Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (17 page)

“Oh, cut the blarney,” she said into his shoulder, and heaved a shuddering sigh; then she looked up at him with an expression he had seen before, and sworn never to describe to her, such a power it would give her over him if she knew: her eyes bright, wide, and wet, her brows tilted up in the middle and down at the ends and worried wrinkles to carry them there, and her lower lip wet and bright too, protruding a little in her appeal, and a little swollen to boot, having just been bitten as the anxiety came on her. “I just have this awful feeling—”

He cut the blarney altogether, and said to her in a voice gravelled with stubbornness, “Cathy, the more you or anyone convinced me of a danger, the less I could send another man. Did you come in here to make sure I’d go, then? Because that’s the way to do it.”

She looked at him for a long time in that way he’d never describe to her, until he had to hold himself steady by all his muscles, for she was melting his bones. Then she nodded and dropped her eyes. “Very well, Lee.” She would have turned away, but he held her hard with one hand and put the other over the intercom call, and said urgently, “Sweetheart, when the knights of old went out to do battle with the heathens and the dragons and such trash, they’d fly milady’s kerchief for a pennant, or wear milady’s girdle about their brows.”

She blinked her eyes rapidly and responded with a light-hearted voice and a full-hearted bravery that made him hurt inside. “Puh-
leez!
” she intoned with mock schoolgirl shock, “Her
girdle?
on his
head?
”

“It was a belt, silly, and don’t interrupt or I’ll give you one. Anyway, I’m not carrying a spear this trip, and—”

“I will not lend you a—”

“Sh—and so the best I can do is this: what’s your favorite color?”

“Blue. You know that.”

Crane flipped the button. “Now hear this! Now hear this! Diving gear detail: I’ll use the blue suit. Repeat, the blue suit. Over.” He turned off the switch and rubbed her nose with his. “There now. That’s as much as I can do to wrap myself up in you in an emergency situation. Beat it.”

“Lee . . .” she whispered hoarsely, hugged him savagely and ran away.

Crane gave her a moment and then stepped out into the corridor; no sewing circle since bone-splinters first pierced an untanned fur could out-gossip any crew of any ship any time. He padded aft in his waffle-clad feet, and found Dr. Jamieson, Dr. Hiller, Gleason, Jimmy Smith, Hodges and Chip Morton clustered around the hatch to the well-chamber.

A number of possible responses to this reeled past Crane’s inner eye—amusement, anger, even a modicum of embarrassment, for uniform-of-occasion or no, what he wore was still underwear. He chose the rifle-crack voice and the direct order: “Smith! Gleason! Stand by to assist me. The rest of you get back on duty or go forward to the grandstand; you have no business here.” It was the kind of voice which caused movement before thought, and the crowd broke up and disappeared, except for Dr. Jamieson, who stepped forward, peered into his eyes while holding his wrist, then nodded and went away. Dr. Hiller, standing in that inhumanly motionless, wide-eyed, way of hers, judging nothing, noticing everything; she stood there until she met his gaze, held it a moment, then turned without a word and left; and finally, Alvarez. He had not been able to see Alvarez until the rest had gone; he stood well back out of the way, his eyes awake, his face asleep. Crane opened his mouth to blast him away like a man sneezing at a gnat, and then unaccountably turned away and forgot him in the business of struggling into the skin-tight wet-suit. Perhaps Alvarez was as yet so unimportant to him that a showdown wasn’t worth it. Perhaps the departure of the others gave him room enough now, and the supercargo’s presence presented no nuisance.

Crane sat down on a storage chest and got his feet into the suit, and then began working it up his right leg while Gleason palmed the spongy fabric up his left. Once it was up to his waist he did three kneebends and swore under his breath; this always hurt his kneecaps. Then Gleason on one side and Smith on the other wrestled his arms in and his shoulders, got the short zipper up and at last the hood.

These deep suits had helmet and mask inherent; it was a full face-mask with a hose fitting on the left jowl. Once it was sealed at the throat, any sound, even a loud sound, in air was only a mumble; sweat began to prickle out all over his body; he had to breath partly his own exhalations and would until the fitting by the hinge of his jaw met the air-hose; all-in-all it made for hurry. He gestured and Gleason checked the well-chamber seal, and Crane dropped into the manhole. As the cover swung to over his head, he saw with infinite annoyance that it did not seal but bounced right open again, hauled up by young Smith who at the same time was fighting Gleason off. Knowing it was useless to speak, the Captain sent a glare up that by rights should have pierced the mask like discharges of artificial lightning, but all Smith did was to turn abruptly, shove Gleason hard with both hands while kicking his feet out from under him, and then without looking at the fallen CPO, knelt on the deck, reached down, got both hands on the Captain’s left biceps and hauled. He was well-braced, but even so, Crane was a big and solid man; yet the youngster snatched him up out of the manhole like a kitten out of a basket, and dropped him stomach down across the edge.

Crane slowly and ominously got to his feet, as Gleason was doing, and between them Jimmy Smith stood waiting, breathing hard. He threw a hot single word over his shoulder at Gleason—probably ‘Wait!’ for Gleason waited; and when the Captain finally stood erect, Smith reached startlingly up and shoved his stubby forefinger downward against the seam between hood and mask.

Crane found himself looking crosseyed at the finger, which was passed effortlessly through what was supposed to be an impermeable joint, and now shared the mask with Crane’s face.

Crane gestured angrily, and they jumped to pry open the lips of the self-adhering seals, and haul the zippers. Crane slammed the hood back off his head, and stood like a caryatid, carven and still with his arms rigid, straight down, while they peeled him.

“I’m—uh,” said Smith.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Crane glowered at him, and then remembered to take the fury off his face. “Don’t say that, Smith. You know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t seen that open seam? Or grabbed me in time?”

“I can imagine, sir.”

“I wonder if you could imagine it all. Do you know I couldn’t’ve hollered for help? Forty fathom down, that ocean would’ve been in the suit with me before I could say glug. I never even figured to patch in my earphones until I was out at the cable. Mr. Gleason!”

“Yessir.”

“You inspected this suit.”

“Yessir, I did.”

“You missed a slit big enough to stick a finger through.”

“No sir, I did not.”

Crane picked up the suit by the hood and stuck not one, but two fingers through the slot. The act was his comment.

“Yes sir. I inspected every one of those suits, not knowing which one you were going to use. That cut wasn’t there.”

“Cut? It just separated at the—” Crane looked closely at it. “By the Lord. Cut it is—you’re right.”

“Yes, sir.”

“After you inspected the suits, did you leave them un-tended?”

“Why, yes, sir.” The tone conveyed clearly the message,
and why the hell not?
“Me and Smith here took all your gear below and flaked it out so’s you could flip into it and get going.”

“Then you think somebody slipped up and cut the suit with a razor in the few minutes you were below-decks, somebody who not only had a razor ready but who would pick the right suit to cut, not knowing which one I was going to use.”

“No, sir,” said Gleason immediately.

“No, sir,” said Smith in the same breath.

“What d’ye mean no—sir? Gleason?”

“It wasn’t no razor, Cap’n. You don’t cut this stuff with razors; it’d break any razor ever made.”

“I was going to say,” Smith offered, “that everybody knew which one, sir: you put it on the general intercom.”

“Yeah, I did.” Of course he had: the hooter in his bunk had two station switches only, one for the control room plus the forward repeaters, the other the ship’s p.a. system. He thought of the faces he had seen clustered around when he arrived, tested each one against the idea of such an act, and could only shake his head.

“Cap’n?”

“Yes, Smith.”

“It didn’t even have to be any of that mob you chased away. You could say it probably wasn’t, just because there were too many of ‘em to see it. It’s more as if someone scooted in and did it and slid out before anyone else came.”

“Yeah,” amended Gleason, “When we took the gear below, there was nobody here, and when we come up, there was a reg’lar convention.”

“What could cut like that that isn’t a razor?”

Gleason’s spaniel face became lost in thought. He opened his eyes and said, “Cookie’s got a matched set of three French chef’s knives’ll cut a baby-hair endwise.” (He did not say “baby-hair.”)

Smith said, questioningly, “Scalpel?”

The galley, where everybody went at one time or another to swap the scuttlebutt. The hospital: Hiller, Jamieson, Alvarez. And all of Alvarez’s apparently endless stream of visitors.

Lee Crane shook his head again. Well—it hadn’t worked, that was the most important thing; and the biggest thing to favor the attempt was its total unexpectedness. That’s one thing that he—whoever-it-was—wouldn’t have going for him any more.

Who it was would bear thinking on—but later, later.

Why
it was would bear even more thinking. Was someone after him, or was it merely someone who wanted to keep him, or anyone, away from the cable?

Lee Crane did not know it at the moment, but it was here that his thought, “What have I done to deserve this?” began to take on the cast of guilt: “Of the things for which I deserve this, which one am I being attacked for?” But as yet this was a nuance; a seed.

“The red suit,” he said.

Gleason and Smith sprang to obey. “And we’ll get the answers if you two batten up tight.” They both grunted their “aye, sirs” and he grimly watched them check the red suit, inside, outside, seam by seam. He then took it from them and they watched while he did it. At last he nodded his head and they wrestled him into the suit. As if it was not only his right but his profession, Jimmy Smith reached up and thumbed the join between hood and faceplate, as Crane was about to pull it down. “This one’s okay.”

“How’d you know the other was cut, Smith?”

“I saw it, just as you ducked below. I mean I—I thought I saw it gap a bit as you bent your head. I wasn’t sure . . . oh holy Pete, sir, suppose I’d been wrong.”

“I’d’ve pried you loose from your lowest gut,” said the Captain candidly, “and handed you over to Commander Emery to chop up for his sharks. Handling an officer that way . . .” he growled, and then zipped in.

He motioned them into the manhole ahead of him, lifted the cover over and dropped in as it boomed closed. He dogged it from inside; it was a tight squeeze for three men, and Gleason got an elbow in the face as the Captain spun the dog. Then Crane cracked the equalizer valve and squatted passively to wait for the pressure to rise to that of the well chamber below. He automatically, of long practice, crackled his ear-drums; he saw Gleason giving frantic spur-of-the-moment instructions to Smith, and saw Smith try them all and still look agonized, pinching nostrils and blowing against them, swallowing like a thirsty chicken with his head thrown back and his mouth gaping. Then the lower gate automatically slid aside and they dropped into the well-chamber, a circular cell consisting only of a depressed walkway and the waist-high well, looking like a backyard wading pool for the little tots.

The significant difference was that this wading pond had only as much bottom as all the oceans of all the earth.

Arrayed on the walkway was equipment, from the minisub men’s earlier visit—diving tanks with straps arrayed for donning with a minimum of fuss, the tool belt with the electrical kit to the left, the mechanical one to the right, and the airsaw, rigged with a self-coiling hose and a quick-release catch to hold it to the center of the X where the tank harness crossed on the chest. The three checked everything. They checked each other’s checking. It took a while, and Crane had to unzip and put up his faceplate because he began to get spots in front of his eyes from inhaling his own breath.

But at last they had him rigged and ready. Crane sat on the rim of the well with his feet dangling within the walkway, and turned on his air. As always it was an exhilarating experience. The air, stored before they had sailed, was different from what circulated and recirculated in the sub. That’s all it had to be—different, not better. When the very first atomic submarine made its first 60-day submersion, the story goes that the crew was quite content to breathe recirculated air, noticing nothing, until the day they cracked the hatch and let some in from outside. By the most careful analyses, the inside was as good or even better than the outside air, but the effect of the outside air, just because it was a little different, on that crew made history. Each according to his nature, every man aboard sipped and gulped the new air as if it were perfume; or laughing gas; or catnip; or the aroma of hand-warmed Armagnac. They say that for ten minutes the entire ship was wild—not intoxicated in any sense, for there was nothing toxic about it—just wild, wild with joy. Tank air is usually like that—cool, because of the regulator’s reduction of two thousand pounds pressure down to whatever the demand valve calls for—ineffably sweet and fresh, just because it’s different. Crane, looking through his faceplate at their two anxious efficient faces, had an airborne surge of admiration for them, and grinned.

Gleason pointed to himself and the sailor and down at the deck, and raised his eyebrows questioningly: it was ‘Shall we stand by here?’ Crane wagged a negative finger and then pointed above: Get out of here. The pressure in the chamber was enormous, to meet that of the water in the well, and a prolonged stay there would mean decompression for them both if, indeed, they did not need it already. He saw them turn toward the airlock ladder and then let himself tumble backward into the water.