and puzzles. Strewn about on tables were at least three iPads, four laptops, a Wii console, and Super Nintendo. In the center of the space was a brand-new foosball game. “Can this be my bedroom, please?” Max said.
But Alex was already peeking into the next room. “Whoa. Max, look!”
Max followed her into an entertainment center with a humongous flat-screen TV, plush sofas, a popcorn machine, and a glass cabinet stocked with candy bars. “The TV is seventy-five inches,” Sophia said, “and because we cannot get Wi-Fi, we have collected three thousand movies and TV shows for viewing.”
Pandora then took over the tour and guided them around the gym, the hospital, and finally the map room, which was loaded with stacks of paper charts. The maps’ bright colors made the sea bottom look like an exotic landscape of smoking volcanos and vast mountain ranges. Next André showed them the engine room, the guts of the ship. It was the largest space of all, extending past the circular area and deep into the dark cylindrical guts of the sub. A massive camshaft turned with a deep and steady groan, its motion turning gears above and below.
“Fnnf,” André said, gesturing toward an electronic board that extended nearly floor to ceiling with levers, switches, and gauges. “Und grssstn.”
Neither Max nor Alex bothered to ask. But Max was relieved whenever the mechanic looked away. The green eyes bothered him. They reminded Max of a snake.
“Sometimes we need quiet,” Pandora said, pushing open another door, “so we have a well-stocked library. Over one hundred thousand volumes here.”
The smell of wood and leather wafted out through the door, and Max stared into a room lined with dark oak shelves and plush, red-leather armchairs. Books were crammed onto every shelf, and each desk contained an e-reader. “Amazing,” Max said. “I like this almost as much as the game room.”
“Yup, nerd paradise,” Alex remarked.
“Here we have the fitting room and diving chamber,” Sophia said as they entered with a swoosh of the doors. “Although diving is not the right word.”
Four thick, massive suits, like the kind the astronauts wore on the moon, stood against the far wall like sleeping zombies. “When we explore the ocean floor, we don these special pressure suits,” Sophia continued. “We enter a sealed chamber that exchanges air for water before we step out into the ocean.”
“And last but not least, the captain’s wheelhouse,” Pandora said, throwing open another door.
“Vin-che-e-e-e-e-e-r-a-a-a-a-h!” The scream was so loud, Max nearly fell back.
Pandora darted inside. Basile was sitting on a stool, rocking back and forth, in front of a steering wheel and a periscope. He was wearing thick headphones, which Pandora yanked off his head.
“What, what?” Basile cried out, spinning around. “Oh. There you are. Do you like opera? Puccini? Come. Be truthful.”
“No,” Ale
x said.
“Very well, I shall sing it nonstop until you tell me where we are going.” He got up from his seat and ushered the others out of the room. “Shoo, scat, the tour is over! Time for work!”
“Thanks, guys! That was awe—” Max shouted as the doors shut abruptly behind him.
Basile turned back into the room. Max gazed around. The walls were crammed with gauges and maps and switches and levers. In the center, where Basile sat, was a stool with a steering wheel and a periscope. A radar map showed a blinking white dot, and a massive pair of rectangular windows showed a panorama of the sea like a fish tank. On one side of the window was a big glass square attached to a small key dangling from a chain. Inside the square was a big red button labeled EMERGENCY DC.
Max liked this room. He wanted to know what all of it meant.
Humming a tune, Basile walked over to a small desk. He opened a drawer, pulled out the leather-bound Jules Verne booklet, and handed it to Alex.
“Like it or not, you’re one of the family now, aren’t you?” he said. “Now read this to me, and tell me where we are going next. Or Stinky is liable to have a fit and kill us all.”
“Actually, we don’t know. It’s in some kind of code.”
Basile grabbed a pair of glasses from a table. “Ha! With three great brains, we should be able to figure this out, easy peasy lemon squeezy! Go on . . .”
Alex placed the book down on the desk and opened it.
Upon reaching the great unruined chamber at the prime locations of the fifteenth, third, and second to the Pole Star and eleventh, seventeenth, and fourteenth to the sunrise, be guided by the camptodactyl of the king.
Basile’s smile disappeared. “Greek to me. Actually, more like Martian.”
“We figured we’d concentrate on the numbers, which we assumed were coordinates,” Max said, “but it turned out to be in Niger.”
He dug from his pocket for the napkin where he’d written it out.
15°3´2˝N 11°17´14˝E
“Not likely we’d reach there in the Conch,” Basile squinted. “Prime location or not.”
“Wait!” Max said with a gasp. “What you said—that’s it!”
Basile’s glasses slipped down his nose. “I don’t follow . . .”
“The note doesn’t say prime location,” Max continued. “It says prime locations. Plural.”
“But it’s only one set of coordinates,” Alex said, “which means one location.”
“Maybe,” Max said. “But what if this is a kind of code? Why does he use the word prime? If I say the word prime, what do you think of right away?”
“Prime meats,” Basile said.
“Prime numbers?” Alex offered.
“Alex for the win,” Max said. “A prime is a number you can’t divide anything into—except itself and one.”
He began scribbling on the other side of the napkin:
2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29
31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61
Basile hooted a laugh. “Just spat that out from memory, did you?”
“I’m smart,” Max said.
“And modest,” Alex added. “But there’s a problem, cuz. Look at the coordinates. The first digit is fifteen. That’s not prime. You can divide it by five and by three.”
“Okay,” Max said, “so this is where we look at the word locations. Maybe Verne is not talking about GPS locations.”
“What else could he mean, lad?” Basile asked.
“Think of cardinal and ordinal numbers,” Max said. “Cardinal is one, two, three, four, and so on. Ordinal is first, second, third, fourth. Cardinal is a number. Ordinal is a place—a location!”
“So Verne might not mean fifteen, but fifteenth?” Alex said.
“Fifteenth what?” Basile asked. “My head is about to explode.”
Max blanched. “Are you being sarcastic?”
“Yes, he is,” Alex said. “Go on.”
“I’m thinking that fifteen means fifteenth prime number,” Max said. “The coordinates are prime locations—each one tells us which prime number to use! So fifteen means the fifteenth prime number, three means the third prime number, two means the second prime number.”
Alex looked at Max’s list of primes again. “The fifteenth prime number is . . . wait, let me count . . . forty-seven?”
“I got it! It’s like a game! We just count along these numbers you wrote!” Basile said, putting his stubby fingers on the list. “The third prime is . . . five. And the second is . . . three.”
Under his first set of coordinates, Max carefully wrote out the second:
15°3´2˝N 11°17´14˝E
47°5´3˝N 31°59´43˝E
“How are we going to find this without Wi-Fi?” Alex asked.
“You little bunnies don’t know life without electronics, do you?” Basile reached into a deep, wooden map cabinet, pulled out a huge paper map, and laid it on a drafting table. “This is the northern Atlantic,” he said, slapping a plastic T square on the map. “Let’s match north . . . and east . . .”
He slid the instrument along the paper, found a spot, and then marked it with a pen. “About equal distance from the Azores, Kap Farvel in Greenland, and Cape Race in Newfoundland,” Basile said. “Used to be a long line of furious volcanoes running up the center of the ocean in this area. With the Newfoundland Basin on one side and the Northeast Atlantic Basin on the other. There may have been land masses here ages ago.”
“But now it’s in the middle of the ocean,” Max said.
Basile clapped him on the back so hard that Max nearly fell over. “So, my boy, are we!”
22
AFTER the seventh movie, Max got tired of entertainment.
After an unfortunate collision with André, who still hadn’t forgiven him, Max stopped racing Alex around the Conch.
By the third day at sea, he had hurt his thumbs from too much Legend of Zelda, gotten sick from overeating energy bars, and made drawings of a hundred thirty-two different fish he’d seen out the window. Everyone had become a little crabby. Niemand stayed in his suite, coming out every few hours to yell at Basile for not going fast enough. And Alex had begun her novel. Which meant writing the first page and then deleting it about a million times.
For Max, the best part was just hanging with Basile in the wheelhouse, a sketchbook on his lap. The room looked out through two curved rectangular windows. It was quiet, except for Basile’s horrible singing.
“You’re the only one who doesn’t make fun of me,” Basile finally said.
“I tune it out,” Max replied with a shrug. “I like just watching the fish. It keeps the smell of sweaty feet away.”
“Ach, sorry, I suppose I should do some laundry,” Basile said.
“It’s not you,” Max said. “When I feel smothered, I smell sweaty feet.”
Basile swiveled on his stool to face Max. “You’re an odd one, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Max said. “My mom could tell you everything about me in forty-three seconds. I can’t.”
“You miss her, eh, lad?” Basile said softly, standing from his stool.
Max nodded. He disliked the way the conversation was going. It was headed in the skunk direction. So he opened up his sketchbook and flipped to a blank page.
“A gifted artist too!” Basile moved toward one of the large windows. “Come close! Ha! Look! Want a fancy writing implement? How about one of those?”
Max walked over and peered through. Rising up from the seafloor was a long, white object, made of coral but thin as a string. It was fringed up and down with delicate coral threads like a ring of feathers, and it tapered to a narrow tip.
“The slender sea pen, aka Stylatula elongata—we don’t have one of those in our museum.” Basile pulled back the throttle. As the Conch slowed, he gestured to a Plexiglas-enclosed cabinet against the wall, about waist-high. Inside were specimens of brilliant-colored coral, salvaged antique-ship specimens, and fossils. “As you see, it is a small but select display. Let’s
add to it. Ever been in a Newtsuit? Come.”
Without waiting for an answer, Basile left the room and entered the narrow hallway. Max followed him to a tiny room where four armored suits stood against a wall. They were made completely of metal, with a series of joints up and down the legs, arms, and torso. At the top was a huge spherical helmet with a round glass window and oxygen tanks hung over both shoulders. “Wait, you want me to put this thing on?” Max said. “I’ve never dived. Well, I snorkeled once. But not scuba—”
“With an atmospheric diving suit, one only needs to know how to breathe,” Basile said. He grunted with the effort as he pulled one off its hooks. “It will feel extremely heavy when you put it on. The earliest versions were a thousand pounds, but this one is forged aluminum alloy. Developed by a fellow named Nuytten, hence ‘Newtsuit.’ May not fit you too well, but it’ll work.”
Max stepped back. The suit looked like it weighed a thousand pounds. “Can I just watch you do it? I’ll stay and listen to opera.”
Basile lay the suit on the ground and unlatched the helmet. “After you,” he said with a grin.
Once Max was in the ocean, the suit didn’t feel nearly so heavy. But his feet could not touch the bottom of the boot section, and he felt like he was sitting on a horse with no stirrups. He was only able to move by rocking left and right and thrusting his legs forward in a walking motion.
But it didn’t matter. Max felt amazing in the suit. Snug and warm. He could have just stood there, planted in that exact space, for days.
A red-striped fish kissed his helmet not with its lips but with two thick, white whiskers on its chin. It disappeared among the tubes of a silver-red scrim of coral that seemed to explode from the seafloor like long trumpets. He saw flat silver-white fish that looked like floating dinner plates, a school of nearly transparent swimmers that moved like a sheet of gauze. As he took a lumbering step forward, the sand below him came to life, forming the fanned shape of a stingray and vanishing into the distance like a great white bird.
In the massive helmet he could hear only his own breathing, deep and rhythmic—with occasional screams of joy and discovery from Basile through a radio transmitter. As the old man collected specimens, he blurted out names that Max tried to memorize—goatfish . . . organ-pipe coral . . . triggerfish . . .