Undersea Quest (5 page)

He also never mentioned Hallam Sperry, the father of my executive officer.

Significant gaps! I could scarcely have guessed how closely they were connected!

I had not realized how important Bob Eskow was to me until he was away. I kept in touch with the hospital, but it was a complete surprise, all the same, when one of our classmates hailed me as we returned from the evening meal to say that Bob was back.

I raced into Fletcher Hall and into the elevator, grinning all over, oblivious to everything else as I punched the button for my floor.

A little too oblivious, maybe. “Mis-ter Lubber!” crackled a familiar voice, and I leaped to attention. It was Cadet Captain Brand Sperry, standing arms akimbo outside the elevator. The door started to close, and hastily I punched the
Stop
button. Sperry’s whiplash voice snapped: “Stand at attention, Mr. Lubber!”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“The Orders of the Day, Mr. Eden,” he said sharply. “Have you had an opportunity to read them?”

“Yes, sir.” I knew what was coming.

“Oh?” He affected to look surprised. He shook his head. “I cannot understand that, Mr. Eden. It is very prominently posted on the bulletin board—I can see it from here—that from 0600 this day onward until further notice, elevators will not be used. That is a general order, Mr. Eden, put forth by higher authority in an effort to conserve power. Or weren’t you aware that there is a power shortage? Uranium is in short supply, Mr. Eden; without uranium, power must be conserved. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.” It went on from there; it wound up with an order to spend the next day’s half-hour before-dinner rest period at attention in front of the bulletin board, memorizing the orders of the day. I could stand that well enough; what hurt was that Cadet Captain Sperry had been within easy earshot when the classmate had called to me that Eskow was back in our room. He knew why I had been hurrying, and why I was absent-minded.

He knew, and yet he jumped on me for what was, after all, the smallest of offenses. I was finding it very difficult to live under the rule of Cadet Captain Brand Sperry.

But five minutes later, in our room, Bob Eskow made up for much.

I pumped his hand in a storm of warm feeling. “Bob!” I said, inarticulately. “I never expected to see you again!”

His grin wavered. In a dour tone, he said: “You may not see me for very long, at that. I’m on probation.”

“Probation! But—”

He shrugged. “They’re right, in a way,” he said. “Wait a minute, and I’ll tell you everything that happened. Back at the night maneuver, I went down for the exercises right behind you and we all started off for the defensive line. I remember turning my headlamp off. And I remember wondering how in the world I could tell if I was swimming up, down, sidewise or what. Then—” he hesitated and shook his head—“then something happened, Jim. I don’t honestly know exactly what. The doctor said something about abnormal sensitivity to pressure and blacking out—I don’t know. All I know is, all of a sudden, everything got foggy. I couldn’t seem to get my breath, and things were getting black—although everything was so black to start out with that it was kind of hard to tell. Then—” he spread his hands—“then I was on the deck of a little fishing ketch; they’d pulled me up in the nets.”

I said, “But, Bob—”

“I know,” he said. “I’d been in the water for a long time—I was just about out of oxygen, they told me. But I was alive. They didn’t have any radio in the ketch, and they didn’t see why they should be bothered bringing me in to the Academy wharf, so they took be to their home port. And then they phoned the Academy, and a Regular medical officer from the Sub-Sea Base came down and got me—and there I was, in the hospital.”

“But what knocked you out?”

He looked at me somberly. “The medical officer asked me a lot of silly questions about that. First he thought it was a malfunction of the breathing apparatus, but then he got an engineering report that wrecked that idea. So he just patted me on the head and told me some people were more susceptible to these things than others and, after all, I could have a perfectly good life as a lubber civilian…”

I gaped at him. “Bob, you’re not
washed out?
”

He grinned and poked me on the shoulder—but the grin wasn’t as happy as it could have been. “Not quite,” he said. “Not quite, but it was pretty close. They had a hearing, right there in the hospital, as soon as I was able to sit up and take notice. And I managed to convince them that, after all, it
might
have been malfunction of the apparatus, so they allowed as how they might give me another chance. But—well, it’s on my record, Jim. It isn’t any disgrace to get washed out of the Academy for medical reasons, I know that—but I don’t want to get washed out for
any
reason. Any little thing now—anything that might ordinarily get me a hard time from the Commandant, for instance—and I’m out.”

I said indignantly, “Bob, there’s been some kind of mistake. That’s not fair! Maybe it
was
punk equipment—they can’t put that kind of a mark on your record unless they’re
sure.
Did they take into consideration your record here? All the calisthenics, and the other underwater exercises, and—”

He wasn’t smiling at all now. He said soberly, “They sure did, Jim. You might say that was the biggest part of it. They had sworn evidence that, from my first day at the Academy, I had been consistently showing signs of being unable to keep up with the rest of the class—puffing and panting and not quite making the number of pushups and so on.”

I was aghast. “But—”

“But nothing! That’s the story, Jim. I won’t deny that maybe I haven’t got as many muscles as you do—who does? But I think I’ve held my end up in everything we did. Only—the testimony said different.”

“
What
testimony?” I demanded. “Who told them a cock-and-bull story like that?”

“He made it mighty plausible, Jim,” Bob said gently. “It was a good friend of yours. He showed up right at the hospital, and he was just the model of a perfect sub-sea cadet while he was answering questions. You know who I mean—Cadet Captain Brand Sperry, himself.”

My second summer at the Academy I almost saw my Uncle Stewart.

I had come a long way from the clumsy young civilian who had entered the Academy’s coral gates two years before. We all had. Two solid years of drill, work and study had turned us into—well, not real sub-sea officers; not yet. But certainly something as far removed from our soft civilian days as possible. I could skin-dive to forty feet, lung-dive to seven hundred, suit-dive to limits of the Edenite armor’s capacity. I could name the duties of every crewman on any fighting sub-sea vessel of the service; in a pinch, I could take those duties over—from scrambling eggs for eight hundred men in the galley to conning my ship through a delicate harbor approach.

True, it was all book-learning, or nearly all. I had yet to put most of my new skills into practice; and I had a good two years more of advanced studies ahead of me before I could be commissioned. But it was as a sea-faring man, a certified midshipman of the Sub-Sea Service, and not as a lubber that, with the rest of my class—now less than two hundred strong—I embarked for our round-the- world training cruise on the old SSS
Pocatello.

It was to be a ninety-day cruise, across the North Atlantic, through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, through the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, where we would take part in Fleet Exercises; then across the Indian Ocean and the treacherous waters around the East Indies to Marinia. There, I hoped, I would have a liberty and a chance to see my uncle again, before we began the long cross-Pacific leg to the Panama Canal and thence back to our Caribbean base. We had just over thirty thousand miles to go, almost all of it submerged; only at Suez and Panama would
Pocatello
transit the canals as a surface vessel.

The crossing of the Atlantic was child’s play. I suppose we needed it to break into the routine of sub-ship life; but there was almost nothing for us to do but stand our watches, keep our engines going and wait until the slow eight-day crossing was over. We ran the ship; there was a skeleton complement of Regulars aboard, but their job was only to stand by in case of disaster, and to observe and make reports on us.

Pocatello’
s Second Officer was Cadet Captain Sperry. He was not technically in command, but he had the functions of an exec; and there was enough of a component of command in his post to give Bob Eskow and me uneasy moments. But there was no trouble all the way across the Atlantic.

We drifted in through the Gates of Hercules—the Straits between Gibraltar and the African shore—with our engines stilled, a trick the ancient Diesel-powered submarines used to use in wartime so that they could steal through the narrow passage unchallenged. The shallow Mediterranean is a giant evaporating pan; water is sucked in from the Atlantic continually. Under the hot Mediterranean sun some of the water steams off and a dense salt solution remains; it sinks to the bottom and flows out again through the Straits of Gibraltar—a dense, heavy outgoing current flowing under a fresher, lighter incoming current, never ending, never mixing. We rode in on the upper current but still well below the surface. I was on the bridge, scanning the waters around us through the microsonar as we transited the Straits; it was an eerie sensation to be there in that big old war vessel, the engines dead and the helm unresponsive, and to see the check points in the sonar screen drift by.

“Well done,” said the Regular officer who was standing by, closing his notebook with a snap. “You may take the conn and surface, Cadet Captain Sperry.”

We set course for the fueling base at the Rock itself—not because we needed fuel but because new orders had come through requiring it. There was no explanation of the orders—but a lot of gossip. We listened to all the gossip, Bob and I, and agreed to discount it—which was a mistake, in a way. Because on the same principle as that of the broken clock, which tells the right time twice a day, of all the contradictory explanations the scuttlebutt gave for our new orders, some of them turned out to be right.

We came into the great U.N. refueling base in broad daylight and on the surface. My relief came before we moored, but I was reluctant to go off duty; Bob Eskow, relieved at the same time from his duties as Junior Engineering Officer, turned up in our wardroom and the two of us slipped silently up to the weather deck, staying as much out of sight as we could. There was no reason we shouldn’t be there—the ship was secured against diving—but neither one of us wanted any of Cadet Captain Sperry’s caustic tongue right at that moment.

We looked at the enormous limestone cliff in wonderment. “We’re bound to get liberty,” said Bob happily. “This ought to be good, Jim! We’ll climb up and see the Barbary apes and look across the Straits at Mount Abyla. And there’s a cave—St. Michael’s, the name is—that some people say goes all the way under the water to Africa, and—”

“Attention on deck,” rasped a loudspeaker behind us. “You two cadets on the weather deck. Report to the O.O.D.—you’re both on report!”

We came to crisp attention as the commander’s voice snapped at us. On report! We saluted the bridge and went below, a lot less cheerful than we had been a moment before.

“There goes your climb to see the apes,” I grumbled to Bob at the gangway. “Of all the rotten luck—”

His face was grim. He nudged me and nodded at the bridge. “It wasn’t luck, Jim,” he said. “I doubt the commander would have bothered us, even if we weren’t supposed to be there. But—take a look.”

I glanced up. There on the weather bridge stood the commander, no longer looking at us, carefully supervising the mooring operation. But beside him, and looking our way with a particularly pleased expression, was our Second Officer, Cadet Captain Sperry.

Instead of a liberty at Gibraltar, we spent our off-duty time in port doing pushups in the training area at the fueling base. It wasn’t too bad—ten minutes of calisthenics, and a five-minute break; for two hours at a time. But in one of the breaks Bob spotted something that neither one of us could figure out.

The loading machines were active around the
Pocatello
—which was normal enough; you expect to see a ship fueled at a fueling station, and the spaced piles of uranium slugs that the machine was working on, each in its own little radiation-proof can, didn’t attract our attention at first.

Until Bob noticed that the slugs were coming
off
the ship.

“Unloading fuel!” I said, unbelieving. “But that’s crazy—we’ve got thirty thousand miles to go.”

Bob wiped his brow, panting—he took the exercises harder than I did. He shook his head. “We don’t need it,” he said slowly.

“One fuel load would carry this tub around the world two or three times, easily enough. That’s just our emergency reserve. But it’s funny, all the same.”

We agreed it was funny, and then the whistle blew and the dozen or so of us who were working off demerits began our pushups again. But we forgot it—for a while.

By nightfall
Pocatello
was on her way again, to the naval base at Naples. It was an uneventful voyage. We surfaced just outside the Gulf of Naples, and rode in between the twin islands of Ischia and Capri just at sunrise. I had the morning watch, and I saw the sun come up over the gently steaming cone of Vesuvius.

It was there that we got the bad news:

The cruise was called off.

Officially, there was no reason given; simply a terse mailgram order for
Pocatello
to return to base. But the scuttlebutt had the explanation, and remembering what Bob and I had seen at Gibraltar I couldn’t doubt that it was true:

Uranium shortage.

I don’t suppose there was a man on the ship who didn’t take it hard when the word got out—all of us had looked forward to that training cruise for a long time. But to me it meant losing something more than a pleasure trip. I had been looking forward, more than I realized, to the chance of being in Marinia, and seeing my uncle, Stewart Eden.