Five and a Half Years

In the spring of 2021 a machine drove the Pacific floor, four kilometres down, for seventy-four hours, and took the stones off a strip the size of seven football pitches.

A stone like that puts on a millimetre or two in a million years. Two or three small things live on each, because down there nothing else is hard.

What it stirred up came down a few hundred metres off on animals that can't move. Some of them can clean themselves. Others can't.

This month a ship left San Diego to go and look. The chief scientist said, before it sailed, he likely won't see any recovery.

The cameras go down anyway, and the corers, and the robot on its cable, to give five and a half years a hard look in a place that keeps that kind of time,

and bring up, well lit, the strip where the stones were, which is what there is to show while the rules are still being written.