Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (20 page)

VOICE: I’ll try, sir.

SPARKS: Could you put some other operators on it? And may I speak to your supervisor?

VOICE: [Cold, tense] I am the other operators, sir. I am the supervisor. I am the charlady and the bottlewasher and the sweeper-up and the doorman. Oh I am the cook and the captain bold, and the mate of the Nancy Lee . . . Sorry,
Seaview
. I’ve been on duty for three days and I haven’t had tea since yesterday . . . The ringing signal’s stopped. Maybe it never was ringing, what? Ring out wild bells . . .

SPARKS: Southampton!

VOICE: Mrs. Symonds is the relief operator, what? She came a little late in her little blue hat. She floated right up to the window and she bobbed about, and she went away with the tide, and when the tide came in, there she was again. [Suddenly businesslike] I’m sorry, sir. I’ve been ringing London right along, but I can’t get an answer from telephone Central. I’m afraid I shan’t get through. The wires are down all over the west coast, y’know. This one London line sounds live, but there hasn’t been anybody on it in days.

SPARKS: Operator, what about the overseas lines?

VOICE: All out, sir. First noise, ever so much noise, and then one by one they went out. Until you came. Where did you say you’re calling from?

SPARKS: United States Submarine
Seaview
, tapped into the submarine cable off Ferdinand de Noronha.

VOICE: Oh, I say: that is a lark.

SPARKS: Could you speak a little more clearly, please. There’s no way you can relay this call to Washington, then? Or to the British authorities?

VOICE: Not until they put the lines right, sir.

SPARKS: [Off mike] Yes sir, I’ll ask. [On mike] Operator, Admiral Nelson wants to know everything you can tell us about the world situation.

VOICE: Now I know you’re pulling my leg. He’s been dead for years.

SPARKS: The American Admiral Nelson!

VOICE: Oh yes, of course. I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry, I’ve been, you know. And no tea. I say, you wanted to call Washington in America, what? Oh dear, you can’t, you know, it isn’t there any more. At least the Government are not. The very last I heard was that they had moved into Virginia, the mountains, you know. There were some calls from New York too, there are still people there. In the tall buildings. They want water. They want food too, but mostly water. The rivers have all gone salt, you see, with the sea coming in. [The background noise louder. The voice fainter.]

SPARKS: Please speak a little closer. Can you read me?

VOICE: Would you repeat that, please.

SPARKS: I’ll shove in more . . . uh . . . there. [Loud, and badly overmodulated] Can you read me now?

VOICE: Ouch! Oh, my poor ear. Yes, I read you,
Seaview
, only the noise is frightfully loud too.

SPARKS: Can you tell us any more news?

VOICE: Oh, not possibly, I can’t remember all those awful things . . . The Prime Minister asks us to keep calm for the duration. The Royal Ballet refused to cancel, last I heard, and I don’t know what will happen because they say the water’s up to the first balcony at Covent Garden. There was word that the sea would overrun Panama, you know, between the Americas. There’s no chance for the hollyhocks, they hate so much wet, you know. Oh, you’ll want to know about the riot in California, they burned down Dr. van Allen’s home. He wasn’t there, Dr. van Allen, I mean, you know, the radiation belt chap. There’s bad fighting in Israel too, something to do with the arm of the Mediterranean that’s filling up the Dead Sea, they blame it on one another. And oh, there’s Mrs. Symonds coming back, I can see her little blue hat floating along like a toy boat. And then there’s all those ships gone out to sink that submarine, that scientific wallah’s submarine, the
Seaview
. Oh, but you’re the
Seaview
, aren’t you? So they can’t have got you yet, can they?

SPARKS: What ships? Operator, please speak more slowly.

VOICE: Sorry. Is this better? What ships? Oh, some silly spat they had at the United Nations, and there was a vote to go out and find you, and it wasn’t carried, and some of them got quite livid and said they would make up their own task force and sink you.

SPARKS: How did the United States vote? [Background noise up]

VOICE: Oh, I say, I haven’t the faintest. The water’s pouring in downstairs, this time, I imagine the tide’s higher than ever. And Mrs. Symonds!

SPARKS: Operator! Operator!

VOICE: Why, she’s going to float right in the window down there. Bless her old heart, she drowned three days ago and still she wants to come back and relieve me. Plucky, what? Are you there? I say, hello, hello, are you there?

SPARKS: Operator! Operator!

VOICE: I say, I can’t hear you. Are you there? Are you there? [Background noise up]

SPARKS:
Seaview
, calling Southampton operator. Can you read me?

VOICE: Mrs. Symonds! Mrs. Symonds! Do you read me? . . . read me; whatever am I saying . . .? I say, whoever you are, I’m hanging up now. Mrs. Symonds is dreadfully wet, poor thing.

SPARKS: Operator!

VOICE: Ta ta.

Click!

[Background noise.]

T
HE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE RISE
was not quite the two degrees a day predicted in the UN debate—but it was 1.9 and a hair over; close enough. The random radiation, all through the radio spectra, and far into the ultra-violet, increased by the hour as the ozone layer was consumed by the firebelt. Electronic circuits began developing odd quirks—little squirts of corona, unexpected inductances and those non-connected, duplicated signals called “ghosts.” Sparks and Reynolds, the Second, and something or an electronics wizard in his own right, passed more than one miracle in insulating and isolating components, and keeping the whole complex going.

All hands had their jobs, and all hands made it their second job to inspect critically the jobs of the others. Pipelines were sanded, steel-wooled down to the bare metal and that polished, then abraded, undercoated, coated again, finish-dressed, waxed and buffed. The submarine was in a perpetual state of detour and re-route, like the streets of New York, constantly dug up; every coat of paint meant a section sealed off by the water-tight doors and signs posted to direct traffic around the work.

There appeared a great deal of what the old sailors used to call scrimshaw. Bone-carving. Inlay.

Hand-lathed machine work: a miniature automobile engine, one-sixteenth normal size, with microscopic cams, capillary-diameter sleeves for hydraulic valve-lifters which really worked. Kaski, the Second Engineer, found a wooden broomstick—a real treasure—and freehand, whittled it into a chain.

Dr. Hiller watched everyone. Cathy Connors kept an odd, unaccountable distance from the Captain, and when at last he called her to account she said, in a complete departure from her usual open manner, “I’ll write you a note.” Shocked, puzzled and hurt, he buttoned his lip and waited a day and a half for the note, the message of which he felt he had to accept—and its second sentence a salve, though not a cure, for his feelings:

Lee, it’s just not fair to the others. I had to write it because I could not bear to tell you and watch
your face while you thought of me this way.

The last part was kind, at least: she cared for him. But it made him angry, too—not so much at Cathy, who was, in the last analysis, doing what was best for the ship; but angry at that glowing coal of animalism which illuminated everything that lived, and most especially men confined. And of all men confined, it glowed brightest in men in danger. Every war, every major disaster, like burning passenger ships, forest fires, floods—all have their tales of flickering, unpredictable, brutal, explosive sexuality. The
Seaview
’s personnel were superior even in comparison with submariners as a whole—and of all human groups, submariners are the friendliest, the most tolerant, the most understanding.

Yet they were men, they were alive, they were confined, and they were in danger; their very species was in danger. Crane could be angry, but he could not, even deep within himself, completely denounce their increasing awareness of the female. Their feelings were only the voice of life itself, only the current of mankind’s immortality as mankind.

They took the Straits of Magellan instead of rounding the Horn, and this was one other occasion where the Old Old Man publicly countermanded his orders: “But Admiral! Those shoals are sure sudden death to anything draws as much water as we do!” he had protested, and the Admiral had looked at him icily and had said, with profound scorn, “What shoals, Captain?” and had left him to face the sounding charts which he, the Admiral, had been studying and which Crane in excusably had not. Crane, his ears burning in the presence of O’Brien and Hodges, pored over the charts and the logbook, open beside them. The perpetual soundings entered in the book, compared with the ones marked on the printed chart, showed that there was now eighteen to twenty feet more water everywhere in the Straits, eliminating two shoals out of three as dangerous.

A third of the Magellanic shoals are, however, no inland waterway. It was a painstaking, hairsbreadth passage, with red lights often aglow on the consoles, and the one unforgettable experience they had of thrusting their transparent nose gingerly into the mangled carcass of a super-gigantic blue whale which blocked their passage in the very narrowest of the channels. It was Emery who noticed what was gorging on the mountain of flesh—darting, cruel, ravenous schools of barracuda.

Barracuda, hardly anything, ever, but a tropical fish: barracuda in the treacherous water between Tierra del Fuego and Arenas!

It was Emery, too, who wondered what had killed the whale. Even the ripped, tattered evidence of the ‘cudas at work could not conceal that the whale had been riven, blasted, crushed. Someone aboard might certainly have thought of an answer if it had not been for the murder of O’Brien.

Black-haired, red-browed O’Brien, with a touch delicate as an electroscope, steady as an H-beam; taciturn O’Brien, who had little to say and who said it the way he did everything else, with efficiency; who would stand his watch until he was relieved, and if not relieved would stand the next man’s; who could be given an order and forgotten about; O’Brien was garroted with a loop of stainless steel wire twisted up, tourniquet-like, by the cork handle of a diver’s knife.

It took Commander Emery eight minutes to bring out the plentiful fingerprints on the blade of the knife.

It took Dr. Jamieson four minutes to match them in his files.

He and the captain went to the murderer’s cabin to get him. When they opened the door, they stopped and looked, and turned to each other and stared, and then Jamieson went in and picked up a small bottle. “Call Dr. Hiller, will you, sir?” and he knelt by the bunk and, taking a penlite out of his shirt pocket, turned its needle-beam into one of the rigid, staring eyes.

Crane saw young Smith in the thwartship corridor and sent him for Dr. Hiller, and then returned, watching Jamieson work.

Dr. Hiller came. “Yes, Captain Crane?” Crane stepped aside and she went in. Her eyes flicked from Jamieson to the body and then to the bunk shelf, where the small bottle stood. “Hodges?” she asked.

“Dead,” said Jamieson.

“Did—did he—”

“Did he kill himself? He did. Did he murder O’Brien? He did.” Dr. Jamieson rose slowly; he looked, somehow, a good deal taller than usual. “Dr. Hiller, did you give him that stuff?”

“Only to make him sleep. To
let
him sleep.”

“You had him under some sort of therapy. Did you have no evidence of murder and suicide in the man?”

It was a rough question, especially coming from one doctor to another. One answer would be that such information was privileged; no ethical psychiatrist would answer a question like that. Yet . . . to say Yes was to admit a horrendous oversight; Hodges might have been prevented; others certainly might have been warned; such knowledge on her part, properly conveyed, might well have saved two lives. To say No was a profound reflection on her professional ability; even a layman would raise eyebrows at the idea of this degree of violence being present and escaping the supposedly searching techniques of psychotherapy. Crane could sense the tension rising, compounded, as all things were compounded, by the desperate unreality of all things in all the world just now, by the crash and clatter of Jamieson’s shattered idolatry, and above all by Susan Hiller’s very presence: Crane thought, is it loving Cathy, or approaching old age, that has made me never notice before how beautifully Hiller carries herself, how full her breasts?

“I find evidence of murder and suicide in every man I examine deeply enough,” she answered quietly; and the part of Crane which always stood off and watched, applauded her—not especially for the worth of what she had had, but for its cleverness. For Crane’s part-that-watched was a childlike thing, and was filled with wonder at jugglers, and violin virtuosi, and suspension bridges and the men who built them, and at anything else surpassingly deft. Jamieson’s blunt question had had her at a disadvantage, demanding as it did a blunt answer—and Yes and No and I don’t know were all equally damaging. But her answer, which was no answer, demanded a rephrasing of the question, which was a lessening of the bluntness, which was a widening of the field, an opening of loopholes, a tack for maneuvers.

And turning to see how Jamieson would catch this ball, Crane realized that the doctor had in him, in this special case, enough ethical harshness to ask the blunt question once; that to maneuver with this woman whom he admired so extravagantly was to lose to her. He looked back at her; her face was still, her eyes wide. He saw her nostrils dilate, nothing else move; it was, he thought, a species of smile. “He should,” she said professionally, “have left some sort of a note.”

Jamieson turned his gaze away from her face. It seemed to cost him something, as if the gaze must stretch and check him briefly before it broke. He passed his hand across his eyes and then fumbled along the bunk shelf, glanced at the settle and turned up a pillow, and finally returned to the bunk. The dead Third Officer’s hands were cupped and clenched together; he gently moved them, raised them, plucked at a white ear of paper which protruded between the left thumb and forefinger, and worked it loose. He unfolded it and glanced at it, then handed it to the Captain.