Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (13 page)

Nelson, Emery and Cathy Connors plunged by and dove down the gangplank, with Crane and Morton right behind them. Later the Captain was to recall with vast amusement that not one of the five forgot to salute the colors at the stern as they hurtled down the plank. “Slow ahead all!” he bellowed as he ran, “Hard left!” hoping against hope that though he had not ordered the topside microphones activated, someone below had had the wit to turn them on. A surge of joy ran through him with the sudden trembling of the hull, the gout of swirling water under the stern. Yet she seemed to take forever to answer, and the long deck seemed to be part of a nightmare, a long steel path upon which one could run and run forever and never get to that conning tower. He risked another glance aft and saw the four guards clattering down the gangplank, which had acquired a slight list. Behind them, the two guards whom he and Morton had commandoed were following, weaving a bit, but bravely doing their best to get back into the action.

Still moving as if rehearsed, Crane and Morton passed the others, who were understandably tiring, sprang up the conning ladder together, each monkeying up a vertical, and six feet up bent together, got Cathy Connors under the armpits, and virtually threw her upward. They sprang after her to where she clung gasping, passed her one on each side, stopped above her and threw her upward again. This placed her on the platform. Crane picked her up in his arms and dropped her down the hole, hoping she would catch a rung on the way down but prepared to pay the penalty and patch the damage if she did not. He turned in time to pull Nelson while Morton pushed: the Old Old Man was feeling it. His lips were blue, even in this heat, and his eyes seemed to have a tendency to roll upwards out of sight. He heaved the gasping Admiral over the coaming and down, and saw a pair of hands from below—Gleason’s, probably—reaching up to assist. Emery sprang up, over, and down; the grizzled old squirrel was barely breathing hard. And at last the captain vaulted over the coaming, bawling to shut the hatch. The guards were running forward; two were already on the deck ladder.

One of the others fired into the air, and almost instantly pegged one which whanged and whined off the inside of the hatch-cover as it came down. Crane did not wait for such comforts as rungs, but slid to the bottom and hit the deck as the cover above made seal.

It seemed very quiet in the control room. It was like the instant’s dreadful quiet which on occasion follows an automobile accident, before the people begin screaming.

“Take her down,” whispered the Admiral.

“There’s six guards on deck and the gangplank’s gone,” gasped the Captain.

“Take her down.” The Old Old Man closed his eyes and let himself go limp for a moment against the bulkhead. Then he stiffened, shook himself hard, and rounded on Crane. “Take her down, mister, and that’s now.”

Crane nodded to O’Brien, which was all that was necessary. “Maybe,” he said, “some of ‘em can’t swim.”

“They have to take their chances then,” said the Admiral, his face like a rock.

Crane shook his head bleakly and turned to Cathy Connors. “Come on,” he said, bending over her. She sat on the deck with her back against the bulkhead, her knees drawn up and her skirt tucked over them. He put a hand under her arm but she shook her head.

“What’s the matter?”

She looked up at him, very calm now, very pale, her eyes very wide. “I’m afraid to move just now,” she said in a cool voice. And suddenly from her wide eyes, tears burst and coursed down her cheeks. She seemed unaware of them. “I think,” she said in that same cool careful voice, “that I’ve hurt my ankle rather badly.” He then realized that under the skirt, she was holding her ankle with both hands, so hard her arms were trembling.

“Cathy, why didn’t you say so!” He scooped her up in his arms. He said to O’Brien, “The story is that the channel’s dredged to a hundred feet from here to the seaward side of the Narrows. Steer as if that could be so but you don’t really believe it.”

“Aye, sir.” Periscope depth for the
Seaview
was ninety feet, so he was asking the Diving Officer to chop it rather fine. But one got used to asking matter-of-course miracles from O’Brien. “Gleason, put two men in the nose as lookouts. Rig the cable remote to the big searchlight and give it to whichever one has the most good eyes and good sense. And use your floods as well. This is one time when it wouldn’t pay at all to run aground.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Be right back, sir,” he told Nelson, who nodded.

Crane carried the girl aft as far as the mess, where a man in pressed dress whites, shoes shined to a blaze, a snow-white seabag on his shoulder, ran past him weeping.

“What the—” Crane recoiled out of his way, banging the point of his ankle against the high sill of the mess. He glared after the man, and caught the black stencil on the seabag:
BERKOWITZ
.

Crane retraced his steps a few paces, for the man, skidding to a stop in the control room, had begun to scream.

“You got to let me off, you got to! I have a furlough coming and Mr. Morton signed my pass and I don’t even know if he’s born yet, she could be dead for all I know, why couldn’t I phone at least.”

“Sir,” suggested the Admiral.

Berkowitz craned wildly up at the dark pocket of the sealed conning tower. “Nobody told me, oh my God, you’ll go all the way to the Marianas, me not knowing is she alive or dead with the radio out.”

“Sir,” suggested the Admiral again, even more quietly.

“Sir!” spat Berkowitz furiously. He glared at Nelson, who stood silently, still leaning against the bulkhead, but lightly. The color was beginning to return to the old man’s lips. Berkowitz’s eyes wavered. “S-sir . . .?” he whimpered faintly.

“That’s better . . . If it makes any difference to you, Berkowitz, nobody knew we were going to jet out like that until it happened.”

“What am I going to do, sir?”

“You’re going to drop that duffel right here and go aft to the sick bay and ask Dr. Jamieson to quiet you down.”

Anyone who knew the Admiral at all would know that this was the time to aye-sir and off.

Berkowitz may have known him well enough, but he was also more than a little hysterical, so he said,

“But what about—”

Nelson’s voice became gentle as a lover’s, and every man there knew how big the trouble was that Berkowitz was getting himself into. “Berkowitz,” he crooned, “you know we’ll do what we can for you. We’ll get you off. We’ll—”

“Th-thank you sir—” Berkowitz began to weep again.

“We’ll get you off if we have to dig a hole in the cellar and drop you out, mister. Because we can’t run a ship with the likes of you aboard. Now get aft and see the doctor.”

Berkowitz, stricken, dropped his duffel bag and turned blindly aft. Nelson watched him go and then fetched a sudden kick on the bag. “I hate a weeper,” he said quietly to no one in particular, but Berkowitz heard. Crane, pacing slowly behind him carrying Cathy Connors, watched the stride of a man who needed a tail to tuck between his hind legs.

“Oh man,” the Captain murmured, “I wouldn’t slam an outhouse door that hard . . . Sorry, Cathy.”

“That’s all right,” she whispered. “I wasn’t listening . . . Oh Lee, I know that seemed terribly cruel, but can’t you see why he did it?”

“He said why he did it. He usually . . . picks on someone his size, though.”

“You slap hysterical people. That’s all it is. He’ll let Berky off some way—you’ll see. If Sue Hiller was here she’d explain the whole thing to you. The one thing he couldn’t do was to be nice to the kid. Berky’d have gone all to bits.”

Lee Crane chuckled. “The O.O.M. can do no wrong, hey, Cats? By golly, if he batted a ball and ran to third you’d change the rules to make him right.”

“Now that’s just silly and you—”

“And I know it. Sorry, honey. I just hated to stand here and see that happen. Also I’m jealous, because I can be wrong—you’ve told me so—and he never is, which you’ve also told me. Are you sure which one of us you want to marry? Choose, hussy.”

She bit his ear. “I choose thee now and forever,” she whispered and then was crying again.

“Damn,” she said, “Oh, damn, damn.”

“Ankle hurting again?”

“Sure it is,” she said furiously, “but that’s not worth crying over. It’s this whole . . .
thing
, Lee. It’s the ranch and the curtains I’d put up waiting for you to come home. It’s getting married yesterday which we didn’t do. It’s all this, this mess.”

“Shh. Shh . . . I hate a weeper,” he said. She smacked him, but it wasn’t meant to hurt. The sick bay was empty when they entered, except for Berkowitz, who sat close to the inboard bulkhead with his head in his hands. The Captain put the girl down on the examining table and turned to face Jamieson, who was coming from the after section of the sick bay. “I see by the papers,” said the doctor, “that we’re on our way again. “The O.O.M. says go, we go.”

“My patient, or is it star boarder, tells me it’s God’s will. You tell me it’s the Admiral’s.” He held up a ham-dramatic finger and mugged astonishment. “Or perhaps they’re the same after all.”

“Don’t be irreverent,” said Cathy.

“To which one of ‘em, girl? And what, may I ask, makes me so fortunate this morning?” He looked at the torpedoman and then at the girl. “My, business is brisk.”

“She came down the conning tower without using the ladder. But gracefully,” added the Captain.

“I was not graceful,” Cathy pouted. “The Captain dropped me in like a sack of coal.”

“Let’s see it. Oh my. You did give that a wringing out, didn’t you?” he turned to the torpedoman.

“And what’s with you, Berky?”

“I’m all right now, sir,” said Berkowitz shakily. “I thought I had a furlough and they pulled it out from under me and I kind of blew my stack. Admiral Nelson told me to come to you and get quieted down.”

Jamieson bent over him, took his wrist, looked closely at his eyes. “All right. You seem okay now. I don’t know really if the God’s will hypothesis holds water or not, but I can tell you one thing for sure: For enlisted personnel, practically anybody’s will take precedence over the e.m.’s.”

“Y-yes sir.” Berkowitz almost smiled.

“And take this doctor’s advice,” added Jamieson. “Don’t argue with admirals.”

“I won’t, sir.”

Jamieson stood up and waved him out. When he had gone, he said, “Nelson give him some lumps?”

The Captain told him what had happened. The doctor shrugged. “Rough. But then, this is likely to be a rough trip all around. You straighten ‘em out or you throw ‘em over the wall. If a man’s going to have the miseries, he’d best not be corked up in a bottle with a bunch of others. The Admiral doesn’t have to be nice. He doesn’t have to be kind. He just has to be right.” He turned to Cathy. “Get that shoe and stocking off.”

“I’ll go forward,” said the Captain, rising.

“She’ll be all right,” said the doctor. “Nothing busted. And you know the compression bandages we have nowadays. She’ll walk out of here. Only,” he said sternly to Cathy, “no dancing on no chopping blocks for a while.”

Cathy and the Captain laughed. “Oh, you heard about that.”

“It didn’t get lost in the flurry of news we’ve been having.”

The inner door swung open and the Captain, in the very act of stepping over the high-stilled out door, swung around and his jaw dropped. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“Now that is what I call a warm and welcoming statement,” smiled Dr. Susan Hiller.

“Sue!” cried Cathy.

“Hello, honey. What happened to you?”

“Used a steel deck for a trampoline,” said the doctor.

“Dr. Hiller, I thought I told you to go ashore.”

“I thought you told me I could go ashore.”

“I remember what I said.”

“Oh . . . Lee,” Cathy chided.

“I’ll carry my weight,” said Susan Hiller.

Jamieson, who had never lost the gloss of his admiration of Dr. Hiller, said gently, “Cap’n—isn’t the discussion academic at this point?”

Without answering him, Crane fixed Dr. Hiller with a cold eye. “You chose to stay aboard, then.”

A smile twitched the corners of her carven mouth. “I came aboard to study men under stress conditions,” she reminded him.

“There’ll be plenty of that ashore.”

“My present project was to study them here.” Suddenly she smiled. The effect, as always, was like throwing back heavy drapes on a sunny day. “I’d like to stop fencing with you, Captain. I was going to request permission to stay aboard anyway. Days ago I took the trouble to find out if my extra mouth would burden your stores, or even your oxygen supply. I checked on the available space. I wouldn’t think of doing it if I’d be in the way. And I’m not just supercargo. I think I can help.”

“Let me underline that,” pleaded Jamieson. “God knows what we’re in for now. Dr. Hiller’s a specialist in something we’re going to get a lot of. I’m supposed to handle these stress cases along with everything else: Dr. Hiller’s being here is a gift from God.”

“God seems to be taking a special interest in this project,” said the Captain, but he had relaxed; he was kidding; it was all right.

Dr. Hiller, sensing it immediately, said, “Thank you, Captain.”

Crane saluted and went out.

“And thank you,” said Dr. Jamieson to the psychiatrist.

“Don’t,” she said. “People are always attaching nobility to the simple matter of doing a job. I know what I have to do here,” she added with a sudden profound gravity, “I know what I must do, and I know I’m equipped to do it. I had no choice; the choice made itself.” Abruptly businesslike, she changed her voice and the subject and demanded, “What was the matter with Berkowitz?”

Jamieson, getting to work on Cathy’s ankle, said, “The poor kid. His wife’s expecting a baby about now. He doesn’t know if the baby’s alive or dead or his wife either. He got a little hysterical.”

“A lot hysterical,” Cathy amended. “I was there, and I don’t blame him a bit. But he didn’t help himself by taking off on the Admiral.”

“What happened?”

“The O.O.M. pinned his ears back clear to the sacroiliac, which he then, in a manner of speaking, kicked . . . I told Lee it was equivalent to slapping a hysterical patient. Was I right?”