Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (4 page)

“Jiggers! gasped the cook, sidling rapidly back of the preparation tables, “The Admiral!”

The hand-pounding stopped abruptly. The accordionist, an enlisted man, was apparently in a closed-eyes transport, and kept on for perhaps two more bars before the silence overwhelmed him too.

The girl, apparently in such deep concentration on her footwork that she noticed nothing else, was finally reached by the shriek of the parrot, which said, in tones of total panic, “Hide the dames! Ditch the grog!”

There was an extended hush. Then the girl started down from the chopping block. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright.

The visitors examined this scene, Admiral Crawford impassively, Admiral Nelson with stern disapproval (but then why was he biting the insides of his cheeks?) and Dr. Hiller with her—simply with her examining look.

The Captain took it upon himself to speak first. “Miss
Connors!
”

The dark girl dropped her eyes.

Congressman Parker said dryly, “Dietician, Admiral? Or dance instructor?”

“Neither,” said Nelson. “She’s my secretary.”

Miss Connors spoke up. “I am very sorry, sir. It was my fault altogether. My idea, I mean I thought of it. Started it.”

Captain Crane flicked about him that four-stripe look, in which each stripe is a whiplash, that every enlisted man knows. “You men turn to,” he said levelly, and Cookie and the second chef flew into the motions of activity, while the others melted away through the far door. Miss Connors edged in the same direction as the Admiral passed her, “We’ll have a little talk later, Miss Connors,” he said without inflection.

“Stand by, Connors,” said the Captain, and she stopped in mid-stride, her head humble, as if his words had the power to switch her off. “We’ll have our little talk right now.”

The Admirals went out the far door, followed by the Congressman. As she passed him, Dr. Hiller murmured, “It only means high morale, Captain.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Lee Crane coldly. He and Miss Connors waited until the door had closed behind them, and another interminable thirty seconds, while the galley staff succeeded in not looking at them while fairly creaking with the effort. At last Crane motioned to the girl and they in turn went through the door and closed it behind them.

They found themselves in the relative privacy of the starboard corridor. “That,” said Crane chillingly, “was quite an act, Connors.”

“Yes,” she admitted faintly.

“It will, I’m sure, get a favorable review in the Congressional Record. And say yes, sir, this time.”

“Yes, sir.” She raised her downcast eyes and they were full of laughter, though there was none on her face as she whispered, “Will they fire me, Captain?”

“They’ve fired better men for less. Can you explain this undignified behavior?”

“I was just showing Cookie how I’ll dance at my wedding.”

“Well,” said Crane grudgingly, “that is an extenuating circumstance. In about three weeks, isn’t it?”

“. . . and two days and four hours.”

“Hm,” grunted the Captain, “And who’s the unlucky man?”

She raised her eyes again, and her face, and her arms, and her warm lips met his eagerly and with joy. “Oh Lee,” she said with her lips still against his, “I feel like an idiot.”

“Nice idiot,” he chuckled. “I love the idiot. But watch it, will you?”

Now it was in this moment, with his lips on hers, that there came to him the surge of feeling he was later to identify, derisively, as the Big Brag. It must be understood that it came to him in a flash, and, for all its intensity, it lasted for the least part of a second. It was this which, later, he came so bitterly to regret, although the Big Brag was unspoken and no one knew of it but Lee Crane in his own innermost secret self. We all impose guilts upon ourselves; it is one of the penalties we pay for belonging to a social species—a vague and constant awareness, however far away from the surface, that we are part of the race, and that for our sins all mankind might be punished. Had things remained normal, this passing flash of Lee Crane’s may well have disappeared forever into that lightless region into which we all drop passing thoughts which no longer matter. But things, of course, were never to be what the world once called “normal” again . . .

The Big Brag, coming to a man who ordinarily did not turn his thoughts inward, and who was not given to taking stock of himself in any way, let alone making mountains of the credit side—the Big Brag, then, suffusing him as he stood in the corridor with the slight strong body of Cathy Connors in his arms, ran thus:

Do you know who I am? I’m Crane. Lee Crane. Yes—that Lee Crane. My girl loves me and her
standards are high. Never since grammar school have I been off the honor roll. I’m still the youngest
sub skipper in the country, maybe the world. My crew, every man Jack of ‘em, would jump to sail this
ship under the cellar of Hell and torpedo the boilers. So there you are: I’m strong, smart, young and
respected, my girl loves me and the world is watching. I’m Crane. Lee Crane. I’m—that Lee Crane!

The Big Brag—unspoken, but rising up in him in a sudden surge that made his eyes smart. Then the knob on the door behind them turned and they sprang apart. O’Brien, with his black hair and red eyebrows, emerged: “Beg pardon, Cap’n.”

“Carry on, O’Brien.” To Cathy he said sternly, “We’ll continue this at a later time, Connors.”

“Yes, sir,” she said demurely: and it was over.

The episode was over, but the Big Brag, wrapping itself in a coating like one of those delayed-action pills, awaited only the right environment to be released. And the world, and space itself got exactly the right environment ready, by the millions and millions of cubic miles.

D
AY AFTER DAY THEY DROVE NORTH
. The
Seaview
behaved like a dream—the dream of a hard-headed, demanding, detailed and logical dreamer, which indeed she was. If ever Admiral Nelson had his Big Brag moments—and he really rated them—Lee Crane could see no sign of it. Not that he was ever persnickety—he was too big for that. But he ranged the sub from stern to keelson to stem to bilge, not so much looking and listening as reading and hearing. Any mere expert can be spoken to by a generator or a pump or a computer; Nelson seemed able to have conversations with rivets and the seam of a weld. In another man, this would come out looking like worry, like fear and mistrust of design and materials. But in Nelson, it was more as if the thousands upon countless thousands of components making up the submarine were a great body of friends of his, to each and all of whom he had said, “Now if anything ever bothers any of you fellers, you tell me about it, no matter who you are. That’s what I’m here for.” This, to a rivet.

A warm friendship sprang up between Dr. Hiller and Cathy Connors; from the second day, it was “Sue” and “Cathy.” Dr. Jamieson spent his time in one of the higher levels of heaven, at Dr. Hiller’s beck and call; he admired her with a touch-me-not whole heartedness which, to give her credit, she took no advantage of. Chip Morton minded his manners and his own business, though anyone who knew him well—and the Captain knew him very well—was aware of his constant corner-of-the-eye awareness of the svelte psychologist, and of tension like that in a cocked crossbow, as the Executive Officer searched for a chink in the doctor’s armor. Lee Crane, however, trusted the latch that held it cocked. Chip Morton might be headstrong, but stupid he was not.

Staying most of the time at the 500-foot level, the
Seaview
slipped under the ice on the second day. For six more days she cut herself off from the world, traveling north by and large, but zigging and zagging, diving, lying doggo, and rehearsing drills: collision, fire, and various breakdowns: air plant, power, even food shortage. Nelson ran an elaborate series of observations on Earth magnetism and another on crust temperature on the bottom, either of which would have been full time work for a specialist in either field, and still was able to get some sleep.

On the ninth day Cathy Connors entered the office of the sick bay with a thick folder under her arm, and found Dr. Hiller transcribing notes from the little book she always carried, to a tiny tape recorder. “Hello, Cathy. I have some hot coffee here.”

“Hi, Sue. Brought you the personnel file you wanted. Yes, I think I will.” She hopped up to sit on the edge of the examining table and swing her feet.

Dr. Hiller poured the coffee, handed a cup to Cathy, put her own safely back out of the way and placed the heavy folder before her. Leafing rapidly through it, she said, “Your Captain Crane is surprisingly young for a job like this.”

“He was the youngest sub captain in the whole United States Navy,” Cathy said proudly.

“He must have a friend at court,” said the doctor, but Cathy knew she was teasing. “The Admiral?”

“Wrong diagnosis, Doctor. They’re almost like father and son, but the captain earned his rank. Neither he nor the Admiral would want it any other way. If anything, I’d say it was harder that way than if they hadn’t been so close. The three of them have always fought hard to keep personalities out of—”

“Three of them?”

“Admiral Nelson, the Captain, and Chip Morton.”

“Oh,” said the doctor quietly, “Chip Morton.”

“He and Lee—Captain Crane—roomed together at the Academy,” said Cathy. “They were always one-two on the honors lists.”

“Morton always second.”

“Well, yes. How did you know?”

“It’s written all over him. Also that the Captain went through in a breeze and Morton had to fight about twenty-six hours in each day to keep up.”

“Lee’s never talked about it, but—I suppose that’s the way it was. But that isn’t in the file.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” said Dr. Hiller. “It’s written all over them both. Captain Crane accepts challenges because they’re his job and he does his job. Commander Morton accepts them because they’re challenges—I mean, they give him a chance to prove something.”

“Prove what, for heaven’s sake? Look where he is today, at his age!”

Dr. Hiller shrugged. “Prove he’s as good as the best. It’s a little like my being driven to prove I was as tall as B.J. Crawford.” She smiled suddenly “Don’t take all this too seriously. The world is full of Chip Mortons, and whether or not they like it, they make the world’s best second-in-commands. They’re exacting of those under them, and extremely watchful of those above.”

Cathy affected a shudder. “Oooh . . . you strip everybody clear down to their nuts and bolts.”

Dr. Hiller laughed at her “No I don’t. I can’t. Nobody can. There’s always something
else
about people. No matter how you graph and chart and study and distill, there’s always something else. Which is what makes psychology so interesting—the constant search for that something else. It’s the only field where something else is always there, you can bank on that.”

“I guess you could say that about all research—the search for something else.”

“In the sciences, yes. The search for the something else that might be there. In psychology—which isn’t a science, and don’t you believe it is even if a psychologist tells you so—you know darn well it’s there.”

“If psychology isn’t a science, what is it?” asked Cathy.

Dr. Hiller laughed. She had a good laugh. She said, “That depends on the psychologist. Some are statisticians, like insurance men. Some are artists—conscious, creative artists, who match and blend and design to achieve the response they want. And some—well, there isn’t a name for it. It’s an intuitive something, an ability to know instantly what people are, and if anything is wrong, what’s needed to fix it.”

“That would make good psychologists out of a lot of priests, cab-drivers, and maiden aunts.”

“Better,” said Dr. Hiller, “than a lot of ‘em who have a diploma to hang on their walls.” Seriously she added, “There’s just one more thing that makes psychology, and especially psychiatry, such tremendous challenges. And which separates them from the true sciences. And that is that the ultimate instrument, the tool, is after all only a human being. Now a biologist isn’t going to let his work be twisted and tilted by a warped lens in his microscope. Before an astrophysicist writes up a weird new effect from his radio-telescope, he’ll check out the wiring on his amplifiers. These people can see a flaw in their instruments the instant it’s there. But a psychologist or a psychiatrist might operate for years with a wobble in his mental ‘lens’ and not even know it.”

“How can you possibly guard against a thing like that?”

Dr. Hiller shrugged her slim shoulders. “ ‘Man, know thyself.’ is one way, though Socrates should have added ‘. . . if thou canst.’ Otherwise, all you can do is to judge by the results you get. Which, of course, you don’t get until after the work is done, and if there are mistakes, they’re made and you have to live with them. And know better next time.” She smiled. “But perhaps you see why I think it’s interesting.”

“Also scary,” said Cathy Connors. “I—”

There was a dull boom far away, felt rather than heard. The submarine lifted, tilted, subsided rocking, while a crunching ramble proceeded upward around them. The constant, almost un-heard thrum of the motors, the barely-felt tremble of propeller-thrust, ceased abruptly, a change from almost nothing to nothing-at-all which was as shocking as a dynamite blast. Dr. Hiller sat frozen, clutching the edge of the desk. Cathy Connors sat on the deck, where the first jolt had flung her from her perch on the examining table, while a thread of blood curled downward over her temple where her head had struck the corner of the desk.

“Damage control!” roared the speaker on the bulkhead, in Crane’s voice, but hard, tense, filtered.

“Damage control! Report!” The shrill hooting of the alarm filled the ship. They had all heard it many times during the past days of drills, but never with such command, such menace.

“We hit something,” whispered Susan Hiller.

Cathy shook her head dazedly. “Something hit us.”

The doctor rose and came around the desk. “Come,” she said levelly. “You’ve been hurt. Let me—”

Again that dull boom, the lift and lurch. Dr. Hiller’s feet were snatched right out from under her and she sat heavily next to the admiral’s secretary, who said tremblingly, “Well, hello.”