Undersea Quest (3 page)

I remembered by first encounter with him on the steps of the Hall. “He doesn’t like lubbers,” I said.

“That’s the chance you have to take. That is, if you want to. It’s your problem, Jim. I can’t tell you what to do. But I know that it’s causing a lot of talk.”

I put it off. In one week I had learned one thing for sure: Lubbers did not bother upperclassmen without an invitation. In any case, I thought, the talk would die down. The struggle between Hallam Sperry and the Edens was old stuff—the break had been long before I was born. Why revive sleeping dogs?

I didn’t know how wakeful that particular sleeping dog was!

But I had little time for personal problems, and as the days went by the talk did die down. We began to shape up as cadets, instead of bewildered civilians; we worked and studied and exercised and, little by little, began to show what we were made of.

I said that three hundred of us started the course. Within the first month, twenty-five had washed out. Some couldn’t stand the physical strain; some couldn’t seem to master even the basic scientific studies of the beginning of our first year; some could not take the discipline. Twenty- five was not a large number—it was almost certain that, by the time our class of three hundred came to graduation and the commissioning ceremony, fewer than a hundred would be left.

For the service could not afford weaklings.

Those who washed out were snapped up, by and large, by the commercial sub-sea lines. Merely passing the entrance examinations for the Academy was proof of a strong aptitude for sub-sea command. Of the two hundred who washed out of an average class, at least half would become maritime officers in a civilian capacity.

I wondered often if I could make the grade. Just the list of our studies in the first year was frightening: Undersea mining. Submarine motor and hull design. Vau’lain cell operation and repair. Troyon tube-lights. Synthetic air generators. Submarine architecture. Eden generator maintenance and overhaul.

Of course, I had a head start. In the first class on the Eden generator, Eskow was frankly envious; after all, my uncle had invented it! But, of course, the knowledge of how to balance the circuits and check the relays and gauge the capacitances of the weirdly complex Eden generator did not run in the blood. I knew what Edenite was, of course—but so did everyone in the class.

What did help very much was the years of patient schooling my uncle had put me through before I entered the Academy. The scientific courses were much less difficult for me than for most of the class—I had taken the essentials already, in a civilian school where the pace was slow and the pressure infinitely less than at the Academy. At the top of the front wall in every classroom the motto was lettered: The Tides Don’t Wait. The whole Academy was built around that principle; we had to absorb in a single semester courses that civilian universities took four years to present.

But some of the courses were completely new to me. There were classes on naval warfare and tactics; the employment of naval aviation; military and naval logistics and supply. There were ordnance classes where we had to learn and recite the range, purpose and characteristics of every weapon that could conceivably be used by or against a sub-sea warship, from torpedoes to atomic dust. There were interminable classes on the strategy of naval operations; on the infinitely variable tactical problems of sub-sea operations, far more complex than any other military operation known to man since it was conducted in three dimensions.

And there was the infuriating detail of Academy discipline to keep in mind every minute of every hour of the day. There was never a second while we were on the Academy grounds (and in that first year we could be off them a maximum of three hours a week—if we weren’t confined to quarters for some infraction) when we were not liable without warning to find ourselves confronted by some officer or upperclassman hot on the trail of an unshined shoe or a failure to make a square turn going around a corner. We never walked anywhere—we marched; we never lounged back and relaxed, even in our own rooms—we sat at attention. We learned all this the hard way—in the long hours of walking punishment tours around the quadrangle, sometimes a hundred or more of us out there at once. But we learned it. And we never forgot.

For twenty-three hours and thirty minutes out of every day, this was true; but there was the half hour just before the evening meal when, if we weren’t catching up on our punishment tours or frantically boning up for a quiz, we could wander about the grounds as we liked. That half hour, the three hours liberty on Saturdays and the short time between chapel and lunch on Sundays were all of our leisure time. And it was always eaten into by some extra duty.

But what was left was worth while.

The Sub-Sea Academy is a very junior institution, when you compare it with Annapolis, from which it sprang, or ancient West Point. But it has a history and a pride of service; and the grounds of the Academy are filled with trophies of the Sub-Sea Fleet.

Eskow, for instance, was obsessed with the hulk of the old SSN-571—the
Nautilus,
first of the atomic-powered undersea cruisers. He dragged me there as often as he could and we spent hours of our brief leisure wandering through its cramped corridors and chambers, where it lay moored in the gentle Caribbean swell. It was hard to believe that this fragile tin-can had once been the pride of the Navy; compared with the least of our modern sub-sea corvettes, it was pitifully small and weak. Of course, the builders of the
Nautilus
had done the best they could with mere steel for its hull and plating; they hadn’t begun to guess, when
Nautilus’s
keel was laid, that my uncle would develop the thin film of Edenite that, by forcing the pressure of the water back upon itself instead of trying to hold it out by brute force, tricking the pressure itself into furnishing the necessary strength, would make it possible to plunge four miles below the surface.

My own favorite, though, was Dixon Hall. All the history of the sub-sea service was concentrated in this quiet litde hall, from diagrams of the sinking of the
New Ironsides
back in that bloody October of the Civil War, the first successful submarine action of history, through the imposing Honor Roll of Academy graduates who had given up their lives in the Service. One whole wall was taken up with a map of the world, on Mercator’s projection—a strange map, for the continents were a vacant black, with only the rivers traced on them in white and a few great cities indicated. But every detail of the ocean floor was recorded minutely. Various shades of color marked the depths; submarine mountains and ridges stood out in relief. I spent hours tracing the lines that showed the routes of the sub-sea traders, the thin web that showed the pipelines and vacuum tubeways that carried the wealth of the sea. All the domed cities of Marinia were there—Eden Dome and Black Camp and Thousand Fathom and Gold Ridge and Rudspatt and a hundred others. I looked longingly at the dot that marked Thetis, far into the South Pacific, where my Uncle Stewart lived and performed his mysterious duties—for he never discussed his work with me, only mine.

There was incalculable wealth there on the floor of the sea—three times as great an area as all the continents, and three times as wealthy! The shaded zones and colored patches showed tracts of minerals—oil fields, gold sands, coal beds, seams of copper and zinc and platinum. Marked in warning red were the uranium mines, the lifeblood of the world’s powerlines and, particularly, of the Sub-Sea Service, for without atomic energy from the raw uranium our vessels would be as surface-bound as the ancients. It was a sobering experience to see how few and sparse those flecks were; every one of them was being worked intensively, and the supply, the rumors said, was running low.

But most exciting and provocative of all were the patches of pure, featureless white in the middle of the sea. For they are the unexplored Deeps—the Philippine Trench, Nares Deep, the Marianas—six miles, seven miles and more straight down, beyond even the range of our most powerful exploring cruisers, untouched and almost unknown. On the giant map the patches of color that marked mineral deposits seemed to grow thicker and larger as the depth increased—up to the very edges of the unexplored white. It was, they said, natural enough: the heavy minerals settled farthest down. What treasures the Deeps must conceal!

There were treasures enough, though, in Dixon Hall itself—cases of pearls and sea-amethysts and coral, the great pieces of ivory from the deepest plumbed abysses that scientists said were the tusks of ancient sea-monsters. I think that within the range of my eyes, as I stood in the center of the Hall, must have been a million dollars’ worth of precious gems—with never a lock or guard! Truly, the honor system at the Academy was strong!

It was a wonderful, absorbing, exciting place. Most wonderful of all to me, though, were the ranked masses of cabinets and cases where the history of undersea navigation was on display. Beebe’s tiny bathysphere was represented, and the doomed
Squalus,
and the old German
Deutschland
and many more, in carefully precise models. And there was one thing more: the tiny model of my uncle’s first, crude cylindrical Edenite diver.

I think I piled up more demerits in Dixon Hall than anywhere else in the Academy—standing transfixed before some model or map, until the ship’s bell announced the dinner formation, and I arrived at the lines before our quarters, breathless and racing, in time to be gigged by some officer or upperclassman for being late. It was costly of my leisure time, walking off the demerits on the Quad; but it was worth it.

Eskow was usually beside me as we circled the Quad.

It was hard for me to understand what forces drove Bob Eskow through the grinding years of the Academy. In his family was no tradition of the sub-sea service as in mine; his father owned a newsstand in New York, his grandparents had been immigrants from some agricultural community in the Balkans.

The question, when I brought it up, embarrassed him. He said, almost shame-faced, “I guess I just wanted to do something for my country.” And we let it drop. But Eskow was always there with me, prowling through the
Nautilus
or pondering the unmarked Deeps, beyond the four-mile limit where Edenite no longer could turn the force of the water back on itself. I didn’t realize how much I was coming to depend on Eskow’s cheerful determination and quiet friendship.

I didn’t realize it—until it was gone.

Within the first month we were actually going beneath the surface of the sea.

True enough, we were not going very far. But squad by squad, we drew diving gear—aqualungs, face-masks, pneumatic guns and frog-flippers—and set out on our first undersea expeditions.

I was in Crew Five, with twenty others, under Cadet Lieutenant Hachette. When we had drawn our gear we boarded a whaleboat and stood out to sea. We were not quite out of sight of land—Bermuda was a low line on the horizon—and when Lt.

Hachette gave the order to stop the engines. We drifted, bobbing gently on the Caribbean swell until, at the lieutenant’s command, we went over the side, one by one.

The water was shallow there—not more than twenty feet—and crystal clear. We wore regulation weighted shoes, carefully balanced to each man’s weight and body volume. With them on, we exacdy balanced the weight of water we displaced. It was like hanging suspended like Mohammed’s Tomb. At the flick of a webbed foot we climbed; at the merest stroke of the arms, we sank.

We gathered in ranks on the rippled, sandy bottom and waited for orders.

Talking, of course, was out of the question. Standing there, teetering gently back and forth like a pillar of smoke on a still day, I was conscious of the absolute silence. The only whisper of sound that came to me was the ripple of bubbles from my breathing gear. I found out later that this was unusual—the bottom of the sea can be a very noisy place! Fish are not the mute beasts they seem; and, as I can testify, being within range of a battle royal between a hammerhead shark and a squid is about like being on the fringe of two fighting wildcats.

But that morning off Bermuda, I felt as remote as the spaces between the stars.

Lt. Hachette looked us over to make sure everything was in order; signaled us to check our gear for leaks or malfunctions; then ordered us on. In columns of twos, we marched off along the sea bottom. Curious march—in slow motion! We were at route step, and the uneven footing made it a struggle to keep in some sort of proper dress. Stumbling over sand mounds and broken branches of coral, dodging the wicked little sea anemones, that look like chrysanthemums and sting like hornets, we must have been a ludicrous sight to the curious little fishes that swam in schools overhead! It was more a ballet step than a march; half the time my right foot was off the ground before my left foot had touched before me, in a slow, stately
grand jete
that Nijinsky would have envied.

I doubted that we were making more than a mile an hour. We had air, that first dive, for only thirty minutes; we marched about a thousand yards in all, a hundred yards in one direction, then a sharp right turn and a hundred yards more. At the end of the thirty minutes we were back where we started; Lt. Hatchette gave us the signal, and we, two by two, slipped upward toward the waiting whaleboat.

It sounds rather dull, perhaps.

It was not! Every second of that first half hour was pure adventure, and unbelievable excitement. It was not dangerous excitement—we were, after all, only twenty feet down! Even though Bermuda’s waters teem with sharks, they rarely go near humans, and certainly not when the humans come in groups of twenty. But it was an enchanted land we were traveling, inhabited by long- legged starfish and slow sea-cucumbers and pulsing sponges and brilliant-colored, inch-long fish by the uncounted thousands.

We dived twice more that day, and then the whaleboat started back. It would be two weeks before our turn would come again; but already I was making plans for the next time. For I had been on the sea-bottom… it was like going home again, after a long, long time away.