Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (23 page)

“All right.”

The door opened and old Lucius Emery came in. “Hi Lee. Feel all right?”

“Feel like I should,” grunted Crane. “Gleason, Smith, O’Brien.” He shrugged. “Hodges.”

“I know,” said Emery. “Okay, I’ll push off then.”

“Why?”

“I got a gripe. This wouldn’t be the best time for it.”

“Sit down and get rid of it.”

The old Commander sank back into the chair and swiveled it to face the Captain. “What’s this for?” He held out a paper.

Crane looked at it tiredly and did not raise his hand to take it. When he had recognized it he said,

“I told Cathy to post that in the mess.”

“She did, about twelve seconds before I walked in here. I took it down and brought it along.”

“What’s the matter—don’t you like the way it’s worded?” He leaned forward suddenly and snatched the paper out of Emery’s hand. He read it aloud. “ ‘To all hands: As of this posting, the supercargo Alvarez, in or out of his quarters, is to be regarded as out-of-bounds. Signed Lee Crane and-so-forth.’ What’s the matter? Should I have addressed it Gentlemen and included the word Please?”

“It’s only a damn fool’s opinion,” said Emery, “but I think you should have worded it with the eraser end of your pencil and then posted it in your hat.”

Crane shrugged. “It’s your opinion.”

“What’s the matter, Lee? He get to you, that Alvarez?”

Crane filled his lungs to blast the man out of his cabin, but Emery’s acute grey gaze held him, and he let the breath out again. After a time he shrugged again and said, “I guess he did.”

“What’s this really for?” said Emery, taking the paper, crackling it, and tossing it behind him to the desk.

“Protection, I guess is the word for it. That Alvarez has a spooky talent for crawling under a man’s skin.”

“Who’s protected against what?”

“I can’t really answer that,” said Crane candidly. “Say you have a package of—oh, call it force, and you don’t really know what it is—explosive, power supply, magic, like turns frogs into fairy princes, medicine or poison: all you’re damn sure of is that it’s force. You have a crew of men you’re responsible for. So you tell them to stay the hell away from the package.”

“What’s your idea of this force?” Crane thought for a long moment about that. Then he said, “I went storming up there after Hodges knocked himself off. Hodges left a note about God’s will. As far as I was concerned at the time, that was Alvarez’s thumb print.”

“At the time.”

Crane ignored the interruption. “I roared into that sickbay demanding to know what kind of old rope and oakum he’d been jamming into Hodges. Hodges used to go see him a lot.” Crane closed his eyes as if to see the scene again. “I kicked open the door and there he sat. I never saw a man sit like that. A guy by himself is reading or cutting his scrimshaw or maybe even he’s stopped to think, but nobody I ever saw before just sits staring at an outboard rivet. He knew I was there, mind—it wasn’t a trance or anything else, but I had to wait for him to—well, to come back from wherever he was. I
knew
I had to wait. I could’ve bellowed at him, or kicked his stern off the bunk and up and down the sick bay, I s’pose, and it wouldn’t’ve hurried him up one bit. It wasn’t even a question of insolence or stubbornness; hell, if a man’s a half-mile off in a rowboat and I hail him to talk, I’ve got to wait till he rows back, and I’d be a damn fool if I put him in irons because he didn’t make it in two seconds. It was like that. I just had to wait.

“So when he—got back—he turned to me very slowly and looked at me, and then he brought up one of those long bony arms and just as slowly brought it to bear on me, and he said, ‘
Ecce homo
.’ ”

“ ‘
Ecce homo
’?”

“That’s what he said. ‘Behold the man.’ I tell you, I had my mount shot out from under me. I didn’t know what to make of it. Emery,” said Crane, “I can remember what he said to me, idea by idea. I can remember what it was like hearing it. But I don’t know what words he used or the way he used them. If I’m going to tell you about it, I’m going to have to do the best I can, and hope you don’t think I’m nuts.”

“I know,” said Emery, as if he really did know.

“Well, he undertook to tell me who I am.” Crane suddenly tried to laugh and could not. He was sweating, and wiped his forehead. “About me, he said I was real. About everybody else, he said he doubted it. Don’t talk for a minute.”

Crane clutched the bridge of his nose and bent his head, trying to recapture everything about that weird interchange. Then he shook himself, like shuddering, and went on, “The idea is this. I am the center of the universe. Judging by my own subjective evidence since I was a babe in arms, the world and the cosmos have revolved around me as a center. Any evidence to the contrary is somebody else’s evidence, not mine. It’s been said I have a lot of what’s called courage and I have some medals to prove at least that they’ve said it, if nothing else. And you know, I’ve always been amazed, getting medals or promotions or anything like that. If I’m brave it’s because I know nothing can really happen to me; I’m central, the hub, the point at which everything that ever was hangs together. That’s all these eyes can see of themselves; anything else I ever professed, was conceded out of courtesy and not from any real conviction. Got that?”

“Got it,” said Emery.

“All right. Given that I am that, I am the world. I am humanity. Yeah, me, Lee Crane. Rank, like they say in the old Navy, rank has its privileges. The other side of the coin is that rank has its responsibilities. It has its rewards, it has its punishments. The privileges are the rewards, whether it’s a promotion or some May morning I happen to enjoy a lot. The punishments are for all evil done by all mankind—and I am all mankind.

“Emery, Alvarez told me that that was who I am, and that the firebelt, which he says is God’s punishment, is my firebelt, made by me personally. It’s the payoff. I am to be executed for my sins. My sins as Lee Crane and my sins as every one else, you name ‘em.

“Now, what I have to tell you is that I believed him. I didn’t know I was believing him while he was talking. I even argued with him. It was afterward I began to know I had believed him all along.”

“I know that too,” said old Emery, quite as if he knew that too.

Crane said, “It sums up to this: there is one real individual, and that’s me. This ‘me’ includes all of humanity. All the rest of them, you and O’Brien and the O.O.M. and Cathy, they’re scenery and shadows, and maybe my own nerve endings or local irritations on my nerve endings. Sure, they’re born and they die, the shadows, they quarrel among themselves, but they aren’t real. As long as they aren’t real, whatever they do doesn’t really matter very much. It can’t.”

He leaned forward and pointed at Emery’s nose. “But look,” he said harshly, “I know that’s crazy talk and I know you think it is. But that doesn’t matter, any more than Jimmy Smith’s death or anything else. I’m still me, I’m still captain of this vessel, I’m still going to make deadline for that Polaris XII shoot, I still mean to knock out that firebelt.”

“You tell that to Alvarez?”

“Sure I did! And you know what? My saying it, and even if I succeed in doing it—that doesn’t matter to him. For a while there I thought I had some way to cope with this: I’d succeed with this in order to prove Alvarez wrong. But it wouldn’t prove anything to him—he wouldn’t care. You know why not? Because he’s a shadow too. That’s right. The only difference between him and the others is that he knows he’s a shadow, and you and all the others think you’re real.” Crane fell back, as exhausted as if he had just finished carrying a heavy weight up a long hill.

Emery sat still for a long while and then asked, “Did it ever occur to you that maybe he told this same story to other people?”

“Sure it did! That’s the first thing I asked him, before I knew I had been . . . believing him while he talked. I said what I’d come there to say: I demanded to know if he had filled Hodges up with this kind of crap. Because if he had, with Hodges a little tilted anyway, I can easily see how Hodges might have gone off course altogether and killed O’Brien and himself.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said no, he hadn’t told Hodges anything of the kind.”

“And you believed him?”

“You believe him,” said Crane forcefully. “When he opens his mouth, you believe him. You believe him because he doesn’t care; nothing matters: lying wouldn’t help anything. You believe him.”

“You believe him,” nodded Emery, who had, Crane knew, believed Alvarez himself. He waited, and then asked, “Is that all?”

“That’s all,” said the Captain. He glanced at his desk. “Shadows or no shadows, I didn’t want the crew doing what I’ve been doing—chasing the meanings of everything—new meanings for everything—the way I have.”

“But they wouldn’t, Lee. They wouldn’t. He doesn’t upset anyone else—I don’t think he can. Don’t you know why?”

“Well, why?”

“Not one of them is the man—ecce homo—that man.”

“Then what the hell does he say to them?”

“Different things, different men. Some don’t say anything, they just go sit where he is. Nobody makes any fuss about it. He tells them things . . . about birds, or fish—damn him, he’s a marine biologist, did you know that?—surviving an expedition studying the mat of life that lives in and on the underside of polar ice. Wouldn’t you think a marine biologist would have flipped his wig when he found he was aboard with the famous Lucius Emery? But no—Lucius Emery had to come to him, and he didn’t give a damn about Lucius Emery any more than he does about marine biology or anything else—it’s all shadow play anyhow, and about to come to a close.”

“You believe him.”

“I believe he believes what he says,” said Emery carefully. “I believe he doesn’t, or perhaps can’t, lie. The things he says are one hundred per cent beyond the borders of pragmatic proof.” He turned and picked up the paper, holding it as if it was something a little distasteful. “This is just not needed, Lee. We’ve got little enough to hold us together just now—it’s hard for us all to choke down what Chip said a while back about that killer ship maybe being American—and cutting the men off from Alvarez would be only a disaster. That might not affect you much, being what you are, but it’ll play hell with us shadows.”

Emery had a bantering tone, but Crane was not sure what he meant by “being what you are” and hesitated to ask. “Are you telling me the crew’s getting what’s called ‘spiritual solace’ from this man?”

“That’s a mighty good word for it. Nothing churchy, you understand, but somehow . . . well, they have no books they haven’t read, by now, and they have no radio or TV. Alvarez, whatever else you think of him, is a source of an outside something.” He leaned back and grinned. “You never asked me what he told me.”

“Go ahead,” said Crane.

“Nothing that shakes the cosmos like your ecce homo,” grinned Emery. “He just told me the thing I wanted most to know—which was where he himself heads in in this matrix. Now here’s a basic physical fact that you know: a thing floats, or it sinks. It doesn’t do anything between. Shoreside, most people don’t know that or have never thought about it; on a sub, it’s the central fact of the way we live. Float a cork in a tall vase, and start loading it with lead shot; you’ll come to the place where it quits floating and sinks. Bring it up, cut that one pellet that made the difference and put half of it on. The cork will either float or it will sink. Cut the shot again and you’ll get the same result. You will never be able to weight that cork so exactly that it hangs in the middle, hovering. Okay? Okay.

“Now in this world is a great mass of people who want to be liked and admired. Let’s for the sake of argument put them in the ‘float’ category. And there are a number who actively want to be disliked—put them in the ‘sink’ category. Sometimes, by a shift of whatever would be weight in this analogue, an individual will move from one category to the other. But nobody, nobody at all, has ever hit the exact balance that would enable him to stay in between without outside forces, without effort, naturally and stably. Well, Alvarez has made it. He is by definition, and all by himself, a whole new category of human being because of it. He literally doesn’t know, doesn’t care, is not aware of the one thing that weighs most with the social animal—whether or not others like him. Maybe it’s one of the things that frees him to speak the truth as much as he does.” Emery chuckled. “And I got that out of him by observing his dog.”

“His dog?”

“Did you ever in your life hear of a man who had a dog and was loved and admired by that dog, who didn’t give a damn when in his presence that dog was adopted by a whole crowd of other guys? He hasn’t given up that dog. Nor has he kept it. It comes in and nuzzles him, he strokes it, it goes away, he lets it go. This guy doesn’t even care whether or not a dog likes him. He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t need visitors either, which is probably why he gets them. Guys come, soak up something—something different each man, each time—and they go away again.”

“All right,” said the Captain. He took the paper, tore it across, and dropped it in the basket.

Emery rose. “Thanks, skipper,” he said warmly. “You didn’t have to do that. You don’t have to do anything. But I’m glad you did.”

He turned to the door. “Emery—”

“Aye.”

“What have I done to deserve . . .” Crane pointed up, through steel, through water and air, to the burning sky. Emery understood instantly.

“I don’t know, Cap’n. You’ll have to search that out for yourself.”

He left, and that was when Crane hunted until he found the Big Brag, and remembered it, and began to believe that he was going to have to pay for it at, and with, the end of the world.

Of course, there was nothing normal about these times.

M
ILES AND DAYS LATER
, north of Tonga-Tabu and east of the Fijis, they sighted the sub-chaser. The
Seaview
was skimming the surface at the time, all four full ahead and making better time than even the O.O.M. would have bragged about, when Kaski spotted the ship on the horizon.