Undersea Quest (4 page)

Cadet Captain Sperry, from the lead whaleboat, bellowed: “Attention all boats! Stand by for diving!”

The whole class was out in whaleboats; it was our first night maneuver underwater, and it was a mass affair. Fourteen whaleboats strung out behind Sperry’s lead boat; a score of cadets was in each boat.

It was well after sunset, though the Western sky was still faintly glowing, and the air was getting cold. We put our gear on in silence, then sat at ease while Captain Sperry and his crew chiefs settled their last-minute plans.

Overhead the stars were big and clear. The Milky Way looked like a smear of luminous paint; Orion’s Belt lay almost at the horizon and Mars winked red overhead. The starlight seemed captured in the water itself; but it was not reflected light that made the waves sparkle and shine, but their own luminescence. Eskow whispered: “You think it will be as bright as that down below?” I shook my head. I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed to me that I had heard the luminescence was only at the surface. I didn’t know—so many things about the sea I didn’t know!

But I was learning.

Overwater the water the call came: “Attention all boats! Check gear! By the numbers—air valves!” There was a multiple snorting from all the boats as every one of us valved a breath of air out of the aqualungs. “Lights!” A couple of hundred fireflies flickered over the water as we checked our headlamps. “Face masks!” I slipped my mask on, along with all the others; I ran my fingers over the line where the rubber made contact with my flesh.

Everything was in order. There was a moment’s pause, then Sperry’s voice came: “Boat commanders, send your crews down!”

We slipped over the side.

It was absolute blackness beneath us.

As soon as the water had closed over my head, the stars were gone; bright as their light had been, it did not penetrate the surface of the sea. I could see clearly the headlamps of the fourteen crews; it looked like a convention of fireflies. But I could not see a single human figure or object, only the lights; then my eyes grew better adjusted, and I began to make out shadowy shapes moving through the water beside me under the glowing lights.

We assembled at the bottom, as usual; but there was no marching in store for us. This was a maneuver problem, designed to familiarize us with the problems of hand-to- hand sub-sea combat if we should ever need to use it. Six crews had been designated the Invaders; the other eight, Defenders. It was our job, as Invaders, to pass through the Defending line. If we were intercepted, we were “dead”; the success or failure of each team would be judged by the number of Invaders who got through without a challenge. The Defenders were grouped a hundred yards away. At the signal, they doused their lights—and totally disappeared, as far as any of us could see. Our crew officer signaled with his light, and our crew rose from the bottom and began swimming to the attack.

We swam several yards before, according to our plan, we all doused our lights simultaneously. That had been Lt. Hachette’s idea—we would let the defenders see our line of travel; then, when the lights went out, we would strike out in a different direction.

Our crew was the last to turn off its lights. When they were gone, each one of us was utterly, completely alone.

Then the exercise began to seem more serious to me. It had appeared such a simple-minded child’s game, when the lieutenant explained it to us, in a lecture hall, back on the surface. A sort of underwater tag—nothing for grown men to play at! But in the darkness and alone, swimming through ink toward nothingness, I began to see just how difficult it was. First, there was some element of danger; the big predatory fish, the sharks and mantas and barracudas and so on, would seldom attack a human—but in this darkness, how could they tell what we were? True, the lead whaleboat was equipped with microsonar search gear; if anything the size of a shark came-within a quarter of a mile of us at any rapid rate, the underwater alarm would sound and we would abandon the exercise. But—well, just suppose the sonarman missed up?

But there were more than two hundred of us; there was safety in numbers, even if something did go wrong. What was worse than the slim chance of trouble with a shark was the blind, helpless struggle itself. It was suspended in nothingness; there was no up and no down, no way of telling if I were swimming in the proper direction or off in some crazy angle. I remembered the experiences of the daylight dives and all the long lectures I had listened to; and I tried to relax, tried to “sense” with my body and blood and the canals of my ears when I was swimming level with the bottom. It wasn’t easy; I found out later that a dozen cadets had swum straight into the bottom that night, while twice as many had, to their astonishment, found themselves breaking the surface in their first halfdozen strokes.

I tried to listen for the faint whisper of someone else’s aqualung bubbles; I thought I heard them, and then they were gone. I thought I heard them again, but I was completely unable to guess whether they came from ahead of me, behind, on top or below. I strained my ears to listen…

And a rapid brassy gong began thundering in my ear drums. For a moment I was startled almost out of my wits; then I realized what it was.

The emergency alarm! Sharks had been sighted on the microsonar—the exercise was automatically terminated and we were to get back in the whaleboats
pronto!

All around me lights began flickering on, flashing up ward like bubbles in a glass of sparkling wine. I turned on my light and headed up too. At the surface, the silence was gone as though it had never existed. Voices were yelling, bellowing, growling, shouting; it was bedlam. Over the raucous shouting came Captain Sperry’s bull-like shout: “Take your time! Get into the right whaleboat! You’ve got plenty of time! Everybody get into his own whaleboat—anybody in the wrong boat gets ten tours around the Quad. Take your time! You’ll all be in the boats in two minutes, and that’s plenty of time!”

I jerked the face-mask off my head and trod water, staring around. I was in luck—the triple green lights that marked Crew Five’s whaleboat was only a few yards away. A half-dozen strokes brought me to the stern; I clambered aboard and helped the next man in after me.

The shouting and splashing began to quiet down. “At ease!” shouted Sperry from the lead boat. “Crew commanders, report when ready!”

The voices of the commanders of the individual whale- boats began to come in. “First crew all present!” “Second crew all present!” “Eighth crew all present!”

Lt. Hachette made a rapid headcount by the light of his lamp. “Nineteen,” he said worriedly. “Who’s missing? Sound off, men! Roll call!”

The voices came back to him. “Degaret!” “Dodd!” “Domowski!” “Dowling!” “Dunphy!” “Duxley!” “Dyanosky!” “Dye!” “Ealy!” “Eckstrom!” “Eden!” That was me; and I waited to hear Bob Eskow, next in order.

I didn’t hear him. I looked around, hardly believing it, though there could be no doubt.

Bob Eskow was not in the boat.

Already Lt. Hachette had made a swift check of the rest of us. Then, through his megaphone, he hailed the lead boat. “Crew Five missing one cadet! Cadet Robert Eskow out of boat!”

There was a ripple of sound from the fourteen boats. From the lead boat, Captain Sperry called: “Cadet Eskow! Report!”

There was no answer.

The giant searchlights went on and scoured the surface of the water around us, looking for a head, the stroke of an arm…There was nothing. Two hundred and sixty-eight cadets had set out; two hundred and sixty-seven were in their boats.

Bob Eskow was still under the surface of the water.

Cadet Captain Sperry didn’t even ask for volunteers.

The sharks—if it had been sharks that the microsonar spotted, and not porpoises or drifting logs—never bothered us as, by crews, we recharged our aqualungs and slipped over the side. The exercise was forgotten; we grouped in crews at the bottom, lights on, and organized a search.

It looked bad for Bob Eskow, but not—I told myself—necessarily fatal. He had air for thirty minutes; if he had merely wandered off and failed to hear the recall signal (though that was next to impossible), he would get back by himself; if somehow he were trapped, we should be able to find him in plenty of time…

But if his aqualung had failed, it was probably already too late.

Over our heads, the whaleboats began dropping floating emergency flares; the flamed like little suns, bobbing a fathom or so beneath the surface, lighting up the whole sea bottom. In orderly squads we patrolled the bottom, following the hand signals of our crew leaders. The leaders blinked code signals back and forth between themselves with their headlamps, and gradually the entire class was spread out from a central point, searching the sea bottom underneath his own swimming form and for a couple of yards on either side.

Bob could hardly have got more than half a mile from the drop point, and there were almost three hundred of us. Swimming porpoiselike through the eerily lighted waters, plunging down to investigate the kelp valleys and the cord caverns, trying to keep contact with the men on either side of me, racing toward every suspicious hummock or mound of sand, I calculated quickly in my mind: If the search circle spread a half mile in each direction, the two hundred and eighty-odd of us would be spread around a perimeter of nearly seventeen thousand feet… say, sixty feet between men all around the circle. Could one man search a strip sixty feet wide? I doubted it, worriedly; and worse, it was certain that even the giant flares from the whaleboats could not illuminate so vast an area. Long before we reached the half-mile mark, we would be relying on the comparatively feeble light of our headlamps.

We pushed on to the half-mile mark…and beyond.

We searched to the limit of our air supply before the recall signal, dimmed by distance, came faintly to our ears. Dejectedly we rose to the surface, stripped off our face masks and swam back to the whaleboats. There was almost absolute silence from the boats as the motors putt-putted us back to the wharf.

We were a defeated lot as we fell into formation at the wharfside, took a roll call and were dismissed. The empty echo that came back when Eskow’s name was called was accusing.

Several of my classmates fell in with me on the way back to quarters with words of sympathy. But what they said seemed hardly to penetrate; I simply could not believe that Bob Eskow was missing.

It was after midnight. We turned in at once—reveille was canceled for the morning after a night exercise, but still we would have to be up by seven to begin classes. I lay in my unbelievably empty room, staring at the dark ceiling, trying to understand what had happened. It was impossible. He had been there with me; and then he wasn’t.

I must have lain awake for hours, staring into the darkness.

But sometime I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew someone was shaking my shoulder. “Eden!” came Lt. Hachette’s excited voice. “Eden! They found him—he’s alive!”

I struggled to my feet. “What?” I demanded, hardly believing.

“It’s true!” Hachette said. “He was picked up by a fishing boat, three miles from the drop point. Heaven knows how he got there—but he’s alive!”

Alive he was; but that was all we knew. There was an official announcement at morning mess: “Cadet Eskow has been rescued by a small Bermudan vessel and taken to a civilian hospital. He is in fair condition, but will require hospitalization for some time.” And a few days later I got a letter from Bob in the hospital; but it had few more details. It was a seven days’ wonder at the Academy: How had he got there? What had happened? But all we had were the questions, no answers, and as the days and weeks passed Bob’s name became less and less likely to crop up.

It was, in a way, a difficult time for me. At the Academy the “buddy” principle was strongly in force; you and your roommate were supposed to work with each other, look out for each other, know at all times where the other person was. If Bob Eskow had been removed from the Academy duty lists I would have had another roommate assigned me—someone whose original roommate had washed out, perhaps; but he was only on sick leave and his room was kept open for him.

It was more than a little lonely. What made the time not only tolerable but fast-flying was, first, the heavy work schedule—we were all far too busy to brood. And, second, there were the letters from my uncle.

There was no telling when one would arrive; I had gone months on end without hearing from him, then suddenly I would get nearly a letter a day, scarlet ink on stiff yellow paper, sometimes short, sometimes marvelously long. Reading my uncle Stewart’s letters was almost like taking the long, deep trip to Marinia; through them I saw the sights and wonders of the watery world he inhabited, which I hoped to make my own. I could almost see him before me as I read, tall, tanned to a dark leathery brown by the violet light of the sub-tea Troyon Tubes, chin fringed with that bronze beard. I could almost hear his soft, whispering voice telling me of the new world waiting.

Almost as real to me as the sun-drenched Academy grounds outside my window were the great sub-sea cities he wrote of—Thetis, Nereus, Seven Dome, Black Camp and the others—secure on the deep Pacific bed under their domes of the Edenite he had invented. For Uncle Stewart was a man of many enterprises. In the years since I had seen him I had begun to learn a few of them—not from his letters, for he spoke always of what I would do in Marinia, seldom of himself—but from the books and newspapers I devoured. I heard of him boring for petroleum in the new fields two miles down; of the platinum prospect he had staked out in the submarine range called Moutains of Darkness because its rugged slopes are bare of the phosphorescent life that much of the sea-mountains show; of my uncle in a thousand ventures, knocking about the floor of the Pacific from the Kermadec Deep to the Tuscarora.

If I had stopped to think, I might have found myself asking many questions. Petroleum, platinum and other ores; rare deep-sea creatures whose dead carcasses provided the raw materials for astonishing new drugs; his royalties (I didn’t know then that he had never been able to collect them) on the Edenite process itself … my uncle should have been a multi-millionaire many times over. But he never mentioned money, and never seemed like a man of wealth.