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?”
“Just a second, sir . . . ah. Ah!” The speaker roared again, and the roar faded under a signal—a blast of rock-and-roll music. “Pipe that all over the ship,” said the Captain. To Morton he said, “I imagine the rest of the crew will be as glad as I am to know that nothing has happened to the U.S.A.”
“After a rock-and-roll revival, what else should happen?”
They watched the rescue operation for a few moments. Gleason was edging his powered, inflated dinghy in close. He threw the man a rope. The man just looked at it. Crane could imagine the stream of disgusted profanity Gleason was generating.
The Admiral appeared in the after doorway. “Where’s that music coming from?” he demanded.
“Can’t tell yet, sir. Maybe they’ll announce at the end of the number.”
The music slammed and tinkled.
“Of all the times to be broadcasting that,” growled the Admiral.
“It’s a signal,” shrugged Morton.
The music clanked to a close, and a hoarse, static-drenched voice said tiredly, as if repeating a phrase repeated already so often it had become meaningless, “Calling the U.S.O.S. Seaview. This is the Bureau of Marine Exploration, calling Admiral Nelson Come in, Seaview.”
“That’s more like it. Transmit, Sparks. Which mike is hot here? Eh? This one? Good.” Into the mike he said, a little slowly, and enunciating with care, “Admiral Nelson here, aboard U.S.O.S. Seaview.” He read the coordinates of their position, and the identity of the satellite on which they were beamed. “We don’t read you too well. Please tighten your beam if you can, and increase power. We would like to contact Inspector Bergen if he is available.” He glanced at the big screen, either to observe the rescue or to permit himself to believe that that incredible sky still roofed them. Then, “Seaview, standing by.”
What came over the air then was devoid of officialese, crackling with weary intensity, and carrying an undercurrent of hysteria. It was Bergen himself, special officer in charge of the entire Seaview operation, whose cracked tones came out of the speaker: “Nelson! Thank God. Thank God! Have you seen it?”
The Admiral’s eyebrows came up, but without hesitation he answered, abandoning all the identifications, stand-bys, and other rituals of radio. “You mean the sky. What is it?”
“I was afraid you’d ask that,” said Bergen desperately. “I was hoping you’d have an answer . . . sorry, Admiral, but we’ve been depending on you so much . . .” (A ghost of Bergen’s usual humor crept into his voice, got cold, and fled again as he said) “The penalty of your reputation, Admiral. The whole world’s been hunting for real operating geniuses, and I guess you were the only one we know of we haven’t been able to reach. I guess a lot of people felt you could wave your hand and put that fire out . . . or at least tell us what it is.” He paused, but they could hear the hum of his carrier and could sense his conscious, forcible effort to pull himself together. “All right, Admiral, here are the facts. About fifty hours ago it just—happened. That band of fire, or whatever it is, appeared in the sky. As far as we can find out, it appeared first over the Pacific about 4 A.M. as a glowing yellow-and-red patch. Inside of fifteen minutes it acquired those flame-like streamers and began to stretch out east and west, oh, like a forest-fire in a hurricane wind. And north and south, slower . . . anyway, just over seven hours later the two growing ends of the fire joined together on the other side of the world. The band lies roughly over the equator, though it tends a little south over west Africa and a little north over south-east Asia, around the Cambodian peninsula. Then it began to grow wider, until it averaged about four degrees in width. It stopped widening about twenty-eight hours ago, thank God; for a while we thought it would englobe the planet . . . Are you reading me?”
“Much better now,” said the Admiral, and indeed it was; the boys at the Naval Observatory must have been knocking themselves out over the transmitters. “What’s the altitude of this—ah—phenomenon?”
“Near as we can check it, an average of three hundred miles. The margins shift all the time; some of those flames lick down to two-twenty or closer, and you’ll find about the same variation outwards. It’s all of a hundred and fifty miles thick.”
Nelson pursed his lips. A band of fire nearly 28,000 miles long, a thousand wide, and a hundred and fifty thick, was something to think about slowly, take in small bites. He said, “Any idea what started it?”
“Just theories. There was a certain amount of meteoric activity just then, but we haven’t been able to check on it. I mean, by the time we got to that stage, communications were so garbaged up that it got useless to try. We’re hoping some of the people who first observed it will reach here soon with some data. In the meantime we can only wait and try to think. Communications are really shot—there aren’t many tight-beam set-ups like ours, you know.”
“What’s the public reaction?” asked the Admiral.
“What you’d expect from flood tides on every seacoast, out-of-season heat, and panic. The seismologists are walking around scared. There have been one or two quakes but as yet nothing serious; yet they tell me microseism activity is up five, six per cent. The earth’s beginning to quiver like a bowl of jelly on a motor housing—not much, but all the time. The seismologists are afraid of fault-lines everywhere, that what could slip will slip, what could crack will crack. We haven’t heard from Antarctica for more than a day, but their observations showed a measurable rise of that continent. Which only means the ice load is melting off fast. Too fast. How’s your ice?”
“What there is of it is going fast. We have a boat out now picking up a man off a floe. You’ll have a chart, handy, Bergen. Isn’t Station Delta supposed to be in this area now?”
“I’ll get a check on it. I hope they got everyone off before the planes were grounded.”
“Grounded?”
“Admiral, there’s nothing flying anywhere. Even the birds hardly try. You know what the shade temperature is here? One thirty-one. And thermal winds the like of which you wouldn’t believe. No, nothin
g’s flying. Nothing.” On the Seaview, the listeners shifted and tensed; the tone of hysteria kept coming up and falling off in Bergen’s exhausted voice. “Here’s your information . . . yes, you’re right in the area of Delta’s last known station. Thank the Lord you’re there to pull ‘em out.”
“Pull him out. There’s only one, Bergen.”
“Dear God . . . Admiral, can you get here for the meeting?”
“What meeting?”
“I’m out of my mind; I didn’t tell you. We’ve convened an emergency meeting at the UN. The best scientific brains we can get from all over . . . oh, man, you wouldn’t believe how international politics went by the board; blockades and bottlenecks nobody has been able to solve for years just disappeared. Meshikov is coming by ship, Dobrovny, Itanzio, Pittar, Zucco, Charbier—everyone. Half of them are already here and hard at work. Harriman, you’ve got to get here.”
“When do you start?”
“We’ve started, I tell you! We’ve got all the equipment, computers, staff, everything that any of ‘em name. We’re translating everything, processing all data six ways from the middle of any way anyone can suggest. The one thing we don’t have is ideas, more ideas, new ideas. Admiral, we need you.”
“I’ll be there as fast as the Seaview will take me. Meanwhile I wish you’d synthesize whatever you have as soon as you can. Code it for the HS 17 and we’ll set up a schedule so we can surface and receive it when the satellite says we can.”
“I’m one up on you: got a synthesis coded up to an hour ago. Admiral, when I said we have facilities now, I’m not kidding. Kind of thing we used to dream about. Though I’d happily give it all back if I could wake up and find this wasn’t real.”
“Ship me the synthesis,” said the Admiral, and there was a world of encouragement in his tone.
“When shall we schedule another contact?”
“Got it right here.” Suddenly the strained voice uttered what can only be described as a giggle. “I wish you could see me, Harriman. I got six people standing around me while I talk, they’ve practically got their track shoes on. You mentioned schedule, I held up one finger, one of ‘em took off like a Polaris Eight. Here he comes back again. (. . . Thanks.) Admiral? You see, all calculated up: says here you’ll have a usable satellite transit at 14:37.”
Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Page 5