The survivor

by White, Robb, 1909-1990

  Then Guns spat into the water and reached up over his head and began climbing up into the escape trunk.

  They went up one by one until only Adam was left. 'Tell me again, chief. What do I do?"

  The chief told him, slowly, counting off each procedure. He was to close and dog the lower hatch. Next, he was to undog the lateral hatch and

  take it oflF the latch, but not open it. Then he was to admit water—slowly—through the sea valve. This, the chief thought, would take about a minute. When the water was above the top of the lateral door, Adam was to pound on the walls as a signal for the chief to open the emergency high-pressure bottle.

  **Wnien the inside and outside pressure are the same, the lateral door should open by itself. If it doesn't, pull it open."

  "Thanks, chief."

  Suddenly the chief stuck out his hand. "Good luck. Lieutenant," he said. Then he raised his head and looked at the faces of the four marines looking down into the submarine. "To all of you," the chief said. Then he added, "You're not going to make it, but it's as good a way to go as this. . . ." He patted the black gun in his belt

  Adam pulled himself up into the escape trunk, the marines helping him.

  Down in the submarine the chief pushed the heavy, round steel door up toward the floor of the escape trunk,

  Adam watched the oily steel rim of the door moving upward, and as it moved it kept cutting oflE the view of the torpedo room, foot by foot.

  It was, he thought, as though the world were being closed off from him, leaving him . . . where?

  Adam, with hardly room to move, stooped and caught the moving door and pulled it all the way closed. Then he spun the dogging handle, feeling

  the dogs sliding out of the door and into the steel mortises in the deck.

  The heavily lensed lights in the trunk had imploded, the lenses and bulbs bursting inward, but the battery-operated battle lanterns, which were not airtight and whose bulbs were spherical, still worked, throwing a dim and eerie blue light down on Adam and the marines crowded together in the steel cylinder.

  Adam started to reach for the hatch latch but stopped. The marines had not said a word and were just standing there, the yellow of the Mae Wests looking bilious in the blue hght. Adam straightened and looked at Jason. "What do the Marines say when they finally get into a fight?^ he asked.

  ^Tou mean 'committed?"* Jason asked, his voice breaking a little.

  "All right," Adam said, "when we let the water in we're committed. Until then we can ... go back into the boat."

  The marines didn't say anything, but they glanced at one another—quick, furtive glances, as though each one was afraid the other would see his fear.

  "Then here it comes," Adam said, easing the dogs and taking the latch off.

  As it had in the torpedo room, water began pouring in around the edges of the door. They stood watching it rapidly rising up the walls, rising up them.

  'That stuff going to stop?" the tech asked.

  "It should," Adam said.

  "Theoretically," the Rebel said.

  "I want it to stop right below my mustache," Jason said.

  They looked at him and it made Guns laugh.

  The water kept rising, but finally stopped about eight inches above the top of the lateral door.

  "We're about as ready as we're going to get," Adam said. "When you go, go fast. Duck down and move out of the door. Be careful not to snag the Mae West or let your clothes hang up on anything. When you're outside the boat I guess you'd better hang on to it until you get the lanyards pulled and the Mae West inflates. Then turn loose and go."

  He stopped and thought a minute. There would be no change of pressure until they moved upward. "While you're getting out the door and inflating the Mae West you won't have to let your breath out, but once you start up, start letting it out."

  Jason's voice sounded far away and very small. "How long is it going to take, Adam?"

  Adam remembered times in the water. Times when he had been wiped out on a surfboard and buried in the wave, and his movement upward toward the surface had seemed infinitely slow. Then other times, coming up from a free dive, he had seemed to move very fast. But he did not know how fast they would move now. The expanding air in their lungs would make them buoyant and the Mae West would help.

  "I don't know,'* Adam said. "It'll take a while."

  "Like forever," the tech said.

  "Maybe. I don't know. But weTl have enough air in our lungs to stay under for . . ." What had Thorenson claimed? And he remembered the kid yelling that, if he could get enough oxygen in his lungs, he could stay under water with only one breath for fifteen minutes. ". . . fifteen minutes," Adam said.

  "I never heard of anything like that," Guns said.

  "Let's go," Adam said. "Before you go under take a few breaths. Not too deep or they'll make you dizzy. Just slow, ordinary breaths. Then, don't rush anything—don't panic. Just move. But move."

  "I can't swim very well," the Rebel said.

  "No swimming!" Adam said, again remembering Thorenson's Theory, this one about the viscosity of water. "Stay finned out. Except keep your hands straight up above your head. Keep your legs together and your feet pointed down. Try to shape up like a fish. We'll go up faster."

  "You ever done anything like this, Lieutenant?" the tech asked.

  "Not yet," Adam admitted.

  "Well, I'm going to be in a hurry. So I'm going to help myself out a httle. I'm going to swim."

  "No," Adam said. "Don't do anything you have to think about, because I think it's going to take about all you've got to keep the air coming out of your lungs. I think you'U go up faster not swimming."

  "You go your way, I'll go mine," the tech said.

  "Okay. You know exactly as much about all this as I do—as anybody does." Adam turned away toward the lateral hatch and began breathing slowly and regularly. He didn't want to hyperventilate. As nervous as he already was, it might really spin him in, so he breathed only in shallow breaths.

  In his mouth he could taste the stale, dead air which had already been used by four men and would be used again.

  And it suddenly struck him that they would have to go up through the sea a distance longer than two football fields laid end to end; they would have to go almost an eighth of a mile . . . without taking a breath.

  What if Thorenson was wrong and, somewhere along the way, they exhausted all the air in their lungs? What then? Adam knew, from feeling it many times, that the impulse to breathe in was almost insurmountable. Your entire body strained to take that breath. Only, they would be . . . where? With a hundred feet still to go? Fifty? It would be sad, he thought, if Thorenson turned out to be wrong during the last ten feet. That they would run out of air when they could see the sun shining down through the water.

  And then Adam remembered a dog he'd had when he was a kid. A comical pooch who had picked up the name Barnstable.

  And the high cliff in Pacific Palisades, a straight-up-and-down cliff which, if you were brave enough, you could go, on hands and knees, to the edge of and look down at the antlike cars moving

  on the Coast Highway far below. He remembered now, in this escape trunk with four marines, the shaking fear he had had as he edged his way out to the edge of that cHff.

  But Barnstable was absolutely fearless and would go galloping past Adam to the very edge of the cHfiF and stand there wagging that nothing tail of his while he looked down in deHght at the highway far below.

  Adam turned and looked at Jason and was surprised to find Jason looking back at him. And Jason was scared. Adam could see that in his eyes. And Guns was scared. And the Rebel And the tech.

  "Listen,** Adam said, "think the way a dog does. Don't think about what might happen. Just think about what is happening. That's the way dogs think."

  Their eyes, looking at him, didn't change.

  "Well, I guess I'll go," Adam said, turning away from them.

  He lowered himself, bending his knees, and felt the w
ater moving up his chest, up along his neck. To his chin, his mouth. He breathed once more lightly through his nose and went on down, the water closing over his head with a httle swishing sound.

  He was shocked to find that it was pitch-dark. He could not even see the outHne of the opening in the side of the trunk, but had to feel for it with his hands.

  He moved out through the small opening and

  then caught the rim of the hatch to hold himself down. He did not yet begin exhaling, and would not until he started up and the pressure changed.

  It was not quite so dark out in the sea. There was a dim, faint, sourceless green glow all around him. He seemed to be inside the light itself, not outside with it shining on him.

  He could see very httle of the submarine beyond the conning tower, but it looked as though it had been broken apart just behind the forward torpedo room.

  Now the marines were coming out. In the dim light he could not see their faces but recognized their shapes.

  Guns came first, and Adam could see one hand moving as the other gripped the side of the door. Adam reached out to him and found one of the lanyards and pulled it, hard. The Mae West began to swell, a dull yellow blob, and then Guns suddenly streamed up past him and disappeared.

  The tech came then, his Mae West inflating almost before he got clear of the doorway. Then the Rebel. Finally Jason.

  When Adam saw Jason's Mae West filling he pulled his own lanyards, feeling the hard, upward tug as the CO2 exploded into the rubber sacks.

  Adam let go and was instantly surprised at the speed with which he suddenly moved upward.

  However, in a moment, the feeling of movement stopped.

  Until now Adam had been afraid, but he had been too busy to give it time. Now there was time,

  and this sudden sensation of being motionless in the water, caught in it, brought a fear greater than anything he had ever known. A fear which enveloped him with darkness—which seemed to wipe out everything: thought, feeling, sight, everything.

  Adam came out of it to find himself rigid in a strained position, his hands and arms straight up above his head, the palms together the way a girl holds them to dive. His head was back, his eyes open, his Ups open, but his teeth were clenched together. His body, from shoulders to toes, was stiff as a board.

  Then he reahzed, with a relief which made him want to yell, that something was moving. Air was gushing out from between his teeth, billowing in moving grayish white clouds over his face—he could feel the touch of the bubbles against his skin. Then the air was streaming down past his neck.

  For a second Adam lowered his head and looked down. The whole front of his body was covered with the foam of his exhahng.

  He was movingl If he were not, then the bubbles would be going up, not down.

  And he was moving fast. From somewhere—not from No Marbles Marble, not even from Thorenson —an item dropped into his mind: bubbles come up about sixty feet a minute.

  He was moving faster than the bubbles, so he was going up faster than sixty feet a minute.

  But how much faster?

  By holding his head far back, he could get his eyes above the cloud of bubbles foaming out of his mouth. Above him the world was a bright green glow with, suspended in it, four indistinct dark areas.

  They seemed so far away from him, as though leaving him behind, alone. As though the marines were deserting him, leaving him down here to die.

  Adam swung his arms down with one powerful stroke, his head still held back.

  He ran into a trail of air bubbles which blurred his vision.

  He stroked his arms again, turning out of the stream of bubbles, and came up alongside one of the marines.

  It was Jason, who was not yet aware that Adam had pulled up alongside him.

  It was not so lonely now with Jason there, the foam of bubbles from his mouth streaming around his chin and neck and down his chest. Not so lonely. As he looked up, Adam saw that Guns and the Rebel were only a few feet above him, shrouded in the whitish-green stream of bubbles, which looked almost as real as the crocheting his grandmother used to do.

  And then Adam saw the tech. Far away, far above him. The tech's body was a perfectly black shape, and as Adam focused through the salt water on his naked eyes, he saw that the tech was swimming—arms and legs moving rhythmically. No comet tail of bubbles was coming from him.

  Adam watched him, wondering, and afraid

  again. Maybe tlie tech was right. Hold your breath and swim for it. The tech was certainly far ahead of them, far closer to the surface, to survival.

  It bewildered Adam and confused him, and he could feel his mind drifting o£f. Feel it, and yet he couldn't stop the drifting of it.

  He was thinking about the bubbles which he could see streaming from Jason's mouth. Suppose, all of a sudden, no more bubbles came out of Jason's mouth, or out of his mouth. That when he tried to breathe out, to compress his lungs, none of the green-silver bubbles came out? Well, Adam thought, then that nut Thorenson was wrong. The pity of it is going to be, Adam thought, that I won't be able to walk out on State Beach at Santa Monica, California, and grab that nut by that crazy straw hat and tell him, "Back to the drawing board, you nuti Your theory doesn't work. I drotvned."

  And then, as he looked upward, he saw the tech coming toward him. The tech was no longer swimming, no longer even moving. Bubbles were coming out of him, but they were drifting upward. Not fast, just drifting, so that the tech looked as though he were lying in a cluster of soap bubbles, which Adam noticed now were not pale green like Jason's but faintly tinged with pink.

  The position of the tech in the water was what brought Adam's mind roaring back from State Beach.

  The tech was lying stretched out, on his back. He was not moving, not swimming.

  Adam had seen two men die, both of them aviation cadets, killed by their planes, and somehow because of the fire and the wreckage they had, for him, lost their identity as men. They had become part of the great wreckage of the planes.

  But tlie tech was terribly dead. The explosion of his lungs had not disturbed the outer shell of his body. But he was dead, the blood-tinged bubbles still oozing out of his open mouth.

  The tech went by him, and Adam did not lower his head to look down into the blackness.

  They went on, their trails of bubbles streaming down and dying. A feeling of weakness began in Adam now, a feehng which seemed to move through him with the flow of his blood. A threatening weakness because he could feel now that it took an effort to keep the air streaming out of his mouth. He could feel a dull, all-over ache in his chest and lungs, and it didn't seem to him that as many bubbles were flowing out of his mouth as there had been before.

  He looked over at Jason and the sight shocked him. Jason's head was down on his chest, and his arms were half lowered and seemed to be adrift in the water.

  Adam reached out and caught Jason by the short, stiff Marine Corps style hair and pulled his head back. Then he wrapped an arm around Jason's belly and pulled Jason hard against him, forcing the air out of his mouth in a burst of bubbles.

  Green bubbles, not pink with blood.

  Adam turned him loose and pushed him away.

  And they went on up.

  The bubbles from his mouth covered Adam*s eyes now, and he closed his burning eyes, feeling that he could not strain his head back far enough to get his eyes clear of the bubbles.

  Anyway, he thought, what difference does it make?

  Six hundred feet from the bottom of the deep sea was too far to go. So it made no difference.

  After a long time Adam opened his eyes and, with great effort, forced his head back.

  Something was wrong. Instead of the green world he had expected to see—green with the bubble-streaked bodies caught in it, there was a wildly shattered and broken silver mirror. A bright, silvery mirror with, right above him, some legs with bare, pale feet hanging down through the mirror.

  Then Adam broke through the mirror and felt the soft
, warm, fresh air against his face. He breathed it in slowly, riding high in the water with the Mae West shoving him up as though to get him completely out of the water.

  BOOK THREE

  The Deadly Shore

  "T^RETHEREN AN* siSTEREN," the Rebel Said, "that O was the longest trip Ah evah took."

  Adam and the marines lay exhausted in the sea, breathing the good clean air, fl9ating in their yellow Mae Wests.

  Jason said, surprised, "Hey, you guys. You know how long it took us to come up?"

  "All my life," Guns said.

  "No!" Jason said, holding up his arm with a watch on it. "It didn't even take two minutes."

  "You're kidding," Adam said, amazed.

  Jason looked at his watch, shook his arm, held it against his ear. "No, honest. I timed it when I left. It only took a minute and fifty-some-odd seconds. Not even two minutes." Then he said, as though not believing it, "And I feel fine."

  Adam was floating near Jason, and he felt fine too. "Thorenson," Adam said, "you nut!" 165

  "What?" Jason asked.

  ''Nothing. Just a guy I knew."

  Then Adam noticed the thin, pale trickle of blood coming out of Guns' ears and staining the water. "You okay, Grnis?" Adam asked.

  "My ears were giving me a fit, but they feel better now," Guns said. "How about you guys?^

  Adam paddled himself around and raised himself up as high as he could in the water.

  He knew that they were close to the island because of the wall of surf and spray and haze, but also because of those things he could see no sign of land, nor trees, nor buildings—nothing. But they were close, floating just outside the breaking seas.

  *The tech bought it,'* Jason said.

  "He bought it. He swam and he didn't let the air out."

  "That's a pity. He could have made it."

  Guns looked all around and then down at his fatigues billowing around under the Mae West. "We made it," he said, as though just now realizing it Then he raised his head. "I think we ought to get out of these Mae Wests, Lieutenant. You can see 'em for a milhon miles. No use coming all this way and get shot out here in the water."