Not just the life he found there, but the possibilities. From the time he’d strapped on his first snorkel in an unheralded attempt to face another fear, he’d been hooked. He’d quickly graduated from snorkeling to scuba diving, to going on successively deeper, more challenging dives until he’d been able to persuade a small firm to let him dive using a one-atmosphere dive suit. Sealed inside the bulky, jointed “robot suit,” he’d been strapped onto a small platform affixed to the outside of a deep-diving submersible as if he were a piece of machinery rather than a live man dependent on rebreathers and meticulously sealed joints for his survival. The submersible had been lowered from the research boat into the warm, sparkling waters off the Florida coast and released. Unencumbered by any tethers to surface ships, the small, rotund craft had descended steadily through the graduated light and then indescribable darkness to the seafloor eleven hundred feet below the surface. Once the craft had settled gently onto the silty seafloor, Dennis had been released from his bonds and had taken one step, then another into a world in which he was the alien and the locals were unafraid.
