In the corridor, the fluorescents abruptly went out, replaced by the sullen yellow glow of emergency lights. Life rafts dropped from the ceiling and swung at the ends of their cords.
Ahead of the four frogmen, a watertight door was descending. Handing broke into a splashing run toward it, but he was too late. The flood reached the closed door and kept on rising.
“Let me sit here, if you don’t mind, Mr. Womack.” said Bliss. "You and Mr. Gann watch the foretop screens, please.” Bliss sat down at the console and called up a Boat Deck status display. Watertight doors were down at both ends of Corridor Y where it intersected with cross corridors, but the door at the entrance of the lifeboat bay was not closed. A real malfunction, this time, or had they jammed it with something? The water level in the corridor was just over two feet.
“Copter in sight, Chief,” said Womack suddenly.
Bliss felt a sudden paradoxical relief. That meant, at least, that he had not made a grotesque misjudgment.
Submerged, Sea Venture was like a whale, a shape as portly and to all appearance ungraceful as Bliss himself. Only Bliss, perhaps, fully realized how delicately trimmed she was, how easy it would be to make her dance.
He did a mental sum. The isolated section of the corridor was eighty feet long and ten feet wide, ergo eight hundred square feet, times two made sixteen hundred cubic. That was about a hundred thousand pounds of water—fifty tons. Was that enough? Probably, but he wanted to take no chances. Bliss reached out and turned the depth control to plus one twenty-six. Sea Venture descended gently another foot. Now the sensors showed three feet of water in the corridor.
He glanced up at the monitors. The little speck of the helicopter was plainly visible.
Bliss overrode the interlock and began to pump water out of the port-side trim tanks. He watched the clinometer, feeling the vessel tilt almost imperceptibly under him. One degree; two. It couldn’t be much more, or he’d be having a lot of old people falling over and breaking their hips. He adjusted the depth control again to positive one hundred twenty-nine. Sea Venture began to rise.
Womack said, “Chief, the helicopter—!”
Bliss glanced at the monitor. It was close, but there was still time. “We must rise before we can descend,” he said. In the Boat Deck screens, he could see a torrent of water pouring into the ocean. The green light on the panel that indicated the lifeboat-bay door turned abruptly red. The obstruction must have been swept away. Instantly Bliss typed in another override and raised all the watertight doors. The torrent continued. In the screens, Bliss saw five men struggling in the water. When the rush of water stopped, he lowered the doors again and turned the depth control to plus ten.
Sea Venture gently slipped under the surface, all but its upper works, as the helicopter soared closer. A few minutes later, Bliss had the satisfaction of seeing the copter lower a sling to pick up the frogmen.
52
Early in the morning the hospital annex called and told Bliss that Dr. McNulty had awakened. Bliss went down an hour later and found him looking weak and bewildered. "How do you feel. Doctor?”
“Got a sore nose,” said McNulty. “Now I know what it feels like. I was dreaming. I dreamed—” He closed his eyes.
Later in the day Bliss dropped in again; McNulty was looking more alert.
“Doctor, we’ve missed you badly. While you were ill, we’ve been playing cat and mouse with a helicopter carrier— they want to take off our Very Important Passengers.”
“They can’t do that.”
“I know, and I’ve been able to stave them off so far, but it can’t go on forever. Our only chance is to get rid of the parasite somehow in the next few days. If anything at all occurs to you—”
McNulty shook his head. His eyes filled with tears; Bliss, embarrassed, went away.
Paul Newland realized that his deliverance was not far off. He was very weak now, and he slid down into a fuzzy half-consciousness every now and then, but in the intervals his mind seemed clear enough. He had written a note to Hal, and another one to Olivia Jessup. He had gone over his life in memory, as drowning people were supposed to do, and had made his peace with it. There were things he had done that he might do otherwise now if he had the opportunity, but they had been the best things he knew how to do at the time.
It really was quite easy to die; he would have preferred not to do it all by himself, perhaps, but that was a minor complaint. He did not expect anything afterward: he believed that his personality was a unique set of wave forms which after the dissolution of his brain would fade into the background noise of the universe. He was grateful to have had the use of this body and this mind for sixty-four years; he had realized long ago that he did not want it forever.
He was quite sure now that John Stevens must have put him into the lifeboat, perhaps on orders from Bronson’s group. He felt no vindictiveness, only a kind of melancholy regret. The world was going to turn without him. Probably Sea Venture would not survive; perhaps the L-5 program would. Was that a good thing or not? He no longer knew.
He awoke from one of his periods of half-consciousness and knew that the time had come. I’m not sorry for anything, he thought, and drifted away into the long dark.
By midaftemoon heavy swells were overtaking Sea Venture from the east; the barometer was falling. At seventeen hundred hours. Bliss ordered the upper decks cleared and Sea Venture submerged to fifty feet.
Hartman was standing with Bliss and Deputy Davis in the Control Center after dinner. He could feel a faint but perceptible rise and fall of the deck under his feet.
“Why this particular depth, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Navigational problems,” Bliss said. “We could easily get a smoother ride by going a bit deeper, but the deeper we go, the more northing, and we’re already far north of where we ought to be. Excuse us a moment, Davis.”
“Yes, sir.” The deputy stepped aside.
“Here we are,” said Bliss, pointing to the red dot in the center of the display. He pushed a button. “Here’s our projected course for the next twenty-four hours. As you see, we’re going to pass between Rota and Tinian, and that’s bad enough, but farther north the currents are a nightmare, and there’s a risk of being carried into a sort of mini-gyre south of Kyushu.”
“That’s the drawback of steering by currents, then, isn’t it?”
“Quite right, and it would.be much safer to cruise these waters in the summer, but then we wouldn’t get the tourist trade, so there you are.”
“Well, the carrier will never find us in this weather, at least. That’s something.”
“Yes,” said Bliss gloomily.
He played a game with Hartman and went to bed, but did not sleep; he lay and watched the illuminated inertial guidance repeater opposite his bed. After an hour and a half the motion of the vessel was much worse. He picked up the phone.
“Control Center.”
“Womack, take her down to seventy feet.”
“Yes, sir.”
Presently the motion moderated again. For there to be any at all at this depth, the waves at the surface must be a hundred feet tall. Bliss wondered where the carrier was and if it had managed to get out of the storm path.
Down here, they were blind and deaf; the inertial guidance was all they had. Up there, it was a nightmare of wind and wave.
Bliss was aware that he had done all that a man could, and more than he had expected of himself. And it was all for nothing, because he couldn’t isolate the parasite and he couldn’t kill it. For a long time he had clung to the unreasonable hope that Dr. McNulty would think of something when he. recovered. Now he could not deceive himself any longer. In another twenty hours his supply of chemicals would run out and he would be unable to submerge; then the helicopter would land and take the passengers off: mate in one.