Read Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea for Free Online

Connors. “I—”
    There was a dull boom far away, felt rather than heard. The submarine lifted, tilted, subsided rocking, while a crunching ramble proceeded upward around them. The constant, almost un-heard thrum of the motors, the barely-felt tremble of propeller-thrust, ceased abruptly, a change from almost nothing to nothing-at-all which was as shocking as a dynamite blast. Dr. Hiller sat frozen, clutching the edge of the desk. Cathy Connors sat on the deck, where the first jolt had flung her from her perch on the examining table, while a thread of blood curled downward over her temple where her head had struck the corner of the desk.
    “Damage control!” roared the speaker on the bulkhead, in Crane’s voice, but hard, tense, filtered.
    “Damage control! Report!” The shrill hooting of the alarm filled the ship. They had all heard it many times during the past days of drills, but never with such command, such menace.
    “We hit something,” whispered Susan Hiller.
    Cathy shook her head dazedly. “Something hit us.”
    The doctor rose and came around the desk. “Come,” she said levelly. “You’ve been hurt. Let me—”
    Again that dull boom, the lift and lurch. Dr. Hiller’s feet were snatched right out from under her and she sat heavily next to the admiral’s secretary, who said tremblingly, “Well, hello.”
    They helped each other up, and the psychiatrist, holding herself tensely in control, got to a first-aid shelf and deftly examined and treated Cathy’s cut. “Not much, really,” she murmured. “There—the bleeding’s stopped.”
    “Thanks,” said Cathy. “I didn’t even know I was hurt. Sue—let’s go forward and see what’s happened. Only for heaven’s sake remember to keep out from under foot. If there’s anything Admiral Nelson hates in an emergency it’s what he calls ‘non-participating personnel.’ ”
    “I’ll be good,” said the doctor.
    They made their way forward through the central corridor, making a short-cut through what was affectionately called the “fishbowl,” the catwalk over the three small tanks and one large one, where sharks slid oilily. It was here that the submarine took the third impact from below, this by far the worst yet. She listed almost thirty degrees to the accompaniment of shuddering scrapes from outside, slowly nosed down, rolled back, and then achieved an even keel again. The water sloshed over the edges of the tanks below, and its surface boiled, lashed by the tails of the frightened sharks. In one of the smaller tanks—smaller only by comparison, but by no means a small tank—a dark torpedo body flashed out of the water and boomed against the wire mesh which covered it, leaving it thrumming.
    The other tanks, uncovered, seemed to the frightened girls to be ready to fill the air at any moment with flapping, snapping sea monsters.
    “But you know,” said Cathy afterwards, when they had regained the corridor and were moving forward again, “it was a safer place to be in than your office. I’ll take a good strong guardrail on each side, any time, even if there are sharks lunging around underneath.”
    “I’ll requisition some for the office,” said Susan Hiller.
    Twice they stepped aside and flattened against the wall while damage details went by on the double, and when they reached the wardroom and the door into the observation nose, they moved like a couple of schoolgirls visiting someone else’s school, peeping through each doorway before they went through it.
    A knot of officers, Captain Crane, Commander Morton, and Admiral Nelson among them, clustered around the control console in the after starboard comer. Quiet, tense orders flashed and crackled between them. The telltales and grilles flashed and crackled as well, bringing information on pressure, temperature, and the presence outside of huge, hurtling objects . . .
    “Look!” breathed Cathy Connors, pointing forward with a shaking finger.
    The big floods were on, for