Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (8 page)

She glanced at the thick china mugs, the traditional tin can of sugar and the other one of evaporated milk. No food. “Don’t tell me they’re still at it.”

“All they eat for twenty-four hours is coffee and pencils,” nodded the cook.

“I fell spang asleep with my chin in my notebook,” said Cathy ruefully. “The Old Old Man booted me out and told me not to report for twelve hours.” (As on all ships, the Captain was the Old Man; here, the Admiral had become the Old Old Man.)

“They doing any good in there?” asked the cook anxiously.

She touched him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Cookie. If there’s anyone on earth who can do something about it, it’s Nelson. How’s the little dog?”

The cook smiled widely. “Oh, he’s fine. You’d never guess he’d spent four days floating around lost on an ice floe. Except for his sunburn.”

“A dog with sunburn?”

“Yeah, we noticed he was tender when we patted him. Thought at first it was internal injuries or something. Then I thought to look between his fur, you know, and darn if his skin wasn’t all red, just like sunburn. But he’s getting over it.”

She shook her head in amazement and went aft to the mess. She ordered coffee from the messman, and was just starting on it when Susan Hiller opened the door from the after end and stepped in over the high sill.

“ ’Morning, Sue.”

“Is that what it is?” smiled the psychiatrist. She came and sat opposite. “It gets a little hard to tell, doesn’t it?”

“To some people it doesn’t seem to matter. Do you know the Admiral hasn’t had any sleep since we picked up that castaway?”

“I know,” said Dr. Hiller. “I worry about him.”

“Don’t,” said Cathy positively. “There’s one set of rules that applies to human beings and one to—”

“Admirals?”

“No. Just Admiral Nelson. Proof: B.J. Crawford is trying to keep up with him but all he can do now is sprawl on the Admiral’s settee with one eye closed and grunt ‘Yes’ when Nelson calculates something. The Congressman gave up long ago.”

“Here’s one Congressional junket he’ll never forget.”

“Don’t be too hard on him, Sue,” Cathy said warmly. “I was ready to agree with the rest of the world, that Parker is typecast for the headline-hungry, penny-pinching politician, but I’ll give him credit. He hasn’t panicked; he has a good head—you don’t fumble around federal budgets for as many years as he has without learning something about math—and he puts it absolutely at the Admiral’s disposal. At the same time, he operates on a ‘If you can’t help, don’t hinder.’ basis; when he can’t help, he has sense enough to stay out of the way.”

“Good to hear,” nodded the psychiatrist. “And—where do we stand on that—that
thing
up there?”

“The only thing I can tell you—and I’m not pulling security!—is that for some reason which nobody but possibly Nelson understands, the band lies over the earth’s magnetic equator, not its geographic one.”

“Well, I—I hope that helps.”

“Don’t worry, Sue. We’re in good hands.”

Dr. Hiller smiled. “Oh, my dear, I know we are. And with all due and deserved credit to your admired Admiral, I think I could say that even if he didn’t exist.”

“I couldn’t,” said Cathy immediately.

“I can,” said Dr. Hiller seriously, all teasing gone from her voice. She glanced around her, a meaningful gesture; it said things about the crew, about tight mouths, pale sweaty brows, cautious fearful looks at the TV repeaters, which instead of feeding entertainment and enlightenment, stared out at everyone like the cataracted eye of a corpse. “There’s a lot to be afraid of,” she said quietly, “but I am not afraid. I have a sort of . . . secret weapon. I wish I could share it.”

“What is it?” asked Cathy, prepared for some subtle psychological revelation.

“Do you remember the names of the men Bergen read over the radio that first time—the scientists who are meeting at the UN?”

“I remember enough to be a little awestruck still. Pittar, Dobrovny, even Meshikov. Charbier.”

“I know Charbier,” said Susan Hiller. “He was at the big symposium in Athens two years ago. It was a symposium on psychiatry and he’s most famous as a chemist, but the paper he read there was the main thing that happened there. Chemotherapeutics—that is, drugs for treatment of psychic disorders—went ahead twenty years just from that one paper. Then I met him—he’s the most charming, uncomplicated, modest human being you could imagine. But he’s not my secret weapon. Zucco is.”

“Zucco? I—well, of course I’ve heard of him, but I don’t know as much about him as perhaps I should.”

“Emilio Zucco,” said Dr. Hiller, and her eyes glowed. “He’s not by any means an old man, you know, but already he can take his place in the company of the world’s universal geniuses. Like Franklin—scientist, statesman, diplomat, author. Like Leonardo da Vinci, who, while being artist enough to paint the Last Supper, was a technologist five hundred years ahead of his time. You know of Zucco probably as a theoretical mathematician in Einstein’s league—”

“Oh yes, and a practical scientist too—didn’t he design the big radio telescope at Altamont in the Andes?”

“Yes he did. He’s an astronomer, cosmologist, physicist. But I’ll bet you didn’t know he is a superb artist, a composer as well; he plays piano quite well enough to have been a concert performer.”

“I didn’t know that. What I have heard mostly about him is that anyone who gets between Zucco and what he wants, gets a Zucco-sized hole through him.”

Dr. Hiller laughed. “That’s very well put. And pretty close to the truth. But it kind of stands to reason, doesn’t it? He’s so often right—one could say,
always
—that it’s a little foolish to stand in his way. Dr. Zucco is my idea of the ultimate proof of the old saying that when history needs a giant, mankind produces one. Our world is a lot better place to live in because that man is alive.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it. I could have nightmares, though, about what could happen if a man with that much reputation and that much drive ever should be wrong about anything important.”

“Sleep tight,” smiled Susan Hiller, “and dream pretty: that is one nightmare you don’t have to bother yourself with. I don’t know what that fire in the sky is, but one thing I am sure about: Zucco will know what to do about it.”

“If anything can be done about it.”

“If nothing can be done about it,” said Dr. Hiller with absolute certainty, “Emilio Zucco will make a way.”

“Well,” said Cathy Connors, finishing her coffee and getting up, “I’m mighty glad to have him on our team. But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick with the Admiral.”

“I’m glad to have him on the team,” said the psychiatrist, smiling up at the secretary. “But he is, after all, only a technologist.”

“
Only
? Why—”

“Oh please—please, don’t be angry! That was the wrong way to put it, I know. It touches on one of my pet peeves, that’s all. I’ve admitted my own field isn’t a science and never will be. I go against those in my own field who try to call it one, or make it one. I go against those—and there are a lot of them—who want to make a technology out of it, too. You’ve got to understand me—I don’t look down on science and technology—I envy them! I wish I could get the kind of measurements they get, predict results the way they do! But to my mind science is pioneering, discovery, the finding of new paths. Technology is exploitation—the making of six-lane superhighways out of those pioneered paths. I’m really sorry, Cathy—I shouldn’t have said Admiral Nelson was
only
a technologist. It was quite wrong of me. But I do stick to the statement that while he is the best technologist in the whole wide world, he isn’t a scientist like Dr. Zucco. Will you forgive me?”

Still angry, Cathy Connors found it possible to laugh. “I tell you what—you let Dr. Zucco save your world and I’ll let the Admiral save mine. Then I don’t think it matters who does it; it’s the same world, isn’t it?”

“Sure it is,” smiled the psychiatrist. “Meanwhile—I’m not afraid, and I wish I could share the reason. Is that clear now?”

“I see just what you mean,” nodded Cathy. “I’m not either, and when I see these jokers around here getting all tensed up, it just makes me mad. It only means they don’t know the man.”

“Exactly, exactly, exactly what I was trying to say!”

“But not about the same man.”

“That’s right. But—you’re not angry?”

“Of course not. You—just don’t know the man.” She waved and went aft to the Admiral’s suite.

“Come in!” he called to her knock. She did.

Well used to the Admiral and his ways, she still stopped and almost rocked back from the impact of disorder in the suite. Its two rooms, barely separated by a large archway, were carpeted by a veritable snowfall of torn paper, except for a track from a point near the door to a point in the other room by the bed—Nelson’s “pacing” path. It had been said of him that he did not think on his feet, but with them. In the past thirty-six hours he had probably logged more than a hundred miles, back and forth in the little rooms. Except for a grizzled stubble on his chin and a rather unusual brilliance of eye—the brightness one associates with fever or fatigue—Nelson seemed unaffected by his marathon think-session.

On the settle was B.J. Crawford, one foot on the cushions, one on the floor, one eye open and attentive, the rest of his face asleep. On the desk-side chair was Congressman Parker, shaved, starched, combed and pressed. Across the desk and on bookcases and shelves were slide-rules, a portable computer, drawing instruments, charts, maps and grids, and reference books, some wearing so many crumpled book-marks that they looked like the ruffles on a lamb chop.

“Ah, Cathy, come in, come in. Congressman Parker just got here.” Which explained a puzzle.

“Get some sleep?”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Did you?”

“Later. Now then. B.J., where’s that doughnut?”

Admiral Crawford, without opening his other eye, slowly raised one hand and pointed, then let it fall. From the high shelf indicated, Nelson took down a square of cardboard on which rested a large doughnut. “Remarkable technique that man has,” said Nelson, nodding toward the settee. “He’s tuned out everything but the matter at hand. Show you what I mean. B.J.,” he barked, “how do you like the L.A. Angels this season?”

B.J. Crawford lay like a corpse, the one eye fixed unfocussed on middle distance. “And mind you,” said Nelson, “there lies the nation’s number one Angels baseball fan. Now watch. B.J., what do you suppose caused this firebelt?”

“Solar flare,” B.J. responded, mutteringly, but distinctly, moving nothing but his lips, and instantly relaxing them into their former slackness.

“Remarkable man,” said Nelson admiringly. “Cathy, you couldn’t have got here at a better time. I was just about to explain my theory to the Congressman here, and I want you to listen too. You and he are the ideal audience. Intelligent and uninformed. Don’t get mad: I mean it kindly. It’s the most useful you could be.

“Tell you why. When we get to New York it isn’t going to be what you’d expect—a nice quiet technical discussion among scientific bigwigs, with some bright newspaper men to translate and interpret for the wire services. There won’t be time. We have a program, a cure for this thing, and we’ll have to—”

“We have?” cried the Congressman and Cathy in unison, and Cathy added “. . . . sir?”

“Oh sure,” said Nelson, brushing aside their hopeful astonishment; he didn’t quite say, “What else?” but his tone did. “But we haven’t time for presentation plus discussion plus persuasion in the scientific area, and then translation into plain American and the whole thing all over again to the public. We have to hand it over to everybody all at once with no gobbledegook, because from the looks of things we’re going to have to do everything at a dead run or not at all. So you two are to be the guinea pigs, right? I’ll make my little pitch and if there’s anything you don’t understand for Pete’s sake sound off and say so, because when I get up there and spout, I have to be sure my nozzle’s adjusted somewhere between needle-jet and dense fog. Right? Right.

“This,” he said, holding up a ping-pong ball, “is the earth.” He held up the doughnut. This is the Van Allen radiation belt.” He pushed the ball into the hole in the doughnut and held them together.

“This, roughly speaking, is the way the Van Allen belt surrounds the earth. Are you with me?”

“What,” demanded Congressman Parker, “is the Van Allen belt? I mean, what’s it made of?”

“Good,” said the Admiral disarmingly, “that’s what I want, Stupid questions.

“The Van Allen belt is an area of radiation, varying in intensity, formed, as far as anyone knows, of free electrons from the sun trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. Now you’ll notice that the belt impinges on the earth here, in the hole of the doughnut, at about 50° north of the equator and 50° south of the equator. (It’s the magnetic equator I’m talking about, by the way.) Right? Right. Well then, just because I show it to you this way doesn’t mean that’s the way it is. To explain that irritating remark, I’ll have to cut this model through the middle.”

He made a cutting motion at the doughnut with a letter-opener, and then threw opener and doughnut aside. He fumbled for a large square of paper—it was a navigation chart—flipped it to the blank side and stuck it to the inboard bulkhead with cellophane tape. “I hope the UN can get me something fancier than this,” he grumbled as he worked. He scrabbled through the mountain of detritus on his desk and miraculously found a black felt marking pen. Quickly he drew a circle in the middle of the paper. “This is the ping-pong ball, or the Earth. And here—” He sketched, using a wavery broken stroke, a crescent with its points impinging on the circle about 50° above and below the horizontal, its inner diameter about the same as that of the “earth,” and its outer diameter about a third larger. Using a pencil rather than the black, bold marker, he shaded the crescent so that it was darkest where it was thickest. “So your doughnut turns out to be a hollow shell, with a thick wall on the outside,” he said. “The radiation’s most intense out here where it’s thick, and tapers off to nothing about a thousand miles up, over the fiftieth meridians north and south. That’s the outer Van Allen belt. You with me so far?”