The survivor (13 page)

The marines were looking at it too, as they sat crowded together in one big frightened mess on the torpedo racks.

"I don't mind dying doing something," Strings, the tech sergeant, said, his voice morose, "like getting killed in a fire fight. But this sitting here dying gets me down."

"How much longer you figure we got?" someone asked.

Adam looked at the still water, the lenses of the emergency lamps reflected perfecdy in it

The only movement Adam could see was a slow, creeping up the walls. He watched the level of the water reach the bottom of one of the dials near the torpedo tubes. Then it crept past the rim, crept over the face of the dial, crept on until the top rim of the dial made a little indentation in the water for a few seconds and then could hold out no longer. The indentation smoothed over, the dial gone below the surface.

"We got hit about an hour ago," Adam said.

Guns looked down at the still water. "Then I figure another haK-hour is all we got.** He leaned out a httle and spat down into the water. The spit created a few little circles of ripples, and then they died and the water was flat and still again.

The water touched the bottom of the upper torpedo tubes, sHd up over the bright steel, shd around the locking ring, and kept rising.

"Nobody'll even knowl" the rifle-swinging marine cried. "They won't even know where we went. Or what happened to us. My mother wont know."

"Somebody knows,*' Rebel said consolingly. **They know where they sent us. Only we didn't come back, is all."

^^We never got there," Gims said. "We didn't ac-compHsh a thing."

The tech sergeant said, "What are you griping about, Gunny? You're on borrowed time anyhow. You should've got it on Guadal a long time ago."

"The only thing I don't like is sitting here like chicken on a roost," Guns said.

"You thought of anything, Adam?" Jason asked.

"Has the water stopped rising?" Adam asked.

They all looked at the absolutely still surface of the water, now covering all the torpedo tubes and lying just below them.

"Has the water stopped rising, Chief?" Adam Asked.

"Yes," the chief said, inspecting the barrel of the big, black gun then closing the shde.

Adam sat staring at the water and slowly reaHzed why he couldn't understand something as simple

as Thorenson's Theory. It was because he didn't want to. He didn't want to because if he did he might have to find out if Thorenson's Theory worked. That would take some courage. And what Adam now recognized was the fact that he didn't know whether he had that much courage. Simple as that.

Maybe the chief had been talking for a long time. Adam didn't know, but he was talking now and Adam began to half listen to him.

The chief was saying, "I never thought this was ever going to happen to me. I don't know about you guys and what you talk about before you hit a beach or something like that, but in submarines ... I guess I've heard it a hundred times. Always the same thing. You'd be sitting around somewhere and somebody would bring it up and you'd talk about it, each man giving his reason for what he'd do, but you never paid much attention. You were just shooting the breeze.

"But now it isn't shooting the breeze, so 111 line it out for you the way I've heard it a hundred times."

The chief pushed one of the ammo clips up into the butt of the gun and laid it down on his knees. 'We're in the bind every man in the boats has wondered about . . . and wondered what he would do. We're down on the bottom, in deep water, with no chance of rescue, no chance of getting the boat up, with all the air you're ever going to get right here in this room. There's no food, which doesn't matter. But there's no water

and no more air. What are you going to do?" The chief looked around at them, and they in turn looked at him, or at the ugly black .45, or at the close steel walls, or at the still, still water.

"It's happened in other boats," the chief said. *1 don't know what the guys did. Nobody will ever know. But when it's like this. When all you've got left is to go real fast or let it come real slow, I don't think many guys waited for it. All I know is I don't want to take all that agony—for nothing. The foul air, the thirst burning you up. I don't want all that agony."

"Is that all we've got?" Guns asked.

^That's all," the chief said. He picked up the pistol and held it, lying flat in his palm. "We've got this ... or sit here and die real slow, real hard."

"What about outside?" Adam asked.

The chief looked over at him, surprise aU over his face. "Outside? Outside what. Lieutenant?"

"The sea," Adam said.

The chief put the gun carefuUy back down on his knees and then sat there, looking over at Adam. "I don't know what it feels Hke to have your lungs torn right out through your ribs, Lieutenant. And I don't want to know. You were right. There's a million pounds of pressure on us. You go outside and that pressure will tear you apart."

It was coming back. Bit by bit. Thorenson dancing around, kicking sand aU over them and yeUing, "Boyle's Law, you hoodlums!"

Adam looked across at the black gun and then

at the walls, so close now all around him. They were not things tliat were famihar to him—a gun and a coffin.

He looked down at the water and thought that he had never seen water so absolutely still, so absolutely without friendliness. But it was water, it was the sea, and the sun could sparkle on it.

Adam was surprised to hear his own voice saying, "We didn't come here to shoot ourselves, Chief."

The chiefs voice was patient. *Tou're six hundred feet down in the sea, Lieutenant. You leave this boat and you'll drovm before you're halfway to the top."

"It's stupid to drown," Adam said, his mind back on Thorenson's Theory.

"It's stupid to be where we are, but we're here," the chief said, then he shrugged. "Personally, I don't like the idea of dying that way."

"I'm not going to die," Adam said.

They sat over there, the marines and the chief, looking at Adam until finally the chief said, "I don't want to argue with you. Lieutenant, but there's a diflFerence between what you're saying and what I'm saying. I'm saying you don't have a chance to live. You, nor any of us. You're telling these people that they can Uve—out in the sea. So they go out there and they die. What about that?"

Adam had not thought of it that way, but now he did. When he had thought it through he said, "No, I can't promise that you'U Hve. I can't guarantee that. But you'll have a chance to hve. That's better than you've got in here."

"You don t have a chance. Lieutenant," the chief said. "Here's what's going to happen to you out in the water. In the j&rst place, if nothing else was wrong, you'd just run out of oxygen before you could get to the top. You'd lose consciousness and drown. But there's a lot more going against you than that. If you leave the boat the pressure inside your lungs is going to be around two hundred and fifty pounds per square inch. As you go up, that air is going to expand. I'll give you just one little example of how that air expands. With your lungs full of air—with as much air as they can hold without tearing apart—how far do you think you have to come up through the water for that air to rip your lungs out of your ribs? How far?"

The chief stopped and looked around at them, but they did not answer.

"Ill tell you how far," the chief went on. '"Four feet. Only foiu* more feetl You may not know it, but if you could get a lungful of air at the bottom of an ordinary swimming pool, that air could kill you before you could get to the top of the pool. If expanding air can kill you in ten feet of water, what chance have you got in six hundred feet? Tell me that, Lieutenant."

Jason, beside Adam, said, *ls there a chance, Adam?"

^There's a chance."

Volume will vary inversely with the absolute pressure. Boyle's Law. The chief was right, the time of greatest danger would be at the end. When you

could see the sun shining down bright through the water. When you could see the surface of the water itself hke a mirror above you. That would be the time of danger. The air in your lungs would be expanding, doubUng about every thirty feet . . . twenty times in six hundred feet . . .

And that would be the time when you were most afraid, most weary, closest to panic . . .

You could come up a hundred feet, two hundred feet . . . (Thorenson dancing and yelling that you could not exhaust all the air out of your lungs, that it was physically impossible to push it all out; there would be some left to keep you aHve. If you didn't panic, you could stay imder for ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. You only drowned because you panicked.) . . . five hundred and fifty feet, sixty, eighty, ninety . . .

And drown in the last ten feet.

Or—not drown. Live.

**Listen," Adam said, leaning toward the marines on the other rack, "all youVe got to do is keep the pressure inside your lungs the same as the pressure outside, in the water. As we go up, let the air out. Keep letting it out all the way up."

*Toull run out of air. Then what?"' the chief asked.

"No," Adam said, the vision of Thorenson strong in his mind. "You can't run out of air. There'll always be some left." (Thorenson had said if you had a cubic foot of air in your lungs at the surface and went down the three hundred feet you'd only have a tenth as much air. That was important,

but now Adam couldn't think why.) He said, "But we don't have to worry about that. It won't take long. It's only six hundred feet."

The chief was staring angrily at him. '1 happen to know, Lieutenant, that the fastest a man can swim under water is about a hundred feet a minute. You think you can hold your breath for six minutes?"

"We wouldn't swim," Adam said, his voice vague. "Where are those life jackets?"

"Hey, lookl" a marine said, staring at his vmst. "My watch is busted! But, look, it busted in! Everything's busted in, not out."

Adam looked at the man's watch, the crystal and face of it crushed in as though someone had stepped on it. And it scared him. The watch, sealed tight against water, had imploded from the difference in pressure. Just the tiny amount of air brought from the surface inside the watch.

That was what Thorenson meant. If you had a cubic foot of air in your lungs at the surface and went dowm three hundred feet you'd only have one tenth of a cubic foot. It worked the other way, too. If, under this pressure at six hundred feet you breathed in a lungful of air, you would actually have twenty times as much air as you could breath in at the surface.

Twenty times as much.

More than enough, Adam thought. The danger would really be too much, not too little, air.

"I think we can make it," Adam said.

One of the Pfc's said, "Who's this we' you're talking about, Lieutenant?"

Adam looked across at him and then at the others and then at Jason. They were now all strangers. Their faces were closed, their eyes were eyes he'd never seen before. They were strangers. ''We've got to go," Adam said.

Guns leaned forward toward him and asked, "Are you saying that because you're an officer, Lieutenant?"

"Your officers are dead," Adam said.

The marines and the chief sat over there, watching him, studying him. And then the chief said, "Are you using your rank to tell these guys they've got some hope of getting out of this alive, and then ordering them out to be killed in the water?"

"Chief," Adam said, "you and I are in the Navy. So—you keep out of this. This is for me and the marines—"

Guns leaned forward again. "Are you taking command, Lieutenant?"

"You can call it what you want," Adam said. *TBut we've got to try. We've got to go, that's all."

The tech sergeant, Strings, now leaned forward. "Is that an order, Lieutenant?"

Adam had never given an order to anyone in his life, never taken command of anything, and now he was confused. Until now he had never seen himself as an officer with the responsibility of his rank forcing him to order men to die.

Then Jason said, "That's an order!" He said it flat out and hard, and then his voice changed and he said, "I don't know what's happened to you guys. Or what's happened to me. But I don't hke

it. He says we've got a chance out there. In here we haven't. What's the matter with you guys? What's the matter?"

The tech sergeant seemed not to have heard Jason. He asked again, his voice a challenge, "Is that an order, Lieutenant?"

Adam looked back at him, trying, in his mind to straighten this all out. For them to stay in here was no good. And they knew it. It wasn't going to be good in the sea, either. Some—or all—of them might not make it.

He had the right, the authority, to order them out of the boat. The Marine Corps gave him that right, whether he wanted it or not And the Marine Corps expected him to use it. But the reason, the purpose, the mission had changed. He was no longer ordering them to carry out a mission, whether they got killed doing it or not. He was deaUng now only in the life or death of an individual, whose life or death would contribute nothing to winning or losing the war.

"No," Adam said and glanced apologetically at Jason. "It isn't an order. I'm going. You can go with me if you want to."

"It doesn't make any difference," the chief said. "It's all the same in the end."

"AU right, you guys," Guns said, "the lieutenant is asking for volunteers."

"I'll go," Jason said.

The Rebel said, "It's against mah principles because the first law of the Marine Corps is to nevah

volunteer for nothin', but Ah'll go wheah y'all go, /all/'

The tech sergeant surprised Adam by saying, nVhy not?"

The master sergeant looked at the .45 the chief was holding and then at the water. "No," he said.

"No," one of the Pfc's said.

"No," the other one said.

"I can t swim," a corporal said.

"I can t swim very well either," the other one said. That left only Gims, who was leaning back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. They all waited for him and at last the Rebel said, "Okay, Guns, what do you say?"