Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Part 2

"Yes," she admitted faintly.

"It will, I'm sure, get a favorable review in the Congressional Record. And say yes, sir, this time."

"Yes, sir." She raised her downcast eyes and they were full of laughter, though there was none on her face as she whispered, "Will they fire me, Captain?"

"They've fired better men for less. Can you explain this undignified behavior?"

"I was just showing Cookie how I'll dance at my wedding."

"Well," said Crane grudgingly, "that is an extenuating circ.u.mstance. In about three weeks, isn't it?"

"...and two days and four hours."

"Hm," grunted the Captain, "And who's the unlucky man?"

She raised her eyes again, and her face, and her arms, and her warm lips met his eagerly and with joy. "Oh Lee," she said with her lips still against his, "I feel like an idiot."

"Nice idiot," he chuckled. "I love the idiot. But watch it, will you?"

Now it was in this moment, with his lips on hers, that there came to him the surge of feeling he was later to identify, derisively, as the Big Brag. It must be understood that it came to him in a flash, and, for all its intensity, it lasted for the least part of a second. It was this which, later, he came so bitterly to regret, although the Big Brag was unspoken and no one knew of it but Lee Crane in his own innermost secret self. We all impose guilts upon ourselves; it is one of the penalties we pay for belonging to a social species-a vague and constant awareness, however far away from the surface, that we are part of the race, and that for our sins all mankind might be punished. Had things remained normal, this pa.s.sing flash of Lee Crane's may well have disappeared forever into that lightless region into which we all drop pa.s.sing thoughts which no longer matter. But things, of course, were never to be what the world once called "normal" again....

The Big Brag, coming to a man who ordinarily did not turn his thoughts inward, and who was not given to taking stock of himself in any way, let alone making mountains of the credit side-the Big Brag, then, suffusing him as he stood in the corridor with the slight strong body of Cathy Connors in his arms, ran thus: Do you know who I am? I'm Crane. Lee Crane. Yes-that Lee Crane. My girl loves me and her standards are high. Never since grammar school have I been off the honor roll. I'm still the youngest standards are high. Never since grammar school have I been off the honor roll. I'm still the youngest sub skipper in the country, maybe the world. My crew, every man Jack of 'em, would jump to sail this sub skipper in the country, maybe the world. My crew, every man Jack of 'em, would jump to sail this s.h.i.+p under the cellar of h.e.l.l and torpedo the boilers. So there you are: I'm strong, smart, young and s.h.i.+p under the cellar of h.e.l.l and torpedo the boilers. So there you are: I'm strong, smart, young and respected, my girl loves me and the world is watching. I'm Crane. Lee Crane. I'm-that Lee Crane! respected, my girl loves me and the world is watching. I'm Crane. Lee Crane. I'm-that Lee Crane!

The Big Brag-unspoken, but rising up in him in a sudden surge that made his eyes smart. Then the k.n.o.b on the door behind them turned and they sprang apart. O'Brien, with his black hair and red eyebrows, emerged: "Beg pardon, Cap'n."

"Carry on, O'Brien." To Cathy he said sternly, "We'll continue this at a later time, Connors."

"Yes, sir," she said demurely: and it was over.

The episode was over, but the Big Brag, wrapping itself in a coating like one of those delayed-action pills, awaited only the right environment to be released. And the world, and s.p.a.ce itself got exactly the right environment ready, by the millions and millions of cubic miles.

DAY AFTER DAY THEY DROVE NORTH. THE Seaview Seaview behaved like a dream-the dream of a hard-headed, demanding, detailed and logical dreamer, which indeed she was. If ever Admiral Nelson had his Big Brag moments- and he really rated them-Lee Crane could see no sign of it. Not that he was ever persnickety-he was too big for that. But he ranged the sub from stern to keelson to stem to bilge, not so much looking and listening as reading and hearing. Any mere expert can be spoken to by a generator or a pump or a computer; Nelson seemed able to have conversations with rivets and the seam of a weld. In another man, this would come out looking like worry, like fear and mistrust of design and materials. But in Nelson, it was more as if the thousands upon countless thousands of components making up the submarine were a great body of friends of his, to each and all of whom he had said, "Now if anything ever bothers any of you fellers, you tell me about it, no matter who you are. That's what I'm here for." This, to a rivet. behaved like a dream-the dream of a hard-headed, demanding, detailed and logical dreamer, which indeed she was. If ever Admiral Nelson had his Big Brag moments- and he really rated them-Lee Crane could see no sign of it. Not that he was ever persnickety-he was too big for that. But he ranged the sub from stern to keelson to stem to bilge, not so much looking and listening as reading and hearing. Any mere expert can be spoken to by a generator or a pump or a computer; Nelson seemed able to have conversations with rivets and the seam of a weld. In another man, this would come out looking like worry, like fear and mistrust of design and materials. But in Nelson, it was more as if the thousands upon countless thousands of components making up the submarine were a great body of friends of his, to each and all of whom he had said, "Now if anything ever bothers any of you fellers, you tell me about it, no matter who you are. That's what I'm here for." This, to a rivet.

A warm friends.h.i.+p sprang up between Dr. Hiller and Cathy Connors; from the second day, it was "Sue" and Cathy." Dr. Jamieson spent his time in one of the higher levels of heaven, at Dr. Hiller's beck and call; he admired her with a touch-me-not whole heartedness which, to give her credit, she took no advantage of. Chip Morton minded his manners and his own business, though anyone who knew him well-and the Captain knew him very well-was aware of his constant corner-of-the-eye awareness of the svelte psychologist, and of tension like that in a c.o.c.ked crossbow, as the Executive Officer searched for a c.h.i.n.k in the doctor's armor. Lee Crane, however, trusted the latch that held it c.o.c.ked. Chip Morton might be headstrong, but stupid he was not.

Staying most of the time at the 500-foot level, the Seaview Seaview slipped under the ice on the second day. For six more days she cut herself off from the world, traveling north by and large, but zigging slipped under the ice on the second day. For six more days she cut herself off from the world, traveling north by and large, but zigging and zagging, diving, lying doggo, and rehearsing drills: collision, fire, and various breakdowns: air plant, power, even food shortage. Nelson ran an elaborate series of observations on Earth magnetism and another on crust temperature on the bottom, either of which would have been full time work for a specialist in either field, and still was able to get some sleep.

On the ninth day Cathy Connors entered the office of the sick bay with a thick folder under her arm, and found Dr. Hiller transcribing notes from the little book she always carried, to a tiny tape recorder. "h.e.l.lo, Cathy. I have some hot coffee here."

"Hi, Sue. Brought you the personnel file you wanted. Yes, I think I will." She hopped up to sit on the edge of the examining table and swing her feet.

Dr. Hiller poured the coffee, handed a cup to Cathy, put her own safely back out of the way and placed the heavy folder before her. Leafing rapidly through it, she said, "Your Captain Crane is surprisingly young for a job like this."

"He was the youngest sub captain in the whole United States Navy," Cathy said proudly.

"He must have a friend at court," said the doctor, but Cathy knew she was teasing. "The Admiral?"

"Wrong diagnosis, Doctor. They're almost like father and son, but the captain earned his rank.

Neither he nor the Admiral would want it any other way. If anything, I'd say it was harder that way than if they hadn't been so close. The three of them have always fought hard to keep personalities out of-"

"Three of them?"

"Admiral Nelson, the Captain, and Chip Morton."

"Oh," said the doctor quietly, "Chip Morton."

"He and Lee-Captain Crane-roomed together at the Academy," said Cathy. "They were always one-two on the honors lists."

"Morton always second."

"Well, yes. How did you know?"

"It's written all over him. Also that the Captain went through in a breeze and Morton had to fight about twenty-six hours in each day to keep up."

"Lee's never talked about it, but-I suppose that's the way it was. But that isn't in the file."

"It doesn't have to be," said Dr. Hiller. "It's written all over them both. Captain Crane accepts challenges because they're his job and he does his job. Commander Morton accepts them because they're challenges-I mean, they give him a chance to prove something."

"Prove what, for heaven's sake? Look where he is today, at his age!"

Dr. Hiller shrugged. "Prove he's as good as the best. It's a little like my being driven to prove I was as tall as B.J. Crawford." She smiled suddenly "Don't take all this too seriously. The world is full of Chip Mortons, and whether or not they like it, they make the world's best second-in-commands.

They're exacting of those under them, and extremely watchful of those above."

Cathy affected a shudder. "Oooh... you strip everybody clear down to their nuts and bolts."

Dr. Hiller laughed at her "No I don't. I can't. n.o.body can. There's always something else else about people. No matter how you graph and chart and study and distill, there's always something else. about people. No matter how you graph and chart and study and distill, there's always something else.

Which is what makes psychology so interesting-the constant search for that something else. It's the only field where something else is always there, you can bank on that."

"I guess you could say that about all research-the search for something else."

"In the sciences, yes. The search for the something else that might be there. In psychology-which isn't a science, and don't you believe it is even if a psychologist tells you so-you know darn well it's there."

"If psychology isn't a science, what is it?" asked Cathy.

Dr. Hiller laughed. She had a good laugh. She said, "That depends on the psychologist. Some are statisticians, like insurance men. Some are artists-conscious, creative artists, who match and blend and design to achieve the response they want. And some-well, there isn't a name for it. It's an intuitive something, an ability to know instantly what people are, and if anything is wrong, what's needed to fix it."

"That would make good psychologists out of a lot of priests, cab-drivers, and maiden aunts."

"Better," said Dr. Hiller, "than a lot of 'em who have a diploma to hang on their walls." Seriously she added, "There's just one more thing that makes psychology, and especially psychiatry, such tremendous challenges. And which separates them from the true sciences. And that is that the ultimate instrument, the tool, is after all only a human being. Now a biologist isn't going to let his work be twisted and tilted by a warped lens in his microscope. Before an astrophysicist writes up a weird new effect from his radio-telescope, he'll check out the wiring on his amplifiers. These people can see a flaw in their instruments the instant it's there. But a psychologist or a psychiatrist might operate for years with a wobble in his mental 'lens' and not even know it."

"How can you possibly guard against a thing like that?"

Dr. Hiller shrugged her slim shoulders. " 'Man, know thyself' is one way, though Socrates should have added '...if thou canst.' Otherwise, all you can do is to judge by the results you get. Which, of course, you don't get until after the work is done, and if there are mistakes, they're made and you have to live with them. And know better next time." She smiled. "But perhaps you see why I think it's interesting."

"Also scary," said Cathy Connors. "I-"

There was a dull boom far away, felt rather than heard. The submarine lifted, tilted, subsided rocking, while a crunching ramble proceeded upward around them. The constant, almost un-heard thrum of the motors, the barely-felt tremble of propeller-thrust, ceased abruptly, a change from almost nothing to nothing-at-all which was as shocking as a dynamite blast. Dr. Hiller sat frozen, clutching the edge of the desk. Cathy Connors sat on the deck, where the first jolt had flung her from her perch on the examining table, while a thread of blood curled downward over her temple where her head had struck the corner of the desk.

"Damage control!" roared the speaker on the bulkhead, in Crane's voice, but hard, tense, filtered.

"Damage control! Report!" The shrill hooting of the alarm filled the s.h.i.+p. They had all heard it many times during the past days of drills, but never with such command, such menace.

"We hit something," whispered Susan Hiller.

Cathy shook her head dazedly. "Something hit us."

The doctor rose and came around the desk. "Come," she said levelly. "You've been hurt. Let me-"

Again that dull boom, the lift and lurch. Dr. Hiller's feet were s.n.a.t.c.hed right out from under her and she sat heavily next to the admiral's secretary, who said tremblingly, "Well, h.e.l.lo."

They helped each other up, and the psychiatrist, holding herself tensely in control, got to a first-aid shelf and deftly examined and treated Cathy's cut. "Not much, really," she murmured. "There-the bleeding's stopped."

"Thanks," said Cathy. "I didn't even know I was hurt. Sue-let's go forward and see what's happened. Only for heaven's sake remember to keep out from under foot. If there's anything Admiral Nelson hates in an emergency it's what he calls 'non-partic.i.p.ating personnel.' "

"I'll be good," said the doctor.

They made their way forward through the central corridor, making a short-cut through what was affectionately called the "fishbowl," the catwalk over the three small tanks and one large one, where sharks slid oilily. It was here that the submarine took the third impact from below, this by far the worst yet. She listed almost thirty degrees to the accompaniment of shuddering sc.r.a.pes from outside, slowly nosed down, rolled back, and then achieved an even keel again. The water sloshed over the edges of the tanks below, and its surface boiled, lashed by the tails of the frightened sharks. In one of the smaller tanks-smaller only by comparison, but by no means a small tank-a dark torpedo body flashed out of the water and boomed against the wire mesh which covered it, leaving it thrumming.

The other tanks, uncovered, seemed to the frightened girls to be ready to fill the air at any moment with flapping, snapping sea monsters.

"But you know," said Cathy afterwards, when they had regained the corridor and were moving forward again, "it was a safer place to be in than your office. I'll take a good strong guardrail on each side, any time, even if there are sharks lunging around underneath."

"I'll requisition some for the office," said Susan Hiller.

Twice they stepped aside and flattened against the wall while damage details went by on the double, and when they reached the wardroom and the door into the observation nose, they moved like a couple of schoolgirls visiting someone else's school, peeping through each doorway before they went through it.

A knot of officers, Captain Crane, Commander Morton, and Admiral Nelson among them, cl.u.s.tered around the control console in the after starboard comer. Quiet, tense orders flashed and crackled between them. The telltales and grilles flashed and crackled as well, bringing information on pressure, temperature, and the presence outside of huge, hurtling objects....

"Look!" breathed Cathy Connors, pointing forward with a shaking finger.

The big floods were on, for although the water was clear, their depth of over four hundred feet put them on the fringes of the lightless deep. And perhaps a hundred yards away, they saw a shape, like a great white cloud... no, there was nothing cloudly about it; it was solid, jagged, and seemed to be moving majestically, slowly upward through the water, until the startled eye realized how far away it was, and how large: at least as big as a ten-story building. Then it was evident that the thing was coming up with a rush, moving far too fast for anything that big. It disappeared above the loom of their brilliant lights.

"Wh-what was that?"

"It looked like an iceberg," Cathy answered. "But icebergs aren't supposed to be down at the bottom!"

From the console came the shrill reiterated squeal of sonar gear, as one of the officers turned up the gain. They all pressed to a cathode screen where a line of light with a little mountain in the middle danced in time to the squeak. The squeaks came closer together, faster and faster. Chip Morton broke away and ran into the transparent bows, pressing his back against the forward plate and looking down and to the rear. "Give me a beam!" he shouted. "That's it... straight down... aft five... five more... hold it... Oh my G.o.d, it's right under our keel..."

"Got the range," barked O'Brien. "Two hundred... one ninety... eighty... One hundred fifty..."

"Both starboard full ahead!" bellowed the Captain. "Both port full astern. Full left rudder!"

The submarine shuddered from stem to stern as the big atomic-fired turbines took hold. She seemed as if she never would answer, and then a drift could be detected as she began to respond, and flotsam, caught in the lights, began to stream past from left to right. Up in the bows, Chip Morton made a sound of pure animal terror and sprinted aft, only to stand close to the knot of men, as if their very presence formed some sort of sanctuary for him. Eyes wide, he looked forward.

With a grinding crunch, the rising iceberg shouldered into the Seaview Seaview's bows and lifted them.

The transparent plates took the impact on the under side and to the right, and crushed ice showered and swirled like smoke. The s.h.i.+p tilted upward and began to roll to the left, then slide backward, dragging her gla.s.s nose down the jagged slope of the ice mountain, cracking, crus.h.i.+ng, grinding, smas.h.i.+ng into each rough projection as it rose past.

Cathy Connors and Susan Hiller clung to each other and forgot to breathe. Neither could have called the exact figure in pounds per square inch the sub was subjected to at that depth, nor the terrible over-burden of those sickening blows against the transparent nose and the plates around it; both knew, with nightmare horror and utter certainty, that the punishment it was taking was much, much more than anyone, even Nelson, could have dreamed that it would ever take.

She listed sharply and suddenly to port, and then, like an obscuring sheet s.n.a.t.c.hed away, the white wall was gone. The s.h.i.+p slid back and down through the black waters, found her keel, leveled off and dropped her bows dangerously, the whole maneuver precisely like that which a flyer calls a whipstall.

"All slow ahead," rapped the Captain. "Level her. Hold your turn, then steer one eight oh."

Admiral Nelson moved athwarts.h.i.+p, coming quite close to the two girls. He seemed not to see them; his eyes were fixed on the transparent herculite bows, and roved up and back, back and forth, down and across. "By G.o.d," he said hoa.r.s.ely, low: "By G.o.d, it held. It held."

"By G.o.d, Admiral," said Chip Morton shakily from the other side of the big chamber-he could not have heard- "it held."

"Hah!" grunted Nelson, almost jovially. "Of course it held!"

Susan Hiller met Cathy Connors' eyes and almost smiled; and in that moment, Cathy understood much of what the lady-psychiatrist had said about the fascination of psychology.

"What's your course, Mister?" barked the Admiral, as if never in his life before had he whispered, wondered, or called upon G.o.d.

"One eight oh, sir."

"Good." Nelson strode back to the console and barked into the grille, "Damage control: report!"

"One eight oh," said Cathy to the doctor. "That's south. We're getting out of this."

The sonar squealed. The men around the console leapt to action. Range-engines-"Hard left!": a tense pulsing moment of silence, and a great white mountain, mounding up out of the blackness below, disappearing silently into the darkness above the port bow. And everybody breathing again.

"What would make icebergs come up from the bottom like that?"

"Tell me first, Sue, what would make them be down there in the first place."

"No big ones now," said someone at the board.

They looked forward into the green-white glare ahead. Chunks rose-pebble size, football size, automobile size. They came thickly, a strange slow upside-down hailstorm, kissing and stroking the sleek sides of the submarine, knocking impatiently, sc.r.a.ping softly, sometimes like shoes on a coconut mat, sometimes urgently, like a dog which wanted so much to get in. mat, sometimes urgently, like a dog which wanted so much to get in.

"Watch your depth," said Nelson. "It'll hold at about three hundred and then shelve off to six, maybe seven. And when it does you'll see the end of that ice."

"Admiral," said the Captain, "if you know anything at all about what's happening here, for the love of heaven let us in on it."

"I don't know anything," said Nelson, "but I've been doing the old trick of reading the instruments for the last half hour without thinking. That way you get the data that are, and not the ones you think ought to be."

"Three ten, sir," said O'Brien at the depth gauge. "Thirty. Eighty. Four ten. That's not a shelf, sir, it's a cliff. Holding at four ten, give or take a little... uh! uh! four sixty. Five. Five hundred thirty... and holding..." four sixty. Five. Five hundred thirty... and holding..."

"And where's your ice?" asked the old man with something approaching smugness.

All hands swung forward and looked-at the greenish blaze ahead, clear water, a sudden flurry of fish.

"Slow ahead, Captain."

"Slow ahead, sir." To the grille, Lee Crane said, "Slow ahead," and heard it repeated.