The Watch Below (3 page)
Authors: James White
He came to with a pain in the back of his head and regular, stingng pains
which were much worse, affecting both sides of his face. The features of
Lieutenant Radford came gradually into focus as he opened his eyes and
a few seconds later he realized that the doctor was slapping his face,
hard and rapidly, with both hands. Wallis was so shocked that it was
several seconds before he could even speak.
"In-insubordination," he managed finally.
"Resuscitation," said Radford.
Some of the tension seemed to leave the doctor's face and he went on quickly,
"You've been out about twenty minutes, sir. We've been torpedoed --
one in the stern and I think one up for'ard. After the big bang there
were a couple of dull thumps. They sounded like steam explosions, so the
engine room must be holed. I'm telling you this in case you're still a
bit dazed, you may know about it already. Do you think you can stand up?"
"Yes," said Wallis.
With the help of the surgeon lieutenant on one side and the ladder
on the other he managed to stand up. While doing so he kept his eyes
tightly shut, wondering if his head was going to split down the middle
or just fall off. When surprisingly it did neither, Wallis was able to
concentrate again on what the doctor was saying.
" . . . No way of knowing the exact attitude of the ship with all this
pitching and rolling, but I think we're down by the stern," Radford said
hurriedly. "I tried to open the pump-room hatch, but there's too big
a weight of water up there for me to push open the seal. We can't get
out at this and and I don't know anything about the geography of these
blasted tanks beyond the sick bay in Eleven. Is there another way out?"
The picture of what had happened was becoming clear to him, but somehow
he did not feel any of the uncontrollable panic that he expected to feel
in such circumstances. Perhaps he was just too tired for panic, or not
yet fully conscious. Dully, he said, "Amidships. Number Five saddle tank,
port side. . . . But no, we can't use that. . . ."
During the storm the cargo had shifted in that tank. The narrow, steep-sided
passage which had been dug out of the cargo and which joined the tank
entrances at floor level to the ladder from the deck above had disappeared
under an avalanche of dried-egg crates and bean sacks when its walls caved
in. It would be possible to clear a way to that ladder, but not with just
two men working on it, not in time . . .
"Forward of Number One, in the coffer dam," Wallis went on quickly,
stumbling away from the ladder and with Radford close behind him. "There's
a ladder running up the dam into the forepeak. It's going to be tricky
getting those people up it though: we'll have to take them up piggy-back.
The dam is less than three feet wide and there are structural members to
stop us swaying up the stretchers on ropes, but it's the best place to
get out. With that hit in the engine room we must be down by the stern,
and the foredeck will be the last to go under. . . ."
Wallis checked himself suddenly. He was talking too much and too fast.
Even to himself he was beginning to sound panic-stricken.
They went from Number Twelve, which was a saddle tank on the port side,
into Number Eleven, where the doctor had his special sick bay, and through
into Nine without stopping to look at the patients. They were in Seven,
another center tank, when the lights went out. But Radford produced his
pen-light and used this diagnostic tool with its tiny beam to light the
way forward to Number Six, where there were a workbench and a rack of
emergency lamps.
In the tanks where they did not trip over packing cases, bundles of cable
and scattered welding gear, they stumbled against and cursed and climbed
over portions of the Trader's cargo, because even in the sections where
modifications were currently under way there was food stacked in odd
corners. The whole point of the U-boat blockade was to starve Britain
into submission by cutting off supplies of food and war material;
consequently every available cubic foot of cargo space moving eastward
across the Atlantic had to be put to use. Not to have done so would have
been tantamount to treason, considering the frightful cost in lives and
shipping which had to be paid for the vessels successfully running the
gauntlet. In Gulf Trader's tanks the available cargo space was small in
relation to the ship's total capacity because of the modifications, but
the storm had tumbled it all over the place. Climbing over and around it
was like running one of the commando obstacle courses, with the darkness
and a heaving deck underfoot just to complicate things.
We'll never make it, Wallis thought desperately,
we'll never do it
in time!
Wallis did not know how much time they had exactly, only that it was
taking them far too long to reach the fore-hold and that it would take a
whole lot longer to move Dickson and the two girls there. Since the fall
from the ladder his mind had been confused, but now it was beginning
to clear and he felt desperately afraid. The ship was sinking and they
had to get up on deck --
he
had to get up on deck! Trying to save the
injured, or even Radford, was becoming less important somehow. . . .
They left the watertight doors open behind them as they passed through,
to save time during later trips and because all the tanks were free of
water. This was a very good sign. Wallis reminded himself of how incredibly
buoyant tankers were supposed to be, especially when running empty. Trader
wasn't empty, her cargo tended to be small, dense, and heavy, comprising
as it did food and welding gear, but her tanks were intact and there was
a lot of air in them. As well, there seemed to be a definite upward tilt
in their direction of travel -- she was certainly down by the stern. The
fact that he had the sensation of constantly moving uphill might have
been caused by extreme fatigue or wishful thinking or both, but Wallis
did not think so. As they stumbled through the door between Three and One
and saw that the forward tank was as dry as all the others, Wallis began
to lose some of his fear and to feel ashamed of what he had not yet lost.
The door set in the forward wall of Number One tank was the same in all
respects as the other watertight doors they had passed through, an oval
five feet high and two wide whose lower edge was eighteen inches above
deck level. The height of this edge had been carefully calculated, it
was rumored, to remove the maximum amount of skin from the shins of the
people using it, and such doors were generally considered to be a curse
and an abomination and an unprintable waste of time -- until something
disastrous occurred. Now Wallis, while the doctor held both lamps, was
spinning back the wheel which kept the lips of the door pressed tightly
together, and he was cursing only because this one seemed harder to turn
than any of the others.
Suddenly he stopped, aware that one side of his face was wet.
There was water all around the edge of the door, not just a dampness
or a steady trickle or even a slow spillage over the lower edge --
this was the fine, misty spray of water under pressure.
Wallis reversed his pull on the wheel and tightened it until the spray
disappeared. For a long moment he leaned his forehead against the cold
metal of the door, hearing the oddly loud sound of his own breathing and,
now that he was listening instead of tripping noisily over the gear
littering the tank bottoms, the metallic creaking and banging and scraping
sounds coming from their freshly murdered ship. Then he turned to face
the surgeon lieutenant.
"You don't have to tell me," Radford said suddenly in a slow, harsh voice.
"If this ship is riding bows up, then all I can say is that the stern is
a hell of a distance down! That water was under
pressure
! We're not
sinking, dammit, we're
sunk
! And . . . and . . ." There was a long,
tearing crash which seemed to go on for minutes and made the tank around
them ring like a cracked bell, and when it ended the ship seemed to lurch
under them. The doctor went on, "Hear that? We're going down, beginning
to break up! The lower we sink, the higher the pressure. Any time now
the hull will cave in -- you can hear the breaking-up noises already."
Radford had dropped one of the fiashlamps, and it lay on its back on the
deck, throwing up a narrow wedge of light between them. The bottom lighting
gave the doctor's features a terrifying appearance, like something out of
a Dracula picture, and it was only afterwards that Wallis realized that this
was due to the light and that his own face must have looked just as bad.
But at the time he was too frightened by the demoniacal aspect of the
lieutenant and of what he might do if, as seemed likely, he went berserk
to think of anything beyond the immediate necessity of calming him down.
"I . . . I disagree, Doctor," Walljs said, trying to keep his voice steady.
"The watertight door is at the bottom of the coffer dam, and if the dam
was flooded with the ship on the surface and completely undamaged there
would still be considerable pressure down here. And we are not sinking --
or if we are it is very slowly! The pitch and roll is as bad as it ever
was, and if we were even a short distance below the surface the wave
motions would have been damped out. My guess is that we're completely
awash, maybe with just the poop and bridge decks showing -- these tankers
are very hard to sink, you know -- and we could drift that way forever."
It sounded good, Wallis thought. So eminently sane and logical that he was
beginning to believe it himself. When he went on his voice was steady and
quietly confident.
"As for the breaking-up noises," he said, "I think you are mistaken there.
Breaking
off
, yes, but not breaking up. The bows have been hit and the
torpedo probably blew the whole forepeak off the ship. The noises we hear
are loose plating and deck gear being pushed about by the waves. Some of it
is breaking off and falling away. And good riddance, because the more
we lose the greater will be our buoyancy and the higher we will ride in
the water. . . ."
Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. The motion of the deck
caused the lamp to slide away and the lighting on the doctor's face became
less stark. The mad glitter went out of his eyes and the features softened
until they again became those of the dour and competent surgeon lieutenant
whom they had all known but had not exactly loved. Finally Radford spoke.
"If you think there is no immediate danger, sir," he said stiffly,
"I will return to my patients."
Wallis nodded. He said, "I'll join you later. At the moment I'd like to
have another look around. . . ."
But when the doctor and his lamp disappeared into Number Three, Wallis
did not do anything for a very long time. Alone at last, he was having
a fit of the shakes.
IV
Someone had tied the girls very securely to a raft when their ship had
been going down. Possibly the same person had tied himself to the raft
but had not been able to do such a thorough job of it and had been swept
off, or maybe he had not been able to hang on, or had not wanted to hang
on when the raft drifted into the patch of burning oil. But someone had
kept his head amid the flames and explosions and roaring steam to spend
precious minutes seeing that two girls were given a chance to live.
There was very little known about this person other than that he had been
a Lascar seaman with a badly scalded face. The dark-haired girl had babbled
this information several times during her delirium even though the doctor
had failed to elicit from her her own name. The blonde girl had not spoken
at all.
"We must speak quietly," Wallis said, looking at the two bandaged figures
across the room. "This will have to be broken to them gently or they might
. . . Well, they've been through a lot."
Radford nodded silently.
From the stretcher which lay on the deck between them, First Officer Dickson,
his head bandaged, his left arm splinted, and his cracked ribs bound
tightly with tape, said, "I couldn't talk loud . . . if you paid me."
In all probability it was late in the day after they had been torpedoed,
although they were not sure of this because the doctor had banged his
watch against the coaming of one of the watertight doors and there was
now no way of telling the time. But enough time had passed for the early
feeling of panic to disappear. Panic, it seemed, was an extremely violent
and short-lived emotion. When it was not followed shortly by escape or
death or some other form of relief it degenerated quickly into simple
fear. And when their surroundings remained steadfastly, monotonously the
same -- no change in the attitude of the ship, no failures of watertight
doors, no threatening occurrence of any kind -- even their fear began
to subside.
Wallis had spent a long time going through the tanks and searching among
the cargo and equipment they contained for he knew not what. And while
he was searching Nine he had heard voices coming from the sick bay. He
had joined the doctor there to find that Dickson had come to and was
demanding to know why the engines had stopped. Together they had talked
to him until his panic also became simple fear and the fear, like that
of their own, subsided into a sort of intense, gnawing anxiety -- the
state of mind, Wallis thought, that a person might have if the doctors
had given him only a short time to live.
After that they had opened a can of powdered eggs and made tea by boiling
up a kettle with a blowlamp. Because they were all very tired and there was
no good reason for staying awake they had gone to sleep then, and the fact
of their sleeping made them morally certain that this was another day.
And now Wallis was faced with the problem of talking about the future
in terms of hours and days and weeks when there was no way of measuring
these periods of time.
"To begin with," Wallis said quietly, "we must accept the fact that we are
in a dangerous but not hopeless position. We are drifting submerged or
partly submerged, judging by the wave action we feel -- either the sea
above us is rough and we are a short distance below it, or it is calm
and we are practically on the surface. The important thing is that if
we can feel waves a whole day after being torpedoed we can be fairly
sure that we are not sinking."
which were much worse, affecting both sides of his face. The features of
Lieutenant Radford came gradually into focus as he opened his eyes and
a few seconds later he realized that the doctor was slapping his face,
hard and rapidly, with both hands. Wallis was so shocked that it was
several seconds before he could even speak.
"In-insubordination," he managed finally.
"Resuscitation," said Radford.
Some of the tension seemed to leave the doctor's face and he went on quickly,
"You've been out about twenty minutes, sir. We've been torpedoed --
one in the stern and I think one up for'ard. After the big bang there
were a couple of dull thumps. They sounded like steam explosions, so the
engine room must be holed. I'm telling you this in case you're still a
bit dazed, you may know about it already. Do you think you can stand up?"
"Yes," said Wallis.
With the help of the surgeon lieutenant on one side and the ladder
on the other he managed to stand up. While doing so he kept his eyes
tightly shut, wondering if his head was going to split down the middle
or just fall off. When surprisingly it did neither, Wallis was able to
concentrate again on what the doctor was saying.
" . . . No way of knowing the exact attitude of the ship with all this
pitching and rolling, but I think we're down by the stern," Radford said
hurriedly. "I tried to open the pump-room hatch, but there's too big
a weight of water up there for me to push open the seal. We can't get
out at this and and I don't know anything about the geography of these
blasted tanks beyond the sick bay in Eleven. Is there another way out?"
The picture of what had happened was becoming clear to him, but somehow
he did not feel any of the uncontrollable panic that he expected to feel
in such circumstances. Perhaps he was just too tired for panic, or not
yet fully conscious. Dully, he said, "Amidships. Number Five saddle tank,
port side. . . . But no, we can't use that. . . ."
During the storm the cargo had shifted in that tank. The narrow, steep-sided
passage which had been dug out of the cargo and which joined the tank
entrances at floor level to the ladder from the deck above had disappeared
under an avalanche of dried-egg crates and bean sacks when its walls caved
in. It would be possible to clear a way to that ladder, but not with just
two men working on it, not in time . . .
"Forward of Number One, in the coffer dam," Wallis went on quickly,
stumbling away from the ladder and with Radford close behind him. "There's
a ladder running up the dam into the forepeak. It's going to be tricky
getting those people up it though: we'll have to take them up piggy-back.
The dam is less than three feet wide and there are structural members to
stop us swaying up the stretchers on ropes, but it's the best place to
get out. With that hit in the engine room we must be down by the stern,
and the foredeck will be the last to go under. . . ."
Wallis checked himself suddenly. He was talking too much and too fast.
Even to himself he was beginning to sound panic-stricken.
They went from Number Twelve, which was a saddle tank on the port side,
into Number Eleven, where the doctor had his special sick bay, and through
into Nine without stopping to look at the patients. They were in Seven,
another center tank, when the lights went out. But Radford produced his
pen-light and used this diagnostic tool with its tiny beam to light the
way forward to Number Six, where there were a workbench and a rack of
emergency lamps.
In the tanks where they did not trip over packing cases, bundles of cable
and scattered welding gear, they stumbled against and cursed and climbed
over portions of the Trader's cargo, because even in the sections where
modifications were currently under way there was food stacked in odd
corners. The whole point of the U-boat blockade was to starve Britain
into submission by cutting off supplies of food and war material;
consequently every available cubic foot of cargo space moving eastward
across the Atlantic had to be put to use. Not to have done so would have
been tantamount to treason, considering the frightful cost in lives and
shipping which had to be paid for the vessels successfully running the
gauntlet. In Gulf Trader's tanks the available cargo space was small in
relation to the ship's total capacity because of the modifications, but
the storm had tumbled it all over the place. Climbing over and around it
was like running one of the commando obstacle courses, with the darkness
and a heaving deck underfoot just to complicate things.
We'll never make it, Wallis thought desperately,
we'll never do it
in time!
Wallis did not know how much time they had exactly, only that it was
taking them far too long to reach the fore-hold and that it would take a
whole lot longer to move Dickson and the two girls there. Since the fall
from the ladder his mind had been confused, but now it was beginning
to clear and he felt desperately afraid. The ship was sinking and they
had to get up on deck --
he
had to get up on deck! Trying to save the
injured, or even Radford, was becoming less important somehow. . . .
They left the watertight doors open behind them as they passed through,
to save time during later trips and because all the tanks were free of
water. This was a very good sign. Wallis reminded himself of how incredibly
buoyant tankers were supposed to be, especially when running empty. Trader
wasn't empty, her cargo tended to be small, dense, and heavy, comprising
as it did food and welding gear, but her tanks were intact and there was
a lot of air in them. As well, there seemed to be a definite upward tilt
in their direction of travel -- she was certainly down by the stern. The
fact that he had the sensation of constantly moving uphill might have
been caused by extreme fatigue or wishful thinking or both, but Wallis
did not think so. As they stumbled through the door between Three and One
and saw that the forward tank was as dry as all the others, Wallis began
to lose some of his fear and to feel ashamed of what he had not yet lost.
The door set in the forward wall of Number One tank was the same in all
respects as the other watertight doors they had passed through, an oval
five feet high and two wide whose lower edge was eighteen inches above
deck level. The height of this edge had been carefully calculated, it
was rumored, to remove the maximum amount of skin from the shins of the
people using it, and such doors were generally considered to be a curse
and an abomination and an unprintable waste of time -- until something
disastrous occurred. Now Wallis, while the doctor held both lamps, was
spinning back the wheel which kept the lips of the door pressed tightly
together, and he was cursing only because this one seemed harder to turn
than any of the others.
Suddenly he stopped, aware that one side of his face was wet.
There was water all around the edge of the door, not just a dampness
or a steady trickle or even a slow spillage over the lower edge --
this was the fine, misty spray of water under pressure.
Wallis reversed his pull on the wheel and tightened it until the spray
disappeared. For a long moment he leaned his forehead against the cold
metal of the door, hearing the oddly loud sound of his own breathing and,
now that he was listening instead of tripping noisily over the gear
littering the tank bottoms, the metallic creaking and banging and scraping
sounds coming from their freshly murdered ship. Then he turned to face
the surgeon lieutenant.
"You don't have to tell me," Radford said suddenly in a slow, harsh voice.
"If this ship is riding bows up, then all I can say is that the stern is
a hell of a distance down! That water was under
pressure
! We're not
sinking, dammit, we're
sunk
! And . . . and . . ." There was a long,
tearing crash which seemed to go on for minutes and made the tank around
them ring like a cracked bell, and when it ended the ship seemed to lurch
under them. The doctor went on, "Hear that? We're going down, beginning
to break up! The lower we sink, the higher the pressure. Any time now
the hull will cave in -- you can hear the breaking-up noises already."
Radford had dropped one of the fiashlamps, and it lay on its back on the
deck, throwing up a narrow wedge of light between them. The bottom lighting
gave the doctor's features a terrifying appearance, like something out of
a Dracula picture, and it was only afterwards that Wallis realized that this
was due to the light and that his own face must have looked just as bad.
But at the time he was too frightened by the demoniacal aspect of the
lieutenant and of what he might do if, as seemed likely, he went berserk
to think of anything beyond the immediate necessity of calming him down.
"I . . . I disagree, Doctor," Walljs said, trying to keep his voice steady.
"The watertight door is at the bottom of the coffer dam, and if the dam
was flooded with the ship on the surface and completely undamaged there
would still be considerable pressure down here. And we are not sinking --
or if we are it is very slowly! The pitch and roll is as bad as it ever
was, and if we were even a short distance below the surface the wave
motions would have been damped out. My guess is that we're completely
awash, maybe with just the poop and bridge decks showing -- these tankers
are very hard to sink, you know -- and we could drift that way forever."
It sounded good, Wallis thought. So eminently sane and logical that he was
beginning to believe it himself. When he went on his voice was steady and
quietly confident.
"As for the breaking-up noises," he said, "I think you are mistaken there.
Breaking
off
, yes, but not breaking up. The bows have been hit and the
torpedo probably blew the whole forepeak off the ship. The noises we hear
are loose plating and deck gear being pushed about by the waves. Some of it
is breaking off and falling away. And good riddance, because the more
we lose the greater will be our buoyancy and the higher we will ride in
the water. . . ."
Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. The motion of the deck
caused the lamp to slide away and the lighting on the doctor's face became
less stark. The mad glitter went out of his eyes and the features softened
until they again became those of the dour and competent surgeon lieutenant
whom they had all known but had not exactly loved. Finally Radford spoke.
"If you think there is no immediate danger, sir," he said stiffly,
"I will return to my patients."
Wallis nodded. He said, "I'll join you later. At the moment I'd like to
have another look around. . . ."
But when the doctor and his lamp disappeared into Number Three, Wallis
did not do anything for a very long time. Alone at last, he was having
a fit of the shakes.
IV
Someone had tied the girls very securely to a raft when their ship had
been going down. Possibly the same person had tied himself to the raft
but had not been able to do such a thorough job of it and had been swept
off, or maybe he had not been able to hang on, or had not wanted to hang
on when the raft drifted into the patch of burning oil. But someone had
kept his head amid the flames and explosions and roaring steam to spend
precious minutes seeing that two girls were given a chance to live.
There was very little known about this person other than that he had been
a Lascar seaman with a badly scalded face. The dark-haired girl had babbled
this information several times during her delirium even though the doctor
had failed to elicit from her her own name. The blonde girl had not spoken
at all.
"We must speak quietly," Wallis said, looking at the two bandaged figures
across the room. "This will have to be broken to them gently or they might
. . . Well, they've been through a lot."
Radford nodded silently.
From the stretcher which lay on the deck between them, First Officer Dickson,
his head bandaged, his left arm splinted, and his cracked ribs bound
tightly with tape, said, "I couldn't talk loud . . . if you paid me."
In all probability it was late in the day after they had been torpedoed,
although they were not sure of this because the doctor had banged his
watch against the coaming of one of the watertight doors and there was
now no way of telling the time. But enough time had passed for the early
feeling of panic to disappear. Panic, it seemed, was an extremely violent
and short-lived emotion. When it was not followed shortly by escape or
death or some other form of relief it degenerated quickly into simple
fear. And when their surroundings remained steadfastly, monotonously the
same -- no change in the attitude of the ship, no failures of watertight
doors, no threatening occurrence of any kind -- even their fear began
to subside.
Wallis had spent a long time going through the tanks and searching among
the cargo and equipment they contained for he knew not what. And while
he was searching Nine he had heard voices coming from the sick bay. He
had joined the doctor there to find that Dickson had come to and was
demanding to know why the engines had stopped. Together they had talked
to him until his panic also became simple fear and the fear, like that
of their own, subsided into a sort of intense, gnawing anxiety -- the
state of mind, Wallis thought, that a person might have if the doctors
had given him only a short time to live.
After that they had opened a can of powdered eggs and made tea by boiling
up a kettle with a blowlamp. Because they were all very tired and there was
no good reason for staying awake they had gone to sleep then, and the fact
of their sleeping made them morally certain that this was another day.
And now Wallis was faced with the problem of talking about the future
in terms of hours and days and weeks when there was no way of measuring
these periods of time.
"To begin with," Wallis said quietly, "we must accept the fact that we are
in a dangerous but not hopeless position. We are drifting submerged or
partly submerged, judging by the wave action we feel -- either the sea
above us is rough and we are a short distance below it, or it is calm
and we are practically on the surface. The important thing is that if
we can feel waves a whole day after being torpedoed we can be fairly
sure that we are not sinking."
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