Before Zero
By Storm
The earliest days aboard Seaview, when John
Phillips was in command
“Sir,” said the rating
sitting at the sonar consol, “there’s something odd
about the bottom up ahead.”
Captain John Phillips,
commanding officer of the research submarine Seaview looked up from the
chart table and said mildly, “Be more specific, Kowalski. Define odd.”
“Sir, it looks like several
hills sticking up from the bottom of the channel.” The rating fiddled with his
equipment for a few seconds, then added. “The top of the biggest comes to about
seven hundred feet below the surface. There‘s a couple more around it.”
Captain Phillips let his
eyebrows rise. They were in the Santa Barbara Channel, just ten miles south of
the city of Santa Barbara itself, taking the opportunity to run more
calibration tests on their equipment as they brought the submarine from the
east coast to what was to be her permanent home.
There shouldn’t have been any
surprises here.
Curiosity aroused, the
captain walked over to peer over the sonar man’s shoulder. The return echoes were quite clear - several conical mounds, with the
largest at least six stories high and about the length of a football field. As Seaview
was running slow at three hundred feet , she had
plenty of clearance. Still, it was a bit odd. He reflected for a moment, then picked up the mike.
“Admiral Nelson, this is the
captain. We have an anomaly on the sea bottom and I was wondering if you wanted
to take a quick look.”
“What sort of an anomaly, John?” can the
query.
“Seems to
be conical hills.”
“Hills? In the channel?” There was a
brief pause as the sound of papers being hastily shuffled together filtered
through the overhead speaker, followed by, “I’ll be right there.”
Phillips grinned. He’d had a
feeling that an unexpected mystery so close to home would bring Nelson out of
his cabin. The Admiral had been going nonstop for the last six weeks since Seaview’s
christening, occupied largely with paperwork that seemed endless. Since one of Seaview’s
purposes was scientific research, this was something that had been profoundly
ironic, particularly since they had taken five weeks to make the voyage from
New London to Santa Barbara around Cape Horn. The time should have provided
ample opportunity for scientific exploration - and hadn’t.
It had been obviously
irritating to the endlessly curious Nelson - and the frustration was starting
to show in a shortened temper.
The sound of the hatch
opening brought Phillips out of his muse and he quickly put on a serious face
as Nelson strode briskly up to the sonar console and leaned over the sonarman’s shoulder to study the display.
After a moment, Phillips saw
the auburn eyebrows rise and a look of speculation fill the Admiral’s face.
“John,” said Nelson thoughtfully,
“let’s go down and take a look for ourselves.”
Phillips nodded. He’d been
expecting that - indeed he’d have been astonished if Nelson hadn’t been keen to
investigate the mystery. The captain lifted his head to the XO, who’d come over
to hover expectantly at the chart table.
“Mr. Morton, take us down to
650 feet, ahead slow. Make a pass across the tallest hill and make sure the
cameras are rolling.”
“Aye, sir,” answered the
blond officer, before turning away to give the orders.
Phillips turned back to
Nelson. “The observation deck?” he asked, but Nelson had already started
forward. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he noted dryly as he turned to follow in
Nelson’s wake. “Mr. Morton, you have the conn,” he added as he stepped out
through the hatch at the forward end of the control room.
By the time the two had
gotten to the observation deck, Seaview was dipping gently down, her
spotlights cutting through the deep gloom. At 300 feet, where they’d been
cruising, there was some light, but as they dove deeper, the dark blue shifted
towards black.
The sub eventually leveled
off. Both officers peered intently downward, searching for the surface of the
hill below them. As it came into sight, Phillips blinked in astonishment.
The top of the hill looked
like black pavement.
“What the hell…?” Phillips
looked over at Nelson in bafflement. The admiral’s eyebrows were threatening to
disappear into his hairline. Phillips picked up the mike. “Control room, come
to dead slow.”
“Dead slow, aye,” came the prompt reply. The great sub slowed to an almost
imperceptible crawl, giving the two men a better look at the surface below
them.
It was still the color of
road tar.
It was also inhabited. Not as
densely perhaps as a hill made of rock - which this clearly wasn’t - but there
was bottom life here. Anemones, sponges, soft corals, brittle stars were
scattered across the surface, along with the occasional fish. Intermittent
curtains of bubbles drifted upward from some of the cracks in the surface -
bubbles most the aquatic life seemed to avoid, though there appeared to be mats
of - something - coating the edges of those cracks.
“What is this, sir?” asked
Phillips, concern in his voice. He’d never seen anything like this before!
Nelson was looking at the
seascape before them with the faint hint of a smile playing about his face. “Without
a sample I can’t be absolutely certain, John, but it looks like asphalt.”
“Asphalt? How could anybody dump that much?”
“Not dumped,” answered
Nelson, “Erupted.”
“What?”
“You’ve been to La Brea,
haven’t you?”
Phillips had - he’d taken his
family there shortly after they’d moved to Santa Barbara, because his oldest
daughter had a keen interest in paleontology. But that didn’t look anything
like this this. He paused, considering. Stuff did tend to react differently
immersed in saltwater or under pressure. This was both.
“So it built a hill instead
of making a pool?”
Nelson nodded and indicated
one of the bubble curtains. “I suspect those bubbles are methane gas. That
would have made the hot asphalt both buoyant and fluid enough to flow..”
“And the cold of the water
would have cooled it enough to make it stiff after the methane escaped.”
Phillips nodded in understanding - buoyancy was something submarines lived and
died by. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”
“I doubt that it occurs often
on land, if at all,” responded Nelson. “The temperature and pressure
requirements are unlikely to be met except in very unusual circumstances.”
Phillips eyed the alien
landscape bathed in the light of Seaview’s powerful lights. “No doubt, sir. Interesting to find
something so unusual so close to home though.”
Now it was Nelson’s turn to
shake his head. “It just demonstrates how little we know about the oceans,
John. I have no doubt that we’ll see much stranger things in the future. But we
do need to come back here once we have Sojourner or the Flying Sub built
and take a closer look. Who knows what else is here.”
What else indeed, though Phillips to himself. He had a sudden
premonition that life aboard the Seaview was going to be unlike that of
any vessel he’d ever served on before. Whether or not this was a good thing
remained to be seen, but it promised that his life would never be dull.
Author’s note: This story is set in my cross-currents universe and takes place (obviously) before the events in the episode Eleven Days to Zero. I’ve always felt IA didn’t do justice to the character of Captain Phillips, because he was never mentioned again in any episode that I can recall.