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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

From the screenplay “Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea” written by Irwin Allen and Charles

Bennett, and based on an original

story by Irwin Allen.

AT THE END, THE BOTTOM, THE VERY WORST of it, with the world afire and hell’s flame-

winged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself. The youngest sub skipper in

history blamed himself for the burning sky and the floods, the droughts and dangers of that

terrible August when the devil himself brought his face to the Earth’s crust and breathed on it,

laughed and said, Die.

It’s my fault, Captain Crane told himself, which is probably why he did what he did. That he

should feel this thing is only a measure of the man.

It’s my fault because I was at the top, that day, and knew it, and told myself so. That was it:

he had let himself tell himself so. Well… it takes a big man to be where he was, that day, and

only a big man, with such a big brag in his heart, could have kept it to himself. And it was like

him to react with horror so huge when he caught himself at it; and only a sizable soul could

shoulder so much guilt for a moment of glory.

In his terror and agony, there near the end, he gave himself again the moment of the brag,

not so much to relive the pleasure, but to flagellate himself with his sense of sin and the ex-

tremities of his penitence. Forgive him that. It was a time for extremities.

The Day of the Brag was a sunny day, and they stood in the wardroom of the U.S.O.S. Seav-

iew, stood, sat, lounged and, as it became one or two of them, postured. The visitors had only

just come aboard from an aircraft carrier lying just off the brim of Earth’s ice hat. A huge tur-

bine-powered whirlybird had gentled them off the flat-top and eased their precious and import-

ant presences on to the broad shoulders of the Seaview just aft of the conning tower, and

from there they were conveyed up and over and down inside with the smoothness of eggs

through a candler.

And with exquisite timing, if you’re building a brag, they were no sooner arranged in the ward-

room with their heart’s desire in welcoming drinks in their hands, when the after bulkhead,

between the doors to the Captain’s galley and the radio shack, a wall nine feet wide and six

feet high, lit up in a blaze of color and presented to them a TV news show featuring them-

selves and their adventure and, oh yes, their importance. Captain Lee Crane, resplendent in

dress blues (a tailor had once remarked of him “the guy’s got one-and-a-half the shoulders

and only half the hips!”) and with pleasure watched the show on the screen, and the show of

the people who watched the show. The image on the new wide-screen TV was perfect, the

sound was stereophonic, the submarine idled along with a greased kind of gentleness, the

drink was excellent and so was the weather.

The man on the screen said, “Today’s top of the news comes from the top of the world. The

unpredictable Admiral Harriman Nelson has done it again! Since his retirement from the Navy

some four years ago to enlist in the newly created Bureau of Marine Exploration, the Admiral

has been secretly at work constructing the first submarine ever built outside the Navy Depart-

ment. Into it has gone his entire personal fortune—you will recall that the Nelsons, with all

their past glories in the form of college presidents, Congressmen, State governors and philan-

thropists, have been an

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