Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (26 page)

Crane glanced at the submarine. The hatch was open, and on its edge sat the Admiral, and his hatch was open as well: he gaped up at the sky as happily as a kid on a fence watching his first model airplane actually fly. Below him, portside and aft, the bright, white signal lamp blinked urgently.

Crane knew enough code to read “LOOK UP YOU IDIOTS” over and over again. He turned and looked at the ships, especially the trigger-happy destroyer. They were all turning, pointing their bows at the submarine, building up white fans of bow wave. White, white at last, not pink-tinged any more.

“Hey, you on the pigboat!” Crane roared. “Goin’ as far as 58th Street?” and he thrust up a thumb in traditional hitchhiker’s style.

The Admiral shaded his eyes, bellowed down the tower, vaulted out, slid down the handrails, and sprinted over the deck like a teenager. “Come aboard, dammit. Hey did you see that? Did you ever in this world see what happened to the firebelt?” and he burst into an echoing roar or unabashed, gloating laughter, ending in a wild whoop that may well have been heard as far as Midway Island.

“Where the hell did you find him?” asked the Admiral, contentedly wetting his feet as he assisted the Captain aboard.

“In hell,” said Crane, helping Alvarez in his turn, “and he found me. Nelse, Nelse, you’re a pigheaded old rooster, which is some animal, but I congratulate you from the bottom of my bottom.”

“I couldn’t’ve done it without you, and I wish nobody had ever used that line before and this was the first time.”

“I didn’t really do anything. I’ve got a secret—nothing can happen to me. God wouldn’t risk it.”

Nelson whistled. “Folks get punished for that kind of talk,” he kidded.

“I used to think that before I found out who I am. Hey!” he roared in greeting to the crew who were coming out of the sail hatch like hornets out of a fallen nest. They roared in answer.

They made way as the Admiral, the Captain and the castaway climbed up. “Don’t stay out too long in this,” said the Admiral, nodding at Crane and Alvarez. Crane touched his forehead; already it was red and tender. The crew looked up respectfully at the sun, suddenly much more authoritative now that its rival was no more.

In the control room, they parted from the Admiral, who went forward to his suite and to get into his ribbons-and-gold; judging from the traffic afloat, he was about to get one great gay gorgeous boarding party.

“You really believe it now, don’t you?” Alvarez asked him quietly as they walked aft.

Crane knew just what he meant. “I’ll tell you,” he said confidentially, “I’m going to act as if it was true. I’ll be a good man and a good commander. I’ll suffer for the sins of all the shadows, and know all the time that it doesn’t really matter, not to them, only to me. They’re safe. I’m not. I’ll be the careful one. I’ll be the good one.” He laughed exultantly. “What about you? All this while you’ve said the firebelt was God’s judgment on evil.”

“And so it was,” said Alvarez composedly, “and so it would have been if you had failed.”

“Not a judgment then: a test.”

“If you had failed? a judgment. Humanity didn’t fail . . . I imagine that’s all God wanted to know.”

Alvarez held up his strong narrow hand in salute, and stepped into the sick bay.

Crane continued aft, through the magazine. As he passed the door to the aquarium, it banged open and Dr. Jamieson sprang out. He was whitefaced, harrowed.

“Jamie! What’s the—”

“It’s Dr. Hiller, she—she’s sick: I have to get a . . .
Don’t!
Don’t go down there. She—”

From the depths of the aquarium chamber, echoing round and round its curved walls and ringing against its ceiling, came a single long scream of mortal agony.

Crane shoved the jittering doctor aside and sprang down the steel ladder. He still wore his yellow wet-suit, which still wore its flippers, so that negotiating the ladder was more of a leap than a run. The water in the large main tank was swirling, and as he gained the catwalk he saw something long and white loom up in the water and sink again under a darting black shape. Without hesitation he vaulted over the rail and down into the water. The sharks, startled, shot away and turned. He bent into the water and came up with the shredded body of Susan Hiller. Even in that mad moment he could experience a profound shock at the sight of her face—eyes wide, features composed: upside down and dripping, and stained from a terrible rip in the side of the neck, the face seemed still to be just . . . watching.

“No, Lee—No—get out! Get out!” screamed the doctor.

A shark slid in and he lashed back with his left foot, catching it so hard on the snout that pain ran all the way up to his hip. He waded to the side and ungently dumped the body over the edge of the tank, got his hands on it and heaved himself up. Something caught at him and pulled; he kicked viciously and got himself seated on the edge. “Don’t worry, they can’t bite through this stuff,” he said, and lifting his right leg to get out, saw that the flipper had been sheared right off within half an inch of his big toe.

He knelt on the steel deck outside and composed the ruined body as well as he could, and tried to cover it with what was left of her clothes.

“Now this is wrong,” he said. “This is wrong, just when everything is . . .” He looked up at the doctor, who was coming around the end of the tank, with all the fingers of his left hand in his mouth and his eyes too round. Crane stood up. “She was so damn fine.”

“So damn fine,” said the doctor, kneeling in his turn. He touched the wet hair. “She was so . . . beautiful. She . . . tried to kill you.”

“What?”

Jamieson nodded miserably. “She told me. She cut one of the wet-suits when you tried to tap the cable, but you wore another suit.”

“She didn’t!”

“She told me,” he said again, brokenly. “She got Hodges under deep hypnosis, made him kill O’Brien.”

“I don’t believe it. And anyway, people don’t kill . . .”

“They don’t kill against their principles, no, but they can be made to kill something else . . . a wax dummy or a robot or a gorilla. She just made him see O’Brien as something else. And then when Hodges knew what he had done he couldn’t live with it and he took that stuff she gave him.”

“Jamie! Jamie! Cut it out! She never—”

“And,” said Jamieson relentlessly, “she wrecked the launcher, thinking you wouldn’t find it until too late. And when she found out you still had an ace up your sleeve, she tried to blow up the
Seaview
.”

“She—”

“
She told me!
” the doctor suddenly screamed at him. Shaken, Crane shut up while the doctor went on, keening over the body. “She took a ball bomb and went into the pile chamber with it.”

“That wouldn’t go off in air! It’s an underwater bomb and has an interlock that—”

“You know that. I know that. She didn’t. The one little thing she didn’t know.” He put out a shaking hand and gently removed something from the tattered strip of cloth that covered one breast, and handed it to the Captain. It was a lapel dosimeter, which would glow when the wearer had been exposed, turn pink as a warning of extreme danger. This one shone ruby-red.

“She was already dead, walking . . . I couldn’t find her anywhere, I ran down here to look for her, I saw her slowly open the door of the pile chamber and come out. I ran and slammed the door and I—held her. I saw the dosimeter right away and the only thing I could say was, was . . . I held her,” he shouted, holding out his arms, “and said I loved her, and she said don’t love me, not me, don’t love me . . . and then she told me all this.”

“But Jamie, Jamie—why? Why?”

“That Zucco, she . . . she admired and she worshipped that Zucco, since she was a schoolgirl. She was his assistant on a project once in Austria. He could do no wrong. She would do anything for him, anything. I don’t know whether or not he knew she existed even . . . well, she was that way, she didn’t need that; she needed to know he was right and she could help. She was so . . . so . . . well anyway, she never knew he was wrong, after all.” He looked up at Crane, weeping, not caring. “She was so beautiful. She hurt, I guess, from the radiation and the heat. I ran to get something for her . . .” he waved at the tank “. . . she didn’t want to die slowly. Go away now, Crane. I’ll be all right, but—go away, will you?”

“All right, Jamie.”

He slap-clumped, clap-clumped away on his one-and-a-half fins.

C
APTAIN
L
EE
C
RANE
, resplendent in dress blues, shoved his tongue in his cheek and formally turned command of the
Seaview
over to the Admiral. The crew, and the visiting officers from the patchy little fleet which had once obeyed Dr. Zucco, all pressed and shining, stood at attention. Crane turned, and old Emery came forward with Cathy Connors, in dress whites, blushing—really blushing—on his arm.

Admiral Harriman Nelson, as commander of the ship, took the little black book and began to read: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together . . .”

When it was all over, and under cover of the shouting, laughing, drinking, backslapping, he could slip a private word, he bent and kissed her ear and said, “You know who I am? I’m the center of the universe.”

“Well, darling, of course you are!”

“You see?” he told the world, the sky, and Alvarez. “You see? I knew it all the time!”

And then Sparks found the United States of America, found it alive; for then Sparks flooded the great submarine with rock-and-roll music . . .

. . . and Crane looked about him with a laughing fear: Maybe I’m not, he wondered to himself: surely to God that isn’t my music?