Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (2 page)

He glanced down and up, wet his careful lips, and began, “In other news around the world, a dispatch—”

Captain Crane made a slight motion with his finger and Sparks, standing in the door of the radio shack, ducked back out of sight. The screen shrank abruptly to a polychrome dot which winked out.

Everyone breathed as if breathing had been forgotten for a while, everyone found that there was after all a glass in hand, everyone drank. Nelson rumbled—self-consciously because all his life he had been doing more important things than learning the formalities—”Well, gentlemen . . . Doctor . . . modesty forbids me adding anything to that.”

“Chivalry,” said a smooth baritone on the port side, “suggests a sorry omission.” It was “Chip”

Morton, Crane’s Executive Officer. Classmates, roommates at the Academy, they had entered the submarine service together and come all the way. It was no one’s fault—certainly not Lee Crane’s—that they had proceeded single file, with Chip in the rear. Chip’s tone just now was as glossy as his sharply trimmed black hair. He leaned toward Dr. Hiller and said, “He never even mentioned Dr. Hiller.”

“By her wish and my specific request,” said old “B.J.”—Admiral B.J. Crawford, head of the Bureau of Marine Exploration, an old turtleback who, they said, bit the heads off three ensigns each day before breakfast.

“I’ve had quite all the publicity I could possibly want,” said the doctor in a well-modulated contralto. “In this special case, I’m here to observe men under stress, to compare their reactions with men in other vessels differently equipped. It’s a job that’s best done quietly.”

“You’re quite right, Doctor,” Crane said quickly, to nip off anything further Chip might have to offer: un-nipped, he would, too, thick, with a broad trowel.

“Let’s take her down, Captain.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Crane briskly. He wheeled to the bulkhead, palmed the bridge tweeter, and said, “Any time you’re ready, Mr. O’Brien.” The Dive Officer’s voice came back at him out of the grille as if by speaking Crane had released a spring: “Aye sir!” Crane said, “Shall we all go up to the bridge?”

Drinks were finished, set aside, and Crane led the way forward, followed by Chip, who stepped over the high sill of the water-tight door and immediately turned to help Dr. Susan Hiller over it, saying, in that I’ll-take-care-of-you-cookie voice of his, “Ship’s etiquette sometimes looks mighty rude to a landlubber, ma’am. But an officer never lets a lady precede him. I guess because it’s too easy to step over one of these sills into a bucket.”

“I have been aboard a ship before, Commander,” said the psychiatrist, not smiling at all, which almost made the Captain laugh out loud. He stepped aside and let them all come through and mill around, then touched a stud, and the curtain-wall behind him slid right and left away, and they found themselves standing at the aft end of the submarine’s unique transparent nose. Like any small boy with new trains to show, like any girl with a two-carat diamond to flash, like—well, any human with something wondrous to display, he smiled and soaked up the three gasps that came from the guests.

He glanced at Admiral Nelson, and saw him eating it with as much relish as he was.

And it was a sight to come upon without warning. What was called the bridge was the extreme bows of the huge sub. A single gigantic curved beam connected keel with backbone, swelling at the dead-forward point to a great escutcheon of steel, which formed the ram prow up ahead. Transversely, this was braced by two more curved beams, so that dead ahead one saw a cross of steel with the escutcheon at their joining, and the spaces between the arms were filled with what at first seemed to be nothing at all. Since the hull was nearly eighty feet high, and the waterline just below the arms of the cross, one might look down into thirty feet of water, up at the sky, and have sea level about at one’s shins.

“By . . .
golly
,” mumbled Admiral Crawford. “Nelson, I’ve lived with this thing about half as long as you have, blueprints on up, and I thought I knew what it would be like. But . . . you’ve got to be here to believe it.”

“Those . . . ports? windows? They’re so big!” said the svelte psychiatrist, wonderstruck as any child.

“Structurally, they’re not windows or ports or anything else but just plain hull,” said Admiral Nelson.

“X-tempered herculite,” said the captain. “A process Admiral Nelson developed. And that is the right description. They’re just oversized hull plates which happen to be transparent.” He stepped to a console and touched a control. “Deck’s clear, Mr. O’Brien?”

“All clear, sir!”

“Check your hatch.”

“Dogged down, sir.”

“Make it ninety feet as a start, and hold it.”

“Ninety feet, sir.”

The Congressman was still staring slackjawed at the herculite nose. When he found something to say, it was, “But the cost of a thing like that . . .”

The grizzled old Bureau head laughed aloud. “The cost was met by Admiral Nelson here, and his ways and means boys, and several million school kids, and his own patent and process holdings. She’s bought and paid for, Mr. Parker, and was before he asked to have her commissioned by the government. We had to start a new Bureau to accommodate her. She’s non-Navy, but federal. She’s available for weapons testing, and for that alone she’s worth her maintenance times fifty—just her availability. Her real business is research.”

“Research,” said the Congressman, at last able to fix on something he knew he disliked. He made the two syllables speak a whole paragraph about blue-sky puttering with useless chemicals resulting in useless mixtures, invoices for elaborate testing devices to determine the molecular changes in bread as it’s toasted.

“Oh—look!” said Dr. Susan Hiller. She pointed downward, and a great shimmering cloud of mullet writhed past.

“Research,” said Nelson, and his two syllables had a sound like a key opening an old lock. “We’ll ride herd on those mullet some day, the way old timers did sheep. Maybe some day folks’ll live down there under herculite domes, ranching the fish and farming sea plants. On a planet that’s 74 per cent sea-floor, Congressman, there’s an awful lot to be researched out. Research can make this a bigger world than ever you thought it was. There’s mines for us down there, and oil wells, and hot-vents for power, there’s food there and work and study for generations to come.”

Without appreciable tilting, for this was not a crash dive, the ship began to go down. So smooth and silent were the mighty engines that their presence was only a vague steady tremble. The waterline crept upward over the giant panes, and the light in the huge chamber took on the blue-green cast of the silent world. Susan Hiller clasped her slim hands together and stood breathless, moving her head from side to side in something like disbelief. The captain, now well on the way to what he later called to himself The Big Brag, affected a studied professional boredom which he hardly felt, so acutely did the awe of the visitors communicate itself. He stood with his back to the wonder of the surging water ahead, and his eyes flicked alertly over the “Christmas Tree”—the banks of lights and repeaters on his console.

“Run the ship from here, do you?” asked Congressman Parker, whose capacity for awe was apparently reached.

“Yes, sir,” said the Captain. “That is, we can, or it can be run from a rather more conventional control room directly under the conning tower. There are automatics for every function from pumping sewage to changing stereo tapes—and manuals to override them.”

“Deck’s awash,” said O’Brien’s voice from the console, and a moment later, “Stern gone.”

“Periscope depth,” ordered the Captain. O’Brien responded and the strange light darkened a shade. The Captain moved some controls. A large screen lit up, and showed a seascape, the sparkling blue-green of sunlit, deep-water. He turned a wheel, and a grid, marked in degrees, began marching past the picture. “This is how we get away from the greasy stick that hangs down in the middle of most subs,” he explained. “We have one ‘midships, of course, but this repeater magnifies the periscope image. Standing right here I can turn it any way including up, without marching around it in a circle like a blind camel pulling buckets out of a well. And if we want it to, it’ll lock on to an object by light or infra-red or radar or sonar, and keep the image right there no matter which way we jump.”

“Must’ve cost—”

“It did,” said the Captain with pleasure, “and it’s paid up.”

“What’s your floor?” asked the Admiral.

“A thousand, sir.”

“Would that be a thousand feet?”

“Fathoms, Mr. Parker. More than a mile.” The Congressman peered downward through the herculite and looked as if he was suddenly afraid of falling.

“Take her down to two hundred feet,” said the Admiral. “All ahead two-thirds, course zero.”

“That’s due North, isn’t it?” asked the psychiatrist, shaking herself awake at last.

Chip Morton answered her; all this time he had been gazing at her in much the same way as she had been gazing at the ocean, and was apparently as bemused. “Oh you are a sailor, aren’t you?” he said fatuously, as if he were talking to an exceptionally clever five-year-old. She passed him a chill brief glance of barely aroused irritation, which only made him grin at her—a lost grin, for she was already looking the other way.

“Two hundred feet,” said the console.

“Trim her, then two-thirds ahead, course zero.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“And O’Brien—set loran and asdic alarms for 200 plus and 400 minus. We’ll have a roof over our heads PDQ. And hang ‘em on the mike.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“I heard what you said,” said Parker, “but what did you say?”

“Told him to go under the ice, set our detectors to operate at anything 200 feet over us or 400 feet under, and use them to operate the mike—‘Iron Mike,’ that is—pet name for automatic pilot. She’ll run herself now until she encounters something she can’t handle. She’ll think it over for a couple of millionths of a second and then yell.”

“This must’ve cost—”

But this time the Captain only smiled at him.

“Doctor . . . gentlemen . . . would you like to go on with the tour?”

They moved aft. The captain murmured into a grille that he was leaving the bridge, and joined the group. They crossed the wardroom, rounded the TV bulkhead and went aft down the central corridor. The Admiral, in the lead, turned to a door on the starboard side and opened it. “Watch your step,” he cautioned, and went in. His warning was useful for on the other side of the usual shin-hungry high sill was a steep flight of steps, virtually a ladder, which twisted downwards into greenish dimness.

Blinking, they found themselves in a cavernous chamber, standing on a steel catwalk which ran about six feet over what at first seemed to be a shiny floor but which, as their eyes adjusted, they were able to see was water, because there was a man on it, about chest deep, wearing a rubber suit and walking slowly. “Hey, Lu!” barked the Admiral.

“Lu?” echoed Admiral B.J. Crawford. “That’s not—that wouldn’t be old Lucius? Lucius Emery?”

“Well, B.J., goddam!” cried the man in the tank. “Beg pardon, ma’am. Didn’t see you.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Dr. Hiller calmly.

“Dr. Hiller, Commander Lucius Emery,” said Nelson. “When better ichthyologists are built, they won’t find the likes of old Lu. Come on up and shake everybody’s hand, Lu.”

“Can’t,” said the man in the tank. “You wouldn’t want my buddy here to drown, would you?”

Dr. Hiller bent over the catwalk rail and peered. “What’s he doing?” she whispered to the captain.

“Walking a shark,” he replied.

“Oh,” she said. She concentrated, and as the man passed under the catwalk, they could make out the dark shape he propelled through the water, the tall dorsal fin like the sail of a good-sized toy boat . . . it must have been all of nine and a half feet. “What?” she cried.

Lucius Emery looked up and smiled cheerfully at her. “Put him to sleep to make some tests,” he called up. “Now I got to walk him until he wakes up, to keep some water going through his gills till he snaps out of it. Who’s your other friend, B.J.?”

“I beg your pardon, Parker. Congressman Parker, Lu. Come to see how we handle government money.”

“Just like throwing it into the ocean, eh, Congressman? I heard of you.” And he laughed—a good laugh, echoing round and round the big tank.

“What,” asked the Congressman tautly, “do you do when he—uh—‘snaps out of it’?”

“Go some place else,” said the ichthyologist.

Admiral Nelson laughed. “That Lu . . . he’d rather make friends with a fish than be remembered as one of the world’s great physical chemists, which he also happens to be.”

“ ‘Remembered’ is probably the word,” said Parker sweatily.

“Is he that Emery?” breathed Dr. Hiller.

The Bureau chief began to move down the catwalk. “Look me up later, Lu. We’ll chew over some old times. I’ll buy the beer.”

“That don’t sound like old times,” said Emery. And the great, the granite-faced, the cold-eyed Admiral B.J. Crawford, Chief of the Bureau of Undersea Exploration and nightmare to a thousand frightened cadets and j.g.’s, laughed and called him a name, took the impertinence and walked on.

Out again in the central corridor, Dr. Hiller paced in puzzled silence for a time and then said, with extreme care, “Commander Emery is . . . uh . . . very informal, isn’t he?”

“What you’re asking, ma’am,” rasped B.J. Crawford, “is where does a lowly superannuated Commander get off talking to the high brass that way, isn’t it? Or: why isn’t the man disciplined for the way he conducts himself with his superiors? Or: doesn’t a man like that eat away at the discipline of the other men? Is that what you wanted to know?”

Dr. Hiller was obviously not cowed, and perhaps could not be. “Yes,” she said.

“All right,” said Crawford (approvingly, the Captain thought). “I’ll tell you in case you want to put it in a psychology book some time. I was forty-three years in the Navy before I retired and now three years in the Bureau, which is as much Navy as I can make it. And I like what they call a taut ship, I believe rank has its privileges, I believe the man who ranks you is God and the man you rank is dirt, even by one half a temporary stripe. I believe all that because when an emergency comes up, that’s the way you’ve got to have it or a lot of otherwise good men get dead. And the only way you can have it that way in emergencies is to have it that way all the time. Men just don’t un-relax and tighten up fast enough; you got to keep them tight all the time.”