by John Barnes
“Take her down!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The diving horn sounded, and I felt the steel deck shifting under my feet as the submarine plunged back beneath the waves.
I looked around. The commandos were sitting in a long double row, feet pressed together in the middle of the corridor, filling it completely. I heard the whine of the electric motors as the sub ran for the open sea.
When the commandos took off their knit watch caps, a second look told me something interesting about them—many were bald, or gray, or both. All had crow’s-feet around their eyes, and though I could see hard muscle under the sweaters, most had at least a little bit of a paunch.
Every one of them must be in his forties.
The captain himself looked more like what you’d expect an admiral to look like where I’d come from. I suppose when a navy doesn’t get any new ships or enlistees, this is what it gets to look like … on the other hand, they were probably the most experienced crew in history.
The silence was interminable, but I had no idea what kind of detection devices we might be hiding from, and I was not going to take any chances in my ignorance. The air got more and more stuffy, not from the failure of the recirc system—we had not been underwater for more than an hour—but from the tang of sweat and fear.
I looked across the corridor at Sandy; she was staring down at the deck, and tears were running down her face. She’d lost three of her best friends—hell, maybe one of them was her lover.
I’d been there; I knew what that felt like. My heart broke for her, and I reached out and quietly took her hand. She squeezed my hand till it felt like she’d break it, but I didn’t take it back.
There was a change in the sound of the motors, and then we drifted silently. Overhead, there was a low thrum, which then became a throbbing sound.
Everyone seemed to hold their breath. Something thundered overhead like a freight train.
We sat perfectly still in the hot air, sweat running down our faces. The commandos, sitting next to me, who probably would have regarded a firefight at close quarters as all in a day’s work, looked sick and drawn.
I didn’t blame them. There was part of me thinking, I don’t know what a depth charge coming in sounds like, but I bet I’ll know it when I hear it.
And with that came images of the walls suddenly bursting in, icy water and high pressure, torn and bloody bodies and hands scrabbling against the pitiless steel surfaces bearing them down to the black depths—
We waited longer. The captain whispered a command, and the motors resumed for a little while, slowly pushing us forward. The commando next to me breathed in my ear, “Cap’n says we’re under a cold-water layer and the tide can take us out, pass it on.” I repeated it to Al, next to me. He nodded. It sounded like things were better than they had seemed to be.
The motors stopped again, and we drifted again. Twice more we heard ship’s engines overhead, but never as close as the first one.
After another hour the captain started us forward again and said, “All right, let’s not make too much noise, but we can talk a bit. We’ll make the rest of this run submerged.”
He turned to us. “I know we were a bit short on ceremony there. I was afraid the plane got a radar fix, and perhaps it did, but for whatever reason they didn’t get on us fast enough. I’m Captain William Stark. Welcome to the USS Skipjack. I know the accommodations are not terribly comfortable, but you’ll only have to bear with them for a day or so.”
“A day or so? How fast does this thing go?” Al asked. “Or are you dropping us off someplace?”
Stark grinned at us, and we noticed how many other people were chuckling. “Well, you’ll just have to see. But the short answer is, things are going to be much more comfortable than this, and the long answer is, if I told you how, you wouldn’t believe it.”
And that was all he said. Teller seemed very excited to get a look at the notebook Al had so carefully brought along, and as soon as he had it he was dead to the world; the commandos weren’t supposed to know too much about us for security reasons. I tinkered with the SHAKK a little, but I still could not come up with any way to reload a gadget that obviously had to have a special substance that I didn’t even know the chemical ingredients to.
Sandy sat in the corner, quietly weeping, and Al said he thought it wasn’t so much for any one of the men who had died back on the beach at Half Moon Bay. It was more that she had lived so close to them for so long, and that some of them had been heroes to her. “Used to be a lot of those on college campuses, you know, boykids and girlkids who wanted to worship artists. God knows I was one. I kind of suspect my mother was, too.”
“You—um, if you don’t want to tell me, it’s okay,” I said, “but I’m really curious. You were saying Kaddish? I thought that after Reconstruction—”
“Oh, some of us survived one way or another. In my case I knew there were a couple of nutcase profs around Berkeley with theories about how to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality, and after the surrender they had been pretty fast to join the Nazi Party, even before the Wehrmacht administrative troops got there. And I knew their ‘therapy’ was basically tormenting people until they said they liked women. Well, women are okay with me—I’m sort of bi, anyway—and so I knew I could fake that part of it. And I turned out to be right—once they’d locked me up for being a queer, it didn’t occur to them to come back and lock me up again for being a Jew. But there were parts of the country where they gassed everybody in both categories. I just happened to have this local dodge.”
He stared off into space. “I wish I’d had a little more privacy, a little more time, gotten to see more of my mother before she died,” he said, “partly because I just wish I had, like anyone would, and partly because I could have written a great poem about her, I think. One of the damned miserable things about all this is that instead of ordinary deaths, you have people who become martyrs, and their martyrdom matters more than who they are.
“I think I might have been very happy if I could have just been a poet.”
I nodded, and then, feeling more tired than ever, I fell asleep. As I was drifting off I noticed Sandy had shifted around to use my shoulder as a pillow, and had the stray thought that I liked her, for her courage and common sense and all the rest of it. I’d have to keep an eye on her for a while; people who are in deep grief often do a very poor job of taking care of themselves.
When I woke up, Sandy was still sleeping on my shoulder, but something was subtly different. It took me a moment to realize the floor was sloping at a funny angle, and then that the motors were making an odd noise and I could hear the hiss of compressed air going into the ballast tanks. We were on our way up to the surface.
I sat up a little more, waking Sandy. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Surfacing, I think,” I said.
There were a lot of sailors swiftly, silently, running back and forth, and all of us sitting in that corridor had to pull our feet all the way in so that they could get past us. The captain appeared to be talking to someone on a sort of telephone, and it didn’t seem to be anyone on board.
“Maybe we’re meeting a ship?” Al suggested, next to me.
“Could be, I guess,” I said, “but I can’t believe they can get a surface ship this close to North America. Maybe it’s a plane? That’s pretty dangerous, too.”
World War II subs were not terribly fast underwater, and they had limited amounts of time they could spend submerged; even if there had been an improvement or two, I didn’t think we could be much more than 150 miles off the California coast.
“Well,” Captain Stark said, “I see we’ve awakened you at last. You’ve all been asleep for most of the last fifteen hours; it’s finally dark enough topside to do the transfer.”
“The transfer to what?”
“To what’s going to take you people, and the commando team, and Dr. Teller, to the Free Zone. I think you’ll be pleased. Unfortunately our abilities to modify
some things are limited; we’ve never worked out a good way to do the transfers underwater.”
We all nodded, just as if he’d given us real information, and he said, “Do get your bags and things in hand, because we have to get you out on the deck and then get you over the side very quickly.”
After a few more minutes, the sub was at periscope depth and cruising along slowly; they ran up a snorkel and the diesels started, which made us go faster but was no advantage—it also brought a strong smell of diesel fumes into the hull. Then, a long half hour later, the captain gave the commands; the sub rose to the surface.
“All of you, topside, now,” he said.
The commandos got up as one man—you could tell they had done this before—and raced up the ladder, one after another. Dr. Teller went next, more slowly and deliberately, and then Al and Sandy, with me bringing up the rear.
The sun had set no more than two hours ago, and the night on the Pacific was warm and pleasant. There was a little fog blowing around, and, all things considered, I liked that; what I lost in starlight I was more than repaid in concealment.
There was a strange feeling, a shudder through the hull of the Skipjack, and it took a moment to realize that it was coming from the sea itself, that some vast force was moving beneath the water near us. The low, heavy vibration became stronger, and began to include a high-pitched component as well. Then the waves directly out in front of us took on a strange color.
Where it had had smokestacks, of course, it now had watchtowers and radars; those broke the water first, in a churning white disorder as they came out of the water, not yet connected to each other. Hundreds of gallons of warm greenish water sluiced from the sides of the rising towers and struts, and then, majestically, her bridge cleared with a booming roar.
By now the whole rising body was surrounded by a great mass of the water foaming and heaving, and there were choppy waves rolling toward us, making the Skipjack bounce and buck under our feet.
Then the gun turrets began to clear, the guns themselves shrouded in fabric of some kind, each turret big as a good-sized ranch house, breaking water one after another with a sound and effect like surf crashing on a great boulder. There was something about the effect that made you want to cheer, but if you did, you had nothing left to do when the main deck cleared with a thunderous roar, millions of gallons of water washing over the side as she came above the water like a ghost ship in a nightmare. It wasn’t easy to keep your feet on the Skipjack’s deck, but you only felt sorry for anyone who had to be below and miss this.
By then the Stars and Stripes had broken from her mast, and at the upper levels there were men running around, getting things in order. The lights of her bridge were visible.
We all waved; it was impossible not to, the way it is for a big ocean liner.
Though nothing could top the huge sixteen-incher turrets and the main deck breaking the surface, there was something awe-inspiring in quite a different way about the manner in which she continued to rise steadily from the waves, foot by foot, until she floated before us on the now-calm ocean.
I knew what she had to be, and a part of my brain was ready to gasp it out—a ship whose picture, heading to the bottom, was famous from Pearl Harbor in my world; the ship that in Al’s poem here had carried Patton and Admiral Nimitz to New Zealand and eventually to the Free Zone … and then I knew how it was possible, and I turned to Dr. Teller and said very softly—“She must have been the only hull you had that would stand the pressure and could be sealed up that way … once you had the atomic reactors to put into her.”
Teller nodded, like a proud papa, and added, “It wasn’t the easiest job we’ve ever done. We’d have fabricated a new hull if we could, but since we couldn’t … the worst part of the job, really, was figuring out what to reinforce and where to seal, since if we’d made a mistake and she’d sunk, we could never have raised her.”
The little boat from the Arizona came out to us, and there was a certain amount of naval pomp and ceremony in getting us transferred to her. We all shook hands with Captain Stark, but like any decent sub captain, I could tell he was eager to get back under the waves and away from such an obvious target.
Finally we were on the Arizona’s boat, whirring over to the side of the battleship.
When we arrived, there was a long, complicated process of getting netting down for us all to climb, but still, in less than half an hour we stood on her deck. From the way the commandos were grinning, I could tell they were looking forward to being dismissed belowdecks, something that happened as fast as their officers got a nose count.
Meanwhile, we three and Dr. Teller were met by a pleasant young Asian man in black pajamas who said, “Captain’s compliments, Dr. Teller, and I’m to conduct you and your party to dive stations and then to the bridge once we’re down and under way.”
“Lead on, then,” Teller said.
We crossed the steel-plated deck—I noted how heavy the gray paint was, and that now that I was looking around a little more, I could see scars here and there, places where things had been taken off or modified in a dozen ways.
We went through a double hatch, with two doors about ten feet apart. The outer one had probably not originally been in that position and might not have been on the ship; the inner one looked like it had been carefully cut from some other steel and made to fit. I realized as the man with us dogged the second hatch down that it was an airlock.
The maze of winding passages inside the battleship was utterly baffling; to judge from the number of welds and the diversity of surfaces, I doubted that anyone from my timeline who had served on the ship would have been able to find his way. They had kept the hull, the bridge, and the turrets, and I guessed they had kept the steam turbines as well, but that was about all.
Diving horns were sounding everywhere, and we felt the decks sinking below us. The young man who had guided us here grinned. “I always feel a little nervous at this point,” he said. “I’ve been on almost every dive since the first one, but this is always the point where I realize this poor old girl was never designed to do any such thing.”
We could feel thuds and bangs through the hull, and all of us must have looked a little nervous, because the kid winked, and said, “You saw her come out of the water. You know she’s not streamlined. What do you suppose happens when you submerge all that steel in such irregular shapes?”
We all relaxed until Teller added, “Mind you, you’re getting that groaning and thumping in the structure because it is a high-stress process. If she ever fails, this is when she would be likely to.”
He appeared to be enjoying the thought, so I decided I wasn’t going to let him scare me. That was one of those decisions easier to make than to carry out …
After a while, the young man said, “We have cabins for each of you, and all four of you will be sharing a head. If you’d like to freshen up before I take you to meet the captain …”
We followed him through more winding corridors and down a few ladders, and eventually found ourselves looking at four coffin-sized compartments with bunks—actually they might better have been described as being bunks with a door—and a phone booth-sized space with a toilet and sink, arranged so that you could use the sink if you practically stood in the toilet, or the toilet if you didn’t mind a sink on the back of your neck. It looked great to me—it was certainly better than anything I’d had in a while.
We all took turns making use of the facilities, and then the young guy took us up to the bridge to meet the captain. It was another climb through a winding passageway, this time one with a lot of traffic, where many times we had to stop and press ourselves into crevices to let various sailors get by.
The crew seemed to be multiracial and multilingual, and many of them were younger than the commando unit. Probably it was easier to rotate new guys onto a big ship than to put them into a tightly knit combat unit.
At last we came to a spiral stair, and, following it up, we found ourselves on the brid
ge.
In some ways it was the most altered part of the ship, in some ways the least. The heavy glass of the windows looked even heavier than what I had seen on a tour, once, of the Missouri, and, of course, at our running depth it was all but pitch-black outside anyway, with just a faint overhead glow. The screens the men were watching were sonar and hydrophone, and there were rank on rank of instrument and gauge boards that no one had ever planned should be here when the ship’s keel was laid down.
The man who turned to us was dressed in old uniform parts, often mended, but there was something—well, stylish about him. He looked like a guy you’d follow anywhere.
Then I got a better look at him and realized with whom I was dealing.
I suppose it was natural enough to work your way up—he couldn’t have stayed in PT boats forever, and there were no offices to run for out in the Free Zone. His hair was short but still managed to be a bit disorderly; the famous, wide-set intelligent eyes were still there, and they looked right through you in a way that made you want to do whatever he asked of you.
I started to understand the reactions of some older people I knew.
Understand, I’m a little too young to really remember John F. Kennedy from my own timeline, but there was a certain kind of magic about him anyway, and of all the things I saw and people I met over in that timeline, this was the one that stuck with me. There were famous people I got to know better, and certainly there were many closer friends, but when I think back on that particular adventure across time, it’s the vision of him standing there, leaning slightly on his cane because his back was bad, staring out into the black ocean depths before us.