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

crumpled book-marks that they looked like the ruffles on a lamb chop.
    “Ah, Cathy, come in, come in. Congressman Parker just got here.” Which explained a puzzle.
    “Get some sleep?”
    “Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Did you?”
    “Later. Now then. B.J., where’s that doughnut?”
    Admiral Crawford, without opening his other eye, slowly raised one hand and pointed, then let it fall. From the high shelf indicated, Nelson took down a square of cardboard on which rested a large doughnut. “Remarkable technique that man has,” said Nelson, nodding toward the settee. “He’s tuned out everything but the matter at hand. Show you what I mean. B.J.,” he barked, “how do you like the L.A. Angels this season?”
    B.J. Crawford lay like a corpse, the one eye fixed unfocussed on middle distance. “And mind you,” said Nelson, “there lies the nation’s number one Angels baseball fan. Now watch. B.J., what do you suppose caused this firebelt?”
    “Solar flare,” B.J. responded, mutteringly, but distinctly, moving nothing but his lips, and instantly relaxing them into their former slackness.
    “Remarkable man,” said Nelson admiringly. “Cathy, you couldn’t have got here at a better time. I was just about to explain my theory to the Congressman here, and I want you to listen too. You and he are the ideal audience. Intelligent and uninformed. Don’t get mad: I mean it kindly. It’s the most useful you could be.
    “Tell you why. When we get to New York it isn’t going to be what you’d expect—a nice quiet technical discussion among scientific bigwigs, with some bright newspaper men to translate and interpret for the wire services. There won’t be time. We have a program, a cure for this thing, and we’ll have to—”
    “We have?” cried the Congressman and Cathy in unison, and Cathy added “. . . . sir?”
    “Oh sure,” said Nelson, brushing aside their hopeful astonishment; he didn’t quite say, “What else?” but his tone did. “But we haven’t time for presentation plus discussion plus persuasion in the scientific area, and then translation into plain American and the whole thing all over again to the public. We have to hand it over to everybody all at once with no gobbledegook, because from the looks of things we’re going to have to do everything at a dead run or not at all. So you two are to be the guinea pigs, right? I’ll make my little pitch and if there’s anything you don’t understand for Pete’s sake sound off and say so, because when I get up there and spout, I have to be sure my nozzle’s adjusted somewhere between needle-jet and dense fog. Right? Right.
    “This,” he said, holding up a ping-pong ball, “is the earth.” He held up the doughnut. This is the Van Allen radiation belt.” He pushed the ball into the hole in the doughnut and held them together.
    “This, roughly speaking, is the way the Van Allen belt surrounds the earth. Are you with me?”
    “What,” demanded Congressman Parker, “is the Van Allen belt? I mean, what’s it made of?”
    “Good,” said the Admiral disarmingly, “that’s what I want, Stupid questions.
    “The Van Allen belt is an area of radiation, varying in intensity, formed, as far as anyone knows, of free electrons from the sun trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. Now you’ll notice that the belt impinges on the earth here, in the hole of the doughnut, at about 50° north of the equator and 50° south of the equator. (It’s the magnetic equator I’m talking about, by the way.) Right? Right. Well then, just because I show it to you this way doesn’t mean that’s the way it is. To explain that irritating remark, I’ll have to cut this model through the middle.”
    He made a cutting motion at the doughnut with a letter-opener, and then threw opener and doughnut aside. He fumbled for a large square of paper—it was a navigation chart—flipped it to the blank side and stuck it to the inboard bulkhead with cellophane tape. “I