Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea

by Theodore Sturgeon

  THE WORLD WAS AFIRE!

  From a flaming sky, heat seared Earth’s surface and cast forests and mighty cities flared and died. In a few weeks, mankind would be burned from the face of the planet.

  There was only one desperate chance—and only one man desperate enough to take it—Nelson, the “Mad Admiral.” Defying his government and the nations of the world, Nelson drove the giant atomic submarine Seaview halfway around the globe to a grim rendezvous with Destiny. Unknown monsters of the deep barred his way—foreign warships hunted him—sabotages delayed him—but Nelson bulled and slashed his way through. Then, at the crucial moment, when disaster struck and the world seemed doomed, Admiral Nelson launched his “mad” plan!

  The spectacular saga of . . .

  VOYAGE TO THE

  BOTTOM OF THE SEA

  . . . is now a thrilling motion picture

  in wide-screen color, starring

  WALTER PIDGEON • PETER LORRE

  JOAN FONTAINE • FRANKIE AVALON

  BARBARA EDEN • ROBERT STERLING

  and MICHAEL ANSARA

  An Irwin Allen Production

  Released through

  Twentieth Century-Fox.

  A PYRAMID BOOK

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by

  mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  Cover painting by Jim Mitchell

  Copyright © Pyramid Books June 1961

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CONTENTS

  VOYAGE TO THE

  BOTTOM OF THE SEA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  1

  AT THE END, THE BOTTOM, the very worst of it, with the world afire and hell’s flame-winged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself. The youngest sub skipper in history blamed himself for the burning sky and the floods, the droughts and dangers of that terrible August when the devil himself brought his face to the Earth’s crust and breathed on it, laughed and said, Die.

  It’s my fault, Captain Crane told himself, which is probably why he did what he did. That he should feel this thing is only a measure of the man.

  It’s my fault because I was at the top, that day, and knew it, and told myself so. That was it: he had let himself tell himself so. Well . . . it takes a big man to be where he was, that day, and only a big man, with such a big brag in his heart, could have kept it to himself. And it was like him to react with horror so huge when he caught himself at it; and only a sizable soul could shoulder so much guilt for a moment of glory.

  In his terror and agony, there near the end, he gave himself again the moment of the brag, not so much to relive the pleasure, but to flagellate himself with his sense of sin and the extremities of his penitence. Forgive him that. It was a time for extremities.

  The Day of the Brag was a sunny day, and they stood in the wardroom of the U.S.O.S. Seaview, stood, sat, lounged and, as it became one or two of them, postured. The visitors had only just come aboard from an aircraft carrier lying just off the brim of Earth’s ice hat. A huge turbine-powered whirlybird had gentled them off the flat-top and eased their precious and important presences on to the broad shoulders of the Seaview just aft of the conning tower, and from there they were conveyed up and over and down inside with the smoothness of eggs through a candler.

  And with exquisite timing, if you’re building a brag, they were no sooner arranged in the wardroom with their heart’s desire in welcoming drinks in their hands, when the after bulkhead, between the doors to the Captain’s galley and the radio shack, a wall nine feet wide and six feet high, lit up in a blaze of color and presented to them a TV news show featuring themselves and their adventure and, oh yes, their importance. Captain Lee Crane, resplendent in dress blues (a tailor had once remarked of him “the guy’s got one-and-a-half the shoulders and only half the hips!”) and with pleasure watched the show on the screen, and the show of the people who watched the show. The image on the new wide-screen TV was perfect, the sound was stereophonic, the submarine idled along with a greased kind of gentleness, the drink was excellent and so was the weather.

  The man on the screen said, “Today’s top of the news comes from the top of the world. The unpredictable Admiral Harriman Nelson has done it again! Since his retirement from the Navy some four years ago to enlist in the newly created Bureau of Marine Exploration, the Admiral has been secretly at work constructing the first submarine ever built outside the Navy Department. Into it has gone his entire personal fortune—you will recall that the Nelsons, with all their past glories in the form of college presidents, Congressmen, State governors and philanthropists, have been an investment banking family for three generations—and every penny he could scrape up from sources as widely separated as Foundation grants and collections of school-children’s pennies. His brainchild, a fantastic—”

  Here the commentator’s well-barbered head gave way to a picture of a detailed model of the Seaview, which in due course dissolved to a montage of the keel-laying ceremonies, the launching, and the commissioning ceremonies of the craft.

  “—a fantastic atomic submarine with an amazing glass nose—is undergoing final tests in Arctic waters, where it will follow the trail blazed twenty years ago by the first atomic submarine—under the ice and across the Pole.

  “This sub of the future,” the commentator went on, becoming visible again and, Captain Lee Crane thought, having run a comb through his faultless waves while off camera, “this child of determined imagination out of the Age of the Computer, is the world’s largest mobile oceanographic laboratory. It was designed to search out the mysteries of the deep as well as to be a research center to test the miracle weapons of tomorrow. To operate this awesome robot, the Admiral has enlisted a hand-picked crew from former Navy men with long experience on atomic subs. To sit in judgment on these final tests, the Bureau of Marine Exploration has sent its top officer, the former Vice Admiral B.J. Crawford and the congressional watchdog of the budget, Congressman Llewellyn Parker, by carrier and ‘copter to rendezvous with the submarine Seaview.”

  Lee Crane, lounging against the forward bulkhead, and behind most of the watchers, was amused to see the slight twitch and erection of the head, the reddening of the ears of the visiting admiral and the visiting penny-pincher, as each in turn their names were called. In his mind’s eye he could see the imp called Vanity winging about overhead, ready to swoop down at the public mention of any name, to seize its owner by the ears (hence the reddening) and pull (hence the twitch and straightening of the neck). The commentator permitted himself to be replaced by a full-color portrait of Crane’s “boss,” the driving force behind the Seaview and all it stood for, Admiral Harriman Nelson. And sure enough, the Admiral’s ears, here in the flesh, pinkened, and the great bull’s head, terror of the china-shop, twitched and rose.

  “And so the question of the day comes to this,” said the now disembodied commentator, “Will the final test on the U.S.O.S. Seaview turn it into ‘Nelson’s Folly,’ or will it be another triumph of an already great man—a great scientist and inventor, who in spite of what some call an odd-ball reputation, may yet emerge as the predominant scientific genius of our time.”

  Admiral Nelson let his gray eaves of eyebrows come up a notch, and otherwise held his face as if it had been carved there by Gutzon Borglum. But Captain Crane saw the slight turn
his right hand gave to the signet ring on his left, a mannerism he had watched for ever since he was a boot at Annapolis and Nelson headed the Science Department; it meant he was annoyed. Fair enough. Chest-tones and the safety of a studio four thousand miles away did not qualify a guy with marcelled hair to call the likes of Nelson an oddball.

  Now, Crane thought, comes the dessert. It’s time for a seductive portrait of Dr. Susan Hiller, some arch remarks about how high this brilliant woman had risen in the ranks of medicine and psychiatry, and how extraordinary that she should yet be so beautiful—and why the hell not, thought Crane in irritation: when would the beautiful-but-dumb, brilliant-but-dowdy legend curl up and die?

  Could it be that most of the world wanted it alive, and if so, why? And in addition, Crane predicted, there would be a polite joke (masking some not only impolite, but downright disgusting implications) about Dr. Hiller’s being the only woman aboard (which she wasn’t).

  “So,” said the commentator, “Bon voyage, Admiral Nelson . . . his crew, and their illustrious visitors Congressman Parker and Admiral Crawford. We will hear nothing of them while they are submerged, of course, for however many hours, days or even weeks the tests take. They will likewise hear nothing from us; therefore, if they are listening to me now, I’d like to speak for all the world, its people, its scientists, young and old, knowing that they share my admiration. High ideals, high courage, and high adventure are their lot, though they find them in a voyage to the bottom of the sea.”

  He glanced down and up, wet his careful lips, and began, “In other news around the world, a dispatch—”

  Captain Crane made a slight motion with his finger and Sparks, standing in the door of the radio shack, ducked back out of sight. The screen shrank abruptly to a polychrome dot which winked out.

  Everyone breathed as if breathing had been forgotten for a while, everyone found that there was after all a glass in hand, everyone drank. Nelson rumbled—self-consciously because all his life he had been doing more important things than learning the formalities—”Well, gentlemen . . . Doctor . . . modesty forbids me adding anything to that.”

  “Chivalry,” said a smooth baritone on the port side, “suggests a sorry omission.” It was “Chip”

  Morton, Crane’s Executive Officer. Classmates, roommates at the Academy, they had entered the submarine service together and come all the way. It was no one’s fault—certainly not Lee Crane’s—that they had proceeded single file, with Chip in the rear. Chip’s tone just now was as glossy as his sharply trimmed black hair. He leaned toward Dr. Hiller and said, “He never even mentioned Dr. Hiller.”

  “By her wish and my specific request,” said old “B.J.”—Admiral B.J. Crawford, head of the Bureau of Marine Exploration, an old turtleback who, they said, bit the heads off three ensigns each day before breakfast.

  “I’ve had quite all the publicity I could possibly want,” said the doctor in a well-modulated contralto. “In this special case, I’m here to observe men under stress, to compare their reactions with men in other vessels differently equipped. It’s a job that’s best done quietly.”

  “You’re quite right, Doctor,” Crane said quickly, to nip off anything further Chip might have to offer: un-nipped, he would, too, thick, with a broad trowel.

  “Let’s take her down, Captain.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Crane briskly. He wheeled to the bulkhead, palmed the bridge tweeter, and said, “Any time you’re ready, Mr. O’Brien.” The Dive Officer’s voice came back at him out of the grille as if by speaking Crane had released a spring: “Aye sir!” Crane said, “Shall we all go up to the bridge?”

  Drinks were finished, set aside, and Crane led the way forward, followed by Chip, who stepped over the high sill of the water-tight door and immediately turned to help Dr. Susan Hiller over it, saying, in that I’ll-take-care-of-you-cookie voice of his, “Ship’s etiquette sometimes looks mighty rude to a landlubber, ma’am. But an officer never lets a lady precede him. I guess because it’s too easy to step over one of these sills into a bucket.”

  “I have been aboard a ship before, Commander,” said the psychiatrist, not smiling at all, which almost made the Captain laugh out loud. He stepped aside and let them all come through and mill around, then touched a stud, and the curtain-wall behind him slid right and left away, and they found themselves standing at the aft end of the submarine’s unique transparent nose. Like any small boy with new trains to show, like any girl with a two-carat diamond to flash, like—well, any human with something wondrous to display, he smiled and soaked up the three gasps that came from the guests.

  He glanced at Admiral Nelson, and saw him eating it with as much relish as he was.

  And it was a sight to come upon without warning. What was called the bridge was the extreme bows of the huge sub. A single gigantic curved beam connected keel with backbone, swelling at the dead-forward point to a great escutcheon of steel, which formed the ram prow up ahead. Transversely, this was braced by two more curved beams, so that dead ahead one saw a cross of steel with the escutcheon at their joining, and the spaces between the arms were filled with what at first seemed to be nothing at all. Since the hull was nearly eighty feet high, and the waterline just below the arms of the cross, one might look down into thirty feet of water, up at the sky, and have sea level about at one’s shins.

  “By . . . golly,” mumbled Admiral Crawford. “Nelson, I’ve lived with this thing about half as long as you have, blueprints on up, and I thought I knew what it would be like. But . . . you’ve got to be here to believe it.”

  “Those . . . ports? windows? They’re so big!” said the svelte psychiatrist, wonderstruck as any child.

  “Structurally, they’re not windows or ports or anything else but just plain hull,” said Admiral Nelson.

  “X-tempered herculite,” said the captain. “A process Admiral Nelson developed. And that is the right description. They’re just oversized hull plates which happen to be transparent.” He stepped to a console and touched a control. “Deck’s clear, Mr. O’Brien?”

  “All clear, sir!”

  “Check your hatch.”

  “Dogged down, sir.”

  “Make it ninety feet as a start, and hold it.”

  “Ninety feet, sir.”

  The Congressman was still staring slackjawed at the herculite nose. When he found something to say, it was, “But the cost of a thing like that . . .”

  The grizzled old Bureau head laughed aloud. “The cost was met by Admiral Nelson here, and his ways and means boys, and several million school kids, and his own patent and process holdings. She’s bought and paid for, Mr. Parker, and was before he asked to have her commissioned by the government. We had to start a new Bureau to accommodate her. She’s non-Navy, but federal. She’s available for weapons testing, and for that alone she’s worth her maintenance times fifty—just her availability. Her real business is research.”

  “Research,” said the Congressman, at last able to fix on something he knew he disliked. He made the two syllables speak a whole paragraph about blue-sky puttering with useless chemicals resulting in useless mixtures, invoices for elaborate testing devices to determine the molecular changes in bread as it’s toasted.

  “Oh—look!” said Dr. Susan Hiller. She pointed downward, and a great shimmering cloud of mullet writhed past.

  “Research,” said Nelson, and his two syllables had a sound like a key opening an old lock. “We’ll ride herd on those mullet some day, the way old timers did sheep. Maybe some day folks’ll live down there under herculite domes, ranching the fish and farming sea plants. On a planet that’s 74 per cent sea-floor, Congressman, there’s an awful lot to be researched out. Research can make this a bigger world than ever you thought it was. There’s mines for us down there, and oil wells, and hot-vents for power, there’s food there and work and study for generations to come.”

  Without appreciable tilting, for this was not a crash dive, the ship began to go down. So smooth and sile
nt were the mighty engines that their presence was only a vague steady tremble. The waterline crept upward over the giant panes, and the light in the huge chamber took on the blue-green cast of the silent world. Susan Hiller clasped her slim hands together and stood breathless, moving her head from side to side in something like disbelief. The captain, now well on the way to what he later called to himself The Big Brag, affected a studied professional boredom which he hardly felt, so acutely did the awe of the visitors communicate itself. He stood with his back to the wonder of the surging water ahead, and his eyes flicked alertly over the “Christmas Tree”—the banks of lights and repeaters on his console.

  “Run the ship from here, do you?” asked Congressman Parker, whose capacity for awe was apparently reached.

  “Yes, sir,” said the Captain. “That is, we can, or it can be run from a rather more conventional control room directly under the conning tower. There are automatics for every function from pumping sewage to changing stereo tapes—and manuals to override them.”

  “Deck’s awash,” said O’Brien’s voice from the console, and a moment later, “Stern gone.”

  “Periscope depth,” ordered the Captain. O’Brien responded and the strange light darkened a shade. The Captain moved some controls. A large screen lit up, and showed a seascape, the sparkling blue-green of sunlit, deep-water. He turned a wheel, and a grid, marked in degrees, began marching past the picture. “This is how we get away from the greasy stick that hangs down in the middle of most subs,” he explained. “We have one ‘midships, of course, but this repeater magnifies the periscope image. Standing right here I can turn it any way including up, without marching around it in a circle like a blind camel pulling buckets out of a well. And if we want it to, it’ll lock on to an object by light or infra-red or radar or sonar, and keep the image right there no matter which way we jump.”