The survivor (12 page)

Now, in various places around the rim of the door, water was coming into the torpedo room. It was coming in thin, strong streams shooting straight out from the door, then curving as it lost velocity and fell to the floor.

The streams of water were falling down on the combat gear which, when the room tilted up, had all slid aft into a tangled heap.

Adam moved a little closer and put the palm of his hand out in front of one of the streams. It struck his hand with great force, knocking it away. Adam, surprised by the force, raised his hand and licked the wet pahn. "Salt water," he said to Jason. They both turned then to look at the chief. "I told you," the chief said, mechanically. **The boat's dead." He turned and walked slowly back to the bunk and sat down, aU the marines watching him with interest.

Then Guns hollered, "Come on, you guys, we're not dead. Stop up those holes. Come on."

Adam joined them as they gathered again at the door, studying it.

Adam knew before they started that they were not going to stop those streams of water. If they had been coming straight through little holes in the door they might have been able to stop them, but the water was coming from behind the flange which overlapped the steel casing, and there was nothing they could do.

They tried. They kept working at it, jamming things into the cracks, stuflBng in rags, pieces of ramrods, pounding in the lead of bullets. But no

matter what they did the streams would break through, slamming against them.

At each failure they grew more wild, until at last one of the marines grabbed a rifle from the mess and started hammering on the steel handles of the dogs with the butt, trying to force them to close more tightly. When the stock broke he kept on hammering, pieces of the rifle breaking off and flying around the room, the barrel bending, the forearm shattering.

"It won't work," Adam said, almost to himself and walked over to the torpedo tubes and sat down on the Httle raised platform.

As the marines moved around at the other end of the room, Adam could see the water either in streams or splashing down on the men and the gear.

He couldn't understand why, but somehow the sight of the water made him feel—good. It was water, water from the sea. It was something he understood. Something he was familiar with. Unlike the whole nightmare—the combat gear, the combat talk, the rifles, and the daggers—the water was real and not strange to him. It was the sea. The sea he had surfed on a thousand times, the sea he had been swimming in a milHon times, the sea he had watched for so many hours waiting for the surf to roU. Or just sitting on some beach watching the sea.

He knew full well that the water streaming past the door and now ankle-deep on the deck was a menace to his life. He knew that the water was going to keep on coming in there, rising to their

faces—their mouths and noses. He knew that the sea coming in here was going to kill them, and yet somehow he felt good.

He raised his feet off the floor and sat on the platform, his arms around his knees, and looked at the water and wondered why it should make him feel good. Why, when he knew that the water was going to kill him, did he think that, somehow, this water was going to save his Hfe?

The marines were still working at the door, slogging around in and on their soaldng gear, tripping over their rifles, skidding on rolling helmets, falling and cursing and working.

And Adam sat there trying to think. And he couldn't think. All he could do was remember a crazy guy who used to bug the surfers (and everybody else), and now, although he could see this guy clearly in his mind, he couldn't even remember his name.

A nut. A long skinny drink of water who always wore a beat up old straw hat with a wide brim and all the straw coming out of it.

A nut. He had a theory a minute, this guy, and he would stand there in front of the surfers and yell at them.

Why those tigers didn't eat this guy alive Adam never did understand. The nut would stand there in that crazy hat and tell these surfers, these real tigers, that (a) they were no-good bums, or (b) hoodlums, and (c) stupid, because they didn't understand these theories he had. But the surfers

let him get away with it, Adam thought, because he was a goof, a nut.

What was that nuts' name?

Adam looked down at the water, then looked intently at the steel walls. He didn't have time, he told himself, to waste thinking about a kook on a California beach a million years ago. This water was coming in here to kill them all.

Across from him Jason and the Rebel were talking earnestly to the chief.

The marine who had been hammering on the door dogs with his rifle now waded a few feet out into the middle of the room and stood there looking at the remains of his rifle. "I've busted my rifle," he said, in a surprised voice.

Adam heard the chief saying, "Pump it out with what? Don't you know this boat is dead? They're dead back there. Everything's dead. The crew, the motors, the batteries, the pimips—everything!"

A marine said to his buddy, "I guess we're going to die in here." He said it exactly as he would have said, "I guess we're going on K.P. next week."

"Yeah, it looks Kke it," his buddy said.

The marine with the broken rifle walked over to Guns and said, "I've busted my rifle. Guns."

'Tou won't need it," Guns said gently.

"I sure busted it," the marine said and dropped it down into the water.

Rebel got up and wandered over to where Adam was sitting hunched up on the platform. Adam watched the water swirling around Rebel's legs, almost up to his knees now. Rebel leaned against a

torpedo tube, looked up at the ceiling and said, "Ah nevah thought, when Ah was pickin' dat cotton and totin' dat bale, that mah hfe was goin' to be measured out in no feet and inches." Then he looked down at Adam. "She's going to fill right up, isn't she, Adam?"

"Not all the way," Adam said. "Most of the way, but not all the way."

"It don't make me no nevah-mind," the Rebel said and wandered away, saying, "Ah guess the South will have to rise again without me. I wonder what it looks like?"

"What looks hke?" Adam asked. "The South," the Rebel said, wandering back. Now the drawl was gone and he spoke in a flat, dry New England accent. "I've never been South. I've always wanted to go, but the farthest south I ever got was Trenton, New Jersey. I'll bet it's nice down South. Vlagnohas and things."

Adam felt as though his mind belonged to someone else. That it was out of his control. Things were drifting around in it that had no business there, no connection with this water, this room. He wished that he could make it work; make it think.

"You're pretty far south now," he said. '^You're past the equator."

"I mean Dixie," the Rebel said, "'way down South in the land of cotton. I been past the equator."

That nut was telling the surfers that their surfboards were all wrong. Telling them that their

boards should (a) be made out of fiber glass and (b) have just a little skeg [that's the way he talked—(a) this and (b) that]. He was a nut.

What was that theory he was yakking about all one summer?

Suddenly Adam remembered the nut*s name. Thorenson. A skinny, intense kid who always danced around when he got mad (which was all the time). Adam could see him now dancing around in the beach sand wearing that straw hat and with his sleeves rolled down and long pants and socks and shoes, all full of sand, as he danced around and yelled at the surfers.

And now he remembered it all. The nut yelling it at them.

Thorenson's Theory was: You are stupid to drown.

ADAM CLIMBED UP to the top torpcdo rack . and perched up there, looking down at the water rising slowly in the room. Across from him the other marines had also gotten up on the top rack and looked, in the dim red light, like some sort of grotesque naked birds.

Jason was standing down in the water looking slowly around, his face a blank. He was holding his trouser legs out of the water with both hands, like a kid starting to wade somewhere.

The chief was moving around in the water, sloshing through it as though, by ignoring it, he could make it go away. He was imwrapping the

CO2 absorbent cakes and spreading them around on the racks and tubes.

Thorenson's Theory.

Why was it, Adam angrily asked himself, that theories are always so easy to read and so hard to understand.

Okay, he thought angrily, so you're stupid to drown! But people drown. How did that nut think he could keep you from drowning?

Thorenson kept yelhng at the surfers something about Somebody's Law. Whose Law? What did it say?

Jason, holding his pants up, waded over and climbed up beside Adam. He sat for a long time looking at the water and then said, "Isn't there something we can do, Adam?"

"There's a theory," Adam said, ''but I can't remember it."

The chief finished breaking out the CO2 cakes and started fishing around in his locker, which was now more than half under water. Adam watched him idly as he found his .45 and then fished around some more until he found two clips with the slug-loaded bullets. The chief then chmbed up with the other marines and started dismantHng the gun.

Adam tried to remember the Law. Somehow he was convinced now that if he could work out Thorenson's Theory it would save his life. So— think.

The best he could do was to remember one day in a physics class in the Santa Monica High School, Santa Monica, California. Samohi, they

called it. Just this one beautiful day and the '38 Ford pickup was parked down near Wilshire with his surfboard sticking out the end, and Butch Lincoln (how did that cat manage not to go to school) was waiting for him and Adam was waiting for the bell, and this teacher, Miss Marble (No Marbles Marble), was going on and on about . . .

Was the guy's name Boyle?

Yeah, Boyle and another one, Charles.

He could hear Thorenson now, yeUing at the surfers and dancing around, "(a) You're too stupid to know what Boyle's Law is and (b) you couldn't understand it if you knew iti"

What was Boyle's Law?

It had been a beautiful day and so, to pass the time, Adam started tossing his books out the window into a bed of geraniums. One by one, when No Marbles wasn't looking, he flicked the books out the window. But she was looking. . . .

One atmosphere equals . . .

*What's going to happen, Adam?" Jason asked.

"I'm just trying to think," Adam told him. "To remember. When I was in school."

"Think about what? I want to know what's going to happen notor Jason complained.

"Well, it's physics," Adam told him. "That's what's going to happen. Physics."

"What's that got to do with notvF'

"I don't know," Adam said, trying to remember what he had been thinking about. The Ford pickup and he'd heard some excited kid yelling outside the window, "Surfs up! Surfs upl" then this

No Marbles tapped him on the shoulder . . .

The tech sergeant was standing down there in the water, looking up at Adam. 'What are we going to do, Lieutenant?^

"I don*t know," Adam said.

'Tou got to know!'' the sergeant yelled up at him. "You're an officer!"

"So, Tm an officer," Adam said. "That doesnt make me a genius automatically."

Jason leaned over toward the sergeant in the water and said, "If he knew how to get out of here, do you think he would be sitting here, stupid? Leave him alone. He's thinking."

Adam felt ashamed of himself, and he didn't want Jason to find out that all he was thinking was about throwing some schoolbooks out a window onto some geraniums.

The sergeant waded back to the other side and climbed up on the rack.

The chief kept cleaning the gun.

The Rebel said, "I keep thinking about Willy on that sand bar at Guadalcanal. He knew we couldn't come get him, and he knew they were coming to kill him. And it was just a matter of time. That's all. A matter of time."

The marine who had wrecked the rifle began to jabber in a high-pitched voice. The Rebel leaned over to him and said, "Listen. You saw Willy lying on that sand bar. Did you hear a yip out of him all day long? No, you didn't. So don't let me hear a yip out of you."

"But I'm going to dier the marine yelled.

"So what?" the Rebel asked, not disgusted. "Did you join the Marine Corps to live forever?"

Suddenly, and from nowhere, a formula jumped into Adam's mind. The pressure of water, he remembered, increases at the rate of .445 pounds per square inch per foot of depth.

He thought about that for a while, multiplying inches and square inches and fathoms. "You know something," he said to Jason. "We're under almost a million pounds of pressure."

Jason turned to stare at him. **What? How many?"

"Almost a million poimds. Each."

Jason didn't believe him. "How can that be? Nobody can stand a million pounds weighing down on him. A milHon pounds could crush steel, let alone skin and blood and a man's bones."

"I never was much good at arithmetic," Adam admitted. But the formula was there—he could see it as though it were written on No Marbles' blackboard: pressure per square inch of surface = .445 X depth in feet X area in inches. A man would have about 2,800 square inches of skin, Adam figured, so the pressure on him—and Jason —was now three quarters of a miUion pounds.

"If it was that much," Jason went on, "we'd all be flat. Like those guys in the cartoons who fall on the pavement and get up flat as a piece of paper."

"No," Adam said. "That's right, and the reason we aren't flat is because we're made out of water and you can't compress water. WTiat isn't water

is full of air pressing out as hard as the air pressing in. So it doesn't make any difference how many million pounds as long as the pressure out is the same as the pressure in."

"Okay," Jason said, "we're not flat." He reached down to the water, which was above the lower torpedo tubes now, and gently moved it with his hand. "A million pounds," he said. Then he took his hand out and watched the httle ripples die down until the surface of the water was as motionless as oily steel.