“No paper,” Pitt said to no one in particular.
March looked at him. “No what?”
“No sign of paper anywhere,” Pitt murmured. “This is where the crew passed time, isn’t it? Then why no playing cards, magazines, books? Why no salt and pepper, no sugar...” Suddenly he broke off in mid-sentence and walked, quickly behind the serving line into the galley. He threw open the doors to the supply lockers and the galley storage compartment. They were completely barren. Only the cooking utensils and dishware remained. He noted with grim satisfaction the specks of corrosion on the dinnerware.
March was regarding him thoughtfully over the serving line counter. “What do you make of it?”
“This compartment’s been flooded,” Pitt said slowly.
“Impossible,” March said simply. “The engine and reactor room..”
“Were never touched by water,” Pitt finished. “That’s obvious. You can’t dry out a nuclear reactor like a load of laundry, but you can restore a galley that’s been flooded.” He carefully closed the storage locker doors, leaving them as he had found them.
They hurried down a long corridor past the officers’ ward room, the living compartments, and the captain’s stateroom. Pitt made a rapid search of Commander Dupree’s quarters but found nothing; even his clothing was gone. Pitt felt as if he were standing in a hospital room where a patient had just died and the orderlies had removed every item of the man’s existence.
Swiftly, without speaking, Pitt continued down the corridor and stepped into what he correctly guessed was the main control room. Barf tightly clutched in his hand, he padded silently past rows of electronic equipment. His eyes scanned the panels and stainless steel gauges, the radar scopes, the illuminated charts, and transparent tracking screens. It was difficult for him to believe that he was in a submarine beneath the sea instead of a highly complex command center at the National Space Headquarters. The Starbuck was humming softly without human supervision, awaiting the day when a command was given that would awaken and send her surging through the seas once more.
At last Pitt found what he was looking for, the door to the radio room. The equipment waited forlornly, as if somehow expecting the operator to return any second. Pitt sat down and, pulling open the nearest drawer, retrieved a manual on the radio’s operation. Good old Navy, he thought; operating instructions are never kept more than spitting distance away. He leaned forward over the transmitter and arranged the necessary dials and switches. Then he turned to March.
“Find the antenna control and shove it up as high as it’ll go.”
It took March sixty seconds to discover and activate the topside antenna. Then Pitt gripped the microphone; absorbed in his task in the eerie emptiness of the submarine, the return trip to the surface was completely forgotten for the moment. He set the frequency to maritime transmission, knowing his message would be picked up back in the bunker at Pearl Harbor. This ought to make a few people believe in ghosts, he thought devilishly. Then he pressed the button for TRANSMIT.
“Hello, hello, Martha Ann. This is Starbuck. I repeat, Starbuck. Do you read me? Over.”
Boland had not been idle. Pitt had no sooner pulled the Starbuck’s escape hatch closed when Boland ordered two of his best men to prepare for diving. They were to carry extra air tanks to replace the ones carried by Pitt and March, which, he figured, must surely be on reserve air by now. He pounded his fist helplessly on the chart table. They had been in that sub too long; they must be trapped in the escape compartment. Goddamn Pitt, he thought, Goddamn him to hell for pulling such a stupid stunt.
He grabbed the intercom mike. “You men on the dive platform. You’ve got less than five minutes to get them out of there. So move your ass.”
He jammed the microphone back in its cradle and turned to the TV monitors. His eyes locked on the viewing screens with a cold, impassive stare. “How long?”
Stanley glanced at his watch for the fiftieth time. “If they don’t exert themselves, I give them another three minutes.”
As they watched the divers hit the water and swim furiously toward the submarine, footsteps sounded in the passageway outside; the boatswain burst into the detection room.
“We”ve got them!” he yelled. “We’ve got the Starbuck on the radio!”
“What are you talking about?” Boland snapped.
“We’re in voice contact with the Starbuck,” the boatswain said more slowly.
The radio man thought the boatswain had hardly left for the detection room before Boland was leaning over his shoulder. He looked up.
“Believe it or not, sir, Major Pitt is calling us from inside the submarine.”
“Tie me in and throw him on the speaker,” Boland said. He couldn’t mask the excitement in his voice- perhaps Pitt could do the impossible after all.
“Starbuck? Boland transmitted, “this is Martha Ann. Over.”
Boland stared at the speaker as though he half expected Pitt to walk through it.
“Martha Ann, this is Starbuck. Over.”
“Is that you, Pitt? Over.”
“In the flesh.”
“What is your condition?”
“We’re fit. March sends his love.” Pitt paused to increase his volume. “The Starbuck is not flooded. I repeat, the Starbuck is not flooded. If we had another ten men down here, we could sail her home.”
“The crew?”
“No trace. It’s as though they never existed.”
Boland didn’t answer immediately. He tried to digest the enormity of Pitt’s words, vainly picturing in his mind a deserted and ghostly ship sitting unattended and ignored. He was conscious of nothing around him; he didn’t even notice half of the crew of the Martha Ann standing in the passageway in stunned silence. First came the creeping wave of numbed disbelief, and then slowly, the agonizing, intolerable realization that it was true.
“Please repeat!”
“The vessel is totally deserted. At least from the forward torpedo room to the main control room amidships. We haven’t searched the aft compartments yet. Somebody was kind enough to keep the electric bill paid up. We have power from the port reactor.”
Boland’s knees felt unsteady. He hesitated, clearing his throat, and said “You and March have done your bit for the cause. Make your way to the escape hatch and return to the Martha Ann. I’ll have men with extra air tanks waiting for your ascent. Is Lieutenant March standing by?”
“Negative. He went aft to check for flooded compartments and to make sure the Hyperion Missiles are still snug in their cradles.”
“I guess you know you’re broadcasting to every receiver within a thousand miles on this frequency.”
“Who’d believe a broadcast from a submarine that’s been sunk for six months?”
“Our friends in the USSR, for one.” Boland paused to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. “I suggest we call it a day. Soon as March returns, head back topside. The admiral may call for a full report. And, just so you don’t get your signals crossed again, that’s an order!”
He could almost see the grin on Pitt’s face.
“Okay, Father. Set up the bar. We’ll be there in...”
Pitt’s voice died in mid-sentence. The only sound that emitted from the speaker was the muted rasp that came between transmissions. Boland brought the mike to his lips again, his eyes narrowing from a growing, inner fear.
“I don’t read you, Starbuck. Please repeat.”
Still the muted rasp from the speaker.
“Come in, Pitt. Dammit, why don’t you acknowledge?”
Silence was his only reply.
Pitt sat there without moving, gaping speechlessly at the wild-eyed, heavily bearded apparition that stood in the doorway of the radio room. He sat there while he absorbed the shock, waiting for the repulsive and foul-smelling thing to dissolve back into the hallucination where it belonged. He blinked, hoping his mind would erase the image, but the thing simply blinked back.
Then the mouth moved and
a hoarse voice whispered, “Who are you? You’re not one of them.”
“What do you mean?” Pitt said quietly, controlling his voice.
“They’ll kill you if they knew you used the radio.” The voice sounded remote and distant.
“They?”
Pitt’s hand crept down to Barf and closed over the handgrip. The thing in the doorway took no notice.
“You don’t belong here,” the apparition went on vacantly. “You’re not dressed like the others.”
The man himself was clothed in dirty rags that resembled a naval noncom’s dungarees, but there was no indication of rank. The eyes were dull and the body thin and wasted. Pitt decided to try a long shot
“Are you Commander Dupree?”
“Dupree?” the man echoed. “No, Farris, Seaman First Class Farris.”
“Where are the others, Farris? Commander Dupree, the officers, your shipmates?”
“I don’t know. They said they would kill them if I touched the radio.”
“Is anyone else on board?”
“They keep two guards at all times.”
“Where?”
“They could be anywhere.”
“Oh, my God!” Pitt gasped, his body suddenly taut. “March!” He leaped to his feet and pulled Farris into the radio operator’s chair. “Wait here. Do you understand me, Farris? Don’t move.”
Farris nodded dully. “Yes, sir.”
Barf held in front of him, Pitt moved swiftly from compartment to compartment, stopping every few seconds to listen. There was no sign of Lieutenant March, and the only sound came from the humming of the duct fans. He stepped into what he immediately recognized as the sick bay. There was an operating table, cabinets filled with neatly labeled bottles, surgical instruments, an X-ray machine, and even a dentist’s chair. There was also a crumpled shape lying between the beds that jutted from the far bulkhead. Pitt bent down, although he knew who the inert form had to be.
March was lying on his side, his arms and legs twisted in rubbery grotesqueness, his body fluid circling the body in a congealing pool. Two small round holes bled on a direct line from his chest to the back of his spine; he lay on the cold steel deck, the eyes open, staring unseeing at the blood that had emptied from his veins. Moved by an instinct as old as man, Pitt gently reached down and closed March’s eyes.
As a shadow crept horizontally across the deck and then vertically up the bulkhead, Pitt snapped his body in a half arc and rammed the point of Barf into the stomach of the man standing behind him and pulled the trigger. The black outline against the white paint also betrayed the blurred shape of either a gun or a club in one of the intruder’s hands, and, if Pitt had wasted a fraction of a second, he’d have been as dead as March. As it was, he barely had time to see that his assailant was a tall, hairy man, wearing only a brief green cloth around his loins. The face was intelligent, almost handsome, with blue eyes and a burled mass of blond hair. The features Pitt soon forgot. It was the next agonized moment in time that he carried to his grave.
The carbon dioxide hissed as it unleashed its immense pressure into pliant, human flesh. The man’s body instantly bloated in a distorted monstrosity of ugliness, the stomach protruding together with the small balloonlike pieces of skin that formed between the ribs. The abject look of horror on the face was wiped out in half a second as his grayish-green innards shot from his nose and ears in a fine spray coating the deck for six feet in each direction, and the mouth contorted to twice its size as a great mass of bloody tissue and pieces of internal organs vomited forth in a cascade of red, slimy matter over the inflated torso in unison with the eyeballs which popped out of both sockets and hung swaying over the puffed cheeks. The arms went straight out to the sides and the hideously deformed figure fell backwards to the deck, slowly deflating to its previous size as the carbon dioxide escaped from the body’s orifaces.
Pitt, the bile rising in his throat, turned from the sickening sight, leaned down, and picked up March, carefully laying him on one of the beds. He covered the young lieutenant with a blanket. Pitt’s eyes were sad and bitter. He knelt beside the still form as if to say: I shouldn’t have let you die. Dammit to hell, March. I shouldn’t have let you die.
Pitt stood up, his legs unsteady. The game had changed drastically now. The Vortex had scored close to home.
He turned again to the deformed body on the deck and realized that he was staring at his first tangible evidence. This was no supernatural being from outer space. This was a two-armed, two-legged human being that bled like everyone else.
Pitt didn’t wait to see more. If there was another one of them lurking nearby, Pitt knew he wouldn’t get another chance at killing them from the inside out The gas canister held only one shot.
Pitt felt helpless, but suddenly it came to him; the weapon he’d seen in the shadow on the wall, the weapon that had killed March. In two steps, he had found it under the surgical table. He hadn’t noticed it before because it was shaped more like a small glove with the index finger pointing, than a standard pistol. The grip was the five-finger type in which each finger had its own special rest and support The hand fit the stock as though it had been poured in. Only a short two-inch barrel protruding above the thumb indicated a firing chamber. There was no trigger in the usual sense, but a small button set so that the tip of the finger rested on its sleeve, ready to fire with only an ounce or two of pressure.
Pitt didn’t wait to test it. Quickly he reached the radio room, grabbed a protesting Farris by the arm, and raced toward the escape hatch.
They almost made it. Ten more steps across the engine and reactor room and they would have reached the torpedo room door. Pitt braked suddenly, his feet digging in, driving backward against the force of Farris’s forward motion behind him as he came face-to-face with a massive mountain of a man wearing only brief green shorts and holding the same type of odd weapon that Pitt clutched in his hand.
Pitt lucked out-surprise was on his side. He had expected and feared an untimely confrontation. The other man clearly had not. There was no “who are you?” or “what are you doing here?” Only the pressure of Pitt’s fingers on the button and an almost inaudible serpentlike hiss as his weapon spoke first.
The projectile from Pitt’s gun-he still wasn’t sure what it was that spat out of the tiny barrel-hit the man high on the forehead at point-blank range. The stranger jerked back violently against the turbine, then fell forward, head and chest striking heavily on the deck. Then, even before the man uttered his last gasp, Pitt had stepped around him and was shoving Farris through the doorway into the torpedo room.
Farris stumbled and fell, sprawling on the deck, taking Pitt down with him, but not before Pitt had smashed his leg just below the knee on the door sill and dropped the weapon. The sharp pain felt as though his leg had been suddenly hacked off. But it was not the pain that paralyzed him as he struggled to rise from the deck, but rather a numbing fear, the realization that he’d blundered by dashing headlong into the forward torpedo room. He groped frantically for the strange gun, knowing it was too late, knowing that either of the two men standing in the compartment could kill him with ridiculous ease.
“Pitt?” said the smaller of the two men.
Pitt was certain that his ears and his mind were deceiving him. Then he found himself gazing into the face of the Martha Ann’s helmsman.
Pitt blurted “You followed us?”
“Commander Boland thought you and March must be about out of air,” answered the helmsman. “So he sent us down with auxiliary tanks. We came in through the escape compartment. We never expected to find it dry.”
Pitt’s numbed senses were forging back now. “We haven’t much time. Can you flood this compartment?”
The helmsman stared at him. The other man, Pitt recognized as one of the deckhands, merely looked blank. “You want to flood . . .”
“Yes, dammit. I want to fix it so no one will be able to raise this ship for at least a month.”
“I can?
??t do it . . .” the helmsman said hesitantly.
“There’s no time to waste,” Pitt said softly. “March is already dead, and we will be too if we don’t hurry.”
“Lieutenant March dead? I don’t understand. Why flood . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” Pitt said, staring directly into the helmsman’s eyes. “Ill take full responsibility.” Even before the words were out, the same empty, worthless phrase he’d given to March haunted him.
The other seaman pointed at Farris, sitting on the deck, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. “Who’s he?
“A survivor of the Starbuck’s crew,” Pitt answered. “We’ve got to get him topside. He needs medical attention in the worst way.”
If the seaman was surprised at meeting someone who should have been dead for months, he didn’t show it. Instead, he simply nodded at Pitt’s gashed and bleeding leg. “Looks like you could use some of that yourself.”
The leg had lost all feeling. Pitt was thankful there was no telltale lump that betrayed a fracture. “I’ll survive.” He turned back to the helmsman. “Flood this compartment!”
“You win,” the helmsman said mechanically. “But only under protest . . .”
“Protest it is,” Pitt said impatiently. “Can you do it?”
“No matter what we did, a good salvage crew could blow her out inside of two days. The escape hatch in this compartment is the only way anyone could get in from the outside, so that’s some help as long as the sub’s power supply can’t be reached. Best solution would be to jam the emergency valves closed to prevent blowing and jam the torpedo tubes open to keep the sea coming in. Then disconnect the extraction pumps in case whoever tries to clear the compartment plugs in an outside power source. Probably take them a day and a half to figure out what we’ve done, and then three or four hours to put everything back in order and pump out and pressurize the compartment.”