Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (22 page)

“Aye, sir.”

“You locked on to those drifters?”

“Yes, sir,” said Morton. “They’re well clear.”

“As you go.”

Crane turned again to the nose and stood looking out until two sailors slipped up beside him. The floor sloped sharply away ahead, and the Captain returned to the console to look at the charts. It looked like sea room at last.

“Full ahead, sir?”

“As you go!” snapped the Captain. Morton shrugged; it was insolent, but to remark on it would have seemed picayune. Instead, Crane said, poring over the chart and not looking at Morton, “Mr. Morton, could you bring yourself to lay mines and then just go off and forget about it?”

Morton looked startled; he turned quickly and looked out through the nose. “You think we’ll get a reception committee?”

By way of answering, Crane gave orders: “Discontinue all sound projection systems. Establish situation Hush [the Sea-view’s drill code for whispers, tiptoes, and the elimination of dish and tool clatter] and break out every passive listening and locating device aboard. Ahoy the minnie.”

“Gleason here, sir,” said the speaker.

“Situation Hush,” said Crane. “Proceed as ordered, course three hundred. Do not acknowledge this. Over.”

Like a shark with a pilot fish,
Seaview
and the minisub crept out of the Straits and into deep Pacific water. Crane hugged bottom until its slope led them to about 40 fathoms, then held that level, shallow enough to keep things comfortable for the minisub, deep enough to make their lights undetectable in daylight.

“Stop all,” said Crane quietly after about ten minutes. As always, the difference between the almost-silent engines, and none at all, was jolting. Morton picked up the minisub in the search beams and flickered them. The sub acknowledged with its fin lights, and seemed to approach backwards—actually the result of
Seaview
’s greater mass carrying the big submarine forward farther and faster than the minnie.

Morton and Crane studied the big screen, on which was the reconstructed image of sounds received by acute electronic ears. On the upper left shimmered a jagged symbol like a wandering clump of grass. Morton telegraphed its location to the minisub with the lights. “Twin screw,” said the Captain. “ ‘Bout as big as a DE. Only one of ‘em.” He watched. “Course about ten degrees—right across our bows. There’s sound gear,” he added as the screen flashed a worm of light which disappeared, then reappeared, at two second intervals. “Condition red,” he murmured into the general call, and flicked the stud which would repeat the call by light signals in each compartment. Morton informed the minisub with the search beams.

The ship passed almost directly overhead, and they began to hear the whistle and ping of its detection gear. As the sound faded they began to breathe again—and then they saw the ship turn and begin an arc.

“Got us,” said Morton.

Crane thought his first critical thought of the mighty
Seaview
. “Just too damn big.” Aloud he said, “Stand by the sonars. If they drop anything I want to know what it is.” He moved to the segment of the console marked Degaussing, and pressed the stand-by button. The engine room would set up the powerful generators and high-frequency alternators which would, when activated, make the entire enormous hull of the submarine disappear from the “sight” of a magnetic-seeking torpedo. Seeing what he planned, Morton spoke up: “It could be a heat-sniffer,” and added “Sir.”

“It could,” said Crane. “So we have a fifty-fifty chance of being right. If we’re right, we’re altogether right, and if we’re wrong it’ll only matter for a minute or so.” He knew as well as Morton that the special degaussing gear they carried would heat up the hull in a matter of minutes—Crane had once seen steam forming and bubbling up past the herculite nose, on a test—and make them a perfect target for an infrared detecting missile. At that moment he would have given all his stripes and a Swiss watch for the simple information as to what that ship up there was, so he could deduce what they might throw. For a painful second he actively missed the O.O.M., who would be sulking in his suite. Nelson had a deductive faculty that amounted to intuition, and that was the best possible substitute for information.

“She’s squatting to lay,” said Morton, his eyes nailed to the screen. The blip of the surface craft had ceased its arc and was cutting toward the overhead point. “And there’s the egg.”

Crane, too, watched with all his being. Here, now, was where the wrong move could not be corrected, even if the correction should be applied a second later. A depth charge, or “ashcan” they could ignore, purely because there was nothing they could do about it. A torpedo, on the other hand, although much more dangerous, could be fought.

The tiny spot of green light representing the attacking device fell wavering for three or four fathoms, which would mean “ashcan” but then suddenly turned into a slender caterpillar on the screen, crawling toward them and trailing a diminishing trace.

“A fish!” Crane hit the engine-room alarm and bellowed for full astern on all four engines.

Morton banged all the prepared sonics and the whole row of screens lit up, picking out images, finding the minisub, the hull of the attacking ship, and most important, the torpedo itself. The
Seaview
shuddered under the flailing of her props, wavered, and began to make weigh astern. “They’re seeking, all right,” cried Morton, watching the curve of the torpedo’s course as they backed out of its original trajectory.

Was it heat-seeking? or magnetic? For an awful split instant Crane could not decide. And it was as if he let his thumb decide for him. Seemingly without his orders, it come down hard on the ‘Degaussing, On’ button. Instantly, as the lights dimmed under the initial surge, the scream of the alternators wailed through the ship.

“Hard left,” he yelped, and the
Seaview
, like many another vessel going astern, answered almost too readily and began to swing. “Watch her head!” he cried, lest they overswing; Kaski, as if inspired, seemed to have caught O’Brien’s delicate touch from the rim of his wheel, for he caught and checked her perfectly, and she shot backwards like a crayfish with her nose dead on to the approaching torpedo, thus presenting a minimum profile to the missile’s seekers.

“Fish number two!” Morton called, and immediately. “Number three!”

Crane laughed, a horrible sound in that time and place. Perhaps the sudden wavering, the long curvette, performed by the first torpedo, was not funny—but it made him laugh. “Foxed ‘em!”

They watched breathless as the first torpedo cut by them a hundred yards to port, followed in a few minutes by the second, which seemed to be tracking it exactly, and probably was, since it was the only magnetically attractive object in the vicinity, the minisub being made largely of high-impact synthetics.

“Where’s that third fish?”

The answer came in the form of a dull boom and a slight lurch. “What’d he do—sink himself?”

“No,” said Morton, watching his screen, where the surface craft still showed intact, “more’s the pity. He must’ve pushed a destruct button before she swam up his back.” He did not say ‘back.’ “Hull temperature’s two hundred or better, cap’n.”

“Let it ride,” said Crane, meaning the degaussing gear, and speaking the three syllables which were to cost him so terribly. They continued to speed astern, steering in a wide arc to bring her course out over deep water and toward her destination. The minisub, invisible except to their detectors, paddled along in their wake. The surface ship obviously could keep them in its sights, for it followed, the sound of its laboring screws creating jagged mountains and valleys of light on one of the screens.

“Fish four,” Morton sang out, and Crane picked up the sonarphone. “Aboard the minnie,” he said, “ ‘Ware torpedo dead in your wake,” for the minisub was not equipped with wear detectors like the mother vessel.

They seemed suddenly to be in a sea of soda-water, for effervescent clouds pressed upward all around the herculite plates. “What’s the hull temperature?”

“Two twenty three . . . four.”

How much of this could she take? he thought. Nelson would know . . . Shut off the degaussers then and have the torpedo draw a bead? Even half a second without the degaussers, and any halfway decent seeking gear would locate and direct. “Hard right,” he said.

The speeding sub veered and began to swing. “Check her at South,” said Crane. “
Well?
” he snapped at Morton. “Is that fish following?”

“Can’t tell yet . . . five seconds more . . . oh my God.” Crane saw it as soon as Morton: the fourth torpedo was following. He should have known, he should have known . . . Nelson would have played chess with that skipper up there and won. He knew now the clue he had overlooked: the firing of torpedos one-two-three, and then that wait before the fourth launching. That wait had been, obviously—now, obviously—to re-equip the torpedo with a heat-seeking head. And by keeping on his degaussers, his bubbling hull couldn’t have pulled in the torpedo more efficiently if he had a line and a winch on it. “A heat-sniffer, and I guess . . .” He swallowed, and continued hoarsely. “I guess we’ve had it.”

“Speak for yourself, skipper,” crashed a voice from the console. Crane stared stupidly at his right hand, which still held the sonarphone mike, then at the grille, then at the screen which was locked on to the minnie. The grille laughed harshly. “You can get off my knee now, Sonny Boy.”

“
Gleason!
”

“Oh, I’ll jest set here, this once, daddy-o,” said the exultant voice of young Smith. “As Billy Budd or somebody said, God Bless Captain Bligh or Nelson or somebody.”

“Kaski,” said Gleason’s voice, “you can have my black shore shoes. I stole ‘em from you anyhow.”

Morton and the Captain stared, hypnotized, at the mini-sub’s screen. They saw its blip accompanied suddenly by a streak, they saw the sub’s blip turn and swoop, they saw the two approach and merge and the screen flare out in a shower of green speckles as suddenly the detector had nothing but scattering wreckage to detect. The sonarphone was dead. The Captain reverently laid down the microphone. “What—the—hell did they do?”

“Saw the fish, rammed it. Stop all, mister. Shut down everything.” The dull thud of the explosion reached them. “Open all ballast cocks. I want that ship to look at a big dead pigboat. Situation Hush, and I’ll have the hide of the man who breaks it.” He flailed at the console, shutting off everything that would shut.

The lights went out, to be replaced by the ghastly dimness of the battery-powered emergency lamps. Outside, bubbles rising and sweeping away from the still-hot hull, tickled countless millions of pelagic life-forms into phosphorescence, so they looked down a pathway of boiling green fire. It quickly shortened, seemed to curve away and up, as their rearward velocity slowed and they began to sink through the dark waters. “Let’s see that ship,” said Crane, his low voice resounding in that dark place even over the crash of silence. Too bright, the No. 2 screen lit up, swept across and back from the scramble of green which was a ship, finally found it and locked on. It was circling, directly overhead.

“We got fish could seek out everything they got including the stink of their armpits,” said Morton. He did not say ‘armpits.’ “Lee, we got to sink ‘em.”

Crane turned to peer at him through the gloom. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re dead. We sink nobody if we’re dead.” He stared at the screen. “They have everything they need for a full report and a medal from Dr. Zucco. They have our hulk sinking. They have an oil slick rising.” They stood quiet, thinking about the minisub’s oil slick—noticeable enough, for all her small size, for she was electric-and diesel-powered, and her fuel tanks were unused and full. Sinking the giant
Seaview
would release hardly as much. “They did a good job.”

“Smith and Gleason.”

“Yeah,” breathed Crane. He looked again at the screen, and returned to the previous subject:

“And that could be an American ship.”

“Holy God.”

They sank slowly, dark in darkness, for another twenty minutes. Quite suddenly, the screen seemed in trouble, the image lost and gained again, then fading and flickering.

“Thermal layer,” said the Captain at last. “Their gear won’t penetrate it. Check her dive. Slow ahead all. I’m going aft.”

“Aye, sir.”

C
RANE LAY ALONE IN HIS CABIN
. . . alone, alone. There was a peculiar, and completely new, naturalness in all the things he had done to cut himself off from Nelson, from Cathy and Morton and even the cook. From the very beginning he had been a “new-style” commander of men, never jealous of his power, the enemy of formality, yet able to induce instant and total obedience in the pinch. His past deference to the Admiral in matters of command was not what Chip Morton implied it was, what, in Chip Morton, it certainly would be: weakness and uncertainty. Crane had been willing to let the O.O.M. take precedence not only because he respected him, but because he himself was absolutely sure of his own worth and position. He, unlike Morton, would never find it necessary to reassure himself of his captaincy by having the enlisted men lick the soles of his shoes. He had been free, then, to associate with men as a man, to speak his piece, to react to anyone or anything without fear of jeopardizing his position.

This was no longer good enough for him; it was no longer even good. And although it might seem that he was, at long last, reverting to a more conventional awareness of self and estate, he was not. He had entered upon some new area, a strange inward universe in which the rules had been changed, the laws largely unknown, old valuation repealed and new ones not yet established. He was still unshakably sure of himself, of his own reality and purpose. As to the rest—all the rest—he could not be sure.

And there was nobody to talk to about it. Nobody, nobody at all. “Oh, God,” he murmured intensely, “send me somebody who can talk about it!”

There was a knock on the door.

Crane lay absolutely still for a moment, brain, body, breath, and, for all he knew, heartbeat. Then he slowly sat up on his bunk and regarded the closed door, which immediately made more knocking sounds at him.