Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (6 page)

“So there must be something wrong with the temp. gauge,” said Nelson with biting irony,

“Because it disagrees with what you think. I tell you, don’t think! Read, and stack up your data, and let them tell you: don’t think until the data speak. Yes, gentlemen, the sea around us really is at 77°, and it is at 77° after having encountered an awful lot of cold water and ice. I’d judge it was better than a hundred and seventy-seven when it first came in.”

“But sir!” Morton almost wailed, “where did it come from?”

“That I don’t know. Take her up, and maybe we’ll find out.”

“We’re under the pack, sir,” said Morton timidly.

“Thank you for reminding me,” said the Admiral caustically. “But unless I miss my guess we’ll find damn little pack left up there.”

“Our schedule calls for another ten days submerged, sir,” said the Captain, almost timidly.

“Our schedule was made during, and in anticipation of, ordinary circumstances. If you regard these circumstances as ordinary, mister, you may continue to disregard my orders to take her dammit up!”

“Sorry, sir,” said Lee Crane stiffly. “Take her up.”

“Take her up,” repeated the Diving Officer.

The never-ending soft powerful symphony of the machine changed tempo and key as tanks were blown and the
Seaview
pressed upward out of the deep. The Admiral stepped to the door of the radio shack and said, “Sparks, release a buoy antenna and warm up your receivers.”

“Buoy, sir? It won’t get past the ice-pack.”

“I have a hunch, mister, that the ice won’t bother it much. I have more than a hunch—why, it’s a downright conviction—that you ought to release a buoy when ordered to do so, or scuttle the ship when ordered to do so, or put yourself under arrest when ordered to do so.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” said the radioman, and pulled a lever. “Buoy released, sir.” He switched on his receivers and with open relief, dove into his headphones.

Crane said, “What do you expect from the radio, Admiral?”

“Rock-and-roll music, probably. And then perhaps, between choruses, a news announcement.”

Dropping his vicious irony as suddenly as he had assumed it, he said seriously, “Whatever this is, it’s too drastic an effect to be purely local. Something’s happened while we were bubbling around down here like fish in a steel tank.”

“And haven’t you any idea at all what it might be?”

“Not the ghost of a guess,” said the Admiral cheerfully. “Which only means it’s time to stop hypothesizing and wait for more data.”

“Two hundred,” said O’Brien.

“Ow,” said Sparks.

They all looked at the door of the radio shack. “In one moment,” said the Admiral, still cheerful, “Sparks will appear in that doorway and announce that something is wrong with his gear.”

“One-eighty,” droned O’Brien.

Sparks appeared in the doorway, and blinked when he saw all eyes on him. “Cap’n,” he said deferentially, “is anyone like welding aboard, or something?”

“No, Sparks.”

“Or is the doctor maybe using a diathermy machine?”

“I don’t believe he even has one aboard.”

Sparks rubbed his ear and shook his head. The earphones were clamped there still, pushed back.

“Something wrong some place,” he murmured, puzzled.

“Let’s hear it, Sparks,” said the Admiral. The operator returned to his shack and threw a switch.

The chamber filled up with an unreadable scratching roar. Sparks, working over his controls, was able to add a couple of heterodyning whines and shrieks, but that was all. The sound cut, and Sparks returned, looking worried. “I tried ‘em all, sir, single sideband, FM, the works. There’s more grass and garbage in the air than I ever heard before.”

“Magnetic storm?” suggested the Captain.

“No, sir,” said the operator positively. “I been there, Captain. This sounds like nothing I ever heard before. Magnetic storms cause fade more’n anything else: this is the exact opposite.”

“One thirty,” said O’Brien.

“We’ll break surface in a second,” said the Admiral, “and then maybe we can locate a relay satellite and get something off it on the tight beam. Meanwhile, do what you can, Sparks.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Periscope depth,” O’Brien sang out, instantly followed by Crane’s “Up periscope.”

Chip Morton switched out the chart grid and replaced it, on the big screen, with the swirling pattern of the periscope just under the surface.

“You were right about the ice, sir,” said Crane. “But according to all the charts, there ought to be solid pack here.”

“Now what’s the matter with the ocean?” breathed the Admiral, glowering at the screen, which, as daylight brightened there, was taking on a pinkish cast.

“I saw a whole lake turn red once, for ten days, sir,” said O’Brien. “Some kind of alga.”

“I think,” said the Admiral, “I here and now stop thinking again, and just watch.”

Spellbound, they watched. The image wavered as water ran off, splashed on, ran off the periscope, and gradually cleared, to show them a typical arctic seascape, scattered floe ice and wide patches of open water. But typical only to the colorblind; for in two important respects it was all wrong. First, they would have had to be hundreds of miles south of their present position to find so little ice. Second, the color was all wrong—for the ice was pink and the water seemed to be full of reflected flame.

“Surface, and crack the hatch,” ordered the Admiral. He wheeled and walked aft, to central control and the conning chamber. O’Brien stayed where he was, but the rest followed, Cathy Connors and the psychiatrist following timidly in the rear.

In the conning chamber, the redheaded minisub man Jimmy Smith pulled down a lever and from above, hollowly, came the crack and hiss of the seals. Without hesitation, and lithely as a youngster, the old Admiral swung up the ladder. Above him came the rumble and clang of the hatch gear, and a blast of air.

Cool air.

Those of the crew who had done arctic work before stopped what they were doing, stared upward, then shared a startled glance. Braced as they were, all unconsciously, for that cutting cold they had known so often, they were unprepared for what felt like the gentle airs of a mild October day. The CPO, Gleason, called to the redheaded seaman, who was pulling heavy parkas and gloves from a locker, “Never mind, Jimmy.”

The Captain wrinkled his brows, shook his head slightly and peered up the ladder. The Admiral was standing on a rung near the stop, and as much sky as Lee Crane could see past his bulky figure seemed to be a flaming orange-red. Crane glanced at his wrist and then at the chronometer on the control panel, shook his head again and called up, “What is it, sir?” and when there was no answer, he mounted the ladder himself.

The Admiral was already out on the deck. Crane ranged up beside him and stood silently, looking. Someone called from down below, but they both ignored the sound. Presently, “God!” said Chip Morton from the lip of the conning tower, “The . . . the sky’s on fire!”

In a broad arc across the sky, a glaring, flaming band of light lay. It trembled, coruscated, rimmed itself shiveringly with tatters of light, yellow, orange, flickers of blue coming and going.

Somehow, its most terrifying feature was its silence; a thing like that, by rights, should have roared and crackled, but it did not.

The Admiral cleared his throat. “It would seem,” he said in a low voice, “that something’s been going on behind our backs. Uh . . . Lee . . . get a periscope slow-scan on that thing and have Sparks lay it on the repeater screens in the wardroom and the crew’s quarters. They have a right to see this. And ask Mr. Gleason to tell off the crew in threes to lay on deck and have a look.”

“Aye, sir,” said the Captain, and went to the conning tower to repeat the order to Chip Morton, who acknowledged and then asked, “But Lee, what in hell is it?”

“Just hell, I guess,” said the Captain. He returned to the Admiral.

“Captain . . .” said the Admiral, and paused. Lee Crane watched that craggy profile, raised to the burning sky, lit as by an opened furnace door, and waited. He knew that the incredible brain under that iron-grey thatch was racing: matching, measuring, hypothesizing, testing. He knew, too, that the way to get his own head taken off at the collar-button was to interrupt.

At last the Admiral shook his head slowly and turned to Crane and looked at him as if he had just appeared there and, like the band of fire in the sky, had to be explained somehow. “Captain, it isn’t aurora. It’s too close. It has to be close because of the heat, and because of those flame movements. I . . . I think if we get a chance to make the measurements, we’ll find that some of the ice-pack melted down and had a lens effect, concentrating heat at a focal area two-three hundred feet down, which would account for all that hot water. Suddenly created there, that hot layer wouldn’t just lie there—it’d have to move. Just which way would depend on already existing currents, bottom and under-floe contours. But move it would. Move it did.” He shook himself suddenly. “Lee, we’ll want a position, really exact. You and Chip duplicate a sun-shot and average your readings. I don’t think you’ll get any help from radio range but try it anyway. Then drag out your newest ephemeris and see if you can’t get a passage time, azimuth and elevation for one of the communications satellites. I don’t expect a thing from it either, in terms of re-radiation, but if we can use it passively and bounce a tight enough beam off it, we might jam some sort of a signal through all this interference and get through to the Naval Observatory. With luck we could listen the same way. They must know about this, they’ve got to have some sort of explanation.”

Sensing that the old man had said—or was thinking aloud—all he was going to, the Captain stepped aft to the conning tower. At the hatch he stood aside while Dr. Jamieson, Dr. Hiller and Cathy Connors emerged. The first two did just what he and the Admiral had done: stopped dead, wordless and thunderstruck, then moved to the outside ladder in something like a daze. Cathy stared, swallowed, then turned terrified eyes to Crane. “What is it?”

“Like the Admiral says,” he answered gently, “sometimes you just have to quit thinking and wait for information.” He squeezed her arm and went below.

The crew moved about their duties, speaking little and that in muted tones. The Captain went into consultation with the radio operator and then repaired to the nose console, where he and Chip Morton went to work on the navigation problem.

Ten minutes later the intercom whuffed and then delivered the Admiral’s bull tones. “Captain, our sharp-eyed lady psychiatrist has spotted something on an ice-floe. I have the glasses on it; it looks like a man. Bearing about 53°. Get the scope on it and have a look.”

Crane acknowledged and switched the big screen to periscope, turned the bearing control, got a focus, and then carefully worked the zoom knob. He found the object quickly enough: the old man’s by-guess-and-by-God 53° was within two minutes of being dead right. The advanced photo-multiplier TV system gave an immense amount of magnification, and he was able to develop a picture which looked as if it were being taken from forty feet away, though it was actually close to half a mile. He grunted and switched the image to the bridge repeater.

“Taking it calmly, isn’t he?” murmured the intercom.

Crane nodded as if the grille could see him, and he and Chip studied the picture. It showed a man in his thirties, dressed in a government-issue parka with the front slide open and the hood flung back.

He was squatting on his heels in the manner practiced by some Amerindians and most desert Arabs, a pose which most people find impossible after five minutes but which they can hold by the day. His face, which was fiery red in the flaming light, red not only from the light but from sunburn and fever, was otherwise suffused with what could only be called peace—nothing ecstatic or blissful, but solely, passively peaceful.

“Rescue detail!” barked the Captain. “Mr. Gleason, blow up a dinghy, take three men and go out and get that man off the ice. Jump! It might not be there much longer.” Gleason acknowledged.

Chip Morton said, “What’s that he’s holding?”

“Looks like a wet muff,” said the Captain, peering. “Muff or busby-hat, it’s wagging its tail,” said Chip. “A dog, by God . . . What’s with that guy, anyhow? If it was me, I’d be dancing a jig and hollering my head off.”

“He could be delirious.”

“Somehow I don’t think so.” Crane shrugged the whole matter out of his mind and motioned Morton back to the ephemeris.

In a few minutes they had a position, taking their turns at the automatic sextant, and averaging their calculations with the course computer which, like similar ones on aircraft, was designed to give current position no matter what maneuvers had been performed, but which was similarly subject to error from unrecognized drift currents. They also averaged the three chronometers to seven or eight hundredths of a second, reduced the whole thing to three lines of figures, and passed them to Sparks, who had already activated the high-powered satellite search radars. The operator glanced at the figures, then moved controls which unfolded the big “bedspring” on its telescopic mast abaft the conning tower, and set it to sweeping the sky in the area where, if their computations were right, the communications satellite should appear. Warmed up and ready to go were transmitter, receiver, and a lock-on device which would follow the satellite as long as it was in range.

The Admiral called from the bridge: “Mr. Crane, have Sparks contact Gleason and have him report on the condition of that man out there.”

In a moment the speaker roared with static, which changed in tone as Sparks tried to trim some of it out. The Admiral’s message went out, and was answered by Gleason on the walkie-talkie, barely readable over the churning interference—at only a quarter of a mile—”He must be sick or something, sir. He just sits there. If he’d come out on that spur we could snatch him off it in a minute now, but I guess we’ll have to go around the other side.”

“Got it, sir!” Sparks cried excitedly. A secondary screen flickered into life and became a seascape showing a small segment of that dreadful fire in the sky. Crosshairs appeared, and at their junction, the familiar silver pip of a satellite. “Locked on, sir!” called Sparks. “Can you get anything off it?”