Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (18 page)

It was too warm. He did not think about that again.

He worked his way along the curving side and left the hull as it turned to be a bow. O’Brien, with his usual precision, had placed the submarine to hover a safe but convenient 15 feet above the sea floor, and exactly head on to the slight current. Her four banks of floodlights and the search beam were trained on the encrusted cable lying on the undersea mesa. Heading “upstream” this way, the
Seaview
was at her steadiest.

Directly under the bows a single slim pillar of light picked out for him the end of the phone wire which Sparks was ready to reel out to him through a watertight grommet in the hull. He swam to it and hooked it to his tool belt, gave it two sharp tugs and then began to make his way up the golden road of light. Thirty yards past the cable, the light faded in that immeasurable way underwater light has; and to either side, with sharper margins, the dark undersea was permitted to press close. It was not quite the black of extreme depths, but rather like thick drapes covering what you know is daylight; you can’t see it but you know. He glanced to right and left, making up his mind to see nothing which was not definitely something. Watching for what you think you see in such wet dark is monstrous.

Therefore he made himself ‘tune out’ what was certainly movement, things looming, things swirling, a spark, a speckle, a patch of something luminous or white or both. Let’m watch, whoever they are. If they have business with me, let’m stand up and be counted.

He rolled once to look back. He caught a flash glimpse of figures clustered inside the submarine’s glass nose. The big one would be Nelson, the small slender one Cathy Connors . . . whose colors, like a faithless varlet, he no longer wore. He grinned and pushed on.

Reaching the cable, he paused and at last plugged the phone line into the jack on the side of his chest, just above the armpit. “Hi, Sparks,” he said casually, “How do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, sir,” Sparks’ voice rang inside his hood. He winced and thumbed the gain control down.

“I’m at the cable, scraping,” he said, and got to work. A ten-inch knife had been prepared for him with a concave edge ground to the exact diameter of the outside of the cable, and it made quick work of the slime, silt, and ambitious barnacle coating—ambitious because the cable was impregnated with the most powerful teredocides known. Having cleaned off a two-foot section, and announcing his every move—Chip Morton had replaced Sparks at the other end, and was checking the manual as he worked—he spaded away the silt under the cable with one of his fins, and pushed the two webbing straps of the airsaw clamps underneath and up the other side.

The airsaw was a species of saber saw held by a movable frame which in turn was bolted to a table. The two cross-members under the table had, like his knife, been ground to fit the cable, so that when the webs were pulled tight and their fasteners snapped over center, the table rested solidly on top. Crane swung the saw frame 30° to the table, locked it, then fed the blade until its tungsten carbide tip touched the armor. He started the saw.

It made the most horrendous noise and, unlike voices in earphones, there was no way to turn down the gain. It clattered and shrieked as it started its plunge cut, and when he began levering it upward, positioning it more and more toward 90°, the dural-x armor protested with a scream in tremolo which would have done justice to a dying dinosaur. Once, and then again, he thought a shadow flicked between him and the submarine’s floods, and each time he gave a quick glance; he saw nothing and concentrated on his work.

When the saw was vertical at last, he checked the depth of cut—it had to be exactly 1/4 inch, to slice into the armor without touching the wires packed inside—and then shut off the drill to report his next move. The infernal clatter kept right on going in his buffeted inner ears, and a lot of screaming—he thought he heard someone shout “Stark, stark naked!” and glanced in alarm at his air gauges, fearing nitrogen narcosis or anoxia, which first paralyze a man’s good sense and then make him feel wonderful, moving him, as Cousteau once wrote, “to tear off his mask and mouthpiece and hand them to a passing fish.” But his gauges reassured him, and he turned the earphone gain down to nothing at all, purely because he couldn’t stand so much as a flyfoot’s extra weight of noise in those roaring eardrums. He announced what he was doing next, threw the creeper in gear, adjusted the web tension and started the saw again. The creepers—endless treads, part crampon, part suction—began to carry the saw table around the armored cable, just as fast as the saw would cut, and if the designers were right, which they had been so far, it would cut the armor all the way around, exactly meeting the kerf at the original plunge point. Crane busied himself while it was creeping and cutting, creeping and screaming, by deepening the trench under the cable so that the saw could pass through. He scrabbled out as much as he could from the side, where all along he had been working with his back to the submarine, and swam over the cable to begin digging from the other side. He had just begun backing down—it was a hands-and-knees proposition—and had his head over the cable, when something the size, shape and nearly the velocity of an airliner fuselage whipped overhead, and the backwash from it lifted him and slammed him down. His head struck the top of the pipe, and he was never able afterward to remember the order in which things happened. There were two long hard yellow tentacles that sprang out and grasped him around the chest. There was something about the noise, the shrieking chatter of the drill, which did not stop, but softened to a murmur and then, still murmuring, snarled with effort. There were red clouds. All through it he held on, held on, and would not slump, would not let the world go black. This was not a matter of pride. It had to do solely with a small valve between his helmet and his tanks. It delivers air exactly equalling the pressure outside the lungs—on demand. And if you don’t demand it, you don’t get it. You demand it by breathing, breathing just a little harder than normally. So if you get yourself knocked out, you don’t demand it for a while, and you don’t get it, and you just loll there and die.

So Lee Crane hung on somehow, even if he couldn’t get things quite in the right order. He knew he wasn’t hanging on to the flaking crust of consciousness just to be hanging on. There was a reason.

Reasons. The world on fire. He was to show Alvarez how a man does something about it. To get a phone call through, that was it, and to do the job himself.

And it hit him finally: somebody tried to
kill
me today. Then he found himself; then he shook away the fogs of now (though not those of a moment ago). He shook his head once, violently, with his eyes hurting-tight closed, then opened them to see those tentacles about him, one up around his back and under his tanks, one crossing his chest. The tentacles were jointed and finned and looked like frog’s legs because a wet-suit with flippers looks that way; this was a diver holding him in this scissors grip!

Deep in his throat he growled, and with one lightning chop, he broke the ankle-to-ankle grip of the legs around him. In an instant he had kicked free and up and had his long, newly-curved knife out, and was plunging down again on the yellow-clad diver who was kicking, lacking trying to get away from that gleaming steel fang. He got a hand on the diver’s tanks, and thrust sidewise as hard as he could to roll him; he came back with the knife, he started down with the knife—

“
Lee!
” screamed Cathy Connors, “
for the love of God don’t!
” and as he gasped in astonishment (making himself cough in his own saliva until tears came) an unseen hand checked him and the yellow-clad diver was gone up the fading road of light, up-current to the dimness beyond.

Lee Crane watched, knife in hand, until the other was swallowed by the dark.

“Oh Lee—come in, come in!”

Crane put his hand to his head and felt the bulge of the earphone in his hood. He turned to look back at the submarine and saw what had anchored him in his chase—the telephone line, and the airhose to the saw, which lay silent in the silt.

He coughed twice, carefully this time, and swallowed. He felt a little light-headed and his pulse was too swift. He checked his mixture and found that his oxygen had been increased. He pulled it down. He heard a murmur in his phones and thumbed up the gain. Someone was saying, “. . . suit up a couple of men and bring him in and—”

“Mr. Morton,” Crane said clearly, “You will send no one out. That is an order. Get on the manual, please. I’ll have that armor off in another few minutes.”

“Lee!” It was Cathy. “Are you—all right?”

“I’m all right. Who was that diver?”

There was a silence. Somebody far in the background said either “Tell him,” or “Don’t tell him.”

“That man tried to prevent me from tapping this cable,” said Crane. “Who is he?”

“W-we don’t know,” said Cathy suddenly; and the background to her voice bubbled with murmurs. “Well,” she said angrily, off mike but clearly, “He has to know. Lee,” she said, “all we know is that you were attacked by the shark and all of a sudden he was there.”

“Shark?”

“We tried to warn you but you couldn’t hear. I suppose because of the saw.”

“Then it rushed you just as you climbed over the cable. It missed,” said a man’s voice—Emery.

“My God, a blue it was, must have been forty feet long. And we were all yelling to you to break out the shark chaser.”

Crane remembered the ghostly screams he had heard drowning in the clatter of the saw: Stark!

Stark naked! was Shark! Shark chaser!—the packs of shark repellent he carried in his belt.

“And then he came,” said Emery, “and when the shark came back for the next pass he held you down with his legs and snatched off the saw and held it up and cut that monster eight inches deep from behind the gills back about twenty-three feet. He just . . . held it. The shark did the rest.”

“And then you got up and started to knife him.”

“I hit my head,” said Crane. “I . . . I guess he kept me breathing, him with that scissors grip. And it must have been him, too, turning up my oxygen. Who was he?”

“We don’t know. We’re all present and accounted for,” said Cathy. “Lee—please come in. I’m . . . scared.”

Crane swam over to the saw, got his feet down and picked it up. He hefted it over to the cable and fixed it to the frame—a simple matter of a single quick-release lever. He carefully reset the blade in the kerf and adjusted it for depth.

Softly, pleadingly, “Lee . . .?” Cathy begged.

“Mr. Morton,” said Crane harshly, “when you had to communicate with me and it was obvious the noise level was too high, it might have occurred to you to do it with the floodlights.”

There was a thick, shocked silence in the earphones, broken by a single sharp smack. Crane, who thought he had forgotten how, suddenly grinned. That would be the Admiral, for one of the few times in his life caught short, smacking his forehead with his palm. Crane had only seen it happen twice before.

Chip Morton at last spoke for all those aboard, any one of whom could have thought of a light-signal: “Oh Jesus, Lee, I’m sorry.”

“Continuing the cut,” said Crane, and started the saw.

The rest of it was simply arduous, careful slaving, part brain, part brawn. Girdling the armor twice was the easiest part, since the saw took itself around. Making a cut from one kerf to the other was easy but disappointing; he had hoped to be able to open out the segment and drop it off; but open out that tough hide would not; it required a second longitudinal cut opposite the first, and then of course the armor fell away. After that it was a long delicate series of probes with an inductance pick-up, a tool like long needlenose pliers or forceps with a small split ring at the tip, which could be made to surround one wire or a pair at a time. When at last they found one—and there was only one—with a signal, it was unreadable until Crane substituted a contact probe for the inductance. After such success, he was unable to hear the conversation that took place, because Sparks took over his phone line. When it was finally over and they blinked the lights and he unhooked the probe, replaced it with a jack and patched himself in, Sparks told him, “We’re done now, sir.”

“Put the Admiral on, Sparks. Private.”

“Yes, Lee,” said the O.O.M.

“Admiral, I can wait for any part of the news but this: did you get Washington?”

“No, Lee, we didn’t. We can’t and we won’t.”

Crane drew a deep breath and let it out again. “I’ll patch up here and come in.”

He got the plastic pod of super-wet epoxy cement, pinched it to break the inner membrane, and kneaded the components together, then clipped the corner off the pod and striped the cut edges of the cable armor with the sticky stuff. He did the same with the portions he had removed and replaced one of them. He carefully positioned the tiny gas pellet and the three “getters” among the wires, and then, replacing the saw’s oscillator with a rotary chuck, drilled a small hole through the remaining section of armor. It was while he was doing this that he saw, from the corner of his eye, something enormous looming up from the darkness, up-current. He dropped the drill, slid over and behind the cable, and put up his head just enough to peep over.

It was nothing . . . more properly, it was no thing. It was a purplish, then lavender cloud moving down toward him, spreading and diluting as it came. He remembered then to breathe again, and snapped a curse at himself for being so jumpy. He thought he knew what this stain was, but to be sure, he pulled out the square packet at the back of his tool belt and yanked the cord which tore it open.

Purple matter smoked out and streamed slowly away, rising in a tall orchid cloud as it approached the submarine.

Shark repellent.

Someone had planted a dispenser or two of shark repellent upwind of him, pinned it under a rock, probably, so it would stream its protection over him. A simple safeguard which proved Crane, for overlooking it, quite as afflicted by the Blind Spot as those aboard who had not been able to think of signaling with the lights.