Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (21 page)

It was God’s will. I did not hate him.

Crane passed the paper to Dr. Hiller. “Would you like to interpret that?”

She flicked her wide eyes over it. “It speaks for itself, I think.”

“Was he saying he did not hate God?”

“I shouldn’t think so. It would be more as if he referred to O’Brien. It says, I think, that he felt he must kill O’Brien, and he could not survive his remorse. But his compulsion was stronger than anything else . . .”

“His compulsion was what he called the will of God. What does that mean?”

“It means whatever his conviction was of the will of God.”

“The will of God,” said the Captain, low in his throat. And he went to see Alvarez.

At last, he went to see Alvarez.

“S
TOP ALL
!” C
HIP
M
ORTON THUMBED
the hooter and called into the general p.a.: “Condition Yellow. Condition Yellow.” He snarled into the Main Control mike, “Both inboard, slow astern. Stop her, damn it.”

Nelson came bursting out of the wardroom. Morton had a fist raised, a thumb pointing forward, all ready for the O.O.M.’s quick glance. Nelson stared forward. “Stop that swing!” he barked. “Watch her head!” snapped Morton into the mike, in his turn. An engineering officer with navigating experience, Kaski was now divemaster. He was a good man, very good. He was not as good as O’Brien. The admiral had said, the day before after they had buried the two dead, submariner style, through the torpedo tubes, “If they gave me my choice to sail without O’Brien or without engines, I think I’d sail without engines . . .”

Captain Crane came in, outwardly alert, inwardly, if anyone cared to look closely, a little dazed.

“What is it, sir?”

The Admiral pointed forward.

They had threaded their way through the Straits of Magellan, running deep to avoid as much of the wild water as possible, navigating by chart and by contact. Although they had not again met a channel as narrow as the one from which they had nudged the whale, there were still some tight ones to be negotiated, and the last of these was dead ahead. It was broad daylight above, and at 150 feet there was plenty of light to see the channel ahead, which looked a little like a mountain pass, with peaks on either side, and beyond a wide emptiness that, after these nervous days, looked like the promised land to them—better than land—it was sea room.

Morton had already turned on the floods, and was manipulating the searchlight controls. The twin white beams, integrated so that their divergence could give range, shot through the V-shaped passage and turned a dim thread out there into a silver chain. Following it upward, it showed what bobbed there, spherical, horned, waiting.

“Now wouldn’t you know,” said Crane. “We’re just lucky, I guess. Of all the places for a mine to drift to, of all the times for it to happen—”

“I don’t think luck had much to do with it,” said Nelson. “Depress that light, Mr. Morton. Right down to the floor.”

The beams came down, scythed along the floor of the pass. It rose, then fell away like a road going over the crown of a hill. Dead ahead, just where it fell away, lay a second mine on a short chain.

“Nobody lost that egg, Captain. Somebody laid it there.” He met Crane’s eyes, and, without any humor, he chuckled. “I must say, I’m flattered.”

“The Southampton woman wasn’t altogether crazy. Dr. Zucco really has scrounged up a task force then.”

“The Southampton woman was altogether crazy,” said the Admiral, “and also altogether right—something which can happen.”

“I couldn’t take it seriously,” Crane confessed. “Zucco—”

“Zucco is wrong,” said the Admiral. “Either he doesn’t know it, in which case he thinks he’s right as much as I do—and I won’t be stopped, you know—or he does know it, which is ten times the reason he’d do a thing like this. He’s never been publicly wrong about anything in his whole life, and he isn’t about to start now . . . I wonder how they got here in time to lay mines? Chanced flying, I guess, to some South American port. Knew we’d try the Straits.”

“I think I know now what happened to that whale we nudged aside.”

“That whale . . . oh, but you . . . are . . . right,” said the Admiral slowly, always a sign that his brain was working fast. He pointed. “If we rise enough to clear that lower one, we’ll be scraping the chain of the other.”

“They could be magnetically armed, horns or no horns,” said Crane. “Just getting near would be enough. We can’t chance that. Either we go back and try some other way, or we get them out of there.”

“We don’t go back,” said the Admiral positively.

“Might send ‘em a fish,” Morton chimed in.

“We can take a whole lot,” said the Admiral, “but I think one torpedo plus two mines plus a rock gradient about 60 per cent sure to slide—I wouldn’t want it.”

“I’ll take out the minisub and cut the chains.”

“You’ll send out the minisub and cut the chains.” The O.O.M. turned what the fo’c’s’le called “the icy eye” on him. “Or have you taken a course in that too?”

“Well, sir, I can certainly—”

“Mr. Morton, ask the CPO to step up here, and Seaman Smith.”

Morton turned to the intercom, and the Admiral said softly to Crane, “You don’t have to be the whole crew, Lee.”

As softly, Crane said, “Why not? I can’t be the Captain.”

At the look of pain which, in swift spasm, crossed that rocky old face, Lee Crane could have bitten off his tongue clear back to the inner ear. Ordinarily he would have been incapable of thinking such a thing, let alone speak it. Shocked and miserable, he stood silent, his face as rockbound as the Admiral’s now was, until the Admiral said quietly, “It’s all yours, Captain,” and started aft.

Crane was after him in two strides. “Admiral—” Nelson stopped, looking aft as if plotting a course. Crane meant it to sound something like an apology, but his throat was tight and it came out harsh, little-boy-smart-alecky: “I’ll get you to the right place at the right time.”

Nelson turned then and smiled like an old man. “I’m sure you will,” and walked out.

Crane scowled and went into the greenhouse to look at the mines, like great big lollipops, standing on their stems and shining in the floods.

“He had that coming, and boy howdy, you handed it over,” said Morton.

“Shut your mouth,” said Crane, and only as the air reverberated around him did he realize how loud he had shouted.

“Okay, okay,” said Morton, his back turned, but the cut of his ears somehow showing that he grinned. “You’re the Captain.” And then he added, “Really, and if Gleason had not appeared at that moment he would certainly have climbed right up the executive officer’s back and hammered him into the deck like a spike into a pine plank.

“Yessir,” said Gleason.

“Where’s Smith?”

“I’ll get’m,” said the CPO, and before anyone could move to stop him, he leaned across the console and sang a few wordless notes into the general intercom. “The knee’s in the greenhouse,” he added, and switched off.

All over the ship could be heard the echoes of laughter. It was too easy to laugh now, to cry, to kill, and where was Cathy just now . . .? He forced his attention back to the CPO, and his mind repeated to him the notes Gleason had sung. They were the same he had once heard Gleason whistling—and in a rush he recognized the tune—that treacly mass of excess sentiment called Sonny Boy. He recalled the day—how long ago it seemed!—when Nelson had, with blatant disregard for the consequences, publicly reminded Smith how once he bounced on old Admiral B.J. Crawford’s knee. He felt a surge of profound annoyance against the O.O.M., probably because he needed to just then. It made him feel much better. How could the old guy have been so stupid? Had he really forgotten the awful cargo of ribbing the youngster would have to carry from that moment on? Didn’t he know? In forty years, hadn’t he learned anything about the Navy?

“Knock off that horseplay,” he snapped harshly. (He did not say “horseplay.”) Gleason’s good, doggy face turned masklike. “Yessir.”

“I want those chains cut.”

Gleason peered forward, pursed his lips to whistle, seemed to recall something, and became masklike again. “Will do, sir.”

Smith came in then, saw Gleason first, said whitely, “Listen, poochface, you pull that Sonny B—”

“
Tenshun!
” said Gleason.

“Sorry, sir,” said Smith to the Captain.

“Seaman Smith,” said Gleason, “we are going to cut those chains.”

Smith looked puzzled, then followed Gleason’s gaze out through the herculite nose. His jaw dropped, and then he nodded and said, “Aye-aye, sir.”

“On the double,” said the Captain, and the harshness was still in his throat, though he did not mean it to be. They tumbled out.

Captain Crane, waiting for the minisub to show itself, stared unseeing out toward the pass and the mines, and tried hard to get hold of himself. For almost two whole days now, ever since he had stormed aft to the sick bay and Alvarez, he had been shaken, overwhelmed by a sense of unreality and disbelief. His inward condition was analogous to that of a man who had for years walked a two-by-four between his house and his barn, until one day someone had pointed out to him that under the narrow timber was a thousand-foot drop. And ever after he took no casual step. Crane was built and trained to do whatever comes next; his world then appeared on both sides of him like scenery, having built itself. But ever since that talk with Alvarez, he had felt compelled to test his every word and pace, every thought and all the meanings of those who spoke to him, to be sure they applied, to be sure they were there, were real.

And these were all feelings, pressures, for which there were no terms as set down here. A man just having learned what a light-year is, and of how many light-years it is across the galaxy, and then that there are other, larger galaxies immeasurably distant across the gulfs of space; such a man, one night, might lie looking up at the stars and suddenly see them as what they are—something other than pinholes in a black cloth bowl. With his own eyes he might suddenly see that some were near and some far and the blackness between a pool of illimitable emptiness. Such a man might, at such a moment, know fear the like of which he had never imagined before, purely in the realization that he had lived all his life with his bones and his soul on the verge of so majestic an emptiness, and brushed its fringes with his hair.

It was such a void that Alvarez had opened to Captain Crane, though one of another kind; and if all the man said was true, then the fire in the sky was a small stripe to lash his back, and the end of the world not quite severe enough to punish him.

Cathy Connors was beside him. “Lee . . . Lee, I’m
frightened
.”

Crane stared into the swirling luminous deep. How strange it seemed that nothing out there looked wet.

She said, “One of the men was . . . after Sue Hiller. She got her door locked and then he tried to break it down. Someone was coming and he ran away. She wouldn’t say who.”

Crane’s lips parted because in the void Alvarez had spread for him lay a word, and in a moment, if it could only be an untroubled and uninterrupted moment, he could lay tongue on it. It tantalized him, coming close enough for him almost to feel its shape—and he closed his lips, knowing it was gone again.

“I’m afraid, Lee. It’s going to happen again. A lot.”

“Maybe,” Crane said distantly, to the herculite hull, “it doesn’t matter after all.”

“Oh,” whispered Cathy Connors, and by the time the minisub appeared, she had gone as quietly as she had come.

“Mr. Morton,” Crane barked, “Rig me a remote mike and hang it on the sonarphone.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

He came forward, trailing wire. Crane reached back without looking and took the microphone.

Morton said, “Jesus, Lee, d’you think—”

“Gleason,” said the Captain, his voice crashing, “do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, sir,” said a speaker on the console from the other end of the greenhouse.

Morton, in mid-sentence, mid-stride, still foolishly extending the hand with which he had carried the microphone, turned suddenly and stamped back to the console.

“Belly down,” said the Captain, “and crawl. I’d guess those things were tuned to something
Seaview
size, but all the same, stay as far away as you can. They could be acoustic or magnetic or contact armed and tripped, or any combination.”

“Aye, sir.” The jaunty-looking, humpbacked, sleek-skinned minisub, looking like somewhat less than a minnow compared with the
Seaview
, settled evenly through the brilliant water. It moved as evenly, and with as little visible effort-of-control, as a seahorse, sank sedately to within a few inches of the ocean floor, and crept up the incline of the pass like a ground vehicle. It topped the rise and went down the other side, out of sight.

Crane watched the horned skin of the lower mine, microphone tensely in hand, ready to bark a caution if he saw any evidence of jolting or swaying. He saw none. At the end of an interminable four minutes the mine simply began to rise, and ballooned upward out of range of the floods.

“One away,” said the Captain. “Mr. Morton, get a sonar fix on that drifter and lock on to it. We want to know its exact position at all times. And get another automatic finder locked on to that second one.”

Morton grunted an acknowledgement. Crane got a glimpse of the minisub as it moved toward the second mine, and then it was out of sight again as it sank to attack the anchor chain as near as possible to the bottom. The minisub’s powerful electric winch was tied to one arm of an oversized bolt-cutter, the other arm of which was held by a fitting in its hull. Apparently it could not have been better designed.

“Two away,” said the Captain. “Slow ahead both inboard. Give Kaski 2.5 magnification on the forward screen and turn over the searchlights to Central Control. Put a man on the screen, give him the controls, and see that he’s ordered to do nothing else. Get me two lookouts for up here. Ahoy the minisub!”

“Smith, on the minnie, sir.”

“Scout ahead. Stay in the loom of our floods, and use your own lights as well. See that your phone stays in the on position at all times and stand by for course corrections.”