Sturgeon, Theodore - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

From the screenplay "Voyage To The Bottom Of The

Sea" written by Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett, and

based on an original story by Irwin Allen.

AT THE END, THE BOTTOM, THE VERY WORST of it, with the world afire and hell's flame-

winged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself. The youngest sub skipper in history

blamed himself for the burning sky and the floods, the droughts and dangers of that terrible August

when the devil himself brought his face to the Earth's crust and breathed on it, laughed and said, Die.

It's my fault, Captain Crane told himself, which is probably why he did what he did. That he should

feel this thing is only a measure of the man.

It's my fault because I was at the top, that day, and knew it, and told myself so. That was it: he had

let himself tell himself so. Well... it takes a big man to be where he was, that day, and only a big

man, with such a big brag in his heart, could have kept it to himself. And it was like him to react

with horror so huge when he caught himself at it; and only a sizable soul could shoulder so much

guilt for a moment of glory.

In his terror and agony, there near the end, he gave himself again the moment of the brag, not so

much to relive the pleasure, but to flagellate himself with his sense of sin and the extremities of his

penitence. Forgive him that. It was a time for extremities.

The Day of the Brag was a sunny day, and they stood in the wardroom of the U.S.O.S. Seaview,

stood, sat, lounged and, as it became one or two of them, postured. The visitors had only just come

aboard from an aircraft carrier lying just off the brim of Earth's ice hat. A huge turbine-powered

whirlybird had gentled them off the flat-top and eased their precious and important presences on to

the broad shoulders of the Seaview just aft of the conning tower, and from there they were conveyed

up and over and down inside with the smoothness of eggs through a candler.

And with exquisite timing, if you're building a brag, they were no sooner arranged in the wardroom

with their heart's desire in welcoming drinks in their hands, when the after bulkhead, between the

doors to the Captain's galley and the radio shack, a wall nine feet wide and six feet high, lit up in a

blaze of color and presented to them a TV news show featuring themselves and their adventure and,

oh yes, their importance. Captain Lee Crane, resplendent in dress blues (a tailor had once remarked

of him "the guy's got one-and-a-half the shoulders and only half the hips!") and with pleasure

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

watched the show on the screen, and the show of the people who watched the show. The image on

the new wide-screen TV was perfect, the sound was stereophonic, the submarine idled along with a

greased kind of gentleness, the drink was excellent and so was the weather.

The man on the screen said, "Today's top of the news comes from the top of the world. The

unpredictable Admiral Harriman Nelson has done it again! Since his retirement from the Navy some

four years ago to enlist in the newly created Bureau of Marine Exploration, the Admiral has been

secretly at work constructing the first submarine ever built outside the Navy Department. Into it has

gone his entire personal fortune—you will recall that the Nelsons, with all their past glories in the

form of college presidents, Congressmen, State governors and philanthropists, have been an

investment banking family for three generations—and every penny he could scrape up from sources

as widely separated as Foundation grants and collections of school-children's pennies. His

brainchild, a fantastic—"

Here the commentator's well-barbered head gave way to a picture of a detailed model of the

Seaview, which in due course dissolved to a montage of the keel-laying ceremonies, the launching,

and the commissioning ceremonies of the craft.

"—a fantastic atomic submarine with an amazing glass nose—is undergoing final tests in Arctic

waters, where it will follow the trail blazed twenty years ago by the first atomic submarine—under

the ice and across the Pole.

"This sub of the future," the commentator went on, becoming visible again and, Captain Lee Crane

thought, having run a comb through his faultless waves while off camera, "this child of determined

imagination out of the Age of the Computer, is the world's largest mobile oceanographic laboratory.

It was designed to search out the mysteries of the deep as well as to be a research center to test the

miracle weapons of tomorrow. To operate this awesome robot, the Admiral has enlisted a hand-

picked crew from former Navy men with long experience on atomic subs. To sit in judgment on

these final tests, the Bureau of Marine Exploration has sent its top officer, the former Vice Admiral

B.J. Crawford and the congressional watchdog of the budget, Congressman Llewellyn Parker, by

carrier and 'copter to rendezvous with the submarine Seaview."

Lee Crane, lounging against the forward bulkhead, and behind most of the watchers, was amused to

see the slight twitch and erection of the head, the reddening of the ears of the visiting admiral and

the visiting penny-pincher, as each in turn their names were called. In his mind's eye he could see the

imp called Vanity winging about overhead, ready to swoop down at the public mention of any name,

to seize its owner by the ears (hence the reddening) and pull (hence the twitch and straightening of

the neck). The commentator permitted himself to be replaced by a full-color portrait of Crane's

"boss," the driving force behind the Seaview and all it stood for, Admiral Harriman Nelson. And sure

enough, the Admiral's ears, here in the flesh, pinkened, and the great bull's head, terror of the china-

shop, twitched and rose.

"And so the question of the day comes to this," said the now disembodied commentator, "Will the

final test on the U.S.O.S. Seaview turn it into 'Nelson's Folly,' or will it be another triumph of an

already great man—a great scientist and inventor, who in spite of what some call an odd-ball

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

reputation, may yet emerge as the predominant scientific genius of our time."

Admiral Nelson let his gray eaves of eyebrows come up a notch, and otherwise held his face as if it

had been carved there by Gutzon Borglum. But Captain Crane saw the slight turn his right hand gave

to the signet ring on his left, a mannerism he had watched for ever since he was a boot at Annapolis

and Nelson headed the Science Department; it meant he was annoyed. Fair enough. Chest-tones and

the safety of a studio four thousand miles away did not qualify a guy with marcelled hair to call the

likes of Nelson an oddball.

Now, Crane thought, comes the dessert. It's time for a seductive portrait of Dr. Susan Hiller, some

arch remarks about how high this brilliant woman had risen in the ranks of medicine and psychiatry,

and how extraordinary that she should yet be so beautiful—and why the hell not, thought Crane in

irritation: when would the beautiful-but-dumb, brilliant-but-dowdy legend curl up and die? Could it

be that most of the world wanted it alive, and if so, why? And in addition, Crane predicted, there

would be a polite joke (masking some not only impolite, but downright disgusting implications)

about Dr. Hiller's being the only woman aboard (which she wasn't).

"So," said the commentator, "Bon voyage, Admiral Nelson... his crew, and their illustrious visitors

Congressman Parker and Admiral Crawford. We will hear nothing of them while they are

submerged, of course, for however many hours, days or even weeks the tests take. They will

likewise hear nothing from us; therefore, if they are listening to me now, I'd like to speak for all the

world, its people, its scientists, young and old, knowing that they share my admiration. High ideals,

high courage, and high adventure are their lot, though they find them in a voyage to the bottom of

the sea."

He glanced down and up, wet his careful lips, and began, "In other news around the world, a

dispatch—"

Captain Crane made a slight motion with his finger and Sparks, standing in the door of the radio

shack, ducked back out of sight. The screen shrank abruptly to a polychrome dot which winked out.

Everyone breathed as if breathing had been forgotten for a while, everyone found that there was after

all a glass in hand, everyone drank. Nelson rumbled—self-consciously because all his life he had

been doing more important things than learning the formalities—"Well, gentlemen... Doctor...

modesty forbids me adding anything to that."

"Chivalry," said a smooth baritone on the port side, "suggests a sorry omission." It was "Chip"

Morton, Crane's Executive Officer. Classmates, roommates at the Academy, they had entered the

submarine service together and come all the way. It was no one's fault—certainly not Lee

Crane's—that they had proceeded single file, with Chip in the rear. Chip's tone just now was as

glossy as his sharply trimmed black hair. He leaned toward Dr. Hiller and said, "He never even

mentioned Dr. Hiller."

"By her wish and my specific request," said old "B.J."— Admiral B.J. Crawford, head of the Bureau

of Marine Exploration, an old turtleback who, they said, bit the heads off three ensigns each day

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

before breakfast.

"I've had quite all the publicity I could possibly want," said the doctor in a well-modulated contralto.

"In this special case, I'm here to observe men under stress, to compare their reactions with men in

other vessels differently equipped. It's a job that's best done quietly."

"You're quite right, Doctor," Crane said quickly, to nip off anything further Chip might have to

offer: un-nipped, he would, too, thick, with a broad trowel.

"Let's take her down, Captain."

"Aye aye, sir," said Crane briskly. He wheeled to the bulkhead, palmed the bridge tweeter, and said,

"Any time you're ready, Mr. O'Brien." The Dive Officer's voice came back at him out of the grille as

if by speaking Crane had released a spring: "Aye sir!" Crane said, "Shall we all go up to the bridge?"

Drinks were finished, set aside, and Crane led the way forward, followed by Chip, who stepped over

the high sill of the water-tight door and immediately turned to help Dr. Susan Hiller over it, saying,

in that I'll-take-care-of-you-cookie voice of his, "Ship's etiquette sometimes looks mighty rude to a

landlubber, ma'am. But an officer never lets a lady precede him. I guess because it's too easy to step

over one of these sills into a bucket."

"I have been aboard a ship before, Commander," said the psychiatrist, not smiling at all, which

almost made the Captain laugh out loud. He stepped aside and let them all come through and mill

around, then touched a stud, and the curtain-wall behind him slid right and left away, and they found

themselves standing at the aft end of the submarine's unique transparent nose. Like any small boy

with new trains to show, like any girl with a two-carat diamond to flash, like—well, any human with

something wondrous to display, he smiled and soaked up the three gasps that came from the guests.

He glanced at Admiral Nelson, and saw him eating it with as much relish as he was.

And it was a sight to come upon without warning. What was called the bridge was the extreme bows

of the huge sub. A single gigantic curved beam connected keel with backbone, swelling at the dead-

forward point to a great escutcheon of steel, which formed the ram prow up ahead. Transversely, this

was braced by two more curved beams, so that dead ahead one saw a cross of steel with the

escutcheon at their joining, and the spaces between the arms were filled with what at first seemed to

be nothing at all. Since the hull was nearly eighty feet high, and the waterline just below the arms of

the cross, one might look down into thirty feet of water, up at the sky, and have sea level about at

one's shins.

"By... golly," mumbled Admiral Crawford. "Nelson, I've lived with this thing about half as long as

you have, blueprints on up, and I thought I knew what it would be like. But... you've got to be here to

believe it."

"Those... ports? windows? They're so big!" said the svelte psychiatrist, wonderstruck as any child.

"Structurally, they're not windows or ports or anything else but just plain hull," said Admiral Nelson.

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

"X-tempered herculite," said the captain. "A process Admiral Nelson developed. And that is the right

description. They're just oversized hull plates which happen to be transparent." He stepped to a

console and touched a control. "Deck's clear, Mr. O'Brien?"

"All clear, sir!"

"Check your hatch."

"Dogged down, sir."

"Make it ninety feet as a start, and hold it."

"Ninety feet, sir."

The Congressman was still staring slackjawed at the herculite nose. When he found something to

say, it was, "But the cost of a thing like that..."

The grizzled old Bureau head laughed aloud. "The cost was met by Admiral Nelson here, and his

ways and means boys, and several million school kids, and his own patent and process holdings.

She's bought and paid for, Mr. Parker, and was before he asked to have her commissioned by the

government. We had to start a new Bureau to accommodate her. She's non-Navy, but federal. She's

available for weapons testing, and for that alone she's worth her maintenance times fifty—just her

availability. Her real business is research."

"Research," said the Congressman, at last able to fix on something he knew he disliked. He made the

two syllables speak a whole paragraph about blue-sky puttering with useless chemicals resulting in

useless mixtures, invoices for elaborate testing devices to determine the molecular changes in bread

as it's toasted.

"Oh—look!" said Dr. Susan Hiller. She pointed downward, and a great shimmering cloud of mullet

writhed past.

"Research," said Nelson, and his two syllables had a sound like a key opening an old lock. "We'll

ride herd on those mullet some day, the way old timers did sheep. Maybe some day folks'll live

down there under herculite domes, ranching the fish and farming sea plants. On a planet that's 74 per

cent sea-floor, Congressman, there's an awful lot to be researched out. Research can make this a

bigger world than ever you thought it was. There's mines for us down there, and oil wells, and hot-

vents for power, there's food there and work and study for generations to come."

Without appreciable tilting, for this was not a crash dive, the ship began to go down. So smooth and

silent were the mighty engines that their presence was only a vague steady tremble. The waterline

crept upward over the giant panes, and the light in the huge chamber took on the blue-green cast of

the silent world. Susan Hiller clasped her slim hands together and stood breathless, moving her head

from side to side in something like disbelief. The captain, now well on the way to what he later

called to himself The Big Brag, affected a studied professional boredom which he hardly felt, so

acutely did the awe of the visitors communicate itself. He stood with his back to the wonder of the

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

surging water ahead, and his eyes flicked alertly over the "Christmas Tree"—the banks of lights and

repeaters on his console.

"Run the ship from here, do you?" asked Congressman Parker, whose capacity for awe was

apparently reached.

"Yes, sir," said the Captain. "That is, we can, or it can be run from a rather more conventional

control room directly under the conning tower. There are automatics for every function from

pumping sewage to changing stereo tapes—and manuals to override them."

"Deck's awash," said O'Brien's voice from the console, and a moment later, "Stern gone."

"Periscope depth," ordered the Captain. O'Brien responded and the strange light darkened a shade.

The Captain moved some controls. A large screen lit up, and showed a seascape, the sparkling blue-

green of sunlit, deep-water. He turned a wheel, and a grid, marked in degrees, began marching past

the picture. "This is how we get away from the greasy stick that hangs down in the middle of most

subs," he explained. "We have one 'midships, of course, but this repeater magnifies the periscope

image. Standing right here I can turn it any way including up, without marching around it in a circle

like a blind camel pulling buckets out of a well. And if we want it to, it'll lock on to an object by

light or infra-red or radar or sonar, and keep the image right there no matter which way we jump."

"Must've cost—"

"It did," said the Captain with pleasure, "and it's paid up."

"What's your floor?" asked the Admiral.

"A thousand, sir."

"Would that be a thousand feet?"

"Fathoms, Mr. Parker. More than a mile." The Congressman peered downward through the herculite

and looked as if he was suddenly afraid of falling.

"Take her down to two hundred feet," said the Admiral. "All ahead two-thirds, course zero."

"That's due North, isn't it?" asked the psychiatrist, shaking herself awake at last.

Chip Morton answered her; all this time he had been gazing at her in much the same way as she had

been gazing at the ocean, and was apparently as bemused. "Oh you are a sailor, aren't you?" he said

fatuously, as if he were talking to an exceptionally clever five-year-old. She passed him a chill brief

glance of barely aroused irritation, which only made him grin at her—a lost grin, for she was already

looking the other way.

"Two hundred feet," said the console.

"Trim her, then two-thirds ahead, course zero."

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"Aye-aye, sir."

"And O'Brien—set loran and asdic alarms for 200 plus and 400 minus. We'll have a roof over our

heads PDQ. And hang 'em on the mike."

"Aye-aye, sir."

"I heard what you said," said Parker, "but what did you say?"

"Told him to go under the ice, set our detectors to operate at anything 200 feet over us or 400 feet

under, and use them to operate the mike—'Iron Mike,' that is—pet name for automatic pilot. She'll

run herself now until she encounters something she can't handle. She'll think it over for a couple of

millionths of a second and then yell."

"This must've cost—"

But this time the Captain only smiled at him.

"Doctor... gentlemen... would you like to go on with the tour?"

They moved aft. The captain murmured into a grille that he was leaving the bridge, and joined the

group. They crossed the wardroom, rounded the TV bulkhead and went aft down the central

corridor. The Admiral, in the lead, turned to a door on the starboard side and opened it. "Watch your

step," he cautioned, and went in. His warning was useful for on the other side of the usual shin-

hungry high sill was a steep flight of steps, virtually a ladder, which twisted downwards into

greenish dimness.

Blinking, they found themselves in a cavernous chamber, standing on a steel catwalk which ran

about six feet over what at first seemed to be a shiny floor but which, as their eyes adjusted, they

were able to see was water, because there was a man on it, about chest deep, wearing a rubber suit

and walking slowly. "Hey, Lu!" barked the Admiral.

"Lu?" echoed Admiral B.J. Crawford. "That's not—that wouldn't be old Lucius? Lucius Emery?"

"Well, B.J., goddam!" cried the man in the tank. "Beg pardon, ma'am. Didn't see you."

"Think nothing of it," said Dr. Hiller calmly.

"Dr. Hiller, Commander Lucius Emery," said Nelson. "When better ichthyologists are built, they

won't find the likes of old Lu. Come on up and shake everybody's hand, Lu."

"Can't," said the man in the tank. "You wouldn't want my buddy here to drown, would you?"

Dr. Hiller bent over the catwalk rail and peered. "What's he doing?" she whispered to the captain.

"Walking a shark," he replied.

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"Oh," she said. She concentrated, and as the man passed under the catwalk, they could make out the

dark shape he propelled through the water, the tall dorsal fin like the sail of a good-sized toy boat... it

must have been all of nine and a half feet. "What?" she cried.

Lucius Emery looked up and smiled cheerfully at her. "Put him to sleep to make some tests," he

called up. "Now I got to walk him until he wakes up, to keep some water going through his gills till

he snaps out of it. Who's your other friend, B.J.?"

"I beg your pardon, Parker. Congressman Parker, Lu. Come to see how we handle government

money."

"Just like throwing it into the ocean, eh, Congressman? I heard of you." And he laughed—a good

laugh, echoing round and round the big tank.

"What," asked the Congressman tautly, "do you do when he—uh—'snaps out of it'?"

"Go some place else," said the ichthyologist.

Admiral Nelson laughed. "That Lu... he'd rather make friends with a fish than be remembered as one

of the world's great physical chemists, which he also happens to be."

" 'Remembered' is probably the word," said Parker sweatily.

"Is he that Emery?" breathed Dr. Hiller.

The Bureau chief began to move down the catwalk. "Look me up later, Lu. We'll chew over some

old times. I'll buy the beer."

"That don't sound like old times," said Emery. And the great, the granite-faced, the cold-eyed

Admiral B.J. Crawford, Chief of the Bureau of Undersea Exploration and nightmare to a thousand

frightened cadets and j.g.'s, laughed and called him a name, took the impertinence and walked on.

Out again in the central corridor, Dr. Hiller paced in puzzled silence for a time and then said, with

extreme care, "Commander Emery is... uh... very informal, isn't he?"

"What you're asking, ma'am," rasped B.J. Crawford, "is where does a lowly superannuated

Commander get off talking to the high brass that way, isn't it? Or: why isn't the man disciplined for

the way he conducts himself with his superiors? Or: doesn't a man like that eat away at the discipline

of the other men? Is that what you wanted to know?"

Dr. Hiller was obviously not cowed, and perhaps could not be. "Yes," she said.

"All right," said Crawford (approvingly, the Captain thought). "I'll tell you in case you want to put it

in a psychology book some time. I was forty-three years in the Navy before I retired and now three

years in the Bureau, which is as much Navy as I can make it. And I like what they call a taut ship, I

believe rank has its privileges, I believe the man who ranks you is God and the man you rank is dirt,

even by one half a temporary stripe. I believe all that because when an emergency comes up, that's

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the way you've got to have it or a lot of otherwise good men get dead. And the only way you can

have it that way in emergencies is to have it that way all the time. Men just don't un-relax and tighten

up fast enough; you got to keep them tight all the time."

Dr. Hiller looked perplexed. "But then Commander Emery—"

"Lu," said Admiral Crawford, "he unrelaxes fast enough. Statistics being what they are, the law of

averages and all that; and men being what they are, there never has been one like him before and

there never will again. Right, Nelson?"

"Right," chuckled the other.

"I think," said the psychiatrist with a kind of dogged primness, "that you have covered everything

with the possible exception of his effect on the others."

"They love 'im," said the craggy old Admiral astonishingly, "which is one other thing I don't believe

in but I'm glad it happened once so it can never happen again. Somehow or other anyone who ever

runs into Lucius Emery knows he can't act like Lucius Emery unless he is Lucius Emery, and Lu

already got that slot filled. Right, Nelson?"

"Right," said Nelson.

"Right," said Dr. Hiller sharply, and then smiled quite the most engaging smile they had yet shipped

aboard that submarine. The two Admirals shared a chuckle, and Crawford, pre-empting the Captain

and outflanking the Executive Officer, Chip Morton, who panted close by, helped her over the sill

into the magazine.

"Reminds you a little of the Ol' Souf, don't it?", drawled Chip Morton, managing at last to corner the

pretty doctor, and pointing to the close-ranked columns on each outboard bulkhead of the wide

magazine. "I mean those old plantation houses with the rows of columns holding up all that-all you-

all prestige."

"What are they?" she asked, sticking to facts.

"Missile tubes. We could lie on the bottom of the Mindanao Deep, six miles down, and lob one of

those things into orbit, or drop it down the smoke-hole of a Navajo wigwam."

Homing on the warm drone of Chip's voice, Lee Crane came over to interrupt. "Here's something

new," he said, holding out a small curved device. "Magnetic hand primers, to fire these Polaris X's in

case all this spaghetti—" he waved his hand around at the computer systems—"should get itself

tangled on someone's fork."

"It's so tiny!"

"It provides exactly the right amount of exactly what's needed. 'Course, you have to go outside. You

hang it on the warhead, slap her on the nose, and back off a little. In six seconds, off she goes."

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With a what'll-they-think-of-next gesture she handed it back, just in time to see Chip Morton tossing

something to her underhanded. "Here's something new, too," he said.

Reflexively, she caught it, turned it over. "Some kind of baseball?"

"Well, for real short games. One hit, no ball park. It's an underwater demolition bomb."

An expression of distaste, absolutely uncolored by fear, crossed her face. "Commander Morton," she

said quietly, handing the bomb back to him, "I don't like sadistic jokes and I don't like sadists." Amid

a thundering silence she added, "I understand them very well, of course, but I don't like them."

Without a word, Chip Morton turned away and went to put the bomb away. The girl raised her

unflickering eyes and looked at Captain Lee Crane, as if to accept, quite without challenge, any

remark he might make and store it away without actually touching it. He said "It couldn't possibly go

off if dropped. It takes a fairly difficult two-handed manipulation to arm it."

"That was perfectly obvious, or he wouldn't have thrown it to me."

"You don't scare easily."

"I do if something comes up that's genuinely frightening. For anything else, I've simply developed a

reflex for analyzing what situations are before I react to what they might be."

"All the same... he will of course be disciplined for that kind of childishness."

"He has been," she said without smiling, but with an unmistakable twinkle in her eye. "You may do

as you like with him, Captain, and of course you will. We each have our own theory of discipline.

With some it's pain for the offender. With others it's correction, whether or not pain should be

involved." She paused and then said, with a recurrence of that twinkle, "In my opinion Commander

Morton stands corrected. He will never do anything like that to me again, and very probably not to

anyone else. So much for correction. As for punishment—"

The captain laughed suddenly. "I'd hate to make any crime of mine fit one of your punishments,

doctor."

Across the compartment, Congressman Parker heaved heartily on a door dog, which refused to

move. "What's in here?"

"Davy Jones' locker," said Nelson. "That's the escape hatch."

The Congressman let go the handle as if it had turned into a live mule's hind foot, and stepped back

smartly. The two Admirals did not smile, but knowing them as well as he did, Crane could see that it

was not easy. "And that?" asked the Congressman, pointing briskly to cover his embarrassment.

"Minisub," said Nelson, looking upward at the stubby craft. "When you have to go outside and

you're too deep for—" he waved his hand at a neat, comprehensive row of racks of diving

gear—everything from simple snorkels to heated wet-suits with self-contained air

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VoyagetotheBottomoftheSeabyTheodoreSturgeonTheodoreSturgeonVoyagetotheBottomoftheSeaFromthescreenplay"VoyageToTheBottomOfTheSea"writtenbyIrwinAllenandCharlesBennett,andbasedonanoriginalstorybyIrwinAllen.ATTHEEND,THEBOTTOM,THEVERYWORSTofit,withtheworldafireandh\ell'sflame-wingedangelscallinghimbyname...

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Sturgeon, Theodore - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.pdf

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Sturgeon, Theodore - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

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