Free Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea by Theodore Sturgeon Page A

one. Our world is a lot better place to live in because that man is alive.”
    “I wouldn’t doubt it. I could have nightmares, though, about what could happen if a man with that much reputation and that much drive ever should be wrong about anything important.”
    “Sleep tight,” smiled Susan Hiller, “and dream pretty: that is one nightmare you don’t have to bother yourself with. I don’t know what that fire in the sky is, but one thing I am sure about: Zucco will know what to do about it.”
    “If anything can be done about it.”
    “If nothing can be done about it,” said Dr. Hiller with absolute certainty, “Emilio Zucco will make a way.”
    “Well,” said Cathy Connors, finishing her coffee and getting up, “I’m mighty glad to have him on our team. But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick with the Admiral.”
    “I’m glad to have him on the team,” said the psychiatrist, smiling up at the secretary. “But he is, after all, only a technologist.”
    “ Only ? Why—”
    “Oh please—please, don’t be angry! That was the wrong way to put it, I know. It touches on one of my pet peeves, that’s all. I’ve admitted my own field isn’t a science and never will be. I go against those in my own field who try to call it one, or make it one. I go against those—and there are a lot of them—who want to make a technology out of it, too. You’ve got to understand me—I don’t look down on science and technology—I envy them! I wish I could get the kind of measurements they get, predict results the way they do! But to my mind science is pioneering, discovery, the finding of new paths. Technology is exploitation—the making of six-lane superhighways out of those pioneered paths. I’m really sorry, Cathy—I shouldn’t have said Admiral Nelson was only a technologist. It was quite wrong of me. But I do stick to the statement that while he is the best technologist in the whole wide world, he isn’t a scientist like Dr. Zucco. Will you forgive me?”
    Still angry, Cathy Connors found it possible to laugh. “I tell you what—you let Dr. Zucco save your world and I’ll let the Admiral save mine. Then I don’t think it matters who does it; it’s the same world, isn’t it?”
    “Sure it is,” smiled the psychiatrist. “Meanwhile—I’m not afraid, and I wish I could share the reason. Is that clear now?”
    “I see just what you mean,” nodded Cathy. “I’m not either, and when I see these jokers around here getting all tensed up, it just makes me mad. It only means they don’t know the man.”
    “Exactly, exactly, exactly what I was trying to say!”
    “But not about the same man.”
    “That’s right. But—you’re not angry?”
    “Of course not. You—just don’t know the man.” She waved and went aft to the Admiral’s suite.
    “Come in!” he called to her knock. She did.
    Well used to the Admiral and his ways, she still stopped and almost rocked back from the impact of disorder in the suite. Its two rooms, barely separated by a large archway, were carpeted by a veritable snowfall of torn paper, except for a track from a point near the door to a point in the other room by the bed—Nelson’s “pacing” path. It had been said of him that he did not think on his feet, but with them. In the past thirty-six hours he had probably logged more than a hundred miles, back and forth in the little rooms. Except for a grizzled stubble on his chin and a rather unusual brilliance of eye—the brightness one associates with fever or fatigue—Nelson seemed unaffected by his marathon think-session.
    On the settle was B.J. Crawford, one foot on the cushions, one on the floor, one eye open and attentive, the rest of his face asleep. On the desk-side chair was Congressman Parker, shaved, starched, combed and pressed. Across the desk and on bookcases and shelves were slide-rules, a portable computer, drawing instruments, charts, maps and grids, and reference books, some wearing so many