Undersea Quest (2 page)

But he could have saved his breath. As soon as the hatch opened and the uniform swung out, still sparkling with drops of the chemical rinse, I was climbing into it. As the glass hatch closed again I caught a glimpse of myself. It was hard to keep a grin off my face: Now anybody could plainly see it, I was a submariner!

But the next storesman was barking at me already; I had no time to admire my reflection.

I stumbled out of the Stores shed, grunting under almost a hundred pounds of gear, the tools and badges of my new life. As I reached the door the Caribbean sun seemed like a furnace door gaping a yard above my head. The heat, after the cool, large shed, was like a physical blow.

It was a hundred yards across the quadrangle to the dormitory to which I had been assigned. By the time I got there I was staggering.

Perhaps the sweat in my eyes was the reason I dida’t see the scarlet-tuniced upperclassman who made a shipshape right turn and started up the steps just ahead of me.

I stumbled into him.

My gear fell all over the steps. I groaned, but I said, “I’m sorry,” although a little grouchily, I admit. I bent down to pick up my cap.

“Atten-HUT!”

The whiplash of the word cleared my foggy brain like magic.

I leaped erect. “Sorry, sir!” I said smartly.

The cadet on the steps above me looked down with an expression of distaste. He was as tall as I, and heavier in build. His eyes under the flat scarlet dress cap were cold; somehow they seemed almost dangerous.

“Keep your mouth shut, Mr. Lubber!” he rapped. “When an officer or am upperclassman wants to know if you’re sorry, he’ll ask you. Don’t volunteer the information. And stand at attention, Mister! Full attention—your arms at your sides.”

“But I’ll drop my cap,” I objected.

“Mis-ter Lubber!”

“Yes, sir!” I let my arms drop. The cap slipped to the ground again. My luck had held once, but on the second fall the crystal visor shattered.

The upperclassman paid no attention.

He stared coldly at me for a moment, then descended the steps and walked slowly around me. When he had made a complete circle, he shook his head.

In a conversational tone, he said:

“I have seen a great many undesirable specimens in my life, Mr. Lubber, but I have never in two years, three days and thirteen hours at the Sub-Sea Academy seen any person, beast or thing—and I may say that I am by no means certain which of these classifications you belong in—which showed as little promise of ever becoming anything close to barely possible material for making a third-rate pump-hand’s second assistant helper as you.” He shook his head. “If I were to call you a disgrace to the country, to the Service and to the Academy, Mr. Lubber,” he went on, “I would be guilty of gross flattery. It is on the face of it clearly impossible that you will last as long as two weeks in this Academy. I should not bother to take an interest in you at all. I am wasting the Service’s good time by doing so. But, Mr. Lubber, a good submariner is charitable. My kind heart forces me to do what I can in order to protract your useless and unpleasant stay with us as much as possible. Therefore, I will take an interest in your education.” He planted his hands on his hips and stared at me. “To start out with, Mr. Lubber, I invite you to learn Rule One. Would you like to learn it? You may answer in two words, each of one syllable, the second being ‘sir.’”

My jaw muscles were trembling—whether from rage or nervous laughter I couldn’t tell. Obediently I said, “Yes, sir.”

He nodded briskly. “Very good—that is, very good for you, considering. You answered me in more or less proper form, and it was the first time you tried it, at that. I congratulate you, Mr. Lubber. There may be some hope for you after all. It may be as long as three weeks, perhaps even three weeks and two or three days, before the Fitness Board is forced to the conclusion that you are utterly unfit to touch the sludgeboots of a real submariner and, throws you out. However, let us get on with Rule One. Attention to orders, Mr. Lubber! Rule One is: ‘Whenever in the presence of an upperclassman, you will stand at strict attention until he either gives you leave to do otherwise or signifies, by departing to a distance of at least five yards, that he no longer has any interest in what you do.’ Do you understand that?”

I started to say, “Yes, sir,” but closed my mouth again in a hurry. He had not given me leave to speak. I was learning the rules.

But I wasn’t quite fast enough. He stared at my jaw in an absorbed way.

“Facial tic,” he mused to himself. “This person is physically sub-normal too, it would appear—as well as mentally, morally, emotionally and otherwise.” He sighed. “Well, enough of this.

Mr. Lubber, it is well known that memorizing difficult rules, particularly those containing forty-five words, requires absolute concentration. To help you achieve this condition, I am permitting you to walk off fifteen tours around the quadrangle. Don’t thank me; I’m glad to do it for you. It’s for your own good. It has nothing to do with punishment, but is only designed to help you concentrate.” He nodded with an expression of cold satisfaction. “However,” he went on, “the question of punishment must also be considered. For conduct unbecoming a sub-sea cadet—to be specific, trampling an upperclassman—you may walk five additional tours. And for wanton destruction of government property—” his eyes flitted to my crushed visor—“ten tours more. You have wasted enough of my time, Mr. Lubber; kindly start on this at once. The tides don’t wait!”

Without another word he about-faced and mounted the steps.

That was my introduction to the Sub-Sea Academy. I didn’t even know his name.

Thirty times around the quadrangle, which is a hundred yards on a side, is seven miles.

I made it. It took me a little more than three hours, and the last few laps were in a state of near-coma.

At the twenty-fifth lap it crossed my mind that no one was counting the laps but myself. At die twenty-seventh I had to fight myself to make my legs carry me on, around that dizzying square.

But plain, homely stubbornness kept me going. The Academy was for honorable men, and—even though at least one upperclassman was obviously a sadistic brute—I was going to follow every order I received to the letter, as long as I wore the uniform.

But, at last, it was over.

I picked up my scattered gear where it lay. Dozens of cadets had climbed the steps while I was walking my tours, but none had given it a glance. I found my way to my room.

As I opened the door, a short and astonishingly young- looking lubber like myself jumped to attention. He relaxed when he got a look at me.

“Oh, you must be Eden,” he said, sticking out his hand. “My name’s Eskow. Tough luck; I saw you out there.”

He was grinning; I liked the friendly look of his grin. “I guess you got a head start on all of us,” he went on. “Well, you won’t be the last. We’ll all be out there sooner or later. If I know me, I’ll be one of the ‘sooner’ ones—and often.”

I mumbled something and dumped my gear on my cot. It made an untidy picture. The unmade bed, with clothes and books and equipment strewn all over it—as untidy and unkempt as I felt.

I looked across at Eskow’s bed. It was neatly made, with an extra blanket taut across the pillow; his footlocker lay with the lid open, showing all his equipment shipshape and stowed away. Eskow himself was pink-cheeked from a bath and shave…though, at a guess, he could have skipped the shaving for quite a while before the fact became obvious.

I must have shown my feelings.

“Cheer up,” said Eskow. “I’ll give you a hand. We don’t have anything to do until dinner, and there won’t be any inspection till after we eat. Take a breather.”

I slumped in the chair while Eskow began cheerfully to sort and stow my possessions. In a couple of minutes I began to feel better and got up to help him. It would be a long time before the soreness went out of my feet; but it looked like all my luck today was not bad. If Eskow was going to be my roommate for the next four years, judging from the first look I had at him I could call myself a lucky man.

At dinner that night I saw the upperclassman again, sitting by himself at a little table at the end of the dining hall. I nudged Eskow and pointed to him.

Eskow whispered, out of the corner of his mouth—first-year cadets were not permitted the privilege of conversation at meals—“Sperry’s his name. Sorry to say it, Jim, but he’s our Exec. You’ll be seeing a lot of him until he graduates.” Eskow hesitated. “Sperry,” he repeated, looking ramrod-straight ahead of him. “I wonder if he could be—”

One of the upperclassmen was looking our way, so Eskow never did say quite what he wondered.

But I knew. And the answer was yes: Executive Cadet Officer Brand Sperry, Cadet-in-Charge of Fletcher Hall, was the son of Hallam Sperry, the millionaire mayor of Thetis in Marinia.

Something about young Sperry’s face had seemed familiar to me at the time—familiar and, oddly, almost dangerous. At the time I couldn’t quite place it.

But now I knew. I had seen Hallam Sperry’s picture many times, and the cadet at the little table now looked like Hallam Sperry when the picture was taken—a picture of the older Sperry, my own father and my Uncle Stewart, when all there was of Marinia was a couple of tiny sub-sea outposts and all three men were young, long before the bitter struggle that divided Sperry from the Edens—

Long before my father had died, his name famous and bright, but his fortune and holdings gone.

I lifted my fork to my lips in the approved square-rigged motions of the Academy—where the combined heritage of old Annapolis and West Point and the Air Academy in Colorado produced a wealth of tradition and a thousand rules to bewilder first-year lubbers like myself. But I hardly tasted the food.

If the son of the man who had defrauded my father and tried to do the same to my uncle was going to be my commander, I had a hard mission to accomplish in the Sub-Sea Academy. And our first meeting, certainly, had been a bad start. Could it have been that he recognized me—that he deliberately picked the quarrel to make sure I knuckled under?

I couldn’t believe it. No matter what Brand Sperry’s father might be, the son was a cadet officer of the Sub-Sea Service, and while we were in service together there would be no trouble between us of my making. I promised that to myself, on the spot.

All the same, I did not enjoy my first evening meal in the SubSea Academy.

Reveille was at 4:45 in the morning. The stars were still out!

We stood there in the pre-dawn light, three hundred of us, shivering and trying to stand at attention. We must have been a strangely lubberish sight in the sacred grounds of the Sub-Sea Academy. I can hardly blame Cadet Captain Sperry for his expression of disgust.

After roll-call, we returned to our quarters and got ready for inspection. After an enormous meal—getting up before daybreak did wonderful things to your appetite!—we fell out for the beginning of our first day of training.

Every one of us had been primed for that first day from the age of ten or twelve on. We were as fit and ready as any first-year class of teen-age youths could be. Each of us had studied as much of the basic subjects we would have as our young heads could hold—and not only the mathematics and science and naval lore, but a curious assortment of widely varying studies, from art to engineering, from ballistics to the ballet. For years the tendency in schools was more and more to specialize—but for us, the future officers of the subsea fleet, the whole world of knowledge and learning was ours to grasp.

We were ready. And we went right to work, sweating on the athletic fields in our fatigues, at rigid attention at our desks in our undress whites, parading across the drillfields in our high-visibility dress scarlet tunics.

It was hard work.

It was intended to be hard. No weakling could rise to command a sub-sea vessel. The service could not afford it. One moment’s weakness or hesitation might mean destruction, down in the mighty depths of the sea, where the enormous weight of miles of water overhead could crush any steel or iron object like cardboard. Only one thing made it possible for our submarines to cruise twenty thousand feet and more below the surface; only one thing kept the dome cities of Marinia alive.

The name of it was: Edenite.

Bob Eskow was the first of my classmates to connect the word

“Edenite” with the name of his roommate, Cadet James Eden. He asked me point blank if I were related to Stewart Eden, the inventor.

In the years since I first saw my uncle, I had found out what the name of Stewart Eden meant. I tried to keep the pride out of my voice as I said: “He’s my uncle.”

“Uncle!” Bob was impressed. He thought for a moment, then ventured cautiously, “There’s a story that he’s working on something new, something—”

“I can’t talk about it,” I said briskly—and it was true, I couldn’t, because I didn’t know anything about it. There had been stories in the paper now and again about what Stewart Eden was up to in Marinia. But what I saw in the papers was everything I knew; what little I heard from my uncle was about me and my schooling, not about him and his work.

Eskow didn’t press the point. I could see, on his open face, the exact moment when he had remembered that between the Eden family and the Sperry family there was reported to be trouble…

The word got around rapidly, and before a week was out half the class was laying bets on how long it would be before there was an open outbreak between the Exec and myself. The story of Hallam Sperry’s struggle with my father and uncle was public knowledge. But my uncle had taught me, in his infrequent letters, that a wise man does not hate; and I was trying to live up to his advice in my relations with Brand Sperry.

I talked it over with Bob Eskow, one afternoon when classes were over and we had half an hour to ourselves before the evening meal. We were sitting on the sandy lawn outside the mess hall, watching the giant cumulus clouds boil up over the water. Eskow said hesitantly, “Maybe you ought to talk to Sperry, Jim. It might clear the air.”