Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea by Theodore Sturgeon Read Free Book Online

ridge, tangling, weaving back down again.
    Morton stood back and glanced at it, opened his eyes wide, returned to the controls, and began fiddling.
    “What are you doing, Commander?”
    “Must be something wrong with the scale comparator circuits, sir. That—” he waved a hand at the map “—that just couldn’t be.”
    “Leave it alone. Just take a good look at it.”
    “I see what Ch—Commander Morton means, sir,” said the Captain. He stepped close and put his hand high up on the chart. “The course as indicated here intersects this ridge. Right here the indicated depth is only six fathoms—forty-two feet. We draw ninety at periscope depth. How could we have been up in there—with deep water showing under us? Chip—pull the course image down about five degrees.”
    “Leave it where it is,” rapped the old man. “You fellows have a thing or two to learn, I see. Let me give you a piece of advice. When you get screwy data, begin by believing it and work from there. Keep your logic sound and link it through until you have an answer. Only if that answer is impossible do you start blaming your instruments. And be damn cautious about what you use that word ‘impossible’ on. Now then: this chart was prepared when?”
    “Soundings taken not over a year ago, sir.”
    “Well then, let’s hypothesize that something’s happened since then to change the depths. Only . . . I think we’ll have to guess that whatever happened, happened in the last week. But I’ll come to that.
    “Now we assume that these soundings—asdic, I suppose, and sonar—bounced off rock, or congealed silt—in any case, good honest ocean bottom. But it also could be ice.”
    “On the ocean bottom, sir?”
    “I know, I know: Ice floats. But what of a situation where the polar currents keep pressing ice against these rising shelves? A hundred-foot berg drifts against a forty-foot undersea peak. More ice crowds it. The pack ice has nowhere to go but up; it piles on top of the berg. And more piles up, and more. The weight finally squeezes the big berg downward, and as more crowds in, more piles up, more goes down. Before long you have solid ice, air on top, rock on the bottom . . . nothing but ice between. A barrier.
    “Just to protect what we are still calling true data, we will assume that this solid barrier extends over a wide area, and has brought ice down three or four hundred feet. We will now introduce a warm current—a very warm current, and a very fast one to boot. We’ll say it locates at about the one hundred foot level and begins to slice away at the ice barrier. It melts the ice in the middle and leaves it as pack above and a kind of thick paving below.”
    “A very unstable situation, sir, if you’ll excuse me. Ice on the bottom like that would soon break up and—oh.”
    “Oh, Mr. O’Brien is right,” said the old man with something like glee. “Ice on the bottom like that would soon break up and you would have the impossible circumstance of bergs rising up from the ocean floor.”
    “Very ingenious,” said the Captain sincerely, “But sir—a current like that—why, it wouldn’t be warm water, it would be hot. And lots of it. Where would that amount of hot water come from?”
    “I return your compliment, Captain. Very ingenious of you to have thought of it. I too have thought of it. And I can’t answer your question. Not yet. I am, however, convinced that there was and is such a current, that it carved out the middle of the barrier, that we proceeded into the area which recently was solid, and that while we were in there the bottom broke up.”
    “It’s hard to believe, sir, that such a current—”
    “You clock-watchers,” said the admiral with a fine scorn, waving his hand at the wide array of dials and telltales, “keep your noses on all the instruments that ought to apply and on none of those which actually do apply. Mr. O’Brien, sight unseen, what’s the water temperature out