Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (5 page)

They helped each other up, and the psychiatrist, holding herself tensely in control, got to a first-aid shelf and deftly examined and treated Cathy’s cut. “Not much, really,” she murmured. “There—the bleeding’s stopped.”

“Thanks,” said Cathy. “I didn’t even know I was hurt. Sue—let’s go forward and see what’s happened. Only for heaven’s sake remember to keep out from under foot. If there’s anything Admiral Nelson hates in an emergency it’s what he calls ‘non-participating personnel.’ ”

“I’ll be good,” said the doctor.

They made their way forward through the central corridor, making a short-cut through what was affectionately called the “fishbowl,” the catwalk over the three small tanks and one large one, where sharks slid oilily. It was here that the submarine took the third impact from below, this by far the worst yet. She listed almost thirty degrees to the accompaniment of shuddering scrapes from outside, slowly nosed down, rolled back, and then achieved an even keel again. The water sloshed over the edges of the tanks below, and its surface boiled, lashed by the tails of the frightened sharks. In one of the smaller tanks—smaller only by comparison, but by no means a small tank—a dark torpedo body flashed out of the water and boomed against the wire mesh which covered it, leaving it thrumming.

The other tanks, uncovered, seemed to the frightened girls to be ready to fill the air at any moment with flapping, snapping sea monsters.

“But you know,” said Cathy afterwards, when they had regained the corridor and were moving forward again, “it was a safer place to be in than your office. I’ll take a good strong guardrail on each side, any time, even if there are sharks lunging around underneath.”

“I’ll requisition some for the office,” said Susan Hiller.

Twice they stepped aside and flattened against the wall while damage details went by on the double, and when they reached the wardroom and the door into the observation nose, they moved like a couple of schoolgirls visiting someone else’s school, peeping through each doorway before they went through it.

A knot of officers, Captain Crane, Commander Morton, and Admiral Nelson among them, clustered around the control console in the after starboard comer. Quiet, tense orders flashed and crackled between them. The telltales and grilles flashed and crackled as well, bringing information on pressure, temperature, and the presence outside of huge, hurtling objects . . .

“Look!” breathed Cathy Connors, pointing forward with a shaking finger.

The big floods were on, for although the water was clear, their depth of over four hundred feet put them on the fringes of the lightless deep. And perhaps a hundred yards away, they saw a shape, like a great white cloud . . . no, there was nothing cloudly about it; it was solid, jagged, and seemed to be moving majestically, slowly upward through the water, until the startled eye realized how far away it was, and how large: at least as big as a ten-story building. Then it was evident that the thing was coming up with a rush, moving far too fast for anything that big. It disappeared above the loom of their brilliant lights.

“Wh-what was that?”

“It looked like an iceberg,” Cathy answered. “But icebergs aren’t supposed to be down at the bottom!”

From the console came the shrill reiterated squeal of sonar gear, as one of the officers turned up the gain. They all pressed to a cathode screen where a line of light with a little mountain in the middle danced in time to the squeak. The squeaks came closer together, faster and faster. Chip Morton broke away and ran into the transparent bows, pressing his back against the forward plate and looking down and to the rear. “Give me a beam!” he shouted. “That’s it . . . straight down . . . aft five . . . five more . . . hold it . . . Oh my God, it’s right under our keel . . .”

“Got the range,” barked O’Brien. “Two hundred . . . one ninety . . . eighty . . . One hundred fifty . . .”

“Both starboard full ahead!” bellowed the Captain. “Both port full astern. Full left rudder!”

The submarine shuddered from stem to stern as the big atomic-fired turbines took hold. She seemed as if she never would answer, and then a drift could be detected as she began to respond, and flotsam, caught in the lights, began to stream past from left to right. Up in the bows, Chip Morton made a sound of pure animal terror and sprinted aft, only to stand close to the knot of men, as if their very presence formed some sort of sanctuary for him. Eyes wide, he looked forward.

With a grinding crunch, the rising iceberg shouldered into the
Seaview
’s bows and lifted them.

The transparent plates took the impact on the under side and to the right, and crushed ice showered and swirled like smoke. The ship tilted upward and began to roll to the left, then slide backward, dragging her glass nose down the jagged slope of the ice mountain, cracking, crushing, grinding, smashing into each rough projection as it rose past.

Cathy Connors and Susan Hiller clung to each other and forgot to breathe. Neither could have called the exact figure in pounds per square inch the sub was subjected to at that depth, nor the terrible over-burden of those sickening blows against the transparent nose and the plates around it; both knew, with nightmare horror and utter certainty, that the punishment it was taking was much, much more than anyone, even Nelson, could have dreamed that it would ever take.

She listed sharply and suddenly to port, and then, like an obscuring sheet snatched away, the white wall was gone. The ship slid back and down through the black waters, found her keel, leveled off and dropped her bows dangerously, the whole maneuver precisely like that which a flyer calls a whipstall.

“All slow ahead,” rapped the Captain. “Level her. Hold your turn, then steer one eight oh.”

Admiral Nelson moved athwartship, coming quite close to the two girls. He seemed not to see them; his eyes were fixed on the transparent herculite bows, and roved up and back, back and forth, down and across. “By God,” he said hoarsely, low: “By God, it held. It held.”

“By God, Admiral,” said Chip Morton shakily from the other side of the big chamber—he could not have heard—“it held.”

“Hah!” grunted Nelson, almost jovially. “Of course it held!”

Susan Hiller met Cathy Connors’ eyes and almost smiled; and in that moment, Cathy understood much of what the lady-psychiatrist had said about the fascination of psychology.

“What’s your course, Mister?” barked the Admiral, as if never in his life before had he whispered, wondered, or called upon God.

“One eight oh, sir.”

“Good.” Nelson strode back to the console and barked into the grille, “Damage control: report!”

“One eight oh,” said Cathy to the doctor. “That’s south. We’re getting out of this.”

The sonar squealed. The men around the console leapt to action. Range—engines—”Hard left!”: a tense pulsing moment of silence, and a great white mountain, mounding up out of the blackness below, disappearing silently into the darkness above the port bow. And everybody breathing again.

“What would make icebergs come up from the bottom like that?”

“Tell me first, Sue, what would make them be down there in the first place.”

“No big ones now,” said someone at the board.

They looked forward into the green-white glare ahead. Chunks rose—pebble size, football size, automobile size. They came thickly, a strange slow upside-down hailstorm, kissing and stroking the sleek sides of the submarine, knocking impatiently, scraping softly, sometimes like shoes on a coconut mat, sometimes urgently, like a dog which wanted so much to get in.

“Watch your depth,” said Nelson. “It’ll hold at about three hundred and then shelve off to six, maybe seven. And when it does you’ll see the end of that ice.”

“Admiral,” said the Captain, “if you know anything at all about what’s happening here, for the love of heaven let us in on it.”

“I don’t know anything,” said Nelson, “but I’ve been doing the old trick of reading the instruments for the last half hour without thinking. That way you get the data that are, and not the ones you think ought to be.”

“Three ten, sir,” said O’Brien at the depth gauge. “Thirty. Eighty. Four ten. That’s not a shelf, sir, it’s a cliff. Holding at four ten, give or take a little . . .
uh!
four sixty. Five. Five hundred thirty . . . and holding . . .”

“And where’s your ice?” asked the old man with something approaching smugness.

All hands swung forward and looked—at the greenish blaze ahead, clear water, a sudden flurry of fish.

“Slow ahead, Captain.”

“Slow ahead, sir.” To the grille, Lee Crane said, “Slow ahead,” and heard it repeated.

“Will you tell us, sir?” asked the Captain, sounding very like a small boy whose uncle had just done a coin trick.

“I’ll check it out. Commander, set up a grid chart on that screen, if you please. I want our maneuvering area for the past two hours.”

“Yes, sir.” Chip Morton worked expertly with the controls, and in a moment the big central screen flickered, flared, and settled down to be a sounding map of their area, with isobars drawn at ten-fathom intervals. It showed deep water, shelving upward sharply to a long curved ridge, some of it no more than forty feet from the surface. Over the whole area was the cross-hatched symbol of unbroken pack ice.

“Very good,” said Nelson.

“A moment, sir,” said the Captain. He spoke into a grille, listened, spoke again. Then, “Damage control, sir. Hull and seams sound. Cookie’s cleaning up a mess in the galley; his stove guards will handle a thirty-degree list and apparently we did better than that.”

“Twice,” said Nelson. “What else?”

“Nothing, sir. She held up.”

“Of course she did. Casualties?”

“Commander Emery reports one bruised porpoise.”

Chip Morton laughed abruptly, too loud, and shut it off too quickly. Cathy Connors thought Dr. Hiller nodded slightly. She did not smile.

“Very good,” said the admiral. “Now, Commander, superimpose our course for the last hour onto that grid.”

“Aye, sir.” Chip Morton’s fingers flew over a cluster of buttons. The information was extracted from the course recorder, coded for the flying cathode beam, and placed neatly on the map, a black, wavy line, meandering up to the ridge, tangling, weaving back down again.

Morton stood back and glanced at it, opened his eyes wide, returned to the controls, and began fiddling.

“What are you doing, Commander?”

“Must be something wrong with the scale comparator circuits, sir. That—” he waved a hand at the map “—that just couldn’t be.”

“Leave it alone. Just take a good look at it.”

“I see what Ch—Commander Morton means, sir,” said the Captain. He stepped close and put his hand high up on the chart. “The course as indicated here intersects this ridge. Right here the indicated depth is only six fathoms—forty-two feet. We draw ninety at periscope depth. How could we have been up in there—with deep water showing under us? Chip—pull the course image down about five degrees.”

“Leave it where it is,” rapped the old man. “You fellows have a thing or two to learn, I see. Let me give you a piece of advice. When you get screwy data, begin by believing it and work from there. Keep your logic sound and link it through until you have an answer. Only if that answer is impossible do you start blaming your instruments. And be damn cautious about what you use that word ‘impossible’ on. Now then: this chart was prepared when?”

“Soundings taken not over a year ago, sir.”

“Well then, let’s hypothesize that something’s happened since then to change the depths. Only . . . I think we’ll have to guess that whatever happened, happened in the last week. But I’ll come to that.

“Now we assume that these soundings—asdic, I suppose, and sonar—bounced off rock, or congealed silt—in any case, good honest ocean bottom. But it also could be ice.”

“On the ocean bottom, sir?”

“I know, I know: Ice floats. But what of a situation where the polar currents keep pressing ice against these rising shelves? A hundred-foot berg drifts against a forty-foot undersea peak. More ice crowds it. The pack ice has nowhere to go but up; it piles on top of the berg. And more piles up, and more. The weight finally squeezes the big berg downward, and as more crowds in, more piles up, more goes down. Before long you have solid ice, air on top, rock on the bottom . . . nothing but ice between. A barrier.

“Just to protect what we are still calling true data, we will assume that this solid barrier extends over a wide area, and has brought ice down three or four hundred feet. We will now introduce a warm current—a very warm current, and a very fast one to boot. We’ll say it locates at about the one hundred foot level and begins to slice away at the ice barrier. It melts the ice in the middle and leaves it as pack above and a kind of thick paving below.”

“A very unstable situation, sir, if you’ll excuse me. Ice on the bottom like that would soon break up and—oh.”

“Oh, Mr. O’Brien is right,” said the old man with something like glee. “Ice on the bottom like that would soon break up and you would have the impossible circumstance of bergs rising up from the ocean floor.”

“Very ingenious,” said the Captain sincerely, “But sir—a current like that—why, it wouldn’t be warm water, it would be hot. And lots of it. Where would that amount of hot water come from?”

“I return your compliment, Captain. Very ingenious of you to have thought of it. I too have thought of it. And I can’t answer your question. Not yet. I am, however, convinced that there was and is such a current, that it carved out the middle of the barrier, that we proceeded into the area which recently was solid, and that while we were in there the bottom broke up.”

“It’s hard to believe, sir, that such a current—”

“You clock-watchers,” said the admiral with a fine scorn, waving his hand at the wide array of dials and telltales, “keep your noses on all the instruments that ought to apply and on none of those which actually do apply. Mr. O’Brien, sight unseen, what’s the water temperature out there?”

“Usually around twenty-eight point—” O’Brien turned to glance at the sea-water temp. gauge, and his jaw dropped. “Seventy-seven!”