DEEP.(The Talk of the Town)(bathyspheres)

In the 1953 science-fiction thriller "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," a scientist is lowered into the ocean's depths in a stylized Hollywood interpretation of a bathysphere--a self-contained diving chamber--to look for a giant prehistoric monster that has been awakened from a hundred-million-year slumber by an atomic explosion. "I feel I'm leaving a world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays," the scientist says, just before he and the bathysphere are devoured by the beast, which goes on to trample its way from Manhattan to Coney Island, where it expires amid the flaming wreckage of the Cyclone. The End.

To oceanography buffs, the real bathysphere, a custom-built steel ball with reinforced portholes, is the Apollo 11 of deep-sea exploration. During the early nineteen-thirties, before which no one had ventured more than a few hundred feet beneath the waves, the famous naturalist William Beebe and his young partner Otis Barton squeezed themselves into it and, attached by a long cable to a ship on the surface, descended thousands of feet to see what they could find.

A few years ago, a writer named Brad Matsen, who was working on a book about Beebe and Barton's underwater exploits (it is called "Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss"), learned that their bathysphere had gone missing. As far as he knew, it had last been seen on display at the New York Aquarium, in Battery Park. Matsen was in Seattle, so he asked his daughter to investigate. After several phone calls and a subway ride to the end of Brooklyn, she reported back. The aquarium, which had moved to Coney Island in 1957, still had the bathysphere, in a fenced-in scrap yard under the wooden trestles of the same roller coaster where the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had met its end.

As soon as he could, Matsen made the pilgrimage to Coney Island. "When I first saw it through the chain-link fence, I completely puddled up," he recalled the other day. "Then I snuck inside the yard and actually ran my hands over it--holy mackerel! I was almost quivering with excitement." After that, he said, "whenever the writing got rough, and I felt like I needed a little bit of a kick, I'd go and hang out with the thing--it has an aura."

Matsen, a former commercial fisherman ...