Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Read Free Page A

“What’s he doing?” she whispered to the captain.
    “Walking a shark,” he replied.
    “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 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