Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea

by Theodore Sturgeon

He left, and that was when Crane hunted until he found the Big Brag, and remembered it, and began to believe that he was going to have to pay for it at, and with, the end of the world.

  Of course, there was nothing normal about these times.

  17

  MILES AND DAYS LATER, north of Tonga-Tabu and east of the Fijis, they sighted the sub-chaser. The Seaview was skimming the surface at the time, all four full ahead and making better time than even the O.O.M. would have bragged about, when Kaski spotted the ship on the horizon.

  They crash dived, but not before Morton, who was on watch at the time, ran the periscope camera up to full magnification and got a whole strip of telescopic pictures.

  Running at a hundred and fifty feet, they found a copy of Jane’s, the index of the world’s naval vessels, and closely comparing silhouettes, identified the ship as a sub-chaser, a year or two old, British-built, manned at the moment by God knew whom, and equipped to the gunwales with radar, asdic, more kinds of sonar than was decent, multi-seeking torpedoes, rocket-launched, and some “turtles.” These were a recent unpleasant invention incorporating a sink-or-swim device of gas release plus water intake which would keep the gadget floating at a predetermined depth for a predetermined length of time, which could be quite a long one—a necessity to allow the turtle-layer to get the hell out of there. For once it went off, it wasn’t bang or boom, it was—whatever the noise of a hydrogen bomb is.

  They were on collision course with this vessel, and therefore lay doggo at three hundred feet, listening to the wheeze, clash, clack, buzz, whine, and clatter of more detection than they had believed possible. Cathy Connors, who had kept herself to herself for the past few days, wordlessly sought out the captain and stood beside him while she waited, while he and all the others waited, to be found.

  The chaser sloped up to them, squawking and chattering, changing course twice to draw a finer bead. The personnel on the Seaview, one and all (even the dog) found themselves wordless and staring at the overhead as if they could see through it. The noise became unbearable, and when it was directly overhead, ceased so suddenly that everyone gasped and Cathy Connors screamed. There was nothing left but the grind of the chaser’s propellers, and then an abrupt metallic whistle, which came in staccato bursts for perhaps ninety seconds, Fortunately for the sanity of all hands, Sparks had his wits about him, or had his training so inground in him that he didn’t need wits; whichever it was, he snatched a pencil and wrote down what was undeniably Morse International. He said later that someone on the chaser must have hung a telegraph key on the tone generator of their biggest and noisiest sonar transmitter. When the signal, for such it was, ceased, all the other gear started up again, and the chaser wheezed, clashed, clacked, buzzed, whined and clattered on its way. They lay, fearful yet hopeful, while the racket died away into the wet distances, and then someone thought to look into the radio shack, where they found Sparks leaning back in his chair, his eyes streaming fit to soak his earphones off, laughing like a fool. They read the message:

  CANT SEEM TO SEE A RUDDY THING JUST NOW CHEERIO YOU CHAPS

  Which told them how some of the English had voted in the UN, and also how some of the English felt about it.

  18

  ON THE 25TH OF AUGUST THE average air temperature was 165.4, within eight degrees of Dr. Zucco’s “burnout point”—or Admiral Nelson’s “burn-up point.” Almost half a day ahead of schedule, the Seaview ran submerged, not only to escape detection in the event that enough armament had reached the launching point, but also to avoid the heat. A mere 165-plus, Seaview could handle, but the nature of some of the rays, all but unshielded now because of the thinning of the ozone layers, made for a very deep penetration; the water at fifty feet actually was warmer than at the surface, where evaporation still operated and air, even warm air, still could cool it. Fifty feet being the depth which contained most of the Seaview when she was theoretically at surface, made surfacing an activity more suited for the potatoes in an Irish stew than for human beings. They rigged a camera buoy and towed it to get what surface lookout it could give them, and ran as fast as they could at a hundred feet, with all eyes and all detectors straining ahead. It is certain that they saw the other atomic submarine before they were seen. They did the only thing they could do—they went down.

  They went ‘way down. At a hundred fathoms they had passed almost directly under the other submarine; but this time there was no lying doggo and waiting; they were too close to their destination, time was too short. They tried to run for it, and were detected.

  The other sub, handled and manhandled by evidently a very determined crew, peeled off and dove at them more like an aircraft than a U-boat; it nosed down and dived under power instead of merely sinking as it ran. The Seaview did likewise, and rather faster. The U-boat launched two torpedoes, and Seaview degaussed and made them miss, luckily guessing these two right. After that there were no more torpedoes—just a headlong flight, down, and down, and down. Seaview tried to level off and run, but the other craft gained alarmingly, and Crane nosed her down again.

  “Look!” gasped the O.O.M., who, though he stonily kept hands off, had been unable to keep himself out of the greenhouse. He pointed to the No. 2 screen, which held a magnified view of the sleek side of their pursuer. He stepped closer and laid his finger on the image of the forward torpedo tube, and again on one mounted on a swiveling turret on the aft quarter. Protruding from the mouth of each was the blunt head of a tin fish.

  “Two fish, jammed in the tubes!” said Chip.

  “Jammed, hell,” said the Admiral. “The pressure’s too great for their launchers. They just can’t push ‘em out. No wonder we haven’t had any more.”

  “She’s not built for this,” said Crane. Uselessly, to the oncoming U-boat, he yelled suddenly,

  “Pull up, idiot! Pull up!”

  “Ah, let ‘em dive,” said Chip Morton, grinning wolfishly, and then had the grin frozen to his face by the sudden, sickening disruption of the other submarine, along which formed a dent, a crease, a dozen splits as transverse bulkheads were forced out through the collapsing hull; then there was nothing but a cloud full of spinning, broken, crushed wreckage as the craft completely imploded.

  “God have mercy on their—” someone started to say, and then the concussion hit them, snatched the deck sidewise, spilled half of them off their feet. Shaken and terrified, they had no sooner climbed to their feet when a second impact shook the sub—but this one quite different; a strange, sliding lurch, a queasy motion, or cessation of motion, like the application of big hydraulic brakes while in the beginnings of a skid. “Stop all!” yelled the captain, and fell.

  The engines stopped, but the motion did not; the submarine heaved and stirred as if it rested on the surface of a rubber river running over rapids.

  Crane rose to his feet, clutching a wrenched shoulder, and hit the light controls. The floods and the twin searchlight banks shot out—and were stopped, soaked up, by a featureless wall not twenty yards ahead.

  “Look what we almost ran into,” gasped one of the lookouts.

  Cathy screamed suddenly. The submarine, lying on what seemed to be a bed of soft silt, still shuddered and trembled: now it began to list to starboard. Crane set his teeth and cranked the searchlights around. The bright spot traveled up the wall ahead, up and up, forty feet, sixty, and settled on a great bowl-like protuberance that looked like . . . that was . . . an eye.

  Then the cliff ahead began to go concave, the edge above to lean . . .

  “Full astern all!” bellowed the Captain, and the submarine awoke and shivered with effort. Gouts of leathery flotsam drifted by and away from the churning propellers, great sickly masses of some whitish, gooey material.

  And the Seaview simply stayed where she was, shuddering, while the wall with the eye in it bent close.

  Suddenly a rounded something appeared on the upper quarter of the transparent nose, and slid snakelike across it. It came from the upper left, slid across the tip
of the prow and vanished in the lower right. It gleamed in the floods, and in the light from inside. It kept coming and coming, an endless belt of sucker-studded horror. Emery said, “A tentacle. Only one tentacle! If it’s an octopus it’ll have seven more. If it’s a squid it’ll have nine more. It’s . . . the kraken . . .”

  Crane stared at the tentacle, still coming, sliding, still thickening. They could have no idea of the size of the thing or things, the shape—it was too overwhelmingly huge. The engines strove helplessly; the props must have been cutting cruelly into whatever held them, but that did not stop the endless sliding of the tentacle, the curving, cupping toward them of that eye-bearing cliff of slime.

  “Well, Captain?”

  Crane turned to old Nelson. The Admiral was holding the edge of the console for support, but all the same, riding the surging deck with the practiced balance of a windjammer man.

  Well, Captain, what? Was the O.O.M. asking him for an answer? He had no answers. Did the O.O.M. have an answer? If so why didn’t he come out with it?

  Well, who was in command around here?

  Crane suddenly grinned, and said to the Admiral, “Take over for me, will you, sir?”

  The Admiral shook his head slowly, but it was not a negation: it was an expression of almost admiration of the nerve, the incredible gall of the request. “Certainly, Captain,” he said courteously, and, half turning, flicked two controls. ‘Degaussing, Stand By’ and ‘Degaussing, On.’

  If it took the engine-room by surprise, it was a surprise that did not last long. The alternators began to scream and the lights dimmed. The submarine humped, tipped, rolled back to an even keel, and shuddered there. Suddenly it was whirled around and held up into clear water; for a moment they thought they were free, but a glance showed the monstrous tentacle, fourteen feet thick, endlessly long, and no longer sliding, still clamped to the transparent herculite nose. The loom of the lights fled across a tremendous outcropping—undeniably rock, this time—a hundred yards away, and the great gaping hole that opened in it. Under them was an undulating plain of flesh, which they realized was the body of whatever horror it was that held them. The rock cliff seemed to be creeping nearer; it could be seen, then, that the monster was oozing across the ocean floor toward that black hole, trailing the part with the tentacles and the submarine.

  The leading edge of the rippling, snail-like body climbed the talus at the foot of the cliff and poured upward and into the black portal. As the whole animal tipped back and up, climbing, the floodlights were directed upwards.

  Someone screamed—a man this time, and no one, then or ever, blamed him. One, three, four other huge tentacles shot over the edge of the cliff above; one, two enormous eyes.

  “Another one . . .” Emery cried.

  Two of the new tentacles streaked down the cliff face. One of them drove deep into a tattered, oozing wound, probably chopped by the Seaview’s propellers. The second serpentine finger probed out and down toward the submarine.

  The effervescence of steam began to appear around the herculite. They saw the suction discs flatten out, withdraw, shift and flatten again. Then abruptly the whole tentacle was gone, and they were free. The engines were still churning away full astern, and they shot backwards, just in time to see the second monster launch itself from the cliff and come down on them like a writhing cloud. It clutched them close, drew them into its embrace . . . spun it about and hurled it away, apparently not having reckoned with its stinging heat. If the average temperature of the ocean trenches is around four degrees, as has been estimated, contact with anything above the boiling point must be an experience for which any creature born to those depths is unequipped and unprepared. As the Seaview hurtled away backward, her screws adding to the momentum of that hysterical cast, her broad floods and sharp searchlights stroked across the awesome sight of the second monster, stung and angry, falling upon the first, which waited with hundred-foot tentacles outspread.

  “Pictures!” screamed Emery in tones of total and tragic loss, “didn’t we get any pictures?”

  “Admiral,” called Crane, a moment later when the submarine had leveled off, reversed its engines, and was proceeding in a long flat climb, on course.

  The Old Old Man came over to the console. “Yes, Captain.”

  “What was the figure you gave for the operational floor?”

  “Thirty-five hundred fathoms.”

  Crane nodded at the gauge. It showed 4800 and a bit over, and they had been rising for some time. “We must have reached 5000—thirty thousand feet!”

  The Admiral nodded. Crane suddenly realized that in this moment, and perhaps for always, now, this old man could not be hurt. He said, “Captain Crane, I have suggested to you before that you keep your eye on the indicators which really do apply to the situation. The reading was 32,470 feet. If you want that in miles, it’s just over six.”

  And quite as if he was a visiting newsman and not the Captain at all, Crane said earnestly,

  “Admiral Nelson, I do congratulate you.”

  Nelson looked around the great greenhouse, nodded with satisfaction, and said, “Thank you . . . Ah—may I be relieved of my command now?”

  Crane flushed. “Oh, hell, Admiral—”

  “Don’t say anything,” said the old man quickly. “I’ll concede that you clipped me on the button, and I’ll admit it hurt. But I have to say to you that I know it was time, past time. Immediate command is your job and it doesn’t do either of us any good for me to cling to it.” He punched Crane affectionately on the shoulder and walked off before Crane could answer, going aft through the ward room.

  Now if that’s a shadow, Crane thought, it’s a big one . . .

  He called to Chip Morton, “Buzz Jamieson for me.”

  A moment later, Morton said, “No answer from the sick bay, sir.”

  “I wanted a casualty report. I hope he—”

  “Oh, he reported five minutes ago. Nothing so far but bruises and a dislocated finger on the cook. I guess he’s scouting around for any more.”

  “Guess so. As you go, Mr. Morton. I’m going aft.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  And there’s another one, thought Crane, moving aft. Morton. He had been so used to Morton all his adult life that he had forgotten how to look at the man. Listen to that snappy aye-aye. He was getting from Crane the one thing which apparently he had always wanted—flat orders, a demand for obedience. He seemed much happier.

  Crane stepped into the magazine, and smiled at the after portside launching tube. Everything was shipshape here, the advanced Polaris missile programmed and sealed, with statically charged carbon particles in the warhead. He walked over to it and slapped the hose-like power supply cable which arched up from the deck to the launch control housing. “Good ol’ horse,” he said and slapped it again, whereupon it came away from the box and toppled limply onto the deck.

  Crane stared for one appalled moment, then flipped the four locking levers on the launch control box and threw up the lid. Inside was not the shambles he half feared he might see. It was much worse than that. It was neat as could be. The clutter of parts had been efficiently tidied up: two tubes were gone, three thermistors and a diode were gone; most importantly, the preset step relay was gone.

  He slammed down the lid and sprinted for the nearest intercom, which happened to be in the sick bay. He burst in. Dr. Hiller was standing beside the desk. “ ‘Scuse me,” he grunted, and half lifted, half shoved her aside, and dove for the key. “Chip, hook me to the Admiral, private, quick. I’m in the sick bay.”

  He pounded an impatient fist against the desk top while he waited out the interminable eight seconds. He found himself looking at Susan Hiller’s face, which wore that wide-eyed, dispassionate, observing look. Well, let her observe. “Admiral,” he barked at the first sound from the intercom, “Crane here. Somebody’s scoured out the launch control box on our prepared missile. How far are we from firing point?”

  “Right on, a hundred fathoms
low. What do you mean scoured?”

  “I mean sabotaged. How much time until launching?”

  A pause. “Forty-six minutes.”

  Forty-six minutes. And if the old man’s calculations were right, they fired in forty-six minutes or they didn’t fire at all, and if they didn’t fire, the belt of flame would reach a critical state, widen, and englobe the earth.

  Because you bragged on yourself, the inner Crane said snidely. Pride goeth before a fall. And he answered it, I’ll do what I have to do right up to the end. No sense getting mad at me. I was made like that.

  He said, “Please, Admiral—get back here. Maybe we—”

  “He’s on his way,” said the intercom in Emery’s voice.

  “We’ve got one ace in the hole,” he told Dr. Hiller, just because she was there. “The manual firing. But that has to be done from outside.”

  “Oh?” she said, but he had already gone. He went, not through the corridor, but at a dead run past her room and into Alvarez’s, banging right through and out the second door, which he recalled facing the nearest of the four one-man escape hatches. He was only mildly aware of Alvarez rising slowly from his settee to stare at him through the door he had left open in his flight; then he was un-dogging the hatch, clawing out the suit which hung there, ripping at his buttons with his free hand. He discarded shoes, trousers and shirt, and sat down on the high sill to fight his way into the clinging fabric. Once he was in it, with the hood pushed back leaving his face free, he ran forward to the magazine. Emery and the Admiral were there. Emery showed only perplexity, Nelson was merely busy; neither showed fear. “The warhead charge hasn’t been messed with, anyway,” announced the Admiral as Crane pelted up to them. “Propelling charges are okay. It’s just the launch impulse she won’t get.”

  “Can’t we cannibalize one of the others?” Emery demanded.

  “Damn it, no: this is a XII; the others are all Tens. I blame myself; I should’ve used something we had two of.”