by Frederick
Undersea Quest
by Frederik Pohl
and Jack Williamson
(1954)
1
The Crested Letter
I saw my uncle, Stewart Eden, for the first time when I was all of ten years old.
He came to our home in New London where our family had always lived. The old housekeeper, Mrs. Flaherty, who was all the “family” I had left, had prepared me for his coming. But she hadn’t prepared me for the way he looked.
I was standing on the porch as my uncle came unevenly up the walk. He was a huge pale giant of a man, bronze bearded, limping a little from some old scar. His voice was strangely soft.
“You’re Jim,” he said, and scratched his head. That was all. I don’t suppose he knew much about ten-year- olds, or whether I was likely to laugh or cry or hide behind the door when he came to visit. I think he suspected that if he patted my head or even shook my hand I might burst into tears—as though I would! I had been standing alone, except for the housekeeper, as far back as I could remember.
But my uncle couldn’t take the chance, because he didn’t have time for tears.
He put down his battered sharkskin bag and glanced at his watch. How characteristic that gesture was! He must have done it a thousand times that first afternoon. And each time he frowned, as though the hours were racing by too fast for him, the minutes disappearing before he could put them to work.
“Come on,” he whispered in his soft voice. He took my arm and led me down the steps—not like a grownup with a child, but as one comrade helps the other.
I held back. I said uncertainly, “What about Mrs. Flaherty?” The housekeeper didn’t let me go off by myself, not since the day she’d found me trapped in a home-made diving bell at the bottom of our lake and had to call the fire department to get me free.
“Sink Mrs. Flaherty,” he said in that chuckling, warm voice. “You’re a man now, Jim. We men have a right to go off together once in a while.”
I followed him with a little doubt in my mind, but the doubt was cleared up when, from the corner of my eye, I saw Mrs. Flaherty peering at us from behind the curtain. Her lips smiled, though she was dabbing at her eyes. Poor Mrs. Flaherty! She had been too loyal to the memory of my mother ever to want to take her place in my eyes—but she couldn’t help thinking of me as a son.
That was an afternoon!
My uncle took me on the big, fast monorail down to the shore. I looked longingly at the amusement park as we went past, but my uncle shook his head. “No, Jim,” he said, chuckling. “Merry-go-rounds and roller coasters aren’t for men. Today you have to be a man. You and I are going to see something you’ve never seen before…”
And he was right. For that afternoon my uncle showed me—the Sea.
Something I had never seen before?
Yes. In spite of the fact that every morning from my window I saw the white flecks of breakers or the slate- gray line of squalls against the horizon. In spite of the hours and endless hours my father and I had spent in catboats.
That afternoon my uncle, Stewart Eden, showed me what the sea really was. We sat there on a jetty watching the gulls, and the low, lean submarine freighters slipping through the water far out, and the waves breaking below us. And he talked. He told me strange and wonderful things; he showed me why the sea was his life—and how it could be mine.
My uncle showed me the great sea itself—the vast solid tangle of submarine deeps and peaks and cities and unknown kelp jungles, of which the part of the ocean we landlubbers can see is only the paper-thin skin. For my uncle was a dedicated man. He had given his life to the lands beneath the sea; and that afternoon, on the rocky Connecticut beaches, I began to understand why.
The sun was low behind us. My uncle finally stopped talking—not so much because he was finished (and certainly not because I was tired of listening!) as because it simply was not possible to tell the story of the sea. It was a thing each man had to find out for himself. A thing you had to live, and could never put in words.
He looked at his watch again, in that hard-pressed, almost worried way, and sighed. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s a whole world, Jim,” he said. “And I’ve got to go back to it. I wish I could spend more time with you, get to know you a little better. But I’m leaving tonight.”
I stood as straight and tall as I could, trying to seem older than my years. “Uncle Stewart,” I said, making my voice deep and grown-up, “take me with you!”
He didn’t smile and he didn’t pat me on the head. He said patiently, “No, Jim. Believe me, I would do it if the thing could be done. But it would be no kindness to you. It’s a hard life in the cities under the sea, Jim. There’s no place for you there—yet. You’ve got a half dozen years of school ahead of you before you can even begin to think of it.”
His hand tightened reassuringly on my shoulder as he went on: “The time will pass though, Jim. Oh, not quickly—I won’t deceive you about that. It will be slow, slow. It’s hard to study and watch the teacher and read the books when the sea-cities are sparkling down there, ready, waiting for you. But some things are hard to do in this life, and we have to do them just the same. Your father—”
He paused for a moment and looked away from me. Then he went on quietly, “Your father was a fine man, Jim. If it hadn’t been for one bad break, and one bad man, it might have been him here today instead of me.” He shook his head. “It isn’t right to hate anybody, Jim,” he said softly, the chuckle almost gone from his voice. “But some men make hating them a temptation that you just can’t resist.”
“You mean Mr. Hallam Sperry?” I piped up.
“I mean Mr. Hallam Sperry. Everything your father was and everything your father did was good, Jim. He, as much as any man, made Marinia a power in the world. Giant cities under the water! And your father helped put them there. And then he died, and Hallam Sperry took over.” He looked broodingly out over the water. Then he shook himself and smiled again. “Time enough for that, Jim!” he said. “But your father never shirked a job, and your father’s son won’t either, will he, boy? So you’ll go back to school and learn your lessons and get ready to be a man. Six years. And, Jim, even after the six years, the schooling won’t be over. Not quite. But then—” The deep chuckle came to life in his voice—“then the schooling will be a little different.”
“Different how?” I demanded, hardly understanding what this stranger who was my uncle was saying, but oddly excited and happy.
“Quite different!” He was grinning at me, a grin that made me forget my disappointment. “You see, Jim, people remember your father and—well, I have a few friends myself. I won’t keep you waiting. If the sea is the life for you, then this is yours.” He reached into his pocket. Like a king handing a gift of emeralds to a favored noble, he gave me a marine-blue envelope with a sparkling platinum crest. “Open it up, Jim. It’s yours,” he said.
The paper in the envelope was stiff and crinkly in my excited hands. The crest was lettered: United States Sub-Sea Academy.
Beneath it, typed in letters of bright sea- dye scarlet, was a short message addressed to me:
Dear Sir:
An application has been made in your behalf by Stewart Eden, Commandant, U.S.S. (Retired), your authorized guardian. It has been reviewed by the Admissions Board of this Academy.
The application has been accepted.
On the first day of September following your sixteenth birthday, you are instructed to report to the Officer of the Deck of the Admissions Section at this Academy for assignment to a Training Squadron.
Sincerely yours,
Roger Shea Larrabee
Vice-Admiral, U.S.S. In
Command
I stood staring at the wonderful, the unbelievably wonderful, letter.
After a moment, my uncle’s golden voice asked, “Well, Jim? Do you want it?”
I said: “Uncle Stewart, I want it more than anything else in the world.”
And then, in spite of being ten years old and a grown man for the day, I think I did cry.
The six years did pass, just as my uncle had promised.
Not quickly or easily, but with that letter locked in my trunk all the time I was at school, the years passed. I had to learn a great many things to be ready for the Academy—mathematics and English and science of a dozen varieties, and languages and history and much, much more. Six years was none too long a time for the job.
But I learned them. And I learned a few other things too.
Among them I learned just who my quiet, soft-voiced Uncle Stewart really was.
2
Cadet Eden Reports for Duty
The Bermuda sun was blindingly bright. The car from the airport let me out at the coral gates as a submarine cadet, in full sea-red dress uniform, presented arms sharply.
I stood there, my bag in my hand, wondering uncertainly if I should salute. The grinning cab driver roared off, and the cadet took the decision out of my hands.
“Advance and be recognized,” he rapped out.
I tried to stand at attention. “James Eden reporting,” I said. “Here are my orders.”
I handed over the travel documents that had come to me in the mail the week before. The cadet scanned them briskly.
“Proceed, Cadet Eden,” he ordered, martinet-like. Then, for a moment, the ramrod formality dropped from his face and he smiled. “And good luck,” he added, as he returned to his post.
That was my first sight of the Sub-Sea Academy.
When I walked in that gate, Jimmy Eden disappeared. Cadet Eden, J., U.S.S., was born.
The first hours went by like seconds. It was a scramble of physical examinations and questionnaires and interviews and instructions and drawing gear and equipment and finding my quarters. In the barnlike supply shed the spidery fingers of the fitting-servo roamed over my body, clicking and twittering; and in the delivery hatch of the servo my first uniform took shape.
It was the dull sea-green fatigue uniform of the submariners. Now that my patterns were on record, I could draw the rest of my uniforms as they were needed. As the arms of the tri-dimensional pantograph sketched in the blouse, and the plastic spinnerets weaved in and out to translate it into fabric, the Stores quartermaster bellowed: “Hurry up, Mister! Put it on. The tides don’t wait!”
But he could have saved his breath. As soon as the hatch opened and the uniform swung out, still sparkling with drops of the chemical rinse, I was climbing into it. As the glass hatch closed again I caught a glimpse of myself. It was hard to keep a grin off my face: Now anybody could plainly see it, I was a submariner!
But the next storesman was barking at me already; I had no time to admire my reflection.
I stumbled out of the Stores shed, grunting under almost a hundred pounds of gear, the tools and badges of my new life. As I reached the door the Caribbean sun seemed like a furnace door gaping a yard above my head. The heat, after the cool, large shed, was like a physical blow.
It was a hundred yards across the quadrangle to the dormitory to which I had been assigned. By the time I got there I was staggering.
Perhaps the sweat in my eyes was the reason I dida’t see the scarlet-tuniced upperclassman who made a shipshape right turn and started up the steps just ahead of me.
I stumbled into him.
My gear fell all over the steps. I groaned, but I said, “I’m sorry,” although a little grouchily, I admit. I bent down to pick up my cap.
“Atten-HUT!”
The whiplash of the word cleared my foggy brain like magic.
I leaped erect. “Sorry, sir!” I said smartly.
The cadet on the steps above me looked down with an expression of distaste. He was as tall as I, and heavier in build. His eyes under the flat scarlet dress cap were cold; somehow they seemed almost dangerous.
“Keep your mouth shut, Mr. Lubber!” he rapped. “When an officer or am upperclassman wants to know if you’re sorry, he’ll ask you. Don’t volunteer the information. And stand at attention, Mister! Full attention—your arms at your sides.”
“But I’ll drop my cap,” I objected.
“Mis-ter Lubber!”
“Yes, sir!” I let my arms drop. The cap slipped to the ground again. My luck had held once, but on the second fall the crystal visor shattered.
The upperclassman paid no attention.
He stared coldly at me for a moment, then descended the steps and walked slowly around me. When he had made a complete circle, he shook his head.
In a conversational tone, he said:
“I have seen a great many undesirable specimens in my life, Mr. Lubber, but I have never in two years, three days and thirteen hours at the Sub-Sea Academy seen any person, beast or thing—and I may say that I am by no means certain which of these classifications you belong in—which showed as little promise of ever becoming anything close to barely possible material for making a third-rate pump-hand’s second assistant helper as you.” He shook his head. “If I were to call you a disgrace to the country, to the Service and to the Academy, Mr. Lubber,” he went on, “I would be guilty of gross flattery. It is on the face of it clearly impossible that you will last as long as two weeks in this Academy. I should not bother to take an interest in you at all. I am wasting the Service’s good time by doing so. But, Mr. Lubber, a good submariner is charitable. My kind heart forces me to do what I can in order to protract your useless and unpleasant stay with us as much as possible. Therefore, I will take an interest in your education.” He planted his hands on his hips and stared at me. “To start out with, Mr. Lubber, I invite you to learn Rule One. Would you like to learn it? You may answer in two words, each of one syllable, the second being ‘sir.’”
My jaw muscles were trembling—whether from rage or nervous laughter I couldn’t tell. Obediently I said, “Yes, sir.”
He nodded briskly. “Very good—that is, very good for you, considering. You answered me in more or less proper form, and it was the first time you tried it, at that. I congratulate you, Mr. Lubber. There may be some hope for you after all. It may be as long as three weeks, perhaps even three weeks and two or three days, before the Fitness Board is forced to the conclusion that you are utterly unfit to touch the sludgeboots of a real submariner and, throws you out. However, let us get on with Rule One. Attention to orders, Mr. Lubber! Rule One is: ‘Whenever in the presence of an upperclassman, you will stand at strict attention until he either gives you leave to do otherwise or signifies, by departing to a distance of at least five yards, that he no longer has any interest in what you do.’ Do you understand that?”
I started to say, “Yes, sir,” but closed my mouth again in a hurry. He had not given me leave to speak. I was learning the rules.
But I wasn’t quite fast enough. He stared at my jaw in an absorbed way.
“Facial tic,” he mused to himself. “This person is physically sub-normal too, it would appear—as well as mentally, morally, emotionally and otherwise.” He sighed. “Well, enough of this.
Mr. Lubber, it is well known that memorizing difficult rules, particularly those containing forty-five words, requires absolute concentration. To help you achieve this condition, I am permitting you to walk off fifteen tours around the quadrangle. Don’t thank me; I’m glad to do it for you. It’s for your own good. It has nothing to do with punishment, but is only designed to help you concentrate.” He nodded with an expression of cold satisfaction. “However,” he went on, “the question of punishment must also be considered. For conduct unbecoming a sub-sea cadet—to be specific, trampling an upperclassman—you may walk five additional tours. And for wanton destruction of government property—” his eyes flitted to my crushed visor—“ten tours more. You ha
ve wasted enough of my time, Mr. Lubber; kindly start on this at once. The tides don’t wait!”
Without another word he about-faced and mounted the steps.
That was my introduction to the Sub-Sea Academy. I didn’t even know his name.
Thirty times around the quadrangle, which is a hundred yards on a side, is seven miles.
I made it. It took me a little more than three hours, and the last few laps were in a state of near-coma.
At the twenty-fifth lap it crossed my mind that no one was counting the laps but myself. At die twenty-seventh I had to fight myself to make my legs carry me on, around that dizzying square.
But plain, homely stubbornness kept me going. The Academy was for honorable men, and—even though at least one upperclassman was obviously a sadistic brute—I was going to follow every order I received to the letter, as long as I wore the uniform.
But, at last, it was over.
I picked up my scattered gear where it lay. Dozens of cadets had climbed the steps while I was walking my tours, but none had given it a glance. I found my way to my room.
As I opened the door, a short and astonishingly young- looking lubber like myself jumped to attention. He relaxed when he got a look at me.
“Oh, you must be Eden,” he said, sticking out his hand. “My name’s Eskow. Tough luck; I saw you out there.”
He was grinning; I liked the friendly look of his grin. “I guess you got a head start on all of us,” he went on. “Well, you won’t be the last. We’ll all be out there sooner or later. If I know me, I’ll be one of the ‘sooner’ ones—and often.”
I mumbled something and dumped my gear on my cot. It made an untidy picture. The unmade bed, with clothes and books and equipment strewn all over it—as untidy and unkempt as I felt.
I looked across at Eskow’s bed. It was neatly made, with an extra blanket taut across the pillow; his footlocker lay with the lid open, showing all his equipment shipshape and stowed away. Eskow himself was pink-cheeked from a bath and shave…though, at a guess, he could have skipped the shaving for quite a while before the fact became obvious.
