The Window Cracked at 32,400 Feet. They Kept Going.

The bathyscaph was not built to travel. Walsh said it himself. The Trieste was about as well suited to the high seas as your house is to a superhighway. On the nineteenth of January it left Apra Harbor, Guam, on a towline behind the ocean tug USS Wandank. The destroyer escort USS Lewis steamed with them. The target was two hundred miles out, a slot of seafloor the charts called Challenger Deep. The Trieste rode about eight hundred feet astern of the tug and took the Pacific in the face. On the twentieth the towline parted. Fifteen minutes into the forenoon watch the house on the highway came off its hitch. They had it back on in half an hour and kept crawling. Four days of that. High swell. A craft that was never meant to be a ship. Giuseppe Buono had already prepared this machine sixty-four times, first in the Mediterranean, then here. On the morning of the twenty-third he asked the question out loud. Do you think we shall be able to make the dive. The sea had torn the surface telephone off the deck. The tachometer was gone. The vertical current meter was broken. Waves were still sweeping the float. Piccard wrote that he was wondering the same thing. At three twenty-eight in the morning the tug sighted flares Lewis had laid about five miles off, marking the hole. That was the place. A box the Navy had found with hundreds of explosive charges, a trench floor about four miles long and a mile wide. Not the whole Mariana. One slot. Walsh woke two hours after the midwatch and had the thought a lot of men have before a job they cannot undo. All he had to do that day was get into a small steel ball and dive to the bottom of the deepest part of the world’s deepest ocean. For a moment it seemed wiser to stay in bed. He did not stay in bed. He went out to the Trieste in a rubber boat because the swell would not let a man step across. John Michel and Buono were already on her, patching what the tow had done. Inside the sphere the air smelled of rubber and solvent. Silica gel bags had pulled the humidity down to about twelve percent. Walsh looked around the instrument rack and said everything seemed to be in order. This is the moment to say what the machine actually was, because the title only works if you know what cracked.