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

sir,” said the operator positively. “I been there, Captain. This sounds like nothing I ever heard before. Magnetic storms cause fade more’n anything else: this is the exact opposite.”
    “One thirty,” said O’Brien.
    “We’ll break surface in a second,” said the Admiral, “and then maybe we can locate a relay satellite and get something off it on the tight beam. Meanwhile, do what you can, Sparks.”
    “Aye, sir.”
    “Periscope depth,” O’Brien sang out, instantly followed by Crane’s “Up periscope.”
    Chip Morton switched out the chart grid and replaced it, on the big screen, with the swirling pattern of the periscope just under the surface.
    “You were right about the ice, sir,” said Crane. “But according to all the charts, there ought to be solid pack here.”
    “Now what’s the matter with the ocean?” breathed the Admiral, glowering at the screen, which, as daylight brightened there, was taking on a pinkish cast.
    “I saw a whole lake turn red once, for ten days, sir,” said O’Brien. “Some kind of alga.”
    “I think,” said the Admiral, “I here and now stop thinking again, and just watch.”
    Spellbound, they watched. The image wavered as water ran off, splashed on, ran off the periscope, and gradually cleared, to show them a typical arctic seascape, scattered floe ice and wide patches of open water. But typical only to the colorblind; for in two important respects it was all wrong. First, they would have had to be hundreds of miles south of their present position to find so little ice. Second, the color was all wrong—for the ice was pink and the water seemed to be full of reflected flame.
    “Surface, and crack the hatch,” ordered the Admiral. He wheeled and walked aft, to central control and the conning chamber. O’Brien stayed where he was, but the rest followed, Cathy Connors and the psychiatrist following timidly in the rear.
    In the conning chamber, the redheaded minisub man Jimmy Smith pulled down a lever and from above, hollowly, came the crack and hiss of the seals. Without hesitation, and lithely as a youngster, the old Admiral swung up the ladder. Above him came the rumble and clang of the hatch gear, and a blast of air.
    Cool air.
    Those of the crew who had done arctic work before stopped what they were doing, stared upward, then shared a startled glance. Braced as they were, all unconsciously, for that cutting cold they had known so often, they were unprepared for what felt like the gentle airs of a mild October day. The CPO, Gleason, called to the redheaded seaman, who was pulling heavy parkas and gloves from a locker, “Never mind, Jimmy.”
    The Captain wrinkled his brows, shook his head slightly and peered up the ladder. The Admiral was standing on a rung near the stop, and as much sky as Lee Crane could see past his bulky figure seemed to be a flaming orange-red. Crane glanced at his wrist and then at the chronometer on the control panel, shook his head again and called up, “What is it, sir?” and when there was no answer, he mounted the ladder himself.
    The Admiral was already out on the deck. Crane ranged up beside him and stood silently, looking. Someone called from down below, but they both ignored the sound. Presently, “God!” said Chip Morton from the lip of the conning tower, “The . . . the sky’s on fire!”
    In a broad arc across the sky, a glaring, flaming band of light lay. It trembled, coruscated, rimmed itself shiveringly with tatters of light, yellow, orange, flickers of blue coming and going.
    Somehow, its most terrifying feature was its silence; a thing like that, by rights, should have roared and crackled, but it did not.
    The Admiral cleared his throat. “It would seem,” he said in a low voice, “that something’s been going on behind our backs. Uh . . . Lee . . . get a periscope slow-scan on that thing and have Sparks lay it on the repeater screens in the wardroom and the crew’s quarters. They have a right to see this.