Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “You put your finger on it, Cookie. He doesn’t give a damn about anything or anybody in the world. He’s got bigger things to think about.”

  The remark, meant sardonically, was taken with complete seriousness. “I guess he has at that, sir.”

  “Talk to him, did you?”

  “I drop in every once in a while. I . . . dunno why you call him a nut.” Cookie said again.

  “If it makes you any happier, I’ll take it back,” smiled Jamieson. “It was two times unprofessional of me to say it anyhow—once for commenting on a more-or-less patient, and again for using non-medical language. Okay?”

  “You think it really might be that God sent the fire?”

  “I’ve had no messages,” said Jamieson. “Which seems to be yet another kind of communications breakdown.”

  “I never know when you’re kidding, Doc.” The medical officer smiled and went to the hospital to see his more-or-less patient.

  10

  THE CPO, GLEASON, RAN HIS FINGERS and his sharp eyes over the limp bulk of the wet-suit, whistling under his breath.

  “Knock it off,” said the redheaded sailor.

  “Knock what?” asked Gleason innocently.

  “I’d like to punch him right in the nose,” said the sailor.

  “That sounds like lezz Majesty or whatever you call it. Insubordination. It’s the Old Old Man’s nose you’re talkin’ about.”

  “All the same,” said the sailor, “and just to be serious for a minute which I doubt you can, wouldn’t you say an officer, and old-time officer, has to be a little out of his mind to say right out in public that another officer once bounced a guy on his knee, for God’s sake?”

  “I wouldn’t say an officer was no such a thing. I might say he was maybe a few years away from remembering what it was like to be a boot like you, but then who wants to remember a dismal thing like that?”

  “I’m trying to be serious, I said. Don’t he know I’ll spend my whole life in the service hearing guys whistle that tune at me? Don’t he know I could get to be an admiral like him fifty years from now and they’ll still call me by that name?”

  “It could be worse, Sonny Boy.”

  Gleason was undoubtedly saved from a sample of the Admiral’s punch in the nose by the arrival of the Captain, who turned in on them from the corridor. “Find any termites or anything?”

  “Not yet, sir,” said Gleason. “Are you calling for volunteers for this, sir?”

  “Thanks, no,” smiled Crane, and walked forward. Jimmy Smith looked after him and said to Gleason, “I thought you told me Rule One is ‘Never volunteer’.”

  “You don’t think for a minute I was going to volunteer me, do you? I was going to volunteer you.” He lifted and spread the frogman’s suit and turned it over on his knees. “But to tell you the truth, I’d like the chance to get out and walk around the block.”

  “Yeah, me too . . .”

  11

  “COME IN.” THE ADMIRAL GLANCED at the clock. The Captain entered and laid the manual down on the desk. “Right on time.” He leaned a little sidewise and tried to peer around the captain.

  “Where’s your diving detail?”

  “I’m the diving detail,” said Crane.

  From the settle, Commander Emery chuckled quietly, “Go ahead, Nelse. Flip. I promised you you would.”

  Nelson’s eyes grew dangerous. “I told you I wanted a wire communications man and a man who could muscle the armored cable and—”

  “I completed a wire communications briefing on my last furlough, said Crane. “I can dive, I can handle an airsaw, and anyway, I think it’s my job.”

  “You’ll tell off someone else, mister. The ship can’t afford—”

  “We’re a little short on frogmen, Admiral.”

  “There’s Gleason and Smith—”

  “Minisub men, sir. Not much help here. And if anything happened to me, you could manage.”

  “Is that a crack?”

  “It’s only the truth.”

  “Hell, he’s right,” said Emery. “We are light on frogmen and heavy on commanding officers.”

  Needling lightly, he added, “Of course, if you don’t think the Captain can handle the job—”

  “Certainly he can handle the job,” rumbled the Admiral, and then realizing he had been played, grinned and said, “Ah, shut up, Emery. All right, Lee, but be careful, will you . . .? Located the cable yet?”

  “Yes, sir. Had it on the mine detectors for twelve minutes now. Ought to be on top of it—there we are,” he said as the slight shudder of engines slowed and all but stopped. “I told O’Brien to get down-current of it and head in. That way he can hold her steady against the current and somebody in the nose can direct in case I need any direction.”

  “You ought to buddy up, all the same, Lee,” said Emery.

  “Another man would just be in the way,” said Crane impatiently. “This job is only careful, not big. I’ll be under observation at all times and I won’t even have to use the sonarphone—I’ll be trailing wire. Sparks can patch my headset into the same wires I’ll be hooking in to the cable.”

  The admiral’s desk annunciator buzzed. Nelson keyed it and spoke his own name. “O’Brien, sir,” said the intercom. “Cable in sight. We’re positioning over it now.”

  “Good,” said Nelson. “Nose along it and get the best footing you can. ‘Ware eel holes and giant clams and the like.”

  “Aye, sir. Looks made to order. It’s a seamount, sir; on land you’d call it a mesa. Looks like sand-silt. Lot of small coral outcrop, must be pretty solid. Cable lies free and clear.”

  “Hang her in the current, then,” said the admiral, and switched off. “Looks like God’s on our side after all.”

  “I hear that name mentioned pretty often around here,” Crane remarked. He meant it to sound casual, but oddly enough it did not. He shrugged when neither Emery nor the Admiral responded, and flipped open the manual with a bookmark. “I’ve sketched in where I’ll tap in red,” he said.

  “Better go over it with Sparks.”

  “Already have, sir. He assembled the electrical kit for me. Gleason’s getting the mechanical stuff.”

  “You watch it with that torch, skipper,” said Emery. “You’ll fuse half the—”

  “I think I mentioned it—I’m using an airsaw.”

  “Don’t bother any more,” Nelson told Emery with amusement. “He’s already thought of everything. Okay, Lee—shove off. Come on, Emery—let’s go up to the greenhouse. We can phone from there and watch at the same time.”

  They went out.

  12

  THE SEAVIEW WAS EQUIPPED WITH more than one escape hatch, and hatches of more than one kind. There was the under-deck hatch which released the minisub from the forward turtleback, and the kelson hatch which was nothing more than a water-tight chamber with a well, a comfortable five feet in diameter, which could be opened to the sea. Entered through an adjoining lock, the chamber could be kept full of air compressed enough to keep the water-level below the rim of the well. There were, in addition, four simple locks on the fore and aft quarters, for emergency work on outside gear, and two of the torpedo tubes could fire a man out if the conditions were mild and the emergency extreme.

  Crane, who would be burdened by tools, wire, and an extra tank for the saw, elected to take the well, for the sub lay almost on the bottom, and it would be a simple matter to drop out, drag over, and pop back in again. This last was a real feature for a man diving alone. No one wants to cling to a slippery hull fighting a watertight gate while, perhaps, a moray is sniffing around trying to decide between ham and a shoulder chop.

  Crane went to his cabin, stripped, and got into thermal long Johns, for though they lay less than ten degrees south of the equator, and the air temperature was climbing almost two degrees a day, their depth was between two and three hundred feet, and cold lives in those dark depths and congeals a man, body and mind.

  There was a sharp rap on the d
oor and it immediately burst open.

  “Cathy!”

  “Lee, Lee—not you! Not you! Please—I have the most terrible feeling that something . . . something awful . . . oh Lee, don’t. Please don’t!”

  She threw herself into his startled arms. “Honey, honey,” he murmured into her hair, “it’s all right. It’s all right. And besides, I’m not decent. And next thing you know the house detective will break down that door and then they’ll throw us right out of this establishment.”

  She pulled back from him and scanned his sexless, neck-to-toe waffle-finished garment.

  “Naked,” she murmured. “My God, I’m a ruined woman.” She laughed, and abruptly burst into tears and clung to him again.

  “Hey, hey now,” he said gently, “That’s enough, Connors my darlin’. Shure and have you got your Irish to boilin’ within? Is it the banshee y’ve seen wailin’ and warnin’? Or is it that ye so fear the foolishness of y’r dharlin’ bhoy that ye fear he’ll fergit how to swim?”

  “Oh, cut the blarney,” she said into his shoulder, and heaved a shuddering sigh; then she looked up at him with an expression he had seen before, and sworn never to describe to her, such a power it would give her over him if she knew: her eyes bright, wide, and wet, her brows tilted up in the middle and down at the ends and worried wrinkles to carry them there, and her lower lip wet and bright too, protruding a little in her appeal, and a little swollen to boot, having just been bitten as the anxiety came on her. “I just have this awful feeling—”

  He cut the blarney altogether, and said to her in a voice gravelled with stubbornness, “Cathy, the more you or anyone convinced me of a danger, the less I could send another man. Did you come in here to make sure I’d go, then? Because that’s the way to do it.”

  She looked at him for a long time in that way he’d never describe to her, until he had to hold himself steady by all his muscles, for she was melting his bones. Then she nodded and dropped her eyes. “Very well, Lee.” She would have turned away, but he held her hard with one hand and put the other over the intercom call, and said urgently, “Sweetheart, when the knights of old went out to do battle with the heathens and the dragons and such trash, they’d fly milady’s kerchief for a pennant, or wear milady’s girdle about their brows.”

  She blinked her eyes rapidly and responded with a light-hearted voice and a full-hearted bravery that made him hurt inside. “Puh-leez!” she intoned with mock schoolgirl shock, “Her girdle? on his head?”

  “It was a belt, silly, and don’t interrupt or I’ll give you one. Anyway, I’m not carrying a spear this trip, and—”

  “I will not lend you a—”

  “Sh—and so the best I can do is this: what’s your favorite color?”

  “Blue. You know that.”

  Crane flipped the button. “Now hear this! Now hear this! Diving gear detail: I’ll use the blue suit. Repeat, the blue suit. Over.” He turned off the switch and rubbed her nose with his. “There now. That’s as much as I can do to wrap myself up in you in an emergency situation. Beat it.”

  “Lee . . .” she whispered hoarsely, hugged him savagely and ran away.

  Crane gave her a moment and then stepped out into the corridor; no sewing circle since bone-splinters first pierced an untanned fur could out-gossip any crew of any ship any time. He padded aft in his waffle-clad feet, and found Dr. Jamieson, Dr. Hiller, Gleason, Jimmy Smith, Hodges and Chip Morton clustered around the hatch to the well-chamber.

  A number of possible responses to this reeled past Crane’s inner eye—amusement, anger, even a modicum of embarrassment, for uniform-of-occasion or no, what he wore was still underwear. He chose the rifle-crack voice and the direct order: “Smith! Gleason! Stand by to assist me. The rest of you get back on duty or go forward to the grandstand; you have no business here.” It was the kind of voice which caused movement before thought, and the crowd broke up and disappeared, except for Dr. Jamieson, who stepped forward, peered into his eyes while holding his wrist, then nodded and went away. Dr. Hiller, standing in that inhumanly motionless, wide-eyed, way of hers, judging nothing, noticing everything; she stood there until she met his gaze, held it a moment, then turned without a word and left; and finally, Alvarez. He had not been able to see Alvarez until the rest had gone; he stood well back out of the way, his eyes awake, his face asleep. Crane opened his mouth to blast him away like a man sneezing at a gnat, and then unaccountably turned away and forgot him in the business of struggling into the skin-tight wet-suit. Perhaps Alvarez was as yet so unimportant to him that a showdown wasn’t worth it. Perhaps the departure of the others gave him room enough now, and the supercargo’s presence presented no nuisance.

  Crane sat down on a storage chest and got his feet into the suit, and then began working it up his right leg while Gleason palmed the spongy fabric up his left. Once it was up to his waist he did three kneebends and swore under his breath; this always hurt his kneecaps. Then Gleason on one side and Smith on the other wrestled his arms in and his shoulders, got the short zipper up and at last the hood.

  These deep suits had helmet and mask inherent; it was a full face-mask with a hose fitting on the left jowl. Once it was sealed at the throat, any sound, even a loud sound, in air was only a mumble; sweat began to prickle out all over his body; he had to breath partly his own exhalations and would until the fitting by the hinge of his jaw met the air-hose; all-in-all it made for hurry. He gestured and Gleason checked the well-chamber seal, and Crane dropped into the manhole. As the cover swung to over his head, he saw with infinite annoyance that it did not seal but bounced right open again, hauled up by young Smith who at the same time was fighting Gleason off. Knowing it was useless to speak, the Captain sent a glare up that by rights should have pierced the mask like discharges of artificial lightning, but all Smith did was to turn abruptly, shove Gleason hard with both hands while kicking his feet out from under him, and then without looking at the fallen CPO, knelt on the deck, reached down, got both hands on the Captain’s left biceps and hauled. He was well-braced, but even so, Crane was a big and solid man; yet the youngster snatched him up out of the manhole like a kitten out of a basket, and dropped him stomach down across the edge.

  Crane slowly and ominously got to his feet, as Gleason was doing, and between them Jimmy Smith stood waiting, breathing hard. He threw a hot single word over his shoulder at Gleason—probably ‘Wait!’ for Gleason waited; and when the Captain finally stood erect, Smith reached startlingly up and shoved his stubby forefinger downward against the seam between hood and mask.

  Crane found himself looking crosseyed at the finger, which was passed effortlessly through what was supposed to be an impermeable joint, and now shared the mask with Crane’s face.

  Crane gestured angrily, and they jumped to pry open the lips of the self-adhering seals, and haul the zippers. Crane slammed the hood back off his head, and stood like a caryatid, carven and still with his arms rigid, straight down, while they peeled him.

  “I’m—uh,” said Smith.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Crane glowered at him, and then remembered to take the fury off his face. “Don’t say that, Smith. You know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t seen that open seam? Or grabbed me in time?”

  “I can imagine, sir.”

  “I wonder if you could imagine it all. Do you know I couldn’t’ve hollered for help? Forty fathom down, that ocean would’ve been in the suit with me before I could say glug. I never even figured to patch in my earphones until I was out at the cable. Mr. Gleason!”

  “Yessir.”

  “You inspected this suit.”

  “Yessir, I did.”

  “You missed a slit big enough to stick a finger through.”

  “No sir, I did not.”

  Crane picked up the suit by the hood and stuck not one, but two fingers through the slot. The act was his comment.

  “Yes sir. I inspected every one of those suits, not knowing which
one you were going to use. That cut wasn’t there.”

  “Cut? It just separated at the—” Crane looked closely at it. “By the Lord. Cut it is—you’re right.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After you inspected the suits, did you leave them un-tended?”

  “Why, yes, sir.” The tone conveyed clearly the message, and why the hell not? “Me and Smith here took all your gear below and flaked it out so’s you could flip into it and get going.”

  “Then you think somebody slipped up and cut the suit with a razor in the few minutes you were below-decks, somebody who not only had a razor ready but who would pick the right suit to cut, not knowing which one I was going to use.”

  “No, sir,” said Gleason immediately.

  “No, sir,” said Smith in the same breath.

  “What d’ye mean no—sir? Gleason?”

  “It wasn’t no razor, Cap’n. You don’t cut this stuff with razors; it’d break any razor ever made.”

  “I was going to say,” Smith offered, “that everybody knew which one, sir: you put it on the general intercom.”

  “Yeah, I did.” Of course he had: the hooter in his bunk had two station switches only, one for the control room plus the forward repeaters, the other the ship’s p.a. system. He thought of the faces he had seen clustered around when he arrived, tested each one against the idea of such an act, and could only shake his head.

  “Cap’n?”

  “Yes, Smith.”

  “It didn’t even have to be any of that mob you chased away. You could say it probably wasn’t, just because there were too many of ‘em to see it. It’s more as if someone scooted in and did it and slid out before anyone else came.”

  “Yeah,” amended Gleason, “When we took the gear below, there was nobody here, and when we come up, there was a reg’lar convention.”