Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Read Free Page B

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’ South, 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 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.”
    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