“Proceed, Congressman,” said the President tiredly. Zucco snorted audibly and sat down. He instantly sprang to his feet again, his jaws and eyes wide. He was staring at the back of the hall. He swung his big head to the left, and the empty seats there, and again to the back of the hall.
Congressman Parker, his eyes fixed on Zucco’s face, said levelly, “As a matter of fact, Mr. President, I venture to say that the situation is resolved as of right now.” Then, for the second time, the crew of the Seaview were treated to the almost unheard of spectacle of Congressman Parker, the petulant, the fault-finder, the little-old-lady-who-pokes-in-the-neighbors’-trash (as one adverse columnist had it) the vinegar-visaged—with a broad smile on his face.
“Mister Pres-i-dent!” screamed Zucco, so loud that even his mighty voice cracked. “Nelson’s gone! Don’t you understand? He’s gone! Gone back to that killer-boat of his, on his way to slaughter us all! Get the guards! After him! Stop him! Stop him! Don’t let that submarine leave the dock!”
The chamber boiled, it churned with running, leaping, shouting figures. Men poured up the center aisle, got in each other’s way.
The last of the episode seen on the screen was one long pan shot across the rapidly emptying hall, with no one left in the foreground but the President, slowly rising and coming toward Parker with his hand out, and B.J. Crawford, sitting limply in the second row behind the podium, shaking from head to foot, his bull laughter rising at last above the pandemonium.
“There!” barked Chip Morton. The Captain moved to the smaller screen and saw the doors to the warehouse tunnel still swinging violently, and three figures pounding toward the gangplank. Crane could pride himself on having handled as many details as he had in the past few minutes, but he was always to regret not having ordered the recorders on that unforgettable scene.
Admiral Nelson, blocky and big, ran like the fabled Babe Ruth, his long legs seeming to gain a little on him so that he tilted backwards a bit as he hurtled along. Commander Emery, on the other hand, ran leaning forward like a ski-jumper about to take off, getting all his speed from the sustained act of falling. Each had an arm hooked around one of Cathy Connors’ elbows, which protruded like the handles on an old-style sugar bowl, for her hands, low on her hips, held her skirts gathered to completely free her legs. She neither galloped, like the Admiral, nor sprinted, like the Commander, but scampered, an all but indescribable scamper, as the Admiral’s back-leaning gait and the Commander’s nose-down bird-dog method tilted her torso about thirty degrees to the left of her course. The Captain watched this spectacle with feelings joltingly mingled, and all of them strong: amusement, excitement, laughter, and a good salting of fury as he saw Chip Morton delightedly taking in the sight of those long, flashing, untrammeled legs.
The guards straightened their lounging spines and got on the balls of their feet, but as yet they apparently had no orders and only watched wall-eyed as the trio broke through the pair by the warehouse and then passed one, then the other who were out on the apron.
“Come on!” rapped Crane, and practically in lock-step, he and Morton sprang down the corridor to the main control room. There O’Brien stood, the engine-room mike captured between chin and collar-bone, his left hand on the master trim control and his right on the rudder, and his eyes flicking back, forth, up and down a panel studded with TV images, each showing a portion of hull and the dock nearest it. It was to the Diving Officer’s profound credit that yelling and pounding feet behind him did not make him shift so much as an eyeball away from his task.
At the foot of the conning tower ladder stood the CPO, Gleason, his hand on the closing lever.
His only movement was to step smartly out of the way as the Captain and the Exec leapt upward and swarmed the ladder.
Crane swung over the lip and down in one smooth motion, with Morton still virtually synchronized behind him. The three fugitives were fifty yards away and coming fast. The two UN guards all too obviously did not know what to do except be alert.
“If only they keep off their p.a. system,” Morton prayed—a prayer which was promptly answered, or rejected, by the blare of the big speaker horns over the warehouse entrance. These horns were designed to punch information through the largest predictable din of loading and unloading ships and chattering passengers; now, in this silent place, they came on like Gabriel.
“Arrest those submarine personnel! The submarine is impounded. Repeat, the submarine Seaview is impounded and its entire complement under arrest!”
The four guards by the warehouse began running toward the sub. Crane and Morton began running with equal purpose down the deck to the gangplank. The two guards at the head of the gangplank turned toward the fugitives, as indeed any human being must; such a sight is seldom offered here below. The two were therefore taken utterly by surprise as Crane and Morton, coming up the gangplank like two Navy jets off a flat-top catapult, hit them from behind, Crane to the left, Morton to the right. It was an amazing performance; even the short hard chop to the guards’ medullae oblongata was identical. One would have sworn the whole thing was rehearsed.
Nelson, Emery and Cathy Connors plunged by and dove down the gangplank, with Crane and Morton right behind them. Later the Captain was to recall with vast amusement that not one of the five forgot to salute the colors at the stern as they hurtled down the plank. “Slow ahead all!” he bellowed as he ran, “Hard left!” hoping against hope that though he had not ordered the topside microphones activated, someone below had had the wit to turn them on. A surge of joy ran through him with the sudden trembling of the hull, the gout of swirling water under the stern. Yet she seemed to take forever to answer, and the long deck seemed to be part of a nightmare, a long steel path upon which one could run and run forever and never get to that conning tower. He risked another glance aft and saw the four guards clattering down the gangplank, which had acquired a slight list. Behind them, the two guards whom he and Morton had commandoed were following, weaving a bit, but bravely doing their best to get back into the action.
Still moving as if rehearsed, Crane and Morton passed the others, who were understandably tiring, sprang up the conning ladder together, each monkeying up a vertical, and six feet up bent together, got Cathy Connors under the armpits, and virtually threw her upward. They sprang after her to where she clung gasping, passed her one on each side, stopped above her and threw her upward again. This placed her on the platform. Crane picked her up in his arms and dropped her down the hole, hoping she would catch a rung on the way down but prepared to pay the penalty and patch the damage if she did not. He turned in time to pull Nelson while Morton pushed: the Old Old Man was feeling it. His lips were blue, even in this heat, and his eyes seemed to have a tendency to roll upwards out of sight. He heaved the gasping Admiral over the coaming and down, and saw a pair of hands from below—Gleason’s, probably—reaching up to assist. Emery sprang up, over, and down; the grizzled old squirrel was barely breathing hard. And at last the captain vaulted over the coaming, bawling to shut the hatch. The guards were running forward; two were already on the deck ladder.
One of the others fired into the air, and almost instantly pegged one which whanged and whined off the inside of the hatch-cover as it came down. Crane did not wait for such comforts as rungs, but slid to the bottom and hit the deck as the cover above made seal.
It seemed very quiet in the control room. It was like the instant’s dreadful quiet which on occasion follows an automobile accident, before the people begin screaming.
“Take her down,” whispered the Admiral.
“There’s six guards on deck and the gangplank’s gone,” gasped the Captain.
“Take her down.” The Old Old Man closed his eyes and let himself go limp for a moment against the bulkhead. Then he stiffened, shook himself hard, and rounded on Crane. “Take her down, mister, and that’s now.”
Crane nodded to O’Brien, which was all that was necessary. “Maybe,” he said, “some of ‘em can’t swim.”
<
br /> “They have to take their chances then,” said the Admiral, his face like a rock.
Crane shook his head bleakly and turned to Cathy Connors. “Come on,” he said, bending over her. She sat on the deck with her back against the bulkhead, her knees drawn up and her skirt tucked over them. He put a hand under her arm but she shook her head.
“What’s the matter?”
She looked up at him, very calm now, very pale, her eyes very wide. “I’m afraid to move just now,” she said in a cool voice. And suddenly from her wide eyes, tears burst and coursed down her cheeks. She seemed unaware of them. “I think,” she said in that same cool careful voice, “that I’ve hurt my ankle rather badly.” He then realized that under the skirt, she was holding her ankle with both hands, so hard her arms were trembling.
“Cathy, why didn’t you say so!” He scooped her up in his arms. He said to O’Brien, “The story is that the channel’s dredged to a hundred feet from here to the seaward side of the Narrows. Steer as if that could be so but you don’t really believe it.”
“Aye, sir.” Periscope depth for the Seaview was ninety feet, so he was asking the Diving Officer to chop it rather fine. But one got used to asking matter-of-course miracles from O’Brien. “Gleason, put two men in the nose as lookouts. Rig the cable remote to the big searchlight and give it to whichever one has the most good eyes and good sense. And use your floods as well. This is one time when it wouldn’t pay at all to run aground.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Be right back, sir,” he told Nelson, who nodded.
Crane carried the girl aft as far as the mess, where a man in pressed dress whites, shoes shined to a blaze, a snow-white seabag on his shoulder, ran past him weeping.
“What the—” Crane recoiled out of his way, banging the point of his ankle against the high sill of the mess. He glared after the man, and caught the black stencil on the seabag: BERKOWITZ.
Crane retraced his steps a few paces, for the man, skidding to a stop in the control room, had begun to scream.
“You got to let me off, you got to! I have a furlough coming and Mr. Morton signed my pass and I don’t even know if he’s born yet, she could be dead for all I know, why couldn’t I phone at least.”
“Sir,” suggested the Admiral.
Berkowitz craned wildly up at the dark pocket of the sealed conning tower. “Nobody told me, oh my God, you’ll go all the way to the Marianas, me not knowing is she alive or dead with the radio out.”
“Sir,” suggested the Admiral again, even more quietly.
“Sir!” spat Berkowitz furiously. He glared at Nelson, who stood silently, still leaning against the bulkhead, but lightly. The color was beginning to return to the old man’s lips. Berkowitz’s eyes wavered. “S-sir . . .?” he whimpered faintly.
“That’s better . . . If it makes any difference to you, Berkowitz, nobody knew we were going to jet out like that until it happened.”
“What am I going to do, sir?”
“You’re going to drop that duffel right here and go aft to the sick bay and ask Dr. Jamieson to quiet you down.”
Anyone who knew the Admiral at all would know that this was the time to aye-sir and off.
Berkowitz may have known him well enough, but he was also more than a little hysterical, so he said,
“But what about—”
Nelson’s voice became gentle as a lover’s, and every man there knew how big the trouble was that Berkowitz was getting himself into. “Berkowitz,” he crooned, “you know we’ll do what we can for you. We’ll get you off. We’ll—”
“Th-thank you sir—” Berkowitz began to weep again.
“We’ll get you off if we have to dig a hole in the cellar and drop you out, mister. Because we can’t run a ship with the likes of you aboard. Now get aft and see the doctor.”
Berkowitz, stricken, dropped his duffel bag and turned blindly aft. Nelson watched him go and then fetched a sudden kick on the bag. “I hate a weeper,” he said quietly to no one in particular, but Berkowitz heard. Crane, pacing slowly behind him carrying Cathy Connors, watched the stride of a man who needed a tail to tuck between his hind legs.
“Oh man,” the Captain murmured, “I wouldn’t slam an outhouse door that hard . . . Sorry, Cathy.”
“That’s all right,” she whispered. “I wasn’t listening . . . Oh Lee, I know that seemed terribly cruel, but can’t you see why he did it?”
“He said why he did it. He usually . . . picks on someone his size, though.”
“You slap hysterical people. That’s all it is. He’ll let Berky off some way—you’ll see. If Sue Hiller was here she’d explain the whole thing to you. The one thing he couldn’t do was to be nice to the kid. Berky’d have gone all to bits.”
Lee Crane chuckled. “The O.O.M. can do no wrong, hey, Cats? By golly, if he batted a ball and ran to third you’d change the rules to make him right.”
“Now that’s just silly and you—”
“And I know it. Sorry, honey. I just hated to stand here and see that happen. Also I’m jealous, because I can be wrong—you’ve told me so—and he never is, which you’ve also told me. Are you sure which one of us you want to marry? Choose, hussy.”
She bit his ear. “I choose thee now and forever,” she whispered and then was crying again.
“Damn,” she said, “Oh, damn, damn.”
“Ankle hurting again?”
“Sure it is,” she said furiously, “but that’s not worth crying over. It’s this whole . . . thing, Lee. It’s the ranch and the curtains I’d put up waiting for you to come home. It’s getting married yesterday which we didn’t do. It’s all this, this mess.”
“Shh. Shh . . . I hate a weeper,” he said. She smacked him, but it wasn’t meant to hurt. The sick bay was empty when they entered, except for Berkowitz, who sat close to the inboard bulkhead with his head in his hands. The Captain put the girl down on the examining table and turned to face Jamieson, who was coming from the after section of the sick bay. “I see by the papers,” said the doctor, “that we’re on our way again. “The O.O.M. says go, we go.”
“My patient, or is it star boarder, tells me it’s God’s will. You tell me it’s the Admiral’s.” He held up a ham-dramatic finger and mugged astonishment. “Or perhaps they’re the same after all.”
“Don’t be irreverent,” said Cathy.
“To which one of ‘em, girl? And what, may I ask, makes me so fortunate this morning?” He looked at the torpedoman and then at the girl. “My, business is brisk.”
“She came down the conning tower without using the ladder. But gracefully,” added the Captain.
“I was not graceful,” Cathy pouted. “The Captain dropped me in like a sack of coal.”
“Let’s see it. Oh my. You did give that a wringing out, didn’t you?” he turned to the torpedoman.
“And what’s with you, Berky?”
“I’m all right now, sir,” said Berkowitz shakily. “I thought I had a furlough and they pulled it out from under me and I kind of blew my stack. Admiral Nelson told me to come to you and get quieted down.”
Jamieson bent over him, took his wrist, looked closely at his eyes. “All right. You seem okay now. I don’t know really if the God’s will hypothesis holds water or not, but I can tell you one thing for sure: For enlisted personnel, practically anybody’s will take precedence over the e.m.’s.”
“Y-yes sir.” Berkowitz almost smiled.
“And take this doctor’s advice,” added Jamieson. “Don’t argue with admirals.”
“I won’t, sir.”
Jamieson stood up and waved him out. When he had gone, he said, “Nelson give him some lumps?”
The Captain told him what had happened. The doctor shrugged. “Rough. But then, this is likely to be a rough trip all around. You straighten ‘em out or you throw ‘em over the wall. If a man’s going to have the miseries, he’d best not be corked up in a bottle with a bunch of others. The Admiral doesn’t have to be nice. He doe
sn’t have to be kind. He just has to be right.” He turned to Cathy. “Get that shoe and stocking off.”
“I’ll go forward,” said the Captain, rising.
“She’ll be all right,” said the doctor. “Nothing busted. And you know the compression bandages we have nowadays. She’ll walk out of here. Only,” he said sternly to Cathy, “no dancing on no chopping blocks for a while.”
Cathy and the Captain laughed. “Oh, you heard about that.”
“It didn’t get lost in the flurry of news we’ve been having.”
The inner door swung open and the Captain, in the very act of stepping over the high-stilled out door, swung around and his jaw dropped. “What the devil are you doing here?”
“Now that is what I call a warm and welcoming statement,” smiled Dr. Susan Hiller.
“Sue!” cried Cathy.
“Hello, honey. What happened to you?”
“Used a steel deck for a trampoline,” said the doctor.
“Dr. Hiller, I thought I told you to go ashore.”
“I thought you told me I could go ashore.”
“I remember what I said.”
“Oh . . . Lee,” Cathy chided.
“I’ll carry my weight,” said Susan Hiller.
Jamieson, who had never lost the gloss of his admiration of Dr. Hiller, said gently, “Cap’n—isn’t the discussion academic at this point?”
Without answering him, Crane fixed Dr. Hiller with a cold eye. “You chose to stay aboard, then.”
A smile twitched the corners of her carven mouth. “I came aboard to study men under stress conditions,” she reminded him.
“There’ll be plenty of that ashore.”
“My present project was to study them here.” Suddenly she smiled. The effect, as always, was like throwing back heavy drapes on a sunny day. “I’d like to stop fencing with you, Captain. I was going to request permission to stay aboard anyway. Days ago I took the trouble to find out if my extra mouth would burden your stores, or even your oxygen supply. I checked on the available space. I wouldn’t think of doing it if I’d be in the way. And I’m not just supercargo. I think I can help.”
Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Page 10