PALAU, Aug. 25 -- It's dark at the bottom of the sea. Beyond the wedge of light radiating from the robotic submarine's pair of 250-watt floodlights the ocean floor is invisible; you could pass six feet from a warship and never see a trace.

That's the intriguing possibility that will send us back out to the search site in a few days. For now, weather and technical malfunctions have sent us to the Palau archipelago for repairs and a few days' rest.

But before retreating, we finally got a glimpse of the ocean floor in the vicinity of where we think the USS Indianapolis rests.

August 24
Within the arc illuminated by the remotely operated vehicle's headlights the undersea world looks like a snowy night on the surface of the moon. A chalk-white blanket of dust covers the ocean floor. A flurry of white specks — plankton or dust — drift constantly past the lens. From time to time, the rover's thrusters kick up a billowing, milky cloud of dust. It's hard not to imagine shipwrecks in every shadow. But for now they are just shadows.

Watching from the soundproofed, dimly lit ROV control van aboard the search ship, you almost forget where you are; you almost feel that you are there — two miles below sea level — stalking the bottom of the ocean for the remains of Indianapolis. Steve Saint Amour sits at the ROV control panel, hands on the joystick, eyes on a monitor displaying a view from the deep and critical data: compass orientation, attitude to horizontal, depth and distance from the bottom. Flying the rover is like playing a video game — a million-dollar video game.

Expedition leader Curt Newport has plotted the search pattern to zero in on the prime target, number 1071: a long, narrow formation on the bottom that echoed with the density of metal, not rock, in a preliminary sonar search several months ago. Without operational sonar today, however, the ROV team can't pick out landmarks to orient themselves on the ocean floor. And while Global Positioning System signals pinpoint the ship's surface position, with the rover dangling at the end of more than two miles of cable there is no way to know exactly where the vehicle is in relation to the target.

"Okay, we should be about 200 meters away from the predicted target," the navigator's voice rings through the intercom into the video-monitoring room.

"Two hundred meters. That's about the length of the ship," says Paul Murphy, one of four survivors from USS Indianapolis aboard the search vessel Sea Eagle. For the last hour he and his crew mates have stared at the bank of monitors, hypnotized by the indistinct image beamed up from the deep.

"It's like looking into space," comments Mike Kuryla. But Mike and his buddies aren't merely looking into space; they're trying to see through time.

"Look, a rock!" calls out L.D. Cox in his Texas drawl.

"Whoa! What the heck! What's that?" An apparition like a glowing, red Halloween mask drifts by. But it's not a ghost, just one of the weird deep-sea creatures occasionally caught in the ROV's headlights.

"C'mon lady, show yourself," pleads Woody James, the fourth member of the group. But tonight, Indy refuses to respond to prayers. At 4:30 in the morning, after three frustrating hours scouring the bottom, Curt and Steve decide to recover the vehicle and fix the sonar.

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George Loy, navigator for the noon-to-midnight shift, puts the situation in perspective: "Without that sonar, it's like looking at the bottom through a paper-towel tube."

Several hours later the ROV is back on the deck after another dive, again without sonar or results. The good news is that the electronics techs have at last tracked down and repaired an elusive wiring fault. Of course, there's bad news as well (at sea there's always bad news looming). A tropical storm is sweeping slowly north from Palau. The seas are already choppy. The math doesn't add up to another dive. With supplies running low and nagging doubts about the readiness of the ROV, Curt and Steve decide to call back to the States for spare parts and reinforcements and head for the nearest port to meet them.

In the lull between the last dives, survivor Mike Kuryla stole a private moment with the ROV. He laid his hands on the vehicle and prayed to find the ship. "I was thinking that maybe some of the guys that are still down there, down with the ship, don't want us to come down," Mike says. "I just want them to know how much it means to all of us who are still here to see her again. I just had to ask them to let us come down."

Twenty-four hours later Sea Eagle is crashing through 12-foot seas, racing through the edge of a typhoon en route to Palau. Luck and the weather have driven us off-site. But nobody's giving up.