Operation Malacca

by Joe Poyer

  'All right, Dr. Keilty,' Rawingson said formally. 'No details to the Navy. Now how?'

  Keilty stood up and turned his back to the admiral. 'Look here.'

  He arched his left hand over his right shoulder until his fingers rested on a flat plastic cap. Grunting with the effort, he turned the cap and began unscrewing it. It came away to reveal a stainless-steel bayonet coupling.

  'What the hell . . . ?' Rawingson jumped up from the bunk for a closer look. Protruding slightly above the skin was a round fitting containing the inner coupling. Inside the three-quarterinch-diameter fitting he could see a pressure valve. The whole fitting was located just above the shoulder line and about three inches to the right of the spine.

  'What the hell?' he repeated.

  Jack had his eyes open now and was watching Rawingson's reaction with interest.

  Keilty screwed the cap back on and sat down in the chair again.

  'To begin with, Pete, this little gadget technically makes me a cyborg.'

  'A what?' he asked weakly as he sank back down on the bunk.

  'A cyborg,' Keilty repeated patiently. 'A cyborg is a partly mechanical human being. A human that has been partly mechanized would probably be a better description.

  'There's nothing so outstanding about that, really. They've been around for quite a while.

  A guy with a hand replaced with a steel hook, if it opens and closes by muscle action, is a cyborg. A man with a mechanical leg, and so on. We've got lots of people walking around now with pacemakers to keep their hearts beating or diabetics with a pancreatic stimulator to keep

  their blood glucose up. They're all cyborgs. Now, they're replacing hearts with heart pumps. Last figures I saw, some four thousand people in the U.S. alone have heart pumps. All implanted in the past three years.'

  `So what's that gadget got to do with you being a cyborg?' Rawingson asked. His color was beginning to return. 'I know what a cyborg is supposed to be.'

  Òkay. Here's how it works. This coupling, attached to an auxiliary lung system, allows me to return quickly to the surface without wasting a couple of days in decompression.

  Charlie has a lung rig too, by the way. The hard part is getting back up; down is easy.'

  `Come on, skip the grade-school explanations. How are you able to accomplish this feat?'

  Keilty nodded to Jack, who swung his legs off the bunk and sat up. He reached out and snagged a flat metal case and pulled it over. Unsnapping the cover, he pulled out a rectangular metal container, two by three feet, and set it on the bunk next to Rawingson.

  Then he took a double hose connected with Y-joints and plugged one end into the machine.

  Jack pointed to the other end and unscrewed a metal cap to reveal a blunt-ended, hollow needle.

  `This end goes into his back,' he said quietly.

  Keilty unfastened several quick-disconnect fasteners and lifted back the cover.

  Rawingson peered inside and saw a shiny gray bladder and several black boxes.

  Keilty pointed at the bladder. 'That stuff is really a silicone membrane permeable to both oxygen and hydrogen. This is how it works. A small pump pulls sea water through the ducts up here and circulates it around the bladder. As it passes through this duct, it is compressed to make it flow faster. Heating coils along the duct bring the water temperature to ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The heater is a simple isotope unit.

  There's a thermoelectric generator coupled to it here that produces the half watt of power to run the pump. By the time the sea water exits the duct end, it's at body temperature.

  The whole contraption is insulated to keep it there. The water flows around the bladder.

  'This tube,' he picked up the metal flex tube, 'attaches to my back and carries blood from the superior vena cava into the silicone plastic bladder.

  `The blood circulates into the bladder and passes the oxygen and hydrogen instantly into the water. The blood, minus the

  excess gases, then flows back through this side of the tubing into the superior vena cava and down into the heart.

  `There's nothing really that complicated about it. The tubing can be bought from Dow Chemical, the pump is out of the Beckman Instruments heart pump. I just use the pump itself and throw away the rest of the gadget. The isotope heater, I bought from Westinghouse. The rest is just a matter of assembly.

  `The big problem in deep dives is that the deeper you go, the greater the pressure from the water. If you are using an aqualung, the pressure control on the air supply compensates automatically and feeds you more air. In effect, it pushes more air into you so that the pressure inside your body is equal to that outside.

  'Now, if you relieve that pressure too quickly, the gases in your air supply will bubble out

  – literally. Your bloodstream will foam and the bubbles will block arteries, capillaries, veins, and what have you. That's what's known as the bends.'

  Rawingson was studying the gadget with interest. 'That's nice, but where in the world does the hydrogen come from?'

  Keilty lit another cigarette. 'Our scuba gear is just a modified aqualung, but instead of compressed air, we use a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. You know as well as I do that at depths over two hundred feet or so, the nitrogen in the air tends to come out in the bloodstream as bubbles. So you either have to spend most of your time – like eighteen to thirty-six hours – waiting at various depths to allow the nitrogen to gradually go back into solution in the blood, or else they have to keep you in a decompression chamber and readjust your internal pressure to sea level.

  'Ever since Jacques Cousteau, people have been looking for a way to get down to greater depths. Cousteau's deep submergence labs and the Navy's Sealabs I, II, III, IV, and V

  showed that once you adjust, you can work normally. But to come back up, you have to go through a long decompression period.

  'A couple of years ago, I got interested in the problem and took it to a friend of mine, a guy named Ralph Dora. He's one of the damnedest engineers you'll ever want to meet.

  He's a bioengineer; he understands the workings of the human body, and he's a brilliant engineer besides.

  `First, he threw out all the old, mechanical ideas for getting a man up from down there and concentrated on the physiological aspects. The most important problem was the gas bubbles. Several people have tried the heavy, inert gases, like krypton, argon, neon, et cetera, but the molecules at those pressures still formed bubbles. You could get down all right and stay there, but you still had to decompress. So Ralph suggested hydrogen and it worked better than we hoped. It has the lowest molecular weight and it is just what we needed for our gadget. Mixed properly with oxygen, it worked great.'

  'Come on,' Rawingson growled, 'don't hand me that. How dumb do you think I am? Any kid with a course in high-school physics will see that the hydrogen will still bubble and if you have five hundred pounds of pressure at a thousand feet, which you do, you have to have five hundred pounds of internal pressure, and that's a hell of a lot of hydrogen. It's got to go somewhere. If you come whizzing back up, you'll inflate and explode like a balloon'

  'Hell yes. Let me finish, will you.' Keilty stubbed out his cigarette and continued. 'The trick in this gadget that makes the whole thing work is the bladder. As you say, at a thousand feet, you have five hundred pounds of pressure inside you, all of it oxygen and hydrogen gas. You have to get rid of it and fast. Now, where is that gas. What part of the body?'

  `The bloodstream of course . . . hey, wait .. ' The light suddenly dawned on Rawingson.

  'Right. As you start your ascent, the blood, filled with gases, circulates into the bladder and the oxygen and hydrogen diffuse through the bladder wall because of the slight pressure differential created by the sea water. As you rise, the pressure lessens and so does the volume of gas in your blood, because it's escaping through the bladder. By the time you reach the surface, the two-gas regulator has cut over to pure oxygen and the hydrogen is completely flushed out. No gas bubbles, no emb
olisms. Simple, what?'

  Ì'll be damned,' Rawingson ejaculated.

  `Yeah, and you probably are too,' Weston retorted. 'It works. Mort and Charlie both have made several dives to eight hundred feet and back with no ill effects.'

  "This crazy thing works on the porp ... dolphin too?'

  `Sure, why not? Same physiological setup – with a few differences of course – but not enough to interfere. We have limited our stay time at great depths to five minutes so far, because we still don't know what effect the high pressure will have on the body's chemical reactions. But it works and we can reach the sub! '

  `Well, how come if you had this rig, you didn't use it with Charlie on the first dive?'

  `Two reasons. First of all, a dolphin on sonar looks a lot like a man unless he comes up to breathe every few minutes. They might have mistaken him for a shark, but I doubt it.

  They probably used shark repellent around the tower, both for safety and for security reasons.

  'Secondly, this gadget works best below two hundred feet where there is enough pressure to make its use worthwhile. Until that depth, you might as well use regular scuba gear and compressed air.'

  `Then that thing on your shoulder is attached to the vein in your back?' Rawingson asked.

  `Yep. It's sewn into the vein walls. The superior vena cava runs down' the thorax and directly into the heart. It's the largest and closest attachment point in the back that can be used for the "lung" hookup.'

  Rawingson was now sitting on the edge of the bunk with his head and shoulders hunched in concentration over the opened 'lung'. Keilty's head was next to his as he traced out the flow pattern through the system. Weston, lying on the bunk and observing them, was struck by the paradox in the scene. He would have sworn two weeks earlier that Keilty would never again have had anything to do with the Navy, the military in general, or the U.S. Government, yet here they were, heads together, deeply involved in a technical discussion.

  He rolled back and shut his eyes. He was bushed, and besides, his shoulder ached.

  Weston grinned to himself. Keilty still had not seen the third 'lung' I When he did, there would be hell to pay. Grinning widely, he fell asleep.

  Rawingson and Keilty talked on for another hour until Rawingson sat up and stopped in the middle of a sentence. `What's the matter?' Keilty asked.

  Rawingson stood up and leaned across the bunk to look out the opened porthole.

  `Sea's roughing up a bit. We're going to be in for some weather tonight.'

  'Monsoon finally going to hit, hey?' Keilty rubbed his hands in anticipation. 'I always wanted to ride a big boat during a good blow.'

  Hmm, you may get your chance tonight.' He stared out a moment longer, then sat down again on the bunk. 'Don't forget,

  if the monsoon does hit, it could foul up the operation pretty badly.'

  'It could at that,' Keilty admitted. 'You know, this is the first time I've been in this part of the world. What's a monsoon like?'

  Rawingson thought for a moment. 'The initial storm is pretty much like the hurricanes you get down in the Keys, some years. The barometer drops steadily for a couple of days, then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of a force nine gale. Winds up to eighty or ninety knots, the rain smashing in level sheets like someone is hitting you with a fire hose. The waves will rise to twenty feet or better with the crests being blown right off ahead of the wind.

  'The rain and winds will keep up for eight to ten hours, then drop away to five to ten knots. The waves will die to pretty solid breakers at ten feet or less. It's particularly bad in this part of the South China Sea due to the currents and crosscurrents caused by the islands and the strait. After the initial blow, the winds only come with the rains, then only at twenty to thirty knots.

  'It's funny, a lot of people think of the monsoon as six months of continual rain. Actually that isn't so. It only rains a couple of hours just after noon, but when it does, it comes down in buckets, up to an inch of rain in one hour.

  'Getting back to the "lung" system,' Rawingson said, 'it works the same way for Charlie?'

  'Yes,' said Keilty. 'It works pretty much the same way. Remember earlier I told you that a dolphin has a lung relatively the same size as a man's. Well, the general arrangement of his anatomy is somewhat similar. In the dolphin, the superior vena cava runs across where his right shoulder is. You know his flippers are actually atrophied legs. Originally he was a sea animal that took a crack at the land and developed legs, et cetera, probably even walked erect towards the end, or almost so. Then he decided he didn't like the land.

  Maybe too much competition. That was roughly near the end of the Reptile Age and he went back to the sea, and by now he's almost completely reverted.

  'I've thought many times,' Keilty continued slowly, 'that perhaps we're reaching the end of our string as complete masters of the planet. Could be that the dolphin will challenge us, at least as far as the oceans go. They're as intelligent as hell, as much or more so than man, if Charlie's any indication.

  But it's such a long, slow process trying to pump him for information, because at each step we have to establish a mutual communication basis for each new concept. You would never realize how many individual concepts we juggle every day and don't even think about.

  `But I wish we could learn more about his early life. I think that's a key, maybe even the key. But because he still has only a hazy conception of time and yesterday means little or nothing to him, I get the feeling that I am continually underestimating him and it's damned frustrating.'

  He paused and shook his head. 'Anyway, that's another problem; to answer your question

  — yes, it does work the same way. Instead of an implanted bayonet valve, we just insert a large-diameter hypodermic needle into the vein with a local anesthetic.'

  Ànd that's all it takes?'

  'Sure. Because the essential thing is to circulate the gas-laden blood into the bladder and there's not as much blood in a dolphin to scrub the wastes from. They have a wonderful survival mechanism, as you would expect of an air-breathing mammal living in the sea.

  They only circulate enough blood to keep their body working and the rest is shunted into storage tanks. That's why, although they're relatively the same size, they can stay down longer than humans. They have to aerate only the blood needed to keep them going.'

  Rawingson sat for some moments thinking, before shifting his position.

  `You're sure it works?'

  `Like Jack says, I tried it several times. With Charlie along, I got down to eight hundred feet.

  `For how long?' Rawingson asked suspiciously.

  `Well, ah ... for long enough to know that it works. 'But not for ten minutes, or a half hour?'

  'Look,' Keilty growled, 'what the hell difference does it make? We're going. You got any better ideas on how to pull it off?'

  `Well no ...' Rawingson started.

  `Well no is right. So shut up. We've made some improvements since the last test and they'll work all right. The last thing in the world that sub will expect is an attack by individuals. So that's how we do it.'

  Rawingson regarded him stonily for several moments. Finally he slapped his hands on his knees and stood up.

  Àll right, you bastard. Go get killed. Your patriotism is admirable, though somewhat short-sighted. However, you are the only one we have that is anywhere near capable of doing the job.'

  `Patriotism,' Keilty snorted. 'I spell that d-o-1-1-a-r-s.'

  Rawingson paused at the hatchway and uttered one short, four-letter expletive. 'Don't try and kid granddad, sonny,' and went out chuckling.

  Keilty stared at the closed hatch for quite a while, then stretched out on the vacated bunk, kicked his sneakers off, and promptly fell asleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Keilty awoke early and completely and braced himself against the rolling of the cruiser, folded both hands behind his head, and turned to reviewing his nebulous plans for finding the Chinese sub. The s
eas were roughing up again as the monsoon season progressed with no monsoon. The cruiser was wallowing heavily in the climbing waves, but the rain had still not broken in appreciable amounts.

  He had spent the previous day with Charlie and Jack, checking equipment and fitting and adjusting the harnesses they would wear. Charlie had seemed preoccupied, but kept assuring him that he was perfectly all right and ready to go at any time.

  He rolled over on his side and looked over to Jack's blanketed form wedged diagonally in the bunk. Since Jack was still asleep, he got out of bed, took a quick shower, quietly shaved and dressed, and left.

  The full force of the cold wind struck him as he stepped through the hatch and spatters of rain struck fitfully on the deck and upperworks. Keeping close to the metal walls, he moved along the bucking deck aft towards the mess.

  The mess was warm and cheerful and almost empty. Keilty filled a tray with eggs and ham, drew a mug of hot, black tea and moved off to a table alone to think. Over more tea and a first cigarette, he let his thoughts dwell on the coming day. There had been a minor change in plans. They would be coming on station by midafternoon. The drill was that he and Charlie would make a scouting dive, both to check their equipment and to let the dolphin re-establish the location of the sub — if it was still there. That would give him the morning to finish going over the equipment with Charlie and let them both catch a two-hour nap. Then, tomorrow morning, just as soon as it was light enough for a helicopter to get them in, they would go after the sub.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the approach of a burly chief petty officer. Keilty glanced up to see a red-faced Australian topping better than six and a half feet. He wore an immaculate chefs white hat and a tee-shirt with an insignia sewn on the chest.

  coptain passed the wurd, you've a dorty mission cum-

  ming op,' he announced in a Scots brogue so thick that Keilty could barely understand him.

  `Mon like ye needs all tha fuel he con eat. De ye won more?'

  Keilty leaned back and grinned. 'Sure do. Those were the best eggs I've had since I left home. But, like you say, six are hardly filling. How about another order?'