Undersea Fleet (5 page)

The band blared into the sub-sea anthem as we wheeled left off the Ramp, boxed the Quadrangle and halted by squads in the center of the square, facing the inspection platform in front of the Ad Building. The sun was murderously hot, though it was not yet noon; but not a man of our class wavered. We stood there while the upperclassmen marched crisply through in their turn; we stood there through the brief address by the Commandant to remind us of the sacredness of the day. We stood there through the exacting man-by-man inspection of the Commandant and his officers, as they strolled down the lines, checking weapons, eagle-eyed for a smudged tunic or tarnished button.

Then it was over and we marched off again by crews, to be dismissed at the end of the Ramp. Bob Eskow and I fell out and began to trot for our quarters—we had just twenty minutes before we were due to fall out again in undress whites for our first class of the day.

We were stopped by a cadet from the Guards crews. “Eden?” he snapped. “Eskow?”

That’s right,” I told him.

“Report to the Commandant’s office, both of you. On the double.”

We stared at each other. The Commandant! But we had done nothing to justify being reprimanded…

On the double,
lubbers!” the Guard cadet barked. What are you waiting for? The tides don’t wait!”

They called me first. I left Bob sitting at ramrod attention in the Commandant’s outer office, opened the door tothe private room, took a deep breath and entered. My hat was properly under my arm, my uniform was as nearly perfect as I could make it; at least, I thought, if the Commandant had to call me in, in was nice of him to make it right after a full-dress inspection! I saluted and said, with all the snap I could give it: “Sir, Cadet Eden, James, reporting to the Commandant as ordered!”

The Commandant, still in his own dress uniform, mopped at his thick neck with a sea-scarlet handkerchief and looked me over appraisingly.

“All right, Eden,” he said after a moment. “Stand at ease.”

He got up and walked wearily to a private door of his office. “Come in, Lieutenant,” he called.

Sea Coach Blighman marched stiffly into the room. The Commandant stood for a moment at the window, looking somberly out at the bright, white beaches and the blue sea beyond. Without turning, he said:

“Eden, we lost a shipmate of yours yesterday in the diving tests. His name was David Craken. I understand you knew him.”

“Yes, sir. Not very well. I only met him a short time before the dive, sir.”

He turned and looked at me thoughtfully. “But you did know him, Eden. And I’ll tell you something you may not know. You are one of the very few cadets in the Academy who can say that. His roommate—Cadet Angel. You. And just about nobody else. It seems that Cadet Craken, whatever his other traits, did not go in for making friends.”

I remained silent. When the Old Man wanted me to say something, he would let me know, I was sure of that.

He looked at me for a moment longer, his solid, ruddy face serious. Then he said: “Lieutenant Blighman, have you anything to add to your report on Cadet Craken?”

“No, sir,” rasped Coach Blighman. “As I told you, as soon as Cadet Craken failed to return in a reasonable time I alerted the bridge and requested a microsonar search. They reported that the microsonar was not fully operative, and immediately beamed the escort tugs, asking them to conduct a search. It took a few minutes for the tugs to reach us, and by the time they did they could find no trace of Cadet Craken.”

I thought of David Craken, out alone in the icy, dark sea, under the squeeze of thirteen hundred feet of water. It was no wonder the tugs had been unable to locate him. A man’s body is a tiny thing in the immensity of the sea.

The Commandant said: “What about the microsonar? What was the trouble with it?”

Blighman scowled. “Well, sir,” said, “I—I don’t know that it makes sense.”

“I’ll decide that,” the Commandant said with an edge to his voice.

“Yes, sir.” Blighman was clearly unhappy; he frowned at me. “In the first place, sir, one of the fathometer rigs was apparently lost from the deck of the gym ship before the dive. Since the microsonar had been adapted to use two fathometers to make an official diving record, that may have affected its efficiency. At any rate, the search room reported a—a ghost image. They had stripped down the sonar to find the trouble when Craken was lost.”

“A ghost image,” repeated the Commandant. He looked at me. “Tell Cadet Eden what that image was supposed to be, Lieutenant.”

“Well—The sonar crew thought it, well, looked something like a sea serpent.”

The Commandant let the words hang there for a moment.

“A sea serpent,” he repeated. “Cadet Eden, the Lieutenant tells me that you said something about a sea serpent.”

I said stiffly, “Yes sir. I—I thought I saw something at eleven hundred feet. But it could have been anything, sir. It could have been a fish, or just my imagination—narcosis or something like that, sir. But—”

“But you used the term ‘sea serpent,’ did you not?”

I swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“I see,” The Commandant sat down at his desk again and looked at his hands. “Cadet Eden,” he said, “I’ve investigated the disappearance of Cadet Craken as thoroughly as I could. There are several aspects to it on which I have not fully made up my mind. In the first place, there is the loss of the fathometer. True, it was not secured, working slipped over the side. But there have been several such incidents. And in this case it may have cost us the life of a cadet.

“Second, there is the suggestion that a sea serpent may somehow be involved. I must say, Eden, that I am instinctively inclined to think all sea serpents come out of bottles. I’ve spent forty-six years in the sub-sea service and I’ve been in some funny places; but I’ve never seen a sea serpent. The microsonar crew isn’t very sure of what they saw—if they saw anything at all—and besides we know that the equipment was operating badly for which I have already disciplined the crew responsible, and it may merely have because of the loss of the fathometer. That puts it up to you. Can you say positively that you saw a sea serpent?”

I thought rapidly, but there was only one conclusion. “No, sir. It may have been a reaction, either from the depth serum or from narcosis.”

The Commandant nodded. “I thought so. So there remains only point three.

“Cadet Eden, I have already interviewed Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane. He reports that there was a serious disagreement between Cadet Craken and himself, and it is his opinion after due reflection that Cadet Craken may have been in an unstable mental state at the time of his final dive. In other words, Eden, Captain Fairfane suggests that Craken may deliberately have gone over the side and straight down, in order to commit suicide.”

I completely forgot Academy discipline.

“Sir!” I blazed. “Sir, that’s ridiculous! Fairfane’s crazy if he thinks David would have killed himself! Why, in the first place, the whole fight between them was Fairfane’s own doing—and besides David had absolutely no reason to do anything of the sort! He might have been a little—well, odd, sir, keeping to himself and so on, but I’ll swear he wasn’t the kind to commit suicide. Why, he was—”

I stopped, suddenly remembering who and where I was. Lieutenant Blighman was frowning fiercely at me, and even the Commandant was looking at me with narrowed eyes.

“Sorry, sir,” I said. “But—no, sir, it’s impossible. Cadet Craken couldn’t have killed himself.”

The Commandant took a moment to think it over. Then he said:

“All right, Cadet Eden. If it is of any interest to you, I may say that your estimate agrees with Lieutenant Blighman’s. In his opinion Cadet Craken—like yourself, I might mention—is, or was, one of the most promising cadets in the Academy. Dismissed!”

I saluted, turned and left—but not before I caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Blighman, looking embarrassed. The old shark! I thought to myself, wonderingly. Evidently behind those fierce and hungry eyes there was a human being, after all.

Because it was Academy Day, there was only one class that afternoon, and Eladio Angel was in it with me. Since Bob didn’t return from the Commandant’s office before it was over, Laddy—so David Craken had called him—and I left together.

We walked toward his quarters, comparing notes on what the Commandant had said to us. It had been about the same for both of us—Laddy was as furious as I at Fairfane’s suggestion that David had committed suicide. “That squid Fairfane, Jeem,” he said, “he hates greatly. David is beyond question a better diver, no? So when he is lost, the squid must destroy his name.” He looked at me searchingly for a moment. “And also,” he added, “I do not think David ees dead.”

I stopped and stared at him. “But—”

Eladio Angel held up his hand to interrupt me. “No, no,” he begged, “do not tell me he is lost. For I know this, Jeem, and also I know David. I cannot say why I think it, but think it I do.” He shrugged with a small smile. “But he ees declared missing and presumed to be drowned, that is true. And so no matter what Eladio thinks, Eladio must abide by what the Academy says. So I am packing his things now, Jeem, to send them back to his father near Kermadec Dome.” He hesitated, then asked: “Would you—would you care to see something, Jeem?”

I said, “Well, thanks. But it doesn’t seem right to pry.”

“No, no! No prying, Jeem. It is only something that you might like to see, Jeem. Nothing personal. A—a thing that David made. It is not only not private, it is hanging on the wall for all to see. Perhaps you should see it before I take it down.”

Well, why not? Although I hadn’t known David Craken well, I thought of him as a friend, and I was curious to see what Laddy Angel was talking about. We went to the room he had shared with David, and I saw it at once.

The spot over the head of a cadet’s bed is his own, to do with as he will. Half the cadets in the Academy have photos of their girl friends hanging there, most of the other half have their mothers’ pictures, or photos of sub-sea vessels, or once in a while a signed portrait of some famous submariner or athlete.

Over David Craken’s bed hung a small, unframed water color.

He had painted it himself; it was signed “DC” in the lower right-hand corner. And it showed—

It was a sub-sea scene. A great armored sub-sea creature was bursting out of a tangled forest of undersea plants.

There was very little about the scene that was familiar, or even believable. The vegetation was straftge to me—vast thick leaves, somehow looking luminous against the dark water. The armored thing itself was just as strange, with a very long neck, wicked fanged flippers—

But with the same head I had seen over the side of the gym ship—
if
I had seen anything—eleven hundred feet down.

And there was something that was odder still:

When I looked more closely at the picture, I saw that the monster was not alone. Seated on its back, jabbing at it with a long goad like a mahout on an elephant, was a human figure.

For a moment I had been shocked into believing fantastic things. Sea serpents!

But the human figure put a stop to it. I might have believed in the existence of sea serpents. I might have thought that his picture was some sort of corroboration of what I had thought I had seen and what the sonarmen thought they had picked up and what David had talked about.

But the man on the monster’s back—that made it pure fantasy, the whole thing, just something that a youth from Marinia had painted to idle away some time.

I thanked Eladio for letting me see the picture and left.

Bob still had not returned from the Commandant’s office.

I went to chow and returned; still no Bob. I began to worry. I had thought it was only to ask him for his report on David’s loss that he had been called in; but surely it couldn’t have taken that long. I began to fear that it was something worse. Lieutenant Blighman was there with the Commandant; could it be that the sea coach had called Bob in in order to disqualify him? Certainly he was now a borderline case. All of us were required to qualify in one sub-sea sport a year to retain our status in the Academy, and Bob had now washed out in three of the four possibles. The marathon sub-sea swim was still to come, and he would not usually wash out unless he failed in that one too—but what other explanation could there be?

There was no point in sitting around worrying. I had got an address from Eladio of David Craken’s father in Marinia. I sat down and began to write him a letter.

The address was:

Mr. J. Craken

Care of Morgan Wensley, Esq.

Kermadec Dome

Marinia

There wasn’t much I could say, but I was determined to say something. Of course, the Academy would notify the elder Mr. Craken; but I wanted to say something beyond the bare, official radiogram. But on the other hand, it would be foolish to stir up worry and questions by saying anything about sea serpents, or about the disagreement with Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane…

In the end, I merely wrote that, though I hadn’t known David long, I felt a deep sense of loss; that he was a brave and skillful swimmer; and that if there was anything I could do, his father had only to ask me.

As I was sealing the letter Bob came in.

He looked worn but—not worried, exactly; excited was a better word. I pounced on him with questions. What had happened? Had he been there all this time over David’s disappearance? Were there any developments?

He laughed, and I felt relieved. “Jim, you worry too much. No, there aren’t any developments. They asked me about David, all right. I just said I didn’t know anything, which was perfectly true.”

“And that took you all this time?”

His smile vanished. He looked suddenly—excited again. But he shook his head. “No, Jim,” he said, “that isn’t what took me all this time.”

And that was all he said.

I didn’t ask him any more questions. Evidently, I thought, Coach Blighman had given him a hard time after all. No doubt he had been put through a rough session, with both the Coach and the Commandant hammering at him, telling him that his record of sub-sea qualification was miserably unsatisfactory, reminding him that if he didn’t qualify in the one remaining sub-sea sport activity of the year he would wash out. It was no wonder, I thought, that he didn’t want to talk about it; it must have been an unpleasant experience.