Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “He had that coming, and boy howdy, you handed it over,” said Morton.

  “Shut your mouth,” said Crane, and only as the air reverberated around him did he realize how loud he had shouted.

  “Okay, okay,” said Morton, his back turned, but the cut of his ears somehow showing that he grinned. “You’re the Captain.” And then he added, “Really, and if Gleason had not appeared at that moment he would certainly have climbed right up the executive officer’s back and hammered him into the deck like a spike into a pine plank.

  “Yessir,” said Gleason.

  “Where’s Smith?”

  “I’ll get’m,” said the CPO, and before anyone could move to stop him, he leaned across the console and sang a few wordless notes into the general intercom. “The knee’s in the greenhouse,” he added, and switched off.

  All over the ship could be heard the echoes of laughter. It was too easy to laugh now, to cry, to kill, and where was Cathy just now . . .? He forced his attention back to the CPO, and his mind repeated to him the notes Gleason had sung. They were the same he had once heard Gleason whistling—and in a rush he recognized the tune—that treacly mass of excess sentiment called Sonny Boy. He recalled the day—how long ago it seemed!—when Nelson had, with blatant disregard for the consequences, publicly reminded Smith how once he bounced on old Admiral B.J. Crawford’s knee. He felt a surge of profound annoyance against the O.O.M., probably because he needed to just then. It made him feel much better. How could the old guy have been so stupid? Had he really forgotten the awful cargo of ribbing the youngster would have to carry from that moment on? Didn’t he know? In forty years, hadn’t he learned anything about the Navy?

  “Knock off that horseplay,” he snapped harshly. (He did not say “horseplay.”) Gleason’s good, doggy face turned masklike. “Yessir.”

  “I want those chains cut.”

  Gleason peered forward, pursed his lips to whistle, seemed to recall something, and became masklike again. “Will do, sir.”

  Smith came in then, saw Gleason first, said whitely, “Listen, poochface, you pull that Sonny B—”

  “Tenshun!” said Gleason.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Smith to the Captain.

  “Seaman Smith,” said Gleason, “we are going to cut those chains.”

  Smith looked puzzled, then followed Gleason’s gaze out through the herculite nose. His jaw dropped, and then he nodded and said, “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “On the double,” said the Captain, and the harshness was still in his throat, though he did not mean it to be. They tumbled out.

  Captain Crane, waiting for the minisub to show itself, stared unseeing out toward the pass and the mines, and tried hard to get hold of himself. For almost two whole days now, ever since he had stormed aft to the sick bay and Alvarez, he had been shaken, overwhelmed by a sense of unreality and disbelief. His inward condition was analogous to that of a man who had for years walked a two-by-four between his house and his barn, until one day someone had pointed out to him that under the narrow timber was a thousand-foot drop. And ever after he took no casual step. Crane was built and trained to do whatever comes next; his world then appeared on both sides of him like scenery, having built itself. But ever since that talk with Alvarez, he had felt compelled to test his every word and pace, every thought and all the meanings of those who spoke to him, to be sure they applied, to be sure they were there, were real.

  And these were all feelings, pressures, for which there were no terms as set down here. A man just having learned what a light-year is, and of how many light-years it is across the galaxy, and then that there are other, larger galaxies immeasurably distant across the gulfs of space; such a man, one night, might lie looking up at the stars and suddenly see them as what they are—something other than pinholes in a black cloth bowl. With his own eyes he might suddenly see that some were near and some far and the blackness between a pool of illimitable emptiness. Such a man might, at such a moment, know fear the like of which he had never imagined before, purely in the realization that he had lived all his life with his bones and his soul on the verge of so majestic an emptiness, and brushed its fringes with his hair.

  It was such a void that Alvarez had opened to Captain Crane, though one of another kind; and if all the man said was true, then the fire in the sky was a small stripe to lash his back, and the end of the world not quite severe enough to punish him.

  Cathy Connors was beside him. “Lee . . . Lee, I’m frightened.”

  Crane stared into the swirling luminous deep. How strange it seemed that nothing out there looked wet.

  She said, “One of the men was . . . after Sue Hiller. She got her door locked and then he tried to break it down. Someone was coming and he ran away. She wouldn’t say who.”

  Crane’s lips parted because in the void Alvarez had spread for him lay a word, and in a moment, if it could only be an untroubled and uninterrupted moment, he could lay tongue on it. It tantalized him, coming close enough for him almost to feel its shape—and he closed his lips, knowing it was gone again.

  “I’m afraid, Lee. It’s going to happen again. A lot.”

  “Maybe,” Crane said distantly, to the herculite hull, “it doesn’t matter after all.”

  “Oh,” whispered Cathy Connors, and by the time the minisub appeared, she had gone as quietly as she had come.

  “Mr. Morton,” Crane barked, “Rig me a remote mike and hang it on the sonarphone.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  He came forward, trailing wire. Crane reached back without looking and took the microphone.

  Morton said, “Jesus, Lee, d’you think—”

  “Gleason,” said the Captain, his voice crashing, “do you read me?”

  “Loud and clear, sir,” said a speaker on the console from the other end of the greenhouse.

  Morton, in mid-sentence, mid-stride, still foolishly extending the hand with which he had carried the microphone, turned suddenly and stamped back to the console.

  “Belly down,” said the Captain, “and crawl. I’d guess those things were tuned to something Seaview size, but all the same, stay as far away as you can. They could be acoustic or magnetic or contact armed and tripped, or any combination.”

  “Aye, sir.” The jaunty-looking, humpbacked, sleek-skinned minisub, looking like somewhat less than a minnow compared with the Seaview, settled evenly through the brilliant water. It moved as evenly, and with as little visible effort-of-control, as a seahorse, sank sedately to within a few inches of the ocean floor, and crept up the incline of the pass like a ground vehicle. It topped the rise and went down the other side, out of sight.

  Crane watched the horned skin of the lower mine, microphone tensely in hand, ready to bark a caution if he saw any evidence of jolting or swaying. He saw none. At the end of an interminable four minutes the mine simply began to rise, and ballooned upward out of range of the floods.

  “One away,” said the Captain. “Mr. Morton, get a sonar fix on that drifter and lock on to it. We want to know its exact position at all times. And get another automatic finder locked on to that second one.”

  Morton grunted an acknowledgement. Crane got a glimpse of the minisub as it moved toward the second mine, and then it was out of sight again as it sank to attack the anchor chain as near as possible to the bottom. The minisub’s powerful electric winch was tied to one arm of an oversized bolt-cutter, the other arm of which was held by a fitting in its hull. Apparently it could not have been better designed.

  “Two away,” said the Captain. “Slow ahead both inboard. Give Kaski 2.5 magnification on the forward screen and turn over the searchlights to Central Control. Put a man on the screen, give him the controls, and see that he’s ordered to do nothing else. Get me two lookouts for up here. Ahoy the minisub!”

  “Smith, on the minnie, sir.”

  “Scout ahead. Stay in the loom of our floods, and use your own lights as well. See that your phone stays in the on position at all times and stand by for cou
rse corrections.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “You locked on to those drifters?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Morton. “They’re well clear.”

  “As you go.”

  Crane turned again to the nose and stood looking out until two sailors slipped up beside him. The floor sloped sharply away ahead, and the Captain returned to the console to look at the charts. It looked like sea room at last.

  “Full ahead, sir?”

  “As you go!” snapped the Captain. Morton shrugged; it was insolent, but to remark on it would have seemed picayune. Instead, Crane said, poring over the chart and not looking at Morton, “Mr. Morton, could you bring yourself to lay mines and then just go off and forget about it?”

  Morton looked startled; he turned quickly and looked out through the nose. “You think we’ll get a reception committee?”

  By way of answering, Crane gave orders: “Discontinue all sound projection systems. Establish situation Hush [the Sea-view’s drill code for whispers, tiptoes, and the elimination of dish and tool clatter] and break out every passive listening and locating device aboard. Ahoy the minnie.”

  “Gleason here, sir,” said the speaker.

  “Situation Hush,” said Crane. “Proceed as ordered, course three hundred. Do not acknowledge this. Over.”

  Like a shark with a pilot fish, Seaview and the minisub crept out of the Straits and into deep Pacific water. Crane hugged bottom until its slope led them to about 40 fathoms, then held that level, shallow enough to keep things comfortable for the minisub, deep enough to make their lights undetectable in daylight.

  “Stop all,” said Crane quietly after about ten minutes. As always, the difference between the almost-silent engines, and none at all, was jolting. Morton picked up the minisub in the search beams and flickered them. The sub acknowledged with its fin lights, and seemed to approach backwards—actually the result of Seaview’s greater mass carrying the big submarine forward farther and faster than the minnie.

  Morton and Crane studied the big screen, on which was the reconstructed image of sounds received by acute electronic ears. On the upper left shimmered a jagged symbol like a wandering clump of grass. Morton telegraphed its location to the minisub with the lights. “Twin screw,” said the Captain. “ ‘Bout as big as a DE. Only one of ‘em.” He watched. “Course about ten degrees—right across our bows. There’s sound gear,” he added as the screen flashed a worm of light which disappeared, then reappeared, at two second intervals. “Condition red,” he murmured into the general call, and flicked the stud which would repeat the call by light signals in each compartment. Morton informed the minisub with the search beams.

  The ship passed almost directly overhead, and they began to hear the whistle and ping of its detection gear. As the sound faded they began to breathe again—and then they saw the ship turn and begin an arc.

  “Got us,” said Morton.

  Crane thought his first critical thought of the mighty Seaview. “Just too damn big.” Aloud he said, “Stand by the sonars. If they drop anything I want to know what it is.” He moved to the segment of the console marked Degaussing, and pressed the stand-by button. The engine room would set up the powerful generators and high-frequency alternators which would, when activated, make the entire enormous hull of the submarine disappear from the “sight” of a magnetic-seeking torpedo. Seeing what he planned, Morton spoke up: “It could be a heat-sniffer,” and added “Sir.”

  “It could,” said Crane. “So we have a fifty-fifty chance of being right. If we’re right, we’re altogether right, and if we’re wrong it’ll only matter for a minute or so.” He knew as well as Morton that the special degaussing gear they carried would heat up the hull in a matter of minutes—Crane had once seen steam forming and bubbling up past the herculite nose, on a test—and make them a perfect target for an infrared detecting missile. At that moment he would have given all his stripes and a Swiss watch for the simple information as to what that ship up there was, so he could deduce what they might throw. For a painful second he actively missed the O.O.M., who would be sulking in his suite. Nelson had a deductive faculty that amounted to intuition, and that was the best possible substitute for information.

  “She’s squatting to lay,” said Morton, his eyes nailed to the screen. The blip of the surface craft had ceased its arc and was cutting toward the overhead point. “And there’s the egg.”

  Crane, too, watched with all his being. Here, now, was where the wrong move could not be corrected, even if the correction should be applied a second later. A depth charge, or “ashcan” they could ignore, purely because there was nothing they could do about it. A torpedo, on the other hand, although much more dangerous, could be fought.

  The tiny spot of green light representing the attacking device fell wavering for three or four fathoms, which would mean “ashcan” but then suddenly turned into a slender caterpillar on the screen, crawling toward them and trailing a diminishing trace.

  “A fish!” Crane hit the engine-room alarm and bellowed for full astern on all four engines.

  Morton banged all the prepared sonics and the whole row of screens lit up, picking out images, finding the minisub, the hull of the attacking ship, and most important, the torpedo itself. The Seaview shuddered under the flailing of her props, wavered, and began to make weigh astern. “They’re seeking, all right,” cried Morton, watching the curve of the torpedo’s course as they backed out of its original trajectory.

  Was it heat-seeking? or magnetic? For an awful split instant Crane could not decide. And it was as if he let his thumb decide for him. Seemingly without his orders, it come down hard on the ‘Degaussing, On’ button. Instantly, as the lights dimmed under the initial surge, the scream of the alternators wailed through the ship.

  “Hard left,” he yelped, and the Seaview, like many another vessel going astern, answered almost too readily and began to swing. “Watch her head!” he cried, lest they overswing; Kaski, as if inspired, seemed to have caught O’Brien’s delicate touch from the rim of his wheel, for he caught and checked her perfectly, and she shot backwards like a crayfish with her nose dead on to the approaching torpedo, thus presenting a minimum profile to the missile’s seekers.

  “Fish number two!” Morton called, and immediately. “Number three!”

  Crane laughed, a horrible sound in that time and place. Perhaps the sudden wavering, the long curvette, performed by the first torpedo, was not funny—but it made him laugh. “Foxed ‘em!”

  They watched breathless as the first torpedo cut by them a hundred yards to port, followed in a few minutes by the second, which seemed to be tracking it exactly, and probably was, since it was the only magnetically attractive object in the vicinity, the minisub being made largely of high-impact synthetics.

  “Where’s that third fish?”

  The answer came in the form of a dull boom and a slight lurch. “What’d he do—sink himself?”

  “No,” said Morton, watching his screen, where the surface craft still showed intact, “more’s the pity. He must’ve pushed a destruct button before she swam up his back.” He did not say ‘back.’ “Hull temperature’s two hundred or better, cap’n.”

  “Let it ride,” said Crane, meaning the degaussing gear, and speaking the three syllables which were to cost him so terribly. They continued to speed astern, steering in a wide arc to bring her course out over deep water and toward her destination. The minisub, invisible except to their detectors, paddled along in their wake. The surface ship obviously could keep them in its sights, for it followed, the sound of its laboring screws creating jagged mountains and valleys of light on one of the screens.

  “Fish four,” Morton sang out, and Crane picked up the sonarphone. “Aboard the minnie,” he said, “ ‘Ware torpedo dead in your wake,” for the minisub was not equipped with wear detectors like the mother vessel.

  They seemed suddenly to be in a sea of soda-water, for effervescent clouds pressed upward all around the herculite plat
es. “What’s the hull temperature?”

  “Two twenty three . . . four.”

  How much of this could she take? he thought. Nelson would know . . . Shut off the degaussers then and have the torpedo draw a bead? Even half a second without the degaussers, and any halfway decent seeking gear would locate and direct. “Hard right,” he said.

  The speeding sub veered and began to swing. “Check her at South,” said Crane. “Well?” he snapped at Morton. “Is that fish following?”

  “Can’t tell yet . . . five seconds more . . . oh my God.” Crane saw it as soon as Morton: the fourth torpedo was following. He should have known, he should have known . . . Nelson would have played chess with that skipper up there and won. He knew now the clue he had overlooked: the firing of torpedos one-two-three, and then that wait before the fourth launching. That wait had been, obviously—now, obviously—to re-equip the torpedo with a heat-seeking head. And by keeping on his degaussers, his bubbling hull couldn’t have pulled in the torpedo more efficiently if he had a line and a winch on it. “A heat-sniffer, and I guess . . .” He swallowed, and continued hoarsely. “I guess we’ve had it.”

  “Speak for yourself, skipper,” crashed a voice from the console. Crane stared stupidly at his right hand, which still held the sonarphone mike, then at the grille, then at the screen which was locked on to the minnie. The grille laughed harshly. “You can get off my knee now, Sonny Boy.”

  “Gleason!”

  “Oh, I’ll jest set here, this once, daddy-o,” said the exultant voice of young Smith. “As Billy Budd or somebody said, God Bless Captain Bligh or Nelson or somebody.”

  “Kaski,” said Gleason’s voice, “you can have my black shore shoes. I stole ‘em from you anyhow.”

  Morton and the Captain stared, hypnotized, at the mini-sub’s screen. They saw its blip accompanied suddenly by a streak, they saw the sub’s blip turn and swoop, they saw the two approach and merge and the screen flare out in a shower of green speckles as suddenly the detector had nothing but scattering wreckage to detect. The sonarphone was dead. The Captain reverently laid down the microphone. “What—the—hell did they do?”