Free The Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert Page B

knuckles white from the pressure of his grip upon the rail, his forehead pressed against the cold metal of the pressure hull.
    He looks ill, thought Ramsey. I wonder if I should go down and relieve him?
    As Ramsey watched, Garcia straightened, slammed a fist against the hull surface so hard his knuckles bled. The Ram took this moment to tip slightly from the thrust of an undersea current. Garcia whirled to the controls, corrected for the deflection. Ramsey could see tears streaming down his face.
    Abruptly, Ramsey switched off his screen, feeling that he had eavesdropped upon the workings of a man’s soul and that it was wrong to have done so. He stared at his hands, thought: Now that’s a strange reaction for a psychologist! What’s come over me? He reactivated the screen,
but now Garcia was calmly going about the business of his watch.
    Ramsey returned to his quarters with the strong sense that he had blinded himself to something vital. For almost an hour, he lay awake on his bunk, unable to resolve the problem. When he fell asleep it was to sink again into the dream of the fish.
    He awoke to his next watch with the feeling of not having slept at all.

    There had been a time when people thought it would solve most seafaring problems to take ocean shipping beneath the surface storms. But, as had happened so many times in the past, for every problem solved a new one was added.
    Beneath the ocean surface flow great salt rivers, their currents not held to a horizontal plane by confining banks. The 600 feet of plastic barge trailing behind the Ram twisted, dragged, and skidded—caught by currents flowing through 60 degrees at right angles to their course. If the current set downward, the Ram tipped upward and had to fight against the climb. If a current took the tow upward, the Ram headed down. Variations often gave the subtug’s deck a stately rolling and tipping as though the vessel were beset by a slow-motion storm.
    Automatics took care of most of the deflections, but many were sufficient to cause wide course error. Because of this, a portable gyro repeater always accompanied the man on duty.
    Bonnett carried such a repeater on his remote-control panel as he prowled the engine room during his watch. The
little timelog repeater beside the gyro dial showed seven days, eight hours, and eighteen minutes from departure. The Ram had moved forward deep into the ocean no man’s land south of Iceland.
    Maybe it’ll be a milk run, he thought. For all our detectors have shown, we could be alone in the whole damned ocean. He fell to remembering the night before departure, wondered if Helene was really faithful to him. So damned many Navy wives …
    An amber light glowed at the upper corner of his board, the signal that someone had entered the control room. He spoke into his chest mike: “I’m on the second-level catwalk in the engine room.”
    Sparrow’s voice came out of the board speaker: “Continue as you are. I’m just restless. Thought I’d look around.”
    â€œRight, Skipper.” Bonnett turned to examine the master control gauges on the reactor bulkhead. Ever since they’d found the dead Security officer, Bonnett had been nursing an uneasy feeling about the room in the subtug’s nose.
    A sudden needle deflection on his control board caught his attention. The outside water temperature had dropped ten degrees: a cold current.
    Ramsey’s voice came over the intercom: “This is Ramsey in the shack. My instruments show a sharp ten-degree temperature drop outside.”
    Bonnett thumbed his mike switch: “What’re you doing up and about, Junior?”
    â€œI’m always nervous when it’s your duty,” said Ramsey. “I couldn’t sleep, so I came in here to run an instrument check.”
    â€œWise guy,” said Bonnett.

    Sparrow’s voice joined them: “Find out how deep it is, Ramsey. If it doesn’t extend below