Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea
Read Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Online
Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
THE WORLD WAS AFIRE!
From a flaming sky, heat seared Earth’s surface and cast forests and mighty cities flared and died. In a few weeks, mankind would be burned from the face of the planet.
There was only one desperate chance—and only one man desperate enough to take it—Nelson, the “Mad Admiral.” Defying his government and the nations of the world, Nelson drove the giant atomic submarine Seaview halfway around the globe to a grim rendezvous with Destiny. Unknown monsters of the deep barred his way—foreign warships hunted him—sabotages delayed him—but Nelson bulled and slashed his way through. Then, at the crucial moment, when disaster struck and the world seemed doomed, Admiral Nelson launched his “mad” plan!
The spectacular saga of . . .
VOYAGE TO THE
BOTTOM OF THE SEA
. . . is now a thrilling motion picture
in wide-screen color, starring
WALTER PIDGEON • PETER LORRE
JOAN FONTAINE • FRANKIE AVALON
BARBARA EDEN • ROBERT STERLING
and MICHAEL ANSARA
An Irwin Allen Production
Released through
Twentieth Century-Fox.
A PYRAMID BOOK
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by
mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
Cover painting by Jim Mitchell
Copyright © Pyramid Books June 1961
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
VOYAGE TO THE
BOTTOM OF THE SEA
1A
T THE END, THE BOTTOM
, the very worst of it, with the world afire and hell’s flame-winged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself. The youngest sub skipper in history blamed himself for the burning sky and the floods, the droughts and dangers of that terrible August when the devil himself brought his face to the Earth’s crust and breathed on it, laughed and said, Die.
It’s my fault, Captain Crane told himself, which is probably why he did what he did. That he should feel this thing is only a measure of the man.
It’s my fault because I was at the top, that day, and knew it, and told myself so.
That was it: he had let himself tell himself so. Well . . . it takes a big man to be where he was, that day, and only a big man, with such a big brag in his heart, could have kept it to himself. And it was like him to react with horror so huge when he caught himself at it; and only a sizable soul could shoulder so much guilt for a moment of glory.
In his terror and agony, there near the end, he gave himself again the moment of the brag, not so much to relive the pleasure, but to flagellate himself with his sense of sin and the extremities of his penitence. Forgive him that. It was a time for extremities.
The Day of the Brag was a sunny day, and they stood in the wardroom of the U.S.O.S.
Seaview
, stood, sat, lounged and, as it became one or two of them, postured. The visitors had only just come aboard from an aircraft carrier lying just off the brim of Earth’s ice hat. A huge turbine-powered whirlybird had gentled them off the flat-top and eased their precious and important presences on to the broad shoulders of the
Seaview
just aft of the conning tower, and from there they were conveyed up and over and down inside with the smoothness of eggs through a candler.
And with exquisite timing, if you’re building a brag, they were no sooner arranged in the wardroom with their heart’s desire in welcoming drinks in their hands, when the after bulkhead, between the doors to the Captain’s galley and the radio shack, a wall nine feet wide and six feet high, lit up in a blaze of color and presented to them a TV news show featuring themselves and their adventure and, oh yes, their importance. Captain Lee Crane, resplendent in dress blues (a tailor had once remarked of him “the guy’s got one-and-a-half the shoulders and only half the hips!”) and with pleasure watched the show on the screen, and the show of the people who watched the show. The image on the new wide-screen TV was perfect, the sound was stereophonic, the submarine idled along with a greased kind of gentleness, the drink was excellent and so was the weather.
The man on the screen said, “Today’s top of the news comes from the top of the world. The unpredictable Admiral Harriman Nelson has done it again! Since his retirement from the Navy some four years ago to enlist in the newly created Bureau of Marine Exploration, the Admiral has been secretly at work constructing the first submarine ever built outside the Navy Department. Into it has gone his entire personal fortune—you will recall that the Nelsons, with all their past glories in the form of college presidents, Congressmen, State governors and philanthropists, have been an investment banking family for three generations—and every penny he could scrape up from sources as widely separated as Foundation grants and collections of school-children’s pennies. His brainchild, a fantastic—”
Here the commentator’s well-barbered head gave way to a picture of a detailed model of the
Seaview
, which in due course dissolved to a montage of the keel-laying ceremonies, the launching, and the commissioning ceremonies of the craft.
“—a fantastic atomic submarine with an amazing glass nose—is undergoing final tests in Arctic waters, where it will follow the trail blazed twenty years ago by the first atomic submarine—under the ice and across the Pole.
“This sub of the future,” the commentator went on, becoming visible again and, Captain Lee Crane thought, having run a comb through his faultless waves while off camera, “this child of determined imagination out of the Age of the Computer, is the world’s largest mobile oceanographic laboratory. It was designed to search out the mysteries of the deep as well as to be a research center to test the miracle weapons of tomorrow. To operate this awesome robot, the Admiral has enlisted a hand-picked crew from former Navy men with long experience on atomic subs. To sit in judgment on these final tests, the Bureau of Marine Exploration has sent its top officer, the former Vice Admiral B.J. Crawford and the congressional watchdog of the budget, Congressman Llewellyn Parker, by carrier and ‘copter to rendezvous with the submarine
Seaview
.”
Lee Crane, lounging against the forward bulkhead, and behind most of the watchers, was amused to see the slight twitch and erection of the head, the reddening of the ears of the visiting admiral and the visiting penny-pincher, as each in turn their names were called. In his mind’s eye he could see the imp called Vanity winging about overhead, ready to swoop down at the public mention of any name, to seize its owner by the ears (hence the reddening) and pull (hence the twitch and straightening of the neck). The commentator permitted himself to be replaced by a full-color portrait of Crane’s “boss,” the driving force behind the
Seaview
and all it stood for, Admiral Harriman Nelson. And sure enough, the Admiral’s ears, here in the flesh, pinkened, and the great bull’s head, terror of the china-shop, twitched and rose.
“And so the question of the day comes to this,” said the now disembodied commentator, “Will the final test on the U.S.O.S.
Seaview
turn it into ‘Nelson’s Folly,’ or will it be another triumph of an already great man—a great scientist and inventor, who in spite of what some call an odd-ball reputation, may yet emerge as the predominant scientific genius of our time.”
Admiral Nelson let his gray eaves of eyebrows come up a notch, and otherwise held his face as if it had been carved there by Gutzon Borglum. But Captain Crane saw the slight turn his right hand gave to the signet ring on his left, a mannerism he had watched for ever since he was a boot at Annapolis and Nelson headed the Science Department; it meant he was annoyed. Fair enough. Chest-tones and the safety of a studio four thousand miles away did not qualify a guy with marcelled hair to call the likes of Nelson an oddball.
Now, Crane thought, comes the dessert. It’s time for a seductive portrait of Dr. Susan Hiller, some arch remarks about how high this brilliant woman had risen in the ranks of medicine and psychiatry, and how extraordinary that she should yet be so beautiful—and why the hell not, thought Crane in irritation: when would the beautiful-but-dumb, brilliant-but-dowdy legend curl up and die?
Could it be that most of the world wanted it alive, and if so, why? And in addition, Crane predicted, there would be a polite joke (masking some not only impolite, but downright disgusting implications) about Dr. Hiller’s being the only woman aboard (which she wasn’t).
“So,” said the commentator, “Bon voyage, Admiral Nelson . . . his crew, and their illustrious visitors Congressman Parker and Admiral Crawford. We will hear nothing of them while they are submerged, of course, for however many hours, days or even weeks the tests take. They will likewise hear nothing from us; therefore, if they are listening to me now, I’d like to speak for all the world, its people, its scientists, young and old, knowing that they share my admiration. High ideals, high courage, and high adventure are their lot, though they find them in a voyage to the bottom of the sea.”