saw the same feeling spreading to all the others, who smiled slightly
as they knew they had withstood the pressure test successfully.
“So far, anyway,” March told himself. “Some things happen occasionally,
I guess, when the pressure is reduced.”
Already the hand on the dial was moving downward again, as the air was
released from the chamber by a man handling the valves on the outside.
March began to feel cooler, and in a few minutes he shivered suddenly.
“Better put on the robes,” the Chief said, tossing the robes to the men
on the benches. “The temperature was up to a hundred and thirty for a
while there, and it drops just as fast as the pressure drops.”
“Feels good!” Stan said, as he slipped into the robe.
“Sure, but I’d like a couple of blankets, too,” March replied, feeling
his teeth begin to chatter.
They heard another pound on the wall and saw that the dial hand stood
at ten pounds of pressure inside.
“We’ve got to stop it here for a while,” the CPO explained. “There’s a
regular rate at which a man’s got to come out of pressure to keep from
getting the bends. You probably know something about the bends—every
sailor does—but here’s the idea. Your blood’s under pressure in the
arteries and veins, too, just like the rest of you, and there’s oxygen
and other things carried in that blood. When pressure is reduced too
much too suddenly, some of the gases in your blood form bubbles—just
like a kettle boiling. And those bubbles in your blood can cause plenty
of trouble.”
Stan turned to March. “Sure,” he said. “Remember those experiments
everybody has in first-year chemistry? Making water boil when you put
it on a cake of ice? The water’s under pressure in a closed container,
and cooling it condenses the steam vapor so that pressure is reduced.
So the air forms bubbles which escape when pressure goes down.”
“I remember,” March said. “They’ve got the bends licked now, though,
since they know just how fast to reduce pressure.”
More air was let out until the dial showed five pounds of pressure for
a while, and then it was reduced to zero. The door was swung open by
the Chief and the men stepped out of the chamber with smiles on their
faces.
“One test passed,” March said. “What’s next?”
“The escape tower,” Stan replied. “Tomorrow.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER FOUR
UNDERWATER ESCAPE
When March returned to his quarters that afternoon he found a letter
from Scoot Bailey waiting for him. It was full of excitement and
enthusiasm, and it filled March with a good deal of envy.
“I’ve flown already!” Scoot wrote. “I didn’t think we’d get around to
it for quite a while, but I got up the third day I was here. Of course,
I didn’t handle the plane, really, but I just held my hand lightly on
the stick while the instructor took me through a few simple turns and
climbs. Just to give me the feel of it, he said, and so I’d know I
really came here to fly, not just to study in classes.”
March shook his head. “And to think that I’ve hardly seen a submarine!”
he muttered to himself. “And I surely haven’t been inside one. But
Scoot’s already been up in a plane! It just goes to show,” he told
himself, “that submarines are tougher than planes. Just think of the
tests we’ve got to go through before they can even let us take a ride
in a sub. With a flier all he’s got to do is pass a physical test!”
“And speaking of classes,” Scoot’s letter went on, “they are really
tough! Remember back in college we used to think we had to study fairly
hard? Boy, we just had a picnic in those days! We’d look on that kind
of business as a hilarious vacation down here.”
March felt worse than ever. “I’m just wasting time!” he complained to
himself. “Not even a class yet, and Scoot’s studying already!”
He finished Scoot’s letter quickly, learning that he had made a few
good friends already, that he felt fine, that he loved flying. Then
March sat down and wrote Scoot a long letter.
“I’ll tell him about the pressure chamber,” March said. “I’ll show the
lad that we’re doing plenty here that he never even dreamed of. And
I’ll tell him about the escape tower we’re going to have a try at
tomorrow. That ought to show him that he’s picked just an easy branch
of the service.”
So March wrote, and he told Scoot plenty. He made the test in the
pressure chamber sound much more harrowing than it had actually been,
even inventing one man who passed out, bleeding profusely, in the
middle of the test.
Then he felt better, and went down to dinner feeling once more that he
was in the cream of the Navy. As he walked down the hill he heard the
drone of an airplane motor overhead.
“Simple,” he said to himself. “See how easy it is? Just push a stick
this way or that, just push a couple of pedals, and keep your eyes on a
couple of dozen instruments. Why, in a sub we’ve got more instruments
and dials than in twenty-five bombing planes!”
When he sat down next to Stan Bigelow, it was even better, for Stan
agreed with him completely about the super-importance of the submarine
service, thinking up a few additional reasons for its superiority over
Naval Aviation that had not occurred to March. Then they began
discussing the escape tower test the next day.
“Do you know much about this Momsen Lung they use?” Stan asked. “I saw
some today when we took the pressure test, but I don’t know the details
of how they work.”
“Yes, I read all about them a few years ago,” March answered. “They
were invented by an Annapolis man—then Lieutenant Charles Momsen—not
much more than ten years ago. And you know, Stan, that guy conducted
every single experiment himself—wouldn’t let anybody else take the
chance.”
“Boy, he should have got a medal for that!” Stan exclaimed.
“He did! Distinguished Service Medal,” March said. “And the Lung is one
of the biggest things ever invented to make subs safer. Simple—really,
like most good things. The good thing about it is that there’s no
connection at all with the outside. Most such devices had a valve
system for letting the exhaled air out into the water. But the valves
jammed shut—or open—too often. There’s nothing like that to go wrong in
the Momsen Lung.”
“How does it get rid of the carbon dioxide that you breathe out?” Stan
asked.
“There’s a can of CO(2) absorbent inside it, that’s all,” March
explained. “Of course, in time it wouldn’t absorb any more, but how
long are you ever going to use a Momsen Lung at one stretch, anyway?”
“Ten or fifteen minutes, I suppose,” Stan replied.
“Sure,” March agreed. “And the can of absorbent can take care of your
carbon dioxide for a lot longer than that. And the rest of it is really
just as simple. It’s an airtight bag that straps over your chest.
There’s a mouthpiece you clamp between your teeth for breath, and a
nose clip to close your nose so you won’t breathe through it. When the
bag’s filled with oxygen—there you are!”
“Wonderful!” Stan said. “But doesn’t that bag of oxygen, plus your own
tendency to float, send you shooting up to the surface in a hurry?”
“It would if you let it,” March replied. “That’s why there always has
to be a line or cable up to the surface, so you can hold on to it and
keep yourself from ascending too quickly.”
“And get the bends,” Stan concluded. “If anything, I know I’ll go more
slowly than they tell me.”
The next morning they had a chance to look more closely at the Momsen
Lungs before they put them on, with the instructor explaining their
workings and showing the students how to adjust them. March did not see
Scott, the radioman, among the group, although all the others were the
same that had gone through the pressure test the day before. He spoke
to the young pharmacist, asking about Scott.
“Got a cold,” was the reply. “Just a little nose cold, but they
wouldn’t let him do the escape test with it.”
“Too bad,” March said. “But he’ll be able to catch up with the rest of
us soon.”
The Chief Petty Officer in charge was explaining the test to the men,
as they got into their swimming trunks.
“First we’ll have twenty pounds of pressure in the chamber,” he said,
“just to be sure noses and ears are in good shape before going into the
water. And then you’ve got a long climb ahead of you. You see, the
bottom of this tower is a hundred feet from the surface at the top. You
won’t be taking the hundred-foot escape for quite a while yet. Today we
go up to the eighteen-foot level.”
March thought that ought to be simple. He had been almost that far
beneath the water sometimes when he went in swimming. But then he
remembered that this test was to teach the men the proper use of the
Momsen Lung, the rate of climb up the cable to the surface. It wasn’t
the pressure at eighteen feet that would bother anyone, unless it was
somebody who had some deep fear of being under water.
“Such a person wouldn’t very well select the submarine service,
though,” he said to himself. “Of course some people have these fears
without knowing it. Nothing has ever happened to bring it out, that’s
all.”
The time in the pressure chamber seemed like nothing after their
fifty-pound session of the day before, and soon the students found
themselves ascending to the eighteen-foot level of the tower.
“Up at the top,” the Chief was saying, “there are plenty of men ready
to take care of you. Nothing much is likely to go wrong with such a
short escape, but we don’t leave anything to chance. So if you get
tangled in the cable or decide to go down instead of up, or anything
like that, there’s a few mighty good swimmers to do the rescue act.
There’s one thing to remember—we send you men up one after the other,
pretty fast, just the way you’d be doin’ it if you were getting out of
a sub lyin’ on the bottom of the ocean. So get away from the cable buoy
fast, and without kickin’ your legs all over the place. You’re likely
to kick the next one in the head, especially if he has come up a little
too fast.”
“How fast are we supposed to go, Chief?” one of the men asked.
“About a foot per second,” the officer replied. “You hold yourself
parallel with the cable, body away from it a little bit, and let
yourself up hand over hand. You can put your hands about a foot above
each other, and count off the seconds to yourself. We’ll be timing you
at both ends, so you’ll find out afterwards whether you went too fast
or too slow. Then you’ll catch on to the rate all right.”
March was among the first men who stepped into the bell at the
eighteen-foot level. The water of the tower came up to his hips and was
kept from going higher in the little compartment by the pressure of the
air forced into the top of the bell-shaped room. He saw a round metal
pipe shaped like a very large chimney extending down into the water.
“That skirt goes down a little below the water level in here on the
platform,” the Chief said. “When you go up, you fasten on your Lung,
duck under the skirt, and go straight up. First, I’m going to check to
be sure that the cable’s set okay.”
March and the others watched closely as the Chief adjusted his nose
clips and mouthpiece deftly, turned the valve opening the oxygen into
the mouthpiece, and ducked under. In a moment he reappeared and removed
the Lung.
“All set,” he said. “Okay, you—” he pointed to the young pharmacist,
“you go first. Your Lung’s filled with oxygen, plenty of it. There’s
the carbon dioxide absorbent in there to take up everything you breathe
out. Remember to go up hand over hand, about a foot per second. And
don’t be surprised if a couple of guys go floatin’ past you in the
water on your way up. There’re other instructors swimmin’ around up
there and once in a while one of ’em swims down to see how you’re
makin’ out. All set?”
“Yes, Chief,” the pharmacist answered. March thought he looked
completely calm, though he felt himself growing excited at even this
short escape.
“Okay, mouthpiece in place,” the Chief said, making sure that the
student did it correctly. “Now, nose clips on—that’s right. Finally,
open the valve so you can get the oxygen. Okay?”
The pharmacist nodded that he was all right. “On your way, then, my
lad,” the Chief said. “Duck under.”
March watched the young man duck under the water and disappear as he
went under the metal skirt. Then he saw the Chief go under, too, right
behind him. Up above, he knew, the instructors would see a tug on the
yellow buoy fastened to the cable, and would begin their timing of the
first ascent. One of them would dive down and have a look at the
student coming up, would make him pull away if he were hugging the
cable too closely, speed him up or slow him down if necessary, with a
gesture and a pat on the shoulder.
Suddenly the Chief reappeared.
[Illustration: _Hand Over Hand He Ascended_]
“Okay, you,” he said, pointing to March. As he put the mouthpiece in
place, he thought how strange it was that in the tower in a pair of
swimming trunks he was just plain “you” to the Chief Petty Officer,
while in uniform outside he would be “sir.”
“Right now,” March thought as he adjusted the nose clips and turned the
valve, “this man’s my superior and my teacher. A young officer can
learn plenty from these boys who’ve had so much experience, if they
give themselves a chance by forgetting for a few minutes that they’re
commissioned officers.”
As the Chief patted his shoulder, March ducked under the water, found
the bottom of the round metal skirt, and went under it. Looking up, he
saw the long shaft of darkness made by the walls of the tower, and the
filmy, cloudy circle of half-light at the surface which suddenly seemed
a great distance away. His hands had already found the cable, and he
held on to it as he felt the upward tug of the Lung which tried to
carry him swiftly to the top.
Putting one hand about a foot above the other he began to count to
himself, hoping that his counts were about a second apart. For every
count he put his hand up what he judged to be another foot in distance.
Then he realized that his legs were unconsciously starting to twine
themselves around the cable, and he pulled them away, holding his body
straight up and down a short distance away from the escape line.
“That’s funny,” he told himself. “I guess I always twined my legs
around a rope when I was going down it, so I want to do the same thing
going up.”
He looked up again quickly and saw legs kicking above him. That would
be the pharmacist pulling away from the buoy. How much farther did he
have to go? It was hard to judge the distance. He had reached a count
of nine, so he should be halfway if he had been putting his hands a
foot apart.
His eyes blinked at a form moving up close to him. He saw a man in
trunks floating toward him in the water, waving his arms slowly. No, he
wasn’t waving—he was swimming! He wore a pair of nose clips but no
Momsen Lung. One of the instructors from above, March concluded.
The man motioned his arms upward urgently. Unmistakably March knew that
he had been going too slowly, so he increased the tempo of his count
slightly. And before he knew it, his eyes blinked in the sunlight and
he felt water running down his face. He was up!
“Clips off! Valve off!” an instructor in the water beside him said.
March moved away from the buoy toward the side of the tank, where he
saw other men standing on the little platform, and as he did so he
removed his nose clips with one hand, shut the oxygen valve. Then he
remembered that it had not felt a bit strange to breathe through his
mouth instead of through his nose.
“I guess as long as your lungs get the oxygen they need, you don’t much
care how it gets there.”
He felt a hand helping him as he climbed up on the little platform at
the top of the tower. Standing there, he removed the mouthpiece and
then took off the lung itself. As he dried himself and slipped into his
robe, the man behind him broke the surface and started toward the edge.
Suddenly March felt a little dizzy. He had looked out the window and
had seen how high he was from the ground. And then he smiled.
“What would Scoot think of me?” he thought, “getting dizzy even for a
second only a hundred feet off the ground?”
Down below was the river, and March saw a sub making its way down
toward Long Island Sound. It looked very tiny and slim.
“How did it go, sir?” asked a voice behind him. He turned and saw the
pharmacist.
“All right, I guess,” March replied. “Didn’t mind it, anyway. I guess I
was a little slow. They had to send a man down to hurry me up.”
“They sent one down to slow me down,” the pharmacist said, “but I came
out just about right. They told me it was a better sign if you went too
slow than too fast.”
“I suppose it indicates you’re not overanxious about being under
water,” March said.
A familiar head broke the water of the tank and March saw Stan Bigelow
moving over toward the platform. When he had got out and removed his
Lung, he smiled at March.
“Nothing to it, was there?” he called. “I’d like to try the fifty-foot
level right away.”
“Same here,” March said, “but I guess we wait a day or two.”
Later, when they _did_ make the fifty-foot escape, they found that it
went just the same as the eighteen-footer. Sure, it took fifty seconds,
but the sensations were about the same. There was more pressure on the
ears, but not enough to bother anyone. March was very surprised to hear
that one of the enlisted men, near the end of the group, had suddenly
gone panicky just before it was his turn to go.
“Had he gone through the eighteen-foot test all right?” March asked the
Chief Petty Officer in charge.
“Yes—just too fast,” the man replied. “But lots of them do that at
first. He must have been holding himself under control for that one,
though, and the thought of the fifty was too much for him.”
“Too bad,” March said. “Will they transfer him back to his old branch
of the service?”
“No—they’ve decided to give him another chance,” the Chief said. “The
Doc—the psychological one—thinks it’s just a fear the guy never even
knew he had. He’s goin’ to talk to him a bit to see if he can find out
what caused it. Then maybe he can get rid of it. He won’t be able to go
down in a pigboat until he handles the fifty-foot escape okay, but
we’ll keep him on for a while to give him another crack at it. Good man
in every other way, as far as I can see.”
March learned later that the man was one of the fire controlmen who had
ridden out on the bus with him.
“Gee, I hope he makes it,” Scott, the radioman, said to March when they
talked it over. “He’s a swell guy. Cobden’s his name, Marty Cobden. And
he’s got his heart set on bein’ a submariner, dreams about it at night
even. Never had the faintest notion he was scared of anything, least of
all just fifty feet of water.”
“Did he go swimming much?” March asked.
“I asked him that, too,” Scott replied. “He says he liked to swim but
he didn’t like to dive. But he wasn’t _scared_ of it!”
Scott had got over his cold and had caught up with the rest of them,
making the eighteen-foot and fifty-foot escapes without difficulty.
“Well, we’re qualified now to go to school here,” March said. “And we
can even go down in a sub. But when do we take the hundred-foot escape?”
“Don’t have to,” Scott said. “But most of ’em try it, sir—some time
later. They all want to see Minnie and Winnie.”
“Minnie and Winnie?” March asked. “Who are they and _where_ are they?”
“They’re mermaids,” Scott said without a smile. “Beautiful mermaids.
And they’re painted on the walls of the tank down at the hundred-foot
level. Only one way to see ’em—and that’s to make the escape. An’ you
get a diploma when you’ve done it.”
“I’ll see you there, Scott,” March said. “We’ll both have a look at
Winnie and Minnie one of these days.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER FIVE
FIRST DIVE
The next day classes started for March and Stan and the other new
officers going through the school. Expecting the most difficult and
intensive of studies, March was a little disappointed in the first
day’s work.
“Just ground work, I suppose,” he said to Stan at mess that evening.
“They couldn’t start throwing the whole book at us on the first day.”
“I think they did pretty well,” Stan said. “I got a big dose of the
history and development of the submarine and the construction of modern
pigboats. Back in college we’d have taken a week to cover what we got
in this one day. But, of course, you’ve read a lot of general stuff
about subs. I was so busy studying engineering in college I didn’t look
at anything else.”
“Yes, I _have_ read a good deal about the underwater ships,” March
said. “I always did think those first experimenters had a lot of guts.
Imagine that Dutchman, Van Drebel, submerging a boat more than three
hundred years ago.”
“Sure, and he stayed down two hours,” Stan agreed. “Made about two
miles—with oars for power!”
“He must have been a clever guy to have those oars sticking out through
leather openings sealed so tight that not a drop of water could come
in,” March said. “But it was the Americans who really made submarines
go.”
“Yes—isn’t there a ship named after Bushnell,” Stan asked, “the man who
made that submarine during the American Revolution?”
“Sure, a submarine tender, naturally,” March replied. “Too bad his idea
didn’t work better. It was a clever one.”
“I had never realized until today,” Stan said, “that Robert Fulton had
anything to do with submarines. I thought inventing the steamboat was
enough for any one man. But now I find out he invented pretty good
submarines long before he did the steamboat. But he just couldn’t get
anybody to listen to him.”
“Well, the sub really couldn’t develop into a reliable ship,” March
said, “until electric motors and storage batteries came along. There
were some pretty good attempts, of course, and John Holland and Simon
Lake, the two Americans who really made subs that worked, turned out
some fair ones driven by gasoline engines, steam engines, and
compressed air.”
“And don’t forget the Diesels!” Stan laughed. “My sweethearts, the
Diesels! They were the last things needed, after storage batteries and
electric motors, to make subs really dependable and good.”
“I won’t forget your Diesels, Stan,” March said. “I’m going to have to
learn plenty about them in the next few weeks, and I know almost
nothing now. And you’ve got to learn plenty about other things, too.”
“Sure, it’ll be tough going,” Stan said. “But it’s a wonderful idea to
have every officer, no matter what his specialty, able to take over
almost any department on a sub if he has to.”
“Yes, if I get knocked cold just when we’re trying to slip away through
some coral atolls to miss a depth-charge attack,” March asked, “won’t
you be glad you really learned how to navigate?”
“Why, all Navy men know how to navigate,” Stan protested. “I know my
navigation pretty well.”
“Maybe so,” March agreed, “but do you know it well enough to take a
ship a few hundred miles under water without ever a chance to look at
the horizon or shoot the sun or get a fix on some landmark? I know I
couldn’t do it, and navigation’s been my main job so far.”
“Navigating a sub’s no bed of roses, of course,” Stan said, “but
nursing my pretty Diesels is no easy task, either. When you’re workin’
on those babies, you pay attention and be good to them.”
“I’ll be good to your Diesels, all right,” March laughed. “But what I’m
most anxious to learn about are all the new sound-detection devices.
Pretty secret stuff, some of it, though we’ve had some of it on our
surface ships.”
“I know,” Stan said. “You don’t feel so blind and lost in a sub any
more, I guess. You can tell from the sound devices just how many ships
are near by and even from the sound of their engines what kind they
are, where they’re goin’ and how fast. But you know what I’m anxious to
do—really get inside a pigboat and look around. Those cross-section
charts are fine, but there’s nothing like seeing the real thing for
yourself.”
“I think they’ll be taking us down for a dive within a couple of days,”
March said. “Just for the ride, you know, and to see how we react. And
it had better be pretty soon. That Scoot Bailey has probably been up in
a plane half a dozen times at least and I haven’t seen the inside of a
sub!”
The next morning they looked for an announcement that they would go
down in one of the subs but there was nothing of the sort. They spent
their time in the classrooms, and they began the really intensive work
that March had been expecting.