Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (14 page)

“You could be. It depends. Slapping a hysterical patient can be beneficial if the slap is administered by a friend or a stranger, but not by an enemy.”

“Oh, the Admiral’s not his enemy!”

“No? Ah . . . tell me; how did he deliver this figurative slap?”

“First he told Berkowitz he would let him get ashore and then he said it was because he wouldn’t have the likes of him aboard; ‘I hate a weeper,’ is what he said.”

“Pick ‘em up and slam ‘em down hard,” said Jamieson.

“A little harder than hysteria called for, perhaps. That sounds inimical enough to me.”

“Oh, Sue, you just don’t understand the military situation,” said Cathy ardently. “The man in command can’t have an ordinary set of values. I’ve thought a lot about this—I had to—I’m marrying one of the monsters. The commanding officer, however decent and kind a man he might be, has to replace a lot of ordinary standards. (Ouch! You’re putting on that bandage awful tight.) ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ can be completely different things when you look at them in terms of a military operation. Admiral Nelson’s heart might bleed for Berkowitz and very probably does, but the welfare of his ship, his mission and his crew have to come first. And though I hate to say it, a hysterical sailor with primary concerns different from the ship’s is an enemy.”

Susan Hiller smiled a small eloquent smile, nodded a tiny, significant nod. “Absolutely all I suggested was that the Admiral treated him like an enemy.”

“Oh,” said Cathy. “Oh dear.”

“Which saves the ship and destroys the man. Which creates stress conditions on military-type missions, especially submarines. Which explains again why I decided to stay.”

“Now hear this!” clattered the annunciator. “Torpedoman Berkowitz. Lay forward to Main Control, on the double.”

The three in the sick bay looked at one another. “Excuse me,” said Susan Hiller quietly, and went out.

“Berkowitz,” said Jamieson, his eyes on his bandaging job, “is now tried and sentenced. Execution of sentence follows.”

“Oh come on now, doc. It isn’t as grim as that. The O.O.M.’s decided what to do and he’ll do it. I bet you anything he’s found a way to get Berky back to his wife. He’s that kind of a man.”

“Interesting, what you said about the military sense of values,” said the doctor. “True, too. If he does get Berky off, I wonder what’s the real reason—to do the man a favor, or to rid the ship of a source of trouble.”

“It doesn’t matter, if he can do both at once.”

“It matters if you’re interested, as Dr. Hiller and I both are, in the clockworks inside a man’s head.” He paused to seal down the end of the pressure-bandage, then said thoughtfully, “I suppose the ideal way to handle it is to do the man a favor in such a way that the rest of the crew thinks it’s a punishment.”

“Like, eat that ice cream or I’ll knock your block off.”

I
N THE CONTROL ROOM
, A
DMIRAL
N
ELSON
and the Captain stood by the control, where the oblivious O’Brien was coaxing the big craft along inches above the channel floor. Dr. Hiller stood back by the main corridor, watching—waiting and watching.

Berkowitz appeared. He held his stocky young figure erect. His smooth face was pale.

“Torpedoman Berkowitz reporting, sir.”

The Admiral reached out a foot and touched a heavy, compact rubber package with his foot.

“Hang that on you.”

Berkowitz, swallowing his surprise and joy, picked up the package, a folded one-man inflatable dinghy, oars, and inflator, and hung it by its strap over his shoulder. “Take your gear,” said the Admiral coldly, looking down at the immaculate seabag as if it were something a dog had left there.

Berkowitz shouldered the bag. The Admiral pointed to the main control console, where one of the TV repeaters showed a periscope view of the famous lower harbor of New York. The view swung to point out a nearby shoreline, crowned with granite walls over which poked old 105-mm. cannon. “Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. You could make that without a boat.”

He signaled with a finger, and the Captain moved a control, swinging the view aft. It showed the prow of a harbor police boat, its bow-chaser like the admiral’s grim pointing finger, the wings of spray it threw up turned pink, light diluted blood, by the glare of the fire-belt. “The metropolitan police,” said the Admiral. “They have no jurisdiction, of course, but they’re hanging on anyway. Whether they will let you go is something I neither know nor care. Up you go.”

Berkowitz stood at tight attention. His eyes glinted, and just once, and fractionally, his face twisted: the Captain knew as clearly as if the man had made a speech that sudden tears had long been an affliction with him, and that he hated them and himself for showing them. He said hoarsely,

“Thank you, sir.”

“That,” said the Admiral, “is just like a gangrenous foot saying thank you when you cut it off. Get out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” Berkowitz whispered, and, clumsy with his burdens, he began inching up the ladder.

It seemed to take forever. When he reached the top, the amazing O’Brien, apparently unaware all this time of what was going on in the chamber, made one efficient motion and hauled back the hatch control. Pink light spilled down, patterning the floor and the inkblot of Berkowitz’s shadow, which humped itself to one side and then was gone. O’Brien’s hand struck again, snakelike, at the control and the hatch boomed down, blacking out the patch of light and thumbing their eardrums. Admiral Nelson found himself, quite by accident, glaring at Dr. Hiller’s face.

“Surgery,” said Dr. Hiller.

“An emetic,” said the Admiral. “What are you doing here?”

“Dr. Hiller volunteered her services,” said the Captain, “which I—my
God!
”

They followed his shocked stare, and saw, on the periscope repeater, which was still trained aft, the curved, whale-like back of the
Seaview
, mostly awash, and behind it, the police launch. On the deck, Berkowitz could be seen standing, up to his shins in water, wrestling with the rubber dinghy, which had just begun to inflate, while with one hand he clutched his shouldered seabag. And from the police boat came a little flickering of light, a mist of thin smoke, and suddenly the long cruel threads of tracer bullets. There was a sudden clatter on the hull.

Berkowitz was facing away from them as he dropped bag and boat both and stood watching the boat; and though they could not see his face, his whole stance and bearing spoke volumes of all the varieties of most intense astonishment. The bag rolled unnoticed into the water and astern; the boat, hung up for a moment on a stanchion-fitting (though the stanchions themselves were stowed away), bobbed like a bubble of tar for a moment, then rolled over, showing a jagged line of punctures, collapsed and sank. Berkowitz turned slowly until he faced the conning tower. They could now clearly see his face. It contained nothing but amazement. He opened his mouth and, effortless as an overfed dog, he vomited. The vomit mingled with the widening soaking stain of blood on the front of his white uniform. Berkowitz’ face then made whatever minuscule change a face needs to go from astonishment to a full, calm, accusing comprehension. He looked as if he understood all mankind, all motives, the reasons for everything and the natures of all. He raised his right hand and waved it; it was in no sense a salute; it was an acknowledgement. Then he let his eyes close and pitched forward into the water washing the deck. It cleansed him away like a flyspeck and left the hull stainless and gleaming.

The launch cut its motors and swung broadside. A man with a boathook appeared on its deck, peering into the water for the body.

“Trigger . . . happy . . . sons . . . of . . . bitches.” It came in an under-the-breath monotone, probably from O’Brien, who nevertheless kept his deft fingertip movements going on the controls; yet it came clearly into the deafening silence.

“Stop all,” said the Captain.

“Aye, sir,” said O’Brien; but before even he could move the Admiral rapped, “As you were.”

“Aye, sir,” said O’Brien.

“What did you have in mind, mister?” demanded the Admiral.

“Ready the deck gun, sir,” said Crane.

“The man is dead,” said the Admiral. “Sinking the launch won’t bring him back. What are your engines, Mr. O’Brien?”

“Half ahead all, sir.”

“Make it three-quarters.” He reached for the mike, pressed a stud. “Bow lookouts.”

“Yes, sir!” chorused two voices on the intercom.

“Take another layer off your eyeballs. We’re increasing speed.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Nelson, his big face impenetrable, fixed Crane with his sharp gaze, then Dr. Hiller. Without speaking, he wheeled and went forward toward his suite.

Crane found himself, as the Admiral had a moment before, staring fixedly at the psychiatrist. She held his gaze, then looked away from him and after the Admiral. He saw her nod. There was something chillingly impersonal about the tiny gesture. It was like the flick of a statistician’s pen, putting a checkmark beside something significant in a long column of figures. He stood immobile watching her as she turned and walked to the corridor and down it out of sight.

The Captain took off his hat and slammed it down on the deck, and said the most famous of all four-letter words.

“Yes, sir,” said O’Brien.

O
N AUGUST
8
TH THE AVERAGE AIR TEMPERATURE
was 139°. On the 12th it was 141.3°.

The sea was sluggish, shiny-surfaced but heaving. The sky was cloudless but hazy, and the firebelt hung across the high southern sky like the bridge to hell.

Captain Lee Crane stopped outside the Admiral’s suite and tapped on the door. “Come in!” said a voice, and he entered.

“You wanted me, Ad—oh! Hi.”

Commander Emery took one of his feet off the Admiral’s desk, swung around in the Admiral’s swivel chair, and put both his feet up on the opposite corner. The Captain grinned at him. Emery was, in Crane’s mind’s eye, the original Shaggy Man. There was an indefinable quality about the man that always called the word up. It had nothing to do with his appearance, really. Starched, smoothed, pressed (none of which he was at the moment) he would still seem shaggy. Perhaps it was the big-dog friendliness of the man, perhaps his utterly confident lack of respect for formality. He was a man who did not need straight ruled lines and sharp creases to comfort himself in an uncertain world. “Hi, Lee. The O.O.M.’s brushing his teeth or something. Sit you down some.”

Crane sat on the edge of the settle. “What’s the occasion?”

“Ways and means. You know Harriman Nelson. He likes to have things all nice and tidy. He never did get permission from anybody to make this trip and shoot this bird.”

“Looks like permission is first-place, hard to come by and second-place, sort of an empty gesture.”

“Not to the O.O.M. He didn’t mind spitting in the eye of those UN characters nor the New York police. Damn them,” he intoned passionately, then dropped the passion and went on in his easy-going rumble. “Question of jurisdiction. This isn’t Navy, this pigboat, or even Government, if it comes down to that; the Bureau of Marine Exploration, you might say, directs it, but when you come right down to it it was created as a land tool of Harriman Nelson. This tail wags that dog.”

“So really, what’s the problem? In fact and actuality, Nelson’s the big wheel. He bought it, built it, paid for it and he bosses it. Why doesn’t he just look in the mirror and say
‘Hm?’
and then nod his head and say,
‘Uh-huh.’
”

Emery laughed. “He would, Lee, he would, if it were any kind of an operation but this. Also if he were any other kind of a man than what he is. But he’s Navy—retired Navy, sure: an out-and-out civilian, when you come right down to it, but Navy for all that; it’s the way he thinks, the way he feels, the way he is. And if you could define the indefinable ‘real Navy’, or at least find the lowest common denominator for the whole sea-going soldier-boy business, you’d find that from the three-day Annapolis boot with hay in his hair, clear on up the layers of legend where live ninety-year-old retired five-star admirals, you’d find that they had one thing in common—they worked for somebody. Now that’s so self-evident up through the ranks that it seems silly to mention it, and so overlooked at the very top that most people wouldn’t even realize what you were talking about.” Emery acrobatically fumbled a hopelessly beat-up pipe out of his right pants pocket, and a tattered oilskin pouch out of his left rear pocket, and a jet lighter out of his left pants pocket, and a knife out of his watch pocket, all without disturbing the feet, ankle upon ankle, which one heel-point supported on the extreme corner of the Admiral’s desk. “And yet the fact that a high admiral is a subordinate is a thing that means a great deal—more, perhaps, than anything else—to such a man. Two reasons: one, conditioning. An admiral is by definition a long-term bedfellow of the naval attitude, and I say bedfellow advisedly; he lives with it, sleeps with it. Two: As he climbs the long hill, there are a lot of guys up there ahead of him—from the bottom it looks like that mob we saw on the plaza in front of St. Peter’s. But the higher they go, the fewer there are, and when he’s spent most of a lifetime getting absolutely as high as he can go, nobody can be surprised that in seeing only one man between himself and the sky that he preoccupies himself pretty completely with that man’s importance.”

“By God, Emery, you do paint a picture. I got as far as four stripes and never thought of it that way before. So he’s got to get the permission of the President of the United States.”

“Got to, must,
sine qua non
and absolutely.”

“And if the President refuses?”

“I think,” said Emery, stabbing his thumb into the bowl of his disreputable pipe, “that every man has within him valuations which override what he knows to be the truth, or what he knows is right. Most of us unfortunately have many such valuations. Harriman Nelson, a professional seeker after truth, a career-man, you might say, in that holy search every bit as much as a career man in the Navy, has very few such valuations. In the support of what he knows to be right, he will kick over anybody or anything—and you saw that happen at the UN. But the one thing—maybe his only thing—weightier than the truth to him is his loyalty to his superior. I pray God the President does say yes, because if he doesn’t, he will obey and that obedience will destroy him.” Emery laughed suddenly; it was shocking. “Of course,” he added, nursing the three-inch flame of his jet lighter into action, “That obedience would destroy all of the rest of us, including the President of the United States, and after that, I guess it wouldn’t matter.”