Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Read online

“Must’ve cost—”

  “It did,” said the Captain with pleasure, “and it’s paid up.”

  “What’s your floor?” asked the Admiral.

  “A thousand, sir.”

  “Would that be a thousand feet?”

  “Fathoms, Mr. Parker. More than a mile.” The Congressman peered downward through the herculite and looked as if he was suddenly afraid of falling.

  “Take her down to two hundred feet,” said the Admiral. “All ahead two-thirds, course zero.”

  “That’s due North, isn’t it?” asked the psychiatrist, shaking herself awake at last.

  Chip Morton answered her; all this time he had been gazing at her in much the same way as she had been gazing at the ocean, and was apparently as bemused. “Oh you are a sailor, aren’t you?” he said fatuously, as if he were talking to an exceptionally clever five-year-old. She passed him a chill brief glance of barely aroused irritation, which only made him grin at her—a lost grin, for she was already looking the other way.

  “Two hundred feet,” said the console.

  “Trim her, then two-thirds ahead, course zero.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “And O’Brien—set loran and asdic alarms for 200 plus and 400 minus. We’ll have a roof over our heads PDQ. And hang ‘em on the mike.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “I heard what you said,” said Parker, “but what did you say?”

  “Told him to go under the ice, set our detectors to operate at anything 200 feet over us or 400 feet under, and use them to operate the mike—‘Iron Mike,’ that is—pet name for automatic pilot. She’ll run herself now until she encounters something she can’t handle. She’ll think it over for a couple of millionths of a second and then yell.”

  “This must’ve cost—”

  But this time the Captain only smiled at him.

  “Doctor . . . gentlemen . . . would you like to go on with the tour?”

  They moved aft. The captain murmured into a grille that he was leaving the bridge, and joined the group. They crossed the wardroom, rounded the TV bulkhead and went aft down the central corridor. The Admiral, in the lead, turned to a door on the starboard side and opened it. “Watch your step,” he cautioned, and went in. His warning was useful for on the other side of the usual shin-hungry high sill was a steep flight of steps, virtually a ladder, which twisted downwards into greenish dimness.

  Blinking, they found themselves in a cavernous chamber, standing on a steel catwalk which ran about six feet over what at first seemed to be a shiny floor but which, as their eyes adjusted, they were able to see was water, because there was a man on it, about chest deep, wearing a rubber suit and walking slowly. “Hey, Lu!” barked the Admiral.

  “Lu?” echoed Admiral B.J. Crawford. “That’s not—that wouldn’t be old Lucius? Lucius Emery?”

  “Well, B.J., goddam!” cried the man in the tank. “Beg pardon, ma’am. Didn’t see you.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Dr. Hiller calmly.

  “Dr. Hiller, Commander Lucius Emery,” said Nelson. “When better ichthyologists are built, they won’t find the likes of old Lu. Come on up and shake everybody’s hand, Lu.”

  “Can’t,” said the man in the tank. “You wouldn’t want my buddy here to drown, would you?”

  Dr. Hiller bent over the catwalk rail and peered. “What’s he doing?” she whispered to the captain.

  “Walking a shark,” he replied.

  “Oh,” she said. She concentrated, and as the man passed under the catwalk, they could make out the dark shape he propelled through the water, the tall dorsal fin like the sail of a good-sized toy boat . . . it must have been all of nine and a half feet. “What?” she cried.

  Lucius Emery looked up and smiled cheerfully at her. “Put him to sleep to make some tests,” he called up. “Now I got to walk him until he wakes up, to keep some water going through his gills till he snaps out of it. Who’s your other friend, B.J.?”

  “I beg your pardon, Parker. Congressman Parker, Lu. Come to see how we handle government money.”

  “Just like throwing it into the ocean, eh, Congressman? I heard of you.” And he laughed—a good laugh, echoing round and round the big tank.

  “What,” asked the Congressman tautly, “do you do when he—uh—‘snaps out of it’?”

  “Go some place else,” said the ichthyologist.

  Admiral Nelson laughed. “That Lu . . . he’d rather make friends with a fish than be remembered as one of the world’s great physical chemists, which he also happens to be.”

  “ ‘Remembered’ is probably the word,” said Parker sweatily.

  “Is he that Emery?” breathed Dr. Hiller.

  The Bureau chief began to move down the catwalk. “Look me up later, Lu. We’ll chew over some old times. I’ll buy the beer.”

  “That don’t sound like old times,” said Emery. And the great, the granite-faced, the cold-eyed Admiral B.J. Crawford, Chief of the Bureau of Undersea Exploration and nightmare to a thousand frightened cadets and j.g.’s, laughed and called him a name, took the impertinence and walked on.

  Out again in the central corridor, Dr. Hiller paced in puzzled silence for a time and then said, with extreme care, “Commander Emery is . . . uh . . . very informal, isn’t he?”

  “What you’re asking, ma’am,” rasped B.J. Crawford, “is where does a lowly superannuated Commander get off talking to the high brass that way, isn’t it? Or: why isn’t the man disciplined for the way he conducts himself with his superiors? Or: doesn’t a man like that eat away at the discipline of the other men? Is that what you wanted to know?”

  Dr. Hiller was obviously not cowed, and perhaps could not be. “Yes,” she said.

  “All right,” said Crawford (approvingly, the Captain thought). “I’ll tell you in case you want to put it in a psychology book some time. I was forty-three years in the Navy before I retired and now three years in the Bureau, which is as much Navy as I can make it. And I like what they call a taut ship, I believe rank has its privileges, I believe the man who ranks you is God and the man you rank is dirt, even by one half a temporary stripe. I believe all that because when an emergency comes up, that’s the way you’ve got to have it or a lot of otherwise good men get dead. And the only way you can have it that way in emergencies is to have it that way all the time. Men just don’t un-relax and tighten up fast enough; you got to keep them tight all the time.”

  Dr. Hiller looked perplexed. “But then Commander Emery—”

  “Lu,” said Admiral Crawford, “he unrelaxes fast enough. Statistics being what they are, the law of averages and all that; and men being what they are, there never has been one like him before and there never will again. Right, Nelson?”

  “Right,” chuckled the other.

  “I think,” said the psychiatrist with a kind of dogged primness, “that you have covered everything with the possible exception of his effect on the others.”

  “They love ‘im,” said the craggy old Admiral astonishingly, “which is one other thing I don’t believe in but I’m glad it happened once so it can never happen again. Somehow or other anyone who ever runs into Lucius Emery knows he can’t act like Lucius Emery unless he is Lucius Emery, and Lu already got that slot filled. Right, Nelson?”

  “Right,” said Nelson.

  “Right,” said Dr. Hiller sharply, and then smiled quite the most engaging smile they had yet shipped aboard that submarine. The two Admirals shared a chuckle, and Crawford, pre-empting the Captain and outflanking the Executive Officer, Chip Morton, who panted close by, helped her over the sill into the magazine.

  “Reminds you a little of the Ol’ South, don’t it?”, drawled Chip Morton, managing at last to corner the pretty doctor, and pointing to the close-ranked columns on each outboard bulkhead of the wide magazine. “I mean those old plantation houses with the rows of columns holding up all that prestige.”

  “What are they?” she asked, sticking to facts.

  “Missile tub
es. We could lie on the bottom of the Mindanao Deep, six miles down, and lob one of those things into orbit, or drop it down the smoke-hole of a Navajo wigwam.”

  Homing on the warm drone of Chip’s voice, Lee Crane came over to interrupt. “Here’s something new,” he said, holding out a small curved device. “Magnetic hand primers, to fire these Polaris X’s in case all this spaghetti—” he waved his hand around at the computer systems—”should get itself tangled on someone’s fork.”

  “It’s so tiny!”

  “It provides exactly the right amount of exactly what’s needed. ‘Course, you have to go outside. You hang it on the warhead, slap her on the nose, and back off a little. In six seconds, off she goes.”

  With a what’ll-they-think-of-next gesture she handed it back, just in time to see Chip Morton tossing something to her underhanded. “Here’s something new, too,” he said.

  Reflexively, she caught it, turned it over. “Some kind of baseball?”

  “Well, for real short games. One hit, no ball park. It’s an underwater demolition bomb.”

  An expression of distaste, absolutely uncolored by fear, crossed her face. “Commander Morton,” she said quietly, handing the bomb back to him, “I don’t like sadistic jokes and I don’t like sadists.”

  Amid a thundering silence she added, “I understand them very well, of course, but I don’t like them.”

  Without a word, Chip Morton turned away and went to put the bomb away. The girl raised her unflickering eyes and looked at Captain Lee Crane, as if to accept, quite without challenge, any remark he might make and store it away without actually touching it. He said “It couldn’t possibly go off if dropped. It takes a fairly difficult two-handed manipulation to arm it.”

  “That was perfectly obvious, or he wouldn’t have thrown it to me.”

  “You don’t scare easily.”

  “I do if something comes up that’s genuinely frightening. For anything else, I’ve simply developed a reflex for analyzing what situations are before I react to what they might be.”

  “All the same . . . he will of course be disciplined for that kind of childishness.”

  “He has been,” she said without smiling, but with an unmistakable twinkle in her eye. “You may do as you like with him, Captain, and of course you will. We each have our own theory of discipline. With some it’s pain for the offender. With others it’s correction, whether or not pain should be involved.” She paused and then said, with a recurrence of that twinkle, “In my opinion Commander Morton stands corrected. He will never do anything like that to me again, and very probably not to anyone else. So much for correction. As for punishment—”

  The captain laughed suddenly. “I’d hate to make any crime of mine fit one of your punishments, doctor.”

  Across the compartment, Congressman Parker heaved heartily on a door dog, which refused to move. “What’s in here?”

  “Davy Jones’ locker,” said Nelson. “That’s the escape hatch.”

  The Congressman let go the handle as if it had turned into a live mule’s hind foot, and stepped back smartly. The two Admirals did not smile, but knowing them as well as he did, Crane could see that it was not easy. “And that?” asked the Congressman, pointing briskly to cover his embarrassment.

  “Minisub,” said Nelson, looking upward at the stubby craft. “When you have to go outside and you’re too deep for—” he waved his hand at a neat, comprehensive row of racks of diving gear—everything from simple snorkels to heated wet-suits with self-contained air recirculators—“those. You enter from below, there, that hatch, see it? and then it goes up through the ‘roof’—a lock just forward of the conning tower.”

  And as they looked up at the sub, the small round hatch swung downward and ejected a pair of feet, followed by the legs, torso and flaming red head of the young sailor who swung down out of the Minisub, found himself standing in the midst of a great mound of high brass and a strange and lovely woman. Her neat dark suit, their heavy loads of gold stripes and “scrambled eggs” on their caps, their epaulettes and the achingly bright shine of their well-turned shoes, all contrasted noisily with the redhead’s sweat-stained, oil-spotted T-shirt, faded fatigues with one knee out, and knob-toed safety shoes. The sailor gulped noisily and begged their pardon. Admiral Nelson cocked his head and looked at the young man, Captain Crane smiled, it may or may not have been at the man’s discomfiture; in any case his eyes were off in the middle distance. True to his creed, the superior B.J. Crawford was not aware that the inferior gob even existed. Dr. Hiller looked straight at the redhead, cool and attentive, and the redhead, bulging his muscles against a dirty rag he held behind his back, was apparently trying to build, with his knob-toed feet, a hatch to fall through.

  “Take a look at this lad, B.J. He’s Seaman Smith. Recognize him?” demanded Nelson.

  Admiral Crawford’s glance struck the redhead a glancing blow. “Should I?” he asked coldly.

  Nelson chuckled. “Seems only yesterday you were bouncing him on your knees.”

  Crawford’s frosty eyes swung around and got a fix on the bridge of Smith’s nose. Suddenly he snatched off his beautiful hat and slammed it cruelly against his knee. “Smith! Ol’ Bricktop’s son! The spittin’ image too!”

  “His mother wrote me that he’d finished his hitch in the Navy, so I had him sign up with us on the double.”

  “Well,” said B.J., toning his voice down from bark to growl. He put his hat back on and put out his hand. “Jimmy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Minisub man, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Crawford glanced aloft. “Mark VII, isn’t it? Like it?”

  “Handles like a dream, sir,” said Smith enthusiastically. “I can’t wait to wring her out under the ice.”

  Nelson began to move off, and said over his shoulder, “You will!”

  Smith looked after him, bright-eyed. “Thank you, sir!”

  Crawford punched the redhead’s shoulder. “Good luck, kid.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The captain herded Dr. Hiller gently over the sick bay sill and glanced back before he let the door swing shut. Young Smith was looking upward like a chicken-farmer thinking about sparrow-hawks, and from the little hatch of the mini dangled shoes, shanks, and bony knees, between which leaned the horse face of the CPO Gleason.

  Gleason said, apologetically, “Sorry to break in on your social life, Commodore, but there’s an important matter of operational procedure awaiting your attention.” Suddenly he dropped a can of metal polish like a bomb (Smith caught it) and roared, “Git back to work!”

  Young Smith got a foot on the top gudgeon of a torp tube and leapt, catching the rim of the hatch while Gleason rolled deftly out of the way. Sticking the can of polish in his back pocket, he pulled himself upward. Gleason’s unmusical voice began some sort of chant, the tune of which Crane could not quite place. He shrugged, smiled, and followed the others into the sick bay. “And now,” Nelson was saying, “see whether or not it’s worth-while getting sick aboard.”

  Seaview had more hospital space than many a liner, and certainly more than any sub afloat. Dr.

  Hiller exclaimed in very real delight at the compact dental equipment, complete with X-ray, folded out of a cabinet the size they used, not long ago, for sterile gauze swabs. From a similar cubbyhole came an amazingly comprehensive medical reference library on microfilm, along with an efficient little projection system and a quick-finder index. Urged by the Admiral to go right ahead, she investigated the autoclave, the pharmacy, the drugs and stores. She was crossing to the inboard bulkhead, where stood an adjustable—very adjustable—examining table, when an inner door opened and an officer, tall, thin, in his mid-forties, walked in. “Admiral! . . . Captain . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Dr. Hiller, this is Dr. Jamieson, our sawbones. You know Admiral Crawford. And this is Congressman Parker.”

  Dr. Jamieson barely acknowledged the
introductions, barely took his eyes from the woman. “Are you—that Dr. Hiller? Dr. Susan Hiller?”

  “I suppose I am . . .”

  “Gentlemen,” said Dr. Jamieson, “we have in our midst a very distinguished person. Dr. Hiller wrote—”

  Nelson laughed. “We know who she is, Doc. That’s why she’s with us. She’s here to do stress observations.”

  “We’re very fortunate,” said the doctor warmly. “Have you any idea how important to us all these psychological observations have been? Why, the size of these cabins, the color of the walls—the air temperature and humidity, the way food is cooked and served, even the layout of dials and controls—all of that, and more, is determined from the analyses of these observational psychologists and psychiatrists. But—Dr. Hiller! Of them all, to have Dr. Hiller!”

  Nelson chuckled. “All right, all right, Doc! We’ll buy it, and Dr. Hiller too.”

  “I’m sorry,” laughed Dr. Jamieson. “Dr. Hiller—Mr. Parker—Admiral—I don’t usually flap off at the mouth that way. But it would be foolish of me to try to conceal my admiration . . . I will see you again, Doctor?”

  “Of course. We’ll have quite a bit to do together, I should imagine. I couldn’t very well do without your help.”

  “Oh, you have it, you have it,” said Jamieson, watching them leave. Why my God, he’s panting, Crane thought as he waved and left. Not at all like Chip (who was off somewhere now, licking his wounds) but still popping off like a school kid on circus day. To those who knew him well, Doc Jamieson was a pretty reserved guy too. Twice today, Crane thought, he’d heard that accolade: Are you that Dr. Emery? Are you that Susan Hiller? Twice . . . weird, he thought. He indulged in a superstition: they come in threes.

  Somewhere in his mind, or perhaps it was from the magazine, he heard a tune, and almost called it by name. He made an effort and hummed a snatch of it, but still he couldn’t remember the name.

  The Admiral and the visitors were in the mess-hall, which was next to the sick bay—a quiet piece of planning for any eventuality which would require ward space.

  “Captain Crane—”

  He turned back. “Yes, Doc.”