Around the World Submerged

by Edward L. Beach

  One thing seemed to be clear. The importance of our voyage, the responsibility which the Navy had placed on us to complete it—for its stated and unstated purposes—justified every reasonable effort to continue. Serious though the loss of the fathometer might be, if this were our only debility, we could and would keep on. Will Adams, I knew, could be depended on to take all reasonable and possible precautions to compensate for the lack of this vitally important navigation aid.

  Poole’s problem was considerably more difficult, and I had much less experience to guide me. Jim Stark’s medical book detailed the treatment for a kidney stone, which involves an extremely complicated operation, and I found myself reading the book quite carefully in order to understand the problem. I read and reread the description of what would happen in the event proper treatment could not be given. As Stark had already said, there would be a backing up of the normal flow; swelling of the tiny ureter tubes; dreadful pain, less and less controllable by opiates; serious illness, possibly involving both kidneys; ultimately, permanent injury to the kidneys; possibly death.

  Unlike most complaints, however, kidney stones can suddenly and dramatically cease to be troublesome. If Poole passed the stone, and there were no others, he might well make a complete recovery in a few hours. This, Jim had assured me, was the normal experience. Or, should the stone not pass, it might not create a complete blockage. If this were the case, Poole might become a sort of arrested case which could be “held”—Jim’s expression—under careful surveillance until our return home.

  A third possibility was that there was not one but a number of stones, any one of which could hang up in an already irritated and inflamed urinary passage. A “remission” could occur, after which Poole might well experience more attacks. There was no possible way, short of X-raying him, to find this out.

  Fourth was the possibility that a complete and permanent blockage had already occurred; that Poole was fated to become progressively worse until he received proper medical attention.

  With a sigh, I recognized that this problem was entirely out of our hands. It was a question of whether Poole got better or worse.

  But suppose Poole recovered for a day or two, or even for weeks, and then had another attack? Suppose by then we were well out into the Pacific? What would we do then? Where could we take him, how get him the medical help he needed? On the other side of South America there was Chile, with its lovely port city of Valparaiso, where surely there was competent medical care to be found. Farther along our route—many thousands of miles farther—lay Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Here, we would be among friends and be able to get all the assistance necessary.

  But either Valparaiso or Pearl Harbor would be well out of our way, far enough to cost us many days of travel.

  In the meantime, we were passing two of the largest cities in South America, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, both bordering on that enormous Rio de la Plata which Magellan had first joyously assumed to be the long-sought south passage to the Pacific. Entering Montevideo, Buenos Aires, or Valparaiso would all be about one and the same, so far as the effect on our intended submerged circumnavigation. But the USS Macon was scheduled to visit Montevideo in a few days. This was an important consideration. On this side of South America, help from the US Navy could best be received from the Macon. On the far side, we would have to wait to reach Pearl Harbor, a matter of about three weeks.

  It would be unfortunate to be forced to surface and wreck our submerged record, but doing so to enter a foreign port was not to be thought of, unless there were no other alternative. Here was a dilemma!

  Fortunately for my peace of mind at that moment, Macon was not due to arrive at Montevideo for a few more days. Besides, Jim Stark had impressed upon me that Poole’s condition, although serious, was still promising. The stone or stones might clear up at any time. We could afford to let events move along at their own speed for a little while longer.

  Feeling depressed, I decided that the first of March was certainly not “our day,” and that troubles came in twos. The only cheery note was that both of our problems had a common quality: we could allow them to develop a little farther.

  This was a far from satisfactory way to handle either, but it did have the virtue of postponing the real decision.

  I think it was about seven o’clock that same night when Jim Stark and Don Fears came to see me together. I immediately sensed that something else was wrong.

  Stark spoke first. “You’ll be glad to know that Poole has been asymptomatic for some time now, sir. The morphine is wearing off and he’s up and around. Apparently, he’s in no pain.”

  “Good,” I said. “Have you found the stone?”

  “No, but that’s not surprising. Sometimes these things are very hard to find.” Jim’s report came in a rush, as though he were anxious to get it over with.

  “Well,” I said, unable to shake off the foreboding in my subconscious, “that’s good. What’s the new problem?”

  Don deliberately shut the metal door behind the curtained entrance to my room, then, very quietly, informed me that something might be seriously wrong with one of our reactors. So far as Triton and the first of March were concerned, it seemed that troubles were not to be confined to pairs. On that day we were to have them in threes.

  Naval reactors, let it be understood, are constructed and inspected with the most extraordinary care. Very precise operating instructions are prepared before anyone is permitted to use them, and the most careful training is given all hands. The remarkable record of dependability which Admiral Rickover’s fantastic new machinery has established is only one of that gentleman’s great gifts to the Navy and our country.

  Among the operating instructions are a carefully calculated set of allowed operating parameters. Should any of these parameters be exceeded, there are in addition precise instructions as to what is to be done next. In some cases, all that is necessary is to change certain operating criteria. In others, we are required to shut the reactor down to find out what is wrong and are not permitted to start it again until the difficulty is resolved. In still other situations, there are automatic safety circuits which, when triggered, instantaneously shut the reactor down without further action by any person. This is called a “scram.” It is accompanied by a deafening siren and all sorts of whirring, grinding, and pumping of automatic machinery.

  The trouble in our case came under the second heading. Les Kelly had instituted a system to log all the readings on the instruments in the machinery spaces periodically, and then the readings were carefully compared to detect changes. Several of the ship’s officers willingly participated in this check, and it so happened that Jim Stark, in poring over the batch of forms consigned to him, had noticed a slow but steady change in certain entries.

  “So, what do you think it is?” I asked.

  Jim and Don both started to talk at once.

  “Don,” I said.

  “Well, I can’t be sure, Captain,” said Don. “But here’s what the book says about it.” He showed me one of the manuals, his finger marking the place.

  I read the paragraph carefully. It applied specifically to our situation, described what we were then experiencing, and stated in clear language the several possible causes. Two of the possibilities we could immediately dismiss. Two others, after some discussion, we were satisfied did not apply. But one, very clearly, applied only too well.

  My stateroom was barely big enough for the three of us, and our impromptu conference became a rather packed affair when Pat McDonald unceremoniously opened the door and entered. I slid over on the padded bench beneath my folded-up bunk and motioned Stark to sit beside me.

  Pat had a slip of paper in his hand. “Here’s a new set of readings, Don,” he said.

  I reached for the paper and held it for both Fears and Stark to see. The new figures were not encouraging.

  “Well, Pat,” I said. “It’s your reactor. What do you think?”

  “We’re still in limits, C
aptain,” Pat replied, “but I don’t like the way this is moving. Of course, it could be . . .” Here Pat described an innocuous possible explanation which had occurred to all of us—“but all we can do is keep on checking.”

  “Who’s checking?” I inquired. “You’re all in here with me.”

  “We’re all into it, Captain,” Don said. “All our reactor technicians, all the officers. Everybody.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well,” Don answered reluctantly, “we either have a problem or we don’t. If we do, it’s a lulu. We’ll know for sure in another couple of hours. We’re checking everything, naturally, and I should be able to tell you more pretty soon.”

  “All right,” I said, trying to show an assurance I did not feel, “get with it. I don’t want to alarm the troops about this and take their morale down any further, unless we can’t help it. Anyway, it’s not as though there were any danger to personnel. I’ll not come back with you right now, but I’ll join you about the time you have another set of data readings.”

  “Right, Captain,” Fears said, as he and Pat rose to leave. “If we go over limits, shall I shut down?”

  “Of course. And when you do, say a blessing for Admiral Rickover and the few farsighted officers in the Pentagon who insisted on the development of a multiple reactor plant.”

  Jim Stark made a move to follow the two engineers.

  “Don’t, Jim,” I said. “One of your duties is radiological safety, you know, and having you be the one who spotted this in the first place is bad enough. If you continue to show interest, the men will think there’s a radiation hazard of some kind. We’ve got enough problems.”

  Stark nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve got Poole to worry about. Should check him right now, as a matter of fact.”

  It took real will power not to go back into the engineering spaces myself right then, and I knew I shouldn’t be able to wait it out very much longer. Kidney stones, a fathometer that wouldn’t work, and now this—all in a single day! If anything could force us to give up our voyage, this latest difficulty would come closest.

  The trouble was, so far, localized in the mechanism of a single reactor, and there was no reason to expect it to appear in the other. Catalogued as an improbable possibility by our manual, this had never happened before in any naval reactor. Could there have been a design error, a weakness undetected in all the testing, something which had at last slipped by Admiral Rickover’s vigilant group? Ergo, might we expect the same problem in the other reactor?

  Triton was fortunate in having two. Indeed, it was precisely for this kind of contingency that Rickover had insisted on building her. The Admiral also wanted to amass the practical experience of operating such power plants, which might be installed in future surface ships and later-model submarines. The casualty facing us would have immobilized any other submarine, forced her to surface and radio for help. In our case, it only threatened to slow us down. We could still keep on with our mission, unless, by sad mischance, the investigation now going on would show both reactors to be involved.

  But time spent in fruitless worry could do no good. Restlessly, I began to wander about the ship.

  Almost the first person I ran into was Poole, up and fully dressed, his head buried in the innards of one of the radar receiving sets in Triton’s air-control center.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Fine, Captain,” he replied, “I feel swell. I think it’s all over now.”

  I didn’t recall Poole as being a particularly placid individual, and something about his bearing, perhaps his half-shut, sleepy eyes, seemed not exactly normal. I found Jim Stark in the ship’s pharmacy and put the question to him.

  “What you’re seeing, Captain, is the after-effects of the dope he’s been given during the last twenty-four hours,” said Jim.

  “You mean he’s still hopped up? He looked just the opposite,” I said.

  “No, what I mean is that the effects of the medication haven’t worn off yet. That’s why he seemed a bit strange. He’s not himself at all. But he feels fine, and maybe he’ll be free of the kidney stone attacks from now on. We can only wait and see.”

  “Then what’s he doing up and working?” I said.

  Jim grinned. “Well, Captain, I’m not very far away from him, and don’t plan to be.” Jim indicated a little tray containing a hypodermic needle and several small bottles. “All this stuff here is Poole’s.”

  “Good man, Jim,” I nodded approvingly. “But why is he working? We don’t need him that badly, do we? Is it because all the other radar technicians are out working on the fathometer?”

  “Nobody has put Poole to work, but he wants to. As long as he wants to be up and working and doesn’t overdo it, it’s the best thing for him. That’s why I’m sticking around.”

  I nodded again. “I get it.”

  As I left the pharmacy, I glanced into the air-control center once more. All I could see of Poole was a rear view. His head and forearms were deep inside the radar console in quest of some stray electron or grid voltage somewhere.

  In the control room, I found that what had been the passageway was now a blueprint reading room. A long, blueprinted diagram of the sonar equipment had been laid out on the passageway deck, and grouped around it on their hands and knees were Lieutenants Rubb and Harris and Electronics Technicians Docker and Simpson. Had the blueprint been a green-felt cloth, I might almost have expected to hear the rattling of dice and low-voiced incantations soliciting the favor of Dame Fortune.

  Despite their ridiculous posture, however, these four gentlemen were in dead earnest. Both ends of the compartment were marked, “No Passageway—Men Working.” Crew members needing to go from one end of the ship to the other were required to drop down a deck and pass through the crew’s mess hall immediately beneath the control room.

  Jim Hay now had the dive, and he had crowded as close as possible to the planesmen in order to leave room for Beckhaus and McDaniel, who were apparently taking readings on the fathometer cabinet itself.

  One of the unwritten rules in the submarine service is that men engaged in important work do not throw down their tools and snap to attention merely because the Commanding Officer happens around. Only Dick Harris rose to greet me.

  “We’ve found out a couple of things, Captain,” he said, “and there may be more than one thing wrong with the fathometer.”

  I nodded. This was about what I had expected.

  “One thing is that the gear is running too hot. There’s a ventilation motor in it which is supposed to be running at all times, but it was hooked up wrong and apparently hasn’t been working. So there’s a transformer burned out and at least one, maybe two, crystals are gone. But I still can’t explain the reduced sensitivity in the fathometer head itself. That’s what has me worried.”

  This was, of course, disturbing news; but compared to what was perhaps going on in the after part of the ship, where Don Fears and his engineers were wrestling with their problem, it was not the worst I had heard this day.

  “Keep me informed, Dick,” I said. “Maybe we can at least keep the sound head from getting any worse.”

  Dick nodded as I left, probably both relieved and surprised that I had not questioned him further. A glance at Jim Hay’s diving crew and the instruments before them showed me that Triton was rock steady at the ordered depth and still at ordered speed. Here, at least, things were under control.

  Of all the urgent things on my mind at this moment, the condition of the engineering plant was the most critical. I could stay away from it no longer.

  I can recall a feeling of resolution as I walked swiftly toward the engineering spaces; this was what Triton was built for. Even though we had to shut down one plant—even though we might have to keep it shut down for the entire remainder of our cruise—there was no reason why the other should have the same bad luck. We could and would carry on. This was the traditional Navy way, and it was, I knew, what A
dmiral Rickover would have had us do, was in principle what he had himself directed when the prototype of USS Nautilus, out on the flats of Idaho, had made that famous full-power simulated run across the Atlantic Ocean.

  When I joined the engineer group, I could see that the news was not good. Don handed me the sheet of paper on which the latest readings had been logged. They were similar to the ones I had seen earlier, but higher.

  “We can’t figure it out, Captain,” he said. “This just doesn’t add up, but here they are!”

  “Were they taken by the same person?” I asked.

  Don shook his head. “I thought of that, too,” he said. “These are an independent set taken by another man.”

  Gloom deepened. Everyone fully understood the implications of the situation.

  “What do you recommend, Don?” I said, knowing what it must be.

  Don looked back squarely. “We’ve gone over every reading, every bit of the instructions, and all the prints. We’re logging another set of readings right now with a third man taking them. I would have taken them myself, but I wanted to stay here to check over what we’ve already got. We’ll just have to keep checking until we’re sure, until we know exactly what’s happened. We haven’t hit the limit yet.”

  The whirring of the main turbine and the great throb of the reduction gears sounded as though nothing could ever disturb them. But this was not so. A minor dislocation somewhere else, in some important control circuit perhaps, down in the reactor space where we could not get to it, could still them at any time.

  My face must have mirrored the gravity of my thoughts. A bell tingled. The telephone. Someone answered it, listened briefly, handed it to me.

  “It’s for you, sir.”

  The caller was Harris, with good news.

  “We’ve found the trouble with the fathometer, Captain, and I think we have the right parts on board. We’ll have her going again in a couple of hours.”