“She was already dead, walking . . . I couldn’t find her anywhere, I ran down here to look for her, I saw her slowly open the door of the pile chamber and come out. I ran and slammed the door and I—held her. I saw the dosimeter right away and the only thing I could say was, was . . . I held her,” he shouted, holding out his arms, “and said I loved her, and she said don’t love me, not me, don’t love me . . . and then she told me all this.”
“But Jamie, Jamie—why? Why?”
“That Zucco, she . . . she admired and she worshipped that Zucco, since she was a schoolgirl. She was his assistant on a project once in Austria. He could do no wrong. She would do anything for him, anything. I don’t know whether or not he knew she existed even . . . well, she was that way, she didn’t need that; she needed to know he was right and she could help. She was so . . . so . . . well anyway, she never knew he was wrong, after all.” He looked up at Crane, weeping, not caring. “She was so beautiful. She hurt, I guess, from the radiation and the heat. I ran to get something for her . . .” he waved at the tank “. . . she didn’t want to die slowly. Go away now, Crane. I’ll be all right, but—go away, will you?”
“All right, Jamie.”
He slap-clumped, clap-clumped away on his one-and-a-half fins.
19
CAPTAIN LEE CRANE, resplendent in dress blues, shoved his tongue in his cheek and formally turned command of the Seaview over to the Admiral. The crew, and the visiting officers from the patchy little fleet which had once obeyed Dr. Zucco, all pressed and shining, stood at attention. Crane turned, and old Emery came forward with Cathy Connors, in dress whites, blushing—really blushing—on his arm.
Admiral Harriman Nelson, as commander of the ship, took the little black book and began to read: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together . . .”
When it was all over, and under cover of the shouting, laughing, drinking, backslapping, he could slip a private word, he bent and kissed her ear and said, “You know who I am? I’m the center of the universe.”
“Well, darling, of course you are!”
“You see?” he told the world, the sky, and Alvarez. “You see? I knew it all the time!”
And then Sparks found the United States of America, found it alive; for then Sparks flooded the great submarine with rock-and-roll music . . .
. . . and Crane looked about him with a laughing fear: Maybe I’m not, he wondered to himself: surely to God that isn’t my music?
Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Page 21