Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (15 page)

Crane looked at his hands and, as if they did not please him, shoved them hastily into his jacket pockets. “And what about if he can’t contact the President to ask him?”

“Now that,” said Emery jovially—and then paused to puff and puff, and stare at, and puff again his pipe alight, “—that presents a clear alternative and what the Navy loves to call an implement situation. If an officer reports for orders and is unable to get them—and mind you, he has to exhaust his every resource in trying to get those orders—then, and only then, is he on his own discretion. I mean, to put it in the simplest possible terms, he is not on his own discretion if he wants to do something and is ordered not to. Even if it’s the right thing to do and he can prove it. On the other hand, inability to make contact is never an excuse for inaction—never. Enough men have been court-martialed on this point to make it painfully clear. No, he must take action on his own discretion. That is written in the Code, in so many words. What is not written, but is there all the same, is that he’d better be right in what his discretion leads him to. If it all turns out well, fine. If it doesn’t, God help him because nobody else will, most especially the Navy. So what we have to pray for, Cap’n, is that he doesn’t make contact.”

“You sound as if one, there were some hope of making contact and two, it would be nice if we personally could do something about it.”

Emery slowly took down his feet and even more slowly straightened his spine. Shaggy old Emery was grave and serious so seldom that when it happened, it hit like a depth bomb. “Crane,” he murmured, and he sounded like far-off thunder, “I’d like to be able to wash out your mouth with sand-and-canvas for that. On the first point, yes, he does have a plan. On the second point, Harriman Nelson plays by the rules, and as long as I’m around to watch, everybody in his command does likewise.”

“Even if it destroys him and all of us—all the world?”

“Even that. Are you arguing the point with me, mister, or just running a test?”

“Just running a test,” nodded the Captain, at which Emery suddenly and warmly smiled. “And here’s the great man himself, to tell you how to chat with the President when all communications are down.”

“ ‘Way down,” said Nelson from the door. “Sit, Lee. Emery, get the hell out of my chair.”

“Just keeping it warm for you, sir,” said Emery. He shambled up and went to sit by Crane.

“Do you believe in God?” asked the Admiral surprisingly, dropping into his chair.

The Captain and the Commander looked at each other and at the admiral. “Well, sure,” said Emery, and “I guess so,” said Crane.

“Been talking to that Alvarez,” said Nelson. He chuckled suddenly and rubbed the side of his neck hard. “You know, if a fellow had nothing else to do, he’d be tempted to listen a whole lot to that man. Ever drop in on him?”

“Never did,” said the Captain. “What have I got to say to him?”

“I did,” said Emery.

“Oh, you would. Bet you had a ball with him.”

“In a way, yes. But then I’m nuts. Everybody knows that. The secret of my success: I’m nuts. I never run out of things to get interested in. One of those movies that puts you to sleep, now: as soon as the plot gets a little soporific, I kind of tune it out. I get to looking at the lighting and figure how they placed it, how big, what kind. Or the costumes: I remember one night it hit me like a ton of bricks, something I’d known all along but never thought about before: cloth is threads lying side by side.”

“Well, what else?”

“Hell, nothing else: it just hit me, that’s all.” He interlaced his fingers and pulled at them hard without pulling them apart. “By the hundreds and the thousands and the hundreds of thousands—all interacting. You ever stop to think of the distribution of force when you tug at one side of a piece of cloth? It all yields, it all holds. It moves without moving. You hang it out in a hurricane or give it the kind of almighty bashing around it gets in a washing machine, and when you’re done none of the relationships in the fabric are changed.”

“You talk too much,” said the Admiral, “but I know you well enough to know you haven’t changed the subject. We were talking about Alvarez.”

“Sure we were. Alvarez sees the universe like a piece of cloth. He envisions—and baby [he was the only man on earth who would dream of addressing Admiral Nelson as “baby” and, further, not notice that he was doing it]—Alvarez is the boy to go to for visions, he really has visions; well, he sees the base of it all as simple as warp and woof; these simple things he calls God’s laws. And where the Age of Faith was secure until disrupted by the Age of Reason, and the Age of Existentialism, or it’s-all-meaningless, came along and bombed the Age of Reason in its turn; all that complication and chaos and upsettings of whole schools of mathematics, all that revolution and assassination and negation and organized, purposeful destruction—all that, to Alvarez, isn’t chaos and never was. It’s cloth in a williwaw, that’s all, twisted up on itself and maybe even ragged at the edges—but, by God (and you can take those two words literally)—by God, they’re there, the warp and the woof, the simple lines of the laws of God. It’s a credo that can handle anything—anything at all—one step further than the all-is-nothing existentialists, because Alvarez believes all is something and feels he can prove it. And I guess, if you really believed it, you could get more comfort out of believing that you were an on-purpose man put in an on-purpose world for a reason, rather than floundering around for a meaningless cosmic second in a purposeless universe.”

“But that sounds like a whole lot I’ve heard before!” said the Captain.

“You haven’t heard anything quite like this before. Because just when you are convinced that this character is strictly passive and the hell with him, he says something or does something about as passive as a weasel with an eel in his throat. He’s actually a very dynamic guy.”

“Then what’s with all this will-of-God megilla of his?”

“That’s simply the conclusion he has come to. It’s God’s time to wipe us out, and that fire up there is going to do it. Alvarez doesn’t argue with or about God, and most especially he doesn’t waste any time trying to understand God—which is where he parts company from most of the reverend gentleman I’ve met so far, who not only claim to understand God, but are prepared to explain God.”

“Then what about this dynamic thing? Is that how he falls from grace—gets off his keyster and uses his own will instead of lying prone under God’s? What does he do then—repent and apologize and get on his back again?”

“Oh no. He does nothing most of the time, unless he’s strongly moved to do something. In other words, he doesn’t operate from moral pressures, duty and all that. He moves when he fells a strong inward compulsion. And to him, that’s God. God acts through him whenever God feels like it. Alvarez just lolls around awaiting the call, and brother, when it hits him, he jumps. Oh, there’s no use trying to describe him to the uninitiate—right, Nelse?”

“Right,” said the Admiral, who had been following the conversation like a tennis spectator, swinging his big head from side to side. “All I’ll offer is that he believes in something, he makes you wish you believed in something—anything—as much; and finally, he . . . fears . . . nothing.”

“Natch,” said Emery. “He has bowed to the will of God as he sees it. It’s acceptance, that’s what it is, not passivity. Since he’s sure the firebelt is God’s ultimate punishment, visited on mankind for his sins; since he is certain that judgment can’t be changed; and finally, since he is convinced that his own every act and thought—and non-act, I might add—is a manifestation of God’s will; why, he is not anxious.” Emery raised his finger, his eyes alight. “That’s it! He’s not anxious! He’s the only man I ever met who’s free of modern man’s epidemic sickness, anxiety. You know what’s so irrational, so wasting, about anxiety? It’s the worrying about all the things that might happen, and the inability to realize that of all the infinity of things that might happen in each instance, only one will. Alvarez sees in this firebelt the one thing that is going to happen. This one thing he totally accepts. Everything else has ceased to matter. Ergo: no worry.”

“And he’s the Lord’s anointed, and fears no punishment.”

“Oh no! Lee, you talk to him once; he doesn’t think of himself as a saint. He knows he will be punished, too. He doesn’t fear it because he isn’t anxious . . . don’t you know that the prime worry of anxious people is that they won’t get a suitable punishment?” Emery grinned his shaggy grin and waved a hand at the overhead. “And that thing up there will do till the real thing comes along.”

Crane turned to the Admiral. “And do you find this castaway’s theories uh—what was the word you used—tempting, sir?”

“If I do, it’s like the passing envy for a guy who has a softer pillow than I do. Sure, I’d like to live in a universe as simple and certain as he does. But I don’t. I’ll tell you where he and I part company. I believe as strongly as he does in a superior power; you can call it God if you want to. And I believe that it is in essence unknowable, the proof of which is that the more we learn, the more things we find that need learning. Now if you want it in simple terms of God, I believe that God put the unknown in the universe for us to know about. (We never will, we never can, but it’s there to work on.) And I believe that we were put here to do that learning. Finally—and here’s the point—I think the knowledge we get should direct our actions. I mean if we don’t use the knowledge we get, we’re spitting right in God’s eye. It isn’t enough just to know what that firebelt is. I have to do something about it. Sure, it’s God’s firebelt. It’s a natural phenomenon—they’re all God’s. But just because God decreed that rivers must flow downhill that doesn’t mean I’m a sinner if I stop one up and build me a power station.”

“Eternal dam-nation,” murmured Emery. Crane shouted and the Admiral groaned. “But anyway,” Crane said at last, “You can have’m. By me, Alvarez is useless, which is all you need from supercargo anyway, and nuts, which is all right as long as it doesn’t come off on any of the crew. What was it you called me in for, sir?”

Emery laughed outright. “The skipper’s had it!”

“I like a God-seeking bull-session,” said the Captain, “but we’re just not fitted out for one here. Make a couple of changes and I’m with you. Get us a dim corner in a college-town tavern and a few gallons of weak beer, and leave us all be from eighteen to twenty-two years old. While you’re arranging that—what’s the business at hand, sir?”

The Admiral waited until Emery had stopped hooting, and then said, “We’ve got to get in touch with the President.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Radio, even tight-beam satellite transfer, is out of the question now.”

“Yes, sir. Any luck with the loran?”

“Brilliant idea Sparks had there. Unfortunately, he had it too late. He’s been sending Morse by our heaviest loran gear for days on end—sometimes twenty hours in one day, till I made him knock off. But it would seem that nobody ashore has had the same bright idea, and nobody’s listening. There’ll be a lot of high-priced communications men and SigCor officers who’ll kick themselves for not thinking about it, when we get back and tell ‘em.

“All right, not having any carrier pigeons, and being fresh out of holy men who can walk on the water, how do you suppose we can get through?”

“I . . . don’t think we can, sir.”

“Sure we can. We call him up on the telephone.”

“Sir?”

“Now I’m just going to sit back and let you think,” said the Admiral professorially.

Telephone! Crane looked at Nelson and at the grinning Emery.

Telephone. Transceiver and wires between. Wires, not ship to shore. Shore to shore. He looked up. “The submarine cable.”

“How much?” Nelson asked Emery.

Emery opened the hands he held on his lap and uncovered a watch. A stopwatch. “Twelve seconds.”

“Damn,” said the admiral. “I said he could do it in ten.” He fished in his pocket and tossed a dollar across to Emery, who pocketed it happily. “All right, Captain. We need a frogman and somebody who has a wire communications rating and somebody with beef enough to saw through the armor and get in to the wires, and know-how enough to make a halfway decent repair afterward.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Whaddaye mean, yes sir? Have we got a squad like that aboard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Now here—” he unrolled a chart—”is the new Natal-Freetown coaxial cable. And here we are. And right here, just southeast of Fernando de Noronha, is a shelf where the cable drops off into the first Deep. It lies in about forty fathoms—yeah, here, it’s marked: 230 feet. We should reach there in about six hours. And here—” He opened a drawer and pulled out a massive loose-leaf binder full of technical data—“here’s the specs of that cable from smelting the ores clear down to what they had for chow aboard the cable-layer that put it there. Round up your squad, brief ‘em, see that they’re all rested as much as possible, and report here in five hours; that’ll be about fifteen hundred.”

Crane took the book and the map. “Aye-aye, sir. Will that be all for now, sir? I’d like to get cracking on this.”

“Shove off.”

When the Captain had gone, Emery laughed. “What are you cackling about now?”

“Just how big a squad do you think he’ll pick?”

“Up to him.”

“You’ll flip when he brings it.”

“I don’t flip easy.”

Emery just put his feet up on the settle, leaned back, and grinned.

“G
ET DRESSED
,”
SAID
D
R.
J
AMIESON.

Hodges, the third officer, obeyed. He was a spare, taut young man with deepset black eyes and black hair. “What’s wrong, sir?”

“Not a thing,” said Jamieson. He removed the stethoscope from his neck and put it on a shelf, and found his pipe.

“Not a thing, sir? Do you mean I’m cracking up like this for nothing?”

“You’re not cracking up,” said the doctor, somewhat sharply, “and when I said not a thing, I meant not a thing in my department. Would you mind very much talking to Dr. Hiller?”