Triumph (28 page)

Ten days later the officers and crew of the
White Shark
were rapidly gaining weight and strength, as both boats followed the twenty-four-hour pattern of assembly, signaling, and hurried departure--along with new night work: fishing. They also maintained constant radar, and other search efforts. And a third, identical "mast" hove into dim view, at the pre-established point of reconnaissance, that tenth night.

The
Leopard Shark
had arrived, all hands in good shape, ample stores, weapons in A-one condition, her delay explained by the fact that she had been near-missed by a nuclear depth charge in the first hours of combat, and had been forced to spend weary months in hiding, on a remote antarctic island, while repairs were made by hand, to ready her for this return to service.

The three skippers decided to give it another week, inasmuch as they were now signaling a coded word of their rally. By then they also had a very good concept of the location and even of the numbers of the enemy, now alive and hard at work--preparing for some sort of military operation, they agreed.

When, in a week, no other vessel met them, they chanced an additional week. No air or sea patrols of enemy origin had come that way, after all.

The
Whale Shark
nosed up on the next-to-last night of that stretch of waiting. Her crew was woefully shorthanded and those aboard still living were barely able to operate the submarine. The reason was as simple as appalling: while surfacing, in a routine "war watch" off the eastern coast of the United States, near Long Island, during the night after the attack, mines of great power had exploded inshore. Before the
Whale Shark
could slam all ports and dive, enough radioactive sodium had been hurled aboard to sicken all hands, with fatal results for most.

Running clear of the contamination, ventilating the whole boat repeatedly, and washing down with uncontaminated water--all done as swiftly as circumstances allowed--

had not been enough to save the officers and men from death, or, at best, weeks of terrible illness. Great blotches of subdermal hemorrhage had appeared on their bodies, faces, and limbs. Every man had lost his hair. Internal bleeding and nausea had caused the first of many to go, in agony.

For months thereafter, the sub had merely cruised at random in the South Atlantic, South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and back to the Atlantic, while the men aboard barely had strength enough, among them, to hold a course and to prepare occasional food.

Her skipper said, "There was a time, I can't say when, but it lasted for weeks, during which no one could stand up even for half an hour. Some of us, after that, started getting better. Some more died. A few--you'll see when you board us. Radiationwise we're a 'clean' ship now, and have been, a long while. But a
few
are sure as hell still
going
to knock off! We heard your signal--oh-three weeks back. We don't even know the date!

We thought we'd never get the
Whale Shark
to the rendezvous. But we did." The pallid, drawn, ruin of what had been an Olympic athlete, bared yellowed teeth, in what was thought a smile.

The three able crews were swiftly "raided" of manpower. The ill were given improved care. And all four submarine skippers decided that they might profitably wait yet a little longer, though they grew daily more anxious about the possibility of an enemy fix on their changing signals or their shifting rendezvous, with ensuing possible annihilation, by plane, ship or, perhaps, rocket.

The anxious delay paid off.

One night, toward the now very jittery end of that vigil the stupendous silhouette of the United States aircraft carrier
Conner
hove into murky view. Another major unit in the small surviving "Last Ditch" forces!

With eleven hundred and fifty-seven men, with only three planes sent into action and lost, with all other weapons systems intact, this great ship was the answer prayed for by the submariners.

After she had been ordered away from Costa Rica and then Australia, she had

"vanished," encountering only the
Whale Shark.
In actual fact she had taken a position near the continent of Antarctica.

On that grim, polar ice mass the aircraft carrier had soon, however, located American scientific bases and found that, immediately after the undeclared outburst of war, the Americans had flown in their specialized nonmilitary planes to the three Soviet outposts, where some four hundred men and seventy women had been taken prisoner.

The Soviet group had not been forewarned of their government's attack plan and had not sufficiently recovered from shock to resist the smaller number of civilian Americans, mostly scientists, who shared the wastes of ice.

Soviet radio stations and other Antarctic communication equipment had been destroyed and the enemy personnel were marched or flown to the American camps.

There, guarded but fairly free, the Soviet party had lived ever since, grim, humiliated, and helpless.

Admiral Sydnor, the captain of the
Conner,
a man of fifty-one, tall, broad, erect, black-haired and beetle-browed, described the events that had followed:

"We thought we and the
White Shark,
if she lived, alone of all the U. S. Navy had come through. No special orders for us were received
ever,
although for weeks we expected such orders." His listeners well understood that circumstance. "With summer coming down there, I decided the best move would be to take the
Conner
into the Pacific to an island I know where very deep water intrudes the land. It's uninhabited and densely jungle-covered. We did so, after the Antarctic people swore to keep our existence secret.

They're okay by the way. In that natural "slip" we managed to camouflage the whole carrier, at first with cut material and, as soon as possible, with growing,
potted,
living stuff-whole palms, tree ferns. Meantime, divers kept the ship's hull clean and all hands maintained ship and weapons. We were still there, aware, as you are, of the--Red's emergence, when we got your first signal. But we greatly feared it merely meant some
Shark-class
sub, or other craft in the 'Last Ditch' plan, had been captured, and some poor so-and-so, after enough torture, had turned us in. Our
plan,
I mean. So the signals could be the enemy, trying to lure together any U. S. Navy units left, so as to dispose of them.

Meantime, we'd orbited a satellite." Seeing the submariners' amazement, the captain chuckled. "Yes, we can do it! And from it we've figured exactly where the enemy is, what he's doing, and about what he intends to do. We have been trying to decide lately how, with the carrier alone, we could get in close enough to end all that. Various weapons system can be altered, and fabricated, on board. And
have
been, to fit our solo-attack plan. But with
four
Sharks to take aboard their quotas of the things we've prepared--

well!" He dropped his deep voice to a growl. "I think, gentlemen, we're on the winning side. Merely
think.
For what that's worth
now!"

The moment when their first monitor was extruded through a six-inch bore (from which air instantly flowed outward) arrived about two hours after Vance had summoned Ben and his aides to the pressure chamber.

As telescoped aluminum rods elevated a gauge above surface ground that, the bore-length showed, had been blasted away for six feet, all eyes watched the dials recording the level of atmospheric radiation.

They read above a thousand roentgens, until Vance pressed a button that would, electrically, remove a metal covering of the gauge and cast it aside. Then, the reading dropped to four hundred and eighteen roentgens. The gauge was elevated ten feet. Down went the reading to ninety-six roentgens. With another ten-foot elevation, it dropped to forty-one r's.

Vance then said, quietly, "I suspect, if we shove the dingus as high as we can--

fifty feet--we'll reach air the filters can make breathable, safely, for
people,
not just,
motors!"

In the next whelming moment, when the guess proved correct, Ben felt an unprecedented, strange urge. An inward voice rendered it aloud:
"Thank God!"
he whispered.

He had never used that phrase and meant it before.

Why, now? he wondered. Why am I not amused at myself for "thanking" some

"Being" in which, or whom, I don't believe? Another question erased the first: How could the rapid drop in radiation in so short a rise be explained?

He pondered that, but it remained baffling.

Meantime, he was vaguely aware of people shouting with joy. Of Kit taking Vance Farr in his lion-strong arms and whirling him in a circle. Of George raptly kissing Lodi. Later on he also remembered that kiss had lasted beyond any time to express mere relief, and that he had seen Kit let Vance down gently to stare with a gathering frown at the Chinese girl kissing the Japanese boy and the possessive return of the kiss.

At the time Ben's mind didn't even register Kit's ensuing scowl of anger, jealousy, or whatever it was-an emotion not directed at the two lovers exactly, just an emotion Kit had felt and for an instant displayed, clear as night fire. Ben saw and ignored seeing. He joined briefly in the celebration held in the Hall, right after that, with everybody present, champagne flowing and people doing extempore dances and swapping kisses in pure jubilation.

For cause.

Now they knew, or at least could expect, that fifty feet above the scarred dome of Sachem's Watch there was air sufficiently free of contamination so their diesels could run and so that they themselves could be sure of going on breathing, for a long time.

By-and-by, however, Ben went back to the machine shop. The "package" would have to be fitted with a longer extrusion-pole than they'd figured. To make that addition of aluminum tubing wouldn't take long. He set to work. Soon, Lodi and George appeared, and helped.

However, it was late afternoon in what they were coming to call by a name Lodi had long ago given it, "Outdoor Time," when they had finally hauled the "package" and its telescoping base up to the bore, fastened it to the long extruding rod, and gently begun to raise the whole above the rock-surface and slowly into the air above the surface.

While Ben and Alberto had sweated in turns to set up that gear, George had brought the latest-model, giant-screen TV set back into the Hall. Ben checked the elevated instruments. Its hollow, telescopic support was also serving as a pipe, to draw air from fifty feet above ground through the resealed bore, for a test run of the elaborate

"atomic filter."

All people in the shelter were at last gathered, nervous but silent, as the screen showed what the TV set "saw" while, slowly, it turned around and around, scanning the landscape both near and afar.

This first sight of the world outside was not recognizable to anyone, from its past appearance. No sign remained of the many-level buildings that, connected by walks and steps, had been the Farr mansion. Just bare, cracked, shattered and, in some spots, sheared rock ledges. No garden. A few heaps of unidentifiable rubble. Toward what had been Candlewood Manor, no trees, evergreen or other, remained. No lawn. Again, just naked rock and blank earth patches in a lowering sunshine, where the apartment buildings had stood. These were vast jumbles of brick and steel girders that had been melted, bent, twisted like hairpins in a child's idle fingers. The bricks showed a little red, much black: red where rain-washed, black where the soot of holocaust still clung. There was no forest beyond, to the north.

To the east, south, and west, little could at first be seen, as a ground-fog was driving along in the valley, a fog that eddied up almost to the TV camera outside. That, Ben mused, did explain the swift changes in levels of radiation: the first monitor had been poked into--and only at last, above--this wind-hustled thick, very radioactive fog!

But before the sun set, Connecticut's seaward slopes could be seen, as George altered the focus of the iconoscope outside. There was not much to look at. Just a somber-hued rubble, once Fenwich, and other ruined towns, on a great, rolling ash-tinted slope that gradually flattened out and ended at the edge of Long Island Sound. No trees. No motion. Nothing but desolation, leveled ruins, rock, earth, air, dissipating fog, and the blue, empty Sound beyond.

For the next four days Ben was occupied, almost without sleep, in analyzing the air sampled at the upraised intake. After that, by lowering the telescopic support ten feet at a time to collect more samples, then blowing clean air through the intake before sucking back more dust samples, Ben finally could present an anxious but patient audience with a reasonable picture (from the radiation standpoint) of the situation prevailing near the top, and above the top, of Sachem's Watch.

Ben summed up his findings while the others sat about the Hall in chairs and lounges they had made and upholstered to speed time's passing and divert melancholy.

"You'll want to know first, I'm sure, how long it will be before it's safe for a person to go out there and just walk around. Well, for an
unprotected
person, it will be
several years.
The ground is loaded with radioactive cobalt, and other, less important elements with long half-lives." He saw their dismay.

"But that's not utterly discouraging!"

The shocked and bitterly disappointed faces brightened.

"Right now,
properly protected,
a person on stilts, so to speak, or on a platform raised, say, fifty feet, could get along for hours, if he or she were careful to wash thoroughly afterward.

"In a year the levels up there--if the rains grow cleaner at the rate I'd expect, and, you know, it did rain,
hard,
two nights ago, so we already have our first rain sample!--

such
rains, in a year, ought to make it safe, say, to stroll around the bare
summit
of Sachem's Watch--oh, for an hour--without getting radiation enough to be worrisome. And that's very conservative. The time lapse would be half, with cleaner rains, cleaner snow melts, spring, and so on.