Read Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea for Free Online Page A

although the water was clear, their depth of over four hundred feet put them on the fringes of the lightless deep. And perhaps a hundred yards away, they saw a shape, like a great white cloud . . . no, there was nothing cloudly about it; it was solid, jagged, and seemed to be moving majestically, slowly upward through the water, until the startled eye realized how far away it was, and how large: at least as big as a ten-story building. Then it was evident that the thing was coming up with a rush, moving far too fast for anything that big. It disappeared above the loom of their brilliant lights.
    “Wh-what was that?”
    “It looked like an iceberg,” Cathy answered. “But icebergs aren’t supposed to be down at the bottom!”
    From the console came the shrill reiterated squeal of sonar gear, as one of the officers turned up the gain. They all pressed to a cathode screen where a line of light with a little mountain in the middle danced in time to the squeak. The squeaks came closer together, faster and faster. Chip Morton broke away and ran into the transparent bows, pressing his back against the forward plate and looking down and to the rear. “Give me a beam!” he shouted. “That’s it . . . straight down . . . aft five . . . five more . . . hold it . . . Oh my God, it’s right under our keel . . .”
    “Got the range,” barked O’Brien. “Two hundred . . . one ninety . . . eighty . . . One hundred fifty . . .”
    “Both starboard full ahead!” bellowed the Captain. “Both port full astern. Full left rudder!”
    The submarine shuddered from stem to stern as the big atomic-fired turbines took hold. She seemed as if she never would answer, and then a drift could be detected as she began to respond, and flotsam, caught in the lights, began to stream past from left to right. Up in the bows, Chip Morton made a sound of pure animal terror and sprinted aft, only to stand close to the knot of men, as if their very presence formed some sort of sanctuary for him. Eyes wide, he looked forward.
    With a grinding crunch, the rising iceberg shouldered into the Seaview ’s bows and lifted them.
    The transparent plates took the impact on the under side and to the right, and crushed ice showered and swirled like smoke. The ship tilted upward and began to roll to the left, then slide backward, dragging her glass nose down the jagged slope of the ice mountain, cracking, crushing, grinding, smashing into each rough projection as it rose past.
    Cathy Connors and Susan Hiller clung to each other and forgot to breathe. Neither could have called the exact figure in pounds per square inch the sub was subjected to at that depth, nor the terrible over-burden of those sickening blows against the transparent nose and the plates around it; both knew, with nightmare horror and utter certainty, that the punishment it was taking was much, much more than anyone, even Nelson, could have dreamed that it would ever take.
    She listed sharply and suddenly to port, and then, like an obscuring sheet snatched away, the white wall was gone. The ship slid back and down through the black waters, found her keel, leveled off and dropped her bows dangerously, the whole maneuver precisely like that which a flyer calls a whipstall.
    “All slow ahead,” rapped the Captain. “Level her. Hold your turn, then steer one eight oh.”
    Admiral Nelson moved athwartship, coming quite close to the two girls. He seemed not to see them; his eyes were fixed on the transparent herculite bows, and roved up and back, back and forth, down and across. “By God,” he said hoarsely, low: “By God, it held. It held.”
    “By God, Admiral,” said Chip Morton shakily from the other side of the big chamber—he could not have heard—“it held.”
    “Hah!” grunted Nelson, almost jovially. “Of course it held!”
    Susan Hiller met Cathy Connors’ eyes and almost smiled; and in that moment, Cathy understood much of what the lady-psychiatrist had said about the