Challenger Deep Read Online Free

crammed into the cargo hold like sardines, in order to lower the ship’s center of gravity. If there’s no task for you on this ship, you become ballast. I should have known better than to complain.
    “As we near our destination,” the captain once told me, “I willbe selecting a special team for our great mission. Do your job with hearty sweat and vigor, and you may earn your nearly worthless hide a place on that team.”
    Although I’m not sure I want that, it may be better than shuffling pointlessly around the deck. I had once asked the captain how far we were from the Marianas Trench, because each day the sea is exactly the same. We seem no closer, and no farther from anything.
    “’Tis the nature of a liquid horizon to feel no passage of space,” the captain said. “But we will know as we near the trench, because there will be signs and dark portents.”
    I won’t dare ask the captain what those dark portents might be.

16. Swabby
    When the sea is calm, and I don’t have to run from side to side, I sometimes hang out on deck with Carlyle. Carlyle is the ship’s swabby—a guy with bright red hair in a short peach fuzz, and a smile friendlier than anyone else’s on the ship. He’s not a kid, he’s older, like the ship’s officers, but he’s not really one of them. He seems to make his own hours and his own rules, with little interference from the captain, and is the only one on the ship who makes any sense.
    “I’m a swabby by choice,” he told me once. “I do it because it’s needed. And because you’re all such slobs.”
    Today I catch sight of rats scurrying away from the water of hismop, disappearing into dark corners of the deck.
    “Blasted things,” Carlyle says, dipping his mop into a bucket of cloudy water and washing the deck. “We’ll never get rid of them.”
    “There are always rats on old ships,” I tell him.
    He raises an eyebrow. “Rats? Is that what you think they are?” Although he doesn’t offer me an alternate theory. The truth is, they scuttle so quickly, and hide so deep in shadows, I can’t be sure what they are. It makes me nervous, so I change the subject.
    “Tell me something about the captain I don’t know.”
    “He’s your captain. Anything worth knowing you already must know.”
    But even the way he says it, I can tell he is an insider in a way that few others are. I figure if I’m going to get any answers, though, I need to be specific with my questions.
    “Tell me how he lost his eye.”
    Carlyle sighs, looks around to make sure we’re unobserved, and begins to whisper.
    “It is my understanding that the parrot lost his eye before the captain. The way I’ve heard it told, the parrot sold his eye to a witch to make a magic potion that would turn him into an eagle. But the witch double-crossed him, drank it herself, and flew away. The parrot, who didn’t want to be the only one with an eye patch, clawed out the captain’s eye as well.”
    “That’s not true,” I say with a grin.
    Carlyle keeps his expression solemn as he splashes soapy water on the deck. “It’s as true as it needs to be.” The tar between the planks seems to retreat from his deluge.

17. I’d Pay to See That
    The navigator says a view from the crow’s nest will bring me “comfort, clarity, charity, chastity.”
    If it’s a multiple choice test, I choose both “A” and “B,” although considering the crew, I may just blacken in choice “D” with my number two pencil.
    The crow’s nest is a small circular tub, high up on the mainmast. It’s only large enough to hold one, maybe two crewmen on lookout. I conclude it would be a good place to be alone with my thoughts, but I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.
    It’s early evening as I climb the frayed ratlines that drape the ship like shrouds. The last hint of dusk slowly vanishes from the horizon, and in the sun’s absence, the strange stars are coaxed to shine.
    The rope lattice of the ratlines