A MARVELOUS DEEP-SEA CRAFT.
The Dolphin was ready. We went down to Norfolk with Dr. Plantet upon
his last inspection. At least, Polly and I went; Arturo did not go. He
was ill, he said, and indeed he looked it. Flushed of face, with cheeks
these last days gone thinner; brooding eyes, with an uneasy, restless
gaze that seemed always to avoid us.
Sardonic words came from Dr. Plantet that morning when we left. Arturo
did not answer them; he moved away in the library, as if suddenly
threatened with childish tears. And Dr. Plantet, wounded to the core of
him, I know turned his back upon his son and stalked grimly out.
I recall that as we ascended the incline to the air-stage runway I
glanced over to the house. At the library window Arturo’s white face
was staring after us.
Was he afraid? He had said he would go with us on the voyage, of
course. Polly was going. We needed a cook; some one to care for
our physical wants. Who could do that better than Polly? It was
characteristic of Dr. Plantet that he should thus be willing to expose
her to danger. A stoicism, a subversion of all his instinctive inner
feelings of fear--and a warm pride in her that she should want to aid
us and her world.
How much more keenly, then, did he feel shame for Arturo! Was the boy
a physical coward? Arturo had said he wanted to go, of course. He was
to record in detail our findings; cartographer upon this adventure to
chart the unknown deeps. He had a skill with mathematical drawings; I
could imagine such a task thrilling him.
Polly tried to hide for him his lame enthusiasm. His fear? We never
discussed it. And I think now it was very strange that we so little
comprehended this boy we all loved.
We stood in the Norfolk shops, where the artificial testing canal came
up like a dark thread; stood gazing at the Dolphin as she hung in the
cradle over the rectangle of water waiting to receive her. A little
dolphin of a ship indeed, hanging there with her _ralite_ hull
smooth as burnished copper. A dolphin with trimmed tail and sharply
pointed nose. Eighty-two feet of burnished hull, sleek as the body of a
seal.
We walked around her; Dr. Plantet showed her points with a creator’s
pride. Hardly a projection to mar this sleek exterior. The vertical
and horizontal rudders might have been a tail; the lateral planes,
flexible, sensitive as the wing-tips of a wasp-flyer, were folded
in against the hull, so closely that the cracks of them were barely
visible. A workman on board slid them out for us--fins opening out to
barely a foot of width, trembling in the air like thin steel sheets.
There were tiny stern ports for the atomic exhausts; the man on board
swung them to show us how in themselves they could guide the vessel.
There were bull’s-eye windows, like freckled patches on the hull;
and under the bow, like a mouth, a tiny port swung open to expose a
torpedo tube, the craft’s single weapon, with the staring eyes of the
Franklin searchlights above it.
We climbed over the spider-bridge and went on board. A small bull’s-eye
turret came sliding up for surface cruising; a tiny door gave into it
so that we might crouch through and descend the ladder.
The upper slope of the hull had ingeniously opened to form a small
level deck upon which we might sit with the ship awash.
Even for the eighty-two-foot length and a bulge at the middle of some
twenty-four-foot diameter, the interior of the Dolphin was surprisingly
small. Dr. Plantet explained to me his principle of reciprocating
pressures, as he called it.
But I could comprehend, this day, no more than its generalities--a mere
glimpse of the fundamentals of what now is so famous; and it was many
months before I grasped it in detail.
* * * * *
There was an inner hull, so that the interior space of the vessel was
considerably reduced. Within these two _ralite_ hulls, each of
them reënforced with every modern device, was an intricate core of
tiny passages and cells, with water circulating through them under
pressure. A strange yet simple principle of hydraulics--so difficult
mathematically to grasp that none before had ever imagined it.
It involved many of the intricate laws of modern hydrodynamics--yet in
theory simple as all great things must be.
The outer hull, crowded by the immense pressures of the ocean’s depths,
would give inward a trifle, to yield its pressure to the water flowing
in the core. And that internal water, so swift of motion, converted the
pressure we call latent into what now physicists are calling kinetic.
Strange term--kinetic pressure. Strange absorption into harmless
gurgling motion of this crushing ocean force which for so long had held
the deeps impenetrable!
I stared at Dr. Plantet. “Kinetic pressure?” Yet we have accepted as
simple enough the conversion of other energies to be lost in motion.
Latent energy, kinetic energy--terms simple indeed.
Dr. Plantet started up the pumps. With my ear near the inner hull I
could hear the water circulating. Bubbling, gurgling at first; and
then, as its speed increased, humming with a sound almost electrical.
And at the windows, which now I knew to be double bull’s-eyes, I could
see the water circulating. A thick flat sheet of it flashing past with
a queer, oscillating, wavelike swing so swift the eye could scarce
remark it.
“These pumps operate automatically, Jeff. A faster flow, as our depth
increases.” He moved the switch-lever over to another contact; the
humming went up to a higher pitch. “Put your hand on the hull, Jeff.”
The burnished cold surface was gradually warming. He shut off the
pumps. He added: “Curiously enough, Jeff, it gives us heat against the
cold of the depths.” He smiled. “Rather too much heat, if we use the
pumps for more than an hour. But I have a refrigeration coil to help
cool it. I think we shall have no trouble, even when running deep for
considerable periods of time.”
We were not long on board the Dolphin this morning; there was so
much that Dr. Plantet had to do. A center passage like a narrow
spider-bridge hung midway of the vessel’s interior.
Beneath it, in the center, the Parodyne engine lay in its terrace of
burnished blocks, with coils and dials and intensifying tubes glowing
dimly yellow in the gloom as Dr. Plantet started it at its lowest
operating force. Almost silent--a vague burring sound as the electrons
were tossed fluorescent in its storage globe--a green fountain of
burring light, running into the outlets, through the pressure valves
of the water-jacket, to plunge at last into the sea beneath our stern.
Tiny electronic streams--there were six of them--reconverted by the
water’s contact from negligible electric mass into ponderable gas of
radiolite, striking the ocean and forcing the Dolphin forward as a
rocket is thrust upward by the fire-stream from its tail.
* * * * *
We stood watching the Parodyne for a moment as it worked up its
energy from the morsels of pitchblende it was breaking down into
freed electrons. An ounce of fuel to run us for a day. So silent, so
free-running, one could hardly hear it. A little jewel of a modern
engine, so recently developed that there were only three, even of this
small size, in existence.
We inspected the several tiny rooms which hung in frames to the sides
of the passage, with the ballast and water tanks and pressure chambers
beneath them. A tiny galley for Polly. Three rooms with bunks; a narrow
space, by courtesy called the diner, with folding table and chairs.
Forward, beyond the end of the passage, the full conical interior
was built as an instrument room, with the torpedo tube running under
it to nearly amidship, where the torpedoes were stored. The Franklin
projectors were here in the bull’s-eye windows, by which, gazing along
the light, through the jacket of humming water, we could see into the
ocean ahead. I noticed here a score of familiar instruments, and others
strange to me. But Dr. Plantet did not stop now to explain them.
We went back to the stern. A similar room, rather larger, held charts
and instruments of navigation. A table at which Arturo would work
over the log and the diagrams. And here I saw the apparatus for air
purification--cylinders of oxylithic powder, moisture coils, tubes for
absorbing carbonic acid and all the waste products of our breathing.
We climbed back to the floor of the shop. By to-morrow our little
vessel would be fully equipped, provisioned, and ready. The Australian
Flyer, westward bound from London to Melbourne, leaving London at
5 P.M. to-morrow evening, would stop and pick us up. The
magnetic cranes lowered the Dolphin into the dark rectangle of canal at
our feet. She lay awash, quiescent, waiting. Polly, trembling with the
thrill of it, christened her with proper ceremony, and the little group
of engineers and workmen cheered.
We flew back home to “Sea End.” The servants had been given a holiday,
and the house was silent as we entered. I recall a sudden pounding of
my heart--the flash of a thought that Arturo might really be ill!
“Arturo! Arturo!” Polly’s voice held a quiver of anxiety. The lad
should have been at the gateway to greet us, of course. “Arturo!” Her
voice echoed as she ran upstairs. “Arturo--father, Jeff, come here!”
We rushed up. Arturo’s room was disordered. Some of his clothes and his
luggage cases were gone. His small personal sending radio was gone from
its accustomed table. In its place was a sheet of paper: a penciled
radio code which evidently he had invented. And a note--a few brief
words in his familiar scrawled handwriting.
We bent over it; pathetic, scrawled little note:
FATHER DEAR: Please try to believe in me. Keep the code
and at midnights listen. If I need or want any one, it shall be
only you. I am all confused. I want to do what is best, and I don’t
know. Please try to believe in me.
ARTURO.